Breach of Duty (9780061739637)

by Jance, Judith A.

  “Be still,” I warned. “Don’t try to move. You’ll make it worse.”

  “The boys,” she whispered desperately. “They’re in the bedroom. He’s going to kill the boys.”

  “No, he’s not,” I told her. “They’re safe. They got out. Jared called me. They’re down the street in a car.”

  Hearing the news, a look of supreme relief washed across Sue’s desperately pale face. I was torn. I wanted to go after Richie, but I didn’t want to leave Sue there alone, wounded, and defenseless. She understood. “Your gun,” she managed. “Your backup weapon. Let me have it.”

  Without a word, I stripped the weapon out of my ankle holster and handed it over. It’s a lightweight Glock, but her strength had ebbed so far that even the Glock was almost too much for her. Strength may have deserted her hand and arm, but not her heart.

  “Go now,” she urged, her voice coming weakly between panting breaths. “If he gets past you, he won’t get past me.”

  “Sue…” I began.

  She shook her head. “Don’t talk,” she said. “Go now. Go!”

  I went. I made my way to the doorway that led into the kitchen. Dreading another blast of gunfire, I peered around the doorjamb. The spotless kitchen I had sat in the night before was no more. The room had been trashed. Broken dishes, jars and boxes and cans of food had been smashed and mingled together in a heap on the floor. In among the mess I saw glimpses of those handmade Easter eggs.

  Where the hell are the neighbors? I wondered savagely. Why didn’t they call?

  Sidestepping as much of the gooey debris and broken glass as possible, I picked my way around the edge of the room to the doorway that opened on the hall. The hallway in turn led to the back of the house.

  Here the shambles continued. Heaps of Sue’s clothing and bedding had been tossed into the hall along with framed pictures and more artwork. It was as though Richie had systematically set out to destroy everything that belonged to her.

  “Where are they?” he demanded now from the far bedroom. “My sons. What have you done with them?”

  “They’re gone, Richie,” I said, ducking into the doorway of Sue’s bedroom. “They’re someplace safe where you’ll never find them.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “How did you get here?”

  It was my turn to taunt. I wanted him to show himself. “Jared called me,” I said. “His mom bought him a cell phone to use in emergencies in case you pulled some off-the-wall stunt down in California. She bought it for him and told him to call if he needed help. Which he did.”

  “She’s a bitch, saying that about me.”

  “What should she say, you shit head?” I demanded. “That you’re the good fucking fairy?”

  “She didn’t have the right to bad-mouth me to the boys. I wanted to do something special with them. I wanted the three of us to have some fun. She wrecked it for us. She wrecked the whole thing.”

  “You wrecked it yourself, Richie. You and nobody else.”

  For the space of almost a minute after that, he didn’t answer. All I could hear in the stretching silence was the hammering beat of my own pounding heart.

  “Who the fuck are you again?” he asked finally. “Her boyfriend?”

  There was no longer any reason for pretense. I wanted him to show himself. I wanted to have my shot at him.

  “No, you son of a bitch!” I shouted back at the top of my lungs, giving voice to all the rage that was boiling inside me. “I’m her partner, God dammit. I’m Sue Danielson’s partner. The first cop to walk in the door…the guy you said you were going to shoot. Come on out and do it then, you sorry son of a bitch. Come on out, with your hands up or not, I don’t give a shit which it is.”

  I heard a slight noise, the scuffling sound of movement. I expected Richie to explode out of the bedroom door with his gun blazing but for the longest time nothing at all happened. The bedroom was silent, so was the hallway, so was the house.

  Then there was a click. A single click. The sound of a firing pin hitting an empty chamber. My thought—if it could be called that—was that he was out of ammo. I sprinted down the hallway. Except he wasn’t out of ammunition at all. One shot had simply misfired. The next one did not.

  I reached the doorway at the exact same time he pulled the trigger. I arrived in time to see Richie Danielson blow his brains out all over a bulletin board covered with his sons’ schoolwork and pictures.

  Without pausing, I turned and raced back down the hall toward Sue. I picked up the wall phone in Sue’s kitchen. When I realized the line was dead, I wrested my own overused cell phone out of my pocket and punched in 911 as I ran. Sue was still there. She had somehow managed to raise herself up and was sitting propped against the wall with my Glock balanced on one outsplayed knee in front of her.

  “Nine-one-one,” the operator said. “What are you reporting?”

  “A shooting,” I said. “At 3654 Dayton Avenue North.”

  “An ambulance is already standing by at that location,” she said. “If you care to stay on the line, sir, we’ve…”

  “I’m a police officer,” I interrupted. “The shooter is dead. Tell the medics they’re clear to enter.”

  “If you’ll please stay on the line, sir…”

  But I didn’t. I turned off the phone and knelt beside Sue. “Did you get him?” she asked.

  “No,” I returned. “He did it himself.”

  “Good,” she whispered. “For once in his life…Richie Danielson finally did something right.”

  She slipped into unconsciousness then. I was still kneeling beside her, holding her, when the Medic One guys burst in the front door. I turned her over to them, then I got up and moved out of the way.

  I was sobbing, leaning against a wall when one of the medics came up behind me. “Sir,” he said. “You’re bloody. Are you hurt, too?”

  “No,” I said. “I’m fine.”

  But even as I said the words, I knew they weren’t true. I wasn’t fine. Not even close.

  There was a whole flurry of activity after that. I moved through it all like an automaton. Tim and Dave took the two boys and followed the ambulance down to Harborview. I stayed on at the duplex long enough to give a statement to the first officers and investigators at the scene, then I left, too, and drove myself to Harborview, as well.

  It wasn’t the first time I’d made that awful trip to the Harborview Trauma Center behind some gravely injured partner. It had happened first with Ron Peters, and then with Big Al Lindstrom. After that, people had ribbed me about being a jinx. The black-humored comments were meant as jokes, but especially after Big Al, no one leaped forward to be my new partner. No one, that is, but Sue Danielson. For everyone but her, J. P. Beaumont had been bad news.

  When I reached the hospital waiting room, I found Chris sound asleep, stretched out on a couch with his head resting in Tim Blaine’s lap. In his hand he clutched the Teddy Bear Patrol stuffed bear all units carry for just such occasions. Jared stood off by himself, a solitary picture of dejection in his baggy, ill-fitting clothing. He seemed to be staring dry-eyed at the front of the Coke machine. I stopped in front of Tim.

  “Any word?” I asked.

  “Not so far.”

  I looked at Jared. “Have you told him about his father?”

  “He heard.”

  “Heard? What do you mean, ‘he heard?’”

  “We had our radio tuned in to SPD’s tactical channel,” Tim said. “The news came over the air before I could switch it off.”

  Shaking my head, I got up and walked over to where Jared stood. He still hadn’t moved. “Jared?”

  “I called my grandmother,” he said, looking up at me. “She and Grandpa are flying in tomorrow morning. Their plane will be here around noon. She asked where we’d be staying. I told her I didn’t know.”

  “You can come home with me tonight,” I said. “Tomorrow we’ll make other arrangements.”

  He nod
ded. “Okay,” he said.

  “I’m sorry about your father.”

  “I’m not,” Jared choked fiercely. “I hate him! I’m glad he’s dead.”

  The boy dissolved into anguished tears then and fell sobbing against my chest. I held him for a long, long time. In fact, I was still holding him some minutes later when Larry Powell walked into the room. Maybe he wasn’t our captain anymore, but he was still there. That meant a lot. Paul Kramer, on the other hand, was notable by his absence.

  “Beau,” Larry began. Then he stopped and shook his head, unable to continue. At last he cleared his throat and tried again. “These are Sue’s kids?”

  “Yes,” I said. “That’s Chris over there.” I nodded toward the sleeping child. “And this is Jared.”

  “This is the young man with the cell phone, the one who raised the alarm?” Larry asked.

  “Yes.”

  Larry turned to Jared and offered his hand. “Good work, son,” he said. “If it hadn’t been for you, no telling how much worse things might have been. You have a place to stay? Someone to look after you?”

  Jared seemed to square his shoulders. “Our grandparents are coming from Ohio in the morning,” he said. “Our mother’s parents. Tonight we’re staying with Mr. Beaumont.”

  “Good,” Larry said. “That’s good.”

  At that precise moment, a door swung open behind Larry. A man in green surgical scrubs stepped into the room. He stopped just inside the door. For a moment his eyes met mine over the top of Jared’s baseball cap, then he shook his head.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “She’s gone.”

  Nineteen

  It was after four in the morning by the time I had the boys home and in bed. I went to bed myself, but I didn’t sleep. At six, I gave up. I got up, made coffee, and called Ralph. He was in my dining room drinking coffee thirty minutes later. Together we made arrangements for a three-room suite at the Four Seasons where Sue’s folks and the boys could stay as long as necessary. I had just finished renting a Lincoln Town Car to ferry people around in when there was a knock on the door and Ron Peters rolled into the room, waving at Ralph as he came.

  “I heard,” he said. “I called down to leave word about the baby at the department. Watty told rne what happened. Are you okay?”

  “I’m all right,” I said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t even think to ask…”

  “Don’t worry about it. There’s no need to apologize. Amy’s fine and so is the baby. Seven pounds, nine ounces. We haven’t named him yet, but we’re working on that. Now, what can I do to help?”

  There wasn’t that much. Until the boys woke up, everything was pretty well done. But both Ron and Ralph knew what I needed—to talk. To tell the story. To unburden myself. And they let me do just that. We sat and drank coffee and I talked. Not that talking fixed anything. When all the words had spilled out, nothing was changed. Sue Danielson was still dead; her two sons orphans.

  “Jared must be one hell of a kid,” Ron Peters commented when I finished.

  “You wouldn’t think so to look at him,” I said. “I always wrote him off as a lamebrained gang wanna-be. But when it counted, he came through and showed some real smarts as well. If it hadn’t been for him, the whole family would have been wiped out.”

  At nine Ron left to go to the hospital and visit Amy and the baby. The moment he walked out the door, the phone started ringing. The condolence calls came mostly from the fifth floor, although there were others as well—Janice Morraine from the crime lab, Phil Grimes from Media Relations, Capt. Anthony Freeman, Ron’s supervisor from Internal Investigations Section. There was even a call from Seattle’s police chief, Kenneth Rankin. After five or six calls, I ran out of steam. I had wanted to talk to Ron and Ralph, but it turned out I wasn’t eager to talk to anyone else. After that, Ralph fielded the remaining calls, jotting down names, numbers, and the gist of each message. Once again Paul Kramer’s call was notable in its absence.

  “By the way,” Ralph told me between phone calls, “I canceled our dinner for tonight as well as the Victoria cruise for this weekend. I didn’t think you’d be up to either one. Cassie said to tell you she understands.”

  About ten I lay down for a nap. I asked Ralph to wake me in time to get the boys down to the airport. Ralph offered to make the airport trip for me, but I wanted to do it myself, to hand deliver Jared and Chris into their grandparents’ hands. It was the least I could do.

  Mary Beth and Hank Hinkle were due in from Cincinnati at twelve. At eleven-fifteen, the boys and I headed for the airport. They were both subdued and quiet. In less than twenty-four hours their entire lives had been blown apart.

  At Sea-Tac, we went to the airport’s South Satellite only to discover that their grandparents’ plane would be twenty minutes late. Chris, too restless to sit still, went to buy himself a soda while Jared and I waited by the gate.

  “What do you think will happen to us?” he asked.

  “I don’t know what kind of arrangements your mother had in mind. Would you like to go back to Ohio with your grandparents?”

  “Maybe,” he said. “I think I want to be far away from here.”

  “Talk to them about it then,” I said. “See what they think.”

  Jared was quiet for a while. “You know,” he said at last. “I almost wish you had been her boyfriend. Mom liked you. She liked you a lot.”

  “I liked her, too, Jared. She was a smart, brave woman. You take after her.”

  “Do you think so?” he asked, his voice quivering. “You think I take after her and not my father?”

  “Absolutely,” I said. “No question.”

  The plane came in a few minutes later. I stood in the background while the heartbreaking reunion took place. When Jared brought them over and introduced them as Mary Beth and Hank Hinkle, I noted how much Sue had resembled her sad-eyed mother. Mary Beth shook my hand, then she reached up and hugged me. “Thank you,” she whispered. “Jared told us everything you did. Thank you so much.”

  I drove them to the Four Seasons. Ralph had asked me earlier what I planned to do after I dropped them at the hotel. I had told him I didn’t know. Now though, there didn’t seem to be anywhere else to go but to the department. I dreaded it—dreaded the black tape on badges, the somber nods, and the furtive looks. But still, like an old broken-up bronc rider who has to get back on the horse one more time, I had to go there and face it.

  After checking in, I went straight to the cubicle. There was still a hint of Sue’s perfume in the air. Her sons’ smiling pictures—this school year’s current versions—still graced her desk. I went back out to Watty’s office, found a suitable box, and returned to the cubicle. I cleaned and packed as ruthlessly as any widow or widower has ever gone through a dead spouse’s possessions. As I was doing it, I told myself that I needed to get things stowed so Sue’s parents could sort through them while they were here. In reality, I needed to have them out of my sight.

  I was just emptying the last drawer when my phone rang. It was tempting not to answer, to simply let the caller go to voice mail, but in the middle of the fourth ring, I picked it up. “Detective Beaumont,” I said.

  “Caleb Drachman here. Frederick Considine just told me he thought the police officer who died this morning was the same one who was with you at Boeing Field yesterday.”

  “That’s true,” I said, working my way around the catch in my throat. “Sue Danielson was my partner.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Drachman said convincingly. “This is probably a bad time then. I’ll tell Fred we’ll do it some other time.”

  “Do what?”

  “He wanted to talk with you. In my presence, of course. I have some time early this afternoon, but in view of what’s happened…”

  What had happened to Sue had left me adrift. Going to work and actually doing something constructive might make it possible for me to get through the day. If nothing else, it would help fill up the hours.

  “I’ll be glad to meet with
you,” I said. “Where and when?”

  “I usually prefer to have these kinds of conferences in my office, but in this case the client wishes us to join him at his residence. Do you know where that is?”

  “Up near the Highlands?”

  “Yes, on the bluff just south of there. It’s probably easier if I send you a map. Do you have a fax?”

  I gave him the number, then I went down to the communal fax machine and waited until it came in. From where I stood, I could see Kramer in his office, talking animatedly on the phone. I turned away before our eyes made contact. Larry Powell had come to the hospital because of the kind of guy he is. In spite of his own personal crisis. As Sue Danielson’s commanding officer—new or not; temporary or permanent—Paul Kramer was the one who should have been there.

  Harboring a grudge against Kramer and still missing Sue Danielson’s presence in the car, I drove north alone. Considering what had happened, it should have been a dreary, rainy, typical Seattle day, but it wasn’t. It was one of those glorious April days when every horizon was punctuated by snowcapped mountains and with the azaleas and rhodies in full glorious bloom. It was a day Sue Danielson hadn’t lived to see.

  Following Caleb Drachman’s directions, I steered my rented Town Car west on 145th just south of the Seattle Golf and Country Club and then wandered over to North West Culbertson. The Considine Compound, labeled as such, was behind an electronically operated and monitored gate halfway down the bluff. Like hillside homes everywhere, what was supposedly the front of the house opened on the spectacular view with the parking area and actual entrance located at the back.

  My first view of Frederick Considine’s backyard led me to believe I had wandered into a Lincoln automotive museum. The jewel of the collection was clearly the 1941 Continental Cabriolet. But the 1956 Mark II wasn’t bad, either, nor was the ’79 Mark V. Their high-gloss finishes as well as the damp brick-work underneath gave evidence that someone was taking advantage of one of April’s few sunny days to polish up the Considines’ rolling stock. I pulled in next to an equally freshly washed pair, a Town Car and a Mark VIII, both of them recent editions. My rented Town Car fit right in. The only odd man out was a single, stray BMW 850 IL. That one, however, had a film of dust on it that made me suspect it belonged to Caleb Drachman.