by J. A. Jance
“I don’t suppose they’ll have desserts like this in the King County Jail,” she said wistfully.
“They don’t,” I agreed. “But who said anything about jail?”
“You are going to arrest me, aren’t you?” Grace Highsmith asked pointedly.
“No,” I said. “I don’t think so.”
She looked clearly offended. “Why not?”
“Miss Highsmith, when it comes to murder investigations,” I explained, “the process of making arrests is far more complicated than most people think.”
“What about the gun?” she asked.
“What about it?”
“Was I or was I not carrying the murder weapon?” she demanded.
“That remains to be seen,” I told her.
Her face fell for a moment, then brightened once more. “But I was carrying a concealed weapon.”
“Carrying is a misdemeanor,” I said. “For simple carrying we usually confiscate the weapon and issue a citation, unless the person is actually brandishing and placing people’s lives in danger, which you weren’t. Furthermore, since we’re outside Seattle city limits, I couldn’t arrest you anyway. Bellevue isn’t part of my jurisdiction.”
For the first time since I met her, Grace Highsmith appeared to be gravely disappointed. “Shoot,” she said. “I suppose I should have thought of that. We could just as well have gone there for lunch.”
Moments later, the waiter dropped off the check. Grace may have been upset, but she deftly slipped the bill off the tray before I ever had a chance to touch it. As the waiter went away to take care of the credit-card transaction, Shelley stopped by the table one last time.
“How was it?” she asked.
“Perfect,” Grace answered “For what I thought was my last meal, it was absolutely wonderful.”
Shelley frowned. “What do you mean, last meal, Grace? Are you going away?”
“I thought so. I was under the impression Detective Beaumont would be arresting me and I’d be spending the rest of my life in jail. Now it turns out I’m not going to jail after all. I’m disappointed. Very disappointed!”
It turned out that in a lunchtime of bizarre conversational twists and turns, Grace Highsmith had finally managed to say something that momentarily rocked Shelley Kuni’s virtually unshakable composure. For a second, the restaurant owner paled, glancing back and forth from Grace to me. Finally, Shelley leaned down and gave the older woman a hug.
“I’m sure everything will work out just fine,” she said. “If you do end up in jail and the cooks don’t serve caramel apple cake, maybe I could send some in for you special.”
“Oh, Shelley,” Grace said, her eyes misting once more. “You’re one of the most thoughtful people I know.”
Being a gentleman, I walked Grace back to her store on Main Street. There was no further conversation. She was obviously quite put out that I had failed to perform as expected. When we arrived at Dorene’s, the door was open, but the middle-aged woman I glimpsed through the window couldn’t possibly have been Latty Gibson.
“I’m still going to need to talk to Latty in person,” I said, pausing outside the door. “Will you give her my number and ask her to call?”
“Oh, all right,” Grace agreed.
“And I’ll want to speak to Virginia Marks as well. I’ve already tried calling her, but I only reached her answering machine.”
“She’s out of town,” Grace said. “She’s due back sometime later this afternoon. I expect to hear from her as soon as she gets in.”
It sounded to me as though Virginia Marks was still working for Grace Highsmith. “Do you know where she’s been?”
“Of course. She’s been down in California.”
“Doing what?”
“Tracking Don Wolf.”
“But why? The man’s dead.”
“As Mark Antony said about Julius Caesar, ‘The evil that men do lives after them.’ These are the nineties, Detective Beaumont. Just because the man is dead doesn’t mean he can no longer hurt her.”
There was a short pause before I finally tumbled to what she meant. “You mean AIDS?”
“Of course I mean AIDS. I haven’t brought it up with Latty, because I don’t want to alarm her unnecessarily. Nonetheless, Virginia is trying to find out if he had any other…sexual connections. Besides his wife, I mean.”
It crossed my mind that for that kind of information, a trip to California wasn’t the least bit necessary. In fact, all Virginia Marks would have needed to do was talk to Jack Braman of the Lake View Condos. But I didn’t tell Grace Highsmith that. It wasn’t my job.
“I’ll need to talk to Virginia Marks as soon as possible, Miss Highsmith,” I said. “And to Latty as well. Please give them my phone numbers. Here’s another card in case you misplaced the first one. It would be better for all concerned if they contacted me rather than having to be tracked down.”
This time Grace Highsmith slipped the card into her pocket. She seemed suddenly subdued and diminished. “You knew right away I was lying, didn’t you,” she said.
I nodded.
“I was a fair actress once,” she said sadly. “I really thought I could pull it off. Now that it’s out in public, though, my confession is probably going to cause a good deal of trouble.”
“Telling me doesn’t mean it’s public knowledge. Don’t worry about it,” I added. “I certainly don’t hold it against you. After all, Latty’s your niece. You were only trying to protect her.”
“Thank you, Detective Beaumont,” she said. “You’ve been most kind.”
I opened the door and let Grace back into her shop, then I climbed into the parked Porsche and started the engine. As I glanced in the rearview mirror, I noticed that a van with a television station’s logo emblazoned on the front was waiting to pull into my parking place.
At the time, I didn’t think a thing about it, although, if I’d been smart, I would have.
Thirteen
Once I was in the car and headed back into Seattle, I remembered the previous day’s hassle with Sergeant Watkins about my not using the beeper. Just to be on the safe side, I checked the display. As soon as I saw the number on the readout—Watty’s, of course—I felt like one of those fork-bending psychics.
I called him on my cellular phone. “Detective Beaumont,” he grumbled. “Where the devil have you been? I’ve been looking everywhere. I even checked with motor pool, but they told me you hadn’t signed out a car.”
“I’ve been busy,” I said. “What’s up?”
“I’ll tell you what’s up. The Media Relations folks have been climbing all over me for the last hour and a half. Phil Grimes is fit to be tied.”
“Media Relations? How come?”
“The jail commander is calling every other minute, complaining because the street outside their sally port is blocked almost solid with wall-to-wall television trucks, cameras, and reporters.”
“What’s going on at the jail?” I asked. “Have I missed something important?”
“Don’t try running that phony innocence crap past me, Detective Beaumont,” Watty growled into the phone. “This time, I’m not falling for it.”
Phony innocence? For once, it wasn’t a matter of feigning innocence, because I didn’t have the foggiest idea of why Watty was so steamed. One thing was painfully clear, however. It had something to do with me.
“What’s going on?” Watty continued. “I’ll tell you what’s going on. Right around eleven-thirty, somebody supposedly in the know faxed every damn newspaper and television and radio station in town and told them that early this afternoon, Seattle Homicide Detective J. P. Beaumont would be arresting Grace Highsmith and charging her with the murder of Don Wolf. The accompanying confession to Don Wolf’s murder appears to be handwritten on Grace Highsmith’s personal stationery and over her signature.”
“But I didn’t even meet up with her until…Suddenly feeling half sick, I remembered how long it had taken Grace Highsmith to come ba
ck out of the back room. She hadn’t tried to skip out on me. She had simply outfoxed me at every turn.
“She sent out a signed confession? And an advance announcement of her impending arrest?”
“That’s right,” Watty returned glumly.
I tried making light of it. “Come on, Watty. You know how this stuff goes. There isn’t a major case on the books where we don’t end up with at least one or two phony confessions. This one’s no different.”
“Believe me, Detective Beaumont, it is different. Now where is she, Beau? Did you arrest her or not?”
“No, I didn’t arrest her. Her confession was so full of holes it was a joke—a put-up deal. The last time I saw Grace Highsmith, she was walking in the door of her gift shop in downtown Bellevue. I don’t understand why everybody’s so upset. There was never any question of my arresting her.”
“Why the confession, then?” Watty asked.
“Grace Highsmith is a nice little old lady who was trying to protect her niece.”
“Nice little old lady!” Watty scoffed. “Here she is, confessing to a killing and announcing the victim’s name in public when we haven’t even released that information to the media. Makes the whole department look like a bunch of jackasses. And if she’s so damned nice, Detective Beaumont, how come she knew the victim’s name?”
“I already told you, Watty. She was trying to protect her niece.”
“So the niece is the killer then?”
“Could be. I don’t know,” I said. “Not yet anyway, although there’s a good possibility. The aunt gave me a gun that may be the murder weapon. She opened up her purse and dumped a thirty-two auto out onto the table right in the middle of lunch.”
“Is it the murder weapon or isn’t it?” Watty demanded.
“Maybe.”
“Look here, Detective Beaumont. I want a lot more than maybes on this, and I want it fast. Where is this alleged murder weapon right now?”
“In my pocket.”
I didn’t add that it was wrapped up in doggy-bag aluminum foil. I don’t think Sergeant Watkins would have seen any humor in that.
“You’d by God better find out whether it is or not,” he fumed. “I want a definitive yes or no, and the sooner the better. If I were you, I’d take the damn thing straight to the crime lab and check it out. And I’d do it before Captain Powell nails you. He’s hot.”
“Hot? What’s he upset about?”
“About your not keeping us informed about what you’re doing, that’s what. If one of his officers is investigating a member of the University of Washington Board of Regents with regard to a current homicide case, then it stands to reason that the captain would appreciate having that information come to him directly from the detective involved and not from some lippy television reporter who looks like she just got her high school diploma late last week.”
A few words leaped out at me from Watty’s latest harangue, and they left me stunned: Member of the Board of Regents! Did that mean Grace Highsmith?…Of course, no wonder her name had sounded so familiar.
“Now where the hell are you?” Watty continued. “Captain Powell was looking for you a few minutes ago, and so was Detective Kramer.”
Obviously, at that precise moment, they both wanted to see me a whole lot more than I wanted to see either one of them.
“Like you suggested, I’m on my way to the State Patrol Weapons Section in Tacoma,” I said quickly. “If I head down there right away, I may be able to make the trip before rush hour rather than being caught in the middle of it.”
“I want to hear from you the moment you know anything,” Watty said. “You got that?”
“Got it,” I said.
“What about this next-of-kin situation on both Don Wolf and the I.D. on the second victim? With his name out over all the media, people are beginning to link the two cases. The captain wants to know—”
“Tell him I’m on it,” I said. “I’ll keep you posted.”
“Good,” Watty returned. “You do that.”
Once I hit I-5, I turned south toward Tacoma. In the old days, two o’clock in the afternoon would most likely have been pre-rush hour. Nowadays, in the Seattle/Tacoma area, rush hour tends to last twenty-four hours a day. I made fairly good time until I got to the diamond-lane construction zone and a three-car injury accident down by Boeing Field. From then on, it was stop-and-go traffic all the way to the Midway landfill. A drive that should have taken forty-five minutes max took almost two hours.
That’s the price of progress, I guess. Used to be, in order to get to the weapons experts, all I would have had to do was walk down a couple of flights of stairs. For years, most of the local functions of the Washington State Patrol crime lab were performed in the Public Safety Building in downtown Seattle. In recent months, however, all that had changed as the crime lab moved into more modern and supposedly more earthquake-proof quarters elsewhere. The firearms section was now working out of a temporary location on the outskirts of Tacoma.
Gabe Rios is a forensic scientist who specializes in weapons, especially firearms. When the receptionist led me into his cluttered office, I was pleased to note that here was a man whose work space was even messier than mine. Sitting with his feet propped up on a paper-strewn desk, Gabe was so deeply engrossed in reading a gun magazine that I wondered if he’d even notice our presence.
“Sorry,” he said, when he eventually looked up and caught sight of us. He put down the magazine, made some kind of notation on a computer keyboard, then looked back at me with a lopsided grin as the receptionist dropped me off and then backed out the door.
“Hey, Detective Beaumont. Long time no see. What brings you all the way down here to the wilds of east Tacoma?”
Without a word, I handed over the foil-wrapped package.
“Lunch?” Gabe asked. “Beau, you shouldn’t have.”
“Don’t worry, I didn’t,” I returned. “It’s one of those new Seecamps.”
“Pretty little thing, isn’t it,” Gabe said, once he untwisted the foil and the .32 was exposed to view. “What is this, your new backup weapon? Did you stop by to show off and rub our noses in it? I understand these little babies are real tough to come by.”
“It’s not mine,” I said. “This one fell out of a little old lady’s purse, right in the middle of lunch. There’s a good possibility it’s a murder weapon. Did the medical examiner’s office send over the bullet from the New Year’s Eve shooting?”
“Which one?” Gabe asked.
“Don Wolf. The floater with the bullet in his head. Has Audrey Cummings sent you anything on him yet?”
“I think so,” Gabe said. “Hang on a minute.” Frowning in concentration, he rifled through the top layer of debris stacked on his desk. At last, he unearthed a large manila envelope which he waved at me in triumph.
“See there?” he said. “I knew it was here somewhere. It came in just a little while ago. I’ve taken a preliminary look at it, but that’s about all. The bullet’s in pretty good shape, considering, so I’d say it mostly went through soft tissue.”
I nodded. “That’s right. Base of the skull at point-blank range.”
Gabe looked down at the .32 auto and clicked his tongue. “They may be little, but oh my.”
“How’s the rifling?” I asked.
Fortunately, most people never have to look down the barrel of a gun. If they did, they’d see a series of spirals. Those markings, known in the trade as lands and grooves—lands for the raised parts and grooves for the depressions—are what put the spin on a bullet when it comes through the barrel of the gun, leaving behind a series of distinctive marks. These marks are called rifling. For an expert like Gabe, rifling patterns from one gun are distinctly different from those made by any other. To him, they’re also as easy to differentiate as two different sets of fingerprints would be to someone who spends all his or her working hours dealing with the details of putting fingerprints into the Automated Fingerprint Identification System.
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br /> “Pretty good for a hollowpoint,” Gabe answered. “Want me to lift prints off the gun before I test fire it?” he asked.
“You can try, but my guess is it’s been wiped clean.”
Gabe shrugged. “It can’t hurt to try.” He got up and headed for the door, taking the .32 with him. “This may take some time, especially if we’re lifting prints. Make yourself at home, Beau. You’re welcome to use both my phone and my desk if you want, as long as the mess doesn’t bother you too much.”
“Thanks,” I said. “The phone would be a big help, and the mess looks just like home.”
Careful not to turn any of the stacks of paper into miniavalanches, I gingerly made my way around Gabe’s desk, eased into his leather chair, and picked up his phone.
On the way down in the car, I had tried reaching Captain Kilpatrick down in La Jolla. It hadn’t been a particularly satisfying experience. “The captain’s in a meeting, and I don’t know anything at all about a next-of-kin notification,” the young woman on the phone had told me in a tone that implied she didn’t much give a damn, either. “I don’t know if he’ll be back in his office this afternoon or not. He may go straight home after the meeting.”
“Would you mind taking a message, just in case?”
“Who did you say was calling?”
“Beaumont,” I had answered. “Detective J. P. Beaumont of Seattle P.D.”
“Where’s that?” she had asked.
“Seattle. All the way up here in Washington State.”
“Oh, really?” she had said vaguely. “I always thought Seattle was somewhere in Oregon.”
Gritting my teeth, I had gone on to leave a message asking Kilpatrick if there were any new developments in the Don Wolf case. I had ended the call and spent the rest of the trip to Tacoma grousing about the half-witted nim-nulls who had decided public schools in this country no longer needed to teach geography.
That exercise in mental curmudgeonliness had kept me occupied. It had given me an excuse to gripe at someone else, and had provided enough intellectual interference to keep me from thinking about some of my own issues. Like Grace Highsmith’s all-too-public confession. Like Captain Larry Powell’s current case of righteous indignation. Like Detective Paul Kramer’s whining.