by J. A. Jance
“Grace!” I shouted, pointing the frail beam off into the dark and dusty interior of the house. “Grace Highsmith! Can you hear me?”
Tripping and stumbling, we fought our way through the darkened kitchen. We scrambled up and over a huge pile of unidentifiable crap that reached almost to a nonexistent ceiling. And just on the other side of the mountain of debris, nose-down into the floor of what had once been the front entry, sat the remains of Grace Highsmith’s Cadillac. With Grace still belted inside.
“Grace?” I shouted again. I braced myself against the crumpled flank of the car and climbed the jumbled wreckage of shattered plaster, lath, shingle, and demolished furniture. “Grace?”
I landed on something soft, a mattress or some kind of cushion, and aimed the flashlight in through the destroyed driver’s-side window. I saw Grace Highsmith then, bloodied and broken. Her glasses were gone and so were her teeth. Until that very moment, I don’t think I had realized that she wore false teeth.
The force of the crash had pushed the whole engine block back through the fire wall and into the passenger compartment. Grace sat there upright, crushed into a tiny corner of what had once been a spacious front seat. Small as she was, I knew that corner of the car was far too small to hold a human body; too small for that body to come out alive.
The horn was still screeching. Guided by some kind of higher power, I reached into the incredible tangle of metal and wire and pulled for all I was worth. It was a miracle. My first yank shut down that infernal noise.
In the eerie silence that followed, I became aware of the steady drip of leaking gas, but by then, Officer Smith had found water somewhere and was already dousing the remains of the flames which, amazingly, were still confined to the fireplace.
“Grace,” I said, “can you hear me?”
She opened her eyes at once and squinted at me. “Detective Beaumont,” she said, more lucidly than seemed possible. “Thank you…for thut-ting off…that awful racket.”
Without teeth, she was hard to understand. “Be quiet,” I said. “Don’t waste your strength.”
But this was Grace Highsmith I was talking to. Even on the point of death, why would she bother to listen to anyone else, most especially me?
“Did…I get…him?” she asked. Her voice was fainter now.
I looked around. There were other cops and other flashlights scrambling into the wreckage now. I could see no sign of Bill Whitten, but that didn’t mean he was dead. I didn’t want to tell Grace that, though.
“Yes,” I said. “You got him.”
“Good.” When she smiled a toothless smile, an ugly streak of bloody spittle dribbled out of the corner of her mouth. I took out my handkerchief and did my best to wipe it away.
“Tell Latty…” Grace paused. For a moment, I didn’t think she’d be able to go on.
“Tell her what?” I urged. “Tell Latty what?”
“To take…”
She said something unintelligible then.
“Take what?”
“Duthty,” she repeated. “Duthty, Duthty, Duthty.”
“Oh, you mean Dusty. The statue.”
Relieved, she nodded. “And tell her that my foot…”
Again she stopped. I waited to see if she would speak again.
“What about your foot?”
“It mutht have thlipped.”
And that was it. She was gone. I reached for something to cover her with, but of course, the blanket had long since disappeared. All I had to offer was my own ragged jacket.
Some minutes later—I don’t have any idea how many—I was still crouched there beside her with tears streaming down my face when Officer Smith came to get me.
“Come on, fella,” he said. “There’s nothing more you can do for her here.”
Twenty-three
The aftermath of something like that is almost as nightmarish as the event itself. Officer Smith—everybody else called him Smitty—along with another flashlight-wielding Kirkland cop, found Bill Whitten, what was left of him, sticking out from under what had once been the front door. He had evidently been hiding in the entryway. Without knowing it, I had told Grace Highsmith the truth. Her chosen trajectory through the middle of the house had scored a direct hit.
Smitty and I were up by the van, debriefing the unit commander when another uniformed young patrol officer came hurrying up to us. “The canine unit just found a woman, hiding down along the beach. They’re bringing her up through a neighbor’s yard.”
Moments later, a scratched, bleeding, and handcuffed Deanna Compton was led into the command-post circle. “Mrs. Compton!” I said.
Captain Miller, the emergency response team commander, looked at me sharply. “You know this woman?”
“She was Bill Whitten’s secretary.”
“For a secretary, she put up a hell of a fight,” the officer with her said. “If we hadn’t had the dog, she might have gotten away.”
“What do you have to do with all this?” Captain Miller asked.
“I want an attorney,” Deanna Compton said.
“We’ll see if we can’t get you one,” the captain replied. “Just as soon as we finish cleaning up some of the mess. Lock her in a patrol car until we’re ready to deal with the paperwork.”
“Sir?” another officer said, speaking from outside the tight little circle.
Captain Miller turned to face him. “What now?”
“There’s a Bellevue cop just up the road. He wants to come down. He has a woman with him. He says she’s the dead woman’s niece.”
“That’s most likely Detective Blaine,” I said quickly. “The niece is Latty Gibson.”
“You know them?” Miller asked me.
“Blaine’s been working this case with me. It’s a joint operation.”
Miller shook his head. “Sounds like everybody and his uncle knew what was going on,” he grumbled. “Everyone but us, that is. Let ’em through.”
A few minutes later, Latty Gibson came stumbling into the light, followed by Tim Blaine. She came straight to me. “Aunt Grace?” she asked.
I shook my head. “I’m sorry.”
Without another word, Latty collapsed sobbing in Tim Blaine’s willing arms. And as he stood there, holding her and patting her shoulder in that useless way men do when they don’t know what the hell else to do with their hands, I had a sudden flash of insight.
Latty didn’t know it yet, because she had no idea Grace Highsmith had revised her will. And Tim Blaine didn’t know it yet, because the men involved are always the last ones to figure it out. But I had a very strong suspicion that the number of independently wealthy homicide detectives in King County was about to increase 100 percent.
I turned to Captain Miller. “There’s an important piece of artwork down in the house,” I said. “A statue. We’ve got to move it out tonight.”
“The hell we do. It can stay there until morning.”
“No,” I said. “This is a very valuable piece. I don’t think you want to be legally responsible for it. Grace was talking about it just before she died.”
Miller glowered at me. “Is the damned thing even still there?”
“Yes,” I said. “I saw it while we were looking for Bill Whitten’s body.”
“Well, take somebody with you and go get it then.”
I ended up taking Smitty and another Kirkland cop. Armed with flashlights, we made our way back into the building. Dusty was heavy enough that it took both of them to lift it. As soon as they did, several pieces of paper, taped to the base of the statue, waved like flags in the wind.
The papers turned out to be Virginia Marks’ fax to Grace Highsmith. I tore them loose and read the first few sentences by flashlight, standing in the wreckage of Grace’s demolished home.
Daniel James Wilkes, aka Donald R. Wolf, was a disbarred patent attorney who used to specialize in biotech products. Until May of this year, Dan Wilkes was living in a pay-by-the-week motel in Las Vegas, Nevada. Early in April, ther
e was an international biotech convention in Las Vegas. Bill Whitten was in attendance at that meeting. Wilkes disappeared from Vegas two weeks later and resurfaced in San Diego, California, early in June. When he reappeared, he had a new name, a new car, and a new wardrobe. With more digging, I believe we’ll be able to verify that Wilkes and Whitten had an employee/employer relationship as early as the beginning of June.
“Hey, Beaumont,” Smitty growled. “Bring that flashlight and come on. This thing is heavy as all hell.”
Folding the papers, I stuffed them in my pocket. Virginia Marks had been one hell of a detective after all. This was information we would all need as we unraveled the strings of our several interconnected cases—starting with Captain Miller of the Kirkland police and working our way back across Lake Washington.
“I’m coming,” I said.
I followed Dusty’s slow progress as the two laboring officers carried the heavy bronze up the debris-littered stairs. When they reached the top, they set The End of the Trail down. “Where to now?” one of them asked.
“I’ll take it,” Tim Blaine said, lifting it single-handedly and looking to Latty to see where she wanted him to carry it. “It belongs to the little lady here.”
And so do you, you dimwit, I thought. And so do you.
Twenty-four
It was six o’clock the next morning by the time Peters and I finally dragged our weary butts back home. My Rollaboard suitcase was already packed and sitting by the door.
“Your plane’s at nine o’clock,” Ralph Ames said. “You could maybe even grab two winks.”
“I can sleep on the plane. What I can’t get in the air is a decent breakfast.”
“You hit the shower,” Ralph told me. “By the time you’re dressed, breakfast will be ready.”
When I finished dressing and came back out to the kitchen, coffee was made and two matching waffle irons sat warming on my counter. With a phone to his ear and evidently waiting on hold, Ralph was mixing up waffle batter.
“Where did those come from?” I asked, indicating the waffle irons as I poured myself a cup of coffee. “I don’t own any waffle irons.”
Ralph grinned. “You do now,” he said. “It’s a bread-and-butter gift. I suppose I should say a waffle-and-butter gift.”
I started to say something else, but whoever had put him on hold must have come back on the line. “I’m here,” he said. “Go ahead.”
Leaving him a little privacy, I went into the living room and sat down on the recliner. I was dog-assed tired. I fell sound asleep and Ralph had to wake me when the waffles were ready. Over breakfast—the waffles were delicious—I gave him the highlights of the previous night’s activities. Telling him about Ron’s part in the proceedings reminded me of something else.
“What about Hilda Chisholm?” I asked him.
“Oh, that,” he said. “That’s who I was on the phone about when you came out of the shower. Do you remember someone by the name of Arnold Duckworth?”
“Not that I know of. Should I?”
“You evidently sent him to the slammer a few years back. He and his partner had a lucrative business growing pot in the basement of a house over in the University District. They got into some kind of beef and Arnold beat the other guy to death with a shovel. You nailed him for second-degree murder. He’s still in prison up in Monroe.”
“What does Arnold Duckworth have to do with Hilda Chisholm?”
“He’s Hilda’s brother, her baby brother.”
I choked on a tiny sip of coffee. “Are you kidding?”
“Not at all. What you told me this woman was doing was so far off the charts that there had to be something to it. I did some behind-the-scenes checking. We’re not altogether out of the woods on this thing. There’ll still be an investigation, of course, but you can be reasonably certain that Hilda Chisholm won’t be running the show. I shouldn’t have any difficulty convincing Child Protective Services that she has a serious conflict of interest here. You go on down to California and let me worry about it.”
For a minute or so after he finished talking, I just sat there staring at him.
“Is something wrong?” he asked finally.
“Nothing’s wrong,” I returned. “Not a damned thing.”
Epilogue
With Hilda Chisholm off my back, I headed for California. As the plane left Sea-Tac Airport, I was wondering if Sam Arnold and Ron Peters would be able to finish nailing Deanna Compton without either Detective Kramer’s and my totally indispensable help. Hard as it is for me to admit it, Seattle P.D. did just fine. Arnold, Ron, and several others eventually uncovered the fact that all the while Wolf had been bringing in the investment money, expecting to end up with part ownership of an important company as his reward, Bill Whitten and Deanna Compton had been gathering the monies into a separate fund.
When Don Wolf figured that out and was preparing to take that information to the D.G.I. board of directors, Whitten and Compton decided to get rid of him and his proof as well. Lizbeth Wolf, sick with pneumonia and sound asleep in her husband’s apartment, was an accidental victim—somebody who died for no other reason than being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
In the days after the murders of both Don and Lizbeth Wolf, Whitten and his lady love Deanna had been transferring funds out of the country—to Colombia. Their airplane tickets, had they ever had a chance to use them, would have transferred them there as well. And with Latty Gibson as a likely suspect to take the murder rap, they might have gotten away with it, had it not been for Virginia Marks and Grace Highsmith.
The private detective’s investigation had come far too close to the truth, necessitating her death as well. And Grace, by virtue of having access to Virginia’s findings, had also been targeted. I had to give Grace Highsmith credit for her single-minded determination to protect Latty from all comers, cops and killers alike.
By the time somebody finally got around to charging Deanna Compton for her part in the three murders; by the time they charged her with the theft of Lizbeth Wolf’s engagement ring, which Deanna Compton was still wearing at the time of her arrest; by the time they finally located Don Wolf/Daniel James Wilkes’ real family who, even after all those years, still lived in Tulsa, Oklahoma—I had long since stopped thinking about the case. By then, I had been in California for a week and a half and was far too preoccupied with more important things.
Hospitals are for people who are sick and plan to get better. Hospices are for people who are sick and plan to die. You’d expect that the latter would be very depressing places, but for some strange reason, they aren’t. Once somebody’s sick enough to be in a hospice, most of the masks come off. People are free to be who and what they really are, at least that’s how it seemed to work with Karen.
Her room was sunny and warm. It overlooked an immaculately kept expanse of lawn dotted with graceful palm trees. There were brilliantly colored flower beds all around. Patio doors opened out on a vividly vital world where a perpetually filled bird feeder brought a never-ending parade of feathered visitors. Sometimes, when I was sitting there in that dazzlingly bright room during my allotted visiting hours, we would go for thirty minutes at a time without saying a word.
“Birds are fascinating,” I said one day. “I wonder why I’ve never noticed them before.”
“Because you never took the time,” Karen said.
My experience with my mother’s final illness had been so appallingly awful, that coming into it, I didn’t know if I’d be able to handle being around Karen at all. Cancer is a ruthless opponent, no matter what, but I learned that the philosophy of treatment has come a long way since my mother’s time. Maybe it doesn’t work exactly the same way everywhere, but in the hospice facility in Rancho Cucamonga, Karen got to call the shots. Literally. I think there were times when she chose to decrease her medication dosages, opting for lucidity over pain control. I’m not sure that given the same circumstances, I would have been tough enough to make the same choices myse
lf, but I blessed her for it. It gave us a chance to talk, to say things that had needed saying. For years.
“Time,” she murmured thoughtfully a long time later. “That’s why I divorced you, you know.”
It was simply a statement of fact. There was no anger or accusation, no acrimony, and no self-pity, either. What goes on in hospices leaves no strength or energy to drag around any unnecessary emotional baggage.
“I know,” I said. “With the job and all there was never enough of that.”
Karen smiled. “With the job and the booze there was never enough time for me,” she corrected.
But this wasn’t a fight. It was a conversation. I didn’t bother to say I was sorry, because we both knew I was.
“Did you know I fell off the wagon a couple of days ago?” I asked a few minutes later.
“No, but you got back on, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
More time passed. An hour, maybe. I believe she slept for a while, but when she woke up again, she resumed the conversation, almost in midthought. “When I found Dave, Beau, I couldn’t believe my luck. From the moment we met, he always put me first.”
“He’s a good guy,” I acknowledged without rancor. “A real good guy.”
“But I’m worried about him,” Karen said.
“Worried? Why?”
“Because I’m afraid he’ll be lost without me. I’m afraid he’ll fall apart.”
“He’ll be fine, Karen,” I reassured her. “He’s a smart man, a solid man.”
“But you’ll look out for him, won’t you?”
“Yes,” I said. “I’ll do my best.”
Dave showed up a little while later. It was his time. We had divided up the days so that one or the other of the kids was there in the mornings, I took the afternoon shift, and Dave did the evenings.
That was the last time I talked to her. By noon the next day, Karen Beaumont Livingston had drifted into a coma. I stayed away after that. From then on, Dave and Kelly and Scott were at her side around the clock, and rightfully so. Three nights later, Dave came home at eleven o’clock—early for him. His eyes were red; his hair was standing on end.