Family Values

by Ford, G. M.

  I’m not often at a loss for words. Might be better if it had happened more often, but this . . . this reduced me to rubble.

  “No” was all I could think to say.

  “Front-page news,” Krauss said.

  They gave me a minute to process. Krauss broke the spell.

  “So you didn’t know anything about any of this?”

  I shook my head. “I was down in Arizona on business. I spoke to her on Sunday. She didn’t say anything . . . you know, about there being any sort of problem.”

  “I take it somebody down there can confirm your whereabouts.”

  I reached into my jacket pocket, pulled out my now-sodden boarding pass from the flight home, and held it out. Krauss walked over and took it from my hand.

  “I wasn’t supposed to get home from Arizona until tomorrow night,” I said. “We finished up early, so I thought . . . you know . . . It was Valentine’s Day. Thought I’d surprise her.”

  “The flowers and candy,” Nelson said.

  “Yeah.”

  Krauss was eyeballing the boarding pass. “First class,” he said.

  “Look to you like I’d fit in coach?” I asked.

  I slid myself off the bed. My knees were very nearly knocking. “Listen . . . ,” I began. “I get it. I can see how this could look like a suicide attempt. I don’t believe it, but I can see how you might. But . . . you gotta listen to me. I’ve known Rebecca Duvall since I was ten years old. There is no straighter arrow on the planet. She’s a by-the-book, by-the-numbers kind of person. There’s no way she would ever even consider harming herself, and there’s no way she would ever falsify anything. None. If—”

  Krauss cut me off at the knees. “It’s not just one instance,” he said. “The investigation’s been ongoing for the past several months. From what I hear, they’ve found multiple instances where forensic paperwork has simply disappeared.”

  “No fucking way,” I said.

  “Way,” Nelson said quickly. “The DA’s losing his mind. At this point, if he had a gun, he’d swallow it. The way this plays out, there’s going to be a number of past cases called into question. Before this is over, every asshole her work ever helped convict is going to be wanting a new trial.”

  “And will probably get it,” Krauss added. “I’m told they’ve got independent labs going back over her work and that it’s not looking good for her.”

  I wanted to lose it. To scream at them. To make them understand what a crock of shit this all was. But, instead, I bit my tongue and got a grip on myself. “Unless I’m under arrest, I’m going downstairs to the ICU. Am I under arrest?”

  Neither of them said a thing.

  My resolve was steadier than my legs, but I managed to motor over to the door and pull it open. “I’m in the phone book,” I said as I slipped out into the corridor.

  Since my trust fund had finally found its way into my pocket a couple of years back, I’d pretty much given up my private investigator business—a life change that, not surprisingly, meant I spent a lot less time in emergency rooms than I used to. I’d forgotten how the air always felt like it was tinged with adrenaline, as if the split-second, life-and-death decisions they were forced to make every day somehow lingered for eternity just beneath the ceiling.

  I was twenty feet down the hallway, trying to remember which way to go, when an orderly came jogging around the corner from my left. I stuck out an arm. He skittered to a stop.

  “Duvall,” I said. “Rebecca Duvall.”

  “Heroin overdose?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “I think she’s in number three.”

  That’s all he said before sprinting off down the hall. I leaned back against the wall, forced several breaths into my lungs, and then continued on.

  I made a couple of wrong turns before I found room three. All I could see through the window were heads. Four of them, working on whomever was hidden behind the privacy screens. I stood there with my nose pressed to the glass for what seemed like an eternity before one of the masked medics caught a glimpse of me.

  A minute passed before he stepped back from the others and started my way. He pulled his surgical mask down with one hand and pulled open the door with the other. He was about my age. Maybe six feet tall. Bald as an egg, with big, strong-looking hands.

  “You the significant other?” he asked.

  “I am.”

  “You the one who found her?”

  I said I was. “How’s she doing?”

  “She’s breathing on her own,” he said.

  “So . . . she’s gonna be all right.”

  He wagged a finger in my face. “I didn’t say that,” he corrected. “Her vital signs are improving, but she still hasn’t regained consciousness.” He reached out and put one of those big hands on my shoulder. “You have any idea how this happened?” he asked.

  “No,” I said. “The cops are treating it like a suicide attempt.”

  He pulled his hand back and shrugged. “The puncture in her left arm is the only needle mark anywhere on her body. Her lungs are clear and her sinus passages show no evidence of drug use, so it’s a good bet she’s not a heroin addict.”

  “Not a chance.”

  “So if it’s not a suicide attempt, what is it? Either she did it to herself, or somebody did it to her.”

  “I don’t know.”

  He looked dubious. “She was under a lot of pressure.”

  I didn’t want to hear it, so I changed the subject. “So what’s her prognosis?”

  “We wait and see. She stopped breathing for quite a while. It’s going to depend upon how long her brain went without oxygen. She’ll either come out of it, or she’ll remain in a persistent vegetative state, in which case we’ll have to consult the next of kin as to what to do next.”

  I stifled a sigh. “I guess I’ll hang around and . . .”

  He was shaking his head. “We’re moving her to critical care. There’s no place to wait in the CC unit.”

  The stifled sigh suddenly escaped.

  “Listen, Mr. . . .”

  “Waterman. Leo Waterman.”

  He pointed over my shoulder. “Leave your contact info at the nurses’ station. We’ll let you know the minute anything changes.”

  I nodded wearily. “Thanks,” I said. “For all you’ve done for her.”

  He shrugged. “You want to thank somebody, you thank that EMT who administered the Narcan. They tell me he used to have a drug problem himself, so he knew what heroin tasted like. He’s the one who saved her life. Without him, we wouldn’t be having this discussion.”

  The double doors bumped open. I watched as they wheeled her into the corridor. The collection of tubes coming out of her face forced me to look away. My gut was churning like a cement mixer full of auto parts. I must have wavered, because he reached out again and put his hand on my shoulder. “You okay?”

  “I’ll survive,” I growled.

  He turned and followed the gurney down the hall.

  The sun was winking over the Cascades, backlighting the jagged spires of downtown Seattle, as I rolled slowly up Magnolia Boulevard with all the windows down. My head felt as if it had been stuffed with fiberglass insulation, and every muscle in my body ached. All I wanted out of life, at that point, was to lie down in my own bed and close my eyes.

  Except . . . except that the front gate was wide open. I pulled to the curb and braked to a stop fifty feet short of the opening. Took a minute to wade through my mental swamp, but my memory was still in possession of a snapshot of the gate rolling closed behind me. Every hair on my body would have stood at attention, except the follicles were too damn tired.

  I dropped the car into reverse, crimped the wheel, and backed into my next-door neighbor’s driveway. The Morrisons were a kindly old couple who owned houses all over the world and thus were hardly ever home. Especially not in the winter.

  I got out of the car, pocketed the keys, and walked down their driveway, moving left so I could
slip between the north wall of their garage and my old man’s stone wall, which separated their property from mine. When I was younger, this was how I used to sneak out after he’d closed the gate for the night. About a third of the way down, I stepped up onto the roof of an old derelict doghouse that had been there for as long as I could remember. The ancient, weather-beaten roof boards groaned under my weight. I levered myself onto the top of the wall, mustered my resolve, and slid into nothingness.

  I landed like a sack of feed. I stifled a groan as I swept my eyes back and forth across the lawn. Nothing was moving, so I pushed myself to my feet and hurried across the matted grass to the garage, where I pulled out my keys, let myself in the side door, and closed it softly behind me.

  I stood with my back against the door. Listening. Letting my eyes adjust to the darkness. Slowly, the familiar cabinets and workbenches that lined the garage walls began to come into view.

  I tiptoed across the empty garage to the tall metal cabinet looming along the north wall. Took me some fumbling, but I eventually found the correct key on my ring, slipped it into the ancient cabinet, and eased the door open. I leaned in and felt around until my hand hit the old army blanket in the back corner.

  I pulled the bundle from the cabinet, carried it over to the workbench on the rear wall, and rolled it open. Inside was my granddad’s old Ithaca double-barreled 12 gauge. The one he supposedly used for goose hunting in British Columbia. At the bottom of the blanket bundle was a half-empty box of shells. Old-time lead shot. I thumbed the release, cracked the gun, slid in a couple of shells, and then jammed the rest of the ammo into my coat pockets.

  I must have looked like Elmer Fudd out duck hunting as I crept up the flagstone walkway to the back door. Through the screen, I could see the kitchen door hanging open. I eased back the screen door, stuck my foot into the crack, and then stepped up onto the back porch with the shotgun waving out in front of me like a flag.

  Took me the better part of twenty minutes, but I went through the rest of the house, room by room, upstairs and down, until I was satisfied that I didn’t have any unwanted company. They’d opened every cupboard and drawer. Spread the contents all over the place like they were looking for something, but as far as I could tell, nothing was missing. By the time I made it back to the kitchen I was madder than a bipolar terrier.

  I worked off some of the pent-up anger by retrieving my car from the Morrisons’ driveway, closing the gate behind me, and locking the car in the garage. Once I’d hauled my gear inside, I was pretty much back to being exhausted, except for the part of me that was still seriously pissed off.

  Whoever had rummaged through the place hadn’t even bothered being covert about it. They’d gone through everything I owned and hadn’t given a rat shit whether I knew it or not. That arrogance stuck in my throat like a fish bone.

  I undressed in the laundry room. Before throwing my jeans into the washer, I went through the pockets. That’s when I came across the pair of business cards the cops had given me at the hospital. A twenty-watt bulb went off somewhere in my head. Way I saw it, when it came to arrogance, the cops were a tough act to follow.

  Stark naked, I padded down the hall to my bedroom, where I pulled my bathrobe from the closet and slipped it on. I sat on the edge of the bed and made a few calls. Nothing new from the hospital, so I dialed again and made arrangements to have Rebecca’s kitchen window and front door fixed. Then I called her condo association office, who assured me they’d keep an eye on things until everything was shipshape. All the while I was talking, my eyes kept flicking over to those two cop business cards on the nightstand. I dialed the number on Frank Krauss’s card. The operator patched me through.

  “Krauss,” he answered.

  “Leo Waterman,” I said.

  I could hear him breathing into the phone.

  “What can I do for you, Mr. Waterman?” he asked finally.

  “Did you guys go through my house?”

  Another breathy pause ensued.

  “You mean, like, did we search it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “If we searched your house, there’d be several copies of the search warrant somewhere where you could find them.”

  I started to say something, but he cut me short.

  “This isn’t the Wild West anymore, Mr. Waterman,” he said. “If I wanted a search warrant for your house, I could have one in less than an hour.” He gave it a minute to sink in and then said, “I hear they’re going to indict Dr. Duvall on Thursday. Assuming she’s still among us, of course.”

  “Thanks for sharing,” I snapped.

  I thought maybe I heard him chuckle. “Anything else I can do for you?”

  “No . . . I guess not.”

  Click.

  In disgust, I flipped the phone onto the bed. Krauss was right. I wasn’t thinking clearly. The cops would have done it by the book.

  The phone rang. And then again. I heaved a sigh big enough to fill a hot-air balloon, turned around, and picked it up. Oh joy. No caller ID.

  “Yeah” was the best I could manage.

  The voice sounded like a space-movie robot. Whoever was on the other end was using one of those gizmos that electronically alters your voice. “One o’clock. South 116th Street where it dead-ends at the river; and make damn sure you don’t have any company.”

  That was it. Whoever it was broke the connection.

  I sat on the edge of the bed for a full five minutes, running the possibilities around my fevered brain, but everywhere I looked just led to another question. This thing with Rebecca. Somebody searching my house. Phone calls to meet in out-of-the-way places. Hard as I tried, none of it made any sense to me.

  What I was sure of was that I was going to have to show up for the mysterious rendezvous. Could be it was a wild-goose chase. Could be somebody wanted me dead. Could be a lot of things . . . But I was going.

  I showed up twenty minutes early, left the car three blocks away in the parking lot of Winters Wholesale Plumbing, and then walked the rest of the way, weaving in and out and around buildings and storage yards, keeping an eye peeled for anything that looked out of place. I had a Walther PPS semiautomatic .40 caliber stuffed under my belt at the small of my back. The way I saw it, when you had this many unanswered questions, it was better to be safe than sorry.

  Last night’s rain had turned the potholes into ponds. Keeping my feet dry took a lot of cutting back and forth. By the time I made it down to the river, my lungs felt like I’d run a marathon on Mars.

  I’m sure that somewhere in east King County, five thousand feet up Blowout Mountain, the Duwamish River begins as a shimmering silver trickle. Up there, in the lush, pine-scented forest, the water is probably as clean and fresh as a Perrier commercial.

  Fifty miles later, it’s not even a river anymore. The last five miles or so before it dumps into Elliott Bay are now known as the Lower Duwamish Waterway, lest you confuse it with an actual river and do something suicidal like drink it or dive in.

  Here at the foot of South 116th Street, a couple of miles short of downtown Seattle, the water was the color of used motor oil and smelled a lot like something’s ass. I picked my way through the rubble and litter over to a big pile of old truck tires somebody’d dumped onto the bank. I backed myself into the pile, pulled the Walther out of my belt, slipped it into my coat pocket, and settled down to wait.

  He was ten minutes late. I heard him coming along the bank. The sound of the black mud sucking at his shoes. I pulled the semiautomatic from my coat pocket, leaned back into the tires, and waited. The footsteps stopped. I held my breath. The deep rumble of an engine wafted in on the breeze. Out on the waterway, a yellow-and-blue tugboat motored slowly into view, and then the gravel barge it was towing meandered by.

  “Waterman. That you behind the tires?”

  The voice startled me. I brought the weapon up by my right ear.

  “Waterman,” the voice said again. Second time was the charm. Suddenly I knew who it was. I
pushed myself out of the steel-belted mountain and stepped into view.

  He was a ferret-faced little runt with one of the worst comb-overs I’d ever laid eyes on. Timothy Eagen was also a very savvy lieutenant in the Seattle Police Department and my longtime rival for Rebecca’s affections.

  “Why all the cloak-and-dagger?” I asked.

  “There’s no cameras down this part of the river,” he said. “Damn near the only place in the city these days where you’re not on CCTV.”

  I slipped the Walther back into my belt and walked down the embankment.

  “I take it you’re not anxious to be caught on camera with me.”

  “You’re a quick one, you are.”

  “So . . . wadda you want?”

  He wiped the corners of his mouth and stared off into space. “I hear you saved her bacon last night.”

  I shrugged. “Right place, right time.”

  “Such modesty.”

  “Humble are us.”

  “Your name came up at a senior staff meeting yesterday.”

  “How’s that?”

  “The powers that be figure you’re a good bet to stick your nose into this thing with Rebecca. They’re planning on clapping your big ass in jail the minute you show your face anywhere near an ongoing investigation.”

  I started to say something, but he waved me off. “Lotta important people in this town are still pissed off about how much of the city’s money you ended up with.”

  “Lotta important people are gonna have to get over it.”

  He moved up the bank so our eyes would be level. “I’m hearing they got Rebecca dead to rights on this thing.”

  “It’s horseshit,” I said.

  He shook his head. I could tell; he wasn’t sure. Cops live in a black-and-white world. Ambiguity makes them nervous. “I asked some questions,” he said. “From what I’ve heard . . .” He cut the air with the side of his hand. “I’m hearing they could convict her right now of gross dereliction of duty. There’s evidence files missing. We’re talking capital cases here. We keep everything in capital cases until somebody either throws the switch on the perp or he runs completely out of appeals. There’s important paperwork missing. They’re telling me there’s an obvious pattern of at least dereliction, if not outright falsification.”