by J. A. Jance
Once on the east side, we split up and drive on to the SHIT Squad B offices in Eastgate in our two separate vehicles. We park next to each other in the parking lot and ride up in the elevator together. Big secret-sneaky and subtle. It’s a lot like thinking you’re pulling the wool over parental eyes when you’re in junior high and busy sneaking in and out of the house in the middle of the night. I suspect our boss, Harry I. Ball, knows all about it and simply chooses to keep his mouth shut on the subject. I believe it’s a variation on the theme of “Don’t ask; don’t tell.”
Mel showed up in the kitchen looking like a million dollars. She gave me a breezy kiss, filled our two thermos traveling cups with coffee, and we headed out. It had been sunny in Ashland over the weekend, but it had rained from Thursday on in Seattle and it was still raining like crazy that Monday morning.
“Did you call Beverly and Lars?” she asked.
Beverly, my ninety-something grandmother, lives with her second husband, Lars Jenssen, in an assisted-living facility up on Queen Anne Hill. Beverly was fading-they both were-and I dreaded calling for fear of hearing bad news.
“Not yet,” I said. “Too early.”
That was nonsense, of course. Both Beverly and Lars were lifelong early risers who could have, individually and together, roused the birds out of bed.
“Try giving them a call later, then,” Mel advised. “Kelly sent along that little framed picture of Kyle-the one they took in the hospital. She wanted to be sure we got it to them right away.”
“Right,” I said. “Maybe we can see them after work tonight.”
We rode up in the elevator together. Mel ducked into her office and turned on her radio. I was surprised to see that Barbara Galvin, our super-efficient office manager, wasn’t at her desk. I found her in the break room waiting for a pot of coffee to finish brewing.
“Heads up,” she said. “The big guy’s here.”
“The big guy,” of course, was none other than Attorney General Ross Alan Connors. In the two years I had worked for the man, I could count on one hand-more like one finger-the times the A.G. had sallied forth from his lair in Olympia and driven up the I-5 corridor to pay a personal visit to Squad B of his Special Homicide Investigation Team.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“Who knows?” Barbara replied with a shrug. “He turned up a few minutes after I did. He’s been closeted with Harry for the last twenty minutes.”
I’m a guilt magnet-even when I haven’t done anything wrong. In this case, I knew I was at fault. There was no doubt in my mind that Ross Connors had appeared in person to read me the riot act for carrying on with Mel. (Mel would insist I was being a sexist jerk since, in actual fact, we were both equally at fault.) Sexist or not, however, when Ross showed up outside my door a few minutes later, I was ready to take full responsibility for our little indiscretion.
“Hey, Beau,” Ross said. “Do you mind?”
“Come on in,” I replied as casually as I could manage. “Be my guest.”
Ross Connors is a big man, someone who fills up any room he enters. That goes triple for my tiny office. At six-four and two-eighty, he looks like what he was in high school and college, a top-drawer tackle. He’s also an experienced politician with all the careful grooming, finely tailored clothing, and good looks that go with that territory. But Ross was beginning to show his age. His wife’s very public suicide a year or so earlier had taken its toll. His hair, once a distinguished salt-and-pepper, was now solid gray, and there were dark circles under his eyes-as though he wasn’t sleeping well. I could certainly relate to that.
Holding a cup of coffee, Ross settled back in my only guest chair. He took a tentative sip of the coffee and then heaved a contented sigh. “Much better,” he said. “I don’t know who made that first pot. It was like drinking crankcase oil.”
“That would be Harry,” I told him. “His own personal witch’s brew. The rest of us have learned to wait until Barbara Galvin makes the next pot.”
“Wise decision,” Ross said. “Remind me next time.”
My office isn’t much larger than a cubicle would be anywhere else. When Ross reached over and pushed the door shut, I figured he was building up to giving me my dressing-down, but he didn’t. Instead, he took another measured sip of coffee.
“So what are you working on these days?” he asked.
This qualified as a disingenuous question of the first water because I was sure Ross Alan Connors knew exactly what each of his special investigators was working on. I decided to go with the flow.
“The missing persons thing,” I answered.
Harry I. Ball, with his usual flair for understatement, had shortened the handle to MPT, and MPT was definitely Ross Connors’s own personal baby. In most jurisdictions, missing persons reports could just as well go into the round file to begin with. The reports come in and they go away almost immediately. Unless the missing person in question is a little kid or a good-looking babe who catches some media attention, nothing much happens. Most agencies don’t have the time, money, resources, or inclination to follow up on them.
It had finally dawned on Ross, however, that it was time for a systematic review of missing persons reports from all over the state. He had embarked on a program that included making the effort of tracking down and interviewing surviving family members, inputting all relevant information from Washington State’s missing persons reports into a national database, and comparing our list to any nationwide reports of unidentified remains. This was all done in the hope and expectation that closing some of our missing persons cases would also help close some unsolved homicides. So far the results were disappointing.
For the past two months, from as soon as I came back from medical leave, that’s what I had been doing-combing missing persons reports, entering the information into national and statewide databases, and seeing what came out the other end. For the most part it was dull, unrewarding work that could have been done by a well-trained clerk, but if the A.G. wanted full-grade investigators working the program, who was I to argue?
“How’s that going?” Ross asked.
“It’s a lot like looking for two halves of the same needle in several different haystacks,” I told him.
“No hits yet?”
“A few. I’ve found three where the people had turned back up, but, for one reason or another, never did get taken off the missing persons list. This afternoon I have an interview scheduled with a woman named DeAnn Cosgrove whose father went missing back in 1980.”
“Twenty-five years,” Ross mused. “That’s a long time.”
“That’s what she said when I called her about it. Why bring it up now? I told her I had to-it was my job.”
Ross smiled and nodded. He didn’t seem to be in any hurry, but I was ready for the other shoe to drop.
“So how are things between you and Seattle PD these days?” he asked.
This was not the shoe I expected. “Seattle PD?” I asked stupidly.
Ross grinned. “You know. Remember the place you worked for twenty-odd years?”
His “how are things” inquiry should have been easy to answer, but it wasn’t. Yes, I had worked in Seattle PD for a long time, most of it as a homicide detective. All the way along, though, I had rubbed the brass the wrong way, and the reverse had certainly been true. I hadn’t liked them much, either. Something to do with my not being considered a “good team player.” It turned out that working for Ross Connors had proved to be the one notable exception in a career marred by ongoing feuds with many of my commanding officers.
“So-so,” I said. “Things improved a little after Mel Soames and I pulled Paul Kramer’s fat out of the fire.”
Kramer was the brownnosing, ambitious jerk who had been a thorn in my side from the moment he first stepped foot in Homicide. His, in my opinion, undeserved promotion to captain had been the final straw in the whole series of unfortunate events that had driven me off the force.
Months earlier, his sing
ularly stupid episode of tombstone courage-of going into a dangerous situation without waiting for backup-had almost cost him his life, would have cost him his life if Mel and I hadn’t ridden to the rescue at just the right moment. And, of course, that was the very reason he had done it in the first place. He had realized that we were following the same trail he was. In his eagerness to beat us to the punch and gain all the credit, he had committed an almost fatal error.
“Good,” Ross said. “Glad to hear it, because we seem to have a little problem, and you may be able to help.”
So he wasn’t here about Mel and me after all. I breathed what I hoped was an inaudible sigh of relief. “What kind of problem?” I asked.
“Does the name LaShawn Tompkins mean anything to you?”
It took a minute but then I remembered. LaShawn was a hotshot, tough-guy gangbanger who had gone to prison years earlier for the rape and murder of a teenage prostitute. I recalled that some time in the last year or so, after sitting on death row for years, he had been exonerated through newly examined DNA evidence. After his release, the state had declined to retry him. Tompkins’s release had been a huge media event, and his subsequent wrongful-imprisonment settlement had caused a storm of controversy that was now the centerpiece of what looked to be a knock-down, drag-out battle in the upcoming campaign to elect a new King County prosecutor.
I nodded. “Isn’t that the guy the do-gooders managed to spring from death row last year?”
“The very one,” Ross agreed.
“What about him?”
“Someone shot the shit out of him last Friday evening,” Ross said. “Plugged him twice, once in the stomach and once in the heart when he opened his mother’s front door over in the Rainier Valley.”
That didn’t sound so unusual to me. In fact, it’s pretty much same old, same old. A guy gets out of prison, comes back, tries to go back to doing whatever he did before he went to the slammer. He soon finds out that times have changed. New thugs have taken over his old territory and his old contacts, and they don’t like him encroaching on what they now regard as theirs.
“Turf war?” I asked.
“Maybe,” Ross said. “Maybe not. That’s what I’d like you to find out for me.”
“Why?” I said.
For the first time since he’d sat down in my office, Ross looked uncomfortable. “I really can’t say,” he said. “Or rather, I won’t. Not at this time. And given the fact that there have been leaks in my office before…”
I nodded. We both knew too much about those.
“I’m not about to put anything in writing,” he continued. “Not in an e-mail. Not in a letter. Not in anything official. At this point it’s strictly an informal inquiry.”
I wanted to ask how come, but I thought better of it. Ross gave me an answer anyway-a partial answer.
“It may be nothing at all. Then again, it could be a big deal,” he added. “Until I have a better handle on what’s going on, I don’t want to leave any kind of a paper trail.”
It was more of an answer than I probably deserved. It was also as much information as I was likely to receive. “Got it,” I said. “I’ll see what I can do. So this is under the radar?”
“Yes. Absolutely.”
“Can I use your name?”
“Let me know first.”
“Reports?”
“Nothing written,” he said. “Nothing that goes through channels and across desks. I’ve cleared it with Harry, so he knows you’re on special assignment. I’ll check with you off and on in the next few days and see how it’s going.”
For the first time I wondered if LaShawn Tompkins’s murder didn’t have something to do with whether Ross Alan Connors himself would stand for reelection.
“So I’m your secret agent man?” I asked.
Ross nodded. “For the time being. I’ve got a good crew of people here,” he added. “All of them are hand-picked, and all of them trustworthy, but you and I have a history, Beau. I’m counting on your discretion in this matter.”
“Okey-dokey,” I said. “You want discretion, you’ve got discretion.”
“Thanks,” he said. “And that includes your special friend, by the way,” he added as he rose to his feet.
It was a long way from what I had expected and deserved, but it was clear Ross knew all about Mel and me, and now I knew he knew. And not telling Mel about what he had asked me to do would put me between a rock and a hard place.
Ross pulled the door open. As he stepped into the corridor, he turned and looked back at me. “Life goes on, doesn’t it,” he said.
That throwaway comment covered a lot of territory. Ross Alan Connors and J. P. Beaumont did have a history, one that included the pain of losing wives to suicide. This was the second time now that Ross had come to me personally when he needed something handled under the radar. In the world of SHIT, I was indeed Ross’s secret agent man. He had just given me the handshake.
“Yes,” I agreed. “Yes, it does.”
CHAPTER 2
For a long time after Ross Connors left my office, I sat there and contemplated what it all might mean. Obviously, by limiting the scope of the investigation into LaShawn Tompkins’s death to one officer and by disallowing any kind of a paper trail, the A.G. seemed to be looking for a certain amount of deniability with regard to whatever his interest might be in the homicide of a now-exonerated killer. I also gave some careful thought to what I would tell Mel when she got around to asking, as she inevitably would, what the hell was going on.
It happened at lunchtime as we were driving through rain-washed sunshine to the Men’s Wearhouse in downtown Bellevue. “So what did Ross Connors want?” she asked. “Barbara told me the two of you were in your office for a closed-door meeting for a very long time.”
We were in the BMW and she was driving, so she wasn’t looking at my face when I answered. There’s a good reason I don’t play poker. My face is always a dead giveaway of whatever’s in my hand.
“Just chewing the fat,” I said casually. “I don’t think he’s ever gotten over what happened to Francine.”
“His wife?” Mel asked, shooting me a questioning look.
All that had happened before Melissa Soames had turned up at SHIT. I nodded, hoping she’d go back to watching traffic instead of watching me.
“That’s understandable,” Mel said. The fact that she swallowed my lie without a moment’s hesitation made me feel that much worse.
I had held out some hope that in the process of actually buying the damned tux I’d somehow manage to jar loose a little more information as to the whys and wherefores of my needing one. No such luck. Other than telling the alterations lady that we needed to have the tux in hand by Friday evening, Mel didn’t let slip any additional details. By then I was in far too deep to ask.
After my ordeal by tux (the first one I ever purchased as opposed to rented, by the way), we hurried across the street to the California Pizza Kitchen to grab some lunch. Mel knows her way around downtown Bellevue the same way I know my way around downtown Seattle. The place was bright, busy, crowded, and noisy, which suited me just fine. I hoped that Mel would be preoccupied enough with her surroundings that she’d stop giving me the third degree about Ross’s special project. Fat chance.
“So what are you up to later?” she asked.
“I have an MPT interview set up for this afternoon,” I said. “Once that’s over, I may end up having to go directly from there into Seattle.”
“So I’m on my own for getting across the water tonight?” she asked.
“Looks like.”
“That’s all right,” she said. “I had forgotten. I have a board meeting tonight. I’d need to bring my car home anyway.”
That’s when it finally dawned on me. Mel had been drafted onto the board of SASAC-the Seattle Area Sexual Assault Consortium. (Who makes up these names?) Their annual fund-raising auction was scheduled for Friday night. Since she’s on the board, not appearing simply wasn’t an
option, and that’s why I needed the tux. But my relief was short-lived.
“What about Beverly?” Mel prodded. “Did you call her yet?”
“Not yet, but I will,” I promised.
“If you go see her tonight, be sure to take that picture of Kyle along. I left it on the hallway table with the rest of the mail.”
I was eager to move away from the uncomfortable subject of visiting my grandmother. “What does your afternoon hold?” I asked.
Mel rolled her very blue eyes. For weeks she’d been working on a county-by-county analysis of violent crime. She’d been complaining about it for that long as well.
“As of this morning,” she said, “I’m suddenly charged with creating a catalog of violent sex offenders, which is, if you ask me, a long way away from our primary mission.”
“A catalog?” I asked.
She took a bite of her pasta salad and nodded. “More like a survey,” she answered. “For the past five years. Ross wants to know where Washington’s released sexual offenders have been-where they went once they got out of jail and where they are now. Oh, and he also wants it ASAP.”
Considering Mel’s extracurricular activity with SASAC, I could see why Ross Connors had drafted her for that particular job.
“Sounds like fun,” I said.
“Doesn’t it just,” she agreed glumly. “I guess I’ll be letting my fingers do the walking.”
We had paid up and were headed toward the door when, over the noise of rattling crockery, I heard someone call, “Melissa! Oh, Melissa.”
I turned and saw someone-a blonde-waving frantically from a table on the far side of the cashier stand. “Is that someone you know?”
Mel’s face broke into a smile. “Come on,” she said. “There’s someone I’d like you to meet. It’s Anita.”