by J. A. Jance
Aside from being the scum of the earth-a deserter and a suspected killer-how much more wrong can you get?
I said, “It’s nothing serious, Mrs. Kelsey. Don’t worry. Everything will be fine.”
With that, I rang off. I had said the soothing words, but I didn’t believe them, not for a moment. I put down the receiver, but before I had begun to think about what to do with this new information, the phone rang again.
“Beaumont here.”
“Detective Beaumont?” It was a man’s voice, tight and tentative and uncertain.
“Yes.” I tried to keep the impatience out of my voice.
“My name is George, George Riggs. You don’t know me but…”
I recalled the name from Max’s story. “You’re Marcia Kelsey’s father.”
“Why, yes. That’s right.” I could tell he was enormously relieved at not having to complete his awkward introduction.
“What can I do for you, Mr. Riggs?”
“I’m calling because my wife, Belle, I mean, LaDonna, asked me to. We’re here at Pete and Marcia’s house with Erin, our granddaughter. Pete had told us about you, I mean, he had told Erin at least, and he showed her your card. So when we found it, LaDonna said we should call you right away. That’s why I’m calling. To see if you can come over. If you would, I mean. We need to talk to you.”
I suspected George Riggs was a shy man, a person of few words, who didn’t much like using the phone to talk with complete strangers. His nervousness broadcast itself through the telephone receiver with such force that what he said was almost unintelligible. The desperation was not.
“Of course, Mr. Riggs. I’ll be right over.”
“You know where the house is? The address?”
“Yes, I do. Is this an emergency, Mr. Riggs?”
“Oh no, nothing like that, but if you could come as soon as possible…”
“It may take half an hour or so,” I reassured him, “but I’ll be there just as soon as I can.”
“Thank you so much. I’ll tell Belle that you’re on your way.”
The garage gods were with me. I checked out a car in record time and was parked on the snow-covered street below the Kelseys’ house in something less than twenty minutes.
Sidewalk, stairs and porch had all been carefully shoveled clean of snow and ice. The red-bowed holiday wreath had disappeared from the front door, which was flung open wide by a ravishing young nymph with a wild mop of uncontrolled red hair, vivid green eyes, and milk white skin. Something about the cheekbones and the set of her eyes seemed vaguely familiar to me, but that was only a passing thought, which disappeared as soon as she spoke.
“I’m Erin,” she announced. “Are you Detective Beaumont?” I nodded. “Thank you for hurrying,” she added. “Gran is worried sick.” She turned away from me and called back over her shoulder, “He’s here.”
An older woman appeared in the doorway to the dining room. She was angular and spare, with her arms clasped nervously around a narrow waist. She moved swiftly across the room, reaching out a hand in greeting.
“Thank you for coming so quickly,” she said. “I’m LaDonna Riggs, but everyone calls me Belle. As soon as I found it, I told George to call you. I wanted that thing out of the house immediately.”
I looked from the older woman to the younger one. “What ”thing‘ are we talking about?“ I asked.
“Why, the gun, of course. Didn’t George tell you about it on the phone?”
Now an older man wearing jeans and cowboy boots stepped into the dining room doorway. Sidled more than stepped. He stood there, leaning against the jamb with his hands shoved deep in his pockets.
LaDonna Riggs turned to face him. “Why didn’t you tell him about the gun, George? I told you to tell him.”
George Riggs shrugged his shoulders. “I must’ve forgot, sweetheart. I can’t always remember everything, you know.”
“What’s all this about a gun?” I asked.
“Daddy and I came over to get Marcia’s things to take down to the mortuary,” Belle Riggs explained. “She wasn’t married in the temple, you see, so she doesn’t have any temple clothes, but we found her a nice white dress to be buried in all the same. And I wanted to find her some nice white underwear, too. New underwear. Marcia was always particular about her undies, and I knew she’d have some nice things put back. She was a saver, you know. That was one thing she was good at. She’d buy bras and panties on sale…”
“Gran,” Erin interrupted impatiently. “Just tell him about the gun.”
“Well, I’m trying to. Anyway, I checked her bottom drawer, thinking that’s where she’d keep any new things she hadn’t worn yet, and that’s where I found the gun. It was there under a stack of panties that were still in their plastic containers.”
“Maybe you’d better show me,” I said.
Erin led the way up a carpeted stairway and into a cheerful master bedroom. The bed was made, the pillows plumped under a Wedgewood blue spread. I wondered if Pete Kelsey had made the bed-I still couldn’t adjust to thinking about him in terms of John David Madsen-or if that was something Belle Riggs had handled before she went searching for her dead daughter’s underwear.
The bottom drawer of a sleek teak dresser still stood open. I walked over to it and peered inside. The rough checkered handle of a. 25 Auto Browning was partially hidden under a stack of shrink-wrapped panties. The barrel was completely visible. It was an old-fashioned gun, well made-almost quaint-the kind of weapon an eccentric Auntie Mame type might have packed in a dainty purse. Old-fashioned and quaint maybe, but at point-blank range, very, very lethal. I recalled from my cursory reading of Doc Baker’s autopsy that the misshapen slug that had severed Alvin Chambers’ spinal cord before tearing through his internal organs had been from a. 25-caliber something.
“It’s not Marcia’s,” Belle Riggs was declaring firmly to the room in general. “It certainly isn’t Marcia’s. She wouldn’t have allowed a thing like that in her home, to say nothing of in her underwear drawer.”
I took a deep breath and turned to Erin. “Where’s your dad?” I asked.
“Mrs. Damon, one of the ladies he did some remodeling for a few months ago, called early this afternoon. One of her pipes had burst and she wanted to know who to call. She didn’t want to bother Dad, and she didn’t want him to go over, but he did anyway. He should be home any time now.”
“Did anyone here touch this?” I asked.
“No way!” Mrs. Riggs responded at once. “I wouldn’t let anyone near it. You’ll take it with you, won’t you?”
Of the three people in the room, Erin, young as she was, seemed most in possession of her faculties. “Can you find me a shoe box?” I asked her.
“A shoe box?” she repeated with a puzzled frown.
“Yes. A shoe box and some string.”
Erin nodded and hurried away.
“What do you need that for?” Belle Riggs asked indignantly. “A shoe box, of all things.”
“I can’t tell whether or not this weapon is loaded. I’ll have to secure it in the box in order to take it down to the crime lab.”
Erin returned at once with the shoe box. “The string is down in the garage. I’ll be right back.”
Carefully I picked up the Browning, holding the grip gingerly between my thumb and fore-finger as I placed it in the box. Television detectives to the contrary, lifting guns with pencils to preserve fingerprints is not only dangerous-you never know whether or not it’s loaded-it ignores the reality that the rough surfaces on most pistol grips are totally unsuitable for fingerprinting techniques.
“The crime lab?” Belle Riggs asked suddenly as though the words had finally penetrated her consciousness. “You don’t think this is connected to what happened. That’s impossible. It couldn’t be. I just wanted the thing out of the house.”
“It’s possible,” I said grimly.
Much as it pained me to admit it, mounting circumstantial evidence made it look more and more
as though Detective Kramer was right, and Pete Kelsey was our man. As the saying goes, I may be dumb, but I’m not stupid, and I wasn’t about to ignore facts that jumped up and hit me in the face.
Erin returned, carrying a ball of string and a pair of scissors. I punched holes in the bottom of the box and immobilized the gun, tying it off with a piece of string. At my request, Erin once more disappeared, returning this time with a Magic Marker. Across the top of the box I scrawled the words “Possibly Loaded” in huge red letters.
A dismayed Belle Riggs had retreated to the bed. She sat on the edge of it, rocking back and forth in a dazed sort of way. George came on into the room and sat on the bed beside her, consolingly patting her hand.
“Now, Mama,” he said. “Don’t you worry. It’s going to be all right.”
“But, George, how can they possibly think that Pete…”
Erin had been out of the room during the first exchange, but now she was back. Squatting on the floor in front of me, she looked at me across the gun-laden shoe box, her green eyes flashing fire.
“My father didn’t do this,” she said in a calm, measured voice that belied the smoldering anger in her eyes. “I know my father. He couldn’t.”
There was a whole lot about her father that I knew that Erin Kelsey didn’t. Somebody was going to have to tell her, and I didn’t want that person to be me.
“Who else besides your father has access to this room?”
“No one, except me, I guess,” she answered.
“What was your mother’s maiden name?” I asked.
“Riggs,” Erin Kelsey replied firmly. “What kind of question is that?”
“Your real mother,” I said. “What was her name?”
For the first time, Erin Kelsey’s lower lip trembled as she answered. “Marcia Riggs Kelsey was my real mother, Detective Beaumont. She was the only mother I ever knew. She changed my diapers and bandaged my knees and taught me how to drive. My birth mother’s name was Carol Ann Gentry Kelsey.”
“Where was she from?”
“Ottawa, like my dad.”
“Have you ever met any of your Canadian relatives?”
Erin shook her head. “No. None of them. My dad was sort of an orphan and there was some kind of trouble with my mother’s parents when my parents got married. I think my birth mother was disowned. That’s why we ended up living in Mexico, and that’s where we were when the car wreck killed my mother. But what does any of this have to do with this gun? I don’t understand.”
“I’m just trying to put together some background information.”
“What kind of background information?” Pete Kelsey asked suddenly from the bedroom doorway, startling us all. “What’s going on here?”
I hadn’t heard or seen him arrive, and I have no idea how long he’d been standing there in the doorway. He was still wearing heavy work boots and his sheepskin-lined denim jacket. His eyes took in the entire room in one long, sweeping glance.
Mrs. Riggs leaped off the bed and rushed to the door. “Oh, Peter, I’m so glad to see you,” she gushed breathlessly. “We found a gun in Marcia’s bottom drawer. I don’t have any idea where it came from, but I wanted it out of the house right away, so I…we asked Detective Beaumont here to come pick it up. So he was…”
“A gun?” Pete Kelsey’s question interrupted his mother-in-law’s harangue. “In Marcia’s drawer?”
Erin and I both stood up, leaving the shoe box sitting forgotten on the floor between us.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Kelsey,” I said calmly. “I’ll need to ask you a few questions about this.” I made no move to draw my weapon. In that crowded bedroom, that could have been deadly for any one of us.
“Daddy,” Erin began, cutting me off in mid-sentence and taking a halting step toward the doorway. Her action, inadvertent or not, effectively blocked my path to the door.
With a stricken look on his face, Pete Kelsey paused, but only for a fraction of an instant, then he turned and bolted back down the stairway. George and Belle Riggs, Erin, and I all leaped for the door like panicked patrons in a crowded theater responding to a shout of fire. We all jammed into the narrow doorway at once, and I heard the front door slam behind Pete Kelsey long before I ever managed to untangle myself from the others.
Breaking free at last, I pounded down the stairway behind him, but to no avail. By the time I reached the front porch, he was gone. I had no way of knowing if he had escaped on foot or if he was driving his Eagle. I turned to go back into the house to call for assistance, but a determined Erin Kelsey barred my way.
“No,” she said firmly, standing before me with her arms folded across her chest and her chin raised in fiery defiance.
“What do you mean, no?”
“You’re not coming back inside this house without a search warrant.”
“But I need to know if your father’s in his car or on foot.”
“That’s your problem.”
I backed off because I could see she meant it. “What about the gun?” I asked.
“It’ll still be right there where you left it when you come back with a warrant,” she said. “Nobody here is going to touch it, but if that’s what you think, if you believe my father’s a cold-blooded killer, I’m not going to lift a finger to help you. My grandparents won’t either.”
I couldn’t blame her for putting up a fight, and there wasn’t time to explain that asking someone questions wasn’t necessarily the same as accusing him of murder, but standing there on the porch arguing about it was splitting hairs and wasting precious time. I hurried back down to my car and radioed for help, feeling foolish that I didn’t know if our quarry was on foot or traveling by car.
Several uniformed patrol officers responded, arriving within minutes. One street at a time, we combed the immediate area at the far north end of Capitol Hill, but it was useless.
By then Pete Kelsey had disappeared completely into cold, thin air.
Chapter 16
In the wintertime it’s dark in Seattle by four-thirty in the afternoon. By then it was clear to all concerned, including the chase-crazed members of the news media, that Pete Kelsey had successfully eluded our efforts to find him.
At that point, despite the fact that he had fled the house on Crockett rather than answer any questions, and despite our learning that he had lived his entire life in Seattle under an assumed identity, we still only wanted him for questioning. The presence of the gun in his bedroom was certainly a strong link, but it would take a laboratory analysis to tell us whether or not that gun was the missing. 25 from the murder scene. If the weapons proved to be one and the same, the web of evidence against Pete Kelsey would become a whole lot stronger.
I left the physical search for Pete Kelsey in the hands of a squad of patrol officers as well as a K-9 unit. They were all much younger than I, and they were all, including the dog, a whole lot better-dressed for the still icy weather.
Returning to the Public Safety Building, I set the necessary wheels in motion to obtain a search warrant for Pete Kelsey’s house on Crockett. Since the warrant wasn’t immediately forthcoming and since there wasn’t a damn thing I could do to speed up the process, I headed back to my cubicle to finish documenting exactly what had happened during the course of that day, and in what order, while it was all still relatively fresh in my mind.
I had completed the first page of the final installment and was almost finished with the second when an irate Detective Kramer materialized in my doorway. He was outraged. It’s a good thing I’d had time enough to cool down.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing, grabbing that AFIS report from Tomi?” he demanded.
“My job, Kramer,” I responded. “I was just doing my job. I got word from Watty that you were being overworked, and I thought I’d help out by picking it up for you.”
But Kramer thundered on as though I hadn’t even opened my mouth. My wonderfully effective use of irony fell on totally deaf ears.
“I go b
y the fourth floor to pick it up on my way back from court,” Kramer continued, “and Tomi tells me you got it from her hours ago. You’ve been sitting on it all this time!”
I kept trying to stay cool and rational, to not get suckered into a confrontational mode, but Kramer was sorely tempting me.
“I haven’t exactly been sitting around on my duff,” I pointed out reasonably. “As a matter of fact, I’ve been dragging my freezing ass all over Capitol Hill looking for your friend and mine, Pete Kelsey.”
“Give me the damn report, Beau. I want to see it.”
“Wait a minute, aren’t you the very same guy who somehow neglected to tell me about the logbook sheets when you talked to me on the phone last night?”
“That was an oversight,” Kramer snapped.
“What the hell do you think this is? I’ve been busier than a one-legged man at an ass-kicking contest, Kramer. I barely got up here with that damned AFIS report of yours when George Riggs calls to ask me to come pick up the gun. What would you have done, ignore him? If you’re pissed that I didn’t take the time to ship you your mail before I went hightailing it out of here, that’s too damn bad, and as far as I’m concerned, you can stay pissed all day.”
Belligerently, Kramer held out his hand. “I don’t know anything about a gun. I want that report, Beaumont.”
“I haven’t had a chance to copy it yet,” I responded heatedly, because by then, my hackles were up too. “When I get around to it, believe me, you’ll be the first to know.”
Just then Sergeant Watkins appeared, drawn as inevitably to the sound of raised voices as iron filings to a powerful magnet. He paused in the doorway and peered at us both from over Detective Kramer’s burly shoulder. “What’s going on here, guys?” he asked.
“You could call it a slight procedural difference of opinion, Sergeant Watkins,” I replied. “It’s no biggie.”
I modified my tone slightly, answering the question as evenly as possible. Detective Kramer, still seething, said nothing.