Fire and Ice

Over the years I didn’t talk about the money with anyone other than Ralph Ames and with Ron Peters, my best friend on the force. Make that my best friend, period. Ron knew all about it. He was there in my apartment on that awful afternoon after Anne Corley died and he did me the enormous favor of running what remained of our wedding cake down the garbage disposal. I suppose there was some talk around the department when I moved from the Royal Crest to Belltown Terrace, but since I didn’t make a big deal of it, neither did my coworkers at Seattle PD or at the Special Homicide Investigation Team. And since I kept coming into the office just like any other poor working stiff and since I didn’t make a fuss about my financial situation, neither did anyone else. The subject of money seldom came up.

Until recently, and that brings me to yet another unintended consequence, Mel, my third wife, and the light of my life. At the time I met Melissa Soames, I wasn’t at all interested in having either another partner or another wife. Despite both our efforts to the contrary, she became both. Once she showed up to work at S.H.I.T. and once I laid eyes on her, I should have known she was trouble, but I didn’t, and by the time I figured it out, it was too late. The wheels were off the bus. J. P. Beaumont was a goner.

When Mel and I were courting, we didn’t talk about money any more than Anne Corley and I had. Mel’s first husband had been pretty well fixed as far as finances were concerned, but he was also a jerk who made sure she didn’t make off with much. Once Mel and I were married and had to file our first set of income taxes, things changed and suddenly money was an issue.

“What the hell’s the matter with you?”Mel had demanded, hands on her hips. “Why on earth do you think Anne Corley gave you all that money in the first place?”

It’s funny that’s how Mel and I both talk about her—Anne Corley, with both names. It’s almost as though I never lasted long enough to be on a first-name basis with the woman. Mel has copied that peculiarity.

“Because she liked me?”I asked lamely.

I have to admit, I had never given that question all that much thought or even any thought. Why would I?

“Because she wanted you to have fun with it,”Mel told me. “Because she figured out the moment she met you that you worked too hard—that you were too serious and too driven. She wanted to lighten your load. Instead, you’ve kept right on working too hard and amassing a fortune. It’s time that changed. You can either sit around like some modern King Midas, or you can get off your dead butt (she didn’t say butt, actually) and have some fun with that gift while you’re still young enough to enjoy it. I don’t need to be a rich widow. We’re both alive and healthy. Let’s have fun now!”

Our trip to Disneyland was a direct result of that conversation. The only bad unintended consequence of that, of course, had been my ride on the teacups.

It turns out that Mel has lots of good ideas for spending my money. Sometime earlier, Mel had become involved with a group of high-flying Seattle-area women who had introduced her to the miracle of private jets, or “Business Aviation,”as they call it in the literature. It turned out that the women had been up to no good, but the private-jet lesson had stuck.

Mel liked using them, and now so do I. It’s nice to travel on your own schedule and to get off and on planes with your luggage and dignity intact. It’s slick that you don’t have to remove your belt or your shoes or your jacket. All you have to do is show your ID, get on the plane, and off you go. If you want to take along a brand-new ten-ounce container of toothpaste? Fine. If you want to take along a twelve-ounce container of mouthwash or baby formula? That’s fine, too. And if you happen to carry a stray 9-mm with you? That’s not a problem, either. You don’t have to walk through any metal detectors. You show the pilots your government-issue ID and away you go.

Being able to do all these things doesn’t come cheap, as I had learned when I flew all my nearest and dearest to Las Vegas for Mel’s and my wedding. It was expensive but a fun first crack at flying private aircraft. Once I actually tried it and found out “how the other half lived,”I had zero interest in ever getting back into one of those slow-moving TSA security check lines at Sea-Tac airport. And that’s how Mel and I had flown to Anaheim, on board a Hawker 400XP. And that’s how we were flying home as well.

When Ross Connors had talked about the chances of my being able to get my luggage back in time to make it over to Ellensburg for the Jane Doe autopsy, I didn’t come right out and say that I knew good and well that getting my luggage wasn’t going to be a problem. And so, although I didn’t mention any of that to Ross, I did place a call to Owners’ Services and let them know that we’d like to leave an hour earlier than our originally scheduled departure time of 10:30 A.M.

“So what do you think?”Mel asked, once we were buckled into our seats and drinking our coffee while we taxied to the end of the runway. “Was it a success?”

I reached across the aisle, took her hand, and kissed the back of it. “Unqualified,”I told her. “Everybody had fun. There were no major blowups. Kelly was on speaking terms with me the whole time. It doesn’t get any better than that.”

Mel, whose relationship with her own father isn’t exactly trouble-free, has been more of a help in decoding my daughter than she could have imagined.

“Jeremy’s an interesting guy,”she said. “The more I’m around him, the more I like him.”

Which was my opinion, too. He deals with Kelly’s periodic outbursts with a quiet reserve that is calming without being patronizing. He’s good with the kids, goes to work every day, carries his weight around the house, and loves my daughter to distraction. What more could a father-in-law want?

“I’m glad they’ll be spending some of Kayla’s spring break with Dave.”

Mel’s easy acceptance of everyone’s ongoing relationship with my first wife’s second husband was another thing that made her easy to love. She had come into our family, lumps and all, and figured out a way to make it work. After three days of nonstop grandkids, though, I was glad to share the wealth and the work with someone else. I was more than ready to let their “other”grandpa have a crack at them.

“Me, too,”I said, and meant it.

I dozed as we flew north. It was bumpy as we did our approach to Boeing Field, circling over Puget Sound, and coming down just to the west of downtown Seattle and our Belltown Terrace condo. It had been sunny in southern California. It was raining in Seattle. My car was sitting waiting for us on the tarmac. Four minutes after landing, our bags had been transferred to the car and we headed north. I dropped Mel and the luggage off with the doorman at Belltown Terrace and went east on the 520 Bridge.

After a winter of hardly any snow, it was snowing some as I headed across Snoqualmie Pass—not enough to require chains, but enough to make for slow going in the pass. I shouldn’t have bothered. When I reached the Kittitas County M.E.’s office, I was stopped by a square-jawed receptionist named Connie Whitman who gave me the third degree. Who was I? What did I want? Did I have an appointment? Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I’m not sure why it is that gatekeepers always get my hackles up, but they generally do. And it was only after I had been grilled three ways to Sunday that I was finally given the information that Dr. Laura Hopewell was on her way back from a conference and had been unavoidably delayed by low-lying fog at SFO.

“Any idea when she’ll arrive then?”I asked.

Ms. Whitman gave me what I regard as the receptionist’s signature cold-eyed stare. “No idea,”she said. “She’ll get here when she gets here.”

Steamed but knowing better than to mention it, I left the office. I put as much distance as possible between the receptionist and myself. I made my way back out to the freeway and grabbed some lunch at Dinah’s Diner.

While I waited for my “Cascade Burger,”I called into the office and talked to Harry. “So you lucked out, drew the latest honey crisp, and ended up in Ellensburg?”he asked. “When do you think you’ll be back?”

Harry I. Ball is a good guy in a man’s man sort of way, but don’t expect him to toe the PC line when it comes to talking the talk. That’s one of the reasons he ended up in charge of S.H.I.T.—he flunked out of his local department’s diversity training. I think Ross Connors took pity on him and gave him a job because he’s a great cop who knows how to get the job done, and that was more important than his being unfailingly politically incorrect.

When he made that comment about “honey crisp,”I knew he was talking about our series of dead females and not some new kind of whole-grain breakfast cereal.

“You might not want to use that particular term with Mel or Barbara,”I advised.

Barbara Galvin is our secretary. Mel and Barbara live in a post-feminist world. I doubt either one of them ever burned a bra, but if the two of them took a notion to clean Harry’s clock, I wouldn’t have bet money on Harry.

“Right,”he said. “Sorry.”

“The Kittitas M.E.’s plane got delayed in San Francisco,”I told him. “I don’t know when she’ll get around to doing the autopsy, and I won’t be back until after she does. Is there anything in particular you can tell me about this case?”

“The guy who found the bones last Friday is named Kenneth Leggett. He’s a heavy-equipment operator who lives on North First Street in North Bend. So far he’s been interviewed by the locals but not by anyone from our office. Do you have your computer with you?”

“Yes,”I said. Astonishingly enough, after years of resisting computers, I now seldom leave home without one, usually air-card equipped. I’m a new man as far as telecommunications are concerned. Harry isn’t. He’s glad computers work as long as he doesn’t have to use them himself.

“Good,”he said. “I’ll have Barbara send over one of those PFDs of the crime scene report.”

“You mean a PDF?”I asked.

“Whatever,”Harry replied. “You know what I mean, and when you get a look at the report, you’ll see. The tarp business pretty well corks it.”

“The tags are clipped off?”I asked.

“You got it,”Harry said.

In each of the previous five cases, the victim had been wrapped in a tarp before being set on fire. In each instance one corner of the tarp that had served as a shroud had been cut off—not torn off, but carefully clipped off. Not surprisingly, those missing corners happened to be the ones that would have held the manufacturing tags along with identifying information that might have led us back both to the original manufacturer and to possible local retail outlets. Not having the tags made it infinitely more difficult to get a line on the ultimate purchaser. Ross Connors had crime lab folks doing chemical analyses of each tarp fragment we’d found in hopes of narrowing where the tarps might have come from, but so far that wasn’t leading us where we needed to go.

“Personal effects?”I asked.

“She was wearing boots, snakeskin Tony Lamas, and what looks like an engagement ring on one of her fingers. No wedding band, though,”Harry said. “The M.E. may find more on the corpse itself.”

That had been the situation in two of the other cases, where personal items had come to light only in the course of the autopsy.

Just then a smiling waitress came to my table to deliver what turned out to be a gigantic hamburger. Early in my career as a homicide detective, the grisly discussion at hand might well have wrecked my appetite. I’m beyond that now. Lunch is lunch, whatever the topic of conversation.

“All right,”I said to Harry. “My food’s here. Have to go. Have Barbara send me the info.”

As soon as I finished my lunch, I paid the tab and headed back over to the M.E.’s office. I wanted to be there, Johnny-on-the-spot, when Dr. Laura Hopewell was ready to rumble. Over the years I’ve learned that most medical examiners have one thing in common with a live theater performance: Don’t show up after the opening curtain and expect the usher to hand you a program and show you to your seat.

It isn’t going to happen.

FOUR (#ulink_09757c6e-be04-5bf0-a169-5af40bb32384)

JOANNA ARRIVED in time to be in on part of Detective Howell’s interview with Mr. Maury Robbins. Clearly much of it was a repeat of what Ernie had already asked him. But that was standard in a homicide investigation—to ask the same questions several different times to see if there were any discrepancies.