RING IN THE DEAD

A J. P. BEAUMONT NOVELLA

J. A. JANCE

DEDICATION

To John Douglas

for taking a chance on a guy named J.P. Beaumont

all those years ago.

CONTENTS

Dedication

RING IN THE DEAD

An Excerpt from Second Watch

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

About the Author

Books by J. A. Jance

Copyright

About the Publisher

RING IN THE DEAD

IT WAS NEW YEAR’S EVE. Back when I was drinking, New Year’s Eve was always a good excuse to tie one on, but now those bad old days were far in the past. Mel was out getting a late-breaking mani-pedi in advance of our surprise (to her) date to walk three blocks up First Avenue for an intimate dinner for two at El Gaucho. Our penthouse condo allows a great view of the Space Needle, three blocks away. That means, at midnight, we’d have ringside seats from the shelter of our bedroom balcony for the Needle’s New Year’s fireworks display. The weather still hadn’t made up its mind if midnight revelers would be greeted by a light sprinkle or pouring rain. It was certain, however, that at least it wouldn’t be snowing.

My wife, Mel Soames, and I both work for the Attorney General’s Special Homicide Investigation Team, affectionately dubbed S.H.I.T. Yes, I know. The name is a running joke and has been for a very long time, but we’ve grown to like it over the years. In the brave new world of no-overtime, we both had plenty of comp time available to us, and we had chosen to take it over the holidays, including before and after Christmas. Use it or lose it, as they say.

So I was sitting in my den in solitary splendor, reviewing my life and times and considering a possible list of New Year’s resolutions, when the phone rang—the landline, not my cell. Not only do we have a landline, we still have a listed number for it, although it’s not one that comes readily to mind since that phone isn’t the one I use on a daily basis.

The idea behind keeping a listed number is simple. Being in the directory makes it possible for the people I want to find me—fellow Beaver alums from Ballard High School, for example—to find me. As for the people I don’t want finding me? For those—for the ones who want to sell me aluminum siding for my high-rise condo, I answer the phone with an icy, salesman-repelling voice that works equally as well on them and on others, like people making political robo-dials for their favorite candidates and the guys trying to convince me to sign up for the policemen’s ball—which is a scam, by the way. For the most part, the spam-type calls come through with the originating number blocked. Those always go unanswered, and if they leave a message, those don’t get picked up, either.

This particular call came with a caller ID name: Richard Nolan, and a 503 phone number that meant it was from somewhere in Oregon. Even so, I answered using my pissed-off, ditch-the-sales-pitch voice.

“Detective Beaumont?” a woman’s voice asked.

I haven’t been Detective Beaumont for years now—ever since I left Seattle PD. It doesn’t mean, however, that I’m no longer that other person.

“I used to be,” I said. “Who’s asking?”

“My name’s Anne Marie Nolan,” she said. “I live in Portland, Oregon. Milton Gurkey was my father.”

That took my breath away, and it also took me back. When I got promoted to Homicide from Patrol, Milton Gurkey, aka Pickles, was my first partner. We worked together for five years, starting in the spring of 1973. In fact, only months earlier, I had spent time dealing with our first case, which, prior to that, had gone unresolved for almost four decades. Pickles died in 1978. I had long since lost track of his widow, Anna.

“Pickles’s daughter?” I replied. “Great to hear from you.”

There was a distinct pause on the phone. “No matter how many times I hear it, I can never get used to the idea that that’s what you guys all called my dad—Pickles. It seems disrespectful, somehow.”

“Sorry,” I mumbled. “I didn’t mean any disrespect. For the guys who called him that, it was almost a term of endearment. How’s your mother, by the way?”

Anne Marie sighed. “Mother passed away a month ago. She was in hospice up here in Seattle when news about that old Wellington case was in the papers. I read the articles to her. She was glad to know that somebody finally solved it. She said that was a case that haunted Daddy until the day he died.”

“I’m sorry to hear about your mother,” I said. “I wish I had known.”

“You and my dad were partners a long time ago,” Anne Marie said. “Mom remarried twice after Daddy died. The first guy was a loser who didn’t hang around long. The second one, Dan, was great. He died two years ago. Mom took his name, Lawson, when they married, so it’s not surprising that you wouldn’t have gotten word about her death.”

Anne Marie had given me a graceful out. Still, I couldn’t help feeling remiss, as if I had been deliberately neglectful. A part of me was glad Anna Gurkey—clearly Anne Marie was her mother’s namesake—had known about our finally solving the long cold Monica Wellington case before she died. That case was a loose end left hanging that Pickles and I had dragged around between us the whole time we worked together. Obviously, in the intervening years since Pickles’s funeral, Anna Gurkey’s life had continued just as mine had, with some good and some bad. Hers was over now, and I regretted that I hadn’t made any effort to see her before she died.

“Anyway,” Anne Marie continued, resuming her story, “I was here for several weeks while Mom was in hospice. Once she was gone, I had to go home and get caught up on things in Portland. That’s where we . . .” She paused, seemed to catch herself, before going on with the story. “That’s where I live now,” she corrected. “I just left everything in Mother’s house as is because I was at the end of my rope. I had expended every bit of energy I could muster, and I simply couldn’t face sorting through all that crap by myself. I’m an only child, you see. At the time she died, Mom was still living in the house she and Daddy bought when they first got married, the one I was raised in.

“My mother wasn’t a hoarder by any means,” Anne Marie said, rushing on, “but she didn’t throw much away. So I’ve spent all of Christmas vacation up here sorting through the house, getting ready for an estate sale that I’m planning on holding when the weather clears up in the spring. I’m on my way back to Portland now. I want to be back home before all the drunks hit the streets. The thing is, I found something down in the basement in a cedar chest that I thought you might want to see. I don’t know where you are in the city, but I’d be happy to drop it off on my way south.”

Pickles and Anna had lived at the north end of Ballard in an area called Blue Ridge. Depending on which route Anne Marie was going to take, she’d be within blocks of my Belltown Terrace condo on her way to I-5 and back out of town.

“I’m at Second and Broad,” I said. “In downtown Seattle. You’re welcome to stop by to visit.”

“I was going to head out right away,” she said. “I really don’t have much time.”

“How about at least stopping long enough for a cup of coffee, then?” I suggested.

“You’re sure it’s no trouble?”

“We have a machine. It’s just a matter of pushing the button.”

“All right then,” she agreed.

“The building has a doorman,” I told her. “Just pull up out front in the passenger loading zone. I’ll come down, meet you, guide you into the parking garage, and let you into the elevator. You can’t get into it from the garage without a key.”

Once I put down the phone, I stood up and looked around. In the old days the room would have been awash in newspapers, including at least one section folded open to the crossword puzzle page. These days I do the crosswords on my iPad. I closed it up and put it away. Then, leaving the den and my comfortable recliner behind, I went out into the living room, closing the French doors behind me.

Since all the kids had been home for the holidays, the living room and dining room were still decorated for Christmas,. My daughter, Kelly, and son-in-law, Jeremy, had come up from southern Oregon with their two kids. My son, Scott, and his wife, Cherisse, had recently moved back to Seattle from the Bay Area, so we’d had an over-the-top Christmas celebration. Because we’d hired a friend, an interior designer, to come in and do the holiday decorating, the place looked spectacular. I hoped when it came time to put the decorations away, we’d manage to fit all of them back into our storeroom down in the building’s basement.

On my way through the kitchen, I made sure the coffee machine was freshly supplied with water and beans. Then I went downstairs to the lobby to wait. I was sitting there, chatting with Bob, the doorman, when a woman in an aging Honda pulled up outside and honked. I went out through the front entrance to meet her. With the wind blowing and a driving rain falling, I was glad to have the building’s protective canopy overhead as I hurried over to the car. She opened the passenger-side window.

“I’m Beau,” I told her. “If you don’t mind, I’ll ride along and show you where to park.”

There was a pause with me standing in the rain while she heaved a stack of assorted junk from the front seat to the back. That’s what happens when you spend most of your driving time in a car all by yourself. The passenger seat morphs into a traveling storage locker.

Once Anne Marie had cleared the seat, I climbed in. By then I was wet, not quite through, but close enough. I directed her around the building on John, into the garage, and over to where the valet parking attendant stood waiting.

“Just leave your keys with him,” I instructed.

“Where do I pay?” she asked.

“Don’t worry about it,” I told her. “I’ll have him put it on my tab. They automatically bill me for guest parking at the end of the month.”

I used my building key first to enter the elevator lobby, next to call the elevator, and finally to make it work. Once I had done so and punched the PH button, I caught the questioning look Anne Marie sent in my direction.

“Yes,” I said in answer to her unasked question. “My wife, Mel, and I live in the penthouse.”

It’s a long elevator ride. About the time we passed the sixth floor, Anne Marie said, “I always thought your name was Jonas.”

When Pickles and I first started working together, he had insisted on calling me by my given name, even though I much preferred being called Beau or J. P. He had come around eventually, but his family must not have gotten the memo.

“I don’t much like my given name,” I said. “Never have.”

After that we fell silent until the elevator door slid open. The penthouse floor of Belltown Terrace is made up of only two units. I showed her to ours, opening and holding the door to let her inside. The attention of first-time visitors is always drawn straight through the dining room to the expanse of windows at the far end of the living room. The glass goes from the upholstered window seat to the crown molding on the ceiling and offers an unobstructed view of Puget Sound on the west and the grain terminal, Seattle Center, and Lower Queen Anne Hill on the north. In the middle of the north-facing windows sat our nine-foot Christmas tree glittering with its astonishing array of lights and decorations.

As I said, most of the time the views through those windows are spectacular with the generally snow-capped Olympic Mountains looming in the far distance. Today, however, in the lashing downpour, the view amounted to little more than variations on a theme of gray on gray. The point where pewter-colored clouds met the gunmetal gray water was somewhere beyond a heavy curtain of rain as a fast-moving storm cell came on shore.

“Sorry about the view,” I said. “It’s usually a little better than this.”

I hoped the quip might help lighten my visitor’s mood. It didn’t. Her face had been set in a grim expression when I first climbed into her vehicle, and that didn’t change. Instead, she stopped in the middle of the room and sent a second accusatory stare in my direction.

“If you were a cop, how did you get all this?”

I shrugged. “What can I say?” I quipped. “I married well.”

That was the truth. Owning a penthouse suite in Belltown Terrace would never have been possible without the legacy left to me by my second wife, Anne Corley. But my offhand comment about that did nothing to lighten Anne Marie’s mood or change her disapproving expression either. She simply turned away and made a beeline for the window seat.

Anne Marie was a relatively tall woman, five-ten or so, squarely built, somewhere in her early fifties. Her graying hair was pulled back in a severe bun, and there was a distinctive hardness about her features that I thought I recognized. Between the time when I’d seen her last—as a teenager at her father’s funeral—and now, the woman had done some hard living, and there was nothing in her demeanor to suggest that this was some kind of cheerful holiday visit.

Once Anne Marie sat down, I noticed that instead of putting her purse on the cushion beside her, she kept it on her lap, clutched tightly in her arms like a shield. I wasn’t sure if she was holding on to it because it contained something precious or if she was using it as a barrier to help me keep me at bay. I also noticed a light band of pale skin on her ring finger that intimated the relatively recent removal of a wedding ring.

If the poor woman’s mother had just died and if her marriage was coming to an end at the same time, it was no wonder that Anne Marie Gurkey Nolan was a woman under emotional siege. I didn’t comment on that deduction aloud, but I tried to take it into consideration as our conversation continued.

“What do you take in your coffee?” I asked.

“Nothing,” she said. “Just black.”

“Strong or not?” I asked. “My wife gave me a fancy coffee machine for Christmas. It makes individual cups of coffee, and we can adjust the strength for each one by turning the bean control lighter or darker.”

“Strong, please,” she said. “It’s a long drive.”

“I don’t envy you making that drive in this weather,” I commented as I walked away.

She nodded but said nothing.

I was aware of her watching me through the pass-through while I was in the kitchen, gathering coffee mugs; waiting for the beans to grind and the coffee to brew. I couldn’t help wondering what this was all about. When I brought the coffee into the living room, she took the mug from the tray with one hand, but she still didn’t relinquish her grip on the purse.

Since Anne Marie was clearly so ill at ease, I made no attempt to join her on the window seat. Instead, I sat in one of the armchairs facing her. Hoping to make things better for her, I bumbled along, doing my best to carry on some semblance of polite conversation. In that regard, I was missing Mel in the worst way. She can always smooth out the kinds of difficult situations that turn me into a conversational train wreck.

“I’m so sorry to hear about your mother,” I said regretfully. “I’m afraid I lost track of her after your father died.”

“I’m not surprised,” Anne Marie replied. “Once Daddy was gone, Mother didn’t want to have anything to do with Seattle PD.”

“Had she been ill long?”

Anne Marie took a tentative sip of coffee and shook her head. “She had a bout with breast cancer several years ago, but she responded well to the treatment. Her doctors said she was in remission. When she got sick again, we thought at first that the breast cancer had returned. It turns out it was a different kind of cancer altogether—pancreatic—and there was nothing anybody could do.”

“Losing your mother is always tough,” I said.

Anne Marie gave me a challenging look, as though she suspected I had no real understanding of her situation. I could have told her that I had lost my own mother to cancer when I was in my early twenties and much younger than she was now, but I didn’t. Still hoping to be a good host, I tried changing the subject, only to land squarely on yet another painful topic.

“I guess the last time I saw you was at your father’s funeral.”

Anne Marie nodded. “I was only a sophomore in college when Daddy died. I’ve always hated funerals,” she added. “Mother did, too. She told me she wanted to be cremated, and she stated in writing that she didn’t want any kind of service. She probably did that for my sake because she knew how much funerals bother me.”

My bouncing unerringly from one loaded topic to another didn’t do much for putting Anne Marie at ease. Still, it must have worked up to a point, because after a brief pause she pressed forward with the real purpose of her visit.

She straightened her shoulders and took a deep breath before saying, “Mother always blamed you for Daddy’s death. So did I.”

I was hard-pressed to summon a suitable response for that. I remembered the day Pickles Gurkey died like it was yesterday—in the middle of the afternoon on a rainy Monday. Pickles and I had just placed a homicide suspect under arrest. The guy had turned violent on us, and it had taken both Pickles and me to subdue him. The suspect was in cuffs and safely in the back of the car, when Pickles had suddenly staggered and fallen. At first I thought he’d been punched in the gut or something during the fight, but I soon realized the situation was far worse than that. He’d already had one heart attack by then, and here we were five years later with the same thing happening When I realized this was a second attack—and a massive one at that—I immediately called for help. Seattle’s Medic 1 was Johnny-on-the spot just as they had been the first time around. On this occasion, however, there was nothing they could do; nothing anybody could do.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I did everything I could . . .”

Anne Marie waved aside my attempted apology. “I’m not talking about what you did that day,” she said brusquely. “Not when Daddy had his second heart attack. Mother and I blamed you because he went back to work after the first one.”

What can you say to something like that? Pickles was a grown man, and grown men get to make their own decisions. We were partners, but I didn’t make him come back to work. He wanted to. He insisted on it, in fact, but that was all ancient history. That first had happened back in 1973, almost forty years ago. Even if it had been my fault, what was the point in Anne Marie’s bringing it up now? Since I had nothing more to say, I kept quiet. For the better part of a minute an uneasy silence filled the room.

“I’m in a twelve-step program,” she explained finally. “Narcotics Anonymous. Do you know anything about them?”

I smiled at that. “Unfortunately I have more than a passing acquaintance as far as twelve steps go,” I said. “I’m more into AA than NA, if you know the drill.”

Anne Marie nodded. “So I suppose this is what you’d call an eighth step call.”

The eighth step in AA and NA is all about making amends to the people we may have harmed. At that moment, I couldn’t imagine any reason why Anne Marie Gurkey Nolan would possibly need to make amends to me, but then she continued.

“I did the same thing,” she said. “Like Mom, I blamed you. As far as we were concerned, you were the reason Daddy died because you were also the reason he stayed on the job. This week, I found this and discovered we were wrong.”

She opened her purse and pulled out a manila envelope. When she handed it over, I could tell from the heft of it that the envelope contained several sheets of paper.

“What is it?” I asked.

“These are some of Daddy’s papers. He always said that after he retired, he was going to write a book. Since he never retired, he never completed the book, either, but on his days off, he was always down in the basement, pounding away on an old Smith Corona typewriter. This is the chapter he wrote about you. I thought you might want to see it.

“It was while I was reading this that I finally realized you weren’t the reason Daddy kept working. He did it because he was worried about money and about what would happen to Mother if he died. It turns out he had been working a case where some old guy murdered his ailing wife and then took his own life for the same reason—because he didn’t think there would be enough money to take care of his widow after he was gone. Daddy wanted to work as long as he could so he could be sure Mother and I wouldn’t be left stranded.”

I vaguely remembered the case Anne Marie had mentioned, but at that very moment I couldn’t recall the exact details or even the names of either victim. What I did remember was that case was the first combination murder-suicide I ever worked. Unfortunately it wasn’t the last.

A few minutes later, Anne Marie finished her coffee and abruptly took her leave. After showing her out, I returned to the window seat in the living room, with a brand-new cup of coffee in hand. That’s when I finally opened the envelope and removed the yellowing stack of onionskin paper. The keys on the typewriter Pickles had used had been worn and/or broken. Some of the letters in the old-fashioned font had empty spots in them. The ribbon had most likely been far beyond its recommended usage limits as well. The result was something so faded and blurry that it was almost impossible to read.

I expected the piece would focus on the murder-suicide Anne Marie had mentioned earlier. To my surprise, it began with the day Pickles and I first became partners.

IT WAS A big shock to my system to come back from my wife’s family reunion in Wisconsin to find out that a new partner had been dropped in my lap. As soon as I clocked in, Captain Tompkins dragged me into the Fishbowl, the glass-plated Public Safety Building’s fifth-floor office from which he rules his fiefdom, Seattle PD’s Homicide Unit, with a bull-nosed attitude and an iron fist. The powers-that-be are trying to discourage smoking inside the building, but Tommy isn’t taking that edict lying down. He smokes thick, evil-smelling cigars that stink to the high heavens. For my money, pipe smoke isn’t nearly as bad, but Tommy says pipes are too damned prissy. Prissy is one thing Captain Tompkins is not.

Because he smokes constantly and usually keeps the door to the Fishbowl tightly closed, stepping inside his office is like walking into the kind of smoke-filled room where political wheeling and dealing supposedly gets done. Come to think of it, as far as his office is concerned, that’s not as far off the beam as you might think.

As soon as I took a seat in front of Tommy’s desk, he slid a file folder across the surface in my direction. There was enough force behind his shove that the file spun off the edge of the desk, spilling the contents and sending loose papers flying six ways to Sunday.

“What’s this?” I asked, leaning down to retrieve the scattered bits and pieces. I didn’t look at the file folder itself again until I straightened up and had stuffed everything back inside. That’s when I saw the name on the outside: Beaumont, Jonas Piedmont.

“Your new partner,” Tommy said, leaning back in his chair and blowing a series of smoke rings into the air.

He’s a hefty kind of guy, with a wide, flushed face and a bulging, vein-marked nose that hints of too much booze. Sitting there with his jacket off and his tie open at the base of a thick neck, he gazed at me appraisingly through a pair of beady eyes. Looking at him, you might think he’d be clumsy and slow on his feet. You’d be wrong. After years of working for the man, I’m smart enough not to make that mistake. Guys who do don’t last long.

“What’s this about a new partner?” I asked. “What happened to Eddy?”

Tommy blew another smoke ring and jerked his head to one side. “Guess he finally gathered up enough brown-nosing points to get kicked upstairs,” he answered.

Eddy Burnside had been my partner for three years. We got along all right, I guess, but there was no love lost between us, and Eddy’s brown-nosing was the least of it. I didn’t trust the guy any further than I could throw him, which, in my mind, made him a perfect candidate to move up the ladder. Get him the hell off the streets. If he’s upstairs making policy, at least he won’t be out in public getting people killed. So even though Eddy was your basic dud for a partner, being stuck with a brand-new detective to wean off his mama’s tits and potty-train isn’t exactly my idea of a good time, either.

“What the hell kind of a name is Jonas?” I asked.

Calling out someone on account of his name puts me on pretty thin ice. Milton is the name my mother gave me. It’s a good biblical name, after all, so I don’t have a quarrel with it. Milton may be the name on my badge, but that’s not what people call me. I don’t know what my father’s people were called in the old country, but when they came through Ellis Island, the last name got changed to Gurkey. That word bears only the smallest resemblance to the word “gherkin”, one of those little sour pickles my mother and grandmother used to make. But Gurkey and gherkin sounded enough alike that the kids at school and later the guys at the police academy dubbed me Pickles. My family never called me that, but at school and work, that’s who I’ve always been—Pickles Gurkey.

In other words, between me and this Jonas guy, I didn’t have a lot of room to talk.

I took a few seconds and scanned through some of the papers in the folder. This Beaumont guy’s job application said he was a U-Dub graduate who had done a stint in the military. That probably meant a tour of duty in Vietnam.

“You’re sticking me with a college Joe?” I demanded. “Criminal justice? Are you kidding? What does a pack of college professors know about criminals or justice, either one?”

Captain Tompkins listened to my rant and said nothing.

“That’s just what I need,” I continued. “Some smart-assed kid who probably thinks that, since he’s got a degree behind his name, he can run circles around someone like me. All I’ve got to brag about is my diploma from Garfield High School. Thanks a whole helluva lot. How’d I get so lucky?”

Tommy blew another cloud of smoke before he answered. “He’s not brand-new,” he assured me. “Beaumont spent a couple of years on Patrol before they shipped him up here last week. Since you were out of town, he’s been working with Larry Powell and Watty Watkins on that dead girl they found over on Magnolia.”

“The Girl in the Barrel?” I asked.

The kid who delivers our home newspaper lives next door. Rather than turning our subscription off while we were out of town on vacation, Anna and I had him hold our papers. When we got home from Wisconsin on Friday night, the kid had brought them over, and we’d both gone through the stack. Anna cut out all the coupons she wanted, and I read all the news, just to bring myself back up to speed.

Doing a balancing act to keep from dribbling ashes all over his desk, Tommy managed to park his stogie on the edge of a large marble ashtray that was already overfilled with cigar butts and ashes. I’m sure the cleaning people love dealing with his mess every night.

“That’s the one,” he said. “As for how you got him? You’re the only guy on the fifth floor without a living/breathing partner at the moment. That means your number’s up, like it or lump it.”

If Tommy had wanted to, I knew he could have moved people around so I wouldn’t have been stuck with the new guy, but there was no point in arguing. If I couldn’t get Tompkins to change his mind about assigning the new guy to me, maybe I could figure out a way to change the new guy’s mind about wanting to be a detective. That was the simplest way to fix the problem—convince the new detective that what he wanted more than anything was to be an ex-detective.

“So where is he?” I asked.

“Probably in your cubicle, writing up his first report. Everybody else was tied up with that serial killer workshop this past weekend, so Beaumont ended up going to the girl’s funeral up in Leavenworth.”

“He went to the funeral by himself?” I asked. “Who was the genius who decided that was a good idea? Shouldn’t an experienced detective have handled it?”

Tommy shrugged. “Didn’t have a choice. Everybody else had paid to go to the FBI workshop. I figured, how bad could it be? But you might want to look over his paper before he hands it in.”

“Great,” I sputtered. “Now I’m supposed to haul out a red pencil and correct his spelling and grammar?”

“That’s right,” Tommy said with wink and a knowing smirk. “If I were you, I’d make sure his report is one hundred percent perfect. Doing it over a time or two or three will be great practice for him, and marking him down will be good for whatever’s ailing you at the moment. Go give him hell.”

Dismissed, I left the smoky haze of the Fishbowl, doing a slow burn. Next to Larry Powell and Watty, I was one of the most senior guys on the squad. It made no sense to stick me with a newbie who would do nothing but hold me back. Rather than go straight to my cubicle, I beat a path to Larry and Watty’s.

“Gee, thanks,” I said, standing in the entrance to their five-foot-by-five-foot cell. Which brings me to something else that provokes me to no end. How come prisoners get more room in their cells than we do in our offices? What’s fair about that?

“For what?” Larry asked.

“For giving me the new guy.”

“He’s not brand-new,” Larry advised. “We’ve had to hold his hand for the better part of a week before you came back, so quit your gritching. Besides, you were new once, too.”

“Sure you were,” Watty said with a grin. “Back when Noah was building that ark, or maybe was it even earlier, back when dinosaurs still roamed the earth?”

“Funny,” I grumbled. “So how did he go about getting moved up from Patrol? The last I heard, the word was out that there weren’t any openings in Homicide.”

“There weren’t until Eddy got promoted,” Watty said, “but I’ve heard some talk from other people about this, too. Beaumont’s former partner from Patrol, Rory MacPherson, was angling to get into Motorcycles. Beaumont wanted Homicide. A week ago Sunday, the two of them took a dead body call. The next thing you know, voilà! Like magic, they both get the promotions they wanted.”

“In other words, something stinks to the high heavens. Are you telling me my new partner is also some bigwig’s fair-haired boy?”

“Can’t say for sure, but it could be,” Larry Powell allowed.

“Sure as hell doesn’t make me like him any better.”

Unable to delay the inevitable any longer, I stomped off and headed for my lair. As I approached my little corner of Homicide, I heard the sound of someone pounding the hell out of our old Underwood. My mother did me a whale of a favor by insisting I take touch typing in high school. When it comes to writing reports, being able to use all my fingers is a huge help. Obviously this guy’s mother hadn’t been that smart. Jonas Beaumont was your basic two-fingered typist, plugging away one slow letter key at a time. When I paused in the entrance, he was frowning at the form in the machine with such purpose and concentration that he didn’t see me standing there. I noticed right off that he was sitting in the wrong chair.

“I’m Detective Gurkey,, your new partner,” I announced by way of introduction. “The desk you’re using happens to be mine.”

He glanced up at me in surprise. “They told me to use this cubicle,” he said. “This is the desk that was empty.”

“Maybe so,” I told him, “but that was Eddy’s desk. He was senior, and he had the window. Eddy’s gone now. I’m senior. You’re junior. I get the window.”

Admittedly, the view from the window is crap. Still, a window is a window. It’s a status symbol kind of thing.

“Sorry,” he mumbled. “Just let me finish this.”

“No,” I replied. “I don’t think you understand. Like I said, I’m senior. You’re junior. That means I don’t stand around in the hallway waiting while you get your act together, clear your lazy butt out of my chair, and clean your collection of crap off my desk. Once your stuff is gone, I move into this one. Just because Watty held your hand and treated you with kid gloves all last week doesn’t mean I’m going to. Got it?”

“Got it,” he answered promptly, pushing his chair away from the desk. “Right away.”

I knew I was being a first-class jerk, but that was the whole idea. I wanted the guy gone, and making him miserable was the fastest way to get that job accomplished. I stood there tapping my foot with impatience while he gathered up his coat from the chair and emptied everything he had carefully loaded into Eddy’s empty desk drawers back out onto the top of the desk. After that I took my own sweet time about moving my stuff from one desk to the other. I could tell he was steaming about it while he had to wait, but I didn’t let on that I noticed. After all, this was one pissing match I was determined to win.

I left him cooling his heels until I was almost done sorting, then I sent him for coffee. “Two creams, three sugars, and no lectures,” I told him. “I get nutritional advice from my wife. I don’t need any from you. And if you want coffee for yourself, you’d better get it now. Once we start hitting the bricks, we won’t be stopping for coffee and doughnuts. This is Homicide, Jonah; it’s not Patrol.”

The Jonah bit was a deliberate tweak, and he lunged for the bait.

“Jonas,” he corrected. “The name’s Jonas, but my friends call me either J. P. or Beau.”

“I’m your partner not your friend,” I told him. “That means Jonas it is for the foreseeable future.”

“Right,” he muttered. Then he stalked off to get coffee.

While he was gone, I took it upon myself to read and edit his report. By the time he got back, I had used a red pen to good effect, marking it up like crazy. It turned out Tommy Tompkins was right. Correcting Detective Beaumont’s work made me feel better. When Jonas came back with the coffees, I handed him the form.

“Not good enough,” I told him. “Not nearly good enough, especially considering you’re a hotshot college graduate. Take another crack at this while I find out what we’re supposed to be doing today.”

I left him there working on that and went looking for the murder book on the Girl in the Barrel. Tommy had told me that until Jonas and I caught a new case of our own, we’d be doubling up with Larry and Watty Watkins on their ongoing case. I spent some time reviewing the murder book entries. The body of the victim, a girl named Monica Wellington, had been found on Sunday afternoon a week and a day earlier. Beaumont and his Patrol partner, Rory MacPherson, had responded to the 911 call. In the intervening days, Larry and Watty, with Beaumont along for the ride, had done a whole series of initial interviews. The autopsy had revealed that the victim was pregnant at the time of her death, but so far no boyfriend had surfaced.

By the time I’d scanned through the murder book, Jonas had finished the second go-down on his report. He ripped it out of the typewriter, handed it over, and then stood behind me, watching over my shoulder, as I read through it. Unfortunately, there wasn’t a damned thing wrong with it.

“I suppose this‘ll do,” I told him dismissively. “Now go down to Motor Pool and get us a car. It’s time to hit the road.”

And we did, driving all over hell and gone with him at the wheel, doing follow-up interviews with all the people who had been spoken to earlier. Follow-ups aren’t fun, by the way. Initial interviews are the real meat and potatoes of the job. The only thing fun about follow-ups is catching people in the lies that they made up on the run the first time around.

Turns out we found nothing—not a damned thing. I was hoping to pull off some little piece of investigative magic to garner some respect and put the new guy in his place, but that didn’t happen. Nobody did a Perry Mason–style confession in our presence. We didn’t discover some amazing bit of missing evidence. In fact, we never did solve that particular case. We worked it off and on for a couple of years and finally got shunted away from it entirely.

All this is to say, it wasn’t a great start for a partnership. In fact, I’d call it downright grim. I kept the pressure on him, expecting him to go crying to whoever it was who had pulled the strings to move him to Homicide, but that didn’t happen, either. He was a smart enough guy who tended to go off half-cocked on occasion.

If he was the hare, I was the tortoise. Jonas had good instincts but he was impatient and wanted to sidestep rules and procedures. I pounded down that tendency every chance I could—made him go through channels, across desks, and up the chain of command. The truth is that with enough practice, he started to get pretty good at it.

I could tell early on that he hit the sauce too much. He and his wife had a couple of little kids at home, and I think they squabbled a lot. I don’t mean that the kids squabbled—Jonas and his wife did. I know her name but it’s slipped my mind at the moment. It’s that old familiar story—the young cop works too hard and can’t put the job away when he gets home. Meanwhile the wife is stuck handling everything on the home front. In other words, I understood it, because those were issues Anna and I had put to bed a long time ago, but like I told him that first day, I didn’t want any advice on nutrition from him, and I figured he didn’t need any marital counseling from me. Fair is fair.

We worked together for several months before the night in early July when everything changed and when our working together morphed from an enforced assignment into a real partnership.

It was an odd week, with the Fourth of July celebration falling on a Wednesday. Jonas and I were at the range doing target practice when we got a call out on the sad case of what, pending autopsies, was being considered murder-suicide. The previous Wednesday, an old guy over in Ballard, a ninety-three-year-old named Farley Woodfield, who had just been given a dire cancer diagnosis, went home from his doctor’s office, grabbed his gun, loaded it, and then took out his bedridden wife, the woman for whom he was the primary caregiver. After shooting her dead, he had turned the weapon on himself. Several days after the shootings, the Woodfields’ mailman had stepped onto their front porch to deliver a package and had noticed what he termed a “foul odor.”

The word “foul” doesn’t cover it. Like I said, it was July. The house had been closed up tight. I had been feeling punk over the weekend with something that felt like maybe a summer cold or a case of the flu. I wasn’t sick enough to stay home from work, but I can tell you that being called to that ugly crime scene didn’t help whatever was ailing me. We found Farley’s note on the kitchen table: “With me gone, there goes the pension. Jenny will have nothing to live on and no one to look after her. I can’t do that to her. I won’t. Sorry for the mess.”

He was right about the mess part. It was god-awful. Seeing the crime scene and the note made it clear what had happened, but when you’re a homicide detective, that doesn’t mean you just fill in the boxes on the report form and call it a job. Once the bodies were transported, Jonas and I spent the day canvassing the neighborhood, talking to people who had lived next to the old couple. From one of the neighbors, we learned that there was a daughter who lived in St. Louis, but there had been some kind of family estrangement, and the daughter had been out of her parents’ lives for years.

As for the neighbors? None of them had paid the least bit of attention to the newspapers piling up on the front porch. None of them had noticed that Farley wasn’t out puttering in his yard or that the grass he always kept immaculately trimmed with an old-fashioned push mower was getting too long to cut. By the end of the day, I was mad as hell at the neighbors, because I could see that the old guy had a point. With the couple’s only child out of the picture, and if Farley wasn’t going to be there to look after his wife, who was going to do it? Nobody, that’s who!

We had taken the Woodfield call about eleven o’clock in the morning, and it was almost eight o’clock that night when we headed back downtown to file our reports. As usual, Jonas was at the wheel. We were driving east on Denny. When I suggested we take a detour past the Doghouse to grab a bite to eat, he didn’t voice any objections. Instead of heading down Second Avenue, he stayed on Denny until we got to Seventh.

The Doghouse is a Seattle institution, started in the thirties by a friend of mine named Bob Murray. It used to be on Denny, but in the early fifties, when the city opened the Battery Street Tunnel to take traffic from the Alaskan Way Viaduct onto Aurora Avenue North, the change in driving patterns adversely affected the restaurant’s business. Undaunted, Bob pulled up stakes and moved the joint a few blocks away to a building on Seventh at Battery. The Doghouse has been there ever since. It’s one of those places that’s open twenty-four hours a day and where you can get breakfast at any hour of the day or night.

It’s no surprise that cops go there. In the preceding months, Jonas and I had been to the Doghouse together on plenty of occasions, grabbing one of the booths that lined the sides of the main dining room. This time, though, when Bob tried to lead us to a booth, I could see we were headed for Lulu McCaffey’s station. That’s when I called a halt.

Lulu was one of those know-it-all waitresses who was older than dirt. One of the original servers who had made the transition from the “old” Doghouse to the “new” one twenty years earlier, she always acted like she owned the place. Unfortunately and more to the point, this opinionated battle-axe also bore a strong resemblance to my recently departed mother-in-law.

Years ago, I had made the mistake of wising off in front of Lulu. She got even with me by spilling a whole glass of ice water down the front of my menu and into my lap. Ever since, I avoided her station whenever possible. This day in particular, I wasn’t prepared to deal with any of her guff, so I asked Bob if we could be seated in the back room.

It turns out that as far as the Doghouse was concerned, Jonas was a back room virgin. There are plenty of restaurant back rooms in Seattle—at the Doghouse, Rosellini’s, Vito’s, and the Dragon’s Head. It’s no surprise that many of the people who congregate in those back rooms and play the occasional game of poker are local cops and elected officials who want to keep up appearances as far as the voting public is concerned.

The back room is where Bob delivered us, safely out of Lulu’s territory and firing range.

We both ordered burgers.

While we were busy, I had more or less forgotten that I wasn’t feeling up to snuff, but sitting still, drinking iced tea, and waiting for our food, it started coming back. The worse I felt, the more I kept remembering everything about that ugly crime scene in Ballard. Farley Woodfield was evidently a World War I vet. There was a framed photo montage hanging over the fireplace. It included several photos of him—a sweet-faced young kid—posing manfully in his brand-new doughboy uniform. The faded cloth matting around the photos was decorated with a collection of miscellaneous pieces that included faded battle ribbons, tarnished medals, and a distinctive sergeant’s chevron.

Just thinking about it hit me hard. Here was a poor guy who had given up his youth to go to war and serve his country. Now, seventy years later, he had been left to his own devices with no one to help him or to watch his back.

Our food came. Jonas dove into his; I pushed mine away.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“Nothing,” I said, because I didn’t want to talk about what I was thinking. “I need to take a piss is all.”

I left the table and the back room, but despite what I’d said, I didn’t head for the rest room. I wanted to clear my head, so I went outside and walked around the parking lot for a few minutes. I was thinking about the old guy and wondering what I’d do if I was in his position. If I were gone, would my pension be enough for Anna to be able to get by? If something went wrong with her health, would our daughter come through and take care of her if I wasn’t able to do it?

Somewhere along the way, I realized that my arm was hurting—aching like crazy. I kept wondering how I had managed to hurt it that badly without noticing anything had happened. It was hot as hell outside. Even though it was close to nine at night, it wasn’t dark outside yet, and it sure as hell wasn’t cool. Pretty soon I started feeling light-headed. I went over and stood by the building so I could lean against the wall. That’s when all hell broke loose. Two guys came charging out of the restaurant and through the parking lot with Lulu chasing after them, screaming like a banshee.

“You come back here!” she screeched, waving a small piece of paper in the air. “You think you can just walk out on your check, you worthless turds? You think your food’s coming out of my paycheck?”

The problem was, as soon as Lulu screamed at them, the two men stopped running and turned on her. At that point, I don’t think any of them had seen me, but I saw them. The one guy grabbed Lulu by the arm and swung her around, sending her crashing head first into the trunk of a parked car. That’s when things went into slow motion for me. It looked like the other guy was closing in on her. Pushing off from the wall, I drew my Smith & Wesson.

“Okay, you guys,” I ordered. “I’m a police officer. Let her go. Get your hands in the air.”

Surprised, they all three turned to gawk at me. That’s when my body just stopped working, starting with my arm and fingers. The gun fell to the ground and went spinning uselessly away from me across the pavement. I couldn’t move and I couldn’t breathe because of the crushing pain in my chest. Even while it was happening, I realized I had to be having a heart attack. I had my wits about me enough that I took a step or two back toward the building so that if I fell, I could slide down the wall instead of falling flat on my face or whacking the back of my head on the pavement.

I remember seeing the three other people in the parking lot, standing there frozen in time, staring at me. The one guy was still hanging on to Lulu’s arm. Lulu’s mouth was open, like she was still screaming although I no longer heard any sound. Her face was red with fury. I more than half expected her to turn around and plant her fist in her attacker’s face, but then he dropped out of sight and disappeared from my line of vision for a moment. A second or so later the look on Lulu’s face changed. Her eyes widened. In that moment the expression on her face went from utter fury to abject fear. A gun must have gone off then although I don’t remember hearing that, either. I saw the blood spray out behind her, saw Lulu stagger backward a step or two, then I blacked out.

When I came to, Jonas was squatting beside me and yelling in my ear. “Pickles! Can you hear me? The ambulance is on its way. What the hell happened?”

He didn’t need to tell me about the ambulance. With my hearing back, I could hear the approaching sirens. They were already, in the background, muffled in a load of cotton, but coming closer fast.

“Two guys,” I managed. “Lulu. Is she . . . ?”

Jonas shook his head. “She didn’t make it,” he said. “She’s dead. What the hell happened here?”

He reached down then. Putting a pen through the trigger guard of my .38, he carefully pulled the weapon out of my lap and laid it aside, just beyond my reach. I remember wondering: How the hell did my gun get there? But then I figured it out. The guy who shot Lulu must have put it there. A dead woman, my weapon, and my fingerprints. I was screwed.

“There were two guys,” I said, gasping around the awful pain in my chest. “They must have taken off. You’ve got to find them.”

“Were they on foot or in a car?”

“On foot, I think. Didn’t see a car.”

That’s the thing. The gun was there in my lap. The assailants were long gone. Jonas knew I hated Lulu’s guts, and yet he never doubted me, not for an instant.

“Okay,” he said. “Will do, but first I’ve got to talk to Bob Murray.”

A Medic 1 guy appeared over Jonas’s shoulder and bodily booted him out of the way. The last thing I remember, as the attendants loaded me onto a gurney, was Jonas striding purposefully back into the restaurant, notebook in hand.

I had other things to think about that night—like living or dying.

I STOPPED READING for a moment, thrown back into that terrible parking lot scene at the Doghouse.

As suddenly as if it were yesterday, it all came crashing back. As soon as Bob Murray told me shots had been fired, I charged out the restaurant’s back door, with him at my heels. Out in the parking lot the smell of burned cordite still lingered in the hot, still air. I found Lulu McCaffey’s bloody body lying sprawled on the pavement between cars. A green bit of paper that I recognized as the check from someone’s table was still clutched in her hand. I checked her pulse first. Finding none and thinking my partner had been shot, too, I turned to Pickles. By then, Bob Murray had raced back inside to call 911.

Pickles was a few feet away from Lulu, slouched against the building. Kneeling next to him, I looked for a wound of some kind, but there wasn’t any. Whatever had happened to Pickles, he hadn’t been shot. But I did find his gun and I could tell it had been recently fired. He kept trying to talk to me, but all I could make out from his mumble was that there had been two guys and they had taken off on foot.

I knew that if Pickles had taken a potshot at the two fleeing bad guys, there was going to be hell to pay, and I didn’t want my fingerprints anywhere on the gun. I used a pen to ease his Smith & Wesson out of his lap and set it down on the pavement. He kept trying to talk to me, but most of what he said was too garbled to understand. Eventually the Medic 1 guys showed up. At the time, Seattle had bragging rights because Medic 1’s still relatively new presence in the city had made Seattle the best place in the world to have a heart attack. By the time the ambulance showed up, I was pretty sure that’s what we were up against—a heart attack.

As soon as the EMTs took over, I heard the sounds of arriving patrol cars converging on the area. I grabbed an evidence bag from the back of our unmarked car, deposited the gun in that, pocketed both, and hurried back into the restaurant. From the way Pickles looked, I was convinced he was a goner. If his death occurred while he was interrupting someone in the process of committing a crime, that meant that whoever had gunned down Lulu McCaffey would be guilty of two counts of homicide—both his and hers—rather than just one.

Bob Murray was a smart guy. He had come to the same conclusions I had—that the two guys who had skipped out on paying their tab had committed cold-blooded murder in his parking lot. Using chairs from the dining room, he had cordoned off both Lulu’s station and the booth where the dine-and-dash bad guys had been sitting. Although the rest of the restaurant had somehow managed to return to some semblance of business as usual, Bob had made sure that none of the tables in Lulu’s section had been cleared. He was personally standing guard to see to it that no one ventured anywhere near them.

“Did you see the two guys?” I asked him. “Can you give me any kind of description to pass along to the guys on patrol?”

Bob shook his head. “I was in the kitchen when they came in. Lulu seated them and served them, so she’s really the only employee who saw them.” He handed me a piece of paper. On it were scribbled several names and phone numbers, written in several distinctly separate styles of handwriting.

“Who are these?” I asked.

“They’re the people who were seated at nearby tables,” he told me. “I had them write down their names and phone numbers in case you need to get back to them.”

“Any of them still here?”

Bob nodded, but his customary grin was missing in action. “All of them,” he answered. “I sent them to the bar and told them to have one on me while they wait.”

See there? I told you Bob Murray was a smart guy.

I glanced over at the booth. “Nobody’s touched it?”

“Nope,” he said. “And I aim to keep it that way.”

“Great,” I said. “When the detectives get here, be sure they get prints off everything. It’s hard to find a suspect from an unknown print like that, but once we get the bad guys, having their prints in the system will help put them at the scene of the crime.”

“You got it,” Bob told me. “I’ll see to it.”

In the bar, the organ that usually filled the place with sing-along music far into the night was notably silent. The organist was there, but he was sitting alone at the bar quietly having a beer. With Lulu’s body still in the parking lot, it wasn’t at all surprising that nobody felt like singing. In the darkened room, seated against the far wall at four separate tables, were the other eight people who had been seated in Lulu’s station at the time all hell broke loose. Still shocked by what had happened, they huddled together in a subdued group, nursing their drinks and their fear.

Milton Gurkey was my partner. Whether Pickles lived or died, I understood this wouldn’t be my case to investigate. Someone else would be doing in-depth interviews of all the potential witnesses, including talking to the poor people currently sheltering in the bar of the Doghouse. All I wanted from them right that moment was a general description of the two suspects—something I could give to the guys out on the streets in patrol cars so officers in the area could be on the lookout for them.

What I ended up with was certainly vague enough. Two guys: one about six feet tall, the other a little shorter. The taller of the two was light-complected with dirty blond hair and maybe/maybe not a mustache. He was wearing yellow and brown plaid Bermuda shorts, a white T-shirt, and tennis shoes with no socks. The other guy, five-ten or so, was both shorter and heavier. He had olive skin—maybe Hispanic. He wore jeans, tennis shoes, and a blue plaid shirt. In other words, neither of these guys were fashion plates, but with the seasonably hot weather, their costumes wouldn’t give them away, either, not the way sweatshirts or parkas would have.

By the time I went back outside, the response to the incident made for mayhem on the street. Although the ambulance had already taken off, there were still fire trucks and plenty of patrol cars, marked and unmarked, in attendance. I tracked down the patrol sergeant and gave him what I had gleaned as far as descriptions were concerned. Having done what I could, I drove to Harborview Hospital, where I planted myself in the waiting room of the ER and waited for word on whether or not Pickles Gurkey was going to make it.

I was there when a sergeant from Patrol brought Anna Gurkey to the hospital and dropped her off. Previously, I had never met the woman, but I knew who she was when she walked up to the admitting desk and asked the clerk about her husband, Milton Gurkey. Whatever was going on with the patient right then, he wasn’t being allowed visitors. Having been given that information, Anna retreated to one of the straight-backed chairs lining the room. As soon as she was seated, I went up and introduced myself.

Anna Gurkey looked liked she might have stepped out of the movie version of The Sound of Music. She reminded me of the homely woman who keeps who bobbing and nodding to the sounds of applause when her group is given its second place award in the talent contest. In other words, Anna wasn’t a beauty-queen showstopper. She had a broad face with rough, reddish skin. Her dingy, graying hair was pulled back in a straggly bun. Anna’s basic plain-Jane looks were worsened by the reality of where she was and what had happened. She looked the way family members found in ER waiting rooms always look—haggard, terrified, and shell-shocked.

“You’re Jonas?” she asked when she heard my name. “Were you there? What happened? The officer who brought me here couldn’t tell me a thing.”

Wouldn’t tell was more likely than couldn’t tell, but I was under no such constraints. I told her what I knew. That we’d been working; that we’d stopped off at the Doghouse for a dinner break; that Pickles had excused himself to make a pit stop. After that, for reasons I didn’t understand, it had all gone to hell, with Pickles caught up in a shootout in the parking lot.

I had finished telling the story when a doctor emerged from behind closed doors. He sought out Anna, spoke with her in a low, grave voice, and then took her back through the swinging doors with him into the treatment rooms. Anna walked away from me without so much as a backward glance. Considering the seriousness of the situation, I didn’t blame her. I waited around awhile longer. When no one came out to give me an update, I finally gave up. On my way home, I stopped by the department to write up my report. That’s when I learned that even with the help of timely eyewitness information, Pickles’s two assailants had disappeared without a trace.

It was far later than it should have been when I finally drove into the garage at our place on Lake Tapps. The kids were already in bed, and so was Karen. I poured myself a McNaughton’s—probably more than one—and sat there waiting for sleep to come. I worried about whether Pickles would make it, but I have to say, not once that day—not one single time—did it ever occur to me that Pickles was the one who shot Lulu McCaffey, but of course, that was just me. I was his partner. What did I know?

When I got to work the following morning, the world had changed. Captain Tompkins called me into his office, where he gave me the welcome news that Pickles was still alive. He was gravely ill and still in Intensive Care, but he was resting comfortably and his condition was listed as stable.

In other words, as far as his health was concerned, Pickles was in better shape than could have been expected. As far as his career was concerned, however, he was not. It turned out that the slug the medical examiner had pulled out of Lulu McCaffey’s body had come from Pickles’s gun.

As of now, Internal Affairs was on the case. In spades.

The captain sent me straight upstairs to IA, where I spent the next three hours being interviewed by the IA investigator assigned to the case. Lieutenant Gary Tatum was a guy with attitude who was used to throwing his weight around and having people dodge out of the way. We detested each other on sight. I wanted to tell him what Pickles had told me about two guys running away. Tatum didn’t want to hear it. He was far more interested in what I knew about the “well-known” feud between Pickles and the dead waitress. I told him about Pickles’s water-in-the-crotch experience with Lulu McCaffey, not because I thought it was funny but because it was the truth.

Lieutenant Tatum listened to my version of the story and then nodded. “I’ve heard that one before.” He said it in a bored fashion—as though he hadn’t needed to hear it again from me. “But as I understand it, that was a long time ago—a couple of years anyway. There has to be something more recent than that—something more serious—for them to get in this kind of beef.”

“There wasn’t any beef,” I explained. “Detective Gurkey went to take a leak. I’m not sure why he went outside, but he was there when whatever went down went down. He may have been in the parking lot when Lulu was shot, but that doesn’t mean he did it.”

Tatum gave me his phony Cheshire cat grin complete with an offhand head shake that implied he wasn’t buying a word I said and that he thought I was a complete idiot.

“Detective Gurkey’s prints are on the gun,” Tatum told me. “His are the only prints on the murder weapon. As far as I’m concerned, that means he pulled the trigger. He’s also got shot residue on his hands.”

“We were at the range yesterday morning,” I countered. “We were doing target practice. You can check with them to verify that.”

“Oh, we’ll be verifying that story, all right,” Tatum assured me. “In the meantime, as long as Detective Gurkey is under investigation, you need to know that you’re under investigation as well.”

“Why?” I demanded. “What did I do? I was sitting there eating my hamburger and minding my own business when the shots were fired. I don’t understand why you’re investigating me.”

“You know the drill,” Tatum said with a shrug. “It’s the old what-did-you-know-and-when-did-you-know-it routine. I’ve told Captain Tompkins to keep you sidelined for the next little while. I wouldn’t mind that much if I were you. I got a look at the next week’s weather forecast. It’s going to be hot as Hades outside. You’ll be way better off cooling your heels at a desk job than you will be out tracking bad guys on sidewalks hot enough to fry eggs.”

I didn’t dignify that statement with a response. Instead, I asked, “What about the two runners—the guys who skipped out on paying their tab, the ones Lulu came outside chasing. What about them? Are you even looking for them?”

“Detective Beaumont,” Tatum said with a grim smile. “I don’t believe you understand. This matter is not yours to investigate. Internal Affairs is handling it. What we do or do not do is none of your concern. Am I making myself clear?”

The threat was there and so was the message: Stay the hell out of the way or get run over and risk your career in the process.

“Detective Gurkey did not kill that woman,” I declared.

Tatum smiled again. “That remains to be seen, doesn’t it.”

We sat there for a length of time, doing a stare down. “May I go?” I said finally.

“Of course,” he said. “Just so long as we understand one another.”

We did that! I rode the elevator down to the fifth floor in a cloud of outrage, where I soon discovered I was not alone. Every detective in Homicide was pissed. They all figured like I did that Pickles was getting a bum rap. He was within months of being able to pull the plug and get a pension. If IA somehow made a homicide charge stick against him, he would be out on the street with nothing.

Pickles remained hospitalized for the next ten days. Captain Tompkins found me some inane busywork checking inventories in the Evidence Room. That’s what I was doing a week later, when I made it a point to track down the McCaffey murder case file. Among the items in evidence I located the piece of paper—the blank order form—Bob Murray had used to write down the names of potential witnesses in the case. A quick check in the murder book revealed that not one of those folks had been singled out for additional interviews beyond my brief questioning of them in the bar at the Doghouse the day the shooting happened. Unbelievable! Pickles Gurkey was being railroaded fair and square.

It was almost time to go home. I had stopped by Pickles and my cubby on my way out. Pickles’s desk was awash in cards and flower and balloons. I was sitting there wondering if I should drag all that stuff up to the hospital before I went home, when my phone rang.

“Hey,” Bob Murray said. “I’ve been calling and calling. How come you never answer your phone?”

“Because I haven’t been at my desk,” I said curtly. “Did you ever think of leaving a message?”

“Is it true Internal Affairs is out to get Milton?” Bob asked.

Police departments are a lot like families. We can say whatever we like about other people inside the organization, but outsiders aren’t allowed the same privilege. I wasn’t about to badmouth Lieutenant Tatum or what he was doing.

“Internal Affairs is handling the investigation,” I said evenly.

“Yes, I know, and you can take it from me that Lieutenant Gary Tatum is an arrogant asshole,” Bob Murray responded. “He came in here for a steak once and sent it back to the kitchen because he said it was too tough to eat. I wouldn’t give him the time of day.”

That made me laugh outright. The Doghouse menu says right there in black and white that the tenderness of steaks can’t be guaranteed.

“So he thought you were what, the Canlis?” I asked.

“Do you want to be cute or do you want me to talk to you?” Bob growled.

“Talk to me,” I said. “What have you got?”

“I was talking to my produce guy the other day,” he told me. “He says the same thing that happened to Lulu has been happening to a lot of people in different restaurants all over town. Two guys come in, order, eat, and then do the old dine-and-dash bit. One minute they’re there. The next minute they’re gone without a trace and their bill is still on the table. Nobody ever sees ’em drive off in a vehicle. They just disappear into thin air.”

“A tall guy and a short guy?” I asked.

“From what he told me, the tall guy is always there—the one with the light-colored hair. The problem is, he doesn’t always seem to hang out with the same guy.”

“So the second guy varies?”

“That’s my understanding,” Bob said.

“Has the produce guy talked to Lieutenant Tatum?”

“Not to my knowledge,” Murray said. “Listen, this is my produce guy. I’m the one he talks to.”

“And these other dine-and-dash incidents,” I said. “Has anyone ever reported it?”

“Probably not. Guys like me don’t want to get involved in all that police report crap, and we don’t want the names of our restaurants showing up in local police blotters that may be sent along to the media. They figure it’s like shoplifting—it’s all part of the cost of doing business.”

“It is shoplifting,” I corrected. “What they’re lifting is your food.”

“Yes, but the amounts are small enough that it doesn’t make sense to make a huge issue of it. Lulu, may she rest in peace, was a hothead, and she always raised absolute hell about it. That’s how come she chased those guys out into the parking lot, acting like the price of their meal was going to come out of her hide. I’ve never once dinged one of my servers because somebody skipped. It’s not the waitress’s fault if the customer turns out to be a dick, pardon the expression. Why should they take a hit for it?”

Lots of people call detectives dicks. I try not to take it personally.

“Would your produce guy talk to me?” I asked.

“In a heartbeat,” Bob Murray said. “Be here tomorrow morning at ten, and I’ll see to it.”

The next morning at ten o’clock sharp, I entered the Doghouse for the first time since the shooting. The booth where the two killers had sat that fateful afternoon had an OCCUPIED sign on it even though the only thing there was a collection of wilting bouquets, their bedraggled flowers dripping dead petals. Around that small sad memorial, the rest of the Doghouse bustled with business as usual.

Bob Murray met me at the host station and escorted me to a seat at the far end of the counter. “As soon as Alfonso gets here, I’ll send him your way.”

I was halfway through a plate of ham and eggs when a smallish Mexican man slipped quietly onto the stool beside me.

“You the detective?” he asked.

I held out my hand. “J. P. Beaumont,” I said. “And you are?”

“Alfonso Romero of Al’s Produce,” he said. “I’m Al.”

It made sense. In Seattle’s white-bread business districts, a Hispanic vegetable delivery guy could pass himself off as white or at least as Italian by plastering the name Al on his truck, and the only people that ruse fooled were the people who needed to be fooled.

“Bob says I should talk to you,” he said. “About the skips.”

“You think it’s a pattern?” I asked.

The waitress brought him coffee and a platter of breakfast that included bacon, eggs over easy, crisp hash browns, whole wheat toast, coffee, and orange juice. It must have been a standing order that was put in place the moment he turned up because Romero hadn’t been there nearly long enough for even the fastest short-order cook to deliver a breakfast like that in such a timely fashion.

Romero nodded. “Five different restaurants that I know about, including this one, but those are only the ones I work with. There are a lot of restaurants out there and a lot of produce guys just like me.”

“Do you know some of them?” I asked. “Your competition, I mean.”

Romero shrugged. “Of course I know them,” he said. “We get our stuff from the same suppliers; we’re out on the docks, loading our lettuce and tomatoes at the same time before we head out on our routes.”

“Would these other drivers know if the same thing was happening at other restaurants?”

“Sure,” Romero said. “Owners talk. Waitresses talk. They’re all in the same business, and everybody knows what everybody else is doing.”

“If I showed up on the dock at the same time, would the drivers talk to me?”

Alfonso thought about that for a moment before he answered. “Maybe,” he said. “But only if I asked ’em.”

Which is how, the next morning, I found myself on the loading dock of a huge warehouse off Rainer Avenue at O-dark-thirty in the morning. Having Bob Murray vouch for me was good enough for Alfonso, and having Alfonso making the introductions was good enough for the other drivers. They all knew that Lulu McCaffey had been murdered, and they were eager to help. By the time I left the dock and headed into the department, I was as excited as a kid on his way to see Santa Claus because I knew I was on to something.

There was a pattern here, and over and over it was the same thing. Two guys—customers who have never been there before—show up in a restaurant, order, eat, don’t pay, and go. According to the drivers, it happened mostly in the evenings, just at rush hour, at restaurants all over the city—from north to south, east to west, but never the same restaurant twice. I took down the drivers’ names and phone numbers. I asked them to keep checking. Back at the department, I had a decision to make. I knew from the scuttlebutt that Lieutenant Tatum was waiting for Pickles to recover enough to be let out of the hospital, at which point he intended to make an arrest and formally charge him in the death of Lulu McCaffey.

If I had thought Tatum was a square shooter, I would have gone straight upstairs with what I had found from Alfonso and the other drivers, but he wasn’t, and I didn’t.

Cops patronize restaurants. We go to restaurants at every hour of the day and night, so it wasn’t necessary to launch an official investigation in order to launch an investigation. I just had to get word out to the beat cops and to the guys on patrol and to the detectives riding around in their unmarked cars that the restaurants in Seattle were suffering from an epidemic of check skippers, and that we needed to be good neighbors and help our friends in the restaurant business find these guys.

That was a cover-your-ass subterfuge, of course. I’m guessing most everybody understood that we were working behind the scenes to give Pickles a helping hand, and they came through. As the produce guys ran their routes and as the cops talked to their contacts, a trickle of information started coming in. The details came in on Post-it notes left on my desk while I was laboring in the Evidence Room; in messages left on my office voice mail; and in some instances, with guys I knew, in phone calls to the house at Lake Tapps.

I finally stapled an oversized map of Seattle to the wallboard in the garage at Lake Tapps and began inserting little plastic beaded straight pins into the map wherever I had a report about another dine-and-dash incident. As the collection of pins grew, it wasn’t hard to see the pattern. They ranged all over town, with a gaping hole in the center of the city, from the north end of Columbia City on the south, to Capitol Hill on the east. The Doghouse was the only restaurant with any proximity to downtown.

Everybody on the fifth floor knew what was up, but no one breathed a word of it to Tatum. Instead, we gathered in the break room or in cubicles and talked about it. One of the detectives, who was married to a departmental sketch artist, took her to see the witnesses who had been at the Doghouse the day of the McCaffey shooting and to some of the other restaurants that had been victimized by the check-skipping team. Over time we developed credible composite sketches of the two guys from the Doghouse. Once we had those in hand, we made sure the guys from Patrol had copies with them in their cars; we made sure the beat guys had them, too.

It sounds like this was all straightforward, but it wasn’t. For one thing, it was an investigation that wasn’t supposed to be happening and had to be invisible. For another, almost everyone had other cases—official cases—that they were supposed to be working. Continuing to toil in the vineyards of the Evidence Room, I was one of two exceptions to that rule. The other one was Pickles Gurkey, who was now officially on administrative leave. Once he got out of the hospital, he was placed under arrest, and then allowed free on bond to await trial after his family posted his immense bail.

I had visited with him in the hospital only once, after he was out of Intensive Care. He told me what he remembered from the crime scene—that he had dropped his gun when the heart attack hit, but that he was sure he hadn’t pulled the trigger. Clearly Lieutenant Tatum wasn’t buying his story and neither was the King County prosecutor. I wanted to tell him that the guys from Homicide were working the problem and that we hadn’t forgotten him, but I didn’t dare. And I never went back to the hospital to see him again. I figured if Tatum got wind that there had been any kind of continuing contact between us, he’d be all over me.

They say luck follows the guy who does the work. In that regard we were bound to get lucky eventually. I was down in the Evidence Room one afternoon when the clerk hunted me down and said someone was waiting outside to talk to me. The guy in the hall was a uniformed officer named Richard Vega. He was holding a copy of one of the Doghouse composites—the one of the taller man with the light-colored hair.

“I’ve seen this guy,” he said, waving the sketch in my direction. “My sergeant sent me to Homicide to talk to you, and the clerk up there sent me down here.”

“Where have you seen him?” I asked.

“Hanging out down around Pioneer Square,” Vega said. “I’m thinking maybe he works somewhere around there.”

I thought about the doughnut hole in my circle of pins. Pioneer Square would be well inside it. So maybe, if the guy lived or worked nearby, maybe he didn’t want to crap in his own bed or victimize establishments where he might want to be regarded as a regular paying customer.

I knew just where to go. A few years earlier, a Chinese family had bought up a local deli named Bakeman’s. The joint was known all over the downtown area for and were doing land-office business selling sandwiches made from fresh turkeys that were roasted on the premises every night.

In regard to restaurant food, pundits often say, “You can get quick, cheap, or good. Pick any two.” As far as that was concerned, Bakeman’s was in a class by itself because they excelled in all three—quick, cheap, and good! And since they were in the 100 block of Cherry, just down the street from the Public Safety Building, plenty of cops went there for lunch on a daily basis.

Bakeman’s was one of the places without a beaded pin on my map, so I rushed there immediately, with a mimeographed copy of the tall guy’s composite sketch in hand. It was early, right at the beginning of the lunch rush. The young Asian guy at the cash register took my order: white turkey meat with cranberry sauce on white bread. Mayo and mustard, hold the lettuce and tomato. I handed over my money. When the clerk gave me back my change, he was already eyeing the next customer. That’s when I held up the sketch.

“You know this guy?” I asked.

“It’s lunch,” he replied. “Gotta keep the line moving.”

“Have you ever seen him?” I repeated.

He glowered at me. “I’m serving lunch here. I got customers.”

I held up my badge next to the sketch. The clerk sighed and shook his head. “You guys,” he said wearily in a tone that said he thought all cops were royal pains in the ass.

“Do you know him?” I insisted.

He nodded. “White meat turkey on white, mayo, mustard, cranberry sauce. Almost like you, only he takes lettuce.”

“Do you know his name?”

“I don’t know names. I know orders. Works construction. Dirty clothes. Who’s next?”

“So he comes in after working all day, orders white turkey on white. When does he come in? What time?”

“Afternoons. Before we close. Around two or so. Next?”

“Any day in particular?”

“You want to talk more, order another sandwich.”

“Done.” I said. “Give me the same as before, both of them to go.”

“You didn’t say to go for the first one.”

“I didn’t know I was getting two sandwiches then, either. Now I want them both to go. But tell me, does he come in on a certain day?”

The clerk looked as though he was ready to leap across the counter and strangle me. Instead he glowered at the servers who were putting my sandwiches together. “Both of those turkeys on white are to go,” he shouted, and then he glared back at me. “Tuesdays maybe?” he said. “Sometimes Wednesdays, but not every week. Takes his sandwiches to go. Puts them in a lunch pail.”

My heart skipped with joy because this happened to be Tuesday.

I gave the clerk my money. He handed me my change. “Next?”

From the way he shouted, I knew better than to press my luck. Without asking any more questions, I took my sandwiches and left. Giddy with excitement, I practically floated back up Cherry to the Public Safety Building, where I rode straight up to the fifth floor, dodged past Captain Tompkins’s Fishbowl, and ducked into the cubicle shared by Detectives Powell and Watkins. They were both in. They looked up in surprise when I entered. Surprise turned to welcome when they caught a whiff of the turkey sandwiches.

By two o’clock that afternoon, the three of us had set up shop. Worried that the two guys might have seen me in the Doghouse the day Pickles and I were there at the same time, I stayed across the street, tucked into the shady alcove of a building that let me watch the door to Bakeman’s while using the excuse of smoking a cigarette to hang around outside. Watty, who wasn’t as fast on his feet as Larry Powell was, stayed in an unmarked car parked at the bottom of Cherry, while Larry went inside and ate a leisurely bowl of soup. I had also contacted Officer Vega and asked him to hang around at the corner of First and Cherry. I was worried that if the suspect was on foot and headed westbound on the eastbound street, Watty wouldn’t be able to follow in his vehicle.

At 2:20 I saw the suspect, trudging up Cherry from First carrying a heavy-duty lunch pail. He certainly looked like the guy in the sketch. He was dressed in grimy clothes and appeared to have put in a hard day of manual labor. I watched him walk past the spot where Watty was waiting at the curb. By the time he turned into Bakeman’s, my heart was pounding in my chest. There was nothing to do now but wait.

I checked my watch. The crowd inside the restaurant had died down. With no line, it would take only a couple of minutes for him to order his sandwich, pay, pick up his food, and leave. At 2:26 he appeared again. He stood for a moment at the top of the worn marble steps, then he stepped down, turned right, and headed back down to First. He walked past Watty’s vehicle, which was parked at the curb, all right, but it was also pointed in the wrong direction on the one-way street.

I slipped out of my hidey-hole and made my way down the hill. When I got to the corner of First, I waved off Vega. After that, it was up to me. When I turned right onto First, I could see the suspect half a block ahead of me walking uphill. Two blocks later, he turned into a run-down building called the Hargrave Hotel.

In theater circles, SRO means standing room only, and that’s considered to be a good thing. In hotel-speak, SRO means single room occupancy, and it’s generally not such a good thing. The Hargrave was a flea-bitten flophouse straight out of Roger Miller’s “King of the Road.” It might have been a lot swankier in an earlier era. Now, though, it was four stories of misery, with ten shoddy rooms, two grim toilets, and one moldy shower per floor. Bring your own towel.

I waited outside until I saw Mr. Lunch Pail get into the creaky elevator and close the brass folding gate behind him. By then, Watty had managed to make it around the block. After flagging him down, I stepped into the building lobby, where a grubby, pockmarked marble countertop served as a front desk. Behind it sat a balding man with a green plastic see-through visor perched on his head.

He looked up at me as I entered. “If you’re selling something,” he told me, “we ain’t buying.”

I held up my badge and my composite sketch. As soon as he saw the drawing, the desk clerk glanced reflexively toward the elevator. The dial above the elevator showed that the car had stopped on floor three. Clearly this was a one-elevator building.

“Who’s this?” I asked.

“You got a warrant?”

“Not at the moment,” I returned mildly, “but I’m wondering how this place would measure up if somebody happened to schedule a surprise inspection from the Health Department?” When he didn’t reply, I pressed my advantage. “Who?” I insisted.

“Benjamin Smith.”

“How long has he been here?”

The clerk shrugged. “A couple of months, I guess. Pays his rent right on time every week.”

“Where does he work?”

“He’s a laborer down at that new stadium they’re building. The Kingdome, I think it’s called. What do you want him for?”

“Girl trouble,” I said quickly. “As in underage. Might be better for your relationship with the Health Department if he didn’t know that anybody had come by asking about him.”

Visor Man nodded vigorously. “My lips are sealed,” he said.

I ducked back outside. By then, Larry had caught up and was waiting in the front seat of the car with Watty. I climbed into the back. “The clerk says our guy’s name is Benjamin Smith. That may or may not be an alias.”

“So if he is our guy,” Larry said, “what do we do now? Even if we can get his prints and connect him to the Doghouse crime scene, that still won’t be enough to let Pickles off the hook. It’ll be his word against Smith’s word. Might be enough for reasonable doubt, but I’m not sure. We need to find a way to corroborate Pickles’s version of the story.”

I thought about that. Presumably there had been three people present when Lulu McCaffey was gunned down. We had found two of them. Now we needed to locate the third. The blond guy was the one who had usually shown up in the establishments marked by the bead pattern on the map in my garage. When it had become clear that the light-haired guy was doing dine-and-dash with a collection of different pals, I had given up carrying the short guy’s sketch and focused instead on the tall one. Now I had a hunch.

“Do either of you have that other Doghouse composite?” I asked.

“I think so,” Watty said. “Hand me the notebook there on the backseat.” I gave it to him. He rummaged through it for several long minutes before finally handing me what I wanted.

“Wait here,” I said. “And open the door so I can get out.”

With the new sketch in hand, I hurried back into the lobby. When the desk clerk looked up and saw me, he gave a disgusted sigh. “You again,” he said.

I held up the drawing. “Have you ever seen this guy?”

“Sure,” he said. “That’s Fred—Fred Beman. Everybody called him Cowboy Fred.”

“Does he live here, too?” I asked.

“Used to. Left sometime in July.”

“Do you know where he went?”

“He’s in Walla Walla,” the clerk said. “Went back home to the family farm. At least, that’s what he said he was going to do when he left here With these guys, you can never tell how much is truth and how much is fiction.”

“Did he leave a forwarding address?”

The clerk turned away from me and pulled a long, narrow file box out of the bottom drawer of a file cabinet behind him. Inside the box was a collection of three-by-five cards. After thumbing through them, he pulled out one and handed it to me. All that was on it was a phone number and a P.O. box number in Walla Walla.

It wasn’t much, but it was a start.

Detectives Watkins and Powell and I went straight back to the department and looked up Frederick Beman. There were two Frederick Bemans listed. The composite sketch was surprisingly close to the younger one’s Department of Licensing photo. His driving record included three DUIs. He’d had a pickup once, but that had been totaled during one of the DUI incidents. The DMV showed no current vehicles listed in his name, although there were several listed for his father, Frederick Beman, Sr., who owned a horse ranch somewhere outside Walla Walla.

“Looks like we’re going to Walla Walla,” Larry Powell said.

“When?” I asked.

“Right now.”

I glanced at my watch. It was after four in the afternoon. “How are we going to do that?”

“We’re going to drive,” Larry said. “We’ll take turns. You go check out a car. Make sure it has a full tank of gas. I’ll clear it with the captain.”

That’s exactly what I did. While the guys at Motor Pool were gassing up the car, I called Karen and told her I wouldn’t be home. Since she was stuck there alone with a toddler and a colicky baby, she was not happy to hear that I was off on a cross-state adventure, but there wasn’t much she could do about it. Captain Tompkins wasn’t thrilled, either, especially with having three members of his Homicide Unit tied up in what he termed a “wild-goose chase,” but he relented finally, too. Larry convinced him that this was basically my lead, but that I was too green to chase after it alone. So off we went, all three of us.

Walla Walla is a long way from Seattle—two hundred and fifty miles, give or take. With me sitting in the backseat, I’m sure people who saw us thought I was a crook being hauled off to jail somewhere. We took turns driving. By the time we got into Walla Walla, it was too late to do much of anything but get a room and wait for morning. We opted for one room with two double beds. Not the best arrangement, but bunking with Watty beat sleeping on the floor or out in the car. The next morning, over coffee, we were all complaining about how everyone else snored, so I guess it was pretty even-Steven on that score.

After breakfast we found our way to Beman Arabians. There was a main house and several immense barns with an office complex at the near end of one of them. There were also a number of outbuildings that looked as though they were occupied by workers of one stripe or another. When we asked for Fred Beman, we were directed to the office, where we found a handsome, white-haired, older gentleman seated behind a messy desk. When he stood up and stepped out from behind the desk to greet us, he looked for the all the world as if he had simply emerged, cowboy boots and all, from one of those old Gene Autry movies I loved so much when I was a kid. One look at him was enough to tell us that this might be Fred Beman, but not the one we wanted.

Larry Powell held up his badge. “We’re looking for Fred Beman, a younger Fred Beman.”

The old man stared at the badge for a moment, then looked back at Larry. “That would be Fred Junior, my son. What’s he done now?”

“We’re actually interested in a friend of his,” Larry said. “A friend from Seattle.”

Beman shook his head. “Don’t know nothin’ about any of those. When Freddie came skedaddlin’ back home this summer and begged me to give him another chance, I figured he was in some kind of hot water or other. He’s out back shovelin’ shit. I told him if he wanted to get back in my good graces and into the family business, he’d be startin’ from the bottom.”

With that Fred Senior led the way out of his office and into the barn. It was pungent with the smell of horses and hay. We found Fred Junior in one of the stalls, pitchfork in hand. He must have taken after his mother because he didn’t look anything like his dad. He didn’t smell like his dad, either. His father carried a thick cloud of Old Spice with him wherever he went. The air around Junior reeked of perspiration flavored with something else—vodka most likely. Anyone who thinks vodka doesn’t smell hasn’t spent any time around a serious drunk. Fred Junior may not have been driving at the moment, but he was most definitely still drinking.

“Someone to see you, Freddie,” the old man said, then he turned on the worn heels of his cowboy boots and walked away. It was clear from his posture that whatever problem we represented was his son’s problem, and he would have to deal with it on his own.

Fred Junior leaned on the handle of the pitchfork. “What’s this about?”

I held up my badge. “It’s about your friend Benjamin,” I said.

A wary look crossed Fred’s face. I had learned at the academy that an assailant with a knife can cut down a guy with a gun before there’s time to pull the trigger. I calculated that the wicked metal tines on the long-handled pitchfork could poke holes in my guts faster than any handheld knife. I was glad I had Watty and Larry Powell there for backup if need be. The problem was, I wanted this guy alive and talking, far more than I wanted him dead.

“What about him?” Fred said.

“He’s been telling us some interesting stories,” I said casually. “He told us you shot a woman a few weeks ago—shot her in cold blood in the parking lot of the Doghouse Restaurant in Seattle.”

The only light in the barn came from the open stall doors along the side of the building and from a few grimy windows up near the roof. Still, even in the relative gloom of the barn, I saw the color drain from his face. The muscles in his jaw clenched.

“I never,” he said. “I was there, but I never shot her. I told him, ‘Hey, man. I’ve got the money. Let’s just pay the woman.’ But Benjy’s crazy. He picked up the gun and fired away.”

“Maybe you’d like to put down that pitchfork and give us a statement,” I suggested.

For a long moment, nobody moved while Fred Junior stood there and considered what he would do. It was quiet enough in the barn that you could have heard a pin drop. Somewhere within hearing distance a fly buzzed.

Finally Fred spoke again. “Can you get me a deal?” he asked.

I shook my head. “I can’t promise any deals,” I said, “but if you’ll help us, I’ll do what I can to help you.”

It was lame, but it was the best I could do under the circumstances, and it probably wouldn’t have worked if Fred Beman hadn’t been ready to turn himself in. He didn’t need a deal. All you had to do was look at him to see that his conscience was eating him alive. He had run home to Daddy after what happened at the Doghouse. He was half dead from a combination of too much booze and too little sleep. I could tell from the haunted look in his eyes that wherever he went and no matter how much he tried to drink himself into oblivion, Fred could find no escape. Lulu McCaffey in her black uniform and little white apron was still lying there on the hot, dirty pavement, as dead as could be.

“Put down the pitchfork, please,” I said quietly. “Place your hands on your head.”

There was another long pause. I hadn’t drawn my weapon, but I had heard the subtle snap of leather as both Larry and Watty drew theirs. As I said, it was deathly quiet in that barn. I think we were all holding our breaths. When Fred finally moved, it was only to lean over and carefully lower the pitchfork to the floor. Without a word, Watty stepped forward and cuffed him. I read him his rights. By then, Fred was crying his eyes out.

“I couldn’t believe it when it happened,” he sobbed. “It was just supposed to be fun. He shot her down like she was an animal or something.”

We were cops from out of town and were a long way outside our jurisdiction. We also hadn’t reported our arrival to any of the local authorities. As a consequence, we needed to get out of Dodge. And since Fred seemed willing enough to talk, we wanted that to happen before he got all lawyered up. Fortunately, Larry Powell had planned ahead. He had brought a battery-powered cassette tape recorder with him. Once the four of us were settled in the car with me riding in back with Fred, we turned on Larry’s recorder, read Fred Beman his rights again, and announced into the tape who all was present in the vehicle. Then we began the long drive back to Seattle, listening to his story as we went.

It turned out that skipping out on checks in restaurants was Benjamin Smith’s hobby. He did it all the time, whether he had money in his pocket to pay for his dinner or not. He traveled around town on bus passes. That’s why he often timed his dine-and-dash events to happen during rush hour when there were plenty of people out and about and lots of buses on the streets. That’s how he managed to disappear so readily—by blending in with the crowd.

Gradually, when Fred got a grip on himself, we had him go over the story again, and recount exactly what had happened in the Doghouse parking lot. His story matched Pickles’s in every detail, including the fact that none of the three of them—Lulu, Benjamin, or Fred—had seen Pickles Gurkey in the parking lot prior to the moment when he had attempted to intervene in the fight between Lulu and Benjamin. They had stopped their altercation long enough to see him standing there, holding a drawn weapon, and announcing he was a cop. Then he had simply dropped the gun, staggered backward, and fallen against the building.

“I don’t know if the guy was drunk or what,” Fred continued. “Benjy reached down and picked up the gun. The woman had stopped yelling by then because she was all worried about the guy who had just fallen over. I think she realized at the last moment that Benjy had a gun, but by then it was too late for her to get away. As soon as Benjy shot her, he wiped the gun off with his shirt, put it in the guy’s hand, and then dropped it in his lap. The guy on the ground was so out of it, I doubt he had any idea what had just happened. After that, we took off, ran like hell over to Denny, and hopped a bus up to Capitol Hill. Benjy said not to worry, that he was sure both the woman and the cop were dead. Benjy was convinced people would think the cop had done it and that no one would ever find us, but you have,” he finished. “You did.”

“It turns out Medic 1 showed up in time, and Detective Gurkey didn’t die,” I told him. “In fact, he’s the whole reason we’re here today. He’s being charged with murder in the death of Lulu McCaffey. He’s about to go down for what you did. Our job is to make sure that doesn’t happen.”

“You still don’t understand,” Fred insisted. “I’m telling you, I didn’t do it. I’m not the one who shot her. Benjy did.”

“And then what?”

“And then I had to get out of Seattle. I called my dad and asked if I could come home. Again. He said he’d give me a place to stay and food to eat, but I had to work for it, just like his other hands. And that’s what I did.”

I looked at my watch. Watty glanced in the rearview mirror and caught me doing it. “Don’t worry,” he said. “We’ll be there in time.”

We drove straight back to Seattle. We dropped by Seattle PD long enough to put Fred Beman in an interrogation room, and then we headed for the Hargrove Hotel. In case Benjamin Smith made a run for it, we stationed two uniformed officers at First and Madison. Watty was parked in a car facing northbound at First and Columbia. Larry Powell and I waited inside the scuzzy lobby of the Hargrave, seated on a pair of swaybacked, cracked leather chairs. The clerk seemed distinctly unhappy to see us. As the moments ticked by, I worried that he might have spilled the beans and Benjamin Smith had already skipped town.

Instead, Benjy—I liked thinking of him that way—showed up right on time, at twenty minutes to three, sauntering along, swinging his lunch pail like he didn’t have a care in the world. It was Wednesday. There was no telling if he’d stopped at Bakeman’s on his way home. As soon as he pushed open the brass and glass door and started for the elevator, I stood up to head him off.

“Mr. Smith,” I said, barring his way and holding my badge up to his face. “Detective Beaumont with Seattle PD. If you don’t mind, I’d like to have a word.”

I was deliberately in his face, and the man did exactly what I hoped he’d do. He took a swing at me with the lunch pail. Since that’s what I was expecting, I blocked it easily. When you need an excuse to take someone into custody, there’s nothing like resisting in front of a collection of witnesses to give you a warrantless reason to lock some guy up in a jail cell for the next few hours. On the way to Benjy’s interrogation room, I made sure he got a look at Fred, anxious and despairing, sitting in his.

“What’s he doing here?” Benjy asked, nodding in Fred’s direction.

“What do you think he’s doing?” I said. “Mr. Beman is singing like a bird. How do you think we found you?”

MEL CAME IN about then, smiling and waving her freshly manicured, scarlet nails in my face as she kissed me hello. “What were you reading?” she asked, looking down at the scatter of yellowing onionskin paper I had dropped onto the carpet in front of the window seat. I had let the pages fall as I read them. After I had finished reading, I had simply let them be as I sat there recalling that long-ago history.

“It’s something Pickles Gurkey wrote before he died,” I explained.

“Your old partner?”

I nodded. “His widow, Anna, died a few weeks ago. His daughter, Anne Marie, was cleaning out her mother’s house and found this. She dropped it off because she thought I’d want to read it.”

“Did you?” Mel asked. “Read it, I mean.”

I nodded again.

“May I?”

“Sure,” I said. “Help yourself.”

So Mel gathered up the pages, settled comfortably on the window seat next to me, and started to read. The storm had long since ended. The clouds had rolled eastward. Outside the sky was a fragile blue, and so was the water out in the sound, but it was getting on toward evening.

I waited quietly until Mel finished reading. Fortunately she’s a very fast reader.

“So what happened?” she asked, straightening the sheets of paper and handing them back to me in a neat stack.

“We found the bad guys eventually,” I said. “The one who turned state’s evidence got off with two years for involuntary manslaughter. The shooter, Benjamin Smith, got fifteen years at Monroe for second-degree homicide, which ended up turning into a life sentence.”

“How did that happen?”

“Benjy was an arrogant asshole. That’s why he thought it was great fun to dodge out of restaurants without paying his bills. As far as he was concerned, the whole thing was nothing but a lark. Unfortunately for him, prison has a way of cutting arrogance down to size. Another inmate stuck a shiv into him. He died ten months into his fifteen-year sentence.”

“The other guy at the restaurant shooting?” Mel asked.

“Fred Beman served his sentence, straightened out his life, and now he’s back home in Walla Walla helping his father run his horse farm.”

“What about Pickles?”

“I was there in the courtroom the day the prosecutor dropped all charges against him. He turned around, grabbed my hand, shook it like crazy, and said, ‘Thanks, Beau. Thanks a lot.’ ”

“What about the Jonas bit. Did he ever call you that again?” Mel asked.

“Never. Not once. We worked together for the next five years, and he never called me anything but Beau.”

Mel frowned, looking at the papers in her hand.

“Isn’t Pickles the guy who ended up dying of another heart attack?” Mel asked.

“Right,” I said. “That was Pickles. The second one was five years later.”

“So if you saved him from a murder charge, I don’t get why his family blamed you when he died of a second heart attack that long after the first.”

“They thought he was working to make it up to me—that he owed me somehow—for keeping him out of jail, but it turns out, that wasn’t it at all. It was the case.”

“What case?”

“The Woodfield case, the one we got called out on that day.”

“The old guy who killed his wife and then turned the gun on himself?”

“That’s the one. From that day on, I remember whenever we’d go somewhere for lunch or dinner, Pickles would spend most of the time sitting there doing arithmetic on paper napkins or in his notebook, trying to figure out if Anna would be better off if he died while he was still on the job so she’d get a lump sum payment or if she’d end up with more money if she was the joint survivor on his pension.”

“Which one would have been better?” Mel asked.

“Pickles opted to work,” I said with a shrug. “Anna probably got a little more money when he died, twenty or thirty thousand more is all. The problem is, she spent the rest of her life mad at him for choosing to work instead of choosing to stay home with her. To her dying day she was convinced that was all my fault.”

“Sounds like they both got the short end of the stick,” Mel observed.

I looked at her. Mel was beautiful. She loved me, and I loved her. Yes, Pickles Gurkey may have thought he owed me something for saving his bacon on that murder charge, but it turned out that, as of today, I owed him for something even more important.

“Let’s not make the same mistake Pickles did,” I said. “Whatever time we have,, let’s not miss it. Let’s spend it together.”

Mel smiled back at me and held out her hand. “Deal,” she said.

We shook on it.

“So what are we doing for New Year’s Eve?” she asked. “Are we going out or staying home?”

I glanced at my watch. The afternoon had disappeared on me. It was almost five o’clock.

“Going out,” I said. “Let’s go put on our Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes and see what El Gaucho is serving for their blue plate special.”

“They don’t have a blue plate special,” Mel pointed out. “They never have.”

“Right,” I said. “And it doesn’t matter if they do or don’t because if there’s one lesson Pickles Gurkey taught me today, it’s this: Don’t worry about the money. Spend the time.”

Hours later, when it came time for midnight, we were standing on the balcony of our penthouse when the first volley of fireworks went off from the top of the Space Needle. Mel was holding her flute of real champagne. I had my glass of faux.

On the balcony below ours, someone had turned up their sound system, and “Auld Lang Syne” was blasting out of their speakers at full volume, loud enough to cover the rock and roll coming at us from Seattle Center.

Mel reached over and clinked her glass gently into mine. “Happy New Year,” she said.

I nodded. “Thank you,” I said. “And to you, and to time spent together.”

The fireworks were still blasting skyward when the song from the unit below ended in the familiar refrain, “We’ll take a cup o’ kindness yet, for auld lang syne.”

Maybe I’m just getting sentimental, but a lump caught in my throat. I wiped a stray tear from my eye.

Mel shot me a concerned look. “What?” she asked. “What’s going on?”

“Just remembering,” I said. Then I raised my glass again. “Here’s to Pickles Gurkey,” I said. “May he rest in peace.”

Next from J. A. Jance:

When memories of J. P. Beaumont’s past—

from his early days on the force at Seattle PD

and then, even earlier, to his days in Vietnam—

bombard him, he is reminded of people and events

he hasn’t thought of in years. But tugging on those long-

ago threads leads to present-day murders,

and soon Beau must face the fact that some bodies

from the Second Watch just won’t stay buried.

Here is a sneak preview of

SECOND WATCH

Coming soon in hardcover

from William Morrow

An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

PROLOGUE

WE LEFT THE P-2 LEVEL of the parking lot at Belltown Terrace ten minutes later than we should have. With Mel Soames at the wheel of her Cayman and with me belted into the passenger seat, we roared out of the garage, down the alley between John and Cedar, and then up Cedar to Second Avenue.

Second is one of those rare Seattle thoroughfares where, if you drive just at or even slightly below the speed limit, you can sail through one green light after another, from the Denny Regrade all the way to the International District. I love Mel dearly, but the problem with her is that she doesn’t believe in driving “just under” any speed limit, ever. That’s not her style, and certainly not on this cool September morning as we headed for the Swedish Orthopedic Institute, one of the many medical facilities located in a neighborhood Seattle natives routinely call Pill Hill.

Mel was uncharacteristically silent as she drove hell-bent for election through downtown Seattle, zipping through intersections just as the lights changed from yellow to red. I checked to be sure my seat belt was securely fastened and kept my backseat- driving tendencies securely in check. Mel does not respond well to backseat driving.

“Are you okay?” she asked when the red light at Cherry finally brought her to a stop.

The truth is, I wasn’t okay. I’ve been a cop all my adult life. I’ve been in gunfights and knife fights and even the occasional fistfight. There have been numerous times over the years when I’ve had my butt hauled off to an ER to be stitched up or worse. What all those inadvertent, spur-of-the-moment ER trips had in common, however, was a total lack of anticipation. Whatever happened happened, and I was on the gurney and on my way. Since I had no way of knowing what was coming, I didn’t have any time to be scared to death and filled with dread before the fact. After, maybe, but not before.

This time was different, because this time I had a very good idea of what was coming. Mel was driving me to a scheduled check-in appointment at the Swedish Orthopedic Institute surgical unit Mel and I have come to refer to as the “bone squad.” This morning at eight A.M. I was due to meet up with my orthopedic surgeon, Dr. Merritt Auld, and undergo dual knee-replacement surgery. Yes, dual—as in two knees at the same time.

I had been assured over and over that this so-called elective surgery was “no big deal,” but the truth is, I had seen the videos. Mel and I had watched them together. I had the distinct impression that Dr. Auld would be more or less amputating both my legs and then bolting them back together with some spare metal parts in between. Let’s just say I was petrified.

“I’m fine,” I said.

“You are not fine,” Mel muttered, “and neither am I.” Then she slammed her foot on the gas, swung us into a whiplash left turn, and we charged up Cherry. Given her mood, I didn’t comment on her speed or the layer of rubber she had left on the pavement behind us.

I had gimped along for a very long time without admitting to anyone, most of all myself, that my knees were giving me hell. And once I had finally confessed the reality of the situation, Mel had set about moving heaven and earth to see that I did something about it. This morning we were both faced with a heaping helping of “watch out what you ask for.”

“You could opt to just do one, you know,” she said.

But I knew better, and so did she. When the doctor had asked me which knee was my good knee, I had told him truthfully that they were both bad. The videos had stressed that the success of the surgery was entirely dependent on doing the required postsurgery physical therapy. Since neither of my knees would stand up to doing the necessary PT for the other, Dr. Auld had reluctantly agreed to give me a twofer.

“We’ll get through this,” I said.

She looked at me and bit her lip.

“Do you want me to drop you at the front door?”

That was a strategy we had used a lot of late. She would drop me off or pick me up from front doors while she hoofed it to and from parking garages.

“No,” I said. “I’d rather walk.”

I didn’t add “with you,” because I didn’t have to. She knew it. She also knew that by the time we made it from the parking garage to the building, we would have had to stop to rest three times and my forehead would be beaded with sweat.

“Thank you,” she said.

While I eased my body out of the passenger seat and straightened into an upright position, she hopped out and grabbed the athletic bag with my stuff in it out of the trunk. Then she came toward me, looking up at me, smiling.

And the thought of losing that smile was what scared me the most. What if I didn’t wake back up? Those kinds of things weren’t supposed to happen during routine surgeries, but they did. Occasionally there were unexpected complications and the patient died. What if this was one of those times, and this was the last time I would see Mel or hold her hand? What if this was the end of all of it? There were so many things I wanted to say about how much I loved her and how much she meant to me and how, if I didn’t make it, I wanted her to be happy for the rest of her life. But did any of those words come out of my mouth? No. Not one.

“It’s going to be okay,” she said calmly, as though she had heard the storm of misgivings that was circling around in my head. She squeezed my hand and away we went, limping along, the hare patiently keeping pace with the lumbering tortoise.

I don’t remember a lot about the check-in process. I do remember there was a line, and my knees made waiting in line a peculiar kind of hell. Mel offered to stand in line for me, but of course I turned her down. She started to argue, but thought better of it. Instead, she took my gym bag and sat in one of the chairs banked against the wall while I answered all the smiling clerk’s inane questions and signed the countless forms. Then, after Mel and I waited another ten minutes, a scrubs-clad nurse came to summon us and take us “back.”

What followed was the change into the dreaded backless gown; the weigh-in; the blood draw; the blood pressure, temperature, and pulse checks. Mel hung around for all of that. And she was still there when they stuck me on a bed to await the arrival of my anesthesiologist, who came waltzing into the bustling room with a phony smile plastered on his beaming face. He seemed to be having the time of his life. After introducing himself, he asked my name and my date of birth, and then he delivered an incredibly lame stand-up comic routine about sending me off to never-never land.

Gee, thanks, and how would you like a punch in the nose?

After a second wait of who knows how long, they rolled me into another room. This time Dr. Auld was there, and so were a lot of other people. Again they wanted my name and date of birth. It occurred to me that my name and date of birth hadn’t changed in the hour and a half during which I had told four other people the same, but that’s evidently part of the program now. Or maybe they do it just for the annoyance factor.

At that point, however, Dr. Auld hauled out a Sharpie and drew a bright blue letter on each of my knees—R and L.

“That’s just so we’ll keep them straight,” he assured me with a jovial smile.

Maybe he expected me to laugh. I didn’t. The quip reminded me too much of the kinds of stale toasts delivered by hungover best men at countless wedding receptions, and it was about that funny, too. I guess I just wasn’t up to seeing any humor in the situation.

Neither was Mel. I glanced in her direction and saw the icy blue-eyed stare my lovely wife had leveled in the good doctor’s direction. Fortunately, Dr. Auld didn’t notice.

“Well,” he said. “Shall we do this?”

As they started to roll me away, Mel leaned down and kissed me good-bye. “Good luck,” she whispered in my ear. “Don’t be long. I’ll be right here waiting.”

I looked into Mel’s eyes and was surprised to see two tears well up and then make matching tracks down her surprisingly pale cheeks. Melissa Soames is not the crybaby type. I wanted to reach up and comfort her and tell her not to worry, but the anesthesiologist had given me something to “take the edge off,” and it was certainly working. Before I could say anything at all, Mel was gone, disappearing from view behind my merry band of scrubs-attired escorts as they wheeled me into a waiting elevator.

I closed my eyes then and tried to remember exactly how Mel looked in that moment before the doors slid shut between us. All I could think of as the elevator sank into what felt like the bowels of the earth was how very much I loved her and how much I wanted to believe that when I woke up, she really would be there, waiting.

CHAPTER 1

EXCEPT SHE WASN’T. WHEN I opened my eyes again, that was the first thing I noticed. The second one was that I was “feeling no pain,” as they say, so the drugs were evidently doing what they were supposed to do.

I was apparently in the recovery room. Nurses in flowery scrubs hovered in the background. I could hear their voices, but they were strangely muted, as if somebody had turned the volume way down. As far as my own ability to speak? Forget it. Someone had pushed my mute button; I couldn’t say a single word.

In the foreground, a youngish woman sat on a tall rolling stool at the side of the bed. My initial assumption was that my daughter, Kelly, had arrived from her home in southern Oregon. I had told her not to bother coming all the way from Ashland to Seattle on the occasion of my knee-replacement surgery. In fact, I had issued a fatherly decree to that effect, insisting that Mel and I would be fine on our own. Unfortunately, Kelly is her mother’s daughter, which is to say she is also headstrong as hell. Since when did she ever listen to a word I said?

So there Kelly sat as big as life, whether I had wanted her at the hospital or not. She wore a maroon-and-gray WSU sweatshirt. A curtain of long blond hair shielded her face from my view while she studiously filed her nails—nails that were covered with bright red polish.

Having just been through several hours of major surgery, I think I could be forgiven for being a little slow on the uptake, but eventually I realized that none of this added up. Even to my drug-befuddled brain, it didn’t make sense.

Kelly and I have had our share of issues over the years. The most serious of those involved her getting pregnant while she was still a senior in high school and running off to Ashland to meet up with and eventually marry her boyfriend, a wannabe actor named Jeff. Of course, the two of them have been a couple for years, and my son-in-law is now one of the well-established members of the acting company at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, Oregon.

The OSF offers a dozen or so plays a year, playing in repertory for months at a time, and Jeff Cartwright has certainly paid his dues. After years of learning his trade by playing minor roles as a sword-wielding soldier in one Shakespearian production after another or singing and occasionally tap dancing as a member of the chorus, he finally graduated to speaking roles. This year he was cast as Laertes in Hamlet in the Elizabethan theater and, for the first time ever in a leading role, he played Brick in the Festival’s retrospective production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in the Bowmer Theatre. (I thought he did an excellent job, but I may be slightly prejudiced. The visiting theater critic for the Seattle Times had a somewhat different opinion.)

It was September, and the season was starting to wind down, but there was no way for Jeff to get away long enough to come up to Seattle for a visit, no matter how brief, and with Kayla and Kyle, my grandkids, back in school, in fourth and first grade, respectively, it didn’t seem like a good time for Kelly to come gallivanting to Seattle with or without them in tow just to hover at my sickbed.

In other words, I was both surprised and not surprised to see Kelly there; but then, gradually, a few other details began to sink into my drug-stupefied consciousness. Kelly would never in a million years show up wearing a WSU shirt. No way! She is a University of Oregon Duck, green and yellow all the way. Woe betide anyone who tries to tell her differently, and she has every right to insist on that!

To my everlasting amazement and with only the barest of financial aid from yours truly, this once marginal student got her BA in psychology from Southern Oregon University, and she’s now finishing up with a distance-learning master’s in business administration from the U of O in Eugene. She’s done all this, on her own and without any parental prompting, while running an at-home day care center and looking after her own two kids. When Kelly turned into a rabid Ducks fan along the way, she got no complaints from me, even though I’m a University of Washington Husky from the get-go.

But the very idea of Kelly Beaumont Cartwright wearing a Cougars sweatshirt? Nope. Believe me, it’s not gonna happen.

Then there was the puzzling matter of the very long hair. Kelly’s hair used to be about that same length—which is to say more than shoulder length—but it isn’t anymore. A year or so ago, she cut it off and donated her shorn locks to a charity that makes wigs for cancer patients. (Karen, Kelly’s mother and my ex-wife, died after a long battle with breast cancer, and Kelly remains a dedicated part of the cancer-fighting community. In addition to donating her hair, she sponsors a Relay for Life team and makes certain that both her father and stepfather step up to the plate with cash donations to the cause on a yearly basis.)

As my visitor continued to file her nails with single-minded focus, the polish struck me as odd. In my experience, mothers of young children in general—and my daughter in particular—don’t wear nail polish of any kind. Nail enamel and motherhood don’t seem to go together, and on the rare occasions when Kelly had indulged in a manicure she had opted for something in the pale pink realm, not this amazingly vivid scarlet, the kind of color Mel seems to favor.

Between the cascade of long blond hair and the bright red nail polish, I was pretty sure my silent visitor wasn’t Kelly. If not her, then, I asked myself, who else was likely to show up at my hospital bedside to visit?

Cherisse, maybe?

Cherisse is my daughter-in-law. She has long hair and she does wear nail polish. She and my son, Scott, don’t have kids so far, but Cherisse is not a blonde—at least she wasn’t the last time I saw her. Besides, if anyone was going to show up unannounced at my hospital bedside, it would be my son, not his wife.

I finally managed to find a semblance of my voice, but what came out of my mouth sounded croaky, like the throaty grumblings of an overage frog.

“Who are you?” I asked.

In answer, she simply shook her head, causing the cascade of silvery blond hair to ripple across her shoulder. I was starting to feel tired—sleepy. I must have blinked. In that moment, the shimmering blond hair and maroon sweatshirt vanished. In their place I saw a woman who was clearly a nurse.

“Mr. Beaumont. Mr. Beaumont,” she said, in a concerned voice that was far too loud. “How are you doing, Mr. Beaumont? It’s time to wake up now.”

“I’ve already been awake,” I wanted to say, but I didn’t. Instead, looking up into a worried face topping a set of colorful scrubs, I wondered when it was that nurses stopped wearing white uniforms and white caps and started doing their jobs wearing clothes that looked more like crazed flower gardens than anything else.

“Okay,” I managed, only now my voice was more of a whisper than a croak. “My wife?”

“Right here,” Mel answered, appearing in the background, just over the nurse’s shoulder. “I’m right here.”

She looked haggard and weary. I had spent a long time sleeping; she had spent the same amount of time worrying. Unfortunately, it showed.

“Where did she go?” I asked the nurse, who was busy taking my blood pressure reading.

“Where did who go?” she asked.

“The girl in the sweatshirt.”

“What girl?” she asked. “What sweatshirt?”

Taking a cue from me, Mel looked around the recovery room, which consisted of a perimeter of several curtained-off patient cubicles surrounding a central nurses’ station. The whole place was a beehive of activity.

“I see nurses and patients,” Mel said. “I don’t see anyone in a sweatshirt.”

“But she was right here,” I argued. “A blonde with bright red nail polish a lot like yours. She was wearing a WSU sweatshirt, and she was filing her nails with one of those pointy little nail files.”

“A metal one?” Mel asked, frowning. “Those are bad for your nails. I haven’t used one of those in years. Do they even still sell them?”

That question was directed at the nurse who, busy taking my temperature, simply shrugged. “Beats me,” she said. “I’m not big on manicures. Never have been.”

That’s when I got the message. I was under the influence of powerful drugs. The girl in the sweatshirt didn’t exist. I had made her up.

“How’re you doing, Mr. B.?” Mel asked. Sidling up to the other side of the bed, she called me by her currently favored pet name and planted a kiss on my cheek. “I talked to the doctor. He said you did great. They’ll keep you here in the recovery room for an hour or two, until they’re sure you’re stable, and then they’ll transfer you to your room. I called the kids, by the way, and let everybody know that you came through surgery like a champ.”

This was all good news, but I didn’t feel like a champ. I felt more like a chump.

“Can I get you something to drink?” the nurse asked. “Some water? Some juice?”

I didn’t want anything to drink right then because part of me was still looking for the girl. Part of me was still convinced she had been there, but I couldn’t imagine who else she might have been. One of Ron Peters’s girls, maybe? Heather and Tracy had both gone to WSU. Of the two, I’d always had a special connection with the younger one, Heather. As a kid she was a cute little blond-haired beauty whose blue-eyed grin had kept me in my place, properly wrapped around her little finger. At fifteen, a barely recognizable Heather, one with hennaed hair and numerous piercings, had gone into full-fledged off-the-rails teenage rebellion, complete with your basic bad-to-the-bone boyfriend.

In the aftermath of said boyfriend’s death, unlamented by anyone but Heather, her father and stepmother had managed to get the grieving girl on track. She had reenrolled in school, graduated from high school, and gone on to a successful college experience. One thing I did know clearly—this was September. That meant that, as far as I knew, Heather was off at school, too, working on a Ph.D. somewhere in the wilds of New Mexico. So, no, my mysterious visitor couldn’t very well be Heather Peters, either.

Not taking my disinterested answer about wanting something to drink for a real no, the nurse handed me a glass with water and a straw bent in my direction. “Drink,” she said. I took a reluctant sip, but I was still looking around the room; still searching.

Mel is nothing if not observant. “Beau,” she said. “Believe me, there’s nobody here in a WSU sweatshirt. And on my way here from the lobby, I didn’t meet anybody in the elevator or the hallway who was wearing one, either.”

“Probably just dreaming,” the nurse suggested. “The stuff they use in the OR puts ’em out pretty good, and I’ve been told that the dreams that go along with the drugs can be pretty convincing.”

“It wasn’t a dream,” I insisted to the nurse. “She was right here just a few minutes ago—right where you’re standing now. She was sitting on a stool.”

The nurse turned around and made a show of looking over her shoulder. “Sorry,” she said. “Was there a stool here? I must have missed it.”

But of course there was no stool visible anywhere in the recovery room complex, and no maroon sweatshirt, either.

The nurse turned to Mel. “He’s going to be here for an hour or so, and probably drifting in and out of it for most of that time. Why don’t you go get yourself a bite to eat? If you leave me your cell phone number, I can let you know when we’re moving him to his room.”

Allowing herself to be convinced, Mel kissed me again. “I am going to go get something,” she said.

“You do that,” I managed. “I think I’ll just nap for a while.”

My eyelids were growing heavy. I could feel myself drifting. The din of recovery room noise retreated, and just that quickly, the blonde was back at my bedside, sitting on a rolling stool that seemed to appear and disappear like magic at the same time she did. The cascade of swinging hair still shielded her face, and she was still filing her nails.

I’ve had recurring dreams on occasion, but not very often. Most of the time it’s the kind of thing where something in the dream, usually something bad, jars me awake. When I go back to sleep, the dream picks up again, sometimes in exactly the same place, but a slightly different starting point can lead to a slightly different outcome.

This dream was just like that. I was still in the bed in the recovery room, but Mel was gone and so was my nurse. Everyone else in the room was faded and fuzzy, like from the days before high-def appeared. Only the blonde on the stool stood out in clear relief against everything else.

“Who are you?” I asked. “What are you doing here? What do you want?”

She didn’t look up. “You said you’d never forget me,” she said accusingly, “but you have, haven’t you?”

I was more than a little impatient with all the phony game playing. “How can I tell?” I demanded. “You won’t even tell me your name.”

“My name is Monica,” she answered quietly. “Monica Wellington.”

Then she lifted her head and turned to face me. Once the hair was swept away, however, I was appalled to see that there was no face at all. Instead, what peered at me over the neck of the maroon sweatshirt was nothing but a skull, topped by a headful of gorgeous long blond hair, parted in the middle.

“You promised my mother that you’d find out who did it,” she said. “You never did.”

With that she was gone, plunging me into a strange existence where the boundaries between memory and dream blurred somehow, leaving me to relive that long-ago time in every jarring detail.

CHAPTER 2

WHEN IT COMES TO BORING, nothing beats second watch on a Sunday afternoon. It’s a time when nothing much happens. Good guys and bad guys alike tend to spend their Sunday afternoons at home. On a sunny early spring day, like this one, the good guys might be dragging their wintered-over barbecue grills out of storage and giving them a first-of-the-season tryout. The bad guys would probably be nursing hangovers of one kind or another and planning their next illegal exploit.

Rory MacPherson was at the wheel of our two-year-old police-pursuit Plymouth Fury as we tooled around the streets of Seattle’s Central West Precinct. We were supposedly on patrol, but with nothing much happening on those selfsame streets, we were mostly out for a Sunday afternoon drive, yakking as we went.

Mac and I were roughly the same age, but we had come to Seattle PD from entirely different tracks. He was one of those borderline juvenile delinquent types who ended up being given that old-fashioned bit of legal advice: join the army or go to jail. He had chosen the former and had shipped out for Vietnam after (a) knocking up, and (b) marrying his high school sweetheart. The army had done as promised and made a man out of him. He’d come home to the “baby killer” chorus and had gone to work for the Seattle Police Department because it was a place where a guy with a high school diploma could make enough money to support a wife and, by then, two kids. He had been there ever since, first as a beat cop and now working patrol, but his long-term goal was to transfer over to the Motorcycle unit.

Mac’s wife, Melody, stayed home with the kids. From what I could tell from his one-sided version of events, the two of them constantly squabbled over finances. No matter how much overtime Mac worked, there was never enough money to go around. Melody wanted to go to work. Mac was adamantly opposed. Melody was reading too many books and, according to him, was in danger of turning into one of those scary bra-burning feminists.

From my point of view, letting Melody go out and get a job seemed like a reasonable solution. It’s what Karen and I had decided to do. She had been hired as a secretary at the Weyerhaeuser corporate headquarters, but we had both regarded her work there as just a job—as a temporary measure rather than a career—because our ultimate goal, once we finally got around to having kids, had been for Karen to stay home and look after them, and that’s what she was doing now.

In that regard, our story was different from Mac and Melody’s. The two of us had met in college, where I had snagged Karen away from the clutches of one of my fraternity brothers, a pompous ass named Maxwell Cole. Due to the advent of the pill, we did not get “in trouble” before we got married, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. My draft number came up at about the same time I graduated from the University of Washington, so I joined up before I was drafted. Karen was willing to get married before I shipped out; I insisted on waiting.

Once I came home, also to the by-then-routine “baby-killer” chorus, Karen and I did get married. I went to work at Seattle PD, while Karen kept the job at Weyerhaeuser she had gotten while I was in the service. It’s possible that Karen had a few bra-burning tendencies of her own, but it didn’t seem like that big an issue for either one of us at the time, not back when we were dating. For one thing, we were totally focused on doing things the “right way.” We put off having kids long enough to buy the house on Lake Tapps. Now that Scott had just turned one, we were both grateful to be settled.

Yes, I admit that driving from Lake Tapps to downtown Seattle is a long commute. That’s one of the reasons I drove a VW bug, for fuel economy, but as far as this former city kid is concerned, being able to raise our kids in the country rather than the city makes the drive and the effort worthwhile.

I was raised in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood, where I was one of the few kids around with a single mother. My mom supported us by working at home as a seamstress. Growing up in poverty was one of the reasons I was determined to raise my own kids with two parents and a certain amount of financial security. I had my eye on being promoted to investigations, preferably Homicide. I had taken the exam, but so far there weren’t any openings.

Karen and I had both had lofty and naive ideas about how her stay-at-home life would work. However, with one baby still in diapers and with another on the way, reality had set in in a very big way. From Karen’s point of view, her new noncareer path wasn’t at all what it was cracked up to be. She was bored to tears and had begun to drop hints about being sold a bill of goods. The long commute meant that my workdays were longer, too. She wanted something more in her life than all Scotty, all the time. She also wanted me to think about some other kind of job where there wouldn’t be shift work. She wanted a job for me that would allow us to establish a more regular schedule, one where I could be home on weekends like other people. The big problem for me with that idea was that I loved what I did.

So that’s how me and Mac’s second-watch shift was going that Sunday afternoon. We had met up at Bob Murray’s Doghouse for a hearty Sunday brunch that consisted of steak and eggs, despite the warning on the menu specifying that the tenderness of the Doghouse’s notoriously cheap steaks was “not guaranteed.” I believe it’s possible—make that likely—that we both had some hair of the dog. Mac had a preshift Bloody Mary and I had a McNaughton’s and water in advance of heading into the cop shop in downtown Seattle.

Once we checked our Plymouth Fury out of the motor pool, Mac did the driving, as usual. When we were together, I was more than happy to relinquish the wheel. My solitary commutes back and forth from Lake Tapps gave me plenty of “drive time.” During Mac’s and my countless hours together in cars, we did more talking than anything else.

Mac and I were both Vietnam vets, but we did not talk about the war. What we had seen and done there was still too raw and hurtful to talk about, and what happened to us after we came back home was even more so. As a result we steadfastly avoided any discussion that might take us too close to that painful reality. Instead, we spent lots of time talking about the prospects for the newest baseball team in town, the second coming of the Seattle Rainiers, to have a winning season.

Mac was still provoked that the “old” Seattle Rainiers, transformed into the Seattle Pilots, had joined the American League and boogied off to Milwaukee. I didn’t have a strong feeling about any of it, so I just sat back and let Mac rant. Finished with that, he went on to a discussion of his son, Rolly, short for Roland. For Mac it was only a tiny step from discussing Seattle’s pro baseball team to his son’s future baseball prospects, even though Rolly was seven and doing his first season of T-ball, complicated by the unbelievable fact that Melody had signed up to be the coach of Rolly’s team.

My eyes must have glazed over about then. At our house, Karen and I were still up to our armpits in diapers. By the way, when I say the word “we” in regard to diapers, I mean it. I did my share of diaper changing. From where I stood in the process of child rearing, thinking about T-ball or even Little League seemed to be in the very distant future.

What I really wanted right about then was a cigarette break. Mac had quit smoking months earlier. Out of deference to him, I didn’t smoke in the patrol car, but at times I really wanted to.

It must have been close to four thirty when a call came in over our two-way radio. Two kids had been meandering around the railroad yard at the base of Magnolia Bluff. Somewhere near the bluff they had found what they thought was an empty oil drum. When they pried off the top, they claimed, they had discovered a dead body inside. I told Dispatch that we were on our way, but Mac didn’t exactly put the pedal to the metal.

“I’ll bet dollars to doughnuts this is somebody’s idea of a great April Fool’s joke,” he said. “Wanna bet?”

“No bet,” I agreed. “Sounds suspicious to me.”

We went straight there, not with lights and sirens, but without stopping for coffee along the way, either. We didn’t call the medical examiner. We didn’t call for the Homicide squad or notify the crime lab because we thought it was a joke. Except it turned out it wasn’t a joke at all.

We located the two kids, carrot-topped, freckle-faced twin brothers Frankie and Donnie Dodd, waiting next to a pay phone at the Elliott Bay Marina where they had called 911. They looked to be eleven or twelve years old. The fact that they were both still a little green around the gills made me begin to wonder if maybe Mac and I were wrong about the possibility of this being an April Fool’s joke.

“You won’t tell our mom, will you?” the kid named Donnie asked warily. “We’re not supposed to be down by the tracks. She’ll kill us if she finds out.”

“Where do you live?” I asked.

“On Twenty-third West,” he said, pointing to the top of the bluff. “Up on Magnolia.”

“And where does your mother think the two of you are?” I asked.

Frankie, who may have been the ringleader, made a face at his brother, warning Donnie not to answer, but he did anyway.

“She dropped us off at the Cinerama to see Charlotte’s Web. We tried to tell her that’s a kids’ movie, but she didn’t listen. So after she drove away, we caught a bus and came back here to look around. We’ve found some good stuff here—a broken watch, a jackknife, a pair of false teeth.”

Nodding, Frankie added his bit. “Halfway up the hill we found a barrel. We thought there might be some kind of treasure in it. That’s why we opened it.”

“It smelled real bad,” Donnie said, holding his nose and finishing his brother’s thought. “I thought I was going to puke.”

“How do you know a body was inside?” I asked.

“We pushed it away from us. When it rolled the rest of the way down the hill, she fell out. She wasn’t wearing any clothes.”

“That’s why we couldn’t tell our mother,” Donnie concluded, “and that’s when we went to the marina to call for help.”

“How about if you show us,” Mac suggested.

We let the two kids into the back of the patrol car. They were good kids, and the whole idea of getting into our car excited them. Kids who have had run-ins with cops are not thrilled to be given rides in patrol cars. Following their pointed directions, we followed an access road on the far side of Pier 91. There were no gates, no barriers, just a series of NO TRESPASSING signs that they had obviously ignored, and so did we.

The road intersected with the path the barrel had taken on its downhill plunge. Its route was still clearly visible where a gray, greasy film left a trail through the hillside’s carpet of newly sprung springtime weeds and across the dirt track in front of us. What looked like a bright yellow fifty-gallon drum had come to a stop some fifteen yards farther on at the bottom of the steep incline. The torso of a naked female rested half inside and half outside the barrel. The body was covered in a grayish-brown ooze that I couldn’t immediately identify. The instantly recognizable odor of death wafted into the air, but there was another underlying odor as well. While my nicotine-dulled nostrils struggled to make olfactory sense of that second odor, Mac beat me to the punch.

“Cooking grease,” he explained. “Whoever killed her must have shoved her feet-first into a restaurant-size vat of used grease. Restaurants keep the drums out on their loading docks. Once they’re full, they haul them off to the nearest rendering plant.”

I nodded. That was it—stale cooking grease. The combination of rotten flesh and rotting food was overwhelming. For a time we both stood in a horrified stupor while I fought down the urge to lose my own lunch and wondered if the victim had been dead or alive when she had been sealed inside her grease-filled prison.

Eventually the urgent cawing of a flock of crows wheeling overhead broke our stricken silence. Their black wings flapped noisily against the early April blue sky. I’m a crossword puzzle kind of guy. That gives me access to a good deal of generally useless information. In this instance, I knew that a flock of crows is called a murder, and this noisy bunch, attracted by what they must have expected to be a sumptuous feast, seemed particularly aptly named.

Mac was the first to stir. “I guess it’s not a joke,” he muttered as he started down the hill toward the body. “I’ll keep the damn birds away. You call it in.”

Mac was a few years my senior in both regular years and in years on the force. He often issued what sounded like orders. Most of the time I simply went along with the program. In this instance, I was more than happy to comply.

I went back over to the car and leaned inside. Donnie and Frankie were watching, wide eyed, from the backseat. “Did you see her?” Donnie asked. At least I think it was Donnie.

“Yes,” I said grimly. “We saw her. While I call this in, I want the two of you to stay right where you are. Got it?”

They both nodded numbly. It wasn’t as though they had a choice. There was a web of metal screen between the cruiser’s front seat and the backseat. The doors locked from the outside, and there were no interior door handles. Frankie and Donnie Dodd weren’t under arrest, but they weren’t going anywhere without our permission. They sat there in utter silence while I made the call, letting Dispatch know that they needed to summon the M.E. and detectives from Homicide. When I finished, I hopped out of the car and skidded down the steep incline. Mac was already on his way back up.

“I gave up on the damn birds,” he muttered. “She’s already dead. How much worse can it be?

“That’s all right,” I said. “I think I’ll go have a look anyway.”

“Suit yourself,” Mac said with a shrug. “Some people are dogs for punishment.”

We had worked together long enough that he knew I wanted a cigarette, but we were both kind enough not to mention it. I waited until I was far enough down the hill to be out of sight before I lit up. I figured out of sight is out of mind and damn the smoke smell later.

Still, smoking was what I was doing when my eyes were inevitably drawn to the body. People passing car wrecks on the highway aren’t the only people guilty of rubbernecking. Cops do it, too, and at that time in my career I was enough of a newbie that seeing dead bodies was anything but routine.

I found myself staring at the dead woman—what I could see of her, at least. She lay sprawled facedown on the weedy hillside, half in and half out of the barrel. A tangle of what looked like shoulder-length blond hair spilled out over the ground. A moment later, something red caught my eye, sticking out through the layer of greasy slurry. At first I thought what I was seeing was blood spatter, but that wasn’t possible. Clearly the woman had been dead for some time. Once blood is exposed to the air, it oxidizes and goes from red to muddy brown. This was definitely red. Bright red. Scarlet. Inhaling a lungful of smoke, I moved a step or two closer to get a better look.

What I was seeing, of course, was nothing but tiny little patches of bright red nail polish glowing in the sunlight. And that was the single detail that stayed with me from that crime scene—the nail polish. Wanting to look pretty for someone, the victim had gone to the trouble of having a manicure, or else she had given herself one. Had she been going to a dance or a party, maybe? Had she been out on the town for a night of fun?

Whatever it was, when she’d done her nails, she hadn’t expected to be dead soon, or that the vivid red nail polish would be the only thing she’d be wearing when someone found her body.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

J. A. JANCE is the New York Times bestselling author of the J. P. Beaumont series, the Joanna Brady series, the Ali Reynolds series, and four interrelated thrillers about the Walker Family. Born in South Dakota and brought up in Bisbee, Arizona, Jance lives with her husband in Seattle, Washington, and Tucson, Arizona.

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Books by J. A. Jance

Joanna Brady Mysteries

Desert Heat

Tombstone Courage

Shoot/Don't Shoot

Dead to Rights

Skeleton Canyon

Rattlesnake Crossing

Outlaw Mountain

Devil's Claw

Paradise Lost

Partner in Crime

Exit Wounds

Dead Wrong

Damage Control

Fire and Ice

Judgment Call

The Old Blue Line

Remains of Innocence

J. P. Beaumont Mysteries

Until Proven Guilty

Injustice for All

Trial by Fury

Taking the Fifth

Improbable Cause

A More Perfect Union

Dismissed with Prejudice

Minor in Possession

Payment in Kind

Without Due Process

Failure to Appear

Lying in Wait

Name Withheld

Breach of Duty

Birds of Prey

Long Time Gone

Justice Denied

Betrayal of Trust

Ring In the Dead

Second Watch

Stand Down

and

Hour of the Hunter

Kiss of the Bees

Day of the Dead

Queen of the Night

Edge of Evil

Web of Evil

Hand of Evil

Cruel Intent

Memoir

After the Fire: A Memoir in Poetry and Prose

Anthology

Bark M For Murder "(with Virginia Lanier, Chassie West, and Lee Charles Kelley)"

COPYRIGHT

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Excerpt from Second Watch copyright © 2013 by J. A. Jance.

RING IN THE DEAD. Copyright © 2013 by J. A. Jance. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

EPub Edition JULY 2013 ISBN: 9780062291097

Print Edition ISBN: 9780062294821

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