Day One (22 page)

I try to fight my Pavlovian response to the silver bar on her collar. I don’t have to follow her orders. But in the end, there’s little point in resisting, and anyway I’ve got no enthusiasm for Tri-Met or for the cost of a cab.

I wait until we’ve cleared the garage and are heading down the hill. “Susan, what are you up to, anyway?”

“I’m going back to the crime scene.”

“Sure, that’s what Moose and Frannie are doing. What are
you
doing?”

“What do you mean? I’m doing my job.”

“Hauser never followed the investigators around crime scenes. Hell, even Owen left us to do our work without his nose up our asses.”

“You know major crime scenes bring the brass out.”

“Sure, but they stand around at the margins being self-important, not haunting the working cops. Why are you driving me around? Why are
you
going to Mitch’s house? Again. Why aren’t you back in the office?”

She doesn’t answer right away. I can see her chewing on it, trying to decide exactly what to say to me. “You think a lieutenant can’t be a little hands-on with a case this messy?”

“Is that what you’re doing? Being hands-on?”

She sighs. I’m badgering her. But I don’t like feeling as though I’ve got a babysitter. She got stuck with me twice today—teach me
to live on a street too narrow for the mobile command unit. It’s always easier to deal with an ex-cop than a citizen. But setting up a command center in my living room wasn’t anything compared to Mitch fixing on me for his confessional.

“You didn’t used to be so angry all the time.”

“Maybe if you’d taken me seriously when I told you about Eager I wouldn’t have anything to be pissed about. Retirement doesn’t turn people into high-functioning morons.”

A silence stretches out between us and I start to feel like an ass. I sigh, stare out the window at the tree-clad hillside.

“I know that. In fact, after our talk this morning, I got to thinking and there’s something I want to run by you. We’ve been bringing in retired homicide detectives to do open case file reviews, to help take the pressure off the cold case squad. I thought you might be interested.”

“You want me to review case files.” All the women in my life feel duty-bound to load me up with busy work. I can’t blame them. It keeps my hands otherwise occupied.

“It’s got to be done, Skin. My cold case guys are good, but they’re swamped. They can’t drop everything every time someone calls wanting to know if there’s anything new on their dead father or husband or sister or daughter.”

“So you’re pulling in fogies to do the grunt work.”

“That’s not the way I see it. You’re qualified, you’ve got the experience.”

“The pension is what I’ve got.”

“So hanging out in a coffee shop all day is working out for you? Doing off-the-books insurance investigations? Chasing women half your age?”

She stays informed.

“Riggins has been helping us out. We’ve even got a federal grant coming through. We’ll be able to pay a small stipend. Simple case
review, flag anything that stands out. No interviews, no testifying, just helping us stay on top of things. The detectives develop the evidence.”

“Maybe I like sitting in a coffee shop all day.”

“Well, think about it. Okay? You’ve got good eyes. You could help us out.”

I grunt. I can’t decide if she really wants me or is trying to do me some kind of half-assed favor. I decide to change the subject.

“Did you send someone to look for Jase?”

She seems to appreciate the change of topic. “He’d left. You should have called me first. I might have been able to get a car down there before he ran off.”

“Susan, you ever been down there?”

“Of course.”

“Then you know a scrotum face like me stands out. And anyway, I went looking for someone who might know Eager. It’s one of his hangouts. I wasn’t there to be furtive. You’re lucky Jase talked to me at all.”

She nods, conceding the point. “Do you think he was telling the truth?”

Nobody is ever honest with a cop, even a dried-up ex-cop. And Jase, no doubt, is an accomplished liar, which means he mixed in enough truth to avoid tripping himself up later but omitted everything important. “Maybe. I’m sure he knows more than he was telling, but where Luellen went probably isn’t it.”

“But beyond that ... he must know about the kitchen.”

“You have to figure.” And you have to figure he knows what Eager was doing there too, despite his protests to the contrary. Kids that age always know all the household secrets, and between his hints and Mitch’s revelations clearly there are a lot of secrets. I know none of them. For a moment I have the eerie sensation I’m chasing a ghost. Eager’s, or my own, who can say? Where I ought to be is
back in Uncommon Cup. And what I ought to be doing is drinking coffee with Ruby Jane and getting past myself.

But Susan isn’t done with Jase. “Not too broken up about his father, I take it.”

“Shoot his Xbox, that’ll draw a tear.”

She chuckles and some of my tension lessens. Suddenly we’ve become two cops jawing about a case. Spinning out the threads, seeing what can be woven together. Been a long time since we talked to each other like colleagues.

“What all have you found out about Luellen and Danny?”

“Granger is Luellen’s maiden name.”

“Yeah, she’s mentioned it.”

“She’s from a small town in southern Oregon, but moved to Portland about four-and-a-half years ago. She worked part time at the women’s health clinic over on Southeast 50th until August 2004. Both her parents died in a car accident shortly after she came to Portland.”

August 2004 is also when the Tabor Doe dropped, but I don’t mention that. No need to wreck the mood. “I’m pretty sure Mitch’s father is dead too, way back. I know his mother died last year.” I think for a moment about the wheelchair I carried around in my trunk for several days.

“So whoever Danny’s grandfather is, he’s neither Mitch nor Luellen’s father.”

“Biological father?”

“So far, nothing on him. Danny’s birth certificate lists the father as unknown. But we just started looking.”

There’s only so much you can find out in a short morning, but sometimes you can sense when you’ve hit a wall. “You’re not going to find anything else.”

“It seems unlikely.”

“Mitch confirmed he’s not Danny’s real father.”

“The math didn’t add up.”

“So grandpa could be the bio father’s old man.”

“Whoever that is.”

“Luellen never struck me as someone with a lot of random sexual partners. She knows who the father is.”

Susan thinks for a moment. “Unless she was raped.”

It wasn’t a possibility I’d considered until that moment, but Susan might on to something. If true, it could explain a lot, everything from Luellen’s singular dedication to Danny to her flight from the police this morning. Hell, it might even explain the strange things Mitch said about their relationship.

“Skin, you need to come clean to me. I mean, that bit about watching Danny? Come on. What do you know about these people?”

I hesitate for only a moment. There’s no reason to stick with my earlier reticence. I’m already part of the investigation; Mitch saw to that. I shrug. There’s little enough to tell.

“They moved in a couple of years ago, late winter. Two and a half years, I guess.”

“Did Eager ever show any interest in them?”

The question embarrasses me a little, but after what Mitch said, it’s a good one. “I thought he was hanging around me.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know he used to show up at my place a lot. We’d talk about nothing. He’d show me skateboard tricks and I’d patch him up when he wiped out. I’d try to draw him out about that day up on Mount Tabor.”

“For all the good that did.”

“Yeah.”

“What else?”

“I don’t know, Susan. I saw him running around with Jase a few times, but I didn’t think much of it. He lived in the neighborhood.”

“But Jase is older than he is.”

“Yeah, by a year or two. I figured it was hero worship or whatever.”

“If you say so.”

“I had no idea Eager had a relationship with Luellen.”

“What was that about the tagging?”

I sigh. I’m feeling like a fool, but it’s not like she wasn’t there. I describe my visit from Mitch a few months earlier, about seeing Eager’s tag on the front of the house.

“But you didn’t do anything about it.”

“I told Mitch to report it to the police.”

“Did he, that you know?”

“I don’t know.”

“But you didn’t tell him you knew who did it.”

“Susan, you don’t have to live next to the guy. Mitch is mostly just one endless pain in the ass. I thought Eager was in some kind of dog fight with Jase, so I figured I would talk to him about it the next time I saw him. And as it happened, today was the first time I’ve seen him in a year.”

“Did you look for him after he tagged the Bronstein house?”

“A little, here and there.” A few visits to Burnside, and O’Bryant Square in addition to my fruitless call to Charm. “I didn’t see the point in pushing it.”

“Obviously there was a point. If Mitch is to be believed, he targeted the boy this morning.”

“What do you want me to say, Susan?”

“I just think you were behaving irresponsibly.” So much for collegial discourse. I suppose this is her stab at me for holding out about my sideline in childcare, but I can’t read her face. It’s blank.

“Oh, Jesus Christ. Are you kidding me? I had no reason to think anything was going on but a teenage spat.”

“You know Eager’s history.”

“Better than you do, goddammit. A little spray paint on Mitch Bronstein’s front porch wasn’t cause for calling out the National Guard.”

She knows I’m right, but I also know she’s a little right too. Obviously I missed a lot playing footsie with Eager, all the while babysitting for Luellen and dodging Mitch whenever I could. Across the street, I saw unremarkable domesticity. Husband, wife, two kids. All they lacked was the dog. But what the fuck did I know?

I don’t speak again until we turn on to my street.

Things have changed since this morning. The street is open, the barricades gone. Hardly any cars are parked along the street, a sight I don’t expect to see repeated in my lifetime. There is a patrol car parked in front of my house, though, along with two vans belonging to the crime scene examiners. Warning tape crisscrosses the porch. Moose and Frannie are waiting on the walkway leading back to Mitch and Luellen’s kitchen door when we pull up in front of the house.

“What’s the plan?”

“Thanks for your help, Skin. I’m sorry things didn’t go better at the hospital.”

“So I’m dismissed.”

She pauses, then surprises me. “You can come in with us, if you like. Perhaps you can tell us if anything seems out of place.”

She’s assuming I’ve spent enough time inside the house to know. “A lot seems out of place today.” She smiles, eyes weary, and I follow her up the walk to the back door.

The kitchen isn’t in too bad a shape. There are dishes in the sink and a skillet of coagulated eggs on the stove, fingerprint powder on the counters and cupboard doors. A couple of spilled drawers. Trail of dried blood on the floor, gouge in the plaster where the bullet was extracted. But not the disaster I expected. Justin Marcille, primary
examiner for the state, is there boxing up his kit. He looks at me like I’m covered in my own vomit. I guess he still remembers the last time we spoke. He draws himself up, five feet, seven inches of irritable French Canadian and faces Susan.

“We’re packing up, Lieutenant. We should be out of here in another ten minutes.”

“Anything of interest?”

“Nothing obvious that you haven’t already seen. I’ll have a prelim for you tomorrow, but it’s going to be a while before we process everything.”

“Give me the highlights.”

Justin frowns. From experience, I know he doesn’t like to speculate until he’s had a chance to review the evidence. But he also knows cops want to know anything they can, as soon as they can. “There are points of disturbance in the foyer, front hall, dining room and kitchen. We collected material from each location, but I have no sense yet of how much of it is relevant. A lot of latents, of course, mostly partials. Don’t be in a hurry there.”

“I understand. Maybe you could help us with something. We’re looking for a phone number. Did you turn up an address book, anything like that?”

Marcille thinks for a moment. “Nothing like that, Lieutenant. The warrant—”

“We’re working on an amendment.”

“Fine.” A couple of others join us from the dining room. They’re PPB criminalists, but I don’t recognize them. After my time, I guess.

Susan nods. “What about the computers?”

I whistle. “Computers? Who wrote that affidavit?” Then I realize they’re interested in Mitch’s state of mind. Emails, letters, anything that might shed light on what happened this morning. I wonder if they’ll find nudie shots of his girlfriend Lynn from work.

Justin ignores me. “A couple of laptops. Password protected, so you’ll have to wait till the IT guys can get at them. Won’t be a problem, but you won’t get anything today.”

“How about a cell phone?”

“There was one charging in the study. But you’re stuck there too. It’s got a PIN.”

Susan’s lips go thin.

“Check with IT in the morning.”

Time is ticking. Tomorrow morning could be too late. “Tell you what, Justin. See if you can expedite IT. We need that phone number, and the computers or the cell phone is our best bet for it, okay?”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

“Thank you.”

She turns to us. “We might as well have a look around.”

I wonder where the amended warrant is, but I don’t say anything. Neither does Frannie Stein, but Moose has a question. “What are we looking for?”

“A cell phone number for Eager Gillespie.” Moose’s eyebrows raise a fraction of an inch. He knows Eager too. “An address book would be great, but I’m not hopeful about that.” Her eyes stray to the fridge, which is a mess of photographs and coupons. Magnetized block letters, C-A-T and B-I-R-D and D-A-N-N-Y spelled out in primary colors. One of the N’s is a sideways Z. “Maybe a sticky note somewhere. Or check to see if the house phones have speed dial numbers programmed.”