Rogue Justice (29 page)

Zora looked at him sideways.

"That's the plan, right? To track down a whale?"

After a long pause, she replied, "Yes, that's the plan."

"And you didn't tell the DA."

"It's a felony, detective. To be honest it scares the hell out of me telling
you
."

"Fair enough. But here's the thing you need to know about Scott Rosekrans. He's been scorched by that grease-ball Towers before."

"How so?"

"Long story short, one of the governor's cronies lured a fifteen-year-old girl onto his sailboat over in Port Ludlow, tied her up, and raped her repeatedly over two days. The case was a lock until SIU reared its butt-ugly head. Then, poof, like magic, it all went away. Meanwhile the kid was all messed up, I mean real bad. She's been in and out of psychiatric hospitals ever since, going on three years now. Scott took it personal, can't say as I blame him."

"Me neither," Zora said with obvious contempt. "It's sick."

They sat silently as Laurie approached. She dropped off two heaping plates of food, topped off their water glasses, and quickly retreated to the kitchen. Steiger tore a hunk of chicken off the skewer, popped it into his mouth.

"Okay, so what about my mother and the orca?" Zora asked, eyeing him expectantly.

Steiger made a sour face. "Two words: Mitchell Chandler."

"What about him?" Zora asked, already going there in her own mind. She was certain Chandler was pulling all the strings, though so far she had no way of proving it. And even if she did, what good would it do? One wrong move could prove fatal for her mother.

"Let's just say he and I have a history, too." Steiger wiped the corners of his mouth with his napkin, took another bite of chicken. "It involves my ex-partner, guy by the name of Eddie Rice. We worked together for fifteen years. Damn good cop, last of a line, too. His father and four uncles were part of the brotherhood, true-blue believers every last one of them. And Eddie was the smartest of the bunch. He was really going places, would probably be chief by now if it wasn't for Chandler."

Steiger stopped, stared out the window. Zora sensed that beneath the gruff exterior this man had a heart of gold, that whatever happened with his former partner had shaped him more than anyone knew.

He continued. "Eddie loved playing golf. He attacked a course the way a tiger goes after a zebra. Two summers ago he signed up for the annual MDA charity event at his local club and by some fluke ended up in the same foursome as Chandler. Now you need to understand something about Eddie. He didn't pull punches with anybody, and he'd had some really bad dealings with this character in the past. So we're talking about a goddamn accident waiting to happen here."

Steiger then described what went down at the fifth hole, how Chandler had breached one of golf's time-honored rules of etiquette: the player with the best score has the "honor" of teeing off first at the next hole. "So Chandler hits out of turn and storms off down the fairway. By the time the others reach the green the idiot's already holed out. Well, Eddie rips him a new one, right? And what does Chandler do? He grabs a nine iron from his bag and shoves it right in my partner's face. Bad idea! Eddie was carrying heat. He pulls his pistol and shoots the club clean out of Chandler's hands."

Zora's jaw dropped. "That got his attention, I bet."

"Damn right. Back at the clubhouse, Chandler's fat-cat friends had a good laugh at his expense. But there were no grins the next day after Eddie landed in the hot seat. He was demoted to desk duty, a horseshit job in IA of all places."

"IA?"

"Internal Affairs, cops who investigate other cops. We call it the rat squad. Now I'm talking about a stand-up guy who had no use for those shit-for-brains bureaucrats, so that was a real boot in the ass. Chief back then said the decision had to do with a police brutality complaint, but we all knew the real story. Even the union played dead."

"What about your partner? How did he react?"

Steiger hesitated. Zora watched him do a slow burn.

"Like clipping the wings of an eagle. He was frustrated, pissed off, his self-esteem shot to hell. Jack and Coke became his best friends. He wouldn't talk to anybody, including me. His wife ended up throwing him out of the house, refused to let him see their eleven-year-old daughter. Eddie adored that kid. A week later we found him in this real shit hole of an apartment in Pioneer Square. Blew his brains out with his own service revolver."

Zora drew a quick breath as the face of her father flashed in front of her. "That's horrible. I'm really sorry."

Steiger's demeanor softened. Just a bit.

"Yeah, I've probably worked a thousand crime scenes and never had a single nightmare. All that changed when I found Eddie lying there in his own blood. I used to follow
him
through doors and there he was, eyes open, the light completely gone. Finest cop I ever knew and it ended like that. Damn shame. I should have done more. Tough to live with that."

Zora now understood why the DA had sent her to see this man. And she said so, adding, "But you can't blame yourself."

Steiger spoke slowly, deliberately. "Yeah... I'm working on it."

Yet even as they exchanged those words, Zora knew there was a false note here, knew she would never be able to forgive herself if something happened to her mother. She tried to process all this, but now was not the time. Instead, she found a way to shove it aside and recalibrate her focus. The answer to her next question she already knew. She asked it anyway. "So the governor and Chandler are tight then?"

"
Tight
would be an understatement," Steiger said. "Problem is, from where I sit there's not a shred of evidence linking Chandler to the Kincaid murder, or to the blackmail scheme involving your mother and the whale either. Which means there's no way to connect the dots. And SIU will make goddamn sure it stays that way."

"What if I told you there
was
some evidence."

Steiger tilted his head, cracked his knuckles. "You'd have my undivided attention."

Zora pulled a folded sheet of paper from her jacket pocket, handed it to Steiger like it was about to catch fire. He opened it slowly and mouthed the words, "Samson death imminent... Freeman evasive... cover-up!"

"Freeman's the General Manager at Chandler's Seattle park," Zora said.

"Yeah, I know the name. Where'd you get this?"

She told him.

"When was that?"

There was a long gap in the conversation as Zora reflected on what to say next. "Last night. The entry was made shortly before Katrina died."

Steiger thought about that, handed back the paper. "You obviously didn't tell this to the DA either, or he would have mentioned it to me on the phone."

Zora's mind raced. She thought about the antique stove and Katrina's running shoes, but decided to hold off revealing that information, at least for now. "It's that felony thing, remember, detective?"

Steiger did not respond. Zora took his silence as restrained consent.

"Okay, look," he said. "This information might not directly implicate Chandler, but there's no way any of this goes down without his say-so. There's something else here, too."

Zora felt her pulse quicken. "What's that?" she asked, leaning across the table.

"SIU might be able to cover up any physical evidence found at the crime scene, but Towers doesn't have his own geek squad to dig into the computer. For that he'll need the state crime lab and those young guns will find every file Ms. Kincaid ever created, saved, downloaded, sent, or even deleted, including the information on that sheet of paper you just showed me. If we're lucky, we might just stumble on a trail that
does
lead us to the promised land. Unfortunately, that could take some time."

"And
time
is a luxury I don't have, detective," Zora said emphatically. "I need to capture that whale in the next few days, or say goodbye to my mother. It's a choice I'd rather not have to make, but when you get right down to it, it's not really a choice at all, is it?"

"No, I guess not," Steiger replied.

They both went quiet. Zora looked away, feeling the tension build inside her.

He added, "Listen, I'll do everything I can to help, okay?"

She reached across the table, squeezed his hand. "I appreciate that, detective, I do. And I know your reputation, going off the reservation and all, but this is..." Her words trailed off.

Steiger held up a hand. "Look," he said. "I'm edging away from sixty, long past the time most cops retire. My record is clean, no skeletons in the closet, solid pension locked up. There's only one piece of unfinished business on my plate and that's avenging Eddie's death. Nothing would make me happier than knocking on Mitchell Chandler's door in the middle of the night with an arrest warrant, slapping on the bracelets, and then dragging him downtown in his goddamn skivvies. I'll make sure every TV station in town knows about it, too, so they can film the perp walk." He paused, a twisted grin on his face. "The icing on the asshole cake as it were. And that, as they say, is
that
. Now eat up. Best grub in town."

Chapter 31

1 April, 3:15 PM PDT

Kiotlah Point: Olympic Peninsula,

Washington

Houdini crouched beside a giant stone arch, scanning the turbulent waters of Juan de Fuca Strait through a pair of powerful, range-finding Steiner binoculars. The ancient rock had been transformed by time and the relentless pounding of the sea into a towering work of art, its mass and sweep so severe it seemed to defy the laws of gravity. He closed his eyes, lowered the glasses, and breathed deeply of the invigorating ocean air. The rhythmic sound of the waves and a flock of screeching gulls combined to create a stirring soundtrack.

He had arrived at this sacred spot shortly after sunrise, the Old One's words still echoing in his ears:
Sometimes the answer is asking harder questions
. He'd been asking
himself
hard questions most of a sleepless night, but no answers had come, nothing that even hinted at why the mighty killer whales had returned. And thus far, his vigil had been a bust. No sign of the orcas. In fact, there wasn't much to see at all, save for the endless rolling gray swells. With the ban on all non-commercial vessels still in effect, traffic through the shipping lanes had been relatively light, limited to some large tankers, a few freighters, and a couple of cruise ships.

Houdini scanned the waters for another fifteen minutes, and decided to call it a day. He'd gathered up most of his gear when he heard the sound. It was faint at first but soon grew louder and stronger, a piercing, high-pitched tone that reminded him of a police siren. His pulse quickened. He raised the binoculars again and adjusted the focus, straining to see beyond the ranging distance of sixteen hundred meters. Anxious minutes passed before a mighty cloud of white mist exploded into the air. An instant later, there was a second blow, soon followed in quick succession by three more. Set against a mist-shrouded sun, the powerful blasts created a stunning rainbow effect.

Then... the mighty whales appeared on the horizon.

Houdini had tried to visualize in his mind what that first image would be like, as any good photographer would do, yet the reality was beyond anything his imagination could comprehend. The creatures resembled giant gloss-black torpedoes and they were moving fast.
Really
fast. He watched in awe, unable to grasp the towering height of the dorsal fins, the sheer size of their bodies, or their mind-bending speed. A killer whale, he knew, typically traveled at five to six miles per hour, occasionally making a spectacular dash of up to thirty miles per hour when pursuing elusive prey. But these leviathans were moving at more than
twice
that top speed, faster even than the cheetah, the world's swiftest animal, land or sea.

It didn't seem possible.

Houdini had only seconds to capture this ultimate wild world thrill. He unzipped his sling pack, removed his Nikon D3X, and adjusted the 300mm lens. The high-end digital camera was designed for continuous shooting and he was about to test its limits.

Aim, focus,
click, click, click!

Repeat—aim, focus,
click, click, click!