Trial by Fury (9780061754715) (15 page)

W
e went back into Candace Wynn's apartment, eventually, after the deputy had used the laser to go over everything of interest in the garbage can. By then, Watty was as serious as hell. The morphine bottle was no joke. He watched over our shoulders while the crime scene team, the other two Seattle P.D. detectives, and I scoured the place inch by inch. We found a number of useful items, including the automobile license renewal form on Andi's Chevy Luv. Watty phoned the license number, in to dispatch and told them to put out an APB on Candace Wynn.

I lost all track of time. Long after one in the morning somebody thought to reach down behind the couch cushions. There, stuck in the crack between the springs and the back of the
couch, we discovered a small, dark, leather wallet. I recognized it at once.

“That's Peters',” I said.

Sure enough. Inside we found both his badge and his departmental ID. I felt like somebody had kicked me in the stomach.

Right up until then, I suppose I'd kept hoping I was wrong. Hoping that, despite the mounting evidence, Peters would show up and chew my butt for pushing panic buttons when he was just out knocking off a piece of ass. Finding his badge corked it for me. Cops don't get separated from their badges without a fight. Or without a reason.

When we finally left Candace Wynn's apartment, Watty and I took our separate vehicles and drove back downtown to the Public Safety Building. I went upstairs to write my report while a team from the crime lab night shift went to work as fast as they could on comparing the prints we'd found on the things in Joanna Ridley's trunk with the prints in Candace Wynn's apartment.

With every moment vital, it was frustrating to realize that the process, which would take several hours of manual labor, could have been done in a matter of seconds with a computerized fingerprint identification unit. The last request for one had been turned down cold by the state legislature.

When I finished my report, I stamped
around the fifth floor, railing at anybody who would listen about goddamned stupid legislators who were penny-wise and pound-foolish.

In the meantime, another team downstairs had tackled the paint samples. It turns out that paint samples take a hell of a lot less time to compare than fingerprints. My friend, Janice Morraine, called me at my desk about three-thirty in the morning to let me know that the samples taken from Candace Wynn's porch matched those taken from Darwin Ridley's hair as well as those from the rope found in Joanna Ridley's trunk.

That one little chip of information told me who. It didn't tell me why or how. And it didn't give me a clue as to where she was right then.

I left the office about four. I had caught my second wind. Instead of driving home to my apartment, I headed for Kirkland. I needed to talk to Ames and tell him what we had found, to say nothing of what we hadn't. I also needed his calm assessment of the situation.

Much to my surprise, even at that late hour the lights were blazing in Peters' living room. I peered in the window of the door and caught a glimpse of Ames' head peeking over the back of a chair. His face was pointed at a snowy, otherwise blank television screen on the other side of the room.

A series of light taps on the window brought Ames scrambling to his feet. “Who is it?” He opened the door, then stood back, rubbing his eyes. “Oh, it's you,” he mumbled. “Did you find anything?”

Ames led me into the kitchen, where we scrounged around for sandwich makings while I told him what I knew. He nodded as I talked.

“I watched the news at eleven,” he commented somberly. “The reporters didn't have any idea what was going on, but I could tell it wasn't good.”

“Did Heather and Tracie see it?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Mrs. Edwards finally talked them into bed about ten.”

“Good.”

Over a thick tuna sandwich, I finished the story, including all the minute details I could remember, from the paint samples and the morphine bottle to Peters' ID holder hidden in the couch.

Me and my big mouth.

When I ended my story, the room got quiet. It was then I heard the sound of a muted whimper coming from the other room.

Hurrying to the pocket door between the kitchen and the dining room, I slid it open. There, crouched on the floor, I discovered Tracie, her whole body shaken by partially muffled sobs.

“Tracie, what is it? What's the matter?”

I picked her up and held her against my chest. “You didn't find my daddy. You promised you would and you didn't.”

I touched her brown hair, smoothing it away from her tearstained cheeks. “Shhh, sweetie,” I whispered. “It's all right.”

She pulled away and looked at me reproachfully. “It's not all right. He's dead,” she declared. “I know he's dead.”

“No, Tracie. Your daddy's not dead. He's lost, and we're going to find him. You wait and see.”

“But what if he is,” she insisted stubbornly. “That's what happens on TV. The bad guys and the good guys shoot each other. Usually, the bad guys die. But sometimes the good guys die, too.”

Ames came over and gave Tracie's head a comforting pat. “This isn't TV, Tracie. Everything's going to be all right. You'll see.”

“But what if?”

“Don't you worry. You go back to bed and let Uncle Beau and me handle it. It's late. Mrs. Edwards said you have to go to Sunday school in the morning.”

“I don't want to go to Sunday school.”

“Too bad.” Ames reached out and took Tracie from my arms. She went without objection. He carried her out of the room and down the
hall. When he returned to the kitchen, he was alone.

“Will she stay in bed?” I asked.

“We'll see,” he answered.

“Goddamned television,” I muttered.

Ames sat down across the kitchen table from me, a small, tight frown on his face. He rubbed his forehead wearily. “What would happen to the girls?” he asked.

“You mean if something happened to Peters?”

Ames nodded again. “Has he made any arrangements? Do you have any idea?”

I shrugged. “We've never talked about it.”

“Somebody should have talked about it long before this,” he said grimly. “And that somebody should have been me. It's my job.”

“Come on now, Ralph. Don't blame yourself. We're all doing the best we can.”

Unconvinced, Ames shook his head. “In a custody case like this, especially one where the mother is out of the country, I should have taken care of it.”

I had come to Kirkland hoping Ames would make me feel better. Instead, he succeeded in doing just the reverse. The two of us sat there conferring miserably until fatigue finally caught up with us.

It was starting to get light outside when I bailed out and told him I had to get some sleep. Neither one of us went near Peters' bed.
We rummaged around in a linen closet and found blankets and pillows. Ames took the couch. Stripped down to my T-shirt and shorts, I settled down on the floor.

I must have fallen asleep the instant my head touched the pillow. I was dead to the world when thirty-five pounds of kid did a belly flop onto my chest, knocking the wind out of me.

“Unca Beau, Unca Beau,” Heather lisped. “Can I use the blanket, too?”

Unable to speak, I held up the blanket. A chilly, pajama-clad kid wormed her way into my arms, snuggling contentedly against my chest.

“Is Daddy still asleep?” she asked.

“I don't know, Heather. He's not here.”

She sat up and looked at me accusingly. “He isn't? You said you were going to find him.”

“I'm trying, but I haven't been able to yet.”

“When will you?”

“I don't know. I can't say.”

She got up and stood glaring scornfully down at me, both hands on her hips. “I want him home
now
,” she announced. With that, she turned, flounced down the hallway without a backward glance, marched into her bedroom, and slammed the door.

“Sounds like ‘Unca Beau' is in deep shit,” Ames observed dryly from the couch.

I struggled clumsily off the floor with my
bad back screaming at me. I'm too old to sleep on floors. “‘Unca Beau' is going to get the hell downtown and find out what the fuck is going on,” I growled, throwing the wad of bedding onto a nearby chair.

I glanced at the couch, where Ames still lay with the blanket pulled up to his chin. “Are you coming or not?”

“Not. I'll stay here,” he said. “I think it's best.”

I had to agree. When I finally got moving, I discovered the hour or so of sleep had done me a world of good. I was awake and alert as I started toward the city. I drove with my mind racing off in a dozen different directions at once: Why? And how? And where? Those were the basic questions, but where was the most important.

Where could they be? With every passing hour, that question became more critical. I was convinced Peters was being held somewhere against his will. As time passed, Andi Wynn had to be getting more and more desperate. And dangerous.

Through a series of mental gymnastics I had managed to keep my mind from touching on the bottom-line question, the question I had fought to avoid all night long. But as I crossed the bridge to return to Seattle, the question asserted itself, surging full-blown to the surface: Was Detective Ron Peters still alive?

Yes, he was alive, I decided, feeling my grip tighten involuntarily on the steering wheel. He couldn't be dead. No way. Like Heather, I wanted him home and alive. Now.

Fighting for control, I took a deep breath. In the twenty-four hours since Mrs. Edwards had first called me, I had worked my way through a whole progression of feelings, from being pissed because Peters was out screwing his brains out to being worried sick that he was being held someplace with a gun to his head.

But once the idea of death caught hold of me, I couldn't shake it. It filled up the car until I could barely breathe.

The badge and ID told me Peters wasn't in control when he left Candace Wynn's apartment. The morphine bottle hinted at why. I suspected morphine had given Andi the edge both with Darwin Ridley and with Peters, providing a chemical handcuff every bit as effective as the metal variety.

And if Andi Wynn had indeed killed Darwin Ridley, then I had to believe she was capable of killing again. It was my job to find her, to stop her, before she had the chance.

Downtown Seattle was a ghost town at seven-fifteen on Sunday morning. I parked the Porsche in front of the Public Safety Building and hurried inside. There were only two people visible in the crime lab when I was led into the room. One of them was my friend, Janice
Morraine. She reached into her lab coat pocket, removed a package of cigarettes, and nodded toward the door. “Let's go outside,” she said.

As soon as we were out in the elevator lobby, she lit up. “Did you find Peters?” she asked, blowing a long plume of smoke toward the ceiling.

I shook my head. “Not yet. What's the scoop on the stuff we brought in?”

She shrugged. “We've got matches everywhere—the prints from Ridley's clothes, from the flour container, from the Fremont apartment, and from Joanna Ridley's house as well.”

I felt the cold grip of fear in my gut. Looking at Janice's somber face, I could see she felt it, too.

“What does that say to you?” I asked.

“That the killer doesn't give a damn whether you catch him or not.”

The knot in my gut got a little tighter, a little colder. I pushed the call button on the elevator.

“That's what I was afraid you'd say, but it's a her,” I added.

Janice blew another plume of smoke and ground out the remains of her barely smoked cigarette in the sand-filled ashtray in the hall. “Good luck,” she said softly.

I stepped into the elevator. “Thanks,” I told her. “We'll need it.”

When the elevator stopped on the fifth floor, I was almost run over by two detectives who charged through the open door. One of them grabbed me by the sleeve and dragged me back inside as the door slid shut.

“Hey, wait a minute. I wanted off.”

“You'd better come with us,” Big Al Lindstrom ordered.

“How come? What's up?”

“Somebody just spotted that missing Chevy Luv,” he answered.

“No shit? Where?”

“Parked in front of Mercer Island High School. That's where we're going.”

“Who's we?” I asked.

“Baxter here and me. You, too, if you want. Mercer Island Police say they have the place pretty well sealed off, but they called us to let us know.”

Big Al and Baxter got off at the garage level. I had to ride down to the lobby and charge down the street half a block to where I had parked, but once I fired up the Porsche, there was no contest. I passed Big Al and Baxter on the bridge like they were standing still.

I'm not sure if it was because the Porsche was a better car or because Peters was my partner.

Actually, it was probably a little of both.

W
e raced to the high school, only to find ourselves stuck behind a police barricade along with everybody else.

The next hour and a half was an agonizing study of affirmative action in action. From a distance, I caught a glimpse of the new Mercer Island Chief of Police—a lady wearing a gray pin-striped suit and sensible shoes with a dress-for-success polka-dot scarf knotted tightly around her neck. She had definitely taken charge of the situation.

When Marilyn Sykes, assistant police chief in Eugene, Oregon, was hired for the job on Mercer Island, there had been a good deal of grumbling in law enforcement circles. The general consensus was that, in this particular case, the best man for the job wasn't a woman. I hadn't paid a whole lot of attention to the
debate since half the complainers said she was too tough and the other half claimed she was too soft. I figured the truth was probably somewhere in between.

Right then, though, watching the action from an impotent distance, my inclination was to dismiss Marilyn Sykes as a pushy broad, one who didn't have enough confidence in herself and her position to let any other cops within consulting distance, as though she was afraid our advice and suggestions might undercut her authority.

It's something I'll remember as one of the most frustrating times of my whole life. It was only an hour and a half, but it seemed much longer. I wanted to
do
something, to take some physical action, like knocking down the barricade and making an unauthorized run for the building.

Candace Wynn's pickup had been parked right in the middle of the high school lot, with no attempt to conceal it. Chief Sykes had sealed off the entire campus and was in the process of deploying her Emergency Response Team. Directing the operation from her car, she had the team secure one building at a time.

As a cop, I couldn't help but approve of her careful, deliberate planning. It was clear the safety of her team was uppermost in her mind. But I wasn't there as just a plain cop. I was there because Peters was my partner. Marilyn
Sykes' deliberateness drove me crazy. I wanted action. I wanted to get on with it.

The interminable wait was made worse by the fact that our Seattle P.D. personnel were stuck far behind the lines, rubbing shoulders with reporters and photographers, all of them angling for an angle, all of them snapping eagerly toward any snippet of information. It was clear from the questions passing back and forth between them that the names of the missing officer and the missing teacher had not yet been released. I thanked Arlo Hamilton for that. At least Peters' girls wouldn't hear it from a reporter's lips first.

As the minutes ticked by and the tension continued to build, my fuse got shorter and shorter. Finally, I turned to Big Al, who was standing beside me. His face was grim, his hands jammed deep in his jacket pockets.

“God damn it!” I complained. “Why the hell doesn't she send 'em into the gym? I'd bet money they're in the girls' locker room.”

Just then someone tapped me on the shoulder. I turned around and found myself eyeball to eyeball with Chief Marilyn Sykes herself. She was a fairly tall woman in her mid-forties, with sharp, hazel eyes and a tough, overbearing way about her.

“Are you Detective Beaumont?” she demanded.

I nodded. “I am.”

“As I'm sure you realize, Detective Beaumont,” she continued severely, “we've got a potentially dangerous situation here. What I don't need is a Monday-morning quarterback second-guessing my decisions, is that clear?”

Chastised, I gave the only possible response I could muster: “Yes, Ma'am.”

She turned on her heel. “Come with me,” she ordered over her shoulder.

I looked at Big AI, whose only consolation was a sheepish shrug of his shoulders. Without a word, I followed. She led me back to where her car was parked before she stopped and waited for me. By then, we were well out of earshot of all the reporters.

“The detective who's missing, Detective Peters. He's your partner?”

“Yes.”

Turning away, she reached into her car and pulled out a handheld walkie-talkie. She flicked a switch. “Come in, George. Have you cleared the way to the locker-room door yet?”

“Check,” a voice crackled from the device in her hand. “Just now.”

“All right. I've got someone here, Detective Beaumont from Seattle P.D., who thinks they're in that locker room. I'm sending him in with you.”

I pulled my .38 from its holster and started scrambling out of her car. “Just a minute, Detective Beaumont,” she snapped.

I stopped. Chief Sykes picked up a long roll
of paper from the floor of the front seat. When she spread it out on the backseat, it was a detailed architectural drawing of the high school plant. With a slender, well-manicured finger, she traced a line from where we stood to the girls' locker room.

“This is the part we've secured,” she said. “Don't go any other way, understand?”

“Right,” I said.

“And no heroics. You want to see your partner alive, and so do we.”

Once again she reached into the front seat. This time she brought out a bulletproof vest. “Put this on,” she said. “Now get going.”

I shrugged my way into the flak jacket and paused for just a moment before I bailed out of the car. Marilyn Sykes met my gaze without flinching. She was tough, all right, but not in the way her detractors meant. There was a soft spot, too. Not the kind of softness that translates into weakness, but a certain empathy that told me sometime in her past she, too, had lived with a partner in jeopardy, that she knew the terrible helplessness of doing nothing.

Someday, when we had time, Chief Marilyn Sykes and Detective J. P. Beaumont would have to sit down, have a drink, and talk about it. But not now.

“Thanks,” I said, then took off.

I trotted through the buildings, careful not to deviate from the path she had laid out. My
footsteps echoed through the silent walkways. I'm not prone to prayer, but I found myself muttering one as I ran. “Let him be safe, God. Please let him be safe.”

A uniformed Mercer Island officer motioned me into the gym. “They're waiting for you by the door to the locker room,” he whispered as I passed.

Waiting they were. Three officers, all wearing bulletproof vests, crouched against the wall on either side of the door. One of them motioned for me to join him. When I was in position behind him, he raised a bullhorn to his lips.

“Come on out, Mrs. Wynn. You're surrounded. Give yourself up.”

There was no answer. The blank, silent door gave no hint of what was happening on the other side. We waited one endless minute. We waited two.

“Come on out, Mrs. Wynn. Come out before we have to come in after you.”

Still there was nothing. No sound. Images of bloody carnage raced through my mind. Too many years on homicide had left my imagination with too much fuel for the fire. I pictured Peters lying facedown in a pool of blood or dangling on the end of a rope with his head flopped limply to one side. In the silence I heard an imaginary hail of bullets slice
into the door when we attempted to push it open.

“On the count of three, we're coming in. One…Two…Three…” One of the members of the team on the other side of the door reached out and tried to open it. Nothing happened. It was locked.

The leader, the man beside me, nodded to the guy on the other side. “Big Bertha it is.”

The third man came forward carrying a handheld battering ram. He popped the door twice before the lock crumbled. As the door swung open, the silence was deafening.

Crouching low, weapon in hand, I followed the leader into the darkened locker room. We switched on the lights. Inside, we wormed our way around first one bank of lockers and then another. The place was empty.

Peters wasn't in the locker room, and neither was Candace Wynn. They had been there, though. At least someone had.

The locker, the one with the list in it, the Mercer Island High School cheerleader trophy list, had been smashed to pieces by someone wielding a heavy object. I could make out only one or two letters from the battered piece of metal that had once been the inscribed ceiling.

“All clear in here, Chief,” the leader said into his walkie-talkie. He put the microphone into his pocket, then walked up closer to the damaged locker.

“What do you suppose went on here?” he asked.

“Beats me,” I told him. Quickly, I moved away to the other side of the room, out of casual conversation range but close enough to hear him give the all-clear to Chief Sykes via his walkie-talkie. I tried my best to become invisible. Just because Chief Sykes had been kind enough to include me in the operation didn't necessarily obligate me to full disclosure. I didn't want to tell them everything I knew. That locker list might somehow still be useful.

Marilyn Sykes strode into the locker room about that time. She glanced in my direction, then walked up to join the man by the locker. “Vandalism?” I heard her ask.

The man shrugged. “I give up. It's funny, but it looks like this is the only locker that was damaged.” For a moment, Chief Sykes gazed at the mangled pile of sheet metal.

“Somebody went to a hell of a lot of trouble to destroy this one,” she said. Then she turned to me. “What do you think, Detective Beaumont?” she asked.

Whether or not I wanted to be, she had pulled me back into the conversation. “Do you think this has anything to do with your partner's disappearance?”

By aiming her question directly at me, Chief Marilyn Sykes created an instant moral di
lemma. I owed her, goddamnit! She had let me through the barricades onto her turf, and I owed her.

“I'd have the crime lab take a look at it if I were you,” I suggested. That let me off the hook without my having to give up too much.

She nodded. “All right.”

Wanting to get away quick, before she could ask me anything more, I turned and walked out of the locker room. Halfway down the walkway, I ran headlong into Ned Browning rushing toward the gym. “Hello there, Ned,” I said.

He stopped cold when he saw me. He was uncharacteristically agitated. “Oh, yes, Detective…Detective…I'm sorry, I don't remember your name.”

“Beaumont,” I supplied. “Detective Beaumont.”

“You'll have to excuse me. I understand there's been some difficulty in the gym. I'd been trying to get through, but they wouldn't let me until just now. Somebody called me at home when I came back from church.”

“Church,” I grunted with contempt. “That figures.”

Browning started forward again, but I stopped him. “I'm going to want to talk to you, too,” I said. “As soon as they finish with you.”

“I don't have time, Detective Beaumont. My
family is waiting for me. We're having guests.”

“I don't give a shit if it's the pope himself, Ned. I want to talk to you alone. About the cheerleading squad, remember them? I'm sure you remember one or two of them fairly well.”

An almost audible spark of recognition passed over his face. He paled and stepped back a pace or two. “What do you mean?”

“Don't play dumb. You know what I mean,” I said menacingly. “I'll wait for you at Denny's, here on the island.”

“All right,” he said, crumbling. “I'll meet you as soon as I'm finished here.”

You're finished, all right, pal, I thought to myself, but I didn't say it aloud. I didn't have to. And I wouldn't have to lift a finger to make it happen, either. Chief Marilyn Sykes and the Washington State Patrol's crime lab would take care of all those little details.

Meanwhile, while Ned Browning still thought there was a way he could wiggle off the hook, while he still thought there was a way to save his worthless ass and his career, I'd play him for all he was worth, see if I could wrangle any helpful information out of his scared little hide.

That's one thing I've learned over the years. If you have the slightest advantage, use it. And don't worry about it after you do.

Creeps don't have any scruples.

Cops can't afford them.