Every Fear (15 page)

A
cross the city in Ballard, Maria Colson’s condition had deteriorated and her family was talking to a priest.

Detective Grace Garner bit her bottom lip and said a private prayer as she watched them. They were down the hall from the lounge where she’d taken her turn keeping vigil for Maria’s dying declaration.

Come on, Maria. Fight. Lee needs you. Dylan needs you. And I need you to tell me who did this.

Grace was alone, reviewing printouts of tips and leads. She checked her watch when her cell went off, displaying the number for Stan Boulder, her sergeant.

“Grace, we’ve caught one in North Seattle.”

“Is it Dylan?”

“No. An adult. You’re the primary and this one’s pissing me off already.”

“Stan, I can’t. It’s not looking good here at the hospital. Her family’s asking about last rites. I am going to be jammed up.”

“Listen, this fresh one may be linked to the Colson case.”

“What?”

“I can’t go into it now.”

“Do we know who the victim is?” “No, but we know Wade made the find.”
“Jason Wade?
The reporter from the
Mirror?”
“That’s what’s pissing me off. How did that jack-off find out?”

“He’s a good digger and likes playing detective,” Grace replied.

“Well, he’s playing with fire. He faces obstruction, if he’s holding back information on this case.” Boulder paused. “I’ve got somebody from Vice relieving you now. The scene is 444 Brimerley Lane. You copy that?”

“Got it.”

“Get rolling.”

The sky had darkened as sector cars from the SPD’s North Precinct sealed the bungalow on Brimerley Lane. Uniformed officers stretched yellow tape around the yard.

Officer Kyle Scheel, the first responding uniform, and his partner protected the primary scene inside, then escorted Jason and his dad to wait in the back of their patrol car. Scheel took careful notes, collecting initial statements and information.

Grace arrived, parking her unmarked Malibu amid the tangle of vehicles that had grown to include an ambulance, crime scene investigation vans, satellite trucks and press cars bearing station call letters and newspaper logos. A few residents came to the tape. Mothers kept small children close as they gossiped softly, their faces etched with curiosity, concern, and fear.

“Grace.” Perelli waved her over to the responding
officers. After they talked, she started a case log in her notebook and coldly eyed Jason in the backseat of the car.

“I’ll get to you later,” she told him, then headed for the bungalow’s back door with Perelli. Holding up the tape for her, he said, “The uniforms think they chased away most of the rats.”

“Not the two-legged one in the car.”

They tugged on white latex gloves and shoe covers. The usual gagging stench of a corpse that had been undiscovered for a long time was prevalent. The victim appeared to be a female. Maybe in her late twenties or early thirties, it was hard to say. Decomposition had distorted the face into a grotesque death mask.

A small pond of blood had spread everywhere, laced and smeared by the work of vermin. The bacteria that had built inside the corpse’s internal organs had caused the body to swell and discolored the skin tissue. The rats had gone to work on the intestines, which were webbed over the corpse and pulled into every direction on the floor.

Fortunately the rats were gone.

Grace and Perelli sketched the scene and took notes. Using a small digital camera, Grace took scores of photographs of the victim without moving the body.

They looked for a purse, bag, or wallet, anything to suggest who the victim was, but found nothing. She would have to wait for CSI to process everything, Grace thought, taking more photos. Perelli looked around for a wallet or bus pass, anything that might indicate who she was.

“Nothing. At least the hands look good for fingerprints,” he said. “Jaw looks good too.”

Perelli moved to the mail and bills on the kitchen counter. “Could be one Dorothy M. Hall.”

“What do you make of this, Dom?”

“Given the terrible state, I wouldn’t put any money on a cause, but it sure as hell looks like someone wanted something pretty bad.”

“And how did Clark Kent and his father, the private dick, really know about this place?”

“You don’t buy the dad’s statement, that he was following up on a client’s hit-and-run fender bender and took Junior along for the ride?”

“There’s got to be more to their story.”

Taking stock of the scene, Grace shook her head.

After they’d finished in the house, Grace went into the garage, careful not to further contaminate that scene. When she came out, she talked to David Tanaka and Al Sprung’s crew from the King County medical examiner’s office and Seattle CSI detectives about gathering evidence from the house and processing the garage for any other evidence.

In the backyard, Boulder approached Grace.

“I’ve got the team going hard on the canvass,” Boulder said, paging through his notes. “Not clear who resides here. The property owner is Dorothy Mae Hall, who is eighty-nine, has a severe case of Alzheimer’s, and lives in a nursing home a little west of the campus.”

“Anything else?”

“Neighbors say over the years, they’ve seen a younger woman come and go, sometimes stay. They
think she takes care of the place. Got people going over records. The 1998 Toyota Corolla in the garage is registered to this address to Dorothy Mae Hall.”

“She’s not our victim, you think?” Perelli asked.

“Only if the vic is eighty-nine,” Boulder said.

“That’s not an eighty-nine-year-old woman in there,” Grace said.

Boulder nodded to the patrol car with Jason Wade and his father in the back.

“The discovery is tied to them, Grace. I want to know what they know.”

G
race Garner stepped into the dirt driveway at the side of the bungalow and pointed a white-gloved finger at a uniformed officer.

Detectives were now ready to question Jason Wade and his father. Officer Scheel escorted them to Grace, Dominic Perelli, Stan Boulder, and FBI Special Agent Kirk Dupree, who’d just arrived and insisted on being present. They went to the backyard, to a shaded corner and a wooden picnic table that was in sore need of refinishing.

“How you holding up, Jason?” Grace asked.

“I’m fine. How much longer are you going to keep us? I need to get back to the newsroom.”

Signaling that he was in charge, Boulder positioned his right foot on the bench seat next to Jason, invading his space as he stood over him. Boulder’s jacket opened, revealing the butt of the gun in his shoulder holster.

“We’ll keep you for as long as it takes.”

“As long as it takes for what?”

“For you to tell us everything you know about this case,” Grace said.

“We already told you everything.” Jason’s father
looked at her, then at Boulder, who was flipping through his notes.

From the picnic table they saw the medical examiner’s team and the crime scene detectives working inside the house. From the thin line of sight they had on the front, Jason noticed the crowd had grown. He saw several lenses at the yellow tape, TV and still cameras trained on him and the others at the picnic table. Above them, a helicopter was approaching.

“Henry, I see you’re working toward your three years for licensure as a private investigator in the state of Washington,” Boulder said.

“Yes.”

“You’re with Don Krofton’s agency.”

“Yes.”

“I know Don, he used to be on the job.”

“That’s right.”

“Come to think of it, didn’t you used to be on the job, Henry? Long time ago, like when Jesus was a toddler?”

Jason watched a shadow cross his old man’s face as he turned away from Boulder’s question and looked off at nothing.

“Yes.”

Boulder’s expression changed almost imperceptibly, with a trace of melancholy, as if he was attempting to place Jason’s old man somewhere in a buried corner of his memory. A silent moment passed until Jason’s cell interrupted it.

“Jason, it’s Spangler—what the hell is happening?”

Boulder grimaced; the volume of Jason’s phone was high enough for the conversation to be overheard.

“I can’t talk now.”

“One of our shooters at this homicide just called and says he sees you,
inside the crime scene?
What the hell is—”

“I can’t—I—”

Jason’s phone vanished from his hand. Boulder shut it off, then slid it into his breast pocket.

“Hey! Give me that!”

“You better think over how to report this,” Boulder said.

“I’m going to report everything I know.”

“You might consider holding back on publishing every detail, because the killer might be interested in knowing if they’ve made any mistakes.”

“My job is to report the facts, Sergeant Boulder.”

“I’m warning you not to fuck up this case any more than you already have.”

“How? By reporting the truth?”

“Let’s start there,” Grace said. “What exactly were the circumstances that led you to this address?”

“I was investigating a hit-and-run car accident,” Henry Wade said. “This was the address that came up for the plate the client provided.”

“And why did you bring Jason?” she asked.

“The drive was a chance for us to talk. Father and son.”

Boulder smiled after quickly analyzing the statement Henry Wade had given to the responding officer.

“Let’s see, it’s got nothing to do with Jason’s story on the front page of his paper? Got nothing to do with the client’s alleged hit-and-run involving a van that
occurred in the same neighborhood and at the same time as when Maria Colson was run over and her baby son was abducted?”

Jason’s father said nothing.

“Who’s your client, Henry?”

“All of our investigations are confidential.”

“Horseshit,” Boulder said, “I’m going to take you back to when you filled out that application for your private investigator’s license, the one that Don Krofton’s agency had to sign before employing you.”

Jason looked at Boulder, then Grace, for a clue as to where they were headed.

“That first question they ask you on the form there, see if memory serves, goes something like, ‘Have you ever been found guilty of divulging confidential information obtained in the course of an investigation to which you were assigned?’”

Boulder grinned and nodded at Jason.

“I bet your agency has access to IVIPS—that’s confidential. You’re working for a client, Henry, and your boy here makes the find. It
appears
like something confidential got divulged here. He gets a scoop and you risk losing your license, as a trainee. Not the best career move for a man of your years, is it, Henry? But there’s a way out of your predicament.”

“What do you want?”

“Your client,” Boulder said. “Don’t make us waste time to get a warrant. Pass it to us now, so we can maybe try to catch a killer—or should we just leave that to you and Jimmy Olsen here?”

Taking in the hard faces of the detectives, Henry
Wade nodded. He’d thought about calling them from the get-go. Something to be said for first instincts.

“I want to cooperate. Let me make a few calls. My file’s in my truck. Can I get it?”

“Go with him, Dom,” Boulder said, then turned to Jason. “It’s been quite a morning for you, hasn’t it, sport? You got a little breakfast on your chin there.”

I
n Detroit, outside an imposing twenty-first-floor boardroom, a young secretary, her face drawn with worry, rapped on the oak doors. Her voice a whisper, she said, “Excuse me. I’m terribly sorry, Mr. Sinclair—”

She had interrupted Everett Sinclair’s key presentation on the final stages of applying the company’s El Paso scenario to Detroit-Windsor.

“What is it? Can’t you see I’m engaged here?” Sinclair snapped.

“Two gentlemen are here—”

“Who are they?”

“They’re FBI agents and they want to talk to you about a major crime in Seattle. They asked for you specifically.”

Sinclair’s face went red. He was speechless.

In fact, he said little as he rode in the back of a Ford Taurus across Detroit to the FBI’s field office in the Patrick V. McNamara Building downtown on Michigan Avenue.

The federal office complex takes up an entire city block and is under twenty-four-hour security. The two
agents who located Sinclair escorted him into the elevator and pressed the button for the twenty-sixth floor. He feared his ex-wife had discovered his account in Aruba and had her lawyer contact the FBI. It took several attempts for the agents to convey to Sinclair that the urgency to talk to him arose from the Colson case.

“What’s the Colson case?”

As they explained the connection to Krofton and how the agency was cooperating, Sinclair began to believe it might be all true. They were treating him with the utmost respect—but he was wary. He knew federal lawmen could be crafty, to lull you into a false sense of security before hitting you between the eyes with a surprise.

His Aruba account could put him away.

Sinclair kept his guard up.

They led him into a meeting room and immediately pulled up a screen showing detailed maps of the route he had taken through Seattle at the time of his accident. Then they put him on a conference call to Seattle with Homicide Detective Grace Garner, Agent Kirk Dupree, and Ted Parsons, a detective in traffic collision. They walked him through enlarged zone maps showing buildings.

As he recounted the events he realized a problem.

“I don’t want my name in the papers. Can you guys arrange that?”

The agents said they would see what they could do. Their chief concern was finding Dylan Colson and the people behind the crimes—the homicide, the abduction, and the hit-and-run.

“So the van that clipped my Mercedes is the one involved in the kidnapping?”

“That’s our belief,” Grace Garner said.

“Is there a reward?”

“We don’t know all the details, sir, only that we have a homicide linked to the abduction of a baby and the assault of his mother when she tried to rescue him.”

“So there could be a reward?”

“Tell us again what happened, Mr. Sinclair.”

Sinclair repeated the details and they pinpointed his route with times and commercial buildings. He had no idea why one agent kept ticking off certain buildings along the route, not understanding that those buildings had surveillance cameras.

“Again, can you remember anything distinctive about the van, other than how your car got damaged and your suit got ruined?”

Sinclair thought long and hard before it came back to him.

“A palm tree.”

“Sir?”

“The van had a small palm tree painted on the lower rear section.” He sketched the van’s rear, showing a palm tree in the sunset.