Fire and Ice (10 page)

As I said, I’d never been inside the place, but the bartender made me for a cop the moment I stepped through the door. He gave me a careful once-over and probably decided I was liquor control.

“Evening, Officer,” he said. “What can I do for you?”

“I’m looking for Kenneth Leggett.”

“Over there,” he said. “In the booth on the far side of the pool table. He’s been eighty-sixed, by the way. He’s had nothing but coffee for the last hour or so. We’re waiting for him to sober up enough that he can get himself home.”

Yes, I thought. The barkeep definitely thinks I’m liquor control.

The guys playing pool kept a close eye on me as I walked around them and stopped next to a booth where a big balding man sat staring down into a mostly empty coffee cup.

“Mr. Leggett?” I said.

He looked up at me, bleary-eyed and belligerent. “Who the hell are you?”

“My name’s Beaumont,” I said. “I’m with the Attorney General’s Special Homicide Investigation Team. Mind if I sit down?”

I expected a fight. I expected an argument. You never can tell
with drunks. They can go one way or the other. Instead, Ken Leggett pushed his empty coffee cup aside, buried his head in his hands, and bawled like a baby. I thought maybe I was going to come away with an impromptu confession. And I did, but not the one I was looking for.

“I didn’t mean to do it,” he said.

“You didn’t mean to do what, kill her?” I asked.

He looked up at me with tears still streaming down his face. “I didn’t mean to piss on her head,” he said. “Nobody deserves that.”

I’ve detected plenty of lies over the years, but this wasn’t one of them. Detective Caldwell was right. Ken Leggett wasn’t our killer by any stretch of the imagination.

“Come on, fella,” I said to him. “It’s raining outside. How about I give you a lift home.”

HAVING SPENT THE BETTER PART OF THE DAY DEALING WITH MURDER
and mayhem in Ellensburg, it was difficult to remember that I had started the day in, as they like to say in Disneyland, “the happiest place on earth.” I’ve always been under the impression that jet lag happens when you fly east or west across time zones rather than north and south. I also think I read somewhere that men are less likely to be affected by jet lag than women are. It turns out I was wrong—on both counts.

When I got home to Seattle that night, I was bushed, and I chose to blame it on jet lag rather than anything else. I barely managed to finish telling Mel about my adventures east of the mountains when I conked out, sound asleep in my recliner. Sometime after the news and Jay Leno, Mel woke me up long enough to herd me into bed.

When I woke up the next morning and stumbled out of the shower and into the kitchen for coffee, I could tell from the clock that I had overslept and most likely would be late getting into the office. “Why didn’t you wake me up?” I asked.

Mel was up and her usual perky, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed self. To my surprise, however, she wasn’t dressed for work.

“Good morning to you, too, Mr. Grumbly Bear,” she told me, reaching out to hand me a computer printout. “Maybe you should go back into hibernation.”

Of course she said it with a smile. The robe and gown she was wearing made a very fetching concoction—enough to make me wish that I hadn’t gotten dressed quite so fast. When I made a tentative suggestion in that direction, she shook her head and returned her attention to the laptop on her lap. With my coffee cup in one hand and the paper in the other, I squinted at the impossibly vague printing on the page. Finding my arms far too short, I wondered where the hell I’d left my reading glasses.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“A missing persons report,” she said. “From November twelfth of last year. I think she’s your victim.”

One of the tasks Ross Connors had handed over to his Special Homicide Investigation Team was keeping track of missing persons investigations from all over the state. Someone reported missing in Vancouver, for example, wasn’t likely to be noticed if he or she turned up in Bellingham either living or dead. By focusing on those cases and compiling all the information from various jurisdictions and agencies together in one spot, including dental records wherever possible, S.H.I.T. had already managed to solve several previously unsolvable cases. Among those were cases from several different people who, for one reason or another, had gone missing deliberately and wanted to stay that way. Mel’s fine eye
for detail made her a natural as point man, if you’ll pardon the expression, on the AG’s missing persons effort.

It was useless to stand around grousing about my missing glasses. As a general rule, Mel doesn’t like grousing. Instead, muttering something about jet lag, I stomped back into the bedroom and did a thorough search. I finally found my glasses hidden away in the inside pocket of yesterday’s still slightly damp sport jacket.

Thank you, North Bend, I thought.

I returned to the living room with my glasses perched on my nose and busied myself with reading the report. The missing woman’s name was Marina Aguirre, age twenty-nine. She was reported to be five feet five inches tall and was estimated to weigh 130 pounds. She had been reported missing from the City of SeaTac by her fiancé, a truck driver named Mason Waters.

Mel was still on the phone. I sat down next to her on the window seat, which happens to be Mel’s favorite perch in our penthouse condo. The view is downright spectacular. I bought into Belltown Terrace long before I met Mel. The purchase had come during a real estate downturn in Seattle in the early eighties, and I bought it with some of the money I had inherited after my second wife’s death. In recent years, condo living in downtown Seattle had come of age. Now, a space that had once been a real estate white elephant had turned into a real estate gem—at least that’s how it looks when it comes time to pay the tax bill they send out from the King County Assessor’s Office.

In the intervening years, other high-rise buildings had sprung up all over the Denny Regrade area, but none of them were tall enough to impinge on the panoramic view from our window seat. At night and to the south, we saw the myriad lights of downtown Seattle. Occasionally during the day and even farther to the south, we had a view of snow-topped Mount Rainier, but that was only
on those rare but beautifully sunny Pacific Northwest days when, as we say around here, “the mountains are out.” Off to the west, rain or shine, daylight or not, we saw the wide expanse of blue or gray or black Elliott Bay and Puget Sound with their busy shipping lanes and motoring ferries. In other words, Mel isn’t the only one who likes the view from the window seat.

Toward the end of the call she turned to me. “Jot down this number,” she said, and reeled off a phone number which she simultaneously typed into her computer. Women can do that—talk on the phone, talk to someone in person, and work on a laptop all at once. But I did as she told me and wrote the number down on the only piece of paper available to me at the time—the one that happened to be in my hand. Strangely enough, that turned out to be a good choice.

“That’s the phone number for the fiancé, the guy who filed the missing persons report,” Mel said. “He’s a long-haul trucker. According to his dispatcher, he’ll be back in Federal Way early this afternoon. Maybe we can go talk to him after lunch.”

“Excuse me for mentioning this,” I said, “but if you’re going to go to lunch, shouldn’t you start by getting dressed to go to work?”

“I’m working from home this morning,” she explained. “I’m due to show up at noon and bring the food with me. It’s Harry’s birthday, remember? I volunteered to handle the food for the party. And don’t mention it to Harry when you get in,” she added. “It’s supposed to be a surprise.”

Now, having had it pointed out, I did remember. Squad B’s fearless leader, Harry Ignatius Ball, is now and always has been a sucker for barbecue. When Mel first moved across the water from the east side of Lake Washington to the west side, I had introduced her to several of my favorite hangouts. She had really fallen for one of them, the Pecos Pit Barbecue, and was now a die-hard fan.
Any excuse is good enough for her, and the fact that Harry I. Ball adores barbecue made this a perfect match.

Pecos Pit Barbecue is located down in…Wait a minute. I’m dating myself again. I started to say “Sodo,” which used to be Seattle-speak for “South of the King Dome,” but the King Dome is gone now, so forget that.

Pecos Pit is in a born-again gas station on First Avenue South. Five days a week, the people who own it cook in the mornings, serve lunches until the food is gone, and then they go home. Customers stand in lines outside, rain or shine, and then eat outside on picnic tables, rain or shine as well. Don’t expect to use your credit card. Don’t expect to get moved to the head of the line. Restaurants wanting to discourage table hogging sometimes post signs that say, “Eat, Pay, and Go.” For Pecos Pit, you walk up to the window, place your order, pay, and go eat somewhere else. In this case, the food would be coming across Lake Washington in individual paper bags, destined for Squad B’s break room.

“Maybe I could go in late, too,” I offered. To be honest, I wasn’t really thinking about work per se. “After all, I put in a very long day yesterday.”

Mel saw right through that lame excuse. “Go to work,” she said. “Keep your mind on the job and leave me alone.” Again, she smiled so brightly when she told me to shove off that it was hard to take it personally.

“But later…” I said, not exactly whining but close to it.

She nodded and smiled. “Later,” she agreed.

I knew walking away that was a promise, not a put-off.

Joanna and Butch ate a leisurely breakfast in the heated cabana out by the pool. It was easy to spot the tourists. Escapees from the
Midwest’s perpetual winter were decked out in shorts or bathing suits and gave the propane heaters a wide berth. Thin-blooded locals, on the other hand, still wore long pants, sweaters, and the occasional corduroy jacket.

After checking out of the hotel, they stopped to pick up washer-saving laundry bags from Eleanor Lathrop Winfield’s favorite lingerie shop, Alice-Rae. After that, they spent an hour trudging through Costco. It turned out there were lots more things on Butch’s shopping list than just the steaks for Thursday night’s party.

Once the boxes of groceries were loaded into the car, it was time to head back for Bisbee. As they drove south, Joanna reflexively reached for her phone. She took it out, looked at it, and put it away.

“No phone,” she reminded herself. “It’s a vacation day.”

“Yes,” Butch said with a grin. “I know it’s a difficult concept for you to master, but at least you’re trying.”

“And you’re right,” she agreed. “If you hadn’t taken the bull by the horns, our anniversary would have gotten lost in the shuffle.”

“If you want to stop off at the department for a little while when we go by to pick up your car…” Butch offered.

Joanna shook her head. “Nope, you were right the first time. We’ll just pick up the car and go. I won’t even poke my head inside. Taking a whole day off now and then is the right thing to do.”

The guy who came up with that saying about the war’s not won until the paperwork is done was probably a cop in his other life. I believe most law enforcement officers would agree with me when I say that paperwork is the bane of our existence. The fact that it’s done mostly on computers these days as opposed to on paper may be good for saving trees, but it’s still a pain in the neck and takes
inordinate amounts of time. As far as Team B is concerned, since Harry hates computers, everything has to be printed out for him, which means that the poor trees lose anyway, but at least we don’t have to make quite as many copies.

So once I got to the office…yes, even later than I expected because traffic was hell…once I got there, I spent the rest of the morning working on a report that recounted everything I had seen and heard the previous day on my trek back and forth to Ellensburg.

After Harry had had a chance to read it, he strolled into my tiny office staring down at his hard copy through his own pair of Bartell Drugs “special” reading glasses. I found it comforting to know that I wasn’t the only person around who’d had to eat crow and succumb to the indignity of needing them. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Getting older is hell.

“So do you think this doer is the same guy?” he asked.

“Maybe, maybe not,” I hedged. “But one way or another, I think our burned girls are all connected. Once we figure out who they all are, maybe we can put the rest of it together.”

“But this one still had her teeth?” he asked.

I nodded.

“And do you think yesterday’s victim will turn out to be this Marina Aguirre, the missing person case Mel turned up?” Harry asked.

“Could be,” I told him. “The dates work. We’ll know more after Mel and I meet with Ms. Aguirre’s fiancé later this afternoon.”

“Speaking of Mel,” he said, “where is she? Don’t you two usually ride in together?”

I’m always at a loss when it comes time to spin a plausible fib. My limited ability to keep my face looking honest in the process is one of the reasons I don’t play poker. At all.

“She’s busy doing something,” I said. “You should check with Barbara. She’ll know.”

Barbara Galvin is Squad B’s indispensable clerk/typist, receptionist, ace coffeemaker, and all-around girl Friday. I knew that if anyone could pull the wool over Harry’s eyes, she was it.

“Want to go have lunch later?” Harry asked. “I thought I’d run over to that tandoori place in Eastgate.”

I felt sorry for the guy. It was his birthday, after all, and he was looking for a little company. “No, thanks,” I said. “Indian food doesn’t sound all that good to me today.”

He moped off to his office. Minutes later, Mel arrived. With Barbara’s help, she smuggled the barbecue as well as a decorated birthday cake into the break room. Usually we all cycle in and out of the break room in ones and twos. By the time six investigators and Barbara were gathered inside, it was crowded. Finally Mel called Harry to come join us. When he stepped inside, it was that much more crowded.

The party was fun. It was messy. Barbecued meat leaks out of those sandwiches with wild abandon. There were eight bags in all—seven Ms for mild and one H for not-mild. That one went to Harry, who was in his glory, chowing down while little beads of sweat broke out all over his nose and forehead. When someone spotted a tear or two, he claimed it was because of the hot food. I wondered if they didn’t have more to do with the fact that we hadn’t forgotten his birthday.

When the sandwiches were history and so was the cake, Mel and I took our leave and headed south on I-405. In bumper-to-bumper traffic. That’s the thing about the Seattle area—too many cars and not enough roadways. With two of us in the vehicle, we were able to use the express lanes, which helped some. Mel had opted to drive her Cayman. She’s the kind of intimidat
ing driver who doesn’t need lights or a siren in order to encourage people to get out of her way. When she drives, we make good time, but it’s not easy on hapless passengers dumb enough to join her—namely me.

“So,” she said casually as she darted across three lanes of traffic, zipping us into the express lanes in front of a very annoyed solo driver in a red Volvo station wagon who used his horn to let us know what he thought about the maneuver. “Do you want to know what I found out?”

Of course I wanted to know. What kind of question was that? “What?” I asked.

“Whoever they’ve got in the morgue over in Ellensburg isn’t Marina Aguirre,” she said.

“You already know that for sure?”

Mel nodded.

“Why are we on our way to see the boyfriend then?” I asked. “Why bother?”

“Because the poor dope may think he was engaged to Marina Aguirre, but it turns out the real Marina Aguirre, at least the one whose Social Security number matches the one on the missing persons report, died in 1986. When she was eight. Of a ruptured appendix.”