Name Withheld : A J.p. Beaumont Mystery (9780061760907) (22 page)

“Evidently,” I said dryly.

Nodding to each of the ladies in turn, I followed Detective Blaine out into the street. “Isn't she something!” Tim Blaine was saying as I caught up with him.

“I'll say,” I agreed. “I've only known her for two days, but I can tell you that Grace Highsmith is full of surprises.”

“I wasn't talking about Grace,” he said. “I mean Latty. She's the most beautiful woman I've ever met. How could that son of a bitch do that to her! I swear, if he weren't dead already…”

As I said before, the late Don Wolf was amazingly unlamented. Even people who never met him were glad he was dead. It should have been enough to give the guy a complex. “You and everybody else,” I said.

“I believe somebody's out to get her,” Tim continued. “They're trying to frame her. Maybe Virginia Marks was even in on it. That business with
her finding the gun is just too much of a coincidence.”

Cops aren't ever supposed to mix business with pleasure. With good reason. The people who turn up involved in homicide cases—suspects and witnesses alike—are supposed to be off limits, especially when it comes to romantic entanglements. The prohibition makes perfect sense. Once an investigator has a personal connection to someone involved in the case, his perspective and judgment both become clouded, and his impartiality flies right out the window.

Assuming the mantle of wise old man, I made a futile attempt to give Tim Blaine the benefit of my own hard-won experience. When I set out to pop his romantic bubble, I was speaking from the unenviable position of first-hand experience. Of being able to say, “Do as I say, not as I do.” After all, years ago, when I fell for one of my own prime suspects, that relationship had come within inches of being fatal—for both of us.

“Tim,” I said, “would you mind if I gave you a word of advice?”

“What's that?” he asked.

“Forget about Latty Gibson, at least for the time being.”

“Forget about her? Are you kidding?”

“No,” I said. “I'm not kidding at all. I'm as serious as I can be. And I'm telling you this for your own good.”

Our eyes met for a moment as we stood there on that sunlit sidewalk. “I'll take it under advise
ment,” he agreed grudgingly. “But I'm not making any promises.”

He turned toward his Ford, reached down, and wrenched open the door. “See you around,” he added, before climbing in and slamming the door shut behind him.

In other words, “Screw you!” As I watched him drive away, I realized I had never told him about the real implications of Latty leaving her coat with the gun in it somewhere on the premises of D.G.I. That was all right, though. Blaine was a Bellevue police officer, and Bill Whitten was in Seattle.

The day before, Captain Powell had threatened to add more personnel to the case if, after twenty-four hours, Kramer, Arnold, and I weren't making measurable progress. As far as I could tell, we weren't. That meant that if Powell had carried through on his promise to increase the body count, we'd be able to draft someone to go to D.G.I. and collect the missing coat.

Tossing Don Wolf's jacket over my shoulder, I crossed the street to my own car. At three o'clock in the afternoon, there was already a traffic jam on Main Street in Old Bellevue. With the interview over, I reached down to check my pager. I wasn't particularly concerned when I realized it wasn't there on my belt where it belonged. I reasoned that I had probably left it on the bathroom counter earlier when I stripped out of my clothes for that quick shower. But that was no great loss. If people who knew me were trying to reach me,
they were probably used to the idea that I didn't return calls instantly.

As I waited for my turn to go play in the gridlock, I checked the recall button on my cell phone. Naturally, there was a call.

At first, I thought my caller might be Ralph, but when I tried reaching him at Belltown Terrace, there was no answer. Next, I checked in with the department.

“Sergeant Watkins here,” Watty said, answering his phone.

“Did Kramer ever show up?” I asked.

“As a matter of fact, he did. But before I put him through to you, I've got a bone to pick with you, Detective Beaumont. Where's your pager?”

“Oops,” I said, hoping this sounded like news to me. “It's not here. I must have misplaced it.”

“Right,” Watty answered. “You win the booby prize. And I just happen to know where you left it.”

“Where?”

“A housekeeper found it at the Silver Cloud Motel over there in Bellevue. I told her to leave it at the desk, that you'd come by and pick it up. At least it was on. I checked with the person who called.”

“Look, Watty,” I said, hoping to mollify the man. “I'm just a couple of minutes from there right now. I'll go straight over and pick it up.”

“And if I were you, in the future, I'd be a whole lot less careless with departmental equipment.
Now, do you still want to talk to Detective Kramer?”

“No, thanks,” I said. “Not necessary. I'll see him when I get back down there. Tell him I'm on my way.”

“Oh, one more thing,” Watty said, before I could hang up. “Lori's looking for you.”

“Lori?”

“You know, Lori Yamaguchi, who works in the latent fingerprint lab. She didn't say what she wanted, but she said to have you come see her as soon as you're back downtown.”

“I'll go right away,” I said.

“But not until after you retrieve your pager.”

“I wouldn't think of it,” I said.

I gave a generous tip to the desk clerk at the Silver Cloud who handed over the pager, and I left an equally hefty one for the housekeeper who had found it. Unwittingly, those two people had saved my life. If I had lost the pager for good, both Sergeant Watkins and Captain Powell would have had my ass.

Twenty-five minutes later, with Don Wolf's jacket still slung over my arm, I was standing leaning against the counter in the reception area of King County's Fingerprint Lab. When the receptionist told me Lori was on the phone, I told her I'd wait, and helped myself to a chair. Sitting there waiting and with nothing in particular to do, I picked up the jacket and started going through the pockets.

One pocket after another yielded nothing but
pocket lint. Until I reached the last one, the lower inside pocket. There, tucked into smooth lining, was a single tiny scrap of paper that had been folded once, twice, and yet again into a tiny square no bigger than a respectable spitwad. When I unfolded it, the resulting piece of paper was no bigger than an inch square. The printed message on the paper was equally tiny.

“Donnie,” it said, “see you at the apartment at six.” It was signed with the initials, “D.C.” A heart had been drawn around the outside of the two letters and a whimsical pair of happy faces had been made of the insides of both letters.

I studied the note for sometime.
D.C
. Who's
D.C
.? I wondered. And then it hit me. D.C.—Deanna Compton. Bill Whitten's secretary!

“Detective Beaumont?”

I looked up. Lori Yamaguchi was smiling at me in a way that said she had spoken to me more than once without my hearing.

“Yes? Oh, hello, Lori. Sorry I didn't hear you. I was thinking about something else.” Carefully, I refolded the piece of paper and dropped it inside my shirt pocket. “What's up?”

“We got a hit on those fingerprints of yours, the ones Audrey Cummings sent over.”

I stood up and tried to seem less disorganized and distracted than I felt. “Really? That was just a shot in the dark. What kind of hit?” I asked.

“Not just one,” Lori added. “There are seven in all.”

“Seven,” I echoed.

“That's right,” she said. “It turns out, your dead guy is a probable serial rapist with a trail of unsolved attacks in jurisdictions all over California. Same M.O. each time. He'd make an appointment with a real estate agent to go look at houses, and then…”

“Rape them?”

“Right. There might very well be more than just the seven,” Lori said. “It could be the same thing happened in other places and that one way or another they didn't end up in the data bank.”

“But who is he?” I asked.

Lori looked at me blankly. “What do you mean, who is he?” she asked. “Don Wolf, of course. Since you were the detective on the case, I figured you already knew his name. Audrey Cummings said—”

“That's all you have on him then?” I interrupted. “No arrests, no prior convictions?”

Right that minute, I didn't attempt to explain to Lori Yamaguchi that as far as anyone else had been able to discover, the guy named Don Wolf had no known history prior to his sudden appearance in Lizbeth Dorn's life down in California some months earlier.

“Nothing. If there had been, I should have been able to find some record of it. I suppose it's possible that he fell through a crack somewhere along the line and his prints just didn't get entered into the AFIS computer. That automated fingerprints identification system is expensive and time-consuming, you know.”

Lori was justifiably proud of her work, of having made the vital connection. No doubt she expected me to be either more grateful or else more impressed. Maybe both. But at the moment, that folded piece of paper with Deanna Compton's damning initials on it was burning a hole in my shirt pocket. Somebody else besides Latty Gibson had maybe been messing around with Don Wolf, and I wanted to pay her a visit.

“Look, Lori,” I said. “Thanks a whole bunch. Don't think I'm not appreciative, because I am. I owe you lunch. No, more than that, I owe you dinner. But right now, I've got to go. Send me a detailed report on all this, would you?”

“You don't owe me anything, Detective Beaumont,” she said, as I gathered up Don Wolf's jacket and headed for the door. “I was just doing my job.”

With a quick wave over my shoulder, I darted out the door, realizing as I went that it's people like Lori Yamaguchi who, as opposed to the Hilda Chisholms of the world, give a whole different meaning to the word
bureaucrat
.

M
y mother always used to say, “A wise man changes his mind. A fool never does.”

I had told Watty I was on my way back to the department. And I meant to go straight there. I even made it as far as the Third Avenue lobby of the Public Safety Building. But as I stood there waiting for a fully-loaded, rush-hour elevator to disgorge its mass of humanity, I was puzzling over what implications Deanna Compton's note might have for the cases I was investigating.

I kept remembering the Deanna Compton I had met two days earlier at Designer Genes International. She had seemed suitably startled when Bill Whitten delivered news of Don Wolf's death, but she had handled the resultant requests for information in a coolly efficient, businesslike fashion. I could recall nothing at all in her demeanor that would have indicated anything more than a busi
ness-colleague relationship with the dead man. That meant one of two things. Either Deanna Compton wasn't the D.C. in question, or, if she was, she had gone to extraordinary lengths to conceal any kind of inappropriate reaction to the news from me and from her boss, Bill Whitten.

What I needed to do was find some way to verify whether or not Deanna Compton and D.C. were one and the same. That was where my thought process stood when an elevator finally arrived and its door opened. And by the time the last of the passengers filed off and dodged past those of us waiting in the crowded lobby to get on, I realized that I had in my possession a tool that might make that verification possible: the videotapes—Bill Whitten's security tapes. If the surveillance camera switched on whenever someone had walked into Don Wolf's office, then Deanna Compton was bound to have made an appearance somewhere on the footage that was still in my den. If I could show a picture of Deanna Compton to Jack Braman, manager of the Lake View Condominiums…

In my eagerness to turn thought to action, I nearly collided with the people lined up behind me when I turned suddenly and dashed back out the lobby door. I sprinted down Yesler to the garage where I usually leave the 928. Naturally, it was already parked, but one of the attendants was more than eager to go fetch it.

In recent years, a good deal of Seattle's rush-hour bus traffic has disappeared into an under
ground transit tunnel. There were still buses moving up and down Third Avenue, but I was able to make fairly good time on my way uptown. And when I turned up Broad, not only was there an available parking space right there on the corner of Second and Broad, there was still time on the meter. After yesterday's all-time record low, things were starting to look up. A little.

I dashed into the apartment and went straight to the den without even pausing at the answering machine that was sitting there blinking like a crazed Christmas tree. I know the male gender is supposed to reign supreme in the world of television remotes. When it comes to clicker wars, however, I take a backseat to almost everyone—Heather and Tracy Peters included.

It took time to scroll backward through the D.G.I. tape. Characters came and went, walking in comic reverse overdrive back and forth across the screen. Don Wolf himself entered and exited the room several times. In between, there were long periods of time when he sat working at his desk. Once Bill Whitten came in and out. I was about to give up when my patience was rewarded with a view of Deanna Compton walking backward from the doorway to Don Wolf's desk.

Moving close to the set, I let the tape continue rewinding until I reached the point where she opened the door to enter, then I switched the V.C.R. to play once again.

“What's up, Mrs. Compton?” Don Wolf was asking. There was nothing in his greeting that
was in any way suspect. If he was overjoyed to see her, if the two of them had anything going after hours, it was difficult to see that from their perfunctorily polite interaction on the screen.

Deanna put a stack of papers on Don Wolf's desk and then turned and walked away. “You lose, Beaumont,” I said, getting ready to switch again into a backward scroll. Just then, Don Wolf reached out and plucked something off the stack of paper. It was a casual gesture that probably would have escaped notice under most circumstances. I switched to rewind and then ran the segment again. Sure enough. What he had picked up was tiny—barely as big as the top of his thump. Moments later, smiling broadly, Wolf stood up, took his jacket from a hook on a hat rack in the corner, and left the office. As he was leaving, he put something in the lower inside pocket of his jacket—the same pocket in which I had found the note.

I rewound the tape, back to the point where Deanna Compton first entered the room. That was what I had wanted in the first place, a picture of Deanna Compton that I could show to Jack Braman at the Lake View Condos to find out whether or not she had been among the frequent guests at Don Wolf's apartment. About that time, the doorbell rang.

If anybody ever starts a Twelve Step Program for gizmo lovers, Ralph Ames ought to be one of the first to join. He's forever trying to update my technology quotient. He was the instigator be
hind the high-tech electronic security/sound/ light system in my condo. Because of him, lights and music faithfully follow me from room to room. And if I happen to have the special pager with me, I can open doors to allow arriving guests into either the building or the apartment.

The telling detail here is having the pager actually in my possession when needed. And because I have an ingrained aversion to wearing more than one pager at a time, the home pager usually ends up parked on the bathroom counter. Which was precisely where it was right then when the doorbell summoned me away from the VCR in the den.

Rushing to the door, I pulled it open to find Ron Peters and his wheelchair parked outside in the hallway. He was grinning from ear to ear. “In case nobody's mentioned it, your answering machine's broken,” he said, rolling past me first into the entryway and then on into the living room.

His words of complaint about the answering machine didn't nearly jibe with the jubilant expression on the man's face. For somebody whose ex-wife was in the process of making life miserable for anyone within striking distance, he didn't look the least bit concerned.

“What's got you so damned cheerful?” I grumbled, heading back toward the den to collect the tape.

“I've got some good news and some bad news.”

“Come on, Ron. No games. I'm working on something.”

He nodded. “You and me both.”

“So what's the news? Give me the bad, first. We could just as well get it over with.”

“We're both being investigated by Internal Investigations.”

“That's hardly news, Ron. Hilda Chisholm paid me a little visit and dropped that bomb last night. So what's the good news?”

“Tony says I can't be working for I.I.S. at the same time I'm being investigated, so for the time being, they're shifting me back down to investigations. To Homicide. We're partners again, at least until Sue gets back from Ohio or until the I.I.S. investigation blows over, whichever comes first.”

“I'll be damned,” I said.

“As soon as I showed up on the fifth floor this afternoon, Captain Powell pounced on me and put me straight to work on this Wolf case. I can't tell you how good it feels to be back in the harness again, to be working on an investigation that counts for something out in the real world. I think I've come up with something important.”

“What's that?”

“Detective Kramer—somebody needs to shove a corncob up that guy's ass, by the way—said that he thought I could be the most help by going to work on the financial considerations. He and Arnold had already interviewed the high-profile investors, so I went at it from the other end of
the spectrum. Guess what? D.G.I. is in big trouble. The bank is within days of foreclosing on the building, and City Light is about to turn off the power. Same thing for trash collection and phone service. They've evidently been meeting payroll, but that's about all.”

“Wait a minute. That doesn't make sense,” I objected. “With all those big money investors, I thought D.G.I. would be rolling in cash by now.”

“The cash may have come in, but they haven't been using it to pay bills.”

“So where did it go?”

Ron shrugged. “Makes you wonder, doesn't it,” he said with a grin.

Midwinter in Seattle means that it's dark by four-thirty. Somehow, the day seemed suddenly brighter. I found myself grinning back at him. “Aren't you off duty?”

“Depends on whether or not you have something for me to do.”

“How about if we go pay a call on Bill Whitten?” I asked, switching off the VCR, ejecting the tape, and stuffing it into my pocket.

“Sounds good to me,” Ron agreed. “We'll take my car, if you don't mind. When it comes to my chair, that Porsche of yours just doesn't cut it. I'll go get the car and meet you out on the street.”

We had made it as far as the elevator lobby when a thought crossed my mind. “Hey, Ron, are you wearing a vest?”

Ron pressed the button. “You bet I am,” he returned, “although I'm not sure why. Who would
go around trying to kill a crippled cop?”

“You'd be surprised,” I said. “Sitting in a wheelchair sure as hell didn't keep somebody from shooting a freelance detective named Virginia Marks over in Bellevue last night. My guess is that whoever killed Don Wolf also killed the private eye who was investigating him.”

I bailed out in the lobby and went to the street to collect my cellular phone from the 928. By the time Ron came around to where I was standing on the curb, I was attempting to take messages off my broken machine upstairs. It was frustrating going. There must have been nine calls in all. Most of them were hang ups, but the messages that were there weren't really messages at all. They were more like message fragments.

“This is Tony Freeman. There's been a little difficulty…” One was from Gail Richardson, the woman downstairs: “My mother went home today. Want to go out and…”

Midway through the messages, I heard the one Ralph Ames had mentioned to me earlier. “Detective Beaumont, this is Harry…” And that was it.

The last partial message, left after several abortive tries, was from Ron Peters. “This damned thing's obviously not working. Call when you get home.”

As Peters' Buick came around the corner of First Avenue onto Broad I was just erasing the last message. He stopped on the street to pick me up. “Next stop D.G.I.,” he said, as he drove
around the block to head north on First. “Do you think they'll still be open? It's almost five o'clock.”

“Somebody is bound to be there.”

“By the way, on my way down to the garage, I remembered another call that came into the office earlier this afternoon, from Harry Moore down in La Jolla. He wants to talk to you in the worst way.”

Sighing, I shifted the seat belt away from my chest and groped for my notebook. Ron beat me to the punch by handing me a Post-it with a California number jotted on it.

“Here's the number,” he said. “I didn't think you'd want to look it up.”

“Thanks,” I said, keying Harry Moore's direct number into the phone. “After being stuck with Kramer and Arnold for a day or two, it's nice to have a real partner again.”

“No lie,” Ron said.

Moore answered almost immediately. “Detective Beaumont here,” I said. “What can I do for you, Mr. Moore?”

“When I first got the fax, I couldn't believe my luck, but now, with her dead…”

“Whoa, not so fast. What fax are you talking about?”

“The one from Virginia Marks. I left a message on your machine—”

“My machine ate your message, so let's start over from the beginning. What fax did Virginia Marks send you?”

“She sent it last night, after I went home, so I didn't actually see it until I came in this morning around ten. But when I tried calling back Virginia this afternoon, somebody told me that she's dead. Is that true?”

“Unfortunately, yes.”

“Damn!” Moore muttered. “I suppose that means I'm screwed then anyway.”

“I still don't know what we're talking about.”

“Virginia Marks told me she had some critical information for me. She said she could prove that Bill Whitten is using my research—Alpha-Cyte research—to attract investors for D.G.I. And she offered to sell me that information—for a fee, of course. Her asking price was astronomical, but if what she was telling me was true, I could have taken Bill Whitten to the cleaners.”

It sounded to me as though someone else had already wiped out Bill Whitten's finances, but I didn't mention that to Harry Moore. He didn't give me a chance.

“So first I sat here and tried to figure out how Bill Whitten could end up with Alpha-Cyte proprietary information, and finally, it dawned on me. Lizbeth!”

“You think Lizbeth Wolf gave it to him?”

“No, don't you see? That worthless bastard stole it. Don Wolf stole it, probably right out of Lizbeth's computer, and handed it over to Whitten. That's got to be it.”

By the time Harry Moore finally stopped long enough to draw breath, Ron had already parked
the Buick in front of the curb at D.G.I. and was waiting for directions.

I looked over at the door to the building where the five o'clock exodus was already in full swing. “Look, Mr. Moore. I've got to go to an appointment right now. Can we get back to you on this a little later?”

“Sure,” he said. “Don't worry about how late it is. I'll be here.”

By then, Ron had already lowered the wheelchair and was waiting for me on the curb. “What's going on?” Ron asked. “It sounded bad.”

“Come on,” I said. “I'll tell you on the way.”

But then I glanced up and saw the security camera stationed over the door. It reminded me of the ones inside.

“Come to think of it,” I said, “I'll tell you the rest of it when we come back outside. If I tell you in there, Bill Whitten will have it all recorded on his personal
Candid Camera
. From what Harry Moore is telling me, that's probably a real bad idea.”