Second Watch (26 page)

“My husband was a cheat,” she said venomously. “I should have known that since he cheated on his first wife with me. But then he cheated on me with that girl, that slut, and he knocked her up.”

I was gratified to see that she didn’t bother with introductions. Obviously she was giving Mel and me credit for having connected some of the dots.

“You’re saying Kenneth cheated with Monica Wellington and got her pregnant? How did they meet?”

“Does it matter?” she scoffed. “Does a wife ever know how a husband meets his mistress? I met him when he came into the restaurant for lunch—for Mr. Lee’s cashew chicken. I don’t think his wife had a clue, and I have no idea how he met Monica.”

“Wait,” I said. “You mean you worked at the Dragon’s Head?” I asked.

She laughed outright at that. “So you hadn’t put everything together, had you?” she said.

I said nothing.

“She came to him, told him she was pregnant, and wanted to know what he was going to do about it. He was just starting to make his way up the ladder in Seattle PD. The scandal would have spoiled everything. So he strangled her, and that was it.”

She said it so matter-of-factly that it took my breath away.

“Except that wasn’t really it, was it?” I offered.

“No,” she said. “He needed to get rid of the body. I was the one who came up with the grease barrel. I knew where it was. Once we got the body loaded into that, he said he knew of a place in town where he could unload the body and no one would ever be the wiser. But of course, he was wrong about that. Those shitty little boys saw him do it. He warned them that they should be quiet, but of course they couldn’t keep it to themselves. Later that Sunday, he went to see the mother, hoping to talk some sense into her head. As he was walking out, who do you suppose he should meet but good old Mac MacPherson. Kenny said he probably came by hoping his uniform would qualify him for a freebie with the boys’ mother.”

That made sense to me. Mac had always fancied himself as something of a ladies’ man. Reality to the contrary, Mac believed he was downright irresistible.

“Mac, of course, being Mac,” Faye continued, “immediately leaped to the wrong conclusion. He thought Kenny was sleeping around with the boy’s mother. He threatened to spill the beans and tell the world that Kenny, the mayor’s handpicked guy, was carrying on with a hooker. That wasn’t even close to the truth, but Kenny knew that if Mac started spouting that story, we were done for.”

“Because everything else would have come out?” I asked.

Faye nodded. “We were afraid that if people found out about the existence of the mayor’s little side dish, there would be too many people asking all kinds of questions, and before long someone would make a connection back to the dead girl.”

“So what happened?”

Faye shrugged. “So they struck a deal, and Mac promised to forget he saw Kenny at the woman’s house.”

“In exchange for what?” I asked the question even though I already knew the answer.

“Mac got the promotion he wanted, and so did his partner.” She paused and looked at me. “I believe that was you, right? So I guess you were in on it, too.”

“I wasn’t in on it!” I growled. “I had no idea.”

“You were that stupid?”

I thought back to how much I had wanted that promotion—how much I had wanted to be a detective and how hard I had worked to put all the rumors about my promotion to bed, even though, in my heart of hearts, I had somehow suspected they were true.

“No,” I said, at last. “It wasn’t because I was stupid. It was because I was naive.”

She shrugged. “It doesn’t really matter, does it? You both got what you wanted, and all Mac had to do was keep his mouth shut. I worried about that,” Faye continued. “I was afraid we couldn’t trust him. Kenny said he’d be fine, and he was for a long while. I thought it had all blown over, but then last week, Mac wasn’t fine. When he found out that you and that Ainsworth woman were reopening the case, he went nuts. He called me and raised hell. He tried to blackmail me. He said we both knew that he had concealed possible evidence in that homicide years ago. He figured that since his silence had been good enough for him to get promoted back then, maybe I’d be willing to make it worth his while for him to continue keeping quiet now. My late husband was a good cop. If this had all come out now, it would have destroyed Kenny’s reputation at a time when he was no longer able to defend himself. I couldn’t have that.”

“Of course you couldn’t,” I agreed soothingly. “So that’s when you made up your mind to get rid of him?”

“I had to,” Faye said. “Even though Kenny left me in pretty good shape financially, once blackmail gets started, there’s never any end to it.”

“So you ended it for him,” I said. “You went there planning to kill him.”

“When I went there, I thought I could talk some sense into him. When that didn’t work, I decided that if I could get him drunk enough, I could leave him in the garage with the car running and people would think he had committed suicide. I was just getting ready to leave when the doorbell rang and that woman showed up. I thought whoever it was would go away when no one answered, but the door was unlocked, and she let herself in. She called out her name as she opened the door. I was standing right on the other side of it, and I knew what I had to do. I let her have it.”

“Just like that?”

“Just like that.”

“What is it you want now?”

“I wanted to be able to live out my life in peace, but as you can see, that isn’t going to happen, so now it’s really over—all of it.”

With that, Faye Adcock seemed to pull back onto the window seat. Sitting there trying to frame a response, I had no idea of her intentions. Even if I had, I’m not sure I would have tried to stop her. As she stood up, I took advantage of that slight distraction to reach down and try to retrieve the Glock from my ankle holster. I had my hand on it and was about to draw it when Faye made her move, darting toward the end of the window seat.

Lithe as a cat, she slithered through a window opening that would have been far too small for any ordinary-size adult to slip through. She stood there for a moment, poised on the ledge and clinging to the metal frame, and then she was gone, falling in absolute silence from a height of twenty-two stories.

The first sound that shattered that ungodly silence was Marge Herndon’s horrified scream. Next came an awful crash of metal as Faye’s plummeting body slammed into a vehicle far below. That was followed immediately by the urgent bleating of a car alarm.

The sound reinforced what my mind had already grasped. It was over. Faye Adcock was no more, and Monica Wellington’s long-unsolved homicide was finally closed.

CHAPTER 22

F
or most of the time that I was growing up and for a long time afterward, my mother and I were estranged from my mother’s parents. This was due primarily to my grandfather’s general curmudgeonliness, a trait I do my best not to emulate.

During those years, my grandmother, Beverly, went behind her disapproving husband’s back and dutifully kept scrapbooks of all the times she was able to cull anything about me from the newspapers, from Cub Scout postings in the
Queen Anne News
to high school sports articles. Once I became a detective at Seattle PD, whenever one of my homicide cases made it into the pages of the
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
or the
Seattle Times
, Beverly made sure those articles were also clipped and pasted into the mix. I was more than middle aged when I found her precious scrapbooks and realized that she had spent all those years caring about me in silence and following my life from afar. That, more than anything, finally helped put to rest all those long-simmering family-feud issues. Beverly loved me. I loved her. All was forgiven.

But my grandmother stopped cutting and pasting long before the news world went digital, and she would have been astonished by the full-length photo of me that was splashed on the front pages of both the digital and paper editions of the
Seattle Times
on the morning of September twenty-first.

For one thing, it was in full color. I’m not sure how the photographer, listed as R. Tobin, got to the scene so fast. He or she must have arrived close to the same time Mel and I did, and all we had to do was ride down in the Belltown Terrace elevator from the penthouse to the lobby and then walk half a block.

As a result, Mel and I were the first official law enforcement presence on the scene of Faye Adcock’s suicide. The photo in the paper shows me, standing silhouetted in a wash of blazing headlights, attempting to direct traffic around the scene of the incident. I was using my walker as I stomped around the scene, but for some reason the walker doesn’t show in the image. And somehow, too, in all the noisy hubbub, the photographer neglected to catch my name. As far as I’m concerned, that’s just as well.

Fortunately, no one on the ground was injured, although they very easily could have been. Faye’s nosedive had plunged her headfirst onto the hood of a parked car. From there she had bounced into traffic. A second vehicle, in trying to avoid hitting her, ended up plowing into yet a third, thus setting off a chain reaction. Traffic at the intersection of First Avenue and Broad came to a complete halt and stayed that way for the better part of the night.

I was in the process of being interviewed by two newly arrived uniformed officers when Marge Herndon made her presence known.

“He lives here,” she said, pointing at the building. “You have his name. I’m his nurse and I’m telling you that he has to go back inside. If anyone needs to talk to him, tell them to talk to the building’s doorman, and he’ll send them up.”

With that, Marge grabbed my elbow and pointed me and my walker back up the sidewalk along Broad, toward both the lobby and the elevator. I knew she was right, of course. I was way over the limit on both energy and pain, and I went along with the program without so much as a single whimper. Mel, on the other hand, stayed where she was, talking to arriving officers and taking care of business.

“I’m sorry,” I muttered to Marge in the elevator. “I certainly never intended to involve you in something like this.”

She waved off my apology as though it were a bothersome gnat.

“How long has it been since you’ve had a pain pill?” Marge demanded.

“Too long,” I admitted.

“Then I guess I’d better rustle up something to eat—scrambled eggs, most likely,” she added. “As I told you before, you can’t take those pills on an empty stomach.”

I was only too grateful to be ordered around. She herded me over to the window seat where I was able to stretch out flat while Marge bustled around bringing me pillows for both my head and under my knees as well as a very welcome duvet. When the duvet settled over me, I realized how cold I was. Marge must have come to the same conclusion, but when she reached for the crank to close the window, I stopped her.

“Who opened the windows?” I asked. “Did you do it or did she?”

“She did,” Marge said.

“All right, then,” I said. “Let’s make sure that hers are the only fingerprints the CSI techs find on that handle. When the detectives come up here, we need to be able to show them exactly how she got out. If you’re cold, go ahead and turn up the thermostat.”

“Turning up the heat with the windows open will cost a fortune,” Marge objected.

“It’s okay,” I told her. “For this one night, I can afford it. But tell me. How did she get in here in the first place?”

“I was outside, having a smoke. You know, on the sidewalk next to the garage wall, like you told me to. But it was raining. I was getting wet. I was about to let myself into the garage through the gate with the clicker when she came jogging up the sidewalk. She was wet, too. She said she lived in the building and had forgotten her key. Would I mind letting her in. After all, she was just a little bit of a thing. She looked perfectly harmless.”

I didn’t take Marge to task and tell her that was the oldest trick in the book and a surefire way to make a secure building totally not secure.

“Once we got into the elevator,” Marge continued, “I used my building key to run it. When I turned around to ask which floor she wanted, that’s when I first saw the gun. She must have had it hidden in her pocket. She said we were going wherever you lived. All the way up in the elevator, I kept hoping someone else would get on with us, but no one did.”

“How long was she here?”

“Not that long,” Marge said. “She held the gun on me the whole time. It must have been heavy because part of the time she kept it in her lap. It seemed like it was forever. I needed to pee so badly, I was afraid I was going to wet my pants, but I’d be damned if I’d ask that little bitch for permission. She wanted a cigarette, so I lit smokes for both of us. Sorry about that. I hope you don’t mind.”

Considering what might have happened to Marge Herndon in the course of the confrontation, having a little lingering cigarette smoke in the unit seemed like a small price to pay. Besides, the frigid wind leaking into the room had mostly cleared it out.

Marge left me alone and went to the kitchen. I have to give the woman that much credit. She knew her way around our cooktop.

“So she’s the one who killed those people out in Sammamish?” she called to me from the kitchen.

“I guess,” I answered. “What I don’t understand is how she knew to come here.”

“That’s easy,” Marge replied. “She told me she followed us when we left the press conference in Sammamish. She was there, too. She said that as soon as she saw you there, she knew who you were.”

My iPad was lying next to me on the window seat. I picked it up, switched it on, and opened the panoramic photo gallery. Sure enough, one of the series of panoramic shots had captured Faye Adcock, sitting on the aisle in the very last row. So I was right after all. The killer had come to the press conference. I had found her without realizing it. Once she recognized me, she must have understood the danger I posed to her getting away with what she’d done.

I was still thinking about that when I fell asleep with the iPad flat on my chest.

Mel woke me up a few minutes later. “Do you want to eat here or at the table?”

I was glad to be off my feet. “Here, please,” I said.

Mel returned a few minutes later carrying a TV tray. On it was a plate of bacon and scrambled eggs, along with a glass of juice and an eggcup containing a multicolored collection of pills. I sat up and Mel helped me maneuver the tray around my legs. I could see that my ankles were still mad at me. Since Marge wasn’t looking, I took the pills first thing. As I was lifting the first forkful of scrambled eggs to my mouth, Mel returned to the window seat with her own tray of food.

“Did they find her gun?” I asked.

Mel shook her head. “Not yet. I told them about it, and I’m sure they will. The uniforms are out in force, doing an inch-by-inch search. It’s probably under one of the damaged vehicles, and some of those are going to have to be towed away.”

“This is going to be hard to explain,” I said, glancing at the still-open windows. Marge had cranked up the heat, however, and the room wasn’t as cold as it had been.

Mel laughed. “Not as hard as it could be,” she said. “Here, listen to this.” She pulled her iPhone out of her pocket, put it down on my tray, and pressed a button. Soon I was hearing Faye Adcock’s voice as well as my own.

I was dumbfounded. “Are you kidding? You recorded the whole thing?”

“Every bit of it,” Mel said with a grin. “The problem is, it’s audio only. I couldn’t get video because the phone was in my pocket.”

“Even so,” I said, “a recording like that won’t stand up in court.”

Mel shrugged her shoulders. “Doesn’t need to, but it’ll work as a deathbed confession. I think there’s a lot more latitude with those.”

We listened in silence to the whole thing until Marge’s horrified scream and the wailing of the automobile alarm announced that Faye Adcock had made her exit, stage left. It was actually stage right, but let’s not be picky.

Mel switched off the phone and put it away. “Are you going to go talk to Monica’s mother?”

“Tomorrow,” I said. “If you don’t mind driving.”

“No problem,” Mel said. “I just talked to Harry. He told me to take the whole week off. I’m yours for the duration.”

We had finished eating and had cleared out both the dishes and the TV trays when two Seattle homicide detectives—guys I didn’t recognize—showed up. And since Mel had run up the flag to the King County Sheriff’s Department, Detectives Monford and Anderson were hot on the Seattle PD investigators’ heels.

As expected, the four detectives began the process by interviewing Marge Herndon, Mel, and me on an individual basis. That was the only way to keep one eyewitness’s testimony from muddying someone else’s. King County detectives Monford and Anderson accompanied Marge back downstairs to the guest unit and interviewed her there. Seattle PD Homicide detective Taylor Derickson took Mel into the den and closed the doors behind them. I stayed on the window seat, still wrapped in the duvet while Seattle Homicide’s Detective Bonnie Hill did the interview honors.

Detective Hill was a poised and intense young woman. I could tell this was personal for her, and I thought I knew why. While she was setting her recording device, I got the drop on her before she ever lobbed a single question in my direction.

“You knew Detective Ainsworth?” I asked.

Biting her lip and fighting back tears, she nodded. “We came through the academy together.”

“I’m so sorry,” I said. “So let’s get this right.”

In order to make sense of the thing, I had to go back to the very beginning, starting with waking up in my hospital bed determined to reopen a cold case. I expected Detective Hill to object to that. Instead, she accepted my version of events at face value, and while she was letting the recorder do its job, she was also making quick but careful notes the whole time. In a funny way, she reminded me of Pickles Gurkey, and I suspected her case closure ratio would have a lot to do with her clear determination to cover all the bases.

I told her, to the best of my memory, about the interactions I had had with Delilah prior to her second fateful trip to see Mac MacPherson. I told her about the missing evidence and about the sabotaged human resources microfiche. I told her about being worried when Delilah didn’t call me back in a timely fashion and about my summoning Assistant Chief Peters into the fray.

“You know Assistant Chief Peters?” she asked.

“We used to be partners.”

In the world of homicide cops, those five words speak volumes. She nodded, and I continued.

When I told Detective Hill about leaving the hospital and making an uninvited visit to the press conference, I switched on my iPad and showed her the photo of Faye Adcock sitting in the back of the room.

“That’s her,” I said, pointing to Faye’s face in the crowd. “I was looking for someone from Seattle PD who maybe shouldn’t have been there. I didn’t recognize Faye Adcock because, as far as I know, I had never seen her before today.”

I went on from there, explaining how Faye had followed Marge’s vehicle home from the press conference, how she had duped Marge in order to gain entry to the building, and finally about what was said in those few minutes prior to Faye’s fatal plunge. We had finished that part of the interview when the phone rang.

Mel answered and then opened the glass doors between the den and the living room. “That was the doorman,” she said. “Ron Peters is on his way up.”

That news apparently made a good impression on Detective Hill. I saw her brief nod, but she didn’t shut down the recording.

“Did Ms. Adcock say anything to you about the missing evidence or the HR discrepancy?” she asked.

“Not to me,” I told her. “She might have had the motive, but I doubt she had the opportunity. My guess would be that her husband took care of that part of the problem before he left the department.”

“When was that again?”

“In 1981.”

“Were they already digitizing records that early?” Detective Hill asked.

“Definitely not,” I said. “I think the physical records themselves disappeared long before the microfiche record was created.”

The doorbell rang. Mel hurried out of the den to answer it. Ron rolled into the living room, Mel at his side and with her hand in his.

“Thank God you’re both all right!” he exclaimed. He parked his chair next to where I was sitting. Making my knees and his chair maneuver together for a hug wasn’t easy, but we managed.

“Has someone notified Faye’s son?” I asked.

Ron nodded. “Officers are on their way to his home right now.”

A few minutes later, Detectives Monford and Anderson showed up, having finished with their debriefing of Marge Herndon.