Breach of Duty (9780061739637) (2 page)

Reaching across the table, I covered my grandmother's small, frail, liver-spotted hand with my own massive mitt. I was glad to know I reminded someone of my mother—thankful that Carol Ann Piedmont wasn't totally forgotten by everyone in the world but me.

My mother had raised me at a time when being a single mother wasn't in vogue. She had struggled to support us by working at home as a seamstress, by sewing fancy dresses for people far above our station in life. Countless times I remember going to bed on the living-room couch while she worked long into the night. On those nights I fell asleep to the steady hum of Mother's treadle-operated Singer. As a boy growing up, I knew our lives were different from those of most of the kids I knew. For one thing, most of them had fathers. For another, their mothers didn't work. It wasn't until much later—until long after I was a father myself—that I realized Carol Ann Piedmont was very much a hero.

“Good,” I said, patting my grandmother's hand and trying to make a joke of things in hopes that she wouldn't notice how touched I was. “People have called me contrary for years. I'm glad to hear I'm a chip off the old block.”

T
here are people who like change. There are even a few who thrive on it. That's not me. If it were, I wouldn't have reupholstered my ten-year-old recliner, and I wouldn't resole my shoes until they're half-a-size smaller than they were to begin with. When I move into a house or, as in the present case, into a high-rise condo, I'd better like the way I arrange the furniture the first time because that's the way it's going to stay until it's time to move someplace else. In fact, my aversion to change probably also accounts for my Porsche 928. George Washington's axe, with two new handles and a new head, probably doesn't have much to do with our first president. And my replacement Porsche doesn't have a lot of connection to Anne Corley, the lady who gave me the original. Still it's easier to hang on to the one I have now out of sentimental reasons than it is to admit that I just don't care to make the switch to a different car.

In other words, I'm a great believer in the status quo. It also explains why, on the Monday morning after Beverly Piedmont and I drove home from Lake Chelan, I came back to work expecting things at Seattle PD to be just the way they had been. And to begin with, there was no outward sign of change. Sue Danielson and I walked into our cubicle to discover a yellow Post-it note attached to the monitor of the desktop computer we share when we're in the office as opposed to the laptops we're supposed to use in the field.

“See me,” the note said. “My office. Nine sharp.”

There was no signature. On the fifth floor of the Public Safety Building, no signature was necessary. Captain Lawrence Powell has never made any bones about hating electronics in general and computers in particular. His idea of surfing the net is to go around the Homicide Squad slapping Post-it notes on every computer in sight.

Sue sighed. “What have we done now?” she asked, glancing at her watch. At 8:02, there was no reason to hurry to Larry Powell's fishbowl of an office. If we were going to be chewed out for something, I'm of the opinion later is always better than earlier.

“Who knows?” I said. “But remember, whatever it was, I was out of town most of last week, so it can't be my fault.”

“You'd be surprised,” Sue returned.

Sitting down at the desk I removed the note and turned on the computer. In typical bureaucratic fashion, when the department finally decided to create a local-area network and go on-line, they bought computers from the lowest possible bidder. As a consequence, they take for damned ever to boot up. I tapped my fingers impatiently and stared at the cyberspace egg timer sitting interminably in the middle of an otherwise blank blue screen.

“Probably has something to do with that welldone smoker who set herself on fire last Tuesday,” I suggested.

“Oh,” Sue said. “That's right. I forgot. You missed it.”

I didn't like the sound of that “Oh.” My antenna went up. “Missed what?” I asked.

“Marian Rockwell's preliminary report.”

Marian Rockwell is one of the Seattle Fire Department's crack arson investigators. “Agnes Ferman's death is no longer being considered accidental,” Sue continued. “Marian found residue of an accelerant on Agnes Ferman's bedding.”

Smokers die in their beds all the time—in their beds or on their sofas. As far as I was concerned, arson seemed like a real stretch.

“What did she do, dump her lighter fluid while she was refilling her Zippo? Right. The next thing you're going to tell me is that Agnes Ferman is Elvis Presley's long-lost sister.”

Sue scowled at me. “Don't pick a fight with me about it, Beau,” she said. “I'm just telling you what Marian told me. You can believe it or not. It's no skin off my teeth either way. It's all there in the report I wrote up Friday morning.”

Squabbling with my partner in the face of an imminent and possibly undeserved chewing out from the captain more or less took the blush off the morning. Up till then, it had seemed like a fairly decent Monday.

“So what else did you do while I was gone?” I asked.

“On Ferman? Not much. I counted and inventoried all the money and…”

“Money? What money?”

“The three hundred some-odd thousand in cash we found hidden in a refrigerator in Agnes Ferman's garage. I had planned on starting the neighborhood canvass and talking to her next of kin, but counting that much cash takes time. Agnes has a sister who lives up around Marysville and a brother and sister-in-law in Everett. That's about all I know so far. I haven't had a chance to track any of them down. The same goes for neighbors. Marian interviewed some of them—the one who reported the fire—but so far nobody's really canvassed the neighborhood.”

Cash or no cash, homicides come with a built-in timetable. A murder that isn't solved within forty-eight hours tends to not be solved at all. As with any rule, there are exceptions, but the chances are, the longer a case remains unsolved after that deadline, the worse the odds are that it will ever be cleared. Next-of-kin and neighbor interviews are where investigations usually start. The fact that no interviews had taken place so far wasn't good. Furthermore, since my whole purpose in life is to see that killers
don't
get away with murder, I wasn't the least bit pleased by the seemingly unnecessary delay.

“Great,” I fumed. “That's just great. Our case goes stale while all those concerned stand around twiddling their thumbs.”

Sue shot me an icy glare. “I don't suppose you watched the news when you were east of the mountains.”

Watching television—particularly television news—isn't my idea of a good time. I seldom watch TV on either side of the mountains. “As a matter of fact, I didn't. Should I have?” I asked irritably.

“For your information, all hell broke loose the minute you left town, including two drive-bys on Wednesday, a fatality vehicular accident under the convention center in the middle of Thursday-after-noon rush hour, and a homicide/suicide over in West Seattle on Friday morning. Add in a couple of assault cases and some role-playing ghouls in Seward Park and you can understand how poor old Agnes might have taken a backseat.”

“Role-playing ghouls?” I asked. “What's that all about?”

“Funny you should ask,” Sue told me. “That case happens to be ours, as well.”

“What case?”

“The ghouls. About three o'clock Wednesday morning someone called to report a body in Seward Park. Supposedly the park is closed overnight, but it was hopping that night. When uniforms showed up, they found the place full of Generation X'ers dressed up like vampires and zombies and acting out some kind of role-playing game. Your basic Halloween in April. One of the guests freaked out when they stumbled on some non-make-believe human remains. He went home and called the cops. So since the Haz-Mat guys had the Ferman neighborhood shut down most of Wednesday, I got sent out to crawl around Seward Park looking for more bones instead of starting on the Ferman interviews.”

By then I had finished calling up the file and was starting to scan it. The only words that penetrated my consciousness were vampire and Haz-Mat.

“Wait a minute,” I said, turning away from the screen. “What does Halloween revisited have to do with the Hazardous Materials Unit?”

Sue nailed me with an exasperated glare. “Either listen or read,” she told me. “Obviously you're incapable of doing both at once.”

Sue Danielson is not short-tempered. Anything but. Between the two of us, I'm the one who's the grouser. But her tone of voice combined with a chilly stare warned me that I had blundered into risky territory.

“You talk; I'll listen,” I said. “Let's start with Haz-Mat.”

“I was about to head out to Bitter Lake on Wednesday morning to start interviewing neighbors when Marian Rockwell called and told me not to bother because she was in the process of evacuating the whole neighborhood. It seems she had just taken a peek inside Ferman's detached garage. According to her, it's a miracle the whole place didn't go up in a ball of flame during the fire on Tuesday morning. If it had, it might have taken half the neighborhood with it.”

“What was in it, dynamite?”

“Not quite, but close enough. Old oxygen and acetylene tanks and welding equipment along with an old Plymouth van. One whole wall was stacked floor-to-ceiling with deteriorating cans of paint and paint thinner, all of which would have burned like crazy if the garage had happened to catch fire. It was such a mess that it took the Haz-Mat guys almost the whole day to clear the place out. There was an old refrigerator in there, too. Sitting in the back with its face to the wall. That's where they found the money.

“Like I said before, it turns out to be a little over three hundred thou,” Sue told me. “Most of it in hundred-dollar bills. I had been sent to work the Seward Park case, but once they located the money, Marian wanted me to come take charge of it. Which is how we get to have both cases—Seward Park and Agnes Ferman. One old and one new.”

“So where do you suppose all this money came from? How much was it again?”

“Three hundred eleven thousand to be exact, plus change. Agnes must not have liked banks very much. As I said, it took most of Thursday to inventory it all and record the serial numbers. It's in hundreds mostly. Some of them have been circulated, but the majority haven't. The better part of a quarter of a million came straight from the U.S. Mint sometime after 1973 and before 1990. Since about 1993, incoming cash slowed to a trickle.”

“You think that big chunk has been in the refrigerator the whole time?”

“Maybe not in the refrigerator, but the bills have definitely been out of circulation. A lot of them are still banded with consecutive serial numbers.”

“And the earliest serial numbers date from the mid-seventies?”

Sue nodded. “Right. They're old bills, but they look brand new. Meanwhile, knowing there was that much money at stake, Marian Rockwell decided maybe it was premature to declare the fire accidental. And what do you know! As soon as she went looking for an accelerant, she found it.”

“With Agnes Ferman dead, who does the money go to?” I asked.

“No idea. So far there's no sign of a will. My guess is we're not going to find one.”

“Makes sense,” I said. “If Agnes didn't like banks, she probably didn't like lawyers, either.”

“Which means we need to talk to both the brother and sister,” Sue said.

“ASAP,” I agreed. “Now what about Seward Park? Any chance the Generation X'ers did the deed?”

“No,” Sue said. “The bones look like they've been out in the elements for a long time—longer than most of those asshole kids have been on earth. All we've found so far are skeletal remains. A femur here and a tibia there. Not enough for even a partial autopsy, and no sign at all of cause of death. Over the weekend some Explorer Scouts were supposed to go over the whole area inch by inch. So far, though, I haven't heard what if anything more they found. It could be some long-dead guy whose bones washed up during last winter's floods, or it could be a previously undiscovered victim of the Green River Killer. Until someone in Doc Baker's office has a chance to tell us otherwise, however, we have orders to treat it as a possible homicide.”

“In other words,” I added, “it looks like we're back to business as usual with everyone working multiple cases.”

“For the time being,” Sue said.

For a while I had enjoyed the laid-back, eight-hour-a-day pace of chasing cold cases, but now the novelty had worn off. I was bored. “Good,” I said. “It's about time.”

While the printer was spitting out a hard copy of Sue's report, I continued to scan the screen. The date of birth listed on Agnes Ferman's driver's license was within one month of my mother's. Had I not spent so much time with my grandmother the previous week, that's a detail that I might have simply glossed over. As it was, however, it struck me as significant somehow. It made me want to know more about the dead woman. And her killer.

Dying of smoking in bed implies a certain amount of self-destruction, a kind of willfulness. It's the sort of death that doesn't evoke a lot of sympathy. Like dying of a drug overdose or booze. People pretty much shrug their shoulders and say “Who cares?”

On the other hand, dying in bed because of an arson-related fire makes the victim doubly victimized. After all, in the Saturday afternoon Westerns I used to watch at the old Baghdad Theater in Ballard, the Indians never attacked until after dawn. Staging a surprise attack in the middle of the night was definitely not okay. Not honorable. Killing a defenseless, sleeping victim wasn't considered fair play in those old movies, and it didn't seem fair in modern-day Seattle, either—no matter how much money the old girl had hidden in her firetrap of a garage.

Lost in the report, I had gone through Marian Rockwell's Haz-Mat part of the story and was just getting to the inventory of Agnes Ferman's stash of money when Sue sliced through my concentration.

“Time to go,” she said. “It's almost nine. You know what'll happen if we're late.”

Larry Powell's all-glass office allows the captain to keep his finger on the pulse of his troops at all times. Meticulously clean glass makes for an unobstructed view of the status board behind Sergeant Watkins' desk. By reading that the captain can tell at all times which teams of detectives are assigned to which cases. The check-in board next to the status board lets him know who's in, who's out, and when they're expected back. Coming around Watty's cluttered desk, I was surprised to see the Fishbowl crammed wall-to-wall with people—fellow members of the detective division who populate the fifth floor of the Public Safety Building.

“If this is going to be an ass chewing,” I whispered in an aside to Sue, “it's a world-class, groupgrope event. No one on the floor is exempt.”