Dismissed With Prejudice (9780061760631) (10 page)

“They're taking her to Spokane for surgery.”

The blue eyes narrowed at Halvorsen's answer. “What about her mother?”

“She'll probably be all right. They're keeping her in Colfax for observation.”

A car door slammed and the deputy came hotfooting it toward us at a fast trot. “Got a message for you from the sheriff, Detective Halvorsen. He says Cap Reardon just called in to say whoever cut the lines musta used a helicopter.”

“What?” Halvorsen demanded.

“Sheriff Coffee says they used a helicopter. He says for you to call in as soon as you can and he'll give you the details.”

Halvorsen sprinted away toward the car, leaving
me standing there with Rita Brice. “Who are you?” she asked.

“Detective Beaumont,” I replied. “With the Seattle Police Department.” I offered her a business card.

“What happened to your hand?” she asked.

“Slammed it in a door,” I replied, grateful that at least I now had that much of an answer when somebody asked the question.

She stuffed the card in her hip pocket. “What's a Seattle detective doing out here?”

“You haven't heard about Kimi's father?”

Rita frowned. “What about him?”

“He was murdered the night before last. I'm the detective on that case.”

A white pallor slipped under the tanned skin of her cheeks. “What's this all about? Why would anyone do such a thing?”

“That's what we're trying to find out.”

For a time we said nothing. I could see Halvorsen through the windshield of the K-car, talking animatedly on his radio.

Finally, Rita said, “Do you want to see the barn? I let the other horses out, but Sadie's still in there. I'll have to have help to move her.”

“Please,” I said.

We said nothing more as I followed her to the sagging barn. When we first entered the shadowy building, it smelled the way you'd expect it to smell, of hay and manure and horses, but toward the back of the barn, there was another smell as well, the distinct metallic odor of blood.

Rita led me to a stall at the far end and I peered inside over the wooden railing where a mutilated horse lay dead on the floor, sprawled in a blood-soaked layer of straw. A cloud of flies hovered busily on and around the dead animal.

“It must have been terrible for Kimi,” Rita said quietly. “To have to watch. Sadie was like her child.” She pointed toward the far corner of the stall. “That's where I found her.”

Near the wall was another blood-soaked layer of straw. “Those bastards!” I muttered.

Rita Brice nodded and wiped her eyes.

I had seen enough. As we turned away from the stall, Halvorsen came rushing to meet us.

“Can you beat that? A goddamned helicopter. That's what they used. I couldn't figure out how they managed to be all over the county at once.”

“One of the linemen called his supervisor in Spokane this morning after it got light enough to see. He said he noticed a place near one of the poles where the wheat was all beaten down. Sheriff Coffee sent somebody out to check and sure enough, they found evidence that a helicopter landed there. They stopped off at two more sites on the way back. Same thing.”

He had been talking excitedly. Suddenly he stopped and his face fell. “Damn!”

“What's the matter?”

“Those roadblocks won't ever catch a damn helicopter.”

The three of us walked out of the barn together.
Outside, away from the smell of death, the world was serene, peaceful, and awesomely quiet.

“You didn't hear anything?” I asked Rita. It seemed to me that a terrified horse would have made a helluva lot of noise.

Rita Brice shook her head. “I sleep with the television set on,” she said. “My husband snored, and I still haven't learned to sleep when it's quiet.”

“And you don't have a dog?”

“I don't like dogs,” she answered simply. “They chase horses.”

Halvorsen walked straight to the car. “We've lost them,” he said. “We'd better go see the mother.”

I nodded in bleak agreement while Halvorsen relit the short stub of his cigar before starting the car. “So did they get what they were looking for or not?”

“Who knows?”

Halvorsen was my kind of cop—action first, bullshit and paperwork later. We had lost one round fair and square, but he was ready to get up and get back in the game.

Rita Brice went to the house to change clothes before heading to Spokane where she, along with a police guard, would stand vigil with Kimi at Sacred Heart Medical Center. We left her place, drove back out to the highway, and turned left to drive toward Colfax.

“I've got a bad feeling about all this,” Halvorsen said quietly.

“Like what?”

“Helicopters, cut telephone lines, what they did to her. This sounds like big-time shit to me—professionals, the mob. It's the kind of crap I wanted to leave behind me when I came back home to work. And if we're dealing with name-brand muscle here, then whatever or whoever it is has to be big. Something to do with drugs unless I miss my guess. Is it possible either the father or the daughter were involved in dealing drugs?”

“No way,” I said. “Tadeo Kurobashi was broke, dead broke. He was losing both his business and his house. And his daughter shovels horseshit for a living. That doesn't sound like any high-flying drug dealers I know.”

“I still think it's drugs,” Halvorsen insisted.

Colfax Community Hospital, situated on a hillside at the edge of town, was small but modern enough to have gotten on the no-smoking bandwagon, so Halvorsen snuffed out the smoldering remains of his cigar in a sand-filled ashtray near the hospital's main entrance. A nurse directed us to the proper room.

Machiko Kurobashi, looking more frail than ever, lay flat on the bed, wearing a hospital-issue gown. Both eyes were black. A jagged cut on her lower lip had been neatly stitched shut. Her left arm, bandaged and in a sling, was strapped firmly to her chest while the fingers of her other hand stroked a gnarled wooden piece of what had once been her cane. Her glasses were gone, and I assumed they too had been smashed by her attacker.

She gave no sign of recognition when I walked into the room. Only when I came close enough that she could focus on me clearly, did her eyes widen in alarm and her free hand go to her mouth. I'm sure she thought I was coming to give her more bad news about Kimi.

“Kimiko okay?” she asked plaintively, reaching out and grasping my hand with her thin, clawlike fingers.

“I don't have any news of her, Mrs. Kurobashi,” I said gently. “They have taken her to Spokane. That's all I know.”

She nodded and let go of my hand. Peering behind me, she caught a glimpse of someone else and frowned.

“It's Detective Halvorsen,” I explained. “From the sheriff's department. We must ask you some questions.”

Machiko Kurobashi closed her eyes. I wondered if she was listening or not.

“Do you know the men who did this to you?”

“No.”

“You had never seen them before?”

“No.”

“Or heard their voices?”

“No, but if I hear again, I know.”

“Do you think he was someone from MicroBridge, someone who worked with your husband?”

She shook her head. “Maybe, maybe not.”

“What did he look like?”

“One was big,” she answered firmly. “Big and mean. Other, with stocking on face. Smaller and not so mean.”

“Did they say what they wanted?”

“Computer. Kimiko's computer.”

“What computer, and why did they want it?”

She shrugged.

“Where was it? Did Kimi keep the computer at home or at work?”

Machiko shook her head emphatically.

“If she didn't keep it either place, where was it?”

“In trailer. New computer. Surprise from Tadeo.”

I felt a quick catch of excitement in my throat. “A surprise? A gift? Did Kimi even know she had it?”

“No.”

“It was a present for Kimi from her father?”

The eyes opened and looked full at me, bright and alert. “From father and mother,” she corrected firmly. “Graduation present.”

Her answer almost made me smile. Machiko Kurobashi was down but she most definitely was not out. Anyone who thought otherwise would be vastly underestimating her.

“From both of you,” I agreed.

She smiled. Faintly, but a smile nevertheless.

“But the computer's gone now,” I said. “They found it and took it.” I expected that news to have some visible impact on her, but she lay there looking at me, comprehending but showing no sign.

“Do you know why they want it so badly?”

Machiko Kurobashi smiled at me again, almost serenely this time. “No matter,” she said, waving her hand in dismissal.

“No matter!” I exploded, unable to contain my impatience. “What do you mean, ‘No matter'? The people who wanted that computer put you in the hospital and your daughter in surgery.”

“Computer sick,” she explained. “Need medicine. If man not have medicine, computer not work.”

“What does she mean, the computer's sick? The virus?” Halvorsen caught on fast.

“Must be,” I said. Turning to Machiko, I asked, “You mean the computer you were giving Kimiko also has the virus?”

She nodded. “Tadeo smart man. He fix.”

“Fixed so it wouldn't work?”

“Yes.”

For once in my life, I couldn't think of the next question. Halvorsen had to manage for both of us.

“Why?”

“Tadeo worry someone try to steal. He fix. Medicine in safe place. Only Kimiko can use.”

“But where is the medicine? How is she supposed to get it?”

Machiko answered with still another noncommittal shrug. A nurse came in and motioned for us to leave. I started for the door, but Machiko spoke to my back. “Where is sword?” she asked.

Her question, as firm and resolute as the tem
pered steel in the weapon itself, stopped me cold. I turned around to look at her. The nearsighted eyes were gazing vaguely at the whole half of the room.

“Where?” she repeated.

“It's in the crime lab,” I answered slowly. “George Yamamoto is in charge of it.”

She grimaced at the mention of George's name. “I want sword,” she said quietly. “For Kimiko.”

Of course she wanted it for Kimi, I thought. Why shouldn't she? Knowing what I did, I was afraid the sword would be the sum total of Tadeo Kurobashi's legacy to his daughter. “I'll see what I can do,” I told her.

I only hoped Kimiko would live long enough to inherit it.

A
YOUNG
H
ISPANIC-LOOKING DOCTOR
with a chart in his hand was standing near the nurses' station when Andrew Halvorsen and I left Machiko Kurobashi's hospital room.

“How's it going, Rico?” Andy said to him.

The doctor, Enrico Rodriguez, looked up from the chart, saw Halvorsen, and smiled. The two of them evidently knew each other. “Not bad, Andy. This your case?” He closed the chart, impatiently drumming his fingers across the metal cover.

Halvorsen nodded. “Sure is, and this is Detective Beaumont from Seattle P.D.”

“Seattle?” Rodriguez frowned. “Have we been annexed?”

“I'm working a case we believe may be related to this one,” I explained.

“Is that so?” Dismissing me, the doctor turned back to Halvorsen. “What can I do for you, Andy?”

“Will the daughter live?”

Rodriguez shook his head. “It's way too soon to tell. She was still hanging in there when they got to Spokane. That's good for starters.”

“And Mrs. Kurobashi?” I asked.

Rodriguez turned and looked at me before deciding, finally, to answer. “She's not that badly hurt. She's got some cuts and bruises all right, and a couple of cracked ribs. She sprained her wrist when he knocked her down and broke her glasses. I've called her optometrist in Kirkland. He's sending a new pair over by Federal Express. They won't be here until tomorrow, but conceivably, we could release Mrs. Kurobashi this afternoon.”

“Don't,” I said. The word slipped out of my mouth before I could stop it.

Dr. Rodriguez looked at me quizzically. “Don't?” he asked, raising one disapproving eyebrow. “Don't what?”

“Don't release her.”

I knew from the deep frown on Rodriguez's face that I had stepped in it all the way up to my armpits. I had done the unthinkable—called into question a doctor's unquestionable, God-given judgment.

I backpedaled as fast as I could, hoping to undo the damage. “What I meant to say is that if you kept her here, we could probably make arrangements for a guard—”

Dr. Rodriguez cut me off. “Let me remind you, this is a hospital, not a jail. We treat sick people here. We don't hold them under guard, and we don't keep them any longer than absolutely necessary. Furthermore, let me assure you that this hospital is fully capable of protecting patients while
they are here. Once we release them, then they're your problem.”

With that, Dr. Rodriguez slammed the metal chart down on the nurses' station counter and stalked off.

“Rico doesn't like being told what to do,” Andy Halvorsen observed.

“I noticed,” I said.

For the next two hours, accompanied by a telephone company lineman supervisor, we went from one deserted field to another, locating and examining the helicopter flattened areas near the site of each cut phone line. We scoured each area in hopes of finding some shred of evidence that would help us identify the persons responsible, including collecting the cut ends of the wire for sampling later. Other than that, we came up empty-handed.

About two o'clock, we gave up and went back into town to find something to eat. Colfax is far too small to boast its own set of Golden Arches. Big Macs are imported from Pullman, seventeen miles away. Halvorsen led me to the Wheat & Barley, a reasonably upscale eatery, where the two of us dined finger-food fashion, with thick hamburgers and mountains of french fries, on the largess of the City of Seattle. After lunch, we holed up in Detective Halvorsen's Spartan shared office.

When the spoils of statehood were being parceled out here in Washington, Pullman got what was then called the Normal School, and Colfax got the Whitman County Seat. I'm sure it
looked like a good deal at the time. For my money, it still is. I would choose Colfax and county government over living with a town full of kids any day of the week.

Rather than an aging relic, the Whitman County Courthouse was a modern stucco building crowned with a rampart of high-tech antennas. Crammed into a tiny office, we grabbed phones and let our fingers do the walking as we tried to learn where the wire-snipping helicopter had come from and gone to.

Using a series of information operators, we worked our way through major and minor flying services all over the state, everything from slick yuppie charters to down-at-the-heels crop-dusting outfits. To no avail.

Well into the afternoon, Andy received a call from Rita Brice, who phoned from a waiting room in Sacred Heart Medical Center to say that Kimiko had survived the surgery but was not yet out of the woods. She was still in the Intensive Care Unit and still listed in critical condition.

I know all about hospital euphemisms.
Critical
is one degree worse than
guarded. Critical
still has the potential to go either way. Both terms are a hell of a long way from satisfactory.

When Halvorsen passed the news along to me, I didn't allow myself the luxury of a spoken reply. Instead, I picked up the phone and dialed another flying service. By that time we were down to calling seat-of-the-pants outfits in podunk, off-the-
wall towns. It was after five and I was almost ready to give up, but that one last call yielded a slender lead.

The number I had dialed belonged to the St. Helens Flying Service in Woodland, Washington. The woman who answered the phone did so with the frantic hello of someone who has spent hours waiting for a call that doesn't come. I heard her sigh of disappointment when she realized mine still wasn't the voice she wanted to hear, that the call she was expecting still hadn't come.

“My name is Detective Beaumont,” I began.

“A detective! Oh, my God! What's happened? Where is he? Is he all right?”

I hate conversations where I feel as though I'm not playing with a full deck, particularly when I'm the one initiating the call. “Is who all right?”

“My dad, David Lions, who else?”

Who else indeed! I didn't know David Lions from a hole in the ground.

“Excuse me, but I'm afraid I don't know what you're talking about. I don't know anyone named David Lions, and I certainly don't know where he is.”

“Didn't you say you're detective? Aren't you with the Spokane police.”

“No, I'm with the Seattle police, not Spokane's.”

“But the helicopter's in Spokane. They called and told me it was there. How'd he get to Seattle?”

It was getting worse, not better. “Hold on a minute,” I said. “I'm not at all sure what's going
on here. I'm a Seattle police officer investigating a case, and I've been contacting charter services to see if anyone can provide information that would help us.”

The woman was instantly contrite. “I'm sorry. It's just that I'm so worried. He's been missing since this morning, you know.”

I felt a quick catch of excitement in my throat. “Miss…”

“Lions,” she supplied. “Dana Lions. My father and I own the flying service together. He flies the planes. I do the books and handle the reservations.”

“Miss Lions,” I said calmly. “You say your father is missing?”

Across the room, Andy Halvorsen put down his phone and listened intently. Dana Lions hesitated. “Not really. It's just that now nobody can find him.”

“Tell me exactly what happened.”

“He left late yesterday afternoon to pick up a charter in Seattle and ferry him to Spokane. He had flown another trip earlier in the day, so he planned to stay overnight and come back this morning. We haven't heard from him since.”

“Maybe he rented a room somewhere, and he's still asleep.”

Dana Lions took a deep breath. “I already checked the Ridpath. That's where he usually stays, but he's not there. Besides, he wouldn't still be asleep at this hour.” She paused. “Dad doesn't need much sleep.”

She stopped. I had a feeling there was something else, something she wasn't saying, but I had no idea what it was. I waited for her to continue.

“He came back from Vietnam in '71 and started the business in '75. After St. Helens blew up in 1980, he got the idea of doing scenic flyovers so tourists could take pictures. We did fine for a while, but in the last few years he's had some problems.”

“Problems?” I asked. “What kind of problems?”

“Post-traumatic-stress syndrome.”

Those few words gave me a hint of what she hadn't been saying earlier.

“Periodically, if he gets a pocketful of money, he goes a little haywire.”

“And you think that's what's going on here?”

“When the guy called in yesterday to make the reservation, I asked him for a credit card number. We always do that in case of cancellations and no-shows, but he said he'd be paying cash and that he'd throw in a little extra. We need the money real bad right now, so I took it. I hope to God it wasn't anything illegal, was it?”

I sidestepped her question by asking one of my own. “Didn't you say you knew your father had landed in Spokane?”

“We talked to them about noon when we still hadn't heard from him.” Dana Lions gave me the name and number of an official at Spokane International Airport. “Will you let me know what you find out?” she asked.

“Certainly,” I said, allowing my voice to sound far more convincing than I should have. If David Lions was somehow tied in with the severed telephone lines, he and his little company and his worried daughter were in big trouble, far worse than that caused by a few unpaid bills.

“Just a few more questions,” I said. “Did the man making the reservation leave a name?”

“Smith. Charles Smith. I have it written down right here. Dad was supposed to meet him at the Renton Airport.”

“Did he?”

“As far as I know.”

“Did your father file a flight plan?”

“Always. You can get a copy of it from the FAA. But why do you want it? I told you, the helicopter's already safely on the ground in Spokane.”

“Right,” I said. As we finished talking, she gave me her home number in Kalama, and I told her how to locate both Andy Halvorsen and me if she needed to, reassuring her one more time that we'd notify her instantly if we learned anything more about her missing father.

“Looks like you hit the jackpot,” Halvorsen said as I held down the switch hook long enough to get a dial tone. Reading from my notes, I dialed the number at Spokane International and talked to a man named Kyle Preston.

“Do you have a helicopter there that belongs to an outfit named St. Helens Flying Service?”

“Sure do.”

“I want you to post a security guard out by that helicopter,” I said. “No one is to go near it or touch it, is that clear? And if anyone tries to take off in it, detain them until we can get there.”

“Wait just a damned minute! Who the hell do you think you are, ordering me around like this?”

“My name's Detective J.P. Beaumont with the Seattle Police Department, and I've got a Whitman County sheriff's department detective named Andrew Halvorsen with me. We're on our way.”

“What's going on here? This Lions character has been doing nothing but causing trouble all day long. First thing this morning that SOB puts down here and walks off without paying his landing fee, without saying how long he'll be here or kiss my ass. Nothing. It's like the world owes him a goddamned living. We're not running this place just for the hell of it, you know.”

“Did you actually see him get off the helicopter?”

Kyle snorted derisively. “Are you kidding? You think I've got time enough to give every harebrained pilot around here the damned red carpet treatment? We've got an airport to run. We leave the greeting committee bullshit to the local chamber of commerce.”

Without giving him the opportunity to make any further objections, I hung up the phone. Halvorsen picked up his phone and dialed a number.

“Hi, hon,” he said a moment later. “Did I wake you?” A sudden brittle tension had crept into his voice and a slight tic appeared over his jawline, a
mannerism that I hadn't noticed before. “Sorry. Look, Monica, something's come up. Right now I'm on my way to Spokane. Can you get a ride to work?” He paused. “I know. I'm sorry, sweetie, but it's important.”

He grew quiet before a sudden verbal onslaught that I could hear angry echoes of clear across the room. Whoever Monica was, she sounded pissed as hell.

Finally he said resignedly, “But, hon, I'll be back in plenty of time to pick you up…” A dial tone buzzed in his ear. Monica had hung up on him. Halvorsen threw the phone back in its cradle.

“Come on,” he muttered. “Let's get the hell out of here.”

We rode toward Spokane in silence, with Halvorsen brooding and driving like a bat out of hell, alternately smoking and chewing on a new cigar. I left him alone. Whatever was going on between him and Monica was none of my business. Besides I had plenty to think about on my own.

No matter what, I couldn't shake the conviction that St. Helens Flying Service and David Lions were somehow involved in what had happened to Kimi and Machiko Kurobashi. To an outsider, the connection might seem remote, but I'm no believer in blind coincidence. Cops don't think that way. If things appear to be connected, they probably are.

It all boiled down to one major question and several lesser ones. Who the hell was Charles Smith, David Lions' cash-paying passenger, the
mysterious client who had chartered a helicopter to fly across the state? Had he disrupted telephone service and assaulted two innocent women along the way? If so, what did he really want? And did he already have it?

“You have any friends or acquaintances at the Federal Aviation Administration?” I asked.

“Huh?” Halvorsen returned, still lost in his fog of anger.

“Do you have any connections at the FAA?” I repeated. “Someone who could locate the flight plan for us.”

Halvorsen seemed relieved to have something else to think about. Shaking off his black mood, he put out the cigar and picked up the radio. He talked to someone at the Pullman-Moscow Airport, some deer-hunting/fishing buddy from the sound of it. The information we needed came back to us in less than ten minutes.