Dismissed With Prejudice (9780061760631) (9 page)

Where was my missing chunk of time? I worried the question like an old dog gnawing a bone. What had happened to the part of my life that contained my agreement to go to the mystery meeting with Ralph Ames and where I had somehow, inexplicably, smashed my fingers badly enough to require the attention of a doctor? How could I possibly have forgotten those things so completely? As if on cue, the constant throbbing reasserted itself, a pulsing reminder.

Try as I might to remember, though, there was nothing there, not a trace. It was as if a heavy black curtain had been pulled over the window of my memory. A blackout curtain.

As soon as the word came into my head, so did a sickening inkling of where that piece of my life had gone. I had forgotten things before on occasion. Everybody does that, but it had never been anything terribly important. I could recall misplacing my car once, finding it late the next day in the parking lot outside the Doghouse. But this time it was blatantly clear to me that, despite my desperately wanting to remember, I was missing pieces of my life that nobody else was. And there was a distinct cause-and-effect relationship that was hard to deny.

I thrashed around in bed and fought with the covers in a vain effort to deny the word's reality, to make the ugly possibility rebury itself somewhere far away, but it didn't. The word
blackout
was an evil genie let out of its bottle. It was out, and it wouldn't disappear.

And so I waited for sleep and mostly didn't find it until close to daylight. The rain had stopped. The last thing I heard before I fell asleep was the raucous squawk of a marauding sea gull. And that's when the dream came. I know it by heart. I see it over and over, and it's always the same.

Anne Corley, vibrant and alive and wearing the same red dress she wore when I first saw her, stands in a windswept park with the breeze rip
pling her hair. I call to her and she turns to look at me. She is holding a rose, a single, long-stemmed red rose. I go to her, running at that desperate nightmarish pace that robs you of strength and breath but covers no distance. At last I stop a few feet away from her, and she starts toward me. I reach out to clasp her in my arms, but as I do, the rose in her hands changes to a gun, and I step back screaming, “No! No! No!”

I awoke in a room awash in daylight with streams of sweat pouring off my body. Lying there alone in bed, waiting for the shaking to stop and my heartbeat to steady, I cursed Fate and any other gods who might be listening for making me be one of the few men I know who dreams in living color.

In black and white, it might not hurt as much.

An hour or so later, Ames and I were drinking coffee at the kitchen counter when the phone rang. I more than half expected the call to be from Peters—it was about time for him to check in—but the voice on the other end of the line was that of a total stranger.

“Is this the Seattle Police Department?” the gruff male voice asked.

“No it isn't,” I answered. “This is a private residence.”

“I'm looking for somebody named Beaumont. Anybody there by that name?”

“I'm Detective Beaumont. Who's calling, please?”

“Jesus Christ. Did that yo-yo give me your home number?” he demanded.

“Evidently.”

“Sorry. I waited until I figured you'd be at work before I called.”

“It's all right. Who is this, please?” I asked again.

“Oh, sorry. The name's Halvorsen. Detective Andrew Halvorsen with the Whitman County Sheriff's Department. I've got a note here saying that you called in last night concerning a couple of women out at Honeydale Farm?”

My stomach tightened. So did my grip on the telephone receiver. “That's correct,” I said carefully. “Is anything wrong?”

“Are these women related to you in any way, Detective Beaumont?”

“No, they're not. One is the wife and the other the daughter of a man who was murdered here in Seattle day before yesterday. I'm the homicide detective assigned to that case. Why? What's going on?”

“The old woman will probably be all right. She's not as badly hurt, although the doctors tell me that at her age any injury can have serious side effects. As for the other one, I understand they're calling for a Medevac helicopter. As soon as they can get her stabilized enough, they'll be flying her either to Spokane or Seattle for surgery.”

My throat constricted around the last swallow of coffee. A terrible impotent rage rose through my body.

“That's what I was afraid of, for God's sake. Didn't that worthless son of a bitch do
anything?
”

“Now, now, Detective Beaumont,” Halvorsen said soothingly. “Don't be too hard on Larkin. He did the best he could under the circumstances. This place was a zoo last night, and we were spread way too thin with the kind of problems we were having all over the county. He did enter the call in the log, however, and when I put the two together a few minutes ago, I thought I'd better get in touch with you.”

With supreme effort I managed to keep my voice steady enough to speak. “Tell me what happened.”

“We're still not sure. Rita Brice, the owner of Honeydale Farm, evidently got up about six and noticed that the horses still weren't out in the pasture. She went to Kimi's house, thinking she had overslept, and discovered the mother, bound and gagged. Rita untied the mother, left her there in the house, and went to the barn. That's where she found the daughter. Rita did what she could, then ran back to summon help. Luckily, by that time the phones were all working again.”

“Is Kimi going to make it?” I asked.

“Too soon to tell. Larkin's notation said that you thought the women might be in some kind of danger. Do you think these two assaults are related to the murder in Seattle?”

“Absolutely.”

“We'd better put our heads together, then. Do you want to come over here or should I go there?” Halvorsen asked.

“I'll come there,” I said without hesitation. “As soon as I check in with my office.”

“All right. Horizon flies directly into the Pullman-Moscow Airport. If you can let me know what time you'll be in, I'll come pick you up.”

“Meet the next flight that leaves from Sea-Tac,” I said. “If I can't make that one, I'll call and let you know.”

I dropped off his call and immediately dialed Sergeant Watkins at home. Shaking his head, Ralph Ames listened as I explained the situation to Watty. As I expected, the sergeant told me to get my ass to the airport, that he'd handle whatever official paperwork had to be handled, including notifying airport security that I was on my way.

Ralph Ames handed me out the door and told me he'd get me a reservation on the next available flight while I made a dash for the airport.

It turned out that airport security wasn't that much of a problem since Horizon's gate is so small that they don't have a security check. I don't know what strings Ames pulled, but I'm sure he yanked at least one because the Pullman-bound Swearingen Metro-Liner was still waiting on the ground when I got there, even though it had been scheduled to leave some ten minutes earlier.

And that's how, thirty-five minutes after Andy Halvorsen's call, I was in the air on my way to Pullman, Washington, sitting scrunched into one
of the midget-sized seats, with my neck bent to one side and my knees jammed into the backrest of the seat in front of me.

Six foot three is too damned tall for Metro-Liners.

T
HE
P
ULLMAN
-M
OSCOW
A
IRPORT IS SET
in a natural swale among rolling high hills. As the plane landed and the golden-grained landscape loomed up on either side of the runway, I gripped the handles of the seat and cursed myself for flying, although I suppose the safety statistics on red Porsches are a good deal worse than those for commuter airlines.

Not knowing how long I'd be away, I had stuck a briefcase with a change of underwear and a clean shirt in the nose of the plane, and since Metro-Liner passengers carry their own bags, I didn't have to wait for luggage to be delivered to a carousel inside the pint-sized lobby. There
were
no luggage carousels inside the lobby and not much of anything else, either. Two tiny but highly competitive branches of name-brand rent-a-car companies were busy. Both had lines—two customers at one and three at the other—which probably accounted for a major portion of that day's business.

Glancing around the lobby, I searched in vain for someone who might be the detective who was
supposed to pick me up. Seeing no one, I walked over to the plate glass doors that opened on a gravel parking lot. That's where I found Detective Andrew Halvorsen.

There was a good reason for his not being inside the terminal to meet me. They wouldn't let him. He was smoking a cigar, a well-chewed Churchill-sized Royal Jamaican.

Aside from that, Halvorsen seemed like a regular enough kind of guy—tall, well built, about my size, late forties, square-jawed good looks, neatly trimmed brush mustache, curly dark brown hair showing just a sprinkling of gray.

“Detective Beaumont?” he asked, catching sight of me.

I nodded.

“This way. The car's right here.”

He led me to a white, four-door K-car. Lee Iacocca and his pals at Chrysler must have sold a handful of those hummers to every law enforcement jurisdiction in the country. Detective divisions always get stuck with them. Halvorsen popped open the trunk, and I tossed my gear inside.

“Any word?” I asked.

“None so far. They've airlifted the daughter to Sacred Heart in Spokane. They've scheduled emergency surgery for as soon as she gets there. The mother is still in Colfax Community Hospital, but I thought we'd drive by their place on the way so you could take a look around.”

“Good idea,” I said.

If I had any hopes that Halvorsen's car would have a no-smoking section, I was out of luck. The car was clouded by a haze of dense smoke that fogged the windows and made my eyes water. I'll never get used to that foul smell.

He closed the door to the car and exhaled a billowing plume before he ever turned the key in the ignition. I stifled the urge to ask him to put out the cigar. After all, if I wanted my own vices to be off limits to criticism from casual friends and acquaintances, then I'd best keep my mouth shut about somebody else's. What goes around comes around.

Talking as we went, Halvorsen drove us into and then through the hilly, winding streets of Pullman, a sleepy Midwestern-looking farming community with a stable population of about 8,000. Washington State University has been grafted into the middle of town, bringing with it a transient population of 20,000 or so students. God save me from ever living anyplace where minors outnumber regular people by a margin of three to one!

Within minutes we were out in the open again, heading northwest on Highway 195 driving through miles of ripened corn and wheatfields beside an unending line of stocky telephone poles.

“What about the phones?” I asked, eying the drooping lines. “Were the wires deliberately cut?”

It was the question that had been chewing on me all during the hour-long flight from Seattle. I had forgotten to ask Halvorsen about it earlier on the phone.

“You bet,” Halvorsen replied.

“And related to this?”

“No question. Whoever did it wanted to create as big a disruption in communications as possible. They knew that if the wires were cut in just one place, the phone company would probably have been able to reroute calls from the central office and restore service in minutes. Instead, they cut wires in several places. That way, until repair crews fixed one break, they couldn't pinpoint the next.”

Halvorsen took a long pull on his cigar. “It was deliberate all right. Deliberate, methodical, and smart, and it created enough of a smoke screen that we had no idea that the problem centered at Honeydale Farm.”

“And what time did they start?”

“The outages? Right around ten, as far as we can tell.”

“Time enough,” I said.

“Time enough for what?”

“For whoever it was to follow Kimi here from Seattle, learn where she lived, and figure out how to cut off all lines of communication.”

“Any ideas why someone would want to go to all that trouble?” Halvorsen asked.

“That one has me stumped so far. Whoever killed her father tried to cover it up by making it look as though he had committed suicide with an extremely valuable samurai sword. The killer took off and left the sword on the floor beside the body.”

“So we can be relatively sure they weren't after the sword.”

“That's how it looks at the moment. Not only that, at approximately the same time, someone messed with Kurobashi's company computer system. They fed a virus into it, destroying all the records. Because of that, there's no way to tell what they were after.”

“What did he do?”

“Kurobashi? He was an engineer doing some kind of computer stuff. I'm still not sure exactly what.”

“You think maybe they wanted to lay hands on some project he was doing?”

I nodded. “Either to steal it or wipe it out of existence.”

“But that doesn't explain why they'd come after the women,” Halvorsen mused. “What could they possibly know, or is the wife an engineer too?”

“Domestic engineer,” I replied. “An ordinary housewife as far as I can tell.” If Halvorsen noticed my quip, he didn't crack a smile.

“And the daughter?”

“She is an engineer, still a student. Same field as her father, but the two of them have been estranged for years. I don't see how she could know much of anything about his current business operation.”

There was a lull in the conversation. When Halvorsen spoke, his face was grim. “The things they did to her weren't calculated to make her talk.
These bastards got their rocks off doing ugly stuff, torture worthy of calling in Amnesty International. It must have gone on for hours.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“First they dragged her out to the barn and killed her horse in front of her. Made her watch, I'd guess.” Halvorsen paused, chewing angrily on the stub of his cigar. “And finally they raped her, with a bottle, a broken bottle. The medics said it was a miracle she didn't bleed to death before they got to her. She'll be lucky if she lives, to say nothing of ever being able to have children.”

Outrage, like bile, roiled up in my gut. “Machiko too?”

“No. She was beaten up some, but nothing like what they did to the daughter. They must have thought Kimiko was the key to whatever it was they were looking for.”

“You keep saying ‘they.'”

Halvorsen nodded. “From what I understand there were two—one with a stocking over his face and the other wearing gloves.”

“One they'd recognize and one they wouldn't?”

“The thought had crossed my mind,” Halvorsen said.

Silence as thick as the heavy cigar smoke settled over the car. I didn't ask for more details. I didn't need them right then. Moral outrage over the atrocities committed on Kimiko Kurobashi would only get in the way of nailing the creeps who had done them. Instead, I settled for a kind of seething,
controlled anger. There would be time enough later to know the other ugly details. Right now we had to concentrate on catching the sons of bitches.

The sense of urgency to do just that was almost overpowering. “When do you think it happened?”

“Looks like they left early this morning. They were gone before Rita Brice got up at six. I've got roadblocks up all over the county, but I don't know what the hell we're looking for—a car, a truck, who knows?” Halvorsen paused and glanced at me. “Any idea who might be behind all this?”

“Nothing solid so far. I've heard that Kurobashi had a big falling out with a former employer, and that the two of them have been involved in a dog-eat-dog lawsuit, one that essentially put Kurobashi out of business, but that's all I know so far. I would have interviewed the ex-employer today, but I'm over here instead.”

“So Kurobashi's business had something to do with computers,” Halvorsen said thoughtfully.

“Right.”

“I wonder if that's what she was talking about.”

“Who?”

“The mother. One of the paramedics claimed that on the way to the hospital, she kept mumbling something about a computer. He and his partner were busy with the daughter and didn't pay that much attention, but they both agreed she was trying to tell them something about a computer. Incidentally, do you speak Japanese?”

“No.”

Halvorsen pounded the steering wheel. “How the hell are we going to interview her then?” he asked. “The medics said she barely speaks English.”

“Don't worry,” I said. “We'll get by. I'm pretty sure she understands more than she lets on.”

We had swung off Highway 195 onto a narrow gravel road. “It's only about three miles from here.”

Each turn of the K-car's wheels was taking us farther and farther into the vast rolling emptiness of the Palouse, fertile and full of shimmering oceans of golden wheat and ripened corn, but with only isolated farmhouses dotting the countryside. An intense wave of guilt washed over me as I thought of Kimi and Machiko, alone and vulnerable, left to the wolves.

“Damn Mac Larkin!” I exclaimed.

“It wasn't his fault,” Halvorsen returned. “He was doing the best he could.”

The road we were on stopped abruptly at a wire gate. On either side of the gate, a white wooden fence stretched into the distance. Set in a stand of aging cottonwoods and huge drooping willows, Honeydale Farm looked far more like a Kentucky showplace than a horse farm far off the beaten path in the wilds of eastern Washington.

As I stood holding the gate open for Halvorsen to drive through, I more than half expected a guard dog to come snarling up and take a hunk out of the back of my leg. None did. The place lay still and quiet in early autumn's midmorning sunshine.

“People around here think she puts on airs,” Halvorsen said as I got back in the car and we started down a rutted track.

“Who?”

“Rita Brice, the lady who owns this place. She's not a native, you know. She was married to a big-time Appaloosa breeder who had places both here and across the state line in Moscow, Idaho. When they split up, she got this place and he got the one over there. Now she's gone and set herself up in direct competition with her ex.”

“Sounds fair enough to me,” I said.

Andy Halvorsen gave me an odd look and then went on with his story. “She rents out most of the fields, but she runs the breeding operation herself.”

“Alone?”

“Except for that young woman, the one who's in the hospital. That's the main house up there,” he said, pointing toward a gaunt, weathered two-story frame house. “The help lives over there behind the barn and stables.”

We drove through a motley collection of tin and wooden outbuildings which included a slightly tilted, but totally authentic, old red barn.

We stopped in front of a much smaller house, little more than a cottage really. The Suburban was nowhere in sight, but the horse trailer still was parked near the front door. Fifty feet away sat a white Whitman County patrol car. The uniformed deputy inside waved to us, and Detective Halvorsen waved back.

“Where's the car?” I asked.

“The Suburban? It's over there, in the garage. About the trailer—were those all the mother's things in there?” Halvorsen asked, motioning toward the trailer.

I nodded before I really comprehended the underlying message in his question. “Were?” I asked.

“It's all smashed to bits. Want to take a look?”

“I don't but I'd better,” I said.

Halvorsen walked toward the horse trailer and reached for the latch. Worried about preserving evidence, I tried to stop him.

“It's all right,” he said, cutting through the orange evidence tape that had been placed across the door. “We're not exactly hicks around here. We've already dusted for prints. We'll have the trailer towed into the crime lab in Spokane as soon as the wrecker is free.”

With that, he swung the door wide open, allowing me a look at the shambles inside. Before, the trailer had been neatly stacked with Machiko's carefully packed and labeled boxes. Those packed treasures were now nothing more than a pile of debris. There was deliberate malice in the way the boxes had been ripped open, the contents scattered and smashed and torn to bits.

“It's a mess, isn't it,” Halvorsen commented.

Speechless with rekindled anger, I could only nod.

“But there's no sign of a computer here anywhere,” Halvorsen continued. “If it was here, they
got it. That's what I told the guys at the roadblock to look for, a stolen computer.”

As we stood there surveying the damage, a woman came up behind us. Although much older than Kimi, her clothes looked as though they had come off the rack in the same St. Vincent de Paul store—work shirt, faded jeans, dusty, run-down boots.

Rita Brice was well into her fifties with naturally silver hair and the icy blue eyes of a born Scandinavian. Deep laugh lines crinkled up from the corners of her eyes, across tanned and weathered cheeks. The eyes weren't laughing now.

“How's Kimi, Andy?” she asked, addressing Detective Halvorsen with easy small-town familiarity. “Any word yet?”