Authors: J. A. Jance
I
was standing in my own bedroom minding my own business and knotting my tie when Mel Soames hopped into the doorway from her room down the hall. She was wearing nothing but a bra and a pair of panties, and she was doing a strange ostrichlike dance as she attempted to put one foot into a pair of panty hose.
“So what are you going to do about a tux?” she asked. “Buy or rent?”
Some questions posed by half-naked women are more easily answered than others. This one had me tumped. What tux? I wondered.
Since I quit drinking, I find I’m in fairly good shape when it comes to remembering things. For example, we had spent most of the weekend on the road, driving down to Ashland, Oregon, to
see my month-old grandson, Kyle Roger Cartwright. I remembered the eight-hour ride down, including our post-midnight arrival at the Peerless Hotel in the wee hours of Saturday morning.
I remembered spending all of Saturday alternately having my picture taken with and taking pictures of a month-old blanket-wrapped round-faced little kid who looked like he would have preferred sleeping peacefully to being passed from hand to hand during a nonstop day-long photo shoot. I clearly remembered having to explain to my precocious four-year-old granddaughter, Kayla, that Mel was
not
her grandmother. And I particularly remembered how much of a kick my daughter and son-in-law, Kelly and Jeremy, had gotten out of my trying to dig my way out of that hole.
And I also remembered the eight-hour drive back to Seattle on Sunday afternoon, especially the part where I had managed to keep my mouth shut when Mel was pulled over by an Oregon state trooper for doing seventy-seven miles per hour in a posted sixty-five. (It could have been much worse. The alabaster-white S55 Mercedes sedan I bought used from my friend and lawyer Ralph Ames has five hundred horsepower under the hood, a top speed of 184, and is deceptively quiet.) But the motorcycle cop was a young guy. Mel gave him the full-press blonde treatment complete with a winning if apologetic smile and managed to talk her way out of the ticket. But then, that’s Mel for you.
However, nothing in all those bits of memory even hinted at my needing a tux. For any reason whatsoever.
“Buy,” I said.
It was a desperate gamble, but I came up winners. Mel shot me a radiant smile. “Good answer,” she said. “We should probably plan on doing that at lunchtime, or maybe right after work. That way, if there’s tailoring that needs to be done…”
Snapping her panty hose in place, she disappeared back down the hall to finish dressing. I finished knotting my tie and then went out into the kitchen to drink coffee and contemplate my fate. Tux or not, Mel Soames brought something to the table that wasn’t half bad.
We had met working for the Washington State attorney general’s Special Homicide Investigation Team, the SHIT squad, as it’s derisively known in local cop-shop circles. I had gone there after bailing out of homicide at Seattle PD. My former partner, Sue Danielson, had died in a shoot-out, and I had wanted to find a way to keep my hand in law enforcement without having to deal with the emotional stress of a partner. Ross Alan Connors, the A.G., had offered me just such a position. Mel, it turned out, had come to Washington State and to SHIT for a similar reason, only the partnership problem she was leaving behind was a bad marriage and a worse divorce. But then we got turned into partners anyway—unofficially and without either one of us necessarily meaning for it to happen.
In the course of several memorable days, Mel had ended up watching my back in not one but two life-and-death situations. It turned out she was damned good at it, too. And then when someone ran me through a greenhouse wall, cut open my scalp, and filled me full of tiny glass shards, she had brought me home from the ER and had stayed on to look after me. (Months later, little slivers of glass still pop up occasionally when I’m shaving.)
To begin with, Mel camped out in the guest room down the hall, but over the course of time that had changed, too. The only parts of the guest suite she now uses are the closet and the bathroom. We call it her dressing room.
It goes without saying that we’re both well beyond the age of consent and old enough to know that working together and living together is a very bad idea. SHIT is a new-enough agency that nobody has ever quite gotten around to setting down in writing all the rules and procedures about what should or shouldn’t be done. If they had, I’m sure cohabitation between fellow investigators would be close to the top of the prohibited list. But there’s no fool like an old fool—or maybe even a pair of them.
And so, even though it’s probably a bad idea, we do it anyway. Sometimes we stay at Mel’s place in Bellevue, but mostly we stay at my high-rise condo in Seattle’s Denny Regrade neighborhood. (Much better view from the penthouse at Belltown Terrace than from her third-story apartment in the burbs!) We car-pool together in the express lanes across Lake Washington and then pick up or drop off the other vehicle in the park-and-ride lot on the east side of the lake.
A word about my condo. New acquaintances are often curious about how a retired homicide cop happens to sit in the penthouse suite of one of Seattle’s most desirable high-rises. The truth is, I wouldn’t be in Belltown Terrace at all if it weren’t for Anne Corley, my second wife, whose shocking death left me holding an unexpected fortune. I had never driven a Porsche until I inherited hers. And it was only after that one finally bit the dust—after being mashed flat by a marauding Escalade—that I had gone looking for something else.
My Mercedes S55 may have come to me used, but it’s several years newer than Mel’s BMW, so her 740 tends to be relegated to second-class status on most workdays. The only problem with sharing cars is my steadfast refusal to have talk radio playing in mine. Period. (In my opinion, a little bit of all-talk-all-the-time
arguing goes a very long way.) So when we’re in the Mercedes we tend to listen to KING-FM. I’m a latecomer to classical music, but it’s the one inarguable alternative to perpetual arguing.
Once on the east side, we split up and drive on to the SHIT Squad B offices in Eastgate in our two separate vehicles. We park next to each other in the parking lot and ride up in the elevator together. Big secret—sneaky and subtle. It’s a lot like thinking you’re pulling the wool over parental eyes when you’re in junior high and busy sneaking in and out of the house in the middle of the night. I suspect our boss, Harry I. Ball, knows all about it and simply chooses to keep his mouth shut on the subject. I believe it’s a variation on the theme of “Don’t ask; don’t tell.”
Mel showed up in the kitchen looking like a million dollars. She gave me a breezy kiss, filled our two thermos traveling cups with coffee, and we headed out. It had been sunny in Ashland over the weekend, but it had rained from Thursday on in Seattle and it was still raining like crazy that Monday morning.
“Did you call Beverly and Lars?” she asked.
Beverly, my ninety-something grandmother, lives with her second husband, Lars Jenssen, in an assisted-living facility up on Queen Anne Hill. Beverly was fading—they both were—and I dreaded calling for fear of hearing bad news.
“Not yet,” I said. “Too early.”
That was nonsense, of course. Both Beverly and Lars were lifelong early risers who could have, individually and together, roused the birds out of bed.
“Try giving them a call later, then,” Mel advised. “Kelly sent along that little framed picture of Kyle—the one they took in the hospital. She wanted to be sure we got it to them right away.”
“Right,” I said. “Maybe we can see them after work tonight.”
We rode up in the elevator together. Mel ducked into her office and turned on her radio. I was surprised to see that Barbara Galvin, our super-efficient office manager, wasn’t at her desk. I found her in the break room waiting for a pot of coffee to finish brewing.
“Heads up,” she said. “The big guy’s here.”
“The big guy,” of course, was none other than Attorney General Ross Alan Connors. In the two years I had worked for the man, I could count on one hand—more like one finger—the times the A.G. had sallied forth from his lair in Olympia and driven up the I-5 corridor to pay a personal visit to Squad B of his Special Homicide Investigation Team.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“Who knows?” Barbara replied with a shrug. “He turned up a few minutes after I did. He’s been closeted with Harry for the last twenty minutes.”
I’m a guilt magnet—even when I haven’t done anything wrong. In this case, I knew I was at fault. There was no doubt in my mind that Ross Connors had appeared in person to read me the riot act for carrying on with Mel. (Mel would insist I was being a sexist jerk since, in actual fact, we were both equally at fault.) Sexist or not, however, when Ross showed up outside my door a few minutes later, I was ready to take full responsibility for our little indiscretion.
“Hey, Beau,” Ross said. “Do you mind?”
“Come on in,” I replied as casually as I could manage. “Be my guest.”
Ross Connors is a big man, someone who fills up any room he enters. That goes triple for my tiny office. At six-four and two-eighty, he looks like what he was in high school and college, a
top-drawer tackle. He’s also an experienced politician with all the careful grooming, finely tailored clothing, and good looks that go with that territory. But Ross was beginning to show his age. His wife’s very public suicide a year or so earlier had taken its toll. His hair, once a distinguished salt-and-pepper, was now solid gray, and there were dark circles under his eyes—as though he wasn’t sleeping well. I could certainly relate to that.
Holding a cup of coffee, Ross settled back in my only guest chair. He took a tentative sip of the coffee and then heaved a contented sigh. “Much better,” he said. “I don’t know who made that first pot. It was like drinking crankcase oil.”
“That would be Harry,” I told him. “His own personal witch’s brew. The rest of us have learned to wait until Barbara Galvin makes the next pot.”
“Wise decision,” Ross said. “Remind me next time.”
My office isn’t much larger than a cubicle would be anywhere else. When Ross reached over and pushed the door shut, I figured he was building up to giving me my dressing-down, but he didn’t. Instead, he took another measured sip of coffee.
“So what are you working on these days?” he asked.
This qualified as a disingenuous question of the first water because I was sure Ross Alan Connors knew
exactly
what each of his special investigators was working on. I decided to go with the flow.
“The missing persons thing,” I answered.
Harry I. Ball, with his usual flair for understatement, had shortened the handle to MPT, and MPT was definitely Ross Connors’s own personal baby. In most jurisdictions, missing persons reports could just as well go into the round file to begin with. The reports come in and they go away almost immediately. Unless the
missing person in question is a little kid or a good-looking babe who catches some media attention, nothing much happens. Most agencies don’t have the time, money, resources, or inclination to follow up on them.
It had finally dawned on Ross, however, that it was time for a systematic review of missing persons reports from all over the state. He had embarked on a program that included making the effort of tracking down and interviewing surviving family members, inputting all relevant information from Washington State’s missing persons reports into a national database, and comparing our list to any nationwide reports of unidentified remains. This was all done in the hope and expectation that closing some of our missing persons cases would also help close some unsolved homicides. So far the results were disappointing.
For the past two months, from as soon as I came back from medical leave, that’s what I had been doing—combing missing persons reports, entering the information into national and statewide databases, and seeing what came out the other end. For the most part it was dull, unrewarding work that could have been done by a well-trained clerk, but if the A.G. wanted full-grade investigators working the program, who was I to argue?
“How’s that going?” Ross asked.
“It’s a lot like looking for two halves of the same needle in several different haystacks,” I told him.
“No hits yet?”
“A few. I’ve found three where the people had turned back up, but, for one reason or another, never did get taken off the missing persons list. This afternoon I have an interview scheduled with a woman named DeAnn Cosgrove whose father went missing back in 1980.”
“Twenty-five years,” Ross mused. “That’s a long time.”
“That’s what she said when I called her about it. Why bring it up now? I told her I had to—it was my job.”
Ross smiled and nodded. He didn’t seem to be in any hurry, but I was ready for the other shoe to drop.
“So how are things between you and Seattle PD these days?” he asked.
This was not the shoe I expected. “Seattle PD?” I asked stupidly.
Ross grinned. “You know. Remember the place you worked for twenty-odd years?”
His “how are things” inquiry should have been easy to answer, but it wasn’t. Yes, I had worked in Seattle PD for a long time, most of it as a homicide detective. All the way along, though, I had rubbed the brass the wrong way, and the reverse had certainly been true. I hadn’t liked them much, either. Something to do with my not being considered a “good team player.” It turned out that working for Ross Connors had proved to be the one notable exception in a career marred by ongoing feuds with many of my commanding officers.
“So-so,” I said. “Things improved a little after Mel Soames and I pulled Paul Kramer’s fat out of the fire.”
Kramer was the brownnosing, ambitious jerk who had been a thorn in my side from the moment he first stepped foot in Homicide. His, in my opinion, undeserved promotion to captain had been the final straw in the whole series of unfortunate events that had driven me off the force.
Months earlier, his singularly stupid episode of tombstone courage—of going into a dangerous situation without waiting for backup—had almost cost him his life, would have cost
him his life if Mel and I hadn’t ridden to the rescue at just the right moment. And, of course, that was the very reason he had done it in the first place. He had realized that we were following the same trail he was. In his eagerness to beat us to the punch and gain all the credit, he had committed an almost fatal error.