Authors: J. A. Jance
Somewhere in the wilds of the state capitol down in Olympia was the out-of-touch Washington State bureaucrat who had dreamed up the name for the Special Homicide Investigation Team of which former Seattle homicide detective J.P. Beaumont was now the newest member. If you say the name word for word like that—Special Homicide Investigation Team—it sounds fine, dignified, even. The same holds true if you print it out on stationery or business cards. And that’s exactly what that same dim-witted state official did. He went nuts ordering reams of preprinted stationery, forms, envelopes, and business cards.
There was, however, a fly in the ointment. The world we live in is made up of shortcuts and acronyms—the Seattle PD, the U.S. of A., the U Dub, et cetera. The AG’s (see what I mean?) Special Homicide Investigation Team had barely opened its doors for business when people started shortening the name to something a little more manageable. And that’s where the SHIT hit the fan, so to speak. While everyone agrees the name is “regrettable” and “unfortunate,” no one in the state bureaucracy is willing to take the heat for rescinding that previously placed order for preprinted stationery, forms, and business cards. So SHIT it was, and SHIT it remains.
Getting back to my mother. I don’t want you to think Karen Piedmont was some kind of humorless prude. She was, after all, an unwed mother who, in the uptight fifties, raised me without much help from anyone—including her own parents. Her total focus was on turning me into a “good boy.” To that end, “bad language” was not allowed. As far as I know, the word “shit” never escaped my mother’s lips. Her mother, on the other hand, a chirpy eighty-six-year-old named Beverly Piedmont Jenssen, loves to ask me about my job—acronym included. It’s as though, at her advanced age, she’s decided she’s allowed to say anything she damned well pleases. And does.
Woolgathering as I went, I drove straight to what locals call the Mercer Mess—the Mercer Street on-ramp to I-5. I planned to take I-5 south to I-90 and go east across Lake Washington to the business park in Bellevue’s Eastgate area, where the attorney general had seen fit to set his team of investigators up in a glass-walled low-rise building.
But southbound I-5 was where things went dreadfully wrong. I turned onto the on-ramp and stopped cold. Nobody was moving—not on the ramp, and not on the freeway, either.
This was not news from the front. Seattle’s metropolitan area is notorious for gridlock. It’s a tradition. For the last several decades our trusted elected public officials have done everything possible to limit highway construction while allowing unprecedented growth. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that this is a recipe for transportation disaster. Now that it’s here, those very same public officials alternately wring their hands and try to blame the problem on somebody else.
I have to confess that while I was both living and working downtown, the increasingly awful traffic situation was easy to ignore. However, now that I had thrown myself into the role of a trans—Lake Washington commuter, I was learning about the problem up close and personal.
So I wasn’t especially surprised to find that I-5 traffic was barely moving. At least, that’s what I thought—that it was barely moving. Then, when I had advanced only three car lengths in the space of fifteen minutes, I finally switched on the radio in time to hear KUOW’s metro traffic reporter, Leslie Larkin, announce that the I-90 bridge was closed in both directions due to “police action.”
The I-90 floating bridge is made up of two entirely separate side-by-side structures with eight lanes of traffic between them. During rush hour, the two center lanes are reversible. If there’s an accident going one way or the other, it would normally shut traffic down in one direction only. But Leslie had clearly stated that it was closed in both directions, which seemed ominous to me. It made me wish I were still part of the Seattle PD. I could have called in and found out what was really going on. Instead, I concentrated on getting far enough onto the freeway so I could get off again—at the first available exit.
To understand the scope of the Seattle area’s traffic woes, you have to imagine a densely populated metropolitan area with a twenty-five-mile-long lake dividing it neatly in half. Now, superimpose a huge pound sign over that body of water, and you can visualize the problem. The two legs are Interstates 5 and 405 running along the western and eastern sides of the lake. Two bridges, I-90 and Highway 520, form the cross-legs. If one of the two lake bridges goes out of commission, all hell breaks loose. Drivers have to choose among three unacceptably inconvenient and time-consuming choices. They can drive around either the top or the bottom of Lake Washington, or else they take a number and get in line to cross whichever bridge is still working.
I chose to go around. I exited the freeway at Stewart and took surface roads, but by then they were stopped up, too. Finally I called into the office to say I was going to be late.
“Special Unit B,” Harold Ignatius Ball, my new boss, barked into the phone. “Whaddya need?”
I’ve had problems with my name all my life. Jonas Piedmont Beaumont isn’t a handle any right-thinking woman should have laid on a poor defenseless baby, but that’s what my mother did. Once I had a say in the matter, I chose to go by either Beau or by my initials, J.P. But in the troublesome name game, my mother was a piker compared to Harry’s mom. By naming him as she did, Mrs. Ball had sentenced her little son Harold to be designated Harry I. Ball for the rest of his life. The words “Special Homicide Investigation Team” look fine on paper, and so does Harry’s name. The trouble starts when you string the first together or say the second one aloud.
Harry went to work for the Bellingham Police Department right after returning from Vietnam. I suppose he could have nipped the problem in the bud by using his given name, going by Harold at work, and ditching his middle initial altogether. If he’d just used initials alone, it would have still made him an easy target for teasing. Hi-ball isn’t much better. But Harry’s a perverse sort of guy. Harry I. Ball is what his name tag said when he was a uniformed cop in Bellingham, and it’s what’s on his desk right now as Squad B leader of the Special Homicide Investigation Team. Occasionally, someone will look at the name and think it’s some kind of joke, but anyone who underestimates Harry I. Ball is making a serious mistake.
“I’m going to be late,” I said.
“You and everybody else,” he muttered. “Why the hell don’t you move to the right side of the lake?”
Harry lives in North Bend, right up against Mount Si on the west side of the Cascades. His commute is even longer than mine. The only difference is, there are no bridges.
“What’s going on?” I asked. “I understand I-90 is shut down in both directions.”
“Who knows?” he grumbled. “And who cares? When you gonna be in?”
“As soon as I can.”
And I was. I arrived at nine-thirty, an hour and a half late, having spent two and a half hours making what is, in the best of circumstances, a twenty-minute drive. Barbara Galvin, Unit B’s office manager, hadn’t made it in yet, either. Knowing better than to risk my stomach lining on a cup of Harry I. Ball’s crankcase-oil coffee, I timed in and then slipped into my tiny cubicle to go to work.
Every new hire in the Special Homicide Investigation Team spends his first few weeks of employment going over cold-case files before being brought on board one of the current investigations. Conventional wisdom dictates that one of us may bring to the table some previously unheeded bit of insight that will magically solve one of those cold cases. As far as I know, it’s never happened, but it might.
I had worked my way through most of the files, saving the biggest and, as a consequence, most unwieldy, to last. I was manfully working my way through the Green River Killer Task Force documents when Harry’s stocky figure darkened my doorway.
“How’s it going?” he asked.
Sorry to be caught with my reading glasses on, I quickly stowed them in my pocket. “Okay,” I said. “But it’s like slogging though mud.”
“I know,” he said. “And you’re dying to read every word, but I need you in my office. Now.”
I followed him back down the hall. Since Barbara was at her desk by then, I stopped into the break room long enough to pour myself a cup of her freshly brewed coffee. Harry sat at his desk, massive arms resting on a file folder as I eased myself into one of the chairs.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“I understand you’re acquainted with a town in Arizona called Bisbee,” he said casually.
I was so dumbfounded that I nearly dropped my coffee in my lap. The Department of Labor and Industries would have had a blast with that workman’s comp. claim. Yes, I did know Bisbee. My second wife, Anne, had come from there, along with the money that had once been hers and was now mine.
To say Anne Corley was as troubled as she was beautiful is something of an understatement on both counts. I personally never discuss the circumstances surrounding her death on what was our wedding day, but I knew enough about Harry I. Ball to understand that if he was asking the question, he also knew the correct answer.
“Yes,” I said. “I know a little about Bisbee.”
He looked at me with a raised eyebrow worthy of Mr. Spock from
Star Trek
. “Ever been there?” he asked.
I had gotten as close to Bisbee as Sierra Vista once—twenty-five miles or so away. At the time I hadn’t been ready to face visiting Anne’s hometown. I wasn’t emotionally equipped to deal with what I might have learned there. Fresh out of treatment at Ironwood Ranch up near Wickenburg, I was smart enough to know that there were some questions I was better off leaving unanswered.
“No,” I said. “I never have.”
“Would you have a problem going there now?” Harry asked.
I was stronger, older, and hopefully a little wiser. “I don’t think so,” I said.
“Good,” Harry told me. “Because something’s come up that needs looking into. It means sending someone out for an undetermined period of time. Since you say you prefer working alone, I thought it would be a helluva lot easier on the budget if we sent one investigator rather than two.”
He had that right. I’m not a partner kind of guy. “What needs investigating?” I asked.
Harry sighed. He glared at the folder on his desk, but he didn’t open it. “Know anything about UPPI?” he asked.
I shook my head.
Another collection of damnably meaningless letters. Doesn’t anything go by its full name anymore?
“Those initials mean nothing to me,” I said. “Give me a clue.”
“United Private Prisons, Incorporated.”
Then it registered. “Okay, okay,” I said. “I remember now. That’s the company the state of Washington contracted with to ease overcrowding in the state juvenile justice system, right?”
“Exactly,” Harry agreed, “right up until we fired ’em. Now they’re suing the state of Washington’s ass for a hundred and twenty-five million dollars—breach of contract.”
“Great,” I said. “What does that have to do with us—with me, I mean?”
“The state of Washington’s star witness, a young lady by the name of Latisha Wall, was murdered in Bisbee, Arizona, the day before yesterday. Or maybe not murdered, because the local sheriff’s department down there is playing coy. The point is, Latisha Wall is dead, and we need to know how come.”
I was a little foggy on the details of the Latisha Wall situation because I hadn’t been directly involved, but I remembered the name. There had been a huge problem at a new, supposedly state-of-the-art correctional facility built near Aberdeen in southwestern Washington. Aberdeen had been given the nod in hopes that locating a new prison there would help relieve some of the long-standing unemployment in the state’s lumber industry. Two years after opening, the place was summarily closed.
“Wasn’t Latisha Wall some kind of whistle-blower?”
Harry nodded morosely. “That’s right, and now she’s dead. She begged Ross Connors to put her in a witness protection program. Said she was afraid somebody from UPPI might come gunning for her. We did as she asked, but now it looks like they found her anyway.”
Ross Connors, the Washington State Attorney General, was Harry I. Ball’s boss and mine as well.
“Didn’t you say she was murdered in Bisbee, Arizona? Why should we be involved in the investigation?”
At last Harry moved his arms and opened the folder. “Turns out Latisha Wall didn’t actually die in Bisbee proper,” he said. “She died in a place called Naco, a little burg that’s seven or eight miles outside of town and right on the U.S./Mexican border. Technically, the murder is being investigated by the Cochise County Sheriff’s Department.”
“So?”
“So. The sheriff’s a young woman named Joanna Brady. I talked to her a little while ago. Sounds like she’s just barely out of high school. Anyway, as soon as I started asking questions, she got her tits in a wringer and threatened to go to my boss. Of course, that’s no problem since Ross is the one who had me call her in the first place.”
Did I tell you that Harry I. Ball is an almost terminally unreconstituted male chauvinist? Word has it that when the personnel folks at the city of Bellingham diplomatically suggested he attend a sensitivity seminar, Harry told them to put their sensitivity where the sun don’t shine. He then pulled the pin and went down the road, pension in hand. As for Attorney General Ross Connors? I wouldn’t call him a beacon of political correctness, either. That goes for me as well, but I like to think I’m trying.
“Once I got off the phone with her, I called Ross myself,” Harry continued. “Believe me, he has no intention of leaving a case this big in the hands of some little wet-behind-the-ears cowgirl who probably rides a horse, wears ten-gallon hats, and packs a forty-five on her hip, just for show.”
For me, easy acquiescence to that kind of comment has been forever erased by the searing memory of my former partner, a bloodied Sue Danielson, sitting slumped against the wall of her trashed living room, my Glock in her wavering hand.
She
hadn’t been holding it just for show. And no matter how much I try to avoid thinking about it, I know she would have used that weapon if she’d had to. She would have used it to save my life.