“Me, too,” I said, and meant it.
I dozed as we flew north. It was bumpy as we did our approach to Boeing Field, circling over Puget Sound, and coming down just to the west of downtown Seattle and our Belltown Terrace condo. It had been sunny in southern California. It was raining in Seattle. My car was sitting waiting for us on the tarmac. Four minutes after landing, our bags had been transferred to the car and we headed north. I dropped Mel and the luggage off with the doorman at Belltown Terrace and went east on the 520 Bridge.
After a winter of hardly any snow, it was snowing some as I headed across Snoqualmie Pass-not enough to require chains, but enough to make for slow going in the pass. I shouldn’t have bothered. When I reached the Kittitas County M.E.’s office, I was stopped by a square-jawed receptionist named Connie Whitman who gave me the third degree. Who was I? What did I want? Did I have an appointment? Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I’m not sure why it is that gatekeepers always get my hackles up, but they generally do. And it was only after I had been grilled three ways to Sunday that I was finally given the information that Dr. Laura Hopewell was on her way back from a conference and had been unavoidably delayed by low-lying fog at SFO.
“Any idea when she’ll arrive then?” I asked.
Ms. Whitman gave me what I regard as the receptionist’s signature cold-eyed stare. “No idea,” she said. “She’ll get here when she gets here.”
Steamed but knowing better than to mention it, I left the office. I put as much distance as possible between the receptionist and myself. I made my way back out to the freeway and grabbed some lunch at Dinah’s Diner.
While I waited for my “Cascade Burger,” I called into the office and talked to Harry. “So you lucked out, drew the latest honey crisp, and ended up in Ellensburg?” he asked. “When do you think you’ll be back?”
Harry I. Ball is a good guy in a man’s man sort of way, but don’t expect him to toe the PC line when it comes to talking the talk. That’s one of the reasons he ended up in charge of S.H.I.T.-he flunked out of his local department’s diversity training. I think Ross Connors took pity on him and gave him a job because he’s a great cop who knows how to get the job done, and that was more important than his being unfailingly politically incorrect.
When he made that comment about “honey crisp,” I knew he was talking about our series of dead females and not some new kind of whole-grain breakfast cereal.
“You might not want to use that particular term with Mel or Barbara,” I advised.
Barbara Galvin is our secretary. Mel and Barbara live in a post-feminist world. I doubt either one of them ever burned a bra, but if the two of them took a notion to clean Harry’s clock, I wouldn’t have bet money on Harry.
“Right,” he said. “Sorry.”
“The Kittitas M.E.’s plane got delayed in San Francisco,” I told him. “I don’t know when she’ll get around to doing the autopsy, and I won’t be back until after she does. Is there anything in particular you can tell me about this case?”
“The guy who found the bones last Friday is named Kenneth Leggett. He’s a heavy-equipment operator who lives on North First Street in North Bend. So far he’s been interviewed by the locals but not by anyone from our office. Do you have your computer with you?”
“Yes,” I said. Astonishingly enough, after years of resisting computers, I now seldom leave home without one, usually air-card equipped. I’m a new man as far as telecommunications are concerned. Harry isn’t. He’s glad computers work as long as he doesn’t have to use them himself.
“Good,” he said. “I’ll have Barbara send over one of those PFDs of the crime scene report.”
“You mean a PDF?” I asked.
“Whatever,” Harry replied. “You know what I mean, and when you get a look at the report, you’ll see. The tarp business pretty well corks it.”
“The tags are clipped off?” I asked.
“You got it,” Harry said.
In each of the previous five cases, the victim had been wrapped in a tarp before being set on fire. In each instance one corner of the tarp that had served as a shroud had been cut off-not torn off, but carefully clipped off. Not surprisingly, those missing corners happened to be the ones that would have held the manufacturing tags along with identifying information that might have led us back both to the original manufacturer and to possible local retail outlets. Not having the tags made it infinitely more difficult to get a line on the ultimate purchaser. Ross Connors had crime lab folks doing chemical analyses of each tarp fragment we’d found in hopes of narrowing where the tarps might have come from, but so far that wasn’t leading us where we needed to go.
“Personal effects?” I asked.
“She was wearing boots, snakeskin Tony Lamas, and what looks like an engagement ring on one of her fingers. No wedding band, though,” Harry said. “The M.E. may find more on the corpse itself.”
That had been the situation in two of the other cases, where personal items had come to light only in the course of the autopsy.
Just then a smiling waitress came to my table to deliver what turned out to be a gigantic hamburger. Early in my career as a homicide detective, the grisly discussion at hand might well have wrecked my appetite. I’m beyond that now. Lunch is lunch, whatever the topic of conversation.
“All right,” I said to Harry. “My food’s here. Have to go. Have Barbara send me the info.”
As soon as I finished my lunch, I paid the tab and headed back over to the M.E.’s office. I wanted to be there, Johnny-on-the-spot, when Dr. Laura Hopewell was ready to rumble. Over the years I’ve learned that most medical examiners have one thing in common with a live theater performance: Don’t show up after the opening curtain and expect the usher to hand you a program and show you to your seat.
It isn’t going to happen.
CHAPTER 4
Joanna arrived in time to be in on part of Detective Howell’s interview with Mr. Maury Robbins. Clearly much of it was a repeat of what Ernie had already asked him. But that was standard in a homicide investigation-to ask the same questions several different times to see if there were any discrepancies.
“Like I told that Detective Carpenter,” Robbins said. “When I come here after work, I usually arrive somewhere between two and three in the morning.”
“And the gate was open when you got here?” Deb asked.
“Right,” Maury said, “wide open. At the time I thought, why bother buying a season pass when anyone who wanted to could just drive right in?”
“Besides the gate, did you notice anything else that was out of the ordinary?”
“The dog,” Maury said. “Lester’s dog usually raises hell. I forget what his name is, something that starts with an M, I think. I always hear him barking when I roll down the window to open the gate. Last night he didn’t make a peep.”
“Can you tell me anything in particular about Lester Attwood?”
“That’s his last name, Attwood?”
Debra nodded.
“Not much,” Maury said. “I mean, I knew him. Everybody who comes here knows Les. I’m here a couple of times a month. He’d usually meander around the place a couple of times a day, to make sure everything was okay. Sometimes people would get stuck, and he’d help drag ’em out. Sometimes we’d talk. He struck me as a good enough guy, but one who’d put in some hard miles. I asked him once how many times he’d had his nose broken. Said he couldn’t remember.”
“So he was a fighter, then?” Debra asked. “A brawler?”
“Probably, but by the time I met Les, he seemed to have put his demons behind him and had his life back on track.”
“About last night,” Debra said. “Aside from the open gate and missing dog, did you notice anything else amiss?”