I studied the note for sometime. D.C. Who's D.C.? I wondered. And then it hit me. D.C.-Deanna Compton. Bill Whitten's secretary!
"Detective Beaumont?"
I looked up. Lori Yamaguchi was smiling at me in a way that said she had spoken to me more than once without my hearing.
"Yes? Oh, hello, Lori. Sorry I didn't hear you. I was thinking about something else." Carefully, I refolded the piece of paper and dropped it inside my shirt pocket. "What's up?"
"We got a hit on those fingerprints of yours, the ones Audrey Cummings sent over."
I stood up and tried to seem less disorganized and distracted than I felt. "Really? That was just a shot in the dark. What kind of hit?" I asked.
"Not just one," Lori added. "There are seven in all."
"Seven," I echoed.
"That's right," she said. "It turns out, your dead guy is a probable serial rapist with a trail of unsolved attacks in jurisdictions all over California. Same M.O. each time. He'd make an appointment with a real estate agent to go look at houses, and then…"
"Rape them?"
"Right. There might very well be more than just the seven," Lori said. "It could be the same thing happened in other places and that one way or another they didn't end up in the data bank."
"But who is he?" I asked.
Lori looked at me blankly. "What do you mean, who is he?" she asked. "Don Wolf, of course. Since you were the detective on the case, I figured you already knew his name. Audrey Cummings said-"
"That's all you have on him then?" I interrupted. "No arrests, no prior convictions?"
Right that minute, I didn't attempt to explain to Lori Yamaguchi that as far as anyone else had been able to discover, the guy named Don Wolf had no known history prior to his sudden appearance in Lizbeth Dorn's life down in California some months earlier.
"Nothing. If there had been, I should have been able to find some record of it. I suppose it's possible that he fell through a crack somewhere along the line and his prints just didn't get entered into the AFIS computer. That automated fingerprints identification system is expensive and time-consuming, you know."
Lori was justifiably proud of her work, of having made the vital connection. No doubt she expected me to be either more grateful or else more impressed. Maybe both. But at the moment, that folded piece of paper with Deanna Compton's damning initials on it was burning a hole in my shirt pocket. Somebody else besides Latty Gibson had maybe been messing around with Don Wolf, and I wanted to pay her a visit.
"Look, Lori," I said. "Thanks a whole bunch. Don't think I'm not appreciative, because I am. I owe you lunch. No, more than that, I owe you dinner. But right now, I've got to go. Send me a detailed report on all this, would you?"
"You don't owe me anything, Detective Beaumont," she said, as I gathered up Don Wolf's jacket and headed for the door. "I was just doing my job."
With a quick wave over my shoulder, I darted out the door, realizing as I went that it's people like Lori Yamaguchi who, as opposed to the Hilda Chisholms of the world, give a whole different meaning to the word bureaucrat.
Twenty
My mother always used to say, "A wise man changes his mind. A fool never does."
I had told Watty I was on my way back to the department. And I meant to go straight there. I even made it as far as the Third Avenue lobby of the Public Safety Building. But as I stood there waiting for a fully-loaded, rush-hour elevator to disgorge its mass of humanity, I was puzzling over what implications Deanna Compton's note might have for the cases I was investigating.
I kept remembering the Deanna Compton I had met two days earlier at Designer Genes International. She had seemed suitably startled when Bill Whitten delivered news of Don Wolf's death, but she had handled the resultant requests for information in a coolly efficient, businesslike fashion. I could recall nothing at all in her demeanor that would have indicated anything more than a business-colleague relationship with the dead man. That meant one of two things. Either Deanna Compton wasn't the D.C. in question, or, if she was, she had gone to extraordinary lengths to conceal any kind of inappropriate reaction to the news from me and from her boss, Bill Whitten.
What I needed to do was find some way to verify whether or not Deanna Compton and D.C. were one and the same. That was where my thought process stood when an elevator finally arrived and its door opened. And by the time the last of the passengers filed off and dodged past those of us waiting in the crowded lobby to get on, I realized that I had in my possession a tool that might make that verification possible: the videotapes-Bill Whitten's security tapes. If the surveillance camera switched on whenever someone had walked into Don Wolf's office, then Deanna Compton was bound to have made an appearance somewhere on the footage that was still in my den. If I could show a picture of Deanna Compton to Jack Braman, manager of the Lake View Condominiums…
In my eagerness to turn thought to action, I nearly collided with the people lined up behind me when I turned suddenly and dashed back out the lobby door. I sprinted down Yesler to the garage where I usually leave the 928. Naturally, it was already parked, but one of the attendants was more than eager to go fetch it.
In recent years, a good deal of Seattle's rush-hour bus traffic has disappeared into an underground transit tunnel. There were still buses moving up and down Third Avenue, but I was able to make fairly good time on my way uptown. And when I turned up Broad, not only was there an available parking space right there on the corner of Second and Broad, there was still time on the meter. After yesterday's all-time record low, things were starting to look up. A little.
I dashed into the apartment and went straight to the den without even pausing at the answering machine that was sitting there blinking like a crazed Christmas tree. I know the male gender is supposed to reign supreme in the world of television remotes. When it comes to clicker wars, however, I take a backseat to almost everyone-Heather and Tracy Peters included.
It took time to scroll backward through the D.G.I. tape. Characters came and went, walking in comic reverse overdrive back and forth across the screen. Don Wolf himself entered and exited the room several times. In between, there were long periods of time when he sat working at his desk. Once Bill Whitten came in and out. I was about to give up when my patience was rewarded with a view of Deanna Compton walking backward from the doorway to Don Wolf's desk.
Moving close to the set, I let the tape continue rewinding until I reached the point where she opened the door to enter, then I switched the V.C.R. to play once again.
"What's up, Mrs. Compton?" Don Wolf was asking. There was nothing in his greeting that was in any way suspect. If he was overjoyed to see her, if the two of them had anything going after hours, it was difficult to see that from their perfunctorily polite interaction on the screen.
Deanna put a stack of papers on Don Wolf's desk and then turned and walked away. "You lose, Beaumont," I said, getting ready to switch again into a backward scroll. Just then, Don Wolf reached out and plucked something off the stack of paper. It was a casual gesture that probably would have escaped notice under most circumstances. I switched to rewind and then ran the segment again. Sure enough. What he had picked up was tiny-barely as big as the top of his thump. Moments later, smiling broadly, Wolf stood up, took his jacket from a hook on a hat rack in the corner, and left the office. As he was leaving, he put something in the lower inside pocket of his jacket-the same pocket in which I had found the note.
I rewound the tape, back to the point where Deanna Compton first entered the room. That was what I had wanted in the first place, a picture of Deanna Compton that I could show to Jack Braman at the Lake View Condos to find out whether or not she had been among the frequent guests at Don Wolf's apartment. About that time, the doorbell rang.