“Yes well…”
For a moment, I thought she didn’t understand exactly why that had occurred, so I tried to clarify. “Powell pulled Big Al because he and Ben Weston were good friends, had been for years. No other reason. So why are you asking me about a fight?”
“I was just wondering,” she said innocently.
It used to be when a woman gave me that kind of ingenuous nonanswer, I fell for it and really believed they were “just wondering,” but I’m older, now, and wiser. Janice’s bland response put me on notice that something was up.
“Look, I didn’t just fall off the turnip truck yesterday,” I told her. “This is your old pal J. P. Beaumont, remember? What gives? What are you driving at?”
“I think a cop did it,” she blurted.
My jaw dropped. “A cop? Killed all these people? You’re kidding!”
We had stopped on the front porch just outside the door. “I am not kidding,” she declared. “Didn’t you see how the girl was tied up?”
Actually, I hadn’t. For one thing, during our initial kitchen walk-through, I had been on the wrong side of the body. Then, once we discovered Junior in the linen closet, Big Al and I hadn’t stayed around long enough to see anything more before racing off to the department with the child in tow.
“Flex-cufs,” she informed me. “The girl in the kitchen was bound with Flex-cuf restraints, the very same brand all you guys at the department use every day.”
Although metal handcuffs are still more commonly used, Flex-cufs are a high-tech, lightweight substitute. I think of them as a variation on a theme of plastic tie-ups for garbage bags or maybe a hospital ID bracelet for two hands instead of one. Once you put the plastic coil through the hole and tighten it down, the only way to take it off again is to cut it off.
But from this one small piece of evidence, Janice Morraine was making a very premature, very shaky assumption. “Let me get this straight. Because of the presence of Flex-cufs, you’ve decided that the killer is most likely a cop and further, since Captain Powell threw him off the case, that the cop most likely is none other than Detective Lindstrom, right?”
“It was just an idea,” she countered. “Al was acting real strange tonight, or didn’t you notice?”
I almost blew up in her face. “Strange? Let me tell you about strange, lady. You’d be acting funny yourself if you showed up at a homicide scene and discovered that the victims are almost the entire family of one of your very best friends. You walk in and find them one after the other, slaughtered in cold blood. Detective Lindstrom’s been through a hell of an ordeal tonight, including being told by his supervisor that his services aren’t needed or wanted. How the hell would you act?”
“You don’t have to get so hot under the collar,” Janice returned sulkily. “All I did was ask a question.”
I was hot all right. “Why don’t you leave the questions to the detectives and go find some lint to pick up?”
A little professional jealousy is to be expected now and then, especially in such circumstances, but I could see from the look on Janice’s face that my comment had come off sounding a whole lot more insulting than the situation warranted.
“Up yours, Detective Beaumont,” she returned coldly, and marched off into the house, leaving me looking after her in frustrated consternation.
How could someone as smart as Janice Morraine be so dumb? I wondered. How could she even seriously consider the idea that Big Al Lindstrom was capable of murdering his best friend and his family besides? The whole preposterous notion would have been downright laughable if it hadn’t made me so damn mad.
Where the hell did Janice Morraine get off? The killer had been loose in Ben Weston’s house for a considerable period of time. Maybe Ben had a few Flex-cufs stashed at home someplace, and the killer had used those. Had Janice ever considered that possibility? The thought that I too might be jumping to conclusions never entered my mind, for the idea that a fellow officer-any fellow police officer-might also be a cold-blooded killer was totally unacceptable. I dismissed it out of hand.
Still standing on the porch, I glanced out at the street. At four in the morning, the parking places around the Weston house were gradually emptying. With the bodies all hauled away to the medical examiner’s office, most of the law enforcement and emergency vehicles were gone. The Minicam- and microphone-waving reporters had also driven away to meet their various deadlines. By sunrise, except for the yellow crime scene tape that would eventually be strung all the way around the Weston house and yard, the neighborhood would be returning to normal-as normal as it was ever going to be.
Fatigue was catching up with me, and the bone spurs on my feet were killing me. With a sigh, I went inside to go to work. For a while anyway, Paul Kramer was there as well, throwing his considerable weight around, bothering Janice’s investigators, and asking questions when he should have been listening. I stayed out of his way as much as possible. My assignment was Adam Jackson-John Doe, as Captain Powell still thought of him. With Big Al’s invaluable help I at least knew the boy’s name and was that much further along in the investigation. It wasn’t a lot, but it was a start.
I prowled around the house, hoping to stumble across something that would be of assistance. In the kitchen I found a push-button address directory. When I pushed the J button, I thought at first I had hit the Jackson jackpot, and indeed I had-too well. There were no fewer than six Jacksons listed on a page that slopped over into the K ‘s. Unfortunately, there was no clue as to which was which. None of them had a Queen Anne exchange. I jotted down all the numbers, home and work, knowing that if push came to shove, I could compare all the work numbers and see which one would lead me to a hospital switchboard. That was the long way of doing it.
Still hoping for a shortcut, I left the kitchen, heading for Ben and Shiree Weston’s bedroom, where I remembered seeing another phone. Maybe there I would find a forgotten note jotted on a little yellow sticky pad that would give me the information I needed. While I was busy searching, a silent clock ticked continuously in the back of my head, for I was locked in a race against time. If I didn’t get to her first, Adam Jackson’s mother would inevitably learn of her son’s death through other than official channels. Professional pride and compassion mixed fifty-fifty made me want to prevent that from happening.
Walking through the living room, I discovered that, with the exception of a single uniformed officer seated near the front door of the house and another stationed in back, only Janice Morraine and her crime scene specialists remained in the house. The Crime Lab folks acted every bit as frazzled as I felt. By now, I’d been up for twenty-two-plus hours straight, and I sure as hell wasn’t as young as I used to be.
I was just crossing the threshold into Ben and Shiree’s demolished bedroom when the clock radio beside the bed came on automatically at four-thirty. The soft, mournful wail of a country and western lady singer stopped me in my tracks. The familiar “he done me wrong” lyrics left me with an eerie sense of loss, allowing the finality of what had happened in that house to seep into my consciousness once and for all.
As the music went on and on, I realized how, the night before, Ben Weston had matter-of-factly set that alarm, expecting to get up early the next morning-this morning-and be about his business. Whatever he had planned to do had been important enough to be worth getting out of a warm bed three and a half full hours before he was due in at the department at eight.
But morning had come without him. Ben Weston would never again charge out of bed. He would never again hear the mournful music that was now crooning softly in the background. He wouldn’t see Ben Junior play his first Little League game or graduate from high school. Gentle Ben Weston was, literally, history.