Fire and Ice

“Look,”Ernie said, “I know this is all supposition on my part, but what if Action Trail Adventures is being used as a cover for a drug-smuggling operation? Maybe the victim was in on it; maybe he wasn’t. But supposing we end up finding out that the owners of Action Trail Adventures are somehow involved in what went on. We’d better be damned sure we have a valid search warrant in hand before we ever set foot inside that trailer. Otherwise, whatever we find there could end up being ruled as inadmissable.”

“Good point,”Joanna said.

“And I noticed what looked like the remains of a surveillance camera near the gate,”Ernie added. “The killers probably took that down as they were leaving.”

“Makes sense to me,”Joanna said. “But if there’s a camera, there’s probably also a tape. We need to find that, too.”

“Yes, we do,”Ernie asked. “Seen enough?”

“I think so,”Joanna said. “Let’s go talk with your witness.”

I’M JUST an ordinary guy, and it’s taken me a lifetime to learn that we all exist in a world of unintended consequences. For me that’s more than just a slogan. It’s life itself. My unmarried mother had no intention of getting pregnant with me, but she did. And when her fiancé, my father, died in a motorcycle accident prior to my birth, my mother had choices. Even though abortions were illegal back then, she could probably have found a way to make one happen, but she didn’t. And she could have given me up for adoption, but she didn’t do that, either. In spite of her family’s opposition, she had me and raised me and, if you ask me, she did a damned fine job of it, too.

I lost Karen, my first wife, twice. The first time was as a result of the divorce and that was an unintended consequence of my years of drinking. I usually claim it was caused by working and drinking, but you need to consider the source. That’s how alcoholics work. Even when we finally sober up, we try to rationalize things away and minimize the impact our love affair with the bottle had on ourselves and the people around us. When I lost Karen the second time, it was to cancer. Not my fault. I didn’t cause it, and I like to think that, before she died, I managed to make amends for some of the heartache I caused her, and I’m very fortunate to have lived long enough to have a chance to get back in my kids’ lives.

And then there’s Anne Corley, my second wife. When I think of Anne now, I can still see her, striding purposefully through that cemetery on Queen Anne Hill in her bright red dress. And that’s pretty much all I remember, and maybe it’s better that way. Of course, I was still drinking then, so a lot of my forgetfulness may be due to booze, but there’s no arguing with the fact that what happened between us in the course of those next few dizzying days was astonishing—both astonishingly good and astonishingly bad. Thrown together, we were a fire that burned too hot and bright to last—like the brilliant flash from a dying lightbulb just before it goes black.

What I do know about those few interim days was that we didn’t talk about money. We never talked about money. We had far more important things to think about and do, but the money was there all the time. The fact that Anne had plenty of money was plain to see in everything about her: in the car she drove—a Porsche 928; in the hotel where she stayed—the Four Seasons Olympic in those days; in the clothing she wore; in the way she carried herself.

At the time I was far too wrapped up in being with her to wonder what she could possibly see in a hard-drinking homicide cop. And once she was gone, I was too devastated by losing her to have any grasp on what she had given me. It turned out I wasn’t so much a fortune hunter as I was a fortune finder. The money she gave me was there, but for a long time I didn’t pay much attention to it. (Thank God, Anne also left me under the wing of her very capable attorney, Ralph Ames, who was paying attention to it. He’s also the one who finally helped force me into treatment, but that’s another story.)

Over the years I didn’t talk about the money with anyone other than Ralph Ames and with Ron Peters, my best friend on the force. Make that my best friend, period. Ron knew all about it. He was there in my apartment on that awful afternoon after Anne Corley died and he did me the enormous favor of running what remained of our wedding cake down the garbage disposal. I suppose there was some talk around the department when I moved from the Royal Crest to Belltown Terrace, but since I didn’t make a big deal of it, neither did my coworkers at Seattle PD or at the Special Homicide Investigation Team. And since I kept coming into the office just like any other poor working stiff and since I didn’t make a fuss about my financial situation, neither did anyone else. The subject of money seldom came up.

Until recently, and that brings me to yet another unintended consequence, Mel, my third wife, and the light of my life. At the time I met Melissa Soames, I wasn’t at all interested in having either another partner or another wife. Despite both our efforts to the contrary, she became both. Once she showed up to work at S.H.I.T. and once I laid eyes on her, I should have known she was trouble, but I didn’t, and by the time I figured it out, it was too late. The wheels were off the bus. J. P. Beaumont was a goner.

When Mel and I were courting, we didn’t talk about money any more than Anne Corley and I had. Mel’s first husband had been pretty well fixed as far as finances were concerned, but he was also a jerk who made sure she didn’t make off with much. Once Mel and I were married and had to file our first set of income taxes, things changed and suddenly money was an issue.

“What the hell’s the matter with you?”Mel had demanded, hands on her hips. “Why on earth do you think Anne Corley gave you all that money in the first place?”

It’s funny that’s how Mel and I both talk about her—Anne Corley, with both names. It’s almost as though I never lasted long enough to be on a first-name basis with the woman. Mel has copied that peculiarity.

“Because she liked me?”I asked lamely.

I have to admit, I had never given that question all that much thought or even any thought. Why would I?

“Because she wanted you to have fun with it,”Mel told me. “Because she figured out the moment she met you that you worked too hard—that you were too serious and too driven. She wanted to lighten your load. Instead, you’ve kept right on working too hard and amassing a fortune. It’s time that changed. You can either sit around like some modern King Midas, or you can get off your dead butt (she didn’t say butt, actually) and have some fun with that gift while you’re still young enough to enjoy it. I don’t need to be a rich widow. We’re both alive and healthy. Let’s have fun now!”

Our trip to Disneyland was a direct result of that conversation. The only bad unintended consequence of that, of course, had been my ride on the teacups.

It turns out that Mel has lots of good ideas for spending my money. Sometime earlier, Mel had become involved with a group of high-flying Seattle-area women who had introduced her to the miracle of private jets, or “Business Aviation,”as they call it in the literature. It turned out that the women had been up to no good, but the private-jet lesson had stuck.

Mel liked using them, and now so do I. It’s nice to travel on your own schedule and to get off and on planes with your luggage and dignity intact. It’s slick that you don’t have to remove your belt or your shoes or your jacket. All you have to do is show your ID, get on the plane, and off you go. If you want to take along a brand-new ten-ounce container of toothpaste? Fine. If you want to take along a twelve-ounce container of mouthwash or baby formula? That’s fine, too. And if you happen to carry a stray 9-mm with you? That’s not a problem, either. You don’t have to walk through any metal detectors. You show the pilots your government-issue ID and away you go.

Being able to do all these things doesn’t come cheap, as I had learned when I flew all my nearest and dearest to Las Vegas for Mel’s and my wedding. It was expensive but a fun first crack at flying private aircraft. Once I actually tried it and found out “how the other half lived,”I had zero interest in ever getting back into one of those slow-moving TSA security check lines at Sea-Tac airport. And that’s how Mel and I had flown to Anaheim, on board a Hawker 400XP. And that’s how we were flying home as well.

When Ross Connors had talked about the chances of my being able to get my luggage back in time to make it over to Ellensburg for the Jane Doe autopsy, I didn’t come right out and say that I knew good and well that getting my luggage wasn’t going to be a problem. And so, although I didn’t mention any of that to Ross, I did place a call to Owners’ Services and let them know that we’d like to leave an hour earlier than our originally scheduled departure time of 10:30 A.M.

“So what do you think?”Mel asked, once we were buckled into our seats and drinking our coffee while we taxied to the end of the runway. “Was it a success?”

I reached across the aisle, took her hand, and kissed the back of it. “Unqualified,”I told her. “Everybody had fun. There were no major blowups. Kelly was on speaking terms with me the whole time. It doesn’t get any better than that.”

Mel, whose relationship with her own father isn’t exactly trouble-free, has been more of a help in decoding my daughter than she could have imagined.

“Jeremy’s an interesting guy,”she said. “The more I’m around him, the more I like him.”

Which was my opinion, too. He deals with Kelly’s periodic outbursts with a quiet reserve that is calming without being patronizing. He’s good with the kids, goes to work every day, carries his weight around the house, and loves my daughter to distraction. What more could a father-in-law want?

“I’m glad they’ll be spending some of Kayla’s spring break with Dave.”

Mel’s easy acceptance of everyone’s ongoing relationship with my first wife’s second husband was another thing that made her easy to love. She had come into our family, lumps and all, and figured out a way to make it work. After three days of nonstop grandkids, though, I was glad to share the wealth and the work with someone else. I was more than ready to let their “other”grandpa have a crack at them.

“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.

FOUR

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?”

“Nope,”Robbins answered. “That about covers it.”

“Tell me about this morning,”Deb asked.

“I got up, made some breakfast, unloaded Moxie—that’s what I call my ATV. It was while I was doing that that I heard the dog barking. I looked off in that direction, and that’s when I first saw the buzzards circling overhead. They were gliding around and around, just like they do in cartoons. I’m sure now the poor dog was barking his head off trying to keep them away. But seeing the birds made me curious. A little later, when I was ready to take my first ride, the dog was still barking, so I headed here to check it out.”

“You suspected something was dead?”Joanna asked, inserting her own question into the conversation.

“Yeah,”Maury said. “I figured it would turn out to be a cow or a coyote or a jackrabbit. There are a lot of those around here. I sure as hell didn’t expect it to be a person.”

“When you realized the victim was a person, did you recognize him?”

“Are you kidding? That dog wouldn’t let me close enough to see anything, much less touch him.”

Dave Hollicker arrived on the scene. After surveying the situation, he dragged something that looked like a stack of plastic pavers out of the back of his van. The twenty-by-twenty-inch grid pieces can be clicked together and used to create temporary parking. In this case Dave laid them out across the debris field where they formed a two-inch-thick firm pathway that investigators could use to come and go from the body without further disturbing the field of churned sand that surrounded the victim.

“Is that all then?”Robbins asked, glancing first at the two detectives and then at Joanna. “No more questions?”

“Not right now,”Deb said.

“If you don’t mind, then,”Maury said, “I’ll pack up and head out. I was looking forward to having some quiet time to myself to relax. I wasn’t planning on finding a homicide victim. Detective Howell has all my numbers. I’m not due back at work until Wednesday afternoon, though,”he added. “I work four P.M. to midnight. If you need anything at all, feel free to give me a call.”

His last comment seemed to be aimed directly at Detective Howell rather than anyone else. The way he said it made Joanna think he wasn’t just wanting to talk about the case.

“Good,”Deb told him. “We’ll be in touch.”

“I saw the way he was looking at you,”Ernie said to Deb as Robbins sped away on his ATV. “I think you made yourself a conquest.”Joanna suppressed a smile when she realized Ernie had shared that same impression.

“Leave me alone,”Debra said impatiently. “All I did was interview the man. I was just doing my job.”

“Sure you were,”Ernie said, “but he sounded like he was more interested in you than he was in answering your questions.”

There was a squawk from the radio in Ernie’s Yukon. He was still talking on the radio when Joanna heard the sound of another approaching vehicle. Ernie reemerged, waving in the direction of the new arrival. “Victim’s sister is on her way,”he called to Joanna. “Natalie tried to give us a heads-up, but it took this long to relay the message.”

When Animal Control had been folded into Joanna’s department on a “temporary”basis, she had soon discovered that the two radio systems involved were incompatible. Requests to replace Animal Control’s system with new and compatible equipment had been disallowed on the grounds that the situation was “temporary.”Permanently temporary. Relaying messages back and forth was cumbersome, time-consuming, and, in this case, pointless. By the time Joanna knew someone was coming, she was pretty much there.

The three officers watched as an antique jeep careened over the top of the dune behind them. Ernie moved forward to flag down the vehicle. For a time it appeared that the jeep was going to plow right into him. The female driver stopped only a couple of feet from where Ernie was standing. The woman, tanned and weather-beaten, wore a man’s Western shirt and a faded baseball cap. A foot-long gray ponytail stuck out through the hole in the back of the cap. Looking at her, Joanna estimated the woman to be in her late sixties or early seventies. There was no need to guess about her state of mind. She was mad as hell.

“Where’s my brother?”she demanded. “What’s happened and what have you done with him? That’s Lester’s ATV over there. It looks like it’s been wrecked.”She pointed at the fallen ATV. “Is he all right? And who the hell are all of you?”

Since Ernie was right in front of the bumper, he was closer to the newly arrived vehicle than anyone else. Producing his badge and ID wallet, he held them up. “I’m Detective Ernie Carpenter with the Cochise County Sheriff’s Department. That’s Sheriff Brady and Detective Howell,”he added, pointing in their direction. “I’m afraid there’s been an accident.”

“I can see that!”the woman snapped. “What do you think I am, blind or something? Now get the hell out of my way.”

The engine was still idling. She gunned it determinedly, as though she fully intended to hit the gas and barge right past him. Or over him.

“You can’t go there, miss,”he insisted. “It’s a crime scene.”

“Don’t you ’miss’ me…”she began, but before she could pull away, Ernie reached across her, switched off the ignition on the steering column, and took possession of the keys. In the momentary quiet, the woman gave Ernie a piercing look.

“Wait a minute. Did you say crime scene?”she asked. It seemed as though she had only then internalized his words.

Ernie nodded again. “Yes, ma’am,”he said. “It’s a possible homicide.”

A shocked expression flitted across the woman’s face. “You’re saying someone’s dead—that they’ve been murdered?”she asked.