Improbable cause

CHAPTER 2

Anyone who’s seen my desk will understand that I’m a longtime subscriber to the old adage that a clean desk is a sign of an cluttered mind. While Debi Rush was out of the room, I grabbed the opportunity to examine Dr. Frederick Nielsen’s gleaming rosewood desk. It was remarkably clean. Disturbingly clean.

No absentminded doodle or marauding paper clip marred the unblemished green felt of Dr. Fred’s ink blotter. The wooden surface was polished to a high gloss, and no speck of dust or smudge of fingerprint appeared on the shiny brass pen holder or the heavy marble ashtray which sat, side by side, at the top of the immaculate desk.

Six file folders with their name labels clearly visible lay in a deliberately cantilevered stack on the leather-framed blotter. On top of the files sat a neatly typed listing of the day’s scheduled appointments, a detailed inventory of the patients and people Dr. Fred would have seen in the course of that Monday. If he hadn’t died first.

So Dr. Frederick Nielsen had been a neat freak-either that, or downright compulsive. Behind the gleaming desk sat a matching rosewood credenza. On it were two wooden baskets marked in and out. A stack of unopened envelopes waited in the in basket while three additional file folders rested in the out. On top of those folders was another piece of paper, lying facedown. Using the tip of my pencil, I flipped the paper over. It proved to be an additional typed schedule, this one labeled Saturday, July 14.

Studying the schedule, I quickly jotted down the list of names and times into my notebook: 8:30 A.M., Grace Simmons, root canal. 9:00 a.m., Don Nuberg, two fillings. 10:00 a.m., Reece Bowers, cleaning. Beneath the patients’ names were two more notations, one typed and the other handwritten. The typed one said, “10:30, Larry Martin, Damm Fine Carpets.” The second, carefully printed in black ink, said nothing but “LeAnn.”

As far as Dr. Nielsen was concerned, LeAnn evidently needed no last name to identify her.

It was safe to assume she wasn’t a patient. Her name wasn’t listed on any of the Saturday file folders in the out basket. According to the schedule, LeAnn had been due in the office at twelve, well after the carpet installer was supposed to have finished with the carpet, and after Debi Rush should have gone home.

Beneath LeAnn’s name were several more notations, all in the same precise printing: shoes, groceries, tickets, flowers. Dr. Nielsen had evidently used the written schedule as a personal “to do” list as well as a tool for keeping track of his daily appointments.

Big Al stopped prowling around the desk long enough to peer over my shoulder and examine the list himself.

“What about this LeAnn?” I asked, tapping the name with the tip of my pencil. “A girl friend maybe?”

Al nodded. “Like as not. This guy was so organized he probably couldn’t get it up if it wasn’t written on the schedule.”

That made me laugh. Big Al and I had been thrown together and packaged as a temporary team right after my other partner, Detective Ron Peters, was injured. We had worked together now for several months. I was learning to enjoy the big Norwegian’s square-headed sense of humor, as well as to ignore his sometimes surly attitudes.

Debi returned to the small office, bringing with her a lanky, loose-jointed young man who looked a whole lot more like a beardless high school basketball player than someone only two years away from being a real, live, grown-up dentist. College kids seem to look younger with every passing year.

It’s one of the hazards of growing older.

“This is my husband Tom Rush,” Debi said to me, urging the reluctant young man forward. “These are the two detectives I was telling you about.”

I held out my hand. “J. P. Beaumont,” I said. “And this is my partner, Allen Lindstrom.”

Tom Rush nodded politely to each of us, but the hand he extended was cold and clammy. It was like shaking hands with a long dead mackerel.

“I can’t believe he’s dead,” Tom Rush said, shuddering with dismay. “I just can’t believe it. And like this, too. Murdered.”

“I’m sure it’s a shock to you. Murder is always a shock,” I told him. “We’ve been asking your wife some questions, and we’re not finished. Would you mind waiting outside for a few more minutes?”

Tom Rush put it in reverse and backed toward the door. “No problem,” he answered quickly. “I don’t mind at all. I’ll be right out here, if that’s okay.”

He stumbled all over himself escaping the small office. It struck me that Tom Rush was either incredibly shy or terribly nervous. I couldn’t tell which.

As soon as the door closed behind her husband, I turned back to Debi Rush. “Who’s LeAnn?” I asked.

She paused for a moment. “His wife, I guess,” she said.

“You guess? You mean you don’t know? You must be fairly new here if you don’t know his wife’s name.”

“I mean I guess they’re still married,” she added quickly. “They were separated. I don’t know if the divorce was final yet.”

“As far as you know, then, his wife would still be the next of kin?”

Debi Rush nodded.

“Any idea where we can find her?”

“No.”

“Did you see her at all on Saturday before you left?”

“No. Why would I?”

“She was due here at noon.”

“She was?” Debi Rush seemed surprised.

“And she didn’t get here before you went home?” I asked.

Debi shook her head. “No, I didn’t even know she was…”

“But that’s what it says on the schedule.”

Debi stopped abruptly and took a deep breath. A slight flush colored her pale cheeks. “Then Dr. Fred must have written it down himself.” she answered firmly. “I know I didn’t put it on the schedule, and she wasn’t here when I left.”

“You said they were separated. Is she still living in the family home?”

Debi shook her head. “No, she took the kids and moved out.”

“Kids?”

“Two of them. A boy and a girl. Seven and eight.”

“So where are they staying?”

“In one of those shelters someplace.”

“What kind of shelter?”

“You know, one of those places for battered women.”

“A domestic violence shelter? Was LeAnn Nielsen a battered woman?”

“You mean, did Dr. Fred beat her?” Debi Rush’s eyes struck sparks of anger. “Never. He wouldn’t have done that. He said her lawyer probably suggested it in hopes she’d get a better settlement.”

“Do you know which shelter? We’re going to have to locate her to tell her what’s happened.”

Debi shook her head. “I don’t have any idea. Dr. Fred didn’t either. I know he tried to find her when she first took off, but they keep the location of those places a secret.”

“Right,” I said. “Is there anyone else, any other relatives that you know of, who might be able to help us locate her?”

Debi shrugged. “His mother, maybe.”

“His mother? What’s her name?”

“Dorothy, I believe that’s her first name. She always called herself Mrs. Nielsen whenever she called here and talked to me.”

“And where does she live?”

“With Dr. Fred. She’s lived with them for several years now.”

“What’s the address?”

“Green Lake Way North, 6610. It’s one of those big old houses facing the lake.”

“You haven’t made any effort to contact her, have you?”

“No,” Debi answered.

“Do you think she’d be at home?”

Debi shook her head. “Maybe. I haven’t tried to call. One of the officers told me not to, not until someone had notified her in person.”

“Right,” I said. “Detective Lindstrom and I will be taking care of that just as soon as we finish here. Now, let’s go back to Saturday morning for a minute. What happened after the last patient left?” I glanced at my list. “Reece Bowers, I think his name was. Cleaning only.”

For some reason Debi Rush looked down at her hands and smoothed the front of her skirt. “Nothing,” she said. “Like I told you, after he left, we just waited for the installer to get here.”

“We. You mean you and Dr. Fred. Did you talk while you were waiting?”

She shrugged. “I guess,” she said, “but I don’t remember what about.”

There it was again, some tiny alarm inside me, sounding a warning, telling me that Debi Rush was lying through her teeth. But why? What was she covering up? Who was she protecting?

“Where did you wait?” I insisted, pressing for more detail. “In here? Out by your desk?”

“Here,” she answered quickly, nodding toward a short couch that sat opposite the desk. “I remember now. He dictated a couple of letters, and then we talked.”

“About?”

“Things,” she answered evasively. “He wanted to know how Tom was doing in school, stuff like that. But then as it got later and the installer still wasn’t here, he started getting more and more upset.”

“Did that seem unusual to you, for him to be disturbed because someone was late?”

“That’s just the way he was,” she said.

“Was anything out of place at the time you left? For instance, what about the plant in that one examining room. Was it broken?“

“No. It was fine. I put it up on the counter just before I left to keep it out of the installer’s way, but it wasn’t broken.”

“What about this morning when you came into the office. Was there anything out of place when you came to work?”

“No,” she replied. “Not out here. Everything seemed to be fine until I went down the hall.”

“What about the door from outside, was it still locked?”

“As far as I know, both of them were.”

“Both?”

“There’s another door that you may not have seen. It leads from the second examining room and goes directly out into the parking garage. That’s the way Dr. Fred usually came into the office.”

“But you didn’t use that door?”

She shook her head. “I ride the bus, so I don’t use the garage. My key is to the front door.”

“When you came in this morning, didn’t you notice the smell?” Al asked. There was a thinly veiled tone of sarcasm in his voice. I noticed it. Debi Rush didn’t. She shook her head.

“My allergies have been acting up for the last two months. I haven’t been able to smell anything for days.”

“All right,” I said. “One more time. Tell us once more what you did when you got here today.”

“Like I said before, I called today’s list of patients to confirm their appointments, then I came in here and dusted, the way I always do. I always tried to have the dusting done before Dr. Fred got here. And I put the schedule and today’s files on his desk. Dr. Fred liked everything orderly.”

“You dusted?” I focused on that. In this day and age dusting didn’t sound like something that would still be in any self-respecting dental assistant’s job description.

Debi continued. “Every morning. In here, at least. And I polished his desk, too. The whole thing. That’s one of the reasons I got along so well with Dr. Fred. I was always on time, and I was willing to do whatever he wanted.”

“So much for fingerprints,” Big Al grunted under his breath, but I went on with the questions.

“What about the patient files from Saturday?”

“What about them?”

“Shouldn’t they have been refiled? They’re still here in the out basket.”

“I was going to put them away just as soon as I set up Dr. Fred’s tray. That’s when I found him, and I-” She broke off suddenly, too overcome by emotion to continue.

I glanced at Big Al, who looked disgusted. He doesn’t have a very high tolerance for tears. “Anything else you want to know at the moment?” I asked him.

Al shook his head. “Not that I can think of right now. Maybe later.”

“All right then, Debi,” I said. “You can go for the time being, but will you be home in case we need to get back in touch with you?”

She nodded slowly. “Sure, I’ll be there,” she said. “There’s no sense in staying here.”

We found Bill Foster on his hands and knees in the gore-spattered examination room, cutting out the section of blood-soaked carpeting from beneath the examining chair. Big squares where the footprints had been were already missing.

“Finding anything?” I asked, walking up behind him.

Foster looked up at me and shrugged. “Who knows? We’ve raised latent prints all over the place, but I’d lay odds none of them are going to belong to the killer.”

“Why not?”

He nodded in the direction of a Formica counter next to the chair. On it sat an open cardboard dispenser of disposable rubber gloves.

“With that sitting right there? I’d bet money he put on gloves. I sure as hell would.”

“If he had time,” I said.

“Doc Baker and I got talking after you left. He thinks somebody coldcocked the sucker, hit him over the head with something, then finished him off while he was out cold.”

“Hit him with something, like that carpet kicker for instance?” I asked. “It looked like blood on those teeth to me.”

He shrugged. “You’re right about the blood, Beau, but that’s not what clobbered the dentist, at least not the sharp part. There’s no matching wound. Somebody else must be wearing the bite from that set of teeth. In the meantime, I think we may have found the murder weapon.”

“What? Where?”

“A single dental pick. It was in the autoclave.”

“Sterilized?” I asked.

“You bet.”

“What makes you think that? This is a dentist’s office for Christ’s sake! The place must be crawling with dental picks.”

“Maybe so, but what dental assistant in her right mind would sterilize only one dental pick at a time?”

“A dental pick!” Big Al repeated the words, shaking his head. “Come on now, Bill, you’d have to be at pretty close quarters to use one of those things, wouldn’t you? And who’s going to take time to clean it afterward?”

Bill Foster nodded. “You’d have to be a cool customer, all right, but according to Doc Baker, the killer wasn’t the least bit squeamish. He went straight for the jugular.”

I glanced at Big Al, wondering what he was thinking. It wasn’t long before he let me know, sighing as if dismissing some theory that had been growing in his head. “Debi Rush may be lying,” he reasoned, “but she definitely strikes me as the squeamish type. Besides, I didn’t notice any scratches on her, either.”

“At least none we could see,” I added.

“So why’s she lying to us?” Big Al asked with a frown.

“Beats the hell out of me,” I told him.

We left the criminalist to do his painstaking work and made our way out of the office, a plush ground floor space in a building called Cedar Heights at the corner of Second and Cedar. It’s only a block or so from my own building, Bell town Terrace, at Second and Broad.

Both buildings are located at the northern end of the Denny Regrade, a man-made flat area in an otherwise hilly Seattle. The streets are broad and straight, lined with a duke’s mixture of buildings, from high-rise, pricey condominium/office buildings to rat-infested hovels months away from a close encounter with a wrecking ball.

The Regrade is a neighborhood of contrasts. Gay bars and trendy restaurants exist side by side with small appliance repair shops. Flash-in-the-pan delis spring up periodically. During their brief lifetimes they serve the varied collection of longtime, thriving insurance agencies and short-term, faddish specialty shops. Directly across Second Avenue from where we stood, a deserted hot tub company had gone the way of hula hoops and Howdy Doody.

It was still and warm on the sidewalk as we walked out and looked up at a glaringly blue sky. It would be hot later in the day, the kind of hot that many of Seattle“ s older buildings are hard pressed to handle.

Big Al and I stood on the sidewalk for a moment, conferring, trying to decide on a next step. “So why’d the carpet installer leave without finishing the job?” I asked. “And how come he took off without his tools?”

Al shrugged. “He must have left in a hurry. So maybe now we’ve got two suspects, Debi Rush and the carpet installer. What if they’re in it together?”

“Stranger things have happened,” I said.

“What now? Notify the family or go looking for that carpet installer?” Al asked.

“We don’t have a choice,” I told him. “Family comes first. We’ll have to find the installer later.”

While we talked, an older man wearing a pair of bright orange coveralls had ambled slowly around the corner of the building. Dragging a plastic garbage container behind him and picking up trash as he went, he gradually edged his way over to where we were standing.

Stopping a few feet away, he removed a frayed toothpick from his mouth and tossed it into the trash can. “Had some excitement around here this morning, I guess.” he said casually. “You fellows wouldn’t happen to be reporters or something, would you?”

“Police detectives,” I said. “I take it you work around here?”

He let go of the handle on the trash can and fumbled in a pocket of the coveralls until he located a hanky, which he used to wipe his hands before holding one out to me. “Name’s Henry,” he said. “Henry Calloway. I’m the resident manager here at Cedar Heights.”

“I’m J. P. Beaumont,” I replied. “And this is my partner, Allen Lindstrom.” Calloway nodded briefly when I showed him my badge.

“It’s too bad about the doc,” he said. “He was a good tenant. A bit fussy now and again, I suppose, but he usually paid his rent right on time.”

When you’re a homicide cop, you get paid to look for discrepancies, and the word usually offered the promise of something out of the ordinary.

“You mean he didn’t always pay on time,” I said.

Henry Calloway shook his head. “Oh, there was just that once. One of the neighborhood bums spent the night camped out on the steps here and took a piss in the doorway before he left. The doc claimed I hadn’t cleaned it up good enough. Held up the rent until it passed inspection. That was the only time.”

Unfortunately, it wasn’t a discrepancy at all. It seemed totally in character, considering what we had learned so far about Dr. Frederick Nielsen.

Calloway wasn’t about to let us leave. “Heard someone say he’s been dead in there over the weekend,” he went on. “That’s too bad. When will I be able to get inside to clean up?”

“You won’t,” I answered shortly. “Bill Foster’s still in there, gathering evidence. When he leaves, he’ll put up crime-scene tape. No one goes in or out until the tape comes down.”

“I see,” Calloway said, sounding disappointed.

I know the type. I meet at least one on every case. These turkeys thrive on morbid curiosity. They like to view crime scenes for themselves, preferably while the smell of spilled blood still hangs heavy in the air. Having a murder committed in his building would give Henry Calloway a lifetime’s worth of grist for barstool conversations.

I suppressed a shudder. I don’t like the Henry Calloways of the world, but occasionally they prove useful. Big Al was the one who gave Calloway his chance to shine.

“By the way,” he put in casually, “you didn’t happen to see anything unusual over the weekend, did you?”

Calloway straightened his shoulders, puffed out his chest, and drew himself to full attention. “Can’t say that I did, except maybe this morning.”

“This morning?” I asked. “What about this morning?”

“Well, sir, when I saw that little receptionist of his go racing into the office a little before nine, I says to my wife, I says, ”Jody, there’s going to be hell to pay. You mark my words.“ Dr. Nielsen didn’t hold with people being late, you know. But then, I guess he won’t be firing her on that account, now will he?”

“No,” I agreed. “I suppose not. Did you notice anything else unusual, anything at all?”

“Not that I remember.”

“What about your wife? Does she work here, too?”

“She does, and you’re welcome to ask her,” he said, “but I doubt she saw anything else.”

We took his name and phone number. Henry Calloway wandered away, no longer making even the slightest pretense of picking up the trash.

“That lying little wench,” Big Al growled, as soon as Calloway was out of earshot. “She told us she was here at eight o’clock. What the hell do you think she’s up to?”

“I don’t know,” I answered, “but we’re by God going to find out. First, though, we’d better go tell his wife.”