Lying in wait

25

By three o'clock Sunday morning, I was seeing the Seattle Police Department's bureaucratic inaction in action, which is to say, nothing was happening. For one thing, the shit had already hit the officialdom fan over what was now being called the "Culpeper Court break-in." The brass was worried about long-term repercussions from the warrantless search. What is sometimes overlooked down in the south end's Rainier Valley can provoke a firestorm of reaction and protest when it happens elsewhere in the city. It's been my experience that nothing moves slower than a publicity-shy bureaucracy.

What seemed obvious to me-that Else and Kari Gebhardt along with Inge Didriksen were not only missing but also in grave danger-totally eluded the comprehension of Seattle P.D.'s nighttime supervisors. One at a time, Sue and I argued our case across desks and up the chain of command. Eventually, so tired we could barely hold our heads up, we landed in the office of the department's night-watch commander, Major John Gray.

Major Gray, whom I had sometimes heard referred to as Major Grim, is a night owl who has spent years toiling on Seattle P.D.'s graveyard shift. Although he may be a nice enough guy, I had heard persistent, ongoing rumors that he was sometimes a little slow on the uptake. After five minutes of Sue's and my early-morning session with the man, I was inclined to agree with that last assessment.

Although the jigs and jags of the story seemed simple and straightforward enough to me, Major Gray was totally incapable of making the necessary and critical connections between other aspects of the case and the three missing women.

He failed to see any significance in the set of miniature soldiers that had once been thought to be made of gold but that had, on examination, turned out to be made of something else. And he saw no possible correlation between the soldiers and Gunter Gebhardt's assortment of tools, which, although they looked ordinary enough, might very well turn out to be made of gold. The fact that the tools were now also unaccountably missing didn't exactly make Major Gray's day. And he howled at my theory that this entire debacle might possibly have its origins in a failed romance from Ballard High School some thirty years earlier.

"Wait a minute here," he said. "Are you trying to tell me that this Norwegian fisherman, Alan what's-his-name Torvoldsen, got mixed up in all this because a Ballard girl name Else threw him over for somebody else way back in the sixties? Come on, Beau. Get real. You sound more like a hopeless romantic than a homicide cop."

Maybe it did sound a little improbable. "You can laugh all you want to, Major Gray," I said, "but I'm telling you what I believe to be true. Those three missing women are in danger. They're out on a boat with a man who, one way or the other, is involved in the plot surrounding Gunter Gebhardt's murder. Not only that, I have reason to believe this same man is also connected to a fatal house fire up on Camano Island."

"Just for argument's sake," Major Gray said, "let's suppose that's all true. What do you want me to do about it?"

"I want to launch a search. The boat is capable of traveling at a rate of eight to ten knots. The longer we delay, the harder it's going to be to find them."

Major Gray rubbed his chin. Any trained salesman in the world will tell you that's a bad sign.

He said, "Okay, Detective Beaumont, let me play this whole scenario back to you just the way you gave it to me, and you tell me how it sounds. Three women who may or may not be missing and who may or may not have been kidnapped, are possibly-not definitely, but possibly-out on a boat in Puget Sound, traveling in some unspecified direction with an exboyfriend of one of the three women, a guy she jilted a mere thirty years ago. Does this sound a little fishy to you?"

I was beginning to wonder how come anybody ever called the night-watch commander Major Grim instead of Major Laugh-a-Minute. He sounded more like an off-the-wall stand-up comedian from one of those comedy joints down in Pioneer Square.

Major Gray paused as if waiting for me to make some comment, but I was smart enough not to fall into the trap. Especially not, considering that a rarely seen expression-an actual grin-was beginning to play around the turned-down corners of Major Grim's dour mouth.

"And now it gets better," he continued, clearly enjoying himself. "Although no one else besides the captain-not a single passenger-was ever seen on the aforementioned vessel when it cleared the locks, I'm still supposed to believe that, along with the three missing women, there are possibly two other people on board as well, people who are either this Torvoldsen character's fellow conspirators or the Gebhardt woman's fellow victims. Take your pick.

"One of the invisible extra people is supposedly a presumed Nazi war criminal who's been missing for fifty-some years. The other is an unemployed secret agent from East Germany, a country that no longer exists."

"It was raining," I argued feebly. "If the passengers were all inside the boat, nobody would have seen them." Despite that puny attempt at sidetracking him, I already knew it was hopeless. By then Major Gray was having far too good a time.

"Based on all the above-most of which is solely on your say-so and conjecture-I'm expected to alert the media, call in the Coast Guard-maybe even the National Guard-and institute an air-and-ground search."

"An air-and-sea search," I corrected.

"Whatever," Major Gray shook his head. "You can call it any kind of a search you damn well please, Detective Beaumont, but I'm telling you, it ain't a-gonna happen. Not on my watch. Because you've got nothing here to justify it except a few wild figments of your overly active imagination.

"The kind of search-and-rescue operation you want would necessarily cover a large geographical area. Do you have any idea what that would cost? Puget Sound isn't exactly a damn bathtub. We're talking an arm and a leg here-thousands of dollars an hour. That's a lot of cash. We don't happen to have that kind of money sitting around loose in some petty-cash drawer, you know. The only person who could authorize that kind of outlay is the chief himself. I'm sure as hell not calling him in on this. And neither are you. Do I make myself clear?"

"Yes, sir. Loud and clear."

Major Gray shook his head. "Now get out of here, you two. Go home and get some rest. Sleep it off."

Without another word, Sue and I stood up and started toward the door. "Detective Danielson," Major Gray called after us, "if you have any influence on your partner here, you might encourage him to turn off the boob tube. I think he must be watching too many of those World-War-Two era movies on the movie channel."

"What's the movie channel?" I grumbled to Sue when we were out in the hall with the door closed.

"It's on cable," she informed me. "Don't you get cable TV down in that high-flying condo of yours?"

"Who the hell has time to watch television?" I answered irritably.

Sue and I barely spoke as we rode down in the elevator. Once we hit the street level, we hurried to our cars and prepared to go our separate ways. We had picked up Sue's Escort after we left the locks, and both vehicles were parked on Third Avenue, one behind the other.

She stopped beside the Escort and stuck her key in the lock. "You did the best you could," she said, speaking to me over the roof of the car.

I knew she was trying to bolster my flagging spirits and make me feel better, but it didn't help. "It wasn't nearly good enough," I returned glumly. "I feel like the whole system chewed us up and spit us out."

"Maybe Major Gray is right and we're wrong," Sue suggested. "Maybe nothing did happen. Maybe Inge, Else, and Kari will show back up sometime later this morning with a perfectly reasonable explanation for where they've been and what they've been doing."

"You don't believe that," I said, "and neither do I. Erika Weber Schmidt plays for keeps. If anybody ever sees those three women again, they'll probably be as dead as Gunter Gebhardt."

Sue shook her head. "I hope not." She opened the door, started to get in, and then thought better of it. "Give it up for the night," she advised kindly, almost as an afterthought. "We're both too tired to do anything more right now, but call me in the morning. As soon as you wake up. We'll take another crack at it then."

As soon as she said it, I recognized she was right. I was bone-tired, and she had to be every bit as worn out as I was. Still, she had stuck with me all night long; backed me up every futile, bureaucratic inch of the way.

"You've been a brick tonight, Detective Danielson," I said gratefully. "Most guys would have given up and gone home long before this."

She gave me a wan but game grin. "We're partners, remember? Now go home and get some sleep, and I will, too."

I did, and so did she. I hauled my weary ass home, crawled out of my still partially damp clothes, and heaved myself into a nice warm bed. The clock radio came on at six-fifteen Sunday morning, just as it does every morning.

It wasn't that I especially wanted to be up again at that unreasonable hour. The truth is, my radio comes on that way every morning. I can tinker with it for a nap now and again, but I always reset it. I live in fear of not remembering Sunday night to reset it for Monday morning.

When the radio came on that Sunday morning, I'd had so little sleep that I could barely open my eyes and couldn't get my head screwed on straight. Blind with fatigue, I got up and staggered for the bathroom, thinking it was actually Monday.

For one thing, Paul Brendle, The KIRO radio traffic reporter, was in the air giving the helicopter-eye view of a massive but totally unusual Sunday morning traffic tie-up on Interstate 5 just north of downtown Seattle.

Early that morning, a speeding southbound semi had jackknifed on the rain-slicked pavement of the Ship Canal Bridge. The truck had plowed through the Jersey barrier at the south end of the bridge and had taken out two northbound vehicles. One of the wrecked cars, a sedan with one fatality and two seriously injured passengers inside it, had fallen from the northbound lanes into the middle of the express lanes some distance below, while the cab of the truck itself still dangled off the far edge of the raised roadway.

As a result, I-5 was closed to traffic. All lanes were shut down, including the two regular roadways as well as the express lanes. The Department of Transportation's Incident Response team was on the scene. Traffic had been diverted onto surface streets, creating a separate tangle all its own. According to the helicopter-based reporter, even with light weekend traffic volumes, things were a mess in downtown Seattle, and they were likely to remain so for some time-well into daylight hours.

My first thought was that none of this had anything to do with me. I headed back to bed, expecting to close my eyes and go back to sleep. Then the guy back in the studio said something to Paul Brendle to the effect that it sounded like a good day to be up in a helicopter rather than down on the ground. At the sound of those words, something clicked in the back of my head, and I sat bolt upright in bed.

For years, my connection to Paul Brendle-who broadcasts traffic information for the local CBS affiliate-had been exactly the same as that of most other Seattle-area radio listeners. His was a disembodied voice that came to us over the airwaves for several hours each morning and evening, waking us up in the morning-telling us which bridges were screwed up and what alternate routes might work when the one we were accustomed to using turned into an undeclared parking lot.

But my voice-only relationship with him had changed that previous spring when Alexis Downey had invited me to participate in the Seattle Repertory Theatre's first annual charity auction. Along with me, Paul and his wife, JoAnne, had been in attendance at the gala's inaugural event. Both feeling very much like fish out of water, Paul Brendle and I had somehow gravitated to one another and struck up a conversation.

We soon discovered a common bond-we were both moderately disturbed at the idea of being charity-auction cannon fodder. We hid out in a quiet corner of the crowded ballroom. Uncomfortable in my rented monkey suit, I looked to Paul for sympathy. He sighed and nodded, allowing as how he was far more comfortable in a flight jacket, but he advised me to do as he did-to go ahead and buy a tux that actually fit. I told him I'd think about it.

In the course of our few minutes' worth of conversation, the man had proudly told me a little about his company-Puget Sound Helicopters-and about how they had, only the week before, sent three of their twenty-five two-man helicopters up in the air to comb Vashon Island for a missing Alzheimer's patient who had wandered away from home. As I remembered, they had found the man, too, before the elements and hypothermia had a chance to get him.

Search and rescue! As my feet hit the floor, my fingers were scrabbling in the nightstand table looking for the phone book. Maybe Seattle P.D. couldn't-or wouldn't-afford to spend money on mounting a search-and-rescue operation, but J. P. Beaumont, private citizen, sure as hell could.

I tend to be a slow learner, but gradually I've come to have an understanding about the value of having money. What's taken me more time than anything else is coming to the realization that it's mine now, and I'm free to spend it any damn way I please.

I found the number in the phone book and dialed. At Puget Sound Helicopters, a very polite young man answered the phone.

"I'd like to speak to Paul Brendle," I said.

"I'm sorry, sir. He's out of the office right now. Can I give him a message for you?"

"Yes, you can," I said. "My name's Beaumont, Detective J. P. Beaumont, with the Seattle Police Department."

"Does Mr. Brendle know you?"

"I believe so," I answered. "We met last spring at a charity auction. I need to speak to him as soon as possible regarding a search-and-rescue operation."

"You said detective," the young man responded. "Who are you with?"

"Seattle P.D. If my name doesn't ring a bell, tell him I'm the one who gave away the Bentley at the Seattle Rep auction."

"Do you already have the authorization form?" the young man asked.

"What authorization form?"

"A search-and-rescue requisition," the young man explained patiently. "Our insurance requires that we have a signed requisition from the requesting agency in our hands before we can put a helicopter and pilot in the air."

"Seattle P.D. isn't authorizing this search," I told him.

"They aren't?" The man sounded confused. "But I thought you said…Who is, then?" he asked.

"I am. Me, personally."

"Mr. Beaumont," he said patronizingly, as though I were some kind of nut case, "these kinds of operations are very expensive…"

"How expensive?" I cut in.

"How big an area do you want to search?"

"Puget Sound," I answered.

"That's a big place," he returned. "If we put ten aircraft up, we could pretty well cover the area in three or four hours. At a hundred sixty dollars an hour times four hours times ten aircraft, you're looking at sixty-four hundred dollars plus tax. We'd need a check for seven thousand dollars to launch that kind of operation."

"Do you take American Express?"

"Yes."

"Good. Have Mr. Brendle call me ASAP," I ordered, and followed that by rattling off my phone number. "By the way," I added, "tell him I'm prepared to pay for more than one four-hour shift if that proves necessary. And if I have to cough up overtime pay because it's Sunday? So be it. I'll spring for that, too."

"All right," he said, still sounding a little guarded. "I'll try to patch Mr. Brendle through to you as soon as possible."

"You do that," I said.

I put down the phone and wondered how long it would take for him to call me back. There was a time in my life when spending seven thousand bucks at a whack would have been inconceivable. Fortunately, those times were past.

Money talks; bullshit walks. Isn't that how the saying goes?

If hiring a team of helicopters and pilots could save those three women's lives-if it wasn't already too late, that is-then a seven-thousand-dollar investment was money well spent. In fact, saving them would have been cheap at twice the price.

Because, after all, what had happened to them was my fault and my responsibility. I was the stupid damn fool who had sent Alan Torvoldsen up to Culpeper Court to look after Else and the others in the first place. And since the problem was all my doing, then it seemed reasonable that the solution should be mine as well.

After all, I thought. Fair is fair.