Perfect Grave

Chapter Sixty

T en minutes after Cataldo locked on to Sperbeck, Grace was on the phone with his community corrections officer.

“Dead men don’t leave fingerprints,” Grace said. “I need an address.”

“Sonofa-Hold on. Are you sure those are Sperbeck’s prints on that cup?” Herb Kent, ten months from retirement, pulled a page from the file on his desk. “Because I’m looking at the report from the Rangers at Mount Rainier last month. Leon drowned himself in the Nisqually River.”

“I know. But did they find his body?”

“I’m not sure. Sorry, I just came back from sick leave, had surgery to remove two toes.” Kent paged through the file. “Nothing here says they found him yet. But I talked to Leon, maybe a week before he went there. He was despondent, like he said in his note.”

“Do you have his note?”

“I have a copy in here. I’ll fax it to you.”

“Did Sperbeck ever talk about the Boland family or Sister Anne Braxton? Did they visit him inside?”

“Let me grab his visitor sheet.” Kent sifted through the file. “What I know is that Leon was quiet, kept to himself and out of trouble. When he was assigned to me, his case didn’t need a lot of monitoring.”

Kent flipped through reports, applications, test results for Sperbeck.

“He served his full time and was no risk to reoffend. He had no family, or much of a support network. I helped him with his release plan, you know, contacting social service agencies, lining up job interviews. He had no violations and he got work as a janitor, but it didn’t last and he took it hard. Some guys can’t cope after being inside a long time. The world changes, they’re stigmatized.”

Damn it. Grace had had enough.

Sperbeck had fallen through the cracks. Violent felons were supposed to be tracked, even after release. Sperbeck had obviously staged his death. Those were his prints on the cup.

“Herb. Stop. Just give me Sperbeck’s last known address now.”

“Well, he had a couple. I’m still checking. He told me one place got flooded. The other was noisy.”

“Herb.”

“Here we go. This one in the northwest was his last. It’s off Market.”

Grace took it down.

“And, look here, the answer is, yes. Seems Sister Anne Braxton visited him several times at Washington State, then at Clallam Bay and Coyote Ridge.”

“You can confirm that he had contact with her?”

“The file here says she was instrumental in helping Sperbeck with his Moral Reconation Therapy and as his spiritual counselor-hello?”

Grace hung up and alerted SWAT to roll on Sperbeck’s residence.

The SWAT equipment truck and other emergency vehicles moved quickly to set up a command post in the parking lot of Wyslowleski’s Funeral Home, about four blocks from Sperbeck’s address.

The field commander, Lieutenant Jim Harlan, examined detailed maps and blueprints of the small house where Sperbeck rented a room at the rear. Harlan then briefed SWAT and the Hostage Negotiations Team on the objective: Seal the area, choke off all traffic, evacuate all citizens in the line of fire by stealth. Get a visual on the suspect and the hostage, then determine if a blitz entry was viable.

Police set up an outer perimeter well outside the hot zone and began diverting traffic, while cops dressed in work clothes eased a city utility van to a door down from Sperbeck’s building to confirm any movement in his apartment.

Other plainclothes officers quickly and quietly evacuated every resident from the line of fire near the building while SWAT members set up an inner perimeter by keeping out of sight near the house. No one was home in the front section. Then Sergeant Mike Brigger led his SWAT team scouts closer to the building. They would determine safety points for other team members to follow and launch a rescue.

As they waited at the command post, Grace and Perelli studied Sperbeck’s old crime, trying to piece everything together. A child hostage was killed in a $3.3 million heist. None of the money had ever surfaced. How did it all fit with the Bolands, Sister Anne, and Sharla May Forrest?

And Henry Wade was one of the responding officers. Jason Wade’s old man.

While Perelli worked the phone, Grace went over it again and again.

Nothing made sense.

“Hey, Grace.” Perelli finished a call and pulled her out of earshot. “Records says that around the time Sperbeck was released, an investigator for the insurance company that paid out on the claim made some enquiries on the old case. Guy by the name of Ethan Quinn wanted to locate the officers on call that day.”

“Maybe this Quinn has new information?”

A crackling radio interjected.

“ We have movement in the subject’s residence. ”

Tension tightened the air.

The SWAT team scouts had been followed by the utility man, the breacher, the gas team, and sharpshooters, who moved tight up to the building. At the edge of the inner perimeter, SWAT snipers had taken cover to line up on the house.

A window at the rear of Sperbeck’s building came into focus within the crosshairs of the rifle scope of the sharpshooter behind the Dumpster of a welder’s shop nearby.

“Movement in the house. White male,” the sharpshooter repeated.

Uniformed police at the outer perimeter called in on another channel.

“We got press at the east point. WKKR.”

Harlan cursed under his breath.

“Cut his utilities and phone. We can’t risk him monitoring news reports.”

Harlan was in charge. He had seconds to make a decision that could save a life, or cost him one. This is what he knew: The suspect resided here. The suspect had abducted a child, was violent, and wanted in two first-degree homicides. The suspect was an ex-convict who’d served time for killing a child hostage during an armed robbery.

Negotiation was not an option.

Swift attack.

“Mike, you good to go?”

“We’re in position.”

“Then go throw chemicals, flash-bangs, go full bore, take him down and extract the hostage.”

Brigger signaled his team and some thirty seconds later the quiet street echoed with the ker-plink of shattering glass as tear gas canisters catapulted into every window. A thirty-pound steel battering ram took down the door accompanied by the crack-crack and blinding flashes of stun grenades. The heavily armed squad in gas masks stormed the apartment.

Flashlight beams and red-line laser sights probed thick smoke for Brady Boland and Leon Dean Sperbeck.