Without Due Process

CHAPTER 14

It was drizzling lightly as I set out up a crowded Third Avenue sidewalk on my way to Marion and the quaint, upstairs Mexican restaurant frequented by downtown-type Mexican food freaks.

As I walked, I couldn’t help feeling a little guilty. Sue had called out of courtesy offering to volunteer information she was under no obligation to share with me. In return, here I was planning to use her for my own underhanded ends. That didn’t seem quite fair, but I wanted to be part of learning whatever could be learned from Ben Weston’s computer file. Given a choice, Paul Kramer sure as hell wouldn’t clue me in. Because she’s a straightforward woman, Sue Danielson was the weak link in Kramer’s chain of command. By the time I reached the restaurant I had more or less convinced myself that in this case, the ends really did justify the means.

I made good time, but Sue was already there, seated in the smoking section of the restaurant and puffing away like a chimney long before I arrived. A hostess with an authentically thick Mexican accent led me to the table and tried to tempt me with a margarita. Fortunately, I was wearing my margarita repellent.

“So are we having a secret rendezvous?” I asked Sue teasingly, with what I hoped passed for a mischievous grin. “Do you think Detective Kramer had either one of us tailed?”

She didn’t laugh. In fact, she never even cracked a smile. “This is no joke, Beau. What’s with you two guys, anyway? When I mentioned to him that I intended to tell you what I’d learned from the paperboy, Kramer pitched a fit all over that brand-new private office of his.”

“It’s just a little personality conflict,” I assured her. “Nothing serious, but the animosity cuts both ways, if that’s any consolation. I don’t like him any better than he likes me.”

“Great!” she said, shaking her head in disgust. “Some men never grow up, do they. Is this another one of those locker room mine’s-bigger-than-yours situations?”

It pains me to admit that she was probably fairly close to the mark, but I refrained from dignifying her comment with a reply, and she left it at that.

“By the way, I hope you like Mexican food,” she added.

“You go right ahead,” I told her. “I’ll just have coffee. What’s up?”

The waitress came by. Sue ordered a combination plate and a Coke. Although close to my limit, I ordered more black coffee. “Tell me about the paperboy,” I said. “I want to hear all about him.”

“Have you ever had a paper route?” she asked.

It was a typically female way of starting a conversation from way out in left field without directly tackling the issue at hand. Over the years, however, I’ve managed to develop considerable patience, and I played right along.

“Not me. I worked in a movie theater as a kid-hawking tickets and popcorn and jujubes. I’ve been a night owl all my life. I never could have roused myself at some ungodly hour to go deliver morning papers, and an evening route would have screwed up my extracurricular activities. How about you?”

“I had one,” she replied, “back in Cincinnati. A city’s funny at that hour of the morning. It’s so still and peaceful when you’re the only person out and around. You wander up and down streets and through neighborhoods while cars are still parked wherever people happen to leave them overnight. You know who gets up first, who will already be up and waiting for a paper by the time you drop it on the porch. You see all kinds of things, including some things you shouldn’t. Just before the sun comes up, I used to pretend I was invisible.”

She paused and studied me with a searching look. “Am I making sense?”

I bit back the temptation to tell her to hurry up and get to the point. “More or less,” I said.

“Anyway, this kid from Garfield-Bob Case is his name-has had the same Seattle Post-Intelligencer route for three years. He says he used to see Ben Weston out running every morning at the same time, rain or shine. He claims to know most of the cars and drivers that belong in the neighborhood and what times they come and go. He says that in the past few weeks there’s been a lot of extra traffic in the early-morning hours.”

“What kind of traffic?”

“He mentioned three in particular. One is a late-model Lexus with a cellular radio antenna.”

“That doesn’t help much. I don’t remember the last time I saw a Lexus without a cellular phone, do you? All the ones I’ve seen do.”

Sue glowered at me. “Let me finish. He says he got a real close look at it the morning after the murders. Too close, actually. It almost ran him down just half a minute or so after whoever it was took a potshot at you. He heard the noise and thought it was a backfire until the guy almost ran him and his bicycle off the street three blocks away from Ben Weston’s house.”

“How come it took him until now to come forward?” I asked.

“He’s scared, Beau. He’s out on that paper route by himself every single morning. He’s afraid if whoever it was hears he’s gone to the cops, they’ll come back looking for him next. He made the mistake of telling his mother about it, and she called us.”

From a strictly survival standpoint, I had to admit the kid had the right idea. Paperboys on bicycles are sitting ducks for drive-by shootings. I took out my notebook. “What’s his name again?”

“Bob. Robert actually. Robert Case.”

“Well, Bob Case is probably right to be scared. I don’t hold it against him. Did he get a look at the driver?”

“Not really. He said it was a young black man, but he claims he didn’t get a good enough look to give us a positive ID.”

“That figures. My guess is even if he did, he wouldn’t tell us. License number?”

“Negative on that too.”

“So we have what is commonly known as a semi-eyewitness. What about the rest of the unexplained traffic you were telling me about? The news about someone seeing that speeding Lexus moments after the shooting is great, but what did he say about other vehicles?”

“Three. One is a Honda CRX driven by a young black male. On several occasions, Case saw this one driving along beside Ben Weston. The driver and Ben seemed to be chatting while Ben jogged, but the last time he saw that one was maybe as long as a month or two ago. The second is a late-model white Toyota Tercel, driven by a Caucasian male.”

Sue Danielson stopped talking and made no indication that she was going to continue.

“You said three,” I prodded. “What about the last one?”

“A patrol car.” She said the words softly and then waited for my reaction. I didn’t disappoint.

“A patrol car!” I exploded. “You mean as in a Seattle PD blue-and-white?”

Sue Danielson nodded grimly. “That’s exactly what I mean. One of our own. With a uniformed driver.”

“Well,” I said, “what’s wrong with that? That’s not so unusual. There are cop cars in every neighborhood in the city at all hours of the day and night.”

I said the words, but even as I voiced my objection, I remembered what Janice Morraine had said about the Flex-cufs and the possibility of the killer being a cop. First the cuffs and now a patrol car. I let Sue Danielson continue on with her story, hoping my face didn’t betray everything that was going on in my head.

“According to Bob Case, it’s highly unusual in his neighborhood, especially at that hour of the morning. Except for Ben Weston, who happened to live there, other cops tend to show up only when somebody hollers ”cop.“ The rest of the time they pretty much leave well enough alone. In other words, there’s usually zero police presence.”

I didn’t like the troubled look in Sue Danielson’s eyes or the stubborn set to her chin, and I wanted there to be some reasonably innocent explanation for the appearance of that patrol car, just as there had been for the Flex-cufs.

“Maybe the officers in the car were friends of Ben’s from Patrol. Maybe they stopped off now and then to chew the fat for a while before their shifts ended.”

Sue Danielson was prepared for that one, and she lobbed it right back at me. “That’s what Bob Case thought too, until the morning he saw Ben headed down the street in one direction and the patrol car pulled into the alley and stopped behind Ben’s house. The car made zero effort to follow Ben, and the kid thought it was odd. So do I.”

“Surveillance maybe? Had Ben or anyone else reported any recent break-ins or car prowls?” I asked.

“No,” Sue Danielson responded. “I wondered that myself. I already checked.”

“So what do you think?”

“I’ve been wrestling with it ever since I found out. I figure it could go any number of ways.”

I could see several myself. “Maybe whoever was in the patrol car suspected Ben was up to something, and they wanted to catch him at it,” I suggested blandly, already knowing that even Patrol would be more subtle than that. “Or maybe they had a tip that something serious was about to go down, and they were trying to protect him.”

“You’re dead wrong about one thing,” Sue said, “and that’s the ”they‘ part of the equation. According to Bob Case, there was only one person in that car every single time he saw it-a male Caucasian.“

“But graveyard uniformed officers only operate in pairs,” I objected.

She nodded. “I know. I thought at first that maybe someone had called in Internal Investigations Squad, but they usually operate in plain clothes and in unmarked vehicles, don’t they?”

“Most of the time. Did you call up to Internal Investigations and ask?”

Sue Danielson shook her head. “I didn’t have enough nerve. I’ve never talked with anyone from IIS, and I’m still not sure if there’s anything here worth bothering them about.”

Considering the presence of both the Flex-cufs and the mysterious patrol car, I thought there was, but I wanted to play those cards fairly close to my chest.

“With what we’ve found out in the past twenty-four hours,” I said, “especially the bank loan thing, I’d be surprised if they weren’t interested. As a matter of fact, maybe they already were. That would take care of the patrol car problem in a minute.”

“Except for what you said before, that IIS wouldn’t send someone out in a blue-and-white.”

“So where does that leave us?”

Sue pushed her plate away, flattened her napkin, and pulled out a pen. She reminded me of my old-time Ballard High School football coaches, hanging around Zesto’s, drawing X ‘s and O ’s on innumerable paper napkins.

“We have at least two, maybe three players,” Sue said, explaining for her own benefit as well as for mine. “The black guy in the Lexus and the black guy in the CRX who may or may not be one and the same, ditto with the white guy from the patrol car and the one from the Tercel. Since he was fleeing the scene of a crime, it’s safe to assume the guy in the Lexus is also a bad guy. As far as the other two are concerned, it’s anybody’s guess.”

I felt obliged to add my two cents’ worth. “And is the guy in the patrol car really a cop or is he somebody masquerading as a cop?”

“If he isn’t, how would he get hold of the car?” she asked.

“If he’s fake, the vehicle could be too.”

“I suppose,” she agreed reluctantly, but she didn’t sound entirely convinced. Neither was I, but the idea of an imposter posing as a cop sounded a lot more acceptable than the other alternative of a police officer perpetrator.

“What do you think?” I asked her.

“Wild-assed guess?”

“Yes.”

“I didn’t know Ben Weston personally, but from what people have told me about him, if he could go bad, then anybody in the department could go bad, you and me included.”

Detective Danielson’s bleak assessment wasn’t that far from my own. She put her pen down and pushed her napkin with its good guy-bad guy notations in my direction. “Any additions or corrections to the minutes?”

“No, you’ve pretty well covered it all.”

“Any suggestions about what to do next?”

That last question gave me the opening I had been looking for, a way to bring up the question of Ben Weston’s computer project.

“It would help a lot if we knew for sure about Ben Weston, wouldn’t it?” I suggested tentatively.

In a homicide investigation, sometimes the small and seemingly unimportant answers to side questions lead to answers on the important ones as well. Sue grabbed the bait and ran with it. “It sure as hell would.”

“Has anyone talked to you about what exactly Ben was doing in the gang unit?”

“Not specifically, no.”

“Doesn’t it seem like they should? I found out today, almost by accident, that he’s been building a gang profile data base. It includes all kinds of information on the various gang members-where they came from, what their affiliations are, that kind of thing. He was doing it all on the CCI computer.”

“Sounds reasonable,” she said.

“Maybe. Today I saw a very early version of that data base, something he was doing on his own long before he ever transferred into CCI. Two of the bank loan names were on even that early version. We need to get a look at what he’s been doing recently. Maybe then we’ll be able to sort out a pattern or see some connection.”

“Are you sure Detective Kramer hasn’t already done this?”

“Maybe, but I doubt it. Kramer’s got his hands full. He might not even have thought of it, but I’ll tell you one thing, if I ask him to look into it, it’ll be a cold day in hell before it actually gets done. Remember the court orders?”

Sue looked at me warily. “So why are you telling me? Do you want me to go see if I can get you a copy of whatever it is?”

I tried to look as innocent as possible. “You’re still supposed to be locating those missing cosigners, aren’t you? And having their families’ names and telephone numbers couldn’t hurt that process, could it? In fact, it might just make your job a whole lot easier.”

She smiled then, for the first time since we’d entered the restaurant. “Men are so damn transparent it’s disgusting. This is still part and parcel of what’s going on between you and Kramer, isn’t it? You’re afraid to give him the information for fear he’ll ignore it. And you think I’m dumb enough to jump into the cross fire.”

“Are you?”

She grinned back at me. “I prefer to call it curiosity rather than stupidity, if you don’t mind.”

“Which is why you’re going to be one hell of a detective one of these days, if you aren’t already.”

I was deliberately baiting her, expecting a little on-the-job male-female give-and-take. Instead, Sue nodded and raised her Coke glass in acknowledgment, ignoring the teasing and accepting my comment as a compliment.

“And what do you suggest we do about IIS?” she asked. “Call them in? Leave them out of it?”

“That’s a sticky one. I would imagine they’re already looking into the Ben Weston matter. Their concern will be what exactly he was up to and whether or not any other police officers were involved. For right now, though, until we get a better handle on your ”players,“ as you call them, I don’t think we should call the Double I’s in. It would be premature, and it just might backfire.”

She nodded. “That’s exactly why I wanted to talk to you about it, Detective Beaumont. I figured if anybody could give me the benefit of the long view, it was you.”

I’m sure Sue Danielson meant her comment as a compliment-at least I think she did-but there’s a certain amount of ego damage that goes along with being considered the ancient, all-knowing, and time-honored dispenser of the long view. When she offered to buy my coffee, I let her, and I left the restaurant feeling more butt-sprung than ever.

We walked back to the Public Safety Building together. Sue headed for CCI while I went back to my little cubicle in Homicide. Big Al was gone, giving me some working peace and quiet for a change. I was just getting a good start on the Emma Jackson report when the phone rang. It was Sue. I could tell from the sound of her voice that something was seriously wrong.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“Meet me on the eleventh floor,” she answered tersely. “We’re going to IIS for sure, now, and I do mean now. I tried to get hold of Kramer to tell him, but he’s not around, and neither is Watty. I don’t think we should sit on this any longer. It’s too important.”

“For Christ’s sake, Sue, tell me what’s happening?”

“I had to jump through all kinds of hoops, but I finally got Ben Weston’s password and current verification question from the only person who supposedly has it, Kyle Lehman, the department’s computer systems operator. Captain Nichols, the head of CCI, woke him out of a sound sleep to do it. We logged into Ben’s directory on the computer just a few minutes ago.”

I didn’t like the way she verbally underlined the word “supposedly.” “And?” I prompted.

“Between one forty-five and two-fifteen on the morning of April fifteenth, all but two of the files in Ben Weston’s directory were opened and closed.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying that within hours of Ben Weston’s death, someone went through his secured computer directory in CCI. The directory shows log-on and log-off times. In each case the file was open for less than a minute.”

“Was anything changed?”

“I don’t think so.”

“But someone was looking for something.”

“Someone inside Seattle PD was looking for something,” Sue Danielson corrected. “You know yourself. The computer operates on a secured system. You don’t get into it without having the proper passwords as well as coming up with all the right answers to the verifying questions.”

“What do you suppose they were looking for?” I asked.

“And did they find it?” Sue added.

Of course, that changed everything. If someone had tampered with Ben Weston’s files on a secured computer system located in the Public Safety Building within hours of his murder, then it was definitely time for someone to pay a visit to Internal Investigations. High time.

“You’re absolutely right, Sue,” I said. “See you on the eleventh floor just as soon as that damned slow-boat-to-China elevator can get us there.”