Trial By Fury

CHAPTER 25

Cautiously, and without holstering my.38, I gave the place a thorough once-over. By the time I finished, I was beginning to worry about kicking down the door.

As nearly as I could tell, nothing seemed amiss in the apartment. There was no sign of any struggle. It looked like the bed had been slept in on both sides. I found nothing to indicate a hurried leave-taking. The closet was still full of clothes, and the dresser drawers contained neat stacks of female underwear.

Finally, I put my gun away, picked up the phone, and dialed Sergeant Watkins. At home. I figured I was going to get my ass chewed, and I wanted to get it over with as soon as possible.

Watty was particularly out of sorts when he came on the phone. It sounded like he was out of breath. I had a pretty fair idea what Saturday evening activity my phone call might have interrupted.

"I just broke into Candace Wynn's apartment," I told him without preamble. "Nobody's here."

"You what?" he demanded.

"You heard me. I broke into her apartment, hoping to find Peters. They're not here. Now I need some help."

"You're damn right about that! You need more than help. You need to have your goddamned head examined! You ever hear of a fucking search warrant? You ever hear of probable cause?"

"Watty, listen to me. That's what I'm trying to tell you. I've found something important. Remember the blue paint on the rope that killed Ridley and the chips of paint they found in his hair? I think I've found where it came from. I want a crime scene investigator from the crime lab over here on the double."

"Over where?" he asked. "To a place you've broken into without so much as a by-your-leave, to say nothing of a search warrant?"

"Did you hear what I said?"

"I heard you all right. Now you hear me. No way is someone coming over there until you have an airtight search warrant properly filled out, signed, sealed, and delivered. Understand?"

"But Watty," I objected. "It's Saturday night. Where am I going to find a judge at this hour?"

"That's your problem, buster. And you make damn sure it's a superior court judge's signature that's on that piece of paper. I don't want someone throwing it back in our faces later because it's just some lowbrow district court judge. You got that?"

"I don't want to leave here, though," I protested lamely. "What if they come back while I'm gone and find the door broken?"

"You pays your money, and you takes your choice," Watty told me. "You get your ass out of there and don't go back until you have that warrant in your hot little hand."

Watty was adamant. There was no talking him out of it. "All right, all right. I'll go get your fucking search warrant. But we're wasting time."

"You'll be wasting even more time if somebody files a breaking-and-entering or illegal-search complaint against you. Now, give me the address. I'll get somebody over there to watch it until you get back."

Grudgingly, I drove back down to the Public Safety Building, parked in a twenty-four-hour loading zone, and went upstairs to type out the proper form. When I finished typing, I grabbed the list of judges' home phone numbers and started letting my fingers do the walking. I didn't know it, but I was in for a marathon.

Fifteen no answers and three answering machines later, I finally spoke to a human being, a judge's wife, not a judge. She sounded more than a little dingy. According to her, all the judges she knew, including her husband, were in Olympia for a retirement banquet for one of the state supreme court justices. She would have been there herself, she assured me, but she was just getting over the shingles.

The lady must have been pretty lonely. She was so happy to have someone to talk to that she could have kept me on the phone for hours, giving me a detailed, blow-by-blow description of all her symptoms, but I was in a hurry. I cut her off in mid-diagnosis. "Where in Olympia?" I asked.

"I beg your pardon?"

"The banquet," I said, pulling her back on track. "Where is it?"

"Oh, at the Tyee," she answered. "At least I think that's what the invitation said. Since I wasn't going, I didn't pay that close attention."

I thanked her and hung up. Olympia is sixty miles or so south of Seattle.

Fortunately, the Porsche was still there when I went back outside. It hadn't been towed. It didn't even have a ticket plastered to its windshield. The parking enforcement officers must have been taking a coffee break. So was the State Patrol on I-5. I had clear sailing, and I drove like an absolute maniac-forty minutes flat from the time I left the Public Safety Building until I pulled into the parking lot at the Tyee.

I had driven the last twenty miles with my bladder about to burst, so my first priority was to find a restroom and take a leak. A dapper little guy in a suit and tie was having a hell of a time aiming. He was a little worse for wear, but I thought I recognized him.

"You wouldn't happen to be a judge from Seattle, would you?"

He grinned fuzzily. "That's right. Do I know you?"

He didn't then, but by the time he finished signing the search warrant, we were old pals. I grabbed the paper out of his hand and beat it back toward the car. I was back on the Fremont Bridge thirty-eight minutes later.

Happily, Sergeant Watkins hadn't been sitting around playing with himself in my absence. He had alerted the crime scene team and had worked out a treaty with King County for them to bring their laser printfinder along to the apartment. The King County Police crime scene van was parked in Candace Wynn's parking place.

Watty must have pulled out all the stops to conjure up that kind of interdepartmental cooperation on such short notice on a Saturday evening.

There was quite a crowd gathering between the alley and Leary Way. In the process of rounding up everybody we needed, Watty had inadvertently summoned the fourth estate. I found an unwelcome welcoming committee of reporters waiting for me behind the police barricade.

I parked the Porsche and started to make my way through the crowd. Somebody stopped me. "What's happening, Detective Beaumont?" a reporter asked, shoving a microphone in my face. "What's going on in there?"

Someone else recognized me. "Hey, Detective Beaumont, this another homicide? How many does that make this week? You guys going for some kind of record?"

Ignoring the cameras, I pushed on, wondering if there wasn't some other kind of work I could do that wouldn't put me in daily contact with the press.

When I finally reached the bottom of the stairway, I stopped to examine the motley crew Watty had assembled-two latent-evidence examiners from the crime lab, a beefy sheriff's department deputy packing what looked to be a large suitcase, a King County ID person, two night-shift homicide detectives from the department, and a uniformed S.P.D. officer. Each of them nodded to me in turn, but no one said anything.

Sergeant Watkins himself was waiting at the top of the stairs. He stood blocking the doorway, glaring down at me, arms crossed truculently across his chest. He looked like what he wanted was a good fight. "Give it to me," he demanded when I came up the stairs.

"Give you what?" I asked.

"The warrant, for chrissakes!" He held out his hand. I removed the warrant from my inside jacket pocket and slapped it into the palm of his hand. Holding it up to the dim glow of a street lamp half a block away, he studied it for a long time.

"All right," he said finally. "Break the door down."

For the first time, I looked at the door. Sure enough, while I had been driving up and down the freeway to and from Olympia, someone had jerry-rigged the door back together.

"How'd it get fixed?" I asked. "Did she come back home?"

"I fixed it, you asshole," Watty whispered through clenched teeth. "Now break this motherfucker down, and make it look good. I want a picture of this on every goddamned television station in town."

I understood then why Sergeant Watkins was at the top of the steps and everyone else was waiting down below. Watty's nobody's fool. He was looking out for my ass, and his, too. It was all I could do to keep from laughing out loud as I kicked Candace Wynn's door in one more time. Once more with feeling. Take it from the top. J. P. Beaumont does "Miami Vice."

The only problem was, I kicked the door like it was really locked, like it hadn't been wrecked only hours before. I almost broke my neck when it caved in under my foot.

Once inside, Watty motioned the rest of the troops to join us. It turned out the suitcase contained King County 's laser printfinder. The deputy, huffing, lugged the case up the stairs and put it down in the middle of Candace Wynn's living room.

The printfinder weighs around eighty pounds or so, and it works off a regular 110 volt plug-in. He fired it up, plugging it into an outlet right there in the room. The crime scene investigators dusted the various surfaces in the room with a fluorescent powder. Then, one of them donned a pair of goggles.

"Okay, you guys," the other said. "Here go the lights."

With that, he turned out all the lights in the room. We were plunged into darkness. The only illumination was the finger of light from the printfinder as it played over the glowing powder and the periodic flashes from a 35-mm camera as the other investigator snapped pictures.

I felt like a kid who had stumbled into a midnight session with a Ouija board. There was nothing to do but stand there with my hands in my pockets and wait as the investigator ran the lens in the end of a length of fiber optic cable over everything that wasn't readily movable and bagged up everything that was.

He picked up prints from everywhere-the table, the refrigerator, the bathroom counter and mirror, the couch and chair in the living room, all the while recording the prints on film for later examination. Not only did the laser pick up prints, it also located other bits of trace evidence-hairs and fiber fragments that would have been tough to find with the naked eye.

Finally, tired of doing nothing, the rest of the team went outside. The other homicide detectives gathered a series of paint scraping samples from the handrail on the stairs. I showed them which garbage can had held the painting debris I had discovered earlier in the evening when I had been looking for something to use to clean my hands.

Fascinated by the workings of the laser, I went back inside and followed the deputy around like a puppy. I was so intrigued with the process that I failed to notice when one of the crime lab boys came to the door and motioned Watty aside. Moments later, Watty switched on the lights.

"Hey, why'd you do that?" the laser operator griped.

"Can you take that thing outside?" Watty demanded. He looked more anxious, more upset, than I had ever seen him. His whole demeanor vibrated with unmistakable urgency.

"Now?"

Watty nodded.

"I guess we can finish up in here later," the tech grumbled. "But I'll have to get the van to fire up the generator. I thought we were going to be inside. Nobody told me we'd be working outside. I need a place to plug all this shit in."

"What's up?" I asked Watty as soon as they called the deputy back upstairs to carry the equipment down to the alley. "What did they find?"

"Come see for yourself," Watty said grimly.

I followed him outside and down the steps. The King County van had been moved farther down the alley and was parked next to the garbage can. The deputy was busy hauling out power cables to hook the laser up outside.

As we started away from them without acknowledging their presence, the members of the press put up a hell of a fuss.

"Ignore them," Watty ordered. I was only too happy to oblige.

We walked down the alley and gathered around the garbage can like a group of male witches around a mysterious cauldron. Standing to one side, I watched as the laser operator lowered his cable into the can. The brilliant light illuminated only a tiny area at a time. Someone had removed the top layer of paint-sodden rags. I moved even closer to see what had been unearthed, what the light was focusing on.

It was a bottle, a tiny medicine bottle, the kind liquid narcotics are stored in before someone sucks them into a syringe.

I turned to Watty then. "Morphine?" I asked.

He nodded, saying nothing.

"Oh, shit!" I muttered. Sick with dread, I turned to walk away.

Just beyond the police barricade, a camera-man caught me walking back down the alley. As I passed him, I was aware of the red light from his videocam shining full on my face. It was then I realized I had never called Ames to let him know what was going on, and here I was, live, on the eleven o'clock news.

I wanted to grab the camera out of the man's hands and shove it down his throat. I didn't.

Excessive common sense is one of the few side benefits of advancing middle age.

Unfortunately, it's also a symptom of despair.