Without Due Process

CHAPTER 2

Through some mysterious fluke of fate I happened to be out of town at the beginning of two of Seattle’s most notorious murder cases. I was fortunate enough to be in D.C. attending a homicide convention when eleven people were massacred in a downtown supper club. Several years later, I was vacationing in California with my kids when a certified crazy used an ax to murder his psychiatrist as well as the psychiatrist’s wife and two young children.

I was involved in those two cases only on a limited, peripheral level. My connection was primarily in dealing with the mountain of departmental paperwork that is the inevitable accompaniment of any multiple murder. To my great good fortune, I wasn’t embroiled in any of the immediate crime scene aftermath. My luck in that regard ran out completely when it came to the family of Officer Benjamin Harrison Weston.

When the Westons failed to answer Ben’s supervisor’s call, two uniformed officers were dispatched at once to check on the family. They arrived sometime after eleven and were, as a consequence, first on the scene. They walked us through the area and gave us a chilling guided tour of the Weston family’s senseless slaughter.

The killer’s trail was as easy to follow as the set of muddy footprints that marched unwaveringly up the back porch, through the blood-spattered kitchen, dining room, and living room, down the long carpeted hallway, and into two of the three bedrooms.

The first victim was evidently the faithful family dog, a big black-and-white mutt which, according to Big Al, had been unimaginatively but appropriately named Spot. We found Spot in the far corner of the backyard with his throat slit. The patrol officers theorized that the girl might have gone outside after the dog since the first sign of struggle-an overturned chair and a broken flowerpot-were both located on the back deck outside the kitchen door. I made a note to check and see if any of the neighbors might have heard noises from that deadly struggle, but the chances were good that the killer hadn’t given her the opportunity to make any noise.

We found the girl herself just inside the kitchen door. She was lying on her side in a pool of blood. Her mouth had been taped shut with duct tape. Big Al looked down at her and shook his head. “Her name’s Bonnie,” he said gruffly. “Short for Vondelle. Same name as her mother’s.”

Bonnie Weston may have grappled with her assailant on the back porch in an initial encounter, but in the kitchen itself we found little evidence of her continued fight-no broken dishes or upended chairs that indicated that a life-or-death, hand-to-hand combat had occurred in that incongruously cheerful and homey room. Perhaps, faced with her attacker’s superior strength, she had decided to comply with his wishes in hopes of somehow appeasing him. Unfortunately for Bonnie Weston, appeasement had never been part of her killer’s agenda.

Mr. and Mrs. John Q. Public, reading headline-grabbing newspaper stories over their morning coffee, may delude themselves into thinking that having your throat slit isn’t such a bad way to go, that it’s a reasonably quick and relatively merciful way for someone to meet his or her maker. One look at that gore-spattered kitchen floor would convince them otherwise. In her convulsive, drowning death throes, Bonnie Weston had floundered desperately across the yellow tile, leaving behind a muddy brown spatter of stains in which several footprints remained clearly visible.

I turned to the two uniformed officers. “Did either of you leave these tracks?”

The younger one, Officer Dunn, fresh from the academy and barely into his probationary thirteen-week Field Officer Training Program, answered quickly for both of them. “No, sir. We were real careful about that. I came up over there.” He pointed to a clean spot on the tile. “I got close enough to check her pulse and then…” He shrugged. “She was already dead. Nothing we could do.”

I glanced at Big Al. With his face a gray mask, he stood staring down at the dead girl. “This guy’s one mean son of a bitch,” he said grimly, “a real sicko.”

In some politically correct quarters, Big Al’s instant assumption that the killer was male might have been regarded as sexist, but I agreed. Homicide is not yet an equal opportunity occupation, although the numbers are gradually coming up as far as female perpetrators are concerned. But women don’t usually kill with that kind of wanton brutality. And they usually don’t leave that kind of mess either.

“At least she’s still got her clothes on,” Officer Dunn observed helpfully.

What he was trying to say in his own clumsy fashion was that Bonnie Weston had most likely been spared the further indignity of sexual assault, but that knowledge did nothing to mitigate the ruthless butchery of the young woman’s death. I don’t think Big Al even heard him.

“How come nobody came to help her?” he asked. “Couldn’t anybody hear what was going on? Where were Ben and Shiree?”

Again Officer Dunn was quick to answer. “The parents?” Big Al nodded. “In the bedroom at the far end of the hall. I doubt they heard a thing. When we got here, the stereo in the living room was playing fairly loud, tuned to some hot rock station, and the TV set was on in the parents’ room. We switched them off by pulling plugs. We couldn’t hear ourselves think.”

I nodded, glad someone else had thought to turn off the noise, but grateful that the uniformed officers hadn’t touched any of the radio or television controls. I left Big Al to process the kitchen, and I followed Officer Dunn down the hallway to a small bedroom. There, on a two-tiered bunk bed lay two small African-American males, both dead. Both lay on their sides, facing the wall, and both might have been asleep except for deep puncture wounds at the base of each small skull.

Nothing in the room seemed to be disturbed. Little-boy litter, toys and clothes, lay scattered about, but it appeared as though the two children had died without the slightest advance warning of their impending doom.

Without touching anything, I left the room. I found Officer Dunn waiting outside. “Whatever you do,” I told him, “don’t let Detective Lindstrom set foot inside that room.”

Dunn looked at me quizzically. He was far too new on the force to have any inkling of Big Al and Ben Western’s mutual history, but he didn’t argue or question my order. “Right,” he said. “I’ll see to it.”

I went back to the living room and discovered my partner standing there, turning slowly, taking in everything there was to see. Except for faint traces of bloodied footprints on the beige carpet, the living room showed no other sign of tragedy. Nothing in that room had been disturbed. A single floor lamp glowed near the end of a long comfortable-looking couch. A soft green afghan was piled in the middle of the couch, looking as though it had been tossed aside by someone momentarily abandoning a cozy reading nest. A book bag sat on the floor near the afghan while an assortment of school paraphernalia-a stack of textbooks, pens and pencils, and an open notebook-littered the oak coffee table. Nearby was a partially filled ceramic mug with the name “Bonnie” printed in cheerful blue script on the outside.

Big Al leaned over and sniffed the mug. “Tea,” he said.

“Tea?” I asked. “At her age? Why not Coke or Pepsi?”

“Vondelle, Bonnie’s mother, always drank tea. Only tea. No coffee, no sodas. Bonnie must have picked up the habit. Kids do that, you know. It’s a way of hanging on to the past.”

Big Al swung back toward Officer Dunn. “Exactly how long ago did you two get here?”

I think the terrible reality of what had happened was just beginning to hit home with Officer Dunn. His color had faded to a sickly yellow. Perhaps the younger man was beginning to question his own culpability over those five deaths. He seemed to misread an accusation into Big Al’s straightforward question.

“We came as…as…soon as we could,” he stammered. “I’m sorry as hell we didn’t get here sooner. We were on another call, a domestic, when Dispatch asked us to come here. We didn’t dawdle, but we didn’t burn up the car, either. We didn’t think it was that…” He broke off, ducking his chin, his voice choked with emotion.

I felt for him, knew firsthand the impotent frustration of arriving at a crime scene or automobile accident too late to do any good or make any real difference. This might be Officer Dunn’s first such gut-wrenching experience. If he made it through his probationary period, it wouldn’t be his last.

“You couldn’t have saved them,” I said consolingly. “They were probably dead long before you took the call.” He nodded, but it didn’t seem to make him feel any better.

We started toward the hallway only to encounter King County’s medical examiner, Dr. Howard Baker. He nodded in my direction. “What do you want us to photograph first, Beaumont, the kitchen or one of the bedrooms?”

I pointed toward the room where the boys were. “Do that one,” I said.

Doc Baker headed for the bedroom and Big Al started to follow. Officer Dunn and I both stepped forward to stop him. “The boys?” he asked.

I nodded. “You don’t need to see it, Al. Not right now.”

He shook his head helplessly. “No,” he agreed. “I suppose not.”

Without another word, he continued on down the hallway, leading the way into what had been Ben and Shiree Weston’s modest master bedroom. I caught him by the arm before he had a chance to step inside.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” I asked. “Sure you’re all right?”

“Ja,” he said, slipping into Ballardese. “I’m okay.” He didn’t sound terribly convincing but we went on inside anyway.

The room looked as though it had been through a major earthquake. A six-drawer dresser had been shoved away from the wall with its drawers askew and clothing spilling out. A small television set had fallen on its face beside it. The mirror behind the dresser was a splintered wreck.

Avoiding the scatter of furniture, I moved toward the bed. A bedside lamp with its glass base broken lay in a shattered heap on the carpeted floor along with the usual debris that surfaces daily from male clothing-a wallet, some loose change, a small maroon cowhide Day-Timer, a couple of receipts, and a ticket stub from a dry cleaners. Looking at Ben Weston’s leavings, I was struck by the fact that he had emptied his pockets with no inkling that he was doing it for the last time.

That’s the irony of what we call “home invasion” cases, where the victims, presumably safe in their own homes, carry on with their normal lives until the precise moment when their killer comes to call.

But looking at demolished furniture, examining the items on the floor, and philosophizing was nothing more than a delaying tactic, a way of putting off the inevitable necessity of examining the murdered man himself. It’s bad enough to encounter victims who are total strangers. This one was much worse than that. Benjamin Harrison Weston was no stranger to any of us. Not only was he an acquaintance of long standing, he was a cop besides.

He lay facedown in the exact middle of his king-size bed. Sometimes the dead seem to cave in upon themselves, to shrink. Not so Gentle Ben Weston. In life he had been a mountain of a man, and he remained so in death. He too had died of a single stab wound to the neck. Like that to the two boys, Ben’s damage was limited to a single deep puncture right at the base of his skull.

Unknown to me, Doc Baker and both uniformed cops had trailed us into the room. “I believe what you’re seeing here and with the two boys,” Doc Baker began explaining, presumably for Officer Dunn’s benefit, “is something the military refers to as a silent or screamless kill. They teach this kind of thing in hand-to-hand, combat-type training. There are several variations, but for a man sleeping on his stomach, this one would have been by far the simplest. My guess he was attacked without warning. He never had a chance to defend himself or even cry out. If the knife blade is placed exactly right, the result is instant and total paralysis.”

“So whoever did this wanted to make sure he didn’t have to handle Ben in a fair fight?” I asked. Baker nodded.

“Me neither,” I added. “Ben Weston would have swept the floor with me if I’d ever given him a reason.”

“Probably some cowardly little shit Ben could have beaten the crap out of if he’d been awake,” Big Al added bitterly.

Baker gave Big Al a sidelong glance. “You two were friends?”

Al glared down at his shoe. “You could say that,” he said.

Officer Dunn continued to stare at Ben Weston’s still body. “I never heard of screamless kills before,” he mumbled softly.

Doc Baker stood towering beside the bed, with his shock of white hair standing on end, in a stance designed to strike terror in the hearts of the inexperienced. He resembled nothing so much as a demented polar bear, and I knew he was enjoying Officer Dunn’s discomfort.

“Then obviously you’ve never been in the Marines,” Doc Baker observed condescendingly.

“You’re right,” Officer Dunn returned shakily. “I never was, and I don’t think I want to be, either. Mind if I step outside?”

With that, he and his partner left the room. Big Al, too, seemed shaken. Turning away from the bed, he faced the bathroom doorway, but that door only opened onto further evidence of the brutal carnage, for the bathroom was where the killer had left his final victim-Shiree Weston.

“From the looks of it,” Baker said, moving in beside him, “the woman must have had some advance warning of her danger. I believe she may have emerged from taking a shower and encountered the intruder, caught him in the act of murdering her husband and tried to stop him. I’ll say this much for her. She put up one hell of a fight.”

No doubt a fierce battle had been waged all over the demolished bedroom, but inarguably the final confrontation had occurred in the bathroom, where the doorjamb had been splintered around the lock. An examination of the doorknob itself revealed that the lock was still engaged although the door stood wide open.

“She locked herself in trying to get away?” I asked.

Baker shrugged. “Maybe. My guess is she hoped to summon help through the open bathroom window, but it didn’t work. He mowed right through the door and got to her before she had a chance.”

I stood over a naked Shiree Weston and looked down with a real sense of sadness at a woman I had never met during her lifetime. I knew from Big Al that younger than her husband by a good fifteen years, she had been a vital, vibrant woman, one who had taken a widowed and grieving Ben Weston in hand. She had showed him a way to go on living in the aftermath of his first wife’s death.

“Look at her hand,” Big Al said quietly, nudging me out of my reverie.

I looked. Her doubled fist was rolled into a solid ball with tufts of hair sticking out between her tightly gripped fingers.

“DNA fingerprints are going to nail this bastard,” Big Al vowed, “or I’ll know the reason why. Let’s get out of here,” he added. “I need some air.”

With that, he stalked out of the room. I followed him into the hallway. Outside the bedroom, Big Al’s slim margin of control evaporated. He covered his eyes with both hands as if to shut out the horror we had both just witnessed.

“I can’t believe it,” he mumbled, shaking his head. “With Ben and Shiree, it’s bad enough, but at least the two of them had a chance at life. They were happy together, but the kids…My God, those poor little kids…”

He stopped talking then and stood there gulping air like some kind of huge landed fish. A stranger might have thought he was witnessing a heart attack in progress. Instead, it was only Big Al Lindstrom, one of the world’s original cool macho dudes, doing his level best not to cry in public.

“Look, fella,” I said sympathetically. “Captain Powell was right. These people were all your friends. This is too hard on you. Get your ass back home to Molly and let somebody else handle this case. You don’t have to.”

“I sure as hell do,” Big Al returned in a strangled whisper. “And that’s why- because he was my friend. I owe him.”

We were standing in the hallway near a pocket door that seemed to cover a linen closet. Just then, there was a distinct scratching from somewhere near the base of the other side of that door.

I don’t know if the same thing happened to Big Al, but I can tell you, the hair on the back of my neck stood straight up. We both jumped as though we’d been shot, but the scratching came again, followed by a small, whimpering voice.

“Can I come out now? Is the bad man gone?”

If I hadn’t seen it myself, I wouldn’t have believed Big Al Lindstrom capable of that kind of lightning movement. He spun around and grabbed for the finger hole. For a moment, he struggled, trying to open it, but the door had apparently fallen off its track. He had to lift the door and drop it back into place before he could finally slide it open. When it did, a small, pajama-clad child tumbled out into the hallway.

“Junior!” Big Al croaked as soon as he caught sight of the boy. “What in the world are you doing in there?”

The little kid took one look at Big Al and held out his short arms to be picked up. Obviously they knew each other.

“Where’s my daddy?” Junior Weston asked, snuggling close to Big Al’s thick neck “Where’s my mommy? Why wouldn’t they come let me out? The door got stuck. I had to go to the bathroom, but they didn’t come when I called. I think I wet my pants.”

You hardly ever consider the possibility of someone like Big Al Lindstrom being radiant. Brides are radiant. Mothers of newborns are radiant. Men aren’t supposed to look that way, but the exultant joy on Detective Lindstrom’s face was amazing to behold as he clutched Benjamin Harrison Weston, Jr., in a fierce, breath-crushing bear hug.

“Hey, you guys,” he crowed, laughing and crying at the same time, shouting to anyone who cared to listen. “Come see what I found!”

The narrow hallway immediately filled with people, although not one of them stepped on the trail of bloody footprints that marred the carpeting. They all wanted to know what was going on, but no one wanted to risk screwing up the evidence.

“Look here,” Big Al gloated. “Here’s Junior-Junior Weston, and he’s all right, by God. There’s not a scratch on him!”

“So who’s the other kid?”

I asked the question of the world in general rather than anyone in particular, but it turned out that no one was listening and nobody else answered my question. I myself had seen those two dead boys lying on the bunk beds in that first bedroom, but at that precise moment in time, everyone within earshot was focused on the miracle that Junior Weston was still alive, that at least one member of Ben Weston’s family had escaped the scourge. No one else had time to think about that other unfortunate child and his soon-to-be-grieving family.

For a moment, we were all too stunned to do anything, but finally my brain slipped out of neutral. “I’ll be right back,” I told Al. I fought my way down the crowded hallway, through the living room, and out the front door.

“Hey, Detective Beaumont,” Captain Powell yelled after me as I vaulted past him down the steps. “Where the hell do you think you’re going? You can’t be finished in there already.”

“I’m going after the teddy bear,” I called back over my shoulder, “and there by God better be one out in the car!”

Years earlier, a local radio station had sponsored a program called the Teddy Bear Patrol. The idea was to put donated teddy bears in all local emergency vehicles-law enforcement, fire, and Medic One-in both the city and county. When confronted with traumatized children, emergency personnel and police officers would then have something besides mere words with which to comfort injured or frightened kids.

At the time I first heard about it, I confess it struck me as a pretty dumb idea. The idea of men getting ready to go on shift and making sure they had their weapon, their cuffs, their bulletproof vest, and their teddy bear seemed a little ridiculous. After all, real men don’t eat quiche, and they don’t pack teddy bears either. Over the years, however, I’ve been forced to change my mind, having heard enough secondhand, heart-rending stories to see the error of my ways. That April night, though, was the first time I personally had need of one of those damned bears.

“Teddy bear?” Captain Powell echoed, following me down the sidewalk. “What the hell do you want with a teddy bear?”

“Big Al just found one of Ben’s kids, Ben Junior.”

Powell stopped in his tracks. “He’s still alive?”

The soft, squishy brown bear was right there in the trunk, exactly where it was supposed to be. My groping hand closed around one tiny leg. When I triumphantly hauled it out of the car and slammed the trunk lid shut, I almost collided with Captain Powell, who had stopped directly behind me.

“He’s alive all right. He’s fine. He was hiding in a linen closet. Got stuck in there. I think he just woke up and recognized Al’s voice.”

“You’re kidding!”

“The hell I am! Come see for yourself.”

“Hallelujah,” Captain Powell breathed. “I can’t believe it!”

I left him standing there and hurried back up the sidewalk with that precious teddy bear crushed against my chest. Holding that soft, cuddly creature even helped me that night, made me feel better. I knew holding it would help Junior Weston too.

Back in the hallway, Big Al hadn’t moved. He still held the child, although the crowd of onlookers had thinned some as people returned to their various assignments. I caught Big Al’s eye and held the bear up high enough so he could see it. He nodded gratefully as I handed it to him.

“Look here,” Big Al said to the child in his arms. “Look what Detective Beaumont found for you. A teddy bear.”

Benjamin Harrison Weston, Jr., couldn’t have been more than five years old. As far as we knew, he was totally unaware of what had happened to his parents. He had no idea that his entire family had been wiped off the face of the earth and that he himself was an orphan. He saw only the lovable brown teddy bear and knew that, for whatever reason, he was being given a gift.

“For me?” he squealed delightedly, hugging the bear to his pajama-clad chest. “Really?”

For a few moments, there wasn’t a dry eye anywhere within earshot, mine included.