“There was a kid, a young crazy up on Capitol Hill. He was up there taking potshots at people with a gun. I was the first on the scene. I called to him and told him I was coming in. I thought we could talk it out. As soon as I came around the corner into the alley, he fired at me, hit me in the arm, my left one. The bullet knocked me to the ground. He evidently thought I was dead, because he got up and started walking toward me. I shot him, killed him on the spot.
“Max was just starting on the
“And are you a killer cop?”
“I don’t think so. It took months to come to terms with it. I’ve never had to do it again.”
“Would you?”
“Would I what?” I had gotten carried away with the story. Her question brought me back to earth in a hurry. Her eyes were fixed on mine, searching, questioning.
“Would you do it again, given the same circumstance?”
Her gray eyes were serious, her face still and waiting. Here it comes, I thought. The answer to this question is going to blow it. There was no sense in lying. If we were going to be together, I would have to be able to be the real J. P. Beaumont.
“Yes,” I said. “Given the same circumstance, where it was either him or me, I would kill again.”
Anne stood up abruptly. “Let’s go,” she said.
Chapter 15
The bike washed up with the tide on Wednesday morning. I was still in bed sampling the sensations Anne Corley’s body had to offer when Watkins called for me to hit the bricks. He said Peters was on his way from Kirkland. I turned back to Anne. “I have to go,” I said.
“Do you have to? Again?” she whispered, her lips moving across the top of my shoulder to the base of my neck. She pulled me to her, guiding me smoothly back into her moist warmth. It would have been easy to stay.
“Yes, goddamnit,” I said, pulling away. “I have to. That’s what I get for being a cop.”
“All right for you,” she said, petulantly. She smiled and sat up in bed, the sheets drawn across her naked breasts, watching me as I dressed. It made me feel self-conscious. My body’s not that bad for someone my age, but it suffered in comparison to her lithe figure.
“What are you thinking?” I asked, sitting on the bed and leaning over to pull on my shoes and socks.
A man should never ask that kind of question unless he’s prepared for the answer. She ran her fingers absentmindedly across my back. “Do you believe in love at first sight?” she asked.
I almost fell off the bed. I turned and looked at her. “Maybe,” I said.
She smiled and planted a firm kiss on my shoulder. “I hoped you’d say that,” she murmured. I finished tying my shoe and bolted from the room. I was still trying to regain my equilibrium when the bus dropped me at Myrtle Edwards Park, eight blocks from my building.
In Seattle, if you want something named after you, you have to die first. Myrtle Edwards Park is no exception. Myrtle Edwards was a dynamo of a city councilwoman, and the park named in her honor, after she went to the great city council in the sky, trails along the waterfront from Pier Seventy to Pier Ninety-one. It consists of a narrow strip of grass, bicycle and jogging trails, some blackberry bushes, and a rocky shoreline. There is no sandy beach. The waves crash onto a seawall made up of chunks of concrete and rocks, carrying a deadly cargo of stray logs and timbers. Nobody swims in Myrtle Edwards Park, although it is a popular gathering place for noontime joggers and other fitness fanatics.
A squad car was there before me. A park maintenance worker had read a morning newspaper account of the Faith Tabernacle murders. When he saw the bike, a sturdy English three-speed, smashed beyond repair but still a relatively new and fairly expensive one, he called the department. Someone had put him through to Watkins. Not only did he talk to the right person, it even turned out to be the right bike. The tire treads matched the plaster casts taken at Faith Tabernacle.
So how do you find the owner of a bike? It’s not like an automobile where everyone has to register and license it. The few who do are mostly those unfortunates who have already been ripped off once and who know there’s no other way for them to identify and reclaim a bike if the department happens to get lucky and recover it. In other words, bicycle registration in Seattle is a long way from 100 percent.
Peters and I started at the other end of the question, going to the manufacturer and tracing the serial number to the retail outlet that sold it. The actual store was in my neighborhood, which isn’t that unlikely since my neighborhood is a big part of downtown Seattle. The store was a Schuck’s, right across the street from the Doghouse. It took Peters and me the better part of two hours of letting our fingers do the walking before we got that far. We ambled into the store about eleven-fifteen, feeling a little smug. A clerk searched through some files before he found what we needed, but twenty minutes later we walked away with a name and address on Queen Anne Hill.
It sounds simple, doesn’t it? You apply a little logic, a little common sense, and everything falls right into place. We should have known. Things were going far too smoothly. The house on Galer Street was vacant and had been long enough that weeds were pushing up through a once pristine lawn. There was a For Sale sign with a telephone number on it in the front yard. We took down the number and the address.
We called from a pay phone and were directed to a real estate office on the back side of Queen Anne. Our good fortune continued. The listing agent happened to be in. She remembered the owner well. He had been transferred to London with Western Electric. He had been in a hurry to pack and move. His company bought up the equity in his house, and he had held a gigantic moving sale early in March, unloading everything but the bare essentials. It had been a good sale. A bike might have been one of the items sold. Dead end.
This job is like that. You take a slender lead and do your best with it. Sometimes it pays off, sometimes not. You have to take the good with the bad. We called Watkins to let him know we had come up empty-handed. He told us the preliminary report had come in on the Faith Tabernacle murders. Ballistics tests showed the weapon to be a.38. It was hardly a quantum leap toward identifying the killer. Watkins also said Carstogi had called and wanted to see us.
We went to the Warwick. A detective sat at the end of the seventh-floor hallway. Powell and Watkins were making sure Carstogi didn’t go anywhere without an escort.
We knocked. Carstogi opened the door. He looked a little shaken. “Have you seen the paper?” he asked.
“I don’t read papers,” I said.
Peters shook his head. “I didn’t have time.”
“Look,” Carstogi said bleakly.
Peters read aloud. “”Police have sequestered the father of Friday’s slain child in connection with the subsequent double murder of the child’s mother and minister.
“”Andrew M. Carstogi, being detained in an undisclosed downtown location, arrived in town Sunday evening and was involved in a confrontation at Faith Tabernacle in Ballard during the day on Monday.
“”The church in the Loyal Heights area was the scene of two gangland-style murders that occurred later that night. Dead are Pastor Michael Brodie, age forty-nine, and his parishioner, Suzanne Barstogi, Carstogi’s estranged wife. The woman’s age has not been released.
“”Arlo Hamilton, Seattle Police public information officer, said that detectives are searching for a bicycle that may have been used by the killer in making his escape.
“”Barstogi and Carstogi, whose exact marital status is unclear, lost their only child, Angela, on Friday. She was the victim of a brutal homicide that occurred in Discovery Park. That incident is still under investigation. No arrests have been made in that slaying and police officials refuse to say whether or not Carstogi is a suspect in either the church murders or the death of the child.
“”Inquiries in Chicago, former location of Faith Tabernacle, revealed that the group, a fundamentalist sect,
