Nina sighed. “We’ve known each other for oure years now,” she said. “And in all that time, I’ve never once known you not to be able to get around Richard. Nor do I think you should have to give up a job you love just because some sicko out there wants to get his jollies at your expense.”
The instant the word “sicko” came out of Nina’s mouth, the telephone on the desk in Clare’s office rang again.
“You don’t want to hang up on me like that, you know,” the voice said.
“Don’t I?” Nina replied, having beaten Clare to the receiver.
The line went dead.
***
From the time she was six years old, anyone who asked Erin Hall what she was going to be when she grew up would have gotten the same answer. “I’m going to be a woman policeman,” she always replied. “I’m going to catch bad people and make good people safe.”
Of course it helped that both her father and her uncle were police officers in her hometown of Yakima, some hundred and forty miles over the mountains to the east of Seattle. But Erin had no intention of staying in Yakima, and beat a path out of there just as soon as she graduated from high school.
Half Irish and half Native American, Erin had a tall, lean, athletic body, high cheekbones, angular features, and a freckled complexion that didn’t fare too well in the sun. Her brown eyes danced with flecks of gold, and her hair, which she liked to wear in a thick braid down her back, was the color of clay. At the age of thirty-four, she had risen higher and faster in the ranks than many of the men who had graduated from the police academy in the same class she had.
Now entering her fourteenth year with the Seattle Police Department, she had the respect of both her peers and her superiors. She earned it by being smart, working hard, and oftener than not, carrying more than her share of the load without complaining and without allowing anyone to take advantage of her good nature. No man in the department had ever had cause to worry about his back when she was out there covering it. And none had ever attempted to take unwelcome liberties.
One reason Erin was so successful was that she truly loved her work, even the nitty-gritty stuff that drove others up a wall. That didn’t mean it was easy. Some of it wasn’t easy at all, but she loved it anyway. Especially the best part, when they caught the bad guy and developed enough evidence to put him away for a very long time.
Of course, there was also the hard part, when she had to look a victim in the eye and knew that nothing she could say or do would ever take away the fear, or when she had to tell a family the worst news about a loved one and knew that nothing she could say or do would ever take away the pain.
Good or bad, however, the job more than filled her life. She didn’t grumble over doing the paperwork and it was always finished and turned in on time. She did her share of overtime without protest, much of it off the clock. And frequently, it was a full load of work that accompanied her home at night.
Somehow, she had never found the right time to get married and start a family. Or maybe it was that she had never found the right man. Ninety percent of the men she knew were cops, and she knew she could never marry a cop.
“It’s enough that I have to put my life on the line as much as I do,” she told her partner. “I could never deal with having the man I love do that.”
Her partner for the past five years was a seasoned fifty-two year old named Dennis Grissom, known as Dusty, a no-nonsense guy who made up for a lack of humor with a keen mind.
Dusty and Erin were the Mutt and Jeff of the Seattle Police Department, with Erin standing at a full five-foot-eleven inches tall, and Dusty barely managing to make it to the five-foot-eight mark. They clicked with each other almost the moment they met. Erin was by nature intuitive, while Dusty was contemplative. Erin tended to get right in there and mix it up with the trees, while Dusty preferred to keep his distance while observing the forest. They didn’t always agree with each other, but their differences helped more than hindered them in their work, and they respected and trusted each other implicitly.
***
The address Erin and Dusty were heading for on this particular Monday morning proved to be a modest building on Jackson Street, in the middle of a block of similar structures, in the heart of Pioneer Square -- the section of Seattle that had been erected right over the original city, and had a whole underground excavation to prove it. The building had a plain brass plaque with a number affixed to it, but no name. Like its neighbors, it stood four stories high, and was built, circa 1896, of red brick.
The two detectives parked half a block to the south of the building, shortly after eleven o’clock, and entered through a pair of solid wood doors that looked, to Erin’s eye, anyway, as though they had been cut out of a slab of rosewood.
A pretty blonde receptionist sat behind a curved wooden counter that was definitely made of rosewood, beneath a sign mounted on exposed brick that said simply: THORNBURGH HOUSE. When they
