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
