while Kyle lounged against the doorjamb, alternately munching another bag of chips and yet another apple. The guy must have a tape-worm.
“What I want to know is how someone got into Ben Weston’s directory in the first place,” Kyle muttered. That was his area of responsibility, and his feathers were still ruffled that someone had managed to crack his supposedly secure system.
Tony Freeman looked up at him. “My guess is that whoever killed him found Ben’s computer access code in his Day-Timer. Then, if they could lay hands on a copy of Ben’s personnel record, say, they’d have the answers to many of the possible verification questions, wouldn’t they?”
“But he wasn’t supposed to write the damn number down anywhere. I tell everybody that, over and over.”
“Have you ever looked at Ben Weston’s file?” Tony Freeman asked mildly.
“When would I have had time?” Kyle Lehman returned. “I’ve been running my ass off ever since I left here.”
“The man was evidently mildly dyslexic,” Freeman continued. “He did a good job of compensating for it, but remembering random letters and numbers was something he couldn’t do.”
“Oh,” Kyle grunted, and left abruptly, taking his apple core with him. Freeman returned to the computer printout of the people in Motor Pool. He had started with the last page first because that was the one that contained the part where I calculated the S ‘s should have been, and he passed the page along as soon as he finished. There was no Sanders, Sanderlin, Sanford, or Saunders. The Motor Pool’s alphabetized list skipped directly from Rudolph to Simms without anything in between.
“Looks like we struck out,” I said, giving up.
But Captain Freeman is a lover of lists as well as a maker of same. He went to the very beginning page and hunkered down over it, reading through it name by name from square one. His finger moved steadily down the page, then suddenly he stopped and looked up at me.
“How does the name Sam Irwin grab you?”
I shrugged. “It’s not Sanders, but the doctor said he was terrible with names. I, for one, happen to believe him. Sam Irwin sounds good to me.”
Freeman picked up his phone again. “I need a set of personnel records,” he said. “The guy’s name is Samuel V. Irwin, and he’s a mechanic in Motor Pool.”
Secretarial types aren’t exactly plentiful in the middle of the night and it was almost four o’clock in the morning, but Freeman had his ace in the hole, Kyle Lehman, who could, at the drop of a keystroke, present him with a copy of almost any piece of paper churned out by the police bureaucracy. Suddenly, I had a far better understanding of how Tony Freeman could continue using his outdated yellow pad. With Kyle’s expertise available at a moment’s notice, Tony had the best of both worlds.
Once more Kyle showed up, bringing along a several-page document. He tossed it onto Freeman’s desk. “I’m getting a little tired of being a messenger service,” he complained, but Freeman wasn’t listening. His eyes were already scanning down the top page. They stopped halfway down.
“Got him!” he breathed.
“What is it?”
“Look at this.”
He handed me the papers, and I looked straight at the part where it seemed Tony Freeman’s eyes had stopped scanning, and there it was in black and white in a section headed Previous Employment. The words said United States Marines, Hand-to-Hand Combat Instructor.
“Silent kills,” Tony Freeman said grimly. “The United States Marines wrote the book on those.”
“Why’s somebody like that working as a mechanic in Motor Pool?”
“That’s the next thing you and I are going to find out,” Freeman told me. “You, actually. Use Connie’s phone.” Obligingly, I stepped outside to the other desk.
When Pacific daylight time hits Seattle early in April, it takes away big chunks of our hard-earned mornings and turns them back into night. In exchange we receive longer evenings that are great for Little League baseball and not much else. However, on that particular morning when I started my phone search at four-fifteen A.M., I was glad to find that the East Coast was already up and running.
I don’t know how Ralph Ames does it, but he always manages to ease his way through incredible tangles of bureaucracy and come out unscathed and victorious on the other side. I guess I ought to sit down with him and take lessons. My style tends to send me butting up against all manner of official-dom-in this case with representatives of the United States Marine Corps.
The young clerk I wound up talking to eventually was unfailingly polite. He did tell me that after eight years in the military, Samuel V. Irwin had been dismissed with a general discharge. A general discharge isn’t as bad as a dishonorable one, but it isn’t so very good either, and after eight years of service, the infraction must have been pretty bad for the Marines to toss Irwin out on his ear.
“How come?” I asked, wondering if knowing that would explain why Sam Irwin was working in Seattle PD’s Motor Pool and not someplace else. “What did he do?”
“I’m not allowed to divulge that information, sir,” the clerk replied. “Not without a court order.”
“But this is a homicide investigation,” I objected.
“Yes, sir. I’m sorry, sir, but the rules are very explicit.”
Arguing made no difference, and neither did my going over his head. Frustrated, I headed back into Captain Freeman’s office, where he, too, was just finishing a telephone call. “Look at this,” he said, pushing his yellow pad across the desk so I could see it. Most people scribble notes to themselves. Freeman printed his in a rapid but letter-perfect style.
“That’s from Motor Vehicles,” he said, pointing at the bottom notation. “Sam Irwin owns a 1989 Toyota Tercel. What do you think of that?”
“Bingo,” I said.
He nodded. “Bingo,” he repeated, but he didn’t sound the least bit happy.
I couldn’t understand it. If Irwin’s Toyota Tercel proved to be white, it might provide a pretty convincing link to the Weston case, especially if Irwin ended up matching the physical description of the driver Bob Case had seen skulking around the Weston neighborhood.
“What’s the matter?” I asked. “This looks like progress to me.”
Freeman got up and paced to the windows, where he stood looking out at the cleaning crew working away in the high rise across the street.
“At this point, I usually turn a case over,” he said thoughtfully. “So far, everything we have is entirely circumstantial. There certainly isn’t probable cause to make an arrest right now, but there is enough to prompt further investigation. The problem is, nobody from Motor Pool was at Ben Weston’s house the night of the murder. That means, if Irwin is in it, he’s not alone.”
I nodded. It made perfect sense to me.
He drew a deep breath. “So for now, it’s you and me and Detective Danielson. Let’s go.”
He rolled down his shirtsleeves and started putting on his jacket.
“Where?” I asked.
“We’re going to pay a call on Sam Irwin’s residence. He’s not working tonight. I already checked. Where are you parked?”
“On the street.”
“Good. We’ll take your car. I’m in the garage.”
Which is how my 928 got drafted into service for the Seattle Police Department one more time. Neither one of us thought to check with Kyle Lehman before we left the building. In fact, we probably passed each other in the elevator.
He was coming to bring us printed copies of all the deleted but still retrievable files in Ben Weston’s computer. If he had bothered to track us down at the time, it might have helped, but now that the mystery of his broken security system was solved, we had lost both Kyle’s sense of urgency and his interest. He could have reached us by pager, if he had tried. He could have called us on my cellular phone. But he didn’t.
And maybe it’s just as well.
