I’d like to get to her before someone else does.”
“Right,” Big Al said. “I suppose I should call Molly, too.”
But before either one of us had a chance to do anything, we heard a jumble of voices coming down the corridor. I looked up as Sergeant Watkins escorted a tall, stoop-shouldered black man into our cubicle. I would have known him anywhere as Ben Weston’s father. Harmon Weston was a thinner, older version of his son.
“I’ve come for the boy,” he said without preamble, looking hard at Big Al Lindstrom through Coke-bottle- bottom glasses. “Has anybody told him yet?”
“I did, Mr. Weston,” Big Al said. “I’m so sorry.”
Harmon Weston nodded. “”All they that take the sword shall perish with the sword.“ That’s what the Good Book says.”
At first I didn’t understand that the old man was talking about his own son, but Big Al Lindstrom had been far closer to the Weston family, and he immediately recognized the scriptural quote as an attack on Ben. He fairly bristled.
“That’s not fair,” he said quietly. “No matter what you think, Mr. Weston, your son was not a violent man. He wore a gun, but he didn’t use it. He never had to.”
“My son is dead,” Harmon Weston said stiffly. “I didn’t come here to argue about what he did or didn’t do. I came for the boy. Wake up, Benjy. Let’s go.”
Junior Weston fought to rouse himself. For a moment, he looked around, dismayed by the strange surroundings, then his eyes focused on his grandfather’s familiar face.
“It’s true, isn’t it, Grampa? It wasn’t a bad dream, was it?”
“No,” Harmon Weston answered, reaching out and taking the boy’s pudgy hand. He pulled the boy to him and held him close. As he gazed down at his grandson’s curly hair I glimpsed the terrible hurt behind the old man’s outward show of bitterness and rancor. “It’s no dream at all, Benjy. It’s a nightmare. Come on now.”
“Do you need a ride?” Big Al offered.
“The car’s waiting downstairs,” Watty said quickly. “We’ve already got that handled.”
Harmon Weston let go of Junior and started toward the door. The boy took a tentative step after him before turning back to Big Al.
“I’ve gotta go now,” Junior said.
Big Al Lindstrom nodded. “I know. Good-bye, Junior. Thanks for all your help.”
At that, the boy darted back long enough to give Big Al a quick hug around the neck. Then, clutching his teddy bear, he followed his grandfather into the hallway. Accompanied by Sergeant Watkins, the two of them disappeared from view, leaving Detective Lindstrom staring at the empty doorway behind them and shaking his head.
“Stubborn old son of a bitch,” he muttered. “He and Ben were at war for years, and now Harmon’s all Junior Weston has left in the world. I wouldn’t want to be in that poor little kid’s shoes for nothing.”
CHAPTER 4
With Junior safely on his way to his grandfather’s house, Big Al and I headed back toward the Weston family home in Rainier Valley. Without lights and sirens, it’s a ten-minute drive from downtown. For a good part of that time we were both pretty quiet. Big Al finally broke the silence.
“What do you think?” he asked. “Was Ben the real target, or is the killer somebody with a grudge against every cop in the known universe, and Ben was just a stand-in?”
That in a nutshell was the crux of the matter. Should the investigation head off after every crazy who had ever voiced a grudge against the Seattle PD? Regardless, I knew we’d go searching through Ben Weston’s catalog of past and present acquaintances both on and off the job. The problem was, Gentle Ben Weston hadn’t been given that moniker for being some kind of bad-ass cop. The last I heard, he had been working a desk job in Patrol. Of all the possible jobs in the department, a desk position in Patrol seemed least likely to create long-term, homicidal- type grudges.
“What would somebody have against a guy like Ben?” I asked. “I can understand how a crook might build up this kind of rage against somebody in Homicide or Vice, but why have such a hard-on for a poor, pen-pushing desk jockey from Patrol?”
“He wasn’t in Patrol,” Big Al returned quietly, “not anymore.”
“That’s news to me. Since when?”
Lindstrom shrugged. “Six months? A little longer, maybe. Don’t you remember? He took a voluntary downgrade and transfer into CCI.”
In Seattle PD jargon, CCI translates into Coordinated Criminal Investigations. In departmental politics, it’s currently synonymous with hot potato. CCI started out as the unit nobody wanted to have, doing the dirty work with gangs that no one across the street in City Hall wanted to admit needed doing. CCI’s desirability waxes and wanes, depending on the fickle barometer of public relations.
In the past few years, Seattle has received a lot of good press and has turned up on more than one “most livable city” list. Livable cities evidently exist in some kind of fantasy world, and they’re not supposed to have any problems, most especially not gang problems. For years the brass upstairs wallowed in denial despite reported gang-type shootings that came in as regularly as One-A-Day vitamins. When other cities started gang units, Seattle didn’t because starting a unit would have meant admitting it had the problem. When a new unit was finally created, it was given the innocuous and hence less threatening name of Coordinated Criminal Investigations.
A rose by any other name may smell as sweet, but CCI’s whole purpose is to combat gang-related criminal activity, a problem the city still isn’t wild about acknowledging. Not surprisingly, the guys in CCI don’t always get a whole lot of respect, and a posting to that unit isn’t regarded as a plum assignment. If Ben Weston had taken a voluntary downgrade and transfer from patrol supervision to a lower position as a CCI investigator, it was as good as admitting that his career path was way off track and in a downward spiral.
“When did all that happen?” I asked. “I don’t remember hearing anything about it.”
“There was plenty of talk at the time,” Big Al answered. “Maybe it was while you were down in Arizona.”
Any number of things had slipped by me the previous fall when I spent the better part of two months in doctor-ordered attendance at an alcoholism treatment center near Wickenburg. In the world of work, two months is a considerable period of time. Most departmental gossip doesn’t have a two-month-long shelf life. Talk about Ben Weston had evidently run its course well before I came back to work.
“That’s probably when it happened, all right,” I admitted. “Nobody said word one to me.”
“There was quite a stink about it,” Big Al said, “with all the usual crap about how he got as far as he did because of quotas and affirmative action and not because he was any good at what he did. Some people claimed Ben couldn’t measure up in Patrol and that he transferred out before they caught on to him.”
Big Al had known Gentle Ben Weston far better than anyone else in the department. If anyone knew the truth of that matter, he would. “What do you say?” I asked.
There was another pause, longer this time. “I don’t know,” he said at last. “I just don’t know.”
“What do you mean, you don’t know?”
“His transferring didn’t make any sense to me. He was already on the promotion list for lieutenant, but one day for no good reason he just up and says piss on the whole damn thing. Even took a cut in pay because there were no openings at his level. What kind of crazy idea is that with a wife and three kids to support?”
“Did you talk to him about it? Did you ask him why?”
“He told me he had to.”
“That’s all he said?”
“That’s it.”
As he answered, Big Al turned off Genesee onto Cascadia and into Ben Weston’s immediate neighborhood. The surrounding streets were still jammed with law enforcement vehicles. Adding to these were the media’s multiplicity of transportation. We had to park and walk from almost two blocks away. Naturally, someone recognized us, and a group of reporters attached themselves to us like so many hungry leeches, snapping pictures
