minutes after your accident. We have reason to believe it was an arson fire, so anyone seen running from that same general area around the time the incident occurred would certainly be a person of interest. What, if anything, can you tell us about the man you hit?'
'He was Hispanic,' Bonnie Elgin said immediately. 'I know that much. He had an accent. A heavy Spanish accent.'
'You said he was injured and bleeding. Where?'
'There was a cut over his eye.'
'Right or left?'
She stared for a moment and then gestured to an invisible point in space. 'Left, I think.'
'And his leg?'
'It was definitely the right leg. And that was bleeding, too. Pretty badly, I think. From a cut on his knee. My guess is that one will probably need stitches.'
'What was he wearing?'
'Jeans. Tennis shoes. A jacket-a green jacket. Only a windbreaker, really. It didn't look like it was warm enough for this weather.'
'Any identifying features-a beard, mustache, that kind of thing?'
'Not that I remember.'
'How tall was he?'
'Not very. Only five-five or maybe five-six. And not very heavy, either. Medium build.'
To me, five-five sounded smaller than medium, but that's all a matter of perspective.
'Which way did he go when he walked away?' I asked.
'The same way he came,' Bonnie Elgin answered. 'Back down the embankment to the railroad tracks. It seemed like he was more scared of talking to the police than he was of being hit by a car. Right then I couldn't understand why he was leaving, but if he was involved with the fire, I suppose then it all makes sense, doesn't it?'
'Yes,' I said. 'I suppose it does.'
By the time we left Bonnie Elgin's house on Perkins Lane, it was almost ten-thirty. The fog had burned off fairly well. Out on Puget Sound, the water was still mostly gunmetal gray, but here and there overhead were occasional chips of pale blue sky.
'Back to Fishermen's Terminal?' Sue Danielson asked as she started up the Mustang.
'Let's swing by that crosswalk on Gilman,' I told her. 'I want to get out and take a look around.'
It wasn't difficult to find the location of the accident. A splatter of shattered glass marked the point of impact. As far as that was concerned, Bonnie Elgin was in luck. The glass was well south of the crosswalk. Generally speaking, it's not good to hit pedestrians at all. But if you have to hit one, it's better not to do it in a marked crosswalk. Everyone, from judges to insurance companies, takes a dim view of that.
Sue parked the car. I got out and walked over to the guardrail on the far side of the street. Heading down the embankment, a trail of footprints dug deep into the soft, wet earth on the other side. The person who had left those tracks had been in one hell of a hurry. From where I stood, I could look across the railroad cut and see the long creosoted beams that formed the retaining wall for the bank on the far side of the cut, but the metal tracks themselves were out of sight.
Avoiding the footprints, I hitched my legs over the guardrail and climbed down. Even stepping carefully, the compressed mud squished beneath my feet, bubbling up around my heels and into my shoes. I stopped at the edge of the embankment. Just below me, hunkered up against the retaining wall on my side of the cut, was a makeshift tent. A blue tarp had been draped over a sheltering framework of blackberry bramble. Inside was a single box spring, minus the mattress, and the remains of a recent campfire.
I had stumbled uninvited into the home of one of Seattle's homeless, and from the looks of it, so had the injured victim of Bonnie Elgin's hit-and-run. There were several bright red bloodstains on the fabric of the box spring.
As I scrambled back up the incline to the guardrail, it struck me how little physical distance separated the Elgins' marble foyer with its magnificent domed ceiling from this tarpaulin-covered hovel. Existing almost side by side, both were part of Seattle's Magnolia Bluff community, and yet they represented realities so separate and alien that they could just as well have been on different planets.
Or else in parallel universes.
5
Sue Danielson wanted to go straight back to Fishermen's Terminal and see what was happening there, but I persuaded her otherwise. Until members of the crime-scene team finished up with their physical examination of the Isolde, there wasn't all that much for a couple of stray homicide detectives to do but to stand around with our hands in our pockets and look useless and/or pretty, depending on your point of view.
So we turned off Emerson onto Twenty-third, parked in a triangular chuck-holed mire that passed for a parking lot and did an impromptu but thorough shoe-leather tour of the neighborhood. The strip of land on the far side of the railroad tracks contained a collection of small, one- and two-man businesses. We must have dropped in on ten or twelve offices and shops in the area bordered by Emerson and West Elmore. Most of them faced southwest and overlooked the railroad cut that sliced across the northeastern slope of Magnolia Bluff.
Looking out each succeeding window, I was surprised to learn that the blue tarp that seemed so exposed from directly above it was really well concealed from observers on the other side of the cut. The sheltering berry bramble that served as a tent pole not only provided support, it also offered camouflage. Only twice did we catch glimpses of the bright blue plastic. Both of those flashes were seen from businesses due east of both the tent and the crosswalk on Gilman.
Most of the people we spoke to were startled to learn that the makeshift shelter existed at all, that it lay-just out of sight-in what was, to all appearances, a permanent no-man's-land along the Burlington Northern's railroad right-of-way. I had hoped to find some observant witness able to tell us something about the tent's occupant and where we might find him. No deal.
The people we spoke to either feigned astonishment or else seemed downright uncomfortable to learn someone actually lived in a cut where hobos have traditionally hung out since the bad old days of the thirties. The issue of homelessness tends to disappear if you don't see actual living evidence of it up close and personal each and every day. The last person I talked to was a young woman who, despite the chill weather, was bundled up and sitting next to a concrete picnic table on the very edge of the bank. She clutched an oversized plastic traveling mug from the Chevron Beverage Club in one hand and a smoldering cigarette in the other.
In Seattle in the nineties, smokers are generally considered personae non gratae. People who smoke are required to slink outside with their cigarettes so they don't pollute the breathing mechanisms of their nonsmoking colleagues with their pall of secondhand smoke.
From the rim of cigarette butts that surrounded the table, this woman wasn't the only tobacco addict in the neighborhood who'd recently come here to smoke. Even in this alternating cold, wet weather, she was still sitting outside. I wondered how many of those outdoor smokers were courting the same kind of exotic pneumonia that had killed my grandfather.
When the woman saw me approaching, she pulled her coffee mug closer into her down jacket and guiltily moved the cigarette so it was below the level of the tabletop as though I were one of Seattle's smoke police. When I showed her my Seattle Police Department I.D., she seemed relieved to see I was only a homicide detective rather than some radical secondhand-smoke prohibitionist. The cigarette reappeared from under the table.
'Whaddya want?' she asked vaguely.
'Did you happen to see anyone unusual around here this morning, someone who didn't seem to fit in the neighborhood?'
She shook her head, tossing her mall-bang hair. 'It was real foggy,' she answered.
'Have you noticed a derelict-a tramp or street person-any time recently? Or have you seen anyone down near that blue tent on the other side of the cut?'
