21
I understand that there are lots of people in the work force today who are into telecommuting. They work at home. I'm not one of them. I'm used to working at work. There's something about the workaday, slightly grubby ambience of the fifth floor that helps me think and focus. Since focusing was what I needed to do, I headed straight for my cubicle in the Public Safety Building.
It only took a moment to retrieve Stan Jacek's fax containing the Jane Doe autopsy findings. It took a hell of a lot longer than that to digest same.
Because the Camano Island victim's body had burned so completely, there was virtually no soft tissue remaining on the bones. Even so, many of the circumstances were similar to the ones we'd found in the Fishermen's Terminal incident. The victim's fingers and toes had all been removed and left to time-bake in a charred pie tin on top of the body. However, because of the condition of the tissue, it was impossible to discover whether the mutilations had occurred before or after the victim's death.
From my point of view, however, the biggest problem with the autopsy was that it dealt with the wrong person. If the dead woman wasn't Denise Whitney, who was she? And, for that matter, if Denise wasn't dead, where the hell was she? One more time, she had put her family through an emotional ordeal not unlike being tossed in a Waring blender. Had she done this to them herself, willingly? Or was she also among the killer's victims-a missing corpse, rotting and waiting to be discovered?
And then, of course, there was my other problem-the guys who might or might not be Simon Wiesenthal operatives. I hadn't a doubt in my mind that the two men who had paid their timely visit to Else Gebhardt, the two wheeler-dealers who had aced me out of Gunter's soldiers, were the same ones who had called on Kari and Michael up in Bellingham. So-were these characters really on the trail of Hans Gebhardt, or were they actually on the trail of the gold? Both, or neither?
The mire was so deep now that I didn't know what to think. Maybe Hans Gebhardt was still alive, and the Wiesenthal agents were doing exactly what they claimed-tracking him to ground. But there were other possibilities. What were the chances that Gunter Gebhardt's long-missing father was, in fact, long dead, and the story about searching for him was nothing more than an elaborate cover?
The Simon Wiesenthal organization. How do you go about contacting them? I wondered. After a few moments of reflection, I tried my old standby-I dialed Information-and came up winners, twice over. Within minutes I had numbers for the Simon Wiesenthal Foundation in both New York and Los Angeles. But neither office was open at five-something o'clock Pacific Standard Time on a November Saturday afternoon. And what I had to say wasn't something that could be trusted to the impersonal discretion of a taped voice-messaging system.
I could hear myself saying, 'I'm a detective up here in Seattle, and I've got these two guys who may or may not be yours and who may or may not be wandering around the state of Washington killing people. Would you mind having somebody get back to me on this?'
Like hell they would!
So the question was, how to find out more about Moise and Avram without tipping my hand? If they were true-blue, then it might not hurt anything to check them out in a straightforward, official-channel fashion. But if they had gone bad-if they were renegades using their official credentials as free tickets to get away with murder-then any kind of official inquiry might be enough to send them dodging for cover.
Someone once told me that true creativity is 50 percent saturation, 49 percent perspiration, and I percent inspiration. After sitting there in the silence of my cubicle in a near-catatonic state for more than an hour and a half, after doing the hard work of turning the same questions over and over in my mind, inspiration finally struck at five minutes to six.
That's it, I thought. Picking up the phone, I dialed my old partner, Ron Peters.
As soon as he answered the phone and I heard voices and laughter and dishes clattering in the background, I remembered it was Amy's birthday. It sounded as though I had called right in the middle of a party.
'I hope I'm not interrupting anything.'
'It's just family,' Ron answered. 'We're just setting the table.'
'This won't take long, then. Do you happen to have Tony Freeman's home telephone number?'
Captain Anthony Freeman is the head of the Internal Investigations Section of Seattle P.D. He's a well- respected straight-shooter. He was also the one supervisor in the whole department who had been able to see beyond Ron Peters' wheelchair to the fact that a trained detective's abilities were being vastly underutilized in a permanent assignment to the Media Affairs section. Ron was now working full-time as an I.I.S. investigator.
I also happened to know that, despite the fact that he bore a Gentile-sounding name, Tony Freeman was Jewish. As a matter of fact, he once gave me a memorable ass-chewing that had to do with my using a Yiddish word that he personally found offensive. What he said wasn't at all mean-spirited, but it wasn't the kind of thing you forgot, either. Ever since that rebuke, the word schmuck has been excised from my spoken vocabulary.
'I have his number,' Ron answered, 'but it's unlisted, and I'm not supposed to give it out. Why do you need it? What's up?'
I was off on such a wild-goose chase that I wasn't eager to discuss it with anyone right then-not even Ron Peters. 'It's about the boat fire at Fishermen's Terminal,' I said.
'You don't think a police officer is involved, do you?' Ron asked.
'No, nothing like that. But I do need to talk to Tony. Could you maybe call him and see if you can get him to call me here?'
'Where's here?' Ron asked.
'I'm in the office,' I answered. 'At my desk.'
'On Saturday?'
'Don't hassle me about it. Someday maybe I'll get a life.'
Ron laughed. 'Okay,' he said. 'I'll see what I can do. And if for some reason I'm not able to raise him by phone, I'll give you a call back right away.'
But the person who returned my call barely two minutes later was Captain Tony Freeman himself. 'Hey, Beau,' he said. 'I understand you wanted to talk to me. What's going on?'
'What do you know about the Simon Wiesenthal Foundation?' I asked.
It was an unexpected question, one that caught Tony Freeman slightly off guard, but there was only a brief pause. 'Some,' he answered. 'That's the organization devoted to tracking down Nazi war criminals and bringing them to justice. What about them?'
'I think we may have a couple of them wandering around loose in Seattle at the moment,' I told him. 'And from what I've found out so far, they may be up to no good.'
'Maybe you'd better bring me up to speed,' Captain Freeman said.
And so I did, in as orderly a fashion as I could. When I finished, Captain Freeman was silent for a long moment. I could almost hear the wheels grinding through the telephone wires.
'If those two guys have turned, for one reason or another,' he said gravely, 'then they'll have gone to ground, and you'll never find them. If they're playing it straight, you won't have any trouble.'
'Meaning?'
'Call the name-brand hotels and find out if they're registered guests under their own names, or at least under the names they gave those two kids up in Bellingham,' Freeman answered. 'If they are registered, most likely they'll be eating kosher meals, and that takes special arrangements. One of the local caterers that keeps a kosher kitchen would be providing the meals and delivering them, ready-to-eat, to the hotel. I could probably get you a list of the possible caterers if you like, but at this hour on a Saturday, that might be tough.
'So, if I were you, I'd start by calling area hotels. Call, ask for them by name, and see if the hotel operator puts you through to a room.'
'Good idea,' I said. 'I don't know why I didn't think of that myself. I'll see what I can do.'
'One more thing,' Tony Freeman added. 'I don't think the Wiesenthal group operates under any strict budgetary considerations, so I'd start at the top. Don't bother checking with Motel Six. Their expense account would do much better than that.'
If you ask for advice, my position is you'd better be prepared to take it. So I started at the top, both in terms
