of breaking and entering. If she filed a complaint, then there'd be the devil to pay down at Seattle P.D. And the responsibility would fall squarely where it belonged-on me.
A man came walking up to us. He was tall, stoop-shouldered, wearing glasses and a trench coat. 'I'm John Miller,' he said, offering his hand. 'June's taken that poor young man and gone inside to make cocoa. She wanted me to ask you inside. It's cold and wet out here.'
My mother reserved her highest criticism for those she considered too stupid to live. They were always the ones who were 'too dumb to come in out of the rain.' Which is exactly how stupid her middle-aged son was being right then.
The words John Miller used-'cold and wet'-amounted to gross understatement. A gusting wind drove splinters of icy raindrops into our faces and clothing. And there I stood in the Gebhardts' driveway on Culpeper Court with nothing at all on over my soaking sports jacket. I had failed to notice that I was wet to the skin and shivering.
With John Miller leading the way, we migrated across the street to a house with evidence of recent construction and relandscaping. We entered by walking past what architects are fond of calling a 'water feature.' The babble of running water burbling noisily over river rocks may sound wonderful on a hot summer's afternoon, but on a cold, wet winter's evening, it only made me that much colder.
Inside the house, John introduced Sue and me to a grizzled, lop-eared black-and-white terrier named Barney. The dog eased over against Sue to demand some attention and petting while John offered me a stack of towels and led me to a bathroom that was fully stocked with a six-year-old's complement of rubber toys.
After toweling myself as dry as possible, I returned to the living room to find John sitting beside the gas- burning fireplace and quizzing Sue about what it was like to be a single parent as well as a police officer. I found it intriguing that he was more interested in that than he was in the details of whatever untoward events had occurred across the street. Meantime, June had taken Michael Morris into the kitchen, where she was busily making a pot of cocoa and administering a dose of TLC to a young man very much in need of both.
I heard her telling him in a calm, soothing voice that he shouldn't worry, that everything was going to be fine. Even though I didn't agree with her-everything wasn't going to be fine-I still gave the woman credit for trying. Michael Morris was almost frantic with worry.
Like somebody else I knew, he was dealing with his own damning set of 'if onlys.' If only he had insisted that his mother invite Kari over to dinner; if only he had come to Blue Ridge earlier in the evening; if only; if only; if only. Ad infinitum.
I felt like telling him he didn't have a corner on the guilt market. Deeply mired in my own storm of self- recrimination, I almost missed Sue Danielson's shrewd suggestion when she broke off her polite conversation with John Miller and abruptly changed the subject back to the case at hand.
'How long ago did they clear the locks?' she asked.
'Why the hell didn't I think of that?' I demanded.
Lake Washington is big, but not big enough to hide a commercial fishing boat loaded with gold bullion disguised as a handyman's garageful of tools. Shilshole Bay, backed first by Puget Sound and by the open ocean far beyond that, is less than two miles from Fishermen's Terminal. Two miles northwest and, at low tide, twenty-seven feet lower.
To get to one from the other, boats have to pass through Salmon Bay and the Hiram M. Chittenden Locks. As Heather Peters told me once in an elegantly simple but apt description, locks are nothing but elevators for boats. And that's true. When heading out to sea, boats come into the lock area from Salmon Bay and then tie up at a pier. When the lock attendants let the water out, the effect is similar to pulling the plug in a bathtub. The water level goes down, and so do any boats inside the lock. When the operation is over, the boats are lower than they were when they started.
In the summer or during peak fishing and boating seasons when hundreds of boats come and go through the locks each day, it would be virtually impossible to learn whether or not a particular boat had cleared the locks. But this was late fall, and traffic was down. Most boaters, recreational and commercial alike, were content to spend the winter months landlocked and couch-bound in front of their glowing television sets.
Not only was it winter, it was night as well. Nighttime traffic on the locks would be even lighter than during the day. In addition, Alan Torvoldsen's One Day at a Time was one disreputable-looking tub. Old T-class army lighters, born again and refitted as longliners, aren't all that common in the halibut fishery. If a vessel like that had passed through the locks sometime between 9:00 P. M. and midnight, someone-most likely one of the dockside attendants-was bound to remember.
I borrowed the Millers' nearest phone and placed a call to the Lockmaster. It rang for a long time with no answer. Finally, when I was almost ready to give up, someone came on the line. 'Locks,' he said.
'This is Detective J. P. Beaumont,' I said. 'Seattle P.D. We've got an emergency here. I want you to hold all traffic until we get there. It should only take ten minutes or so.'
'No problem,' the man returned. 'We've got almost a half-hour wait right now. What's your name again?'
'Beaumont. Detective J. P. Beaumont.'
'You come ahead on down. I'll have someone go over and unlock the gate.'
As Sue and I stood up and headed for the door, June Miller walked into the living room carrying a tray loaded with cups full of steaming cocoa. She looked disappointed. 'Don't you want to drink some of this before you go?' she asked.
I was grateful when Sue answered for us both. 'I'm sorry, we just realized there's something we need to check right away.'
But June Miller wasn't about to take no for an answer. 'I'll pour it into paper cups for you,' she said. 'That way you can take it with you. And wouldn't you like to borrow one of John's jackets?' she said to me. 'Your clothes are still wet.'
At Sue's insistence, I accepted the traveling cup of cocoa with good grace, but I turned down the use of a borrowed coat. After all, wimps wear coats. Cool macho dudes don't.
'No thanks,' I said, 'I'll be fine.'
Famous last words, of course, but I was too intent on noodling out where Alan Torvoldsen might be going to bother with the mundane issue of whether or not to wear a coat. At the time, it didn't seem all that important.
Out in the driveway, Sue and I settled on using one vehicle-mine. We had to back her Escort out of the way in order to get to the 928, but minutes later, properly belted into the Porsche, we were racing back down Fifteenth from Blue Ridge toward the locks. I drove, while Sue sipped quietly on her cocoa for the better part of a mile.
'When you come out of the locks into Shilshole Bay, you only have two choices,' she said thoughtfully. 'You either have to go north or south, right or left. Which do you think he'd take?'
'It depends on what he wants to accomplish,' I answered. 'If he wants to head for the open sea, then he has to head north along the shipping lanes and out through the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Every ship out there has an American pilot who comes on board at Port Angeles, and all those ships are in constant radio contact with Marine Traffic Control. Someone would be bound to see them.'
'What about south of here?' Sue Danielson asked.
'There's lots less shipping traffic,' I answered. 'If they wanted to hide out until the heat let up a little or to dock somewhere long enough to refit the One Day so she wasn't quite so readily recognizable, they might head south. There must be hundreds of places tucked away in among the islands between here and Olympia at the south end of Puget Sound where a boat could duck in and disappear. Most of those sheltered bays and coves have summer cabins built near them, but in the winter they're pretty much deserted.'
By then we were at the locks. We parked in an almost deserted lot. As promised, the gate was closed but unlocked. We made our way into the office, where we found the two on-duty attendants sipping coffee, complaining about the weather, and huddling next to a wall heater to stay warm.
'What can we do for you?' one asked.
The speaker's disembodied voice came through the kind of synthesizer they use on people who've lost a larynx to throat cancer. That must not have made much of an impression on him, however, since he and his colleague were both still smoking. Not only did that defy the rules of good sense, but it was most likely against the law as well. Smoking in the workplace is very much against the rules in Seattle, a place that prides itself on being the secondhand-smoke conscience of the world.
We showed the two men our badges, but they seemed singularly unimpressed. 'You could help us by letting us know whether or not a fishing vessel named One Day at a Time came through the locks earlier tonight,' I
