Beaumont. Where's your pager?'
'Oops,' I said, hoping this sounded like news to me. 'It's not here. I must have misplaced it.'
'Right,' Watty answered. 'You win the booby prize. And I just happen to know where you left it.'
'Where?'
'A housekeeper found it at the Silver Cloud Motel over there in Bellevue. I told her to leave it at the desk, that you'd come by and pick it up. At least it was on. I checked with the person who called.'
'Look, Watty,' I said, hoping to mollify the man. 'I'm just a couple of minutes from there right now. I'll go straight over and pick it up.'
'And if I were you, in the future, I'd be a whole lot less careless with departmental equipment. Now, do you still want to talk to Detective Kramer?'
'No, thanks,' I said. 'Not necessary. I'll see him when I get back down there. Tell him I'm on my way.'
'Oh, one more thing,' Watty said, before I could hang up. 'Lori's looking for you.'
'Lori?'
'You know, Lori Yamaguchi, who works in the latent fingerprint lab. She didn't say what she wanted, but she said to have you come see her as soon as you're back downtown.'
'I'll go right away,' I said.
'But not until after you retrieve your pager.'
'I wouldn't think of it,' I said.
I gave a generous tip to the desk clerk at the Silver Cloud who handed over the pager, and I left an equally hefty one for the housekeeper who had found it. Unwittingly, those two people had saved my life. If I had lost the pager for good, both Sergeant Watkins and Captain Powell would have had my ass.
Twenty-five minutes later, with Don Wolf's jacket still slung over my arm, I was standing leaning against the counter in the reception area of King County's Fingerprint Lab. When the receptionist told me Lori was on the phone, I told her I'd wait, and helped myself to a chair. Sitting there waiting and with nothing in particular to do, I picked up the jacket and started going through the pockets.
One pocket after another yielded nothing but pocket lint. Until I reached the last one, the lower inside pocket. There, tucked into smooth lining, was a single tiny scrap of paper that had been folded once, twice, and yet again into a tiny square no bigger than a respectable spitwad. When I unfolded it, the resulting piece of paper was no bigger than an inch square. The printed message on the paper was equally tiny.
'Donnie,' it said, 'see you at the apartment at six.' It was signed with the initials, 'D.C.' A heart had been drawn around the outside of the two letters and a whimsical pair of happy faces had been made of the insides of both letters.
I studied the note for sometime. D.C. Who's D.C.? I wondered. And then it hit me. D.C.-Deanna Compton. Bill Whitten's secretary!
'Detective Beaumont?'
I looked up. Lori Yamaguchi was smiling at me in a way that said she had spoken to me more than once without my hearing.
'Yes? Oh, hello, Lori. Sorry I didn't hear you. I was thinking about something else.' Carefully, I refolded the piece of paper and dropped it inside my shirt pocket. 'What's up?'
'We got a hit on those fingerprints of yours, the ones Audrey Cummings sent over.'
I stood up and tried to seem less disorganized and distracted than I felt. 'Really? That was just a shot in the dark. What kind of hit?' I asked.
'Not just one,' Lori added. 'There are seven in all.'
'Seven,' I echoed.
'That's right,' she said. 'It turns out, your dead guy is a probable serial rapist with a trail of unsolved attacks in jurisdictions all over California. Same M.O. each time. He'd make an appointment with a real estate agent to go look at houses, and then…'
'Rape them?'
'Right. There might very well be more than just the seven,' Lori said. 'It could be the same thing happened in other places and that one way or another they didn't end up in the data bank.'
'But who is he?' I asked.
Lori looked at me blankly. 'What do you mean, who is he?' she asked. 'Don Wolf, of course. Since you were the detective on the case, I figured you already knew his name. Audrey Cummings said-'
'That's all you have on him then?' I interrupted. 'No arrests, no prior convictions?'
Right that minute, I didn't attempt to explain to Lori Yamaguchi that as far as anyone else had been able to discover, the guy named Don Wolf had no known history prior to his sudden appearance in Lizbeth Dorn's life down in California some months earlier.
'Nothing. If there had been, I should have been able to find some record of it. I suppose it's possible that he fell through a crack somewhere along the line and his prints just didn't get entered into the AFIS computer. That automated fingerprints identification system is expensive and time-consuming, you know.'
Lori was justifiably proud of her work, of having made the vital connection. No doubt she expected me to be either more grateful or else more impressed. Maybe both. But at the moment, that folded piece of paper with Deanna Compton's damning initials on it was burning a hole in my shirt pocket. Somebody else besides Latty Gibson had maybe been messing around with Don Wolf, and I wanted to pay her a visit.
'Look, Lori,' I said. 'Thanks a whole bunch. Don't think I'm not appreciative, because I am. I owe you lunch. No, more than that, I owe you dinner. But right now, I've got to go. Send me a detailed report on all this, would you?'
'You don't owe me anything, Detective Beaumont,' she said, as I gathered up Don Wolf's jacket and headed for the door. 'I was just doing my job.'
With a quick wave over my shoulder, I darted out the door, realizing as I went that it's people like Lori Yamaguchi who, as opposed to the Hilda Chisholms of the world, give a whole different meaning to the word bureaucrat.
Twenty
My mother always used to say, 'A wise man changes his mind. A fool never does.'
I had told Watty I was on my way back to the department. And I meant to go straight there. I even made it as far as the Third Avenue lobby of the Public Safety Building. But as I stood there waiting for a fully-loaded, rush- hour elevator to disgorge its mass of humanity, I was puzzling over what implications Deanna Compton's note might have for the cases I was investigating.
I kept remembering the Deanna Compton I had met two days earlier at Designer Genes International. She had seemed suitably startled when Bill Whitten delivered news of Don Wolf's death, but she had handled the resultant requests for information in a coolly efficient, businesslike fashion. I could recall nothing at all in her demeanor that would have indicated anything more than a business-colleague relationship with the dead man. That meant one of two things. Either Deanna Compton wasn't the D.C. in question, or, if she was, she had gone to extraordinary lengths to conceal any kind of inappropriate reaction to the news from me and from her boss, Bill Whitten.
What I needed to do was find some way to verify whether or not Deanna Compton and D.C. were one and the same. That was where my thought process stood when an elevator finally arrived and its door opened. And by the time the last of the passengers filed off and dodged past those of us waiting in the crowded lobby to get on, I realized that I had in my possession a tool that might make that verification possible: the videotapes-Bill Whitten's security tapes. If the surveillance camera switched on whenever someone had walked into Don Wolf's office, then Deanna Compton was bound to have made an appearance somewhere on the footage that was still in my den. If I could show a picture of Deanna Compton to Jack Braman, manager of the Lake View Condominiums…
In my eagerness to turn thought to action, I nearly collided with the people lined up behind me when I turned suddenly and dashed back out the lobby door. I sprinted down Yesler to the garage where I usually leave the 928. Naturally, it was already parked, but one of the attendants was more than eager to go fetch it.
