Mel looked at me questioningly. “He told you that?”
“As I said earlier, Ron and I are friends-good friends.”
“When Lujan heard what had happened, that Rosemary was missing, he called Tacoma PD and reported what Rosemary had told him about the incident with her ex. On Sunday afternoon a guy out walking with his dog along the edge of the tide flats stumbled across the body of a dead female. She was found at the bottom of the steep bank that runs along Commencement Bay just south of Brown’s Point. Tacoma PD responded to that incident as well. Sometime late Monday morning someone put two and two together and realized that the missing woman and the dead woman were one and the same. The unidentified gunshot victim was barefoot and wearing nothing but a T-shirt, panties, and robe in frigid weather. From the looks of it, she was forced into the trunk of the vehicle, probably at gunpoint, and then shot while the vehicle was still in the soup kitchen parking lot. The killer then transported the victim to a pullout along Highway 509, where he removed her from the vehicle and rolled her down a steep embankment. Fortunately she didn’t get hung up in a blackberry bramble. If she had, it might have been years before we found the body.”
I thought about the muscles in Ron’s arms and the upper-body strength that came from years of pushing his own wheelchair and lifting himself in and out of vehicles. Unfortunately, none of this sounded as if it were beyond his physical capabilities.
“No tire tracks there, either?” I asked.
Mel shook her head. “Blacktop,” she said. “But we do have something.”
“What’s that?”
“There’s a restaurant just up the road-at Brown’s Point. We checked their security camera. We’ve got a grainy but identifiable video of Ron’s very distinctive vehicle going past the restaurant northbound at eleven fifty- nine P.M. Friday.”
“His clamshell wheelchair topper is pretty distinctive, all right.” That’s what I said, but it wasn’t what I was thinking.
“Yes, it is,” Mel continued. “So based on the security tape and your report that someone had found dried blood in Ron’s car, Brad and I showed up armed with a search warrant. We also impounded his car. We found the blood, lots of it…” She paused, her eyes trained on my face. “And something else. Wedged into the wheel well, where he wouldn’t have seen it in the dark, was a single shoe-a shoe that matches the one found in the parking lot outside the Bread of Life Mission.”
I felt like all the air had been sucked out of my lungs. For lack of something to say, I took Mel’s cup and mine and headed for the kitchen. My hands shook as I poured coffee. I stayed in the kitchen until my breathing and shaking hands were back under control.
By the time I returned to the living room, Mel had kicked off her boots and had wrapped an afghan around her shoulders.
“Did your wife make this?” she asked. “It’s lovely.”
“Neither one of my wives were into crocheting,” I said. “My grandmother made that for me.”
“Oh,” Mel said.
I sat back down beside her. I had no idea what to say. Neither did she, evidently. For a time we both sipped our respective coffees in silence.
“I knew you and Ron Peters had been partners,” she said finally. “But I guess I didn’t realize how tight you were and still are.”
“Yes,” I agreed. “We’re tight, all right.” For a while I thought I was going to let it go at that, but then I surprised myself and told Melissa Soames the rest of it.
“When Ron and I first started working together, I thought he was a prissy jerk. He was a vegan, and that pissed the hell out of me. I mean, how many vegan cops do you know? I gave him a hard time about it every chance I got. Then, in the course of the case we were working on, I met this woman, an amazing woman, and fell in love with her. Anne was her name, Anne Corley. I realized eventually that she was…well, let’s say troubled…but I was in love and figured it wasn’t anything I couldn’t handle. Except she was more than troubled, so troubled she suckered me into shooting her on the afternoon of our wedding day. They didn’t call her death suicide by cop back then, but that’s what it was.”
“I had no idea,” Mel said after a long pause. “I’m sorry.”
I nodded. “It happened a long time ago. I got winged by a bullet in the shoot-out. Once the doctors got through with me, Ron Peters was the one who dragged me home from Harborview Hospital. Not here-but to my old apartment. This is the one I bought after Anne died, and soon after I found out how well off she had left me as far as money is concerned.”
Mel looked around the room as if taking it in for the first time. “She left you all this?”
I nodded. “And more.” I was silent for a long time. I didn’t resume the story until Mel shifted restlessly on the window seat.
“But to go back to Ron. When we came home from the ER, he helped me up to my room in the Royal Crest. There, right in plain sight on the kitchen counter, was what was left of our wedding cake. Ron never said a word. He just picked it up and stuffed it down the garbage disposal. We’ve been friends ever since. Later on, Ralph Ames, who was Anne’s attorney originally, helped Ron get his kids back from a drug-dealing commune in eastern Oregon, where Rosemary had taken up residence.”
“So the three of you have a history.”
“You could say that,” I agreed. “Just call us the three musketeers.”
I talked about Ron then, telling Mel everything I knew about him. She took notes and asked occasional questions. I probably sounded pretty lame. Maybe I was hoping that if I could convince Mel that Ron Peters was a good guy, I could also get her to disregard the mounting evidence against him. The unchanging expression on her face told me I wasn’t making any progress.
“So that’s it, then?” she asked when I finally ran out of steam.
“Pretty much.”
She closed her notebook, stuffed it in her purse, and retrieved one of her boots from the floor.
“Where is he?” I asked, expecting her to say the King County Jail in downtown Seattle, or else the Justice Center out in Kent.
“He’s back home for now,” Mel answered. “At least until the preliminary hearing. We were going to arrest him, but none of the local jails would take him.”
“Because he’s a cop?”
“That’s part of it,” Mel conceded. “But also because of his physical situation. Mrs. Peters and your friend, Ralph Ames, made it quite clear that wherever he ended up, the facility needed to be prepared to handle his ongoing medical needs.”
“As in elimination issues?” I asked, stating what I knew about Ron’s physical challenges as diplomatically as possible.
Mel simply nodded. “That and the possibility of his developing bedsores-or maybe they call them chair sores. If the AG’s office had its own detention facility, it might be different, but none of the jail commanders we talked to were willing to accept the liability. We had to take him back home for now.”
“Doesn’t that leave Ross Connors open to charges of playing favorites?”
Finished zipping up her second boot, Mel gave me a wan smile. “Maybe. But even Ross Connors doesn’t carry much weight when it comes to local officials worrying about possible liability claims. Besides, realistically speaking, Ron Peters doesn’t seem like much of a flight risk. His kids and his wife are here. We’ve confiscated his Camry and his weapons. What’s he going to do?”
I thought of Jared not wanting his daddy to sleep over anywhere else. For tonight, at least, that was true. “Sounds like it’s handled,” I said.
Mel gathered up her purse and coat and started for the door. She paused in the entryway with her fingers on the doorknob. She turned back to me. Once again, her blue eyes were ablaze, but this time her anger wasn’t directed at me.
“I was eleven the first time the cops carted my dad off to jail for beating the crap out of my mother,” she
