have a care package waiting for you.”
It seems to me I spent most of my Seattle PD career at odds with one superior or another. Having Ross Connors go to the mat for me like this was an entirely new experience. Not sure what to expect, I drove straight to Seattle PD.
Denise was a uniformed officer womaning the Seattle PD reception desk. I gave her my name along with my ID. When she returned my ID, she also handed me a thick manila envelope. Standing off to one side of the nearly deserted lobby, I tore open the envelope and sorted through its contents. Inside I found copies of the official police reports on Elvira Marchbank and Wink Winkler. And at the very bottom of the envelope was a laminated special visitor’s pass that, for the next thirty days, allowed me unlimited access to come and go as I pleased in and around Seattle PD without the need of an escort.
In other words, Ross Connors was nothing short of a miracle worker.
Just to see if it would work, I left police headquarters and went downhill to the old Public Safety Building. The pass worked like a charm on both the outside entrance as well as for controlling the elevators. I went straight downstairs to the evidence room. There I filled out the proper form requesting access to the Madeline Marchbank evidence box. In Kramer’s eagerness to sign off on the other two cases, I guessed that he would have returned the box to where it belonged, and I was right.
Through some quirk in scheduling, the clerk behind the counter-the same one who had sicced Kramer on me two days earlier-found the box and handed it to me with no sign of recognition and without so much as a raised eyebrow.
“Is there someplace I can sit to look this over?” I asked.
She pointed wordlessly at the old wooden library carrel, and I didn’t bother to argue. The scarred surface at least offered a flat place for me to work.
When I opened the box, I discovered that, after three days of handling, the cardboard cover wasn’t nearly as dusty as it had been earlier. The first item I removed from inside-a bloodstained apron-sent a shiver of recognition down my spine. I wasn’t sure in which tape Sister Mary Katherine had mentioned the apron, but I remembered her saying in one of them that Mimi Marchbank had been wearing a flower-covered apron on the day she was murdered, but subsequent newspaper accounts of the crime had indicated that Mimi had been found stabbed to death in her bed. In my experience, not that many people wear aprons in bed. In addition to the apron I found a bagged and still-bloody knife, along with several more items of bloodstained clothing and bedding.
None of that surprised me. The contents all seemed perfectly normal. What wasn’t normal was what wasn’t there-the case log. With that missing, there was no official written account of Mimi Marchbank’s murder investigation-no record of where and when the physical evidence had been gathered and no list of who had been interviewed by detectives or why. Without that background information, the physical evidence itself was virtually useless.
How long had it been missing? Had it been gone for decades-say, from the time Wink Winkler had left the department in disgrace-or was its disappearance as recent as this last Tuesday morning?
I replaced the items I had removed, and returned the box to the counter. “Did you find everything you needed?” the clerk asked.
“Absolutely,” I told her with what I hoped sounded like a hint of a swagger. “Everything I needed and more.” I walked out the door hoping that conversation, too, would be reported back to Captain Kramer.
I went home, dragged out my computer, and used my notes to type up the report I had promised to deliver to SHIT in the morning. Next I tackled the police reports I had collected on the deaths of Elvira Marchbank and Wink Winkler. It made for slow going.
Elvira had been found at the bottom of the stairs. A partial shoe print had been found on the glossy cover of a magazine that had landed close to the body. There had been no sign of forced entry; no sign of an altercation. Hair and fiber trace evidence had been collected for analysis, but that would take time. Detectives Jackson and Ramsdahl had conducted a series of interviews with people from the surrounding neighborhood, including one Raelene Landreth, executive director of the Marchbank Foundation. None of the interviewees had reported hearing or seeing anything amiss at Elvira’s residence.
With Wink Winkler there was obviously a crime scene somewhere, but so far no one had found it. Dead bodies sink. They don’t float back up to the surface until there’s a certain amount of decomposition. Wink’s body had been found snagged by a piling under a dock on Harbor Island. What that said to me was that the unknown crime scene was most likely relatively close to where the body was found and that the fact that he had come to the surface had more to do with currents and flood and ebb tide than with anything else.
Wink’s son, William Winkler III-Bill-had been interviewed twice, both times at corporate offices of Emerald City Security, the firm Wink had founded but which was now being run by his son. The first interview had occurred on Wednesday morning, when a uniformed officer had been dispatched to speak to him in regard to the missing person report called in by Wink’s assisted-living facility. The second interview had been conducted late that afternoon by Detectives Jackson and Ramsdahl. By then Wink’s body had been found and identified. Bill Winkler told them that his father had been unhappy about living in the “home” but that he hadn’t seemed either despondent or suicidal.
My spirit was willing, but the flesh is weak. Halfway through Detective Jackson’s interview with Wink’s son, I fell sound asleep. I woke up sometime later to find the loose pages of the reports scattered around the legs of my recliner. I took that as a sign that it was time to toddle off to bed.
The next morning my back was killing me. I lay in bed for a long time, drifting and dozing and waiting for the kinks to straighten out.
When I had first heard Sister Mary Katherine’s account of what had happened on that glorious day in May so long ago, I had thought Elvira Marchbank would be the only surviving person who would know whether or not the story was true. Then Wink Winkler had been added into the mix. Now, with both of them dead, I had too many years of homicide work behind me to buy into Kramer’s notion that the two deaths-an accident and a suicide-were purely coincidental.
I happened to believe that Elvira Marchbank had been alive when Sister Mary Katherine left the old woman’s home. I also believed that, as Sister Mary Katherine left, Wink Winkler had arrived. That meant that Wink was, if not the last, then certainly among the last to see Elvira Marchbank alive. Had he killed her and then rearranged the evidence so her death would appear to be an accident rather than a homicide? And what was the point of killing Elvira in the first place? What in Sister Mary Katherine’s account of Mimi Marchbank’s death was so damaging that Wink Winkler would be willing to commit yet another murder in order to avoid having that story revealed more than half a century later?
Presumably Elvira, determined to make things right, would have identified the long-silent witness who had effected Elvira’s remarkable change in attitude. And if Wink’s sole purpose had been to suppress the story, wouldn’t he have attempted to silence not only Elvira but Sister Mary Katherine as well? And what was the point in his killing himself?
Or had he? Was there another person involved in all this-another person who knew all the particulars and who was smart enough to manipulate evidence? What if Elvira had been murdered and the evidence had been doctored to make it look as though she had died of an accidental fall? And if that was the case, could the same be true of Wink Winkler’s supposed suicide? What if someone other than Wink held the gun to his head and pulled the trigger? Suicide can be successfully faked, but only if the killer is smart enough to take bullet trajectories, blood spatter, and gunpowder residue into consideration.
Half awake and half asleep, I tried to catalog everything I had learned in the last several days. I was jolted out of my half-sleep by the recollection of the photograph Sister Mary Katherine had shown me in Bakeman’s at lunch the day before-the one of her and her father posing together, with her perched on the hood of his spanking- new car.
Hurrying into the living room, I found the phone book and tracked down the number for the Department of Licensing.
After passing through the required verbal identification process, I gave the clerk the year I was interested in and the name-William Winkler.
“Which one?” she asked. “Senior or junior?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Give me both.”
