knife arm, wrapped around her shoulders, they stepped outside.
My part of the job was to usher Amy, Ron, and the kids to safety. Hurriedly I ducked back out of sight behind the dining-room wall.
As soon as the front door slammed shut behind then, I heard someone shout, “Freeze!”
I didn’t wait to hear more. I charged out of the dining room. “Come on, come on,” I yelled at Amy and Tracy, who both seemed astonished to see me. “Into the kitchen, quick!”
I grabbed the startled Jared from his mother’s arms and carried him to safety. Amy and Tracy were right behind me, with Ron in his wheelchair bringing up the rear. I handed my now-wailing namesake, Jared Beaumont Peters, over to his father and then raced back to the front door. I shut off the interior lights before I opened it. Just as Heather and Dillon must have done, I had to pause on the porch for a moment before my eyes adjusted to the sudden change in light.
When I could see again, there was Dillon’s Focus parked in the middle of the drive. Brad stood on the driver’s side of the vehicle, and Mel Soames stood on the other. Both had their weapons drawn and were pointing toward the Ford’s interior. “Drop the knife!” Mel ordered.
As I moved closer, there was some illumination from a nearby streetlight, enough that I could glimpse a single occupant in the front seat of the vehicle. If Dillon was holding Heather down on the far side of the seat, if he was threatening her with the knife, he was probably too preoccupied with the weapon to turn the key in the ignition. That explained why the Focus wasn’t running.
Taking in the chilling scene, I lost all hope. With two.38s trained on the vehicle from the outside and with a drawn knife inside, Heather Peters didn’t stand a chance. And if she got hurt or died, it really would be all my fault.
“Put down the knife.” This time Brad issued the order. “Put it down and step out of the vehicle.”
But nothing happened. The car door didn’t open. The knife didn’t tumble onto the driveway. Determined to help, I charged off the porch, only to be knocked off balance by someone coming toward me at breakneck speed.
“Help him, Uncle Beau,” Heather pleaded as I righted myself. “Stop them before they shoot him. Please.”
Overwhelmed to realize Heather wasn’t being held at knifepoint, I clutched her in a quick but heartfelt bear hug. “All right,” I said. “I will, but you have to go inside. Don’t come back out until we say you can.”
Without waiting to see whether or not Heather did as she was told, I sprinted forward.
“Come on, Dillon, we don’t want to hurt you,” Mel was saying. “You’re not going anywhere. Now put down that knife.”
“We shouldn’t have done it,” I heard Dillon say as I reached the back bumper of the car. “I’m sorry.”
There was a sudden flurry of movement from the driver’s seat.
“Shit!” Mel Soames exclaimed, and she wasn’t talking about the Special Homicide Investigation Team. Brad leaned inside and retrieved the knife. He emerged with both his hand and the knife dripping with blood. By then I could see what Mel had meant. Dillon Middleton sat slumped sideways in the driver’s seat with blood gushing from a self-inflicted wound to his gut.
“No!” Heather shrieked from behind me as she darted toward the car.
Seattle’s award-winning EMTs arrived within two minutes of receiving my 911 call, but I suspected long before they got there that no matter what medical magic they brought with them, it would be too little too late to save Dillon Middleton.
CHAPTER 21
All hell broke loose after that. By the time the aid car took off for Harborview Hospital with Heather and Dillon on board followed by the rest of the Peters family, West Highland had filled up with cop cars and media vans. Queen Anne Hill was no longer my turf. In this instance, it wasn’t Brad’s or Mel’s, either. Temporarily relegated to the sidelines, we stood in the rain watching the proceedings just like the other neighborhood onlookers.
“I guess you heard what Dillon said.” Mel’s comment was a quiet one, but it packed a gut-wrenching wallop, because I had indeed heard what he said. “We shouldn’t have done it.”
It was pretty apparent that the “we” in question had to be Dillon and Heather. And as for the “it”? That had to be the murder of Rosemary Peters. All three of us-three sworn police officers-had heard what might well turn out to be Dillon Middleton’s deathbed confession. Dillon was on his way to a hospital and maybe a funeral home. As for Heather? If what Dillon had said was true, Heather Peters might well be headed for prison. The idea that she had played a part in her mother’s murder had been a possibility all along. I simply hadn’t accepted it. Now it was unavoidable.
“She told me she didn’t do it,” I muttered. It was difficult to speak. My heart was breaking for Ron and Amy- and for me. I was glad it was raining. With water coursing down my cheeks, I hoped people wouldn’t notice some of it was tears.
“She lied to you, Beau,” Mel said. “Kids lie all the time.”
“Are you going to arrest her tonight?”
“Probably not,” Mel said. “Tomorrow will be plenty of time. It’ll take that long to get an arrest warrant. Here.” She held out her hand.
“What’s this?”
“A present for you,” she said and handed me a spark-plug wire.
“That’s how you kept him from leaving?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Good thinking,” I said, slipping the wire into my pocket. “And good work. How did you get her away from him?”
Mel shrugged. “We didn’t dare make a move as long as Dillon was holding the knife to her throat. But when they got close to the car, he let her loose. I think he really believed she was running away with him. That’s when we made our move.”
“She probably was running away with him,” I said. “And all the time I thought she was doing what she was doing to help her parents.”
“She was helping herself,” Mel said.
Sick at heart, I couldn’t argue the point.
A tow truck picked its way through the assortment of parked cars and came to collect the Focus. I was walking over to hand the spark-plug wire over to the tow-truck driver just as a uniformed officer popped the trunk. He lurched back several paces, and I heard him gasp, “Oh my God!”
When I turned to look, I saw that a bloodied corpse had been jammed into the tiny trunk. As soon as I saw the face, I knew who it was-Molly Wright.
A pair of homicide detectives had already been summoned to the scene of Dillon’s attempted suicide. Now Captain Kramer appeared as if on cue. He didn’t bother glancing at the car or at the open trunk. Instead he made straight for me.
“What the hell is going on here, Beaumont? I thought I told you to stop screwing around in my cases.”
Mel Soames stepped out from behind me before I had a chance to respond. “Like it or not, it happens to be our case, too,” she said reasonably enough.
“My associates,” I interjected. “Melissa Soames and Brad Norton. And this is a former associate of mine,” I added. “Captain Paul Kramer, Seattle PD Homicide, but then I believe you two have already met.”
Kramer leered at Mel. “Oh, it’s you,” he said sarcastically. “So the SHIT squad is out in force-the attorney general
I didn’t like his tone. And even though Mel Soames’s figure was definitely worthy of leers, I sure as hell didn’t like the way he looked at her, either. For her part, Mel seemed singularly unimpressed.
“One of the suspects in the Rosemary Peters homicide just tried to off himself here in his vehicle,” Mel told him. “But it turns out he left a little something behind for you to work on, too.”
For the first time Kramer looked inside the trunk. One glance was enough to leave him stricken. Kramer
