told you about tonight as well as with the ones Mel found. You can see why I’m leaning in the direction of a cop gone bad, and if it turns out he’s someone who’s worked for me…” Ross shook his head, lapsed into a moody silence, and stared into the depths of his almost empty wineglass.
Now I began to fathom why Ross Connors was so gun-shy about news of our investigation getting out. A previous leak from the A.G.’s office had resulted in the death of a woman in the witness protection program- someone it had been his professional obligation to protect. I knew that failure on his part still weighed heavily on him, especially since it had eventually led to the death of Ross’s own wife. No wonder he was so concerned. If it turned out a serial killer with close to a dozen victims could be traced back to his administration, Ross’s days as attorney general were probably numbered. Still, it irked me to think that Mel and I were working as glorified fact- checkers for some hotshot economist.
“If we discover present or former law enforcement personnel are involved,” Ross resumed after a pause, “I’ll have to bring in the feds, no question, but I don’t want to do that until I’m reasonably sure what we’re dealing with. On the other hand, we simply must put a stop to this. Yes, the victims are some pretty bad dudes, but they’ve also served their time and paid their debts to society. According to the Constitution, even scumbags have a right to due process.”
“What about Mr. Tompkins?” Mel said.
On the surface her question was directed at Ross, but the look she sent in my direction said otherwise.
“What’s the story with him?” she continued. “Whatever it was must have happened before I came to town.”
That was true. LaShawn Tompkins had been both wrongly convicted and rightly released long before Melissa Soames turned up in Bellevue as Ross Connors’s latest addition to SHIT.
“Ask Beau here,” Ross said helpfully. “At this point I’m sure he knows far more about it than I do.”
So I told them what I knew, pretty much. I left out the part about Kendall Jackson working with me on the q.t. as far as attempting to locate Elaine Manning was concerned. If Ross needed deniability, so did Detective Jackson. After all, he still has to survive inside Seattle PD.
The problem was, the more I told the more I could see Mel didn’t like the fact that I had used Beverly’s death as a smoke screen to hide what I was doing.
“I’m still hoping maybe it is a love triangle,” I finished somewhat lamely. “Maybe, when we locate the girlfriend-”
“I hope so, too,” Ross interrupted. “But I’m not holding my breath. You can see why I turned to the two of you, though. I wanted this situation investigated with as little fuss as possible. Of all my people, you two are uniquely situated for keeping something like this quiet.”
Every time the man opened his mouth he made things worse for yours truly.
“Yes,” Mel agreed, sending yet another scathing glance in my direction. “I can certainly see why you might think that.”
I wanted to turn the focus away from us and back onto something less dangerous-like the victims themselves. “What do our dead guys have in common?” I asked. “Were any of them locked up in the same facility?”
“Todd is working on putting together a spreadsheet analysis of all that. As far as facilities are concerned, we have only so many prisons,” Ross said. “Since these guys were all incarcerated at more or less the same time, it stands to reason that some of them would have served time in the same facility. If it turns out they all were, then that’s another story.”
“The irrigation-canal victims were locked up together,” Mel offered. “They were actually cell mates up in Monroe.”
“What about their crimes? Any similarity there?” I asked.
“With the exception of Mr. Tompkins, they’re all multiple offenders,” Ross replied. “Their crimes run the gamut of your regular felonies-grand theft auto, armed robbery, bank robbery. You name it, they did it.”
“What about gang affiliations?” Mel asked.
Connors shrugged. “They all had some, of course. If they didn’t have them when they went into prison, they sure as hell did when they came out. That’s one of the things Todd assures me he’s great at, data mining-once he has it. That’s where you come in, Mel. You’ll need to gather up all the information we have on these offenders from all applicable jurisdictions so Todd will be able to organize the information for us. Once we look at all the cases together, we may find there are common denominators, details no one has noticed.”
Ross Connors reached for the bottle and emptied it into his own glass without offering any to Mel. I knew he was drinking way too much way too fast. I was glad he had a driver.
“I count ten victims so far,” Mel said. “It seems to me that’s worthy of a task-force approach. If it comes to light that you’ve only put three investigators on this and one of them is an economist instead of a cop, it’s not going to sound like you’re taking this seriously.”
“Oh, I’m serious, all right,” Ross said. “Very serious. What I’m hoping is that the two of you will point me in the right direction. If it turns out our prime suspect is a cop, let me know.”
“There’s more than one state involved,” Mel pointed out.
“I know all that,” Ross said impatiently. “As I said, I’ll call in the feds when it’s time-once I understand the full extent of the problem.”
I had always respected Ross Connors. Politics had always been one of his considerations, but never the top one. This time things were different and I wondered why.
“I still think we need a task force,” Mel insisted.
“We’re already dealing with a task force,” Ross returned. “A task force of killers-a syndicate, if you like. If they’re plugged into in the law enforcement community, as soon as we start putting together a large-scale investigation, they’ll know what we’re doing and when we’re doing it. At that point they’ll go to ground, and we’ll never find them.”
With that, Ross rose unsteadily to his feet. “I’ll call Harry in the morning,” he said. “Tell him that you two are working a special project for me for the foreseeable future. And, considering the situation, it might be better if you worked from home instead of the office.”
Control freak Harry I. Ball was going to love that.
Mel escorted Ross downstairs in the elevator and hooked him back up with his car and driver. When she returned, just as I expected, she took me to the woodshed over the Tompkins situation.
“Maybe you’d better tell me about your friend LaShawn,” she said. “This time don’t leave anything out.”
I have no idea how she knew I had left something out, but she did. And so I told her the whole story, including the parts about working sub rosa with Detective Kendall Jackson. I expected all hell would break loose, but it didn’t. When I finished, Mel stood up and stretched. “Time to go night-night,” she said. “This turned into a hell of a day, and tomorrow isn’t going to be any better.”
A little while later we were lying in bed. I was almost asleep when Mel said, “So how do you feel about all this?”
Even half asleep and without having any idea of the actual topic of discussion, I was smart enough to recognize this as a trick question-almost as volatile as the age-old “Do I look fat in this?”
“Feel?” I asked dimly.
“About our being partners,” she said. “That was the first thing Barbara Galvin told me about you when I showed up at SHIT. She said, ‘Beau doesn’t work with partners.’ Of course, we already did that once-unofficially, yes. But it sounds to me as though this time Ross is making it official-in an under-the-table kind of way.”
Mel was right about my wanting to avoid investigative partnerships. During my time in Homicide at Seattle PD, I felt I had been exceptionally hard on partners. Ron Peters and Big Al Lindstrom had both sustained line-of- duty life-changing injuries. Much later, Sue Danielson had died in a hail of bullets. In all three instances subsequent departmental inquiries had exonerated me of any fault. Officially, Seattle PD had concluded that I was blameless. Undeterred by facts and official findings, however, I had continued to hold myself accountable in each and every instance. As far as I was concerned, my partners’ biggest problem-their single common liability-had been their star-crossed association with me.
My relationship with Melissa Soames, however, was entirely different from the ones I had shared with each of those other partners. For one thing, I sure as hell hadn’t been in love with Ron Peters and Big Al Lindstrom. I hadn’t been in love with Sue, either. I had felt protective of her, had wanted to be her mentor, but there had never been
