Ross smiled and nodded. He didn’t seem to be in any hurry, but I was ready for the other shoe to drop.
“So how are things between you and Seattle PD these days?” he asked.
This was not the shoe I expected. “Seattle PD?” I asked stupidly.
Ross grinned. “You know. Remember the place you worked for twenty-odd years?”
His “how are things” inquiry should have been easy to answer, but it wasn’t. Yes, I had worked in Seattle PD for a long time, most of it as a homicide detective. All the way along, though, I had rubbed the brass the wrong way, and the reverse had certainly been true. I hadn’t liked them much, either. Something to do with my not being considered a “good team player.” It turned out that working for Ross Connors had proved to be the one notable exception in a career marred by ongoing feuds with many of my commanding officers.
“So-so,” I said. “Things improved a little after Mel Soames and I pulled Paul Kramer’s fat out of the fire.”
Kramer was the brownnosing, ambitious jerk who had been a thorn in my side from the moment he first stepped foot in Homicide. His, in my opinion, undeserved promotion to captain had been the final straw in the whole series of unfortunate events that had driven me off the force.
Months earlier, his singularly stupid episode of tombstone courage-of going into a dangerous situation without waiting for backup-had almost cost him his life, would have cost him his life if Mel and I hadn’t ridden to the rescue at just the right moment. And, of course, that was the very reason he had done it in the first place. He had realized that we were following the same trail he was. In his eagerness to beat us to the punch and gain all the credit, he had committed an almost fatal error.
“Good,” Ross said. “Glad to hear it, because we seem to have a little problem, and you may be able to help.”
So he wasn’t here about Mel and me after all. I breathed what I hoped was an inaudible sigh of relief. “What kind of problem?” I asked.
“Does the name LaShawn Tompkins mean anything to you?”
It took a minute but then I remembered. LaShawn was a hotshot, tough-guy gangbanger who had gone to prison years earlier for the rape and murder of a teenage prostitute. I recalled that some time in the last year or so, after sitting on death row for years, he had been exonerated through newly examined DNA evidence. After his release, the state had declined to retry him. Tompkins’s release had been a huge media event, and his subsequent wrongful-imprisonment settlement had caused a storm of controversy that was now the centerpiece of what looked to be a knock-down, drag-out battle in the upcoming campaign to elect a new King County prosecutor.
I nodded. “Isn’t that the guy the do-gooders managed to spring from death row last year?”
“The very one,” Ross agreed.
“What about him?”
“Someone shot the shit out of him last Friday evening,” Ross said. “Plugged him twice, once in the stomach and once in the heart when he opened his mother’s front door over in the Rainier Valley.”
That didn’t sound so unusual to me. In fact, it’s pretty much same old, same old. A guy gets out of prison, comes back, tries to go back to doing whatever he did before he went to the slammer. He soon finds out that times have changed. New thugs have taken over his old territory and his old contacts, and they don’t like him encroaching on what they now regard as theirs.
“Turf war?” I asked.
“Maybe,” Ross said. “Maybe not. That’s what I’d like you to find out for me.”
“Why?” I said.
For the first time since he’d sat down in my office, Ross looked uncomfortable. “I really can’t say,” he said. “Or rather, I won’t. Not at this time. And given the fact that there have been leaks in my office before…”
I nodded. We both knew too much about those.
“I’m not about to put anything in writing,” he continued. “Not in an e-mail. Not in a letter. Not in anything official. At this point it’s strictly an informal inquiry.”
I wanted to ask how come, but I thought better of it. Ross gave me an answer anyway-a partial answer.
“It may be nothing at all. Then again, it could be a big deal,” he added. “Until I have a better handle on what’s going on, I don’t want to leave any kind of a paper trail.”
It was more of an answer than I probably deserved. It was also as much information as I was likely to receive. “Got it,” I said. “I’ll see what I can do. So this is under the radar?”
“Yes. Absolutely.”
“Can I use your name?”
“Let me know first.”
“Reports?”
“Nothing written,” he said. “Nothing that goes through channels and across desks. I’ve cleared it with Harry, so he knows you’re on special assignment. I’ll check with you off and on in the next few days and see how it’s going.”
For the first time I wondered if LaShawn Tompkins’s murder didn’t have something to do with whether Ross Alan Connors himself would stand for reelection.
“So I’m your secret agent man?” I asked.
Ross nodded. “For the time being. I’ve got a good crew of people here,” he added. “All of them are hand- picked, and all of them trustworthy, but you and I have a history, Beau. I’m counting on your discretion in this matter.”
“Okey-dokey,” I said. “You want discretion, you’ve got discretion.”
“Thanks,” he said. “And that includes your special friend, by the way,” he added as he rose to his feet.
It was a long way from what I had expected and deserved, but it was clear Ross knew all about Mel and me, and now I knew he knew. And not telling Mel about what he had asked me to do would put me between a rock and a hard place.
Ross pulled the door open. As he stepped into the corridor, he turned and looked back at me. “Life goes on, doesn’t it,” he said.
That throwaway comment covered a lot of territory. Ross Alan Connors and J. P. Beaumont did have a history, one that included the pain of losing wives to suicide. This was the second time now that Ross had come to me personally when he needed something handled under the radar. In the world of SHIT, I was indeed Ross’s secret agent man. He had just given me the handshake.
“Yes,” I agreed. “Yes, it does.”
CHAPTER 2
For a long time after Ross Connors left my office, I sat there and contemplated what it all might mean. Obviously, by limiting the scope of the investigation into LaShawn Tompkins’s death to one officer and by disallowing any kind of a paper trail, the A.G. seemed to be looking for a certain amount of deniability with regard to whatever his interest might be in the homicide of a now-exonerated killer. I also gave some careful thought to what I would tell Mel when she got around to asking, as she inevitably would, what the hell was going on.
It happened at lunchtime as we were driving through rain-washed sunshine to the Men’s Wearhouse in downtown Bellevue. “So what did Ross Connors want?” she asked. “Barbara told me the two of you were in your office for a closed-door meeting for a very long time.”
We were in the BMW and she was driving, so she wasn’t looking at my face when I answered. There’s a good reason I don’t play poker. My face is always a dead giveaway of whatever’s in my hand.
“Just chewing the fat,” I said casually. “I don’t think he’s ever gotten over what happened to Francine.”
“His wife?” Mel asked, shooting me a questioning look.
All that had happened before Melissa Soames had turned up at SHIT. I nodded, hoping she’d go back to watching traffic instead of watching me.
“That’s understandable,” Mel said. The fact that she swallowed my lie without a moment’s hesitation made me feel that much worse.
I had held out some hope that in the process of actually buying the damned tux I’d somehow manage to jar
