As we drove across the 520 Bridge, it was 5:00 a.m. The early-bird morning commute was already under way, and Mel and I were both starving.
Twenty-four-hour dining has almost gone the way of the dodo bird in downtown Seattle, with the notable exception of the Five Point Cafe at Fifth and Cedar. Smoking may have been abolished in Washington restaurants, but there’s enough residual smoke lingering in the Five Point to make an old Doghouse regular feel right at home.
While we waited for our breakfasts I dialed DeAnn’s cell phone number just to see if she had any update on Donnie’s condition. She didn’t. I also called Detective Lander across the mountains in Chelan to let him know what the deal was. We ate breakfast-no coffee-and then staggered home to bed. At six. In the morning. To say we were both beat is understating the obvious.
Harry I. Ball called at nine and woke us up, and I was something less than cordial. What had been downright endearing at 5:00 a.m. was a lot less lovable on three hours of sleep. When the phone rang Mel didn’t even wiggle. Answering it was my responsibility.
“Time to rise and shine,” Harry bellowed into the phone, breaking my eardrum.
“Come on, Harry,” I said, “have a heart. I barely got my eyes closed.”
“And I haven’t closed mine at all,” he returned cheerily. “So stop complaining. This BOLO that just came across my desk. That would be on the guy who went off to the hospital to have his stomach pumped. Right?”
“Right,” I said.
Mel turned over on her side and buried her head under her pillow.
“And what about these phone records, the ones that were faxed to me this morning? They’re for Jack and Carol Lawrence up in Leavenworth-the two victims, presumably. What do you want me to do with those?”
I sure as hell didn’t want to drive across the water to pick them up. “How about faxing them over to me here in Seattle?” I asked.
“Barbara isn’t here,” Harry said with a growl. “Has to take her kid to the dentist. Faxing’ll have to wait until she gets in. That probably won’t be before noon.”
The truth is, Harry is one of the world’s greatest technophobes, a guy who has never sent a fax in his life. His ineptitude makes me feel like a telecommunications genius. Besides, right about then, noon didn’t sound half bad.
“Fine,” I said. “Whenever.”
I put down the phone. It immediately rang again. “This is the doorman,” Jerome Grimes told me. “I have a Mr. Hatcher down here to see you.”
The very last thing I wanted right then was an in-house visit from Ross Connors’s pet economist, but he was already there. “All right,” I said. “Tell him to go to the deli next door for some coffee and a bagel. Tell him we’ll see him in fifteen minutes.”
Mel groaned. “See who?” she mumbled from under her pillow.
“Todd Hatcher,” I told her, giving her a whack on her down-comforter-shrouded hip. “Up and at ’em. The world awaits. Todd’ll be here in fifteen.”
He was, too, bringing with him two extra toasted onion bagels with cream cheese-in case we were hungry. We weren’t. I went to the door to let him in. Mel was still in the shower.
“You did tell me to come back on Monday, didn’t you?” Hatcher asked uncertainly.
“Yes,” I said. “I just didn’t know we’d be out all night working a case, is all. Come on in and get set up. Mel will be out in a minute.”
While Todd went about taking over the kitchen counter I muddled around making coffee. Mine isn’t as good as Mel’s, but it’s drinkable, and that’s what was called for that particular Monday morning-gallons and gallons of coffee.
Mel emerged from the bedroom fully dressed, made up, and looking far better than she should have under the circumstances.
“Didn’t mean to wake you,” Todd Hatcher apologized. To her. I noticed he hadn’t bothered apologizing to me.
“It’s okay,” Mel said. “We had to get up anyway. What have you got?”
“I spent most of the weekend working on my copies of the abstracts,” he said. “I’ve gone over all but two of them and input most of my observations. If you two could sit down and work on the rest of them this morning…”
That seemed unlikely to me. On less than three hours of sleep, I wasn’t going to be in the best condition to go searching for tiny discrepancies in a stack of old dead files. Mel gave me a look, took her stack of paper and her cup of coffee, and settled down in the window seat to go to work. I was saved by a phone call from Detective Lander over in Chelan.
“Any word on Donnie Cosgrove?” I asked.
“Not since he got to the hospital. I tried checking, but the hospital wouldn’t give me any info.”
Welcome to the world of patient privacy.
“I have DeAnn’s cell phone number,” I told him. “I’ll try reaching her. When they hauled Donnie away in the ambulance, it didn’t look too promising.”
“What do you think about this supposedly suicidal non-confession?” Lander asked. “Do you think he really wasn’t involved in the Lawrence homicides, or was he just trying to throw us off?”
I had been in the room and had seen the note Donnie had left behind as the drugs and booze took effect.
“I think Donnie Cosgrove really did mean to kill himself,” I responded.
“Does that mean he meant the rest of the note as well?” Lander asked.
“Maybe,” I said. “He doesn’t claim to have witnessed the actual shooting. He says he saw a vehicle that could have been the killer’s drive away. At this point, even a description of the vehicle would give us a big leg up.”
“You’ll check on Cosgrove and let me know if and when I can come talk to him?” Lander asked.
“Will do,” I said.
“In the meantime, Ross Connors came through like a champ. The phone records we ordered yesterday were on my desk when I showed up this morning. Have you seen yours yet?”
The fact that Tim Lander was absolutely focused and on task annoyed the hell out of me. Obviously he hadn’t spent the whole night traipsing back and forth across Lake Washington.
“Not yet,” I said.
“They’re pretty interesting,” he continued. “They go along in a pretty predictable pattern. Most of the time the Lawrences were calling the same numbers and the same people over and over. That lasted right up until early last week. After that, we’ve got a bunch of calls that haven’t shown up on the records before. Who was that guy you mentioned to me yesterday, the one you’d said you’d left a message for but he hadn’t called you back?”
“Dortman,” I said. “Thomas Dortman. Why?”
“Because I have a whole series of calls from Jack Lawrence to Thomas Dortman starting first thing on Tuesday morning.”
“That would be the day after I first talked to DeAnn.”
“Like I said, there are no calls at all to this Dortman character until Tuesday morning. Then there are eight, nine, ten calls altogether from Jack Lawrence’s cell phone. Why were you looking at Dortman again?”
“Because in the process of reexamining Tony Cosgrove’s disappearance, I came across an article by Dortman that mentioned Tony by name.”
“This Tony guy is DeAnn’s father, the one who disappeared back when Mount Saint Helens blew?”
“That’s right,” I replied. “Dortman mentioned Tony as a possible whistle-blower. I wondered if there might be some connection between them. They both worked at Boeing around the same time, so I thought maybe they knew each other there or worked in the same department. I also wondered if there might be a relationship between Tony’s possible whistle-blowing activities and his disappearance.”
“Which you’re thinking may not have had anything at all to do with a volcano?” Lander asked.
“Exactly. So we probably do need to talk to Dortman. I have a phone number but no street address.”
“I have his number, too,” Lander said. “In fact, I already tried calling it. No answer. I left a message. If he didn’t get back to you, I probably won’t hear from him either. I have his street address, but I don’t know how much
