Before the situation devolved into open warfare, Mel was able to finesse things enough that we were finally able to open Thomas Dortman’s assorted luggage. The lid of one carry-on was stuffed with packets of hundred- dollar bills.
“Looks like he stopped by his bank this morning and closed out his accounts,” I said.
Mel nodded. “That’s probably why he hung around until Monday,” she said.
In the end Detective Lander settled for walking away with Dortman’s 9-millimeter Beretta while Darrell Cross took control of everything else.
As far as Dortman’s Lincoln was concerned, however, Lander held the trump card. The LS was specifically listed on his search warrant. It wasn’t mentioned on Cross’s. So after we left the TSA office, Lander, Mel, and I spent the next half hour walking through Sea-Tac’s massive parking structure searching for the vehicle. Because local spring breaks were already in process, the garage was packed to the gills. My idea was to start on the top floors and work our way down. It was a logical-enough choice but a bad one. It turned out Dortman had used valet parking. And why not? It didn’t matter how much it cost. Dortman wasn’t planning on coming back, so he wasn’t ever going to pay the bill, either.
In the long run, that was a benefit. Once we located the vehicle and showed the parking attendant the search warrant, he produced the keys. Lander opened the driver’s door, bent down, and peered at the floor. Then he stepped back. “Take a look,” he said.
Mel took a look herself. “Looks like dried blood to me,” she said.
“That’s what I thought,” Lander replied.
He had summoned a tow truck. He and the attendant were arguing over payment of the parking fee when my phone rang.
“You never called me back,” Ralph Ames said accusingly.
Ralph isn’t someone who gets his nose out of joint easily, but this time he did sound miffed.
“Sorry,” I said. “Mel and I have been caught up in a situation that’s just now settling down.”
“So did you tell her-about the nun thing?”
“No,” I said. “I didn’t have a chance. Why don’t you?”
The look on Mel’s face was thoughtful as she finished the call and handed me back my phone. “Two unidentified nuns,” she said. “That pretty well spells it out. Richard Matthews’s murder and Juan Carlos Escobar’s have to be related.”
“Not two unidentified nuns,” I told her. “Three.”
“Three,” she said. “What are you talking about?”
“LaShawn Tompkins. Shortly before he was gunned down at his mother’s front door an unidentified nun was seen lurking in the neighborhood. She was seen, but no one’s been able to find any trace of her. Initially I thought she was an eyewitness, but maybe now…”
“A nun who goes around shooting people or running them down?” Mel asked. “That’s ridiculous.”
But I’m older than Mel Soames, and maybe I’m more cynical. Not only that, I’ve met enough religious nutcases that the idea of an unhinged nun didn’t sound at all beyond the realm of possibility.
“It makes no sense,” Mel insisted.
“It’s still a possibility,” I told her. “And even if it’s a long shot, with both you and Destry Hennessey involved, we’d better give Ross Connors a heads-up on this, too.”
She nodded. When Ross didn’t answer his cell I called his office, only to be told he was locked up in a series of meetings. When those ended, he was scheduled to speak at a dinner meeting in Tacoma. I had to summon a full dose of blarney before I was able to wheedle the location of said meeting out of his secretary, but with Mel’s Sea- Tac performance as inspiration, I hung in there until I finally had the name of the restaurant-Stanley Seaforts.
It’s actually Stanley amp; Seaforts, but I didn’t correct her. By then Mel and I were running on empty on both food and sleep. We had planned to go back to Belltown Terrace and call it a day. Instead we left the airport, hit I-5, and headed south smack in the middle of rush-hour traffic.
“Can’t we stop somewhere and get a sandwich?” Mel complained. She was hungry enough to be downright whiny.
“Wait,” I told her. “You’ll thank me later.”
“I doubt that,” Mel said. Sulking, she folded her arms across her chest, settled into the far corner of the passenger seat, and soon nodded off, leaving me alone to do both the driving and the thinking.
The problem with tying the three cases together was that, an unidentified nun aside, they were still very different. Juan Carlos Escobar had been guilty and punished some, if not enough to satisfy some of his victim’s survivors. Richard Matthews had been guilty and punished not at all-unless the bullet in his chest was some kind of latter-day payback for molesting his daughter. Fair enough. But LaShawn Tompkins hadn’t been guilty at all, although now he was just as dead as the other two. There again, like it or not, another unidentified nun had been seen in the vicinity of the crime. And what about the black cloth they had found in the door of the vehicle they had dredged out of the water up by Chuckanut Drive? Surely these weren’t all connected. That couldn’t be.
By the time we finally exited the freeway and made our way up the hill to the restaurant, the rain had stopped and an afternoon sun break had burned through the gloom. Inside, they had started serving dinner and the early dining crowd was lining up for the cheap eats. I guided Mel into the bar, hoping that from there we’d be able to spot Ross on his way into the restaurant. As we mowed our way through two orders of crab cakes, a side of pea salad, and several cups of coffee, Mel was almost civilized again. She was also puzzling over the same question that was bothering me.
“Okay,” she said. “Matthews clearly got away with something. To a lesser degree, so did Escobar, since the punishment didn’t exactly suit the crime. It makes sense that we’re dealing with a vigilante action of some kind. Other than the involvement of a nun, the only other connection between those two cases is that Destry and I are both involved in SASAC.”
I had already come to that same conclusion, and I was glad to hear Mel arrive there on her own. Under the circumstances it seemed wise to nod and say nothing more.
“But LaShawn Tompkins was exonerated,” Mel continued.
“Of that particular crime,” I said. “What if there’s another crime we don’t know about? What if he got away with that one?”
“The problem with that is, if we don’t know about it, how would anyone else?”
Just then a chauffeur-driven limo stopped at the front entrance. Ross Connors emerged and entered the lobby. Three stylishly dressed, power-suited women greeted him there and were about to lead him off toward a meeting room when I managed to snag him away from them.
The ladies weren’t pleased to let him go, but he excused himself. On his way to join us he ordered a single- malt from the bar.
“I saw that you called,” he said. “What’s up?”
We told him what was going on. All of it, from Donnie Cosgrove and Thomas Dortman right through to our unexpected but possible linking of those three very disparate cases. When we got to the part about LaShawn Tompkins, he stood up abruptly, walked over to the bar, and ordered another drink. By the time he returned to the table he seemed to have made up his mind about something.
By then one of the ladies had returned to retrieve Ross and was standing impatiently at his shoulder. Taking the paper cocktail napkin from under his drink, he jotted a name onto it and then dropped it on the table in front of me. Two words were written there: Analise Kim.
“She works at the Crime Lab in south Seattle,” Connors said. “We may have an evidence-handling problem there. Go talk to her.”
“Mel and I were actually talking about going on down to Olympia to see Destry-”
“No,” Connors barked, cutting me off. “Not at this time.” With that he turned and gave his hostess a bland smile and allowed himself to be led away.
“Whoa,” Mel observed. “Who pushed his button?”
“We did, evidently.”
Mel picked up the napkin. “Who’s this?”
“I’m not sure. I think she’s an evidence clerk.”
“I guess we’d better go see her.”
Which we did. Once again, I drove while Mel ran the phone. We were headed for the crime lab, but
