that rule had been quietly rescinded. Zero tolerance of weapons no longer applied to those carried by trained police officers. The last time Joanna had addressed a school audience, she had done so in her uniform, and no mention had been made of the fact that she’d been armed with both a Taser and a firearm.
“Is Luis all right?” Joanna asked.
“He’s not all right,” Jaime said. “He’s a long way from all right. Marcella has wrecked everything she ever touched. Why should her son be any different?”
“Anything I can do to help?”
Jaime shook his head. “Ernie and I will execute this warrant,” he said. “At least it’ll give me something to think about besides going home and trying to knock some sense into Luis’s head.”
“Don’t do that,” Joanna said. “He’s been through a lot. He’ll come around eventually.”
“I hope so,” Jaime said, but he didn’t sound convinced.
Joanna was tempted to hang around while they searched for clues in Lester Attwood’s Airstream. That sounded far more interesting than going back to her office and facing down a snarl of administrative nitty-gritty. Unfortunately, without Frank Montoya there to handle some of those issues, she had to focus more and more of her energy on day-to-day departmental issues. She knew that if she ever fell behind, she’d never catch up.
“Okay,” she said. “Good luck. I’ll head back to the office and leave you and Ernie to it.”
CHAPTER 6
Lucy Caldwell left me sitting in a grim little cubicle with the murder book while she went to get the evidence box. I scanned through what was there. The skull and bones had been found on Friday afternoon by a road worker of some kind, a guy named Ken Leggett. I made a note of his name, address, and phone number.
Lucy returned, dragging another cop with her. “This is Gary Fields,” she said. “He’s my partner.” Gary dropped an evidence box on the desk, gave me a look, and rolled his eyes.
“Anything else?” he wanted to know. “I need a smoke.”
“Knock yourself out,” Lucy told him.
When you’re a cop, partners are important. Knowing what to expect from the officer next to you sometimes means the difference between life or death. Clearly the partnership between Detectives Caldwell and Fields wasn’t a match made in heaven. And the fact that Gary preferred going out for a cigarette to discussing a current investigation didn’t speak well for him. This was a homicide-his homicide-and he should have exhibited a little more interest. At least I thought he should have.
“What’s his problem?” I asked.
Lucy shrugged. “He thinks a woman’s place is in the home and not in homicide.”
Truth be known, not too long ago that used to be my attitude as well. Once upon a time, the fifth floor at Seattle PD was an all-boys club, one with no girls allowed right up until Sue Danielson arrived on the scene. Since then, I had changed my mind about all that, and I thought the rest of the world had changed right along with me. But maybe not some of the “good old boys” in Kittitas County. And if Detective Caldwell was being treated as a pariah by her homicide detective colleagues, that could go a long way in explaining her pissed-off attitude toward me.
“Remind me to introduce Detective Fields to my wife,” I said. “She’ll clean his clock.”
Lucy Caldwell responded to that with a thin smile. Then she opened the box and pulled out a video-good old- fashioned VHS. The local M.E. might have gone high tech and high def, but the sheriff’s department was still stuck in the twentieth century.
“Here’s the interview we did with Leggett, the guy who found the body. Want to see it?”
I knew that watching the actual interview would take hours-as many hours as the interview itself. No instant replays. No commercial interruptions, and no TiVoed highlights. Besides, since it looked as though I was going to be working with Detective Caldwell, it seemed to me that a show of mutual respect might help us along.
“What about him?” I asked. “Do you think he might have had something to do with it?”
“I came to Homicide from Sexual Assault,” Lucy said. “I’ve interviewed a few scumbags in my time. Leggett is divorced. He drinks too much; he’s had several DUIs and several run-ins with the King County cops over in North Bend where he lives. He’s the guy who found the body, but in my estimation, he didn’t do this. When we interviewed him, he was beyond upset. He saw what he thought was a rock and took a leak on it. But being upset doesn’t make him a killer. I would have been upset, too.”
I read between the lines. “But somebody around here does think he’s the doer,” I ventured. “Who would that be?”
“Gary,” Lucy answered. “My partner.”
“Based on what evidence?” I asked.
“On what he likes to call gut instinct,” Lucy answered.
“His gut instinct but not yours, I take it?”
“Mine doesn’t count.”
Generally speaking, getting caught in the cross fire between feuding partners is a very bad idea. It’s true in domestic-violence situations, and it’s also true when the dueling partners happen to be cops. So I backed off. I made a mental note to stop off and visit with Mr. Leggett on my own. That way I’d be able to form my own opinions about his possible involvement and about his guilt or innocence.
While we talked, Lucy had removed the cardboard lid to the box. As soon as she did so, the room filled with the odor of dead smoke, and not just plain smoke, either. There was something else under the smoke, an ugly aftertaste that lingered on the back of my tongue. I recognized it but didn’t want to acknowledge what it was.
For a few minutes, Lucy busied herself with logging in the item we’d brought back from the M.E.’s office-the broken watch-into the evidence log. The shattered watch was a Timex-relatively cheap but reliable. It wasn’t still ticking as the ads say, but the fact that the date was still visible gave us an invaluable piece of information.
“What else do you have in there?” I asked.
“Exhibit number one,” she said, handing me a small glassine bag. Inside it was what looked like a misshapen hunk of gold with a small emerald-cut stone.
“An engagement ring?” I asked.
Lucy nodded.
“Including a real diamond?” I asked.
Lucy nodded again. “My guess is that the heat of the fire was enough to melt the gold. But the diamond is real enough-three quarters of a carat, and it looks like good quality to me.
“So robbery definitely wasn’t part of the motivation here.”
Nodding again, Lucy reached into the box and pulled out a large paper bag. “This is exhibit number two,” she said. “A buckskin jacket, complete with fringe.”
Instead of handing it to me, she set that one down and pulled out another bag. “Cowboy boot,” she said. “Tony Lama. Snakeskin. Size seven. This is a man’s size seven, by the way, so I’m guessing the victim probably wore a woman’s size eight. That’s what I wear. If news about the boot and the jacket ever gets out, I imagine they’ll stop calling our victim the Lake Kachess Jane Doe and start calling her the Annie Oakley Jane Doe.”
Once again, Lucy set down the bag without letting me touch it. Then she opened the third bag for me. Inside I saw what looked like the remains of a belt.
“Our CSI guy says that the burn patterns on the belt are consistent with its being used as a restraint.”
“In other words, it wasn’t around her waist at the time of the fire.”
Lucy nodded and produced yet another bag. That one contained a collection of charred remains that were evidently the remnants of the tarp, and some frayed pieces of rope.
“We went out to the crime scene on Saturday morning,” Lucy explained. “We took along a generator and a commercial carpet dryer so we could melt the snow. The M.E.’s assistant gathered up the bones. We took everything else. The problem is, what do we do with it now?”
“What’s all this doing here?” I asked. “ Why isn’t it at the crime lab?”
“What crime lab?” Lucy returned. “We don’t have a crime lab.”
“But you have a state-of-the-art M.E….” I began.
