MARCH
I am not a wimp. Maybe that sounds too much like Richard Nixon’s “I am not a crook,” but it’s true. I’m not. With twenty-plus years at Seattle PD, most of it on the Homicide Squad, and with several more years of laboring in the Washington State Attorney General’s Special Homicide Investigation Team, I think I can make that statement with some confidence. Usually. Most of the time. Right up until I got on the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party ride at Disneyland with my six-year-old granddaughter, Karen Louise, aka Kayla.
She had been in charge of the spinning. She loved it. I did not. When the ride ended, she went skipping away as happy as can be toward her waiting parents while I staggered along after her. Over her shoulder I heard her say, “Can we go again?” Then, stopping to look at me, she added, “Gramps, how come your face is so green?”
Good question.
When Kayla was younger, she used to call me Gumpa, which I liked. Now I’ve been demoted or promoted, I’m not sure which, to Gramps, which I don’t like. It’s better, however, than what she calls Dave Livingston, my first wife’s second husband and official widower. (Karen, Kayla’s biological grandmother, has been dead for a long time now, but Dave is still a permanent part of all our lives.) Kayla stuck him with the handle of Poppa. As far as I’m concerned, that’s a lot worse than Gramps.
But back to my face. It really was green. I was having a tough time standing upright, and believe me, I hadn’t had a drop to drink, either. By then, though, Mel figured out that I was in trouble.
Melissa Majors Soames is my third wife. That seems like a bit of a misnomer, since my second wife, Anne Corley, was married to me for less than twenty-four hours. Our time together was, as they say, short but brief, ending in what is often referred to as “suicide by cop.” It bothered me that Anne preferred being dead to being married to me, and it gave me something of a complex-I believe shrinks call it a fear of commitment-that made it difficult for me to move on. Mel Soames was the one who finally changed all that.
She and I met while working for the S.H.I.T. squad. (Yes, I agree, it’s an unfortunate name, but we’re stuck with it.) Originally we just worked together, then it evolved into something else. Mel is someone who is absolutely cool in the face of trouble, and she’s watched my back on more than one occasion. And since this whole idea of having a “three-day family-bonding vacation at Disneyland” had been her bright idea, it was only fair that she should watch my back now.
She didn’t come racing up to see if I was all right because she could see perfectly well that I wasn’t. Instead, she went looking for help in the guise of a uniformed park employee, who dropped the broom he was wielding and led me to the first-aid station. It seems to me that it would have made sense to have a branch office of that a lot closer to the damned teacups.
So I went to the infirmary. Mel stayed long enough to be sure I was in good hands, then bustled off to “let everyone know what’s happening.” I stayed where I was, spending a good part of day three of our three-day ticket pass flat on my back on an ER-style cot with a very officious nurse taking my pulse and asking me questions.
“Ever been seasick?” she wanted to know.
“Several times,” I told her. I could have added every time I get near a boat, but I didn’t.
“Do you have any Antivert with you?” she asked.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Antivert. Meclizine. If you’re prone to seasickness, you should probably carry some with you. Without it, I can’t imagine what you were thinking. Why did you go on that ride?”
“My granddaughter wanted me to.”
She gave me a bemused look and shook her head. “That’s what they all say. You’d think grown men would have better sense.”
She was right about that. I should have had better sense, but of course I didn’t say so.
“We don’t hand out medication here,” she said. “Why don’t you just lie there for a while with your eyes closed. That may help.”
When she finally left me alone, I must have fallen asleep. I woke up when my phone rang.
“Beau,” Ross Alan Connors said. “Where are you?”
Connors has been the Washington State Attorney General for quite some time now, and he was the one who had plucked me from my post-retirement doldrums after leaving Seattle PD and installed me in his then relatively new Special Homicide Investigation Team. The previous fall’s election cycle had seen him fend off hotly contested attacks in both the primary and general elections. With campaigning out of the way for now, he seemed to be focusing on the job, enough so that he was calling me on Sunday afternoon when I was supposedly on vacation.
“California,” I told him. “Disneyland, actually.”
I didn’t mention the infirmary part. That was none of his business.
“Harry tells me you’re due back tomorrow.”
Harry was my boss, Harry Ignatius Ball, known to friend and foe alike as Harry I. Ball. People who hear his name and think that gives them a license to write him off as some kind of joke are making a big mistake. He’s like a crocodile lurking in the water with just his eyes showing. The teeth are there, just under the surface, ready and waiting to nail the unwary.
“Yes,” I told him. “Our plane leaves here bright and early. We should be at our desks by one.”
When Mel had broached the Disneyland idea, she had wanted us to pull off this major family-style event while, at the same time, having as little impact as possible-one and a half day’s worth-on our accumulated vacation time. We had flown down on Thursday after work and were due back Monday at one.
On my own, I’ve never been big on vacations of any kind. Unused vacation days have slipped through my fingers time and again without my really noticing or caring, but Mel Soames is another kind of person altogether. She has her heart set on our taking a road trip this summer. She wants to cross the border into BC, head east over the Canadian Rockies and then come back to Seattle by way of Yellowstone and Glacier. This sounds like way too much scenery for me, but she’s the woman in my life and I want to keep her happy, so a-driving we will go.
“Mel can go to the office,” Ross said, “but not you. I want you in Ellensburg at the earliest possible moment.”
If you leave the Seattle area driving east on I-90, Ellensburg is the second stopping-off place after you cross the Cascades. First there’s Cle Elum and next Ellensburg. Neither of them strikes me as much of a garden spot.
“Why would I want to go to Ellensburg?” I asked.
“To be there when the Kittitas M.E. does an autopsy. Friday afternoon some heavy-equipment operator was out snowplowing a national forest road over by Lake Kachess where he ended up digging up more than he bargained for. This is number six.”
I didn’t have to ask number six what-I already knew. For the past two months S.H.I.T. had been working on the murders of several young Hispanic women whose charred remains had been found at various dump sites scattered all over western Washington. So far none of them had been identified. As far as we could tell, none of our victims had been reported missing. We’d pretty well decided that our dead girls were probably involved in prostitution, but until we managed to identify one of them and could start making connections, it was going to be damnably difficult to figure out who had killed them.
These days it’s routine for the dental records of missing persons to be entered into a national missing persons database. That wasn’t possible with our current set of victims. None of them had teeth. None of them! And the teeth in question hadn’t been lost to poor dental hygiene, either. They had been forcibly removed. As in yanked out by the roots!
“Same MO?” I asked.
“Pretty much except for the fact that this one seems to have her teeth,” Ross said. “So either we have a different doer or the guy ran out of time. This victim was wrapped in a tarp and set on fire just like the others. The body was found late Friday afternoon. It took until Saturday morning for the Kittitas County Sheriff’s Department to retrieve the remains. Unfortunately, their M.E. has been out of town at a conference, so that has slowed down the process. They put the remains on ice until she returns and expect the autopsy to happen sometime tomorrow afternoon. That’s where you come in. I want you there when it happens in case there’s some detail that we know about that the locals might miss.”
“Our plane’s due to depart at ten-twenty,” I told him.
“That’ll be cutting it close then,” Ross said. “God only knows how long it’ll take for you to get your luggage
