He grabbed me under my arms and lifted me like I was a ten-pound-bag of potatoes. W. Reed Harding was strong as an ox. He dumped me unceremoniously on the kitchen stool where Linda Decker had sat earlier to drink her coffee. I didn't object. There wasn't an ounce of fight left in me.
'Is anybody ever going to tell me what the hell is going on?' I asked wearily.
'You bet, Beaumont,' Harding answered. 'I'll be glad to tell you. We're going to find where you stowed the stuff and then we're going to take you off the streets for awhile, lock you up, and throw away the key. I don't like it when cops take walks on the wrong side of the law. It gives all of us a bad name.'
'Wrong side of the law? What are you talking about? What stuff?'
Harding bent down, holding his face only inches from mine. 'The stuff you were going to use to burn down this house.'
I was so dumbfounded I almost fell off the chair. 'Burn the house down? You've got to be kidding. What makes you think that, for Christ's sake?'
'Because you already did it once.'
'Did what?'
'Burned down a house,' he answered grimly.
'Whose house?' I asked.
W. Reed Harding didn't answer me right away. His unblinking eyes bored into mine. I know how to do that too. It's a look calculated to make creeps squirm in their seats, to get them to spill their guts.
'Whose house?' I repeated.
'Linda Decker's mother's house,' he said slowly. 'Her mother's dead, and her brother isn't expected to make it.'
His words hit me with the weight of a sledgehammer blow. Linda Decker's mother and her brother? Jimmy Rising? The enthusiastic little guy with his stainless-steel thermos and Kmart lunch pail?
'No,' I said.
Harding nodded. 'And Bellevue P.D.'s got witnesses who say they saw you prowling around the house yesterday afternoon. Would you care to tell me where you were at midnight last night, Detective Beaumont? And you'd better make sure it's something that will hold up in a court of law, because you're going to need it.'
Suddenly the snippet of news I had heard on the car radio, the one about the fatal eastside fire, resurfaced in my brain. Leona and Jimmy Rising. A cold chill passed over me. It had nothing whatever to do with the weather or my lack of clothes.
Somewhere outside myself I heard the words to the Miranda warning. Reed Harding was reading me my rights, as if I didn't know them already.
'So?' he asked when he finished. 'Where were you?'
And that's when I remembered Marilyn Sykes. At midnight the night before, she and I had been getting it on in her Mercer Island bedroom. Dragging her into this for the sake of an alibi was out of the question.
'I want to talk to my attorney,' I said. 'His name's Ralph Ames. He lives in Phoenix.'
Reed Harding looked at me gravely and shook his head. He seemed disappointed. 'So that's the way you're going to play it?'
'Believe me,' I answered, 'I don't have any other choice.'
CHAPTER 14
That gossipy store clerk in Doty had been right. Linda Decker's house with its barred windows and doors looked a whole lot more like a jail than the new one did in Chehalis. Except for the discreet lockup and secured- entry system at one corner, the building we entered didn't remotely resemble a county courthouse.
Before they stuffed me in a patrol car somebody other than Jamie had finally helped me into my pants and put my shirt over my shoulders. Once inside the courthouse, Sheriff Harding told a deputy to take me into an unoccupied office to make my one phone call. That and removing my handcuffs were his only grudging concessions to professional courtesy. If I hadn't been a cop, I'd have been stuck out in the lobby using a pay phone along with all the rest of the scum. My escort removed the handcuffs but made sure I understood that an armed guard would be posted outside the door.
The advantage of having a high-priced attorney like Ralph Ames on retainer is that he cuts through both bullshit and red tape with equal dispatch. As soon as I got him on the phone and told him what was going on, he let me have it with both barrels.
'Wake up, Beau. Get out from under your rock. That kind of chivalry went out with the Middle Ages. You tell that sheriff, Harwin…'
'Harding,' I corrected.
'Whatever his name is, you tell him to get on the horn to Marilyn Sykes and straighten this mess out before it goes any further. Is there anyone else besides her who can say for certain you were there all night?'
Sheepishly I remembered the security guard and his all-knowing clipboard. 'There was somebody else,' I admitted reluctantly.
'Who for Chrissakes?' Ames demanded. He wanted this fixed, and he wanted it fixed now. He wasn't about to let me hide out under a blanket of genteel niceties.
'A security guard at her condominium complex. They keep track of all cars coming and going.'
'Great. Have the sheriff talk to the guard as well. In the meantime, I'll catch the next plane out of Sky Harbor and be in Seattle sometime tonight. You take the cake, Beau. If it isn't one thing, it's three others. Try to get word to Peters if you still need me to come down to Chehalis. Otherwise, I'll meet you at your apartment.'
'Do you think you need to come up?'
'Of course I'm coming up. If I leave right now I can catch the six-fifty. It's a direct flight.'
There may be take-two-aspirin-get-plenty-of-rest type attorneys in this world, but Ralph Ames isn't one of them.
'How come they picked you up, anyway?' he asked. 'Didn't you tell them you're a cop?'
'I told them,' I said, 'but this woman was so totally convinced I was there to kill her, that she made the Lewis County Sheriff's Department believe it too.'
'If she could convince them of that, she ought to be in sales,' Ames suggested dryly. 'Timeshare rowboats maybe, right here in Phoenix.' With that, he hung up.
For several minutes, I sat alone in the office thinking about Linda Decker. I had been thinking about her all the while I was locked in the back of Reed Harding's patrol car with my hands cuffed firmly behind me. There hadn't been anything else to do but think.
I was sure now that I wasn't alone in thinking Logan Tyree's death was no accident. Linda Decker thought so too. Not only that, she was so sure she was the next target that she had barricaded her home and gone to some fairly dangerous lengths to entrap whoever might come looking for her.
Linda Decker was gutsy, I had to give her that, but she was also stupid. Her plan had worked, but only because I had come alone. If there had been anyone with me…
My old pal Jamie peered through the glass in the door and saw that I was off the phone. He entered without knocking. 'Get going,' he ordered curtly.
'I want to talk to Harding,' I said.
'You already had your chance with Harding. You blew it.'
'Look, you little jerk, my lawyer told me to confess, and I'm ready. Go get Harding and let's get this over with.'
As soon as I saw the look on his face, I knew I had him by the short hairs. Jamie wanted to be a hero every bit as much as I had wanted my pants on earlier. He swallowed the bait whole. 'I'll be right back,' he said.
He took off at a dead run and was back in three minutes with Sheriff W. Reed Harding rumbling along behind him.
'Jamie here tells me you're ready to confess,' Harding said to me. 'Is that true?'
I grinned at Jamie. 'I told him I wanted to talk to you, but he's blowing smoke about the rest of it. I don't know where he got the idea that I wanted to confess.' My mother taught me not to lie. It's taken me a lifetime to
