'Too soon to tell. Larkin's notation said that you thought the women might be in some kind of danger. Do you think these two assaults are related to the murder in Seattle?
'Absolutely.
'We'd better put our heads together, then. Do you want to come over here or should I go there? Halvorsen asked.
'I'll come there, I said without hesitation. 'As soon as I check in with my office.
'All right. Horizon flies directly into the Pullman-Moscow Airport. If you can let me know what time you'll be in, I'll come pick you up.
'Meet the next flight that leaves from Sea-Tac, I said. 'If I can't make that one, I'll call and let you know.
I dropped off his call and immediately dialed Sergeant Watkins at home. Shaking his head, Ralph Ames listened as I explained the situation to Watty. As I expected, the sergeant told me to get my ass to the airport, that he'd handle whatever official paperwork had to be handled, including notifying airport security that I was on my way.
Ralph Ames handed me out the door and told me he'd get me a reservation on the next available flight while I made a dash for the airport.
It turned out that airport security wasn't that much of a problem since Horizon's gate is so small that they don't have a security check. I don't know what strings Ames pulled, but I'm sure he yanked at least one because the Pullman-bound Swearingen Metro-Liner was still waiting on the ground when I got there, even though it had been scheduled to leave some ten minutes earlier.
And that's how, thirty-five minutes after Andy Halvorsen's call, I was in the air on my way to Pullman, Washington, sitting scrunched into one of the midget-sized seats, with my neck bent to one side and my knees jammed into the backrest of the seat in front of me.
Six foot three is too damned tall for Metro-Liners.
CHAPTER 8
The Pullman-Moscow airport is set in a natural swale among rolling high hills. As the plane landed and the golden-grained landscape loomed up on either side of the runway, I gripped the handles of the seat and cursed myself for flying, although I suppose the safety statistics on red Porsches are a good deal worse than those for commuter airlines.
Not knowing how long I'd be away, I had stuck a briefcase with a change of underwear and a clean shirt in the nose of the plane, and since Metro-Liner passengers carry their own bags, I didn't have to wait for luggage to be delivered to a carousel inside the pint-sized lobby. There were no luggage carousels inside the lobby and not much of anything else, either. Two tiny but highly competitive branches of name-brand rent-a-car companies were busy. Both had lines-two customers at one and three at the other-which probably accounted for a major portion of that day's business.
Glancing around the lobby, I searched in vain for someone who might be the detective who was supposed to pick me up. Seeing no one, I walked over to the plate glass doors that opened on a gravel parking lot. That's where I found Detective Andrew Halvorsen.
There was a good reason for his not being inside the terminal to meet me. They wouldn't let him. He was smoking a cigar, a well-chewed Churchill-sized Royal Jamaican.
Aside from that, Halvorsen seemed like a regular enough kind of guy-tall, well built, about my size, late forties, square-jawed good looks, neatly trimmed brush mustache, curly dark brown hair showing just a sprinkling of gray.
'Detective Beaumont? he asked, catching sight of me.
I nodded.
'This way. The car's right here.
He led me to a white, four-door K-car. Lee Iacocca and his pals at Chrysler must have sold a handful of those hummers to every law enforcement jurisdiction in the country. Detective divisions always get stuck with them. Halvorsen popped open the trunk, and I tossed my gear inside.
'Any word? I asked.
'None so far. They've airlifted the daughter to Sacred Heart in Spokane. They've scheduled emergency surgery for as soon as she gets there. The mother is still in Colfax Community Hospital, but I thought we'd drive by their place on the way so you could take a look around.
'Good idea, I said.
If I had any hopes that Halvorsen's car would have a no-smoking section, I was out of luck. The car was clouded by a haze of dense smoke that fogged the windows and made my eyes water. I'll never get used to that foul smell.
He closed the door to the car and exhaled a billowing plume before he ever turned the key in the ignition. I stifled the urge to ask him to put out the cigar. After all, if I wanted my own vices to be off limits to criticism from casual friends and acquaintances, then I'd best keep my mouth shut about somebody else's. What goes around comes around.
Talking as we went, Halvorsen drove us into and then through the hilly, winding streets of Pullman, a sleepy Midwestern-looking farming community with a stable population of about 8,000. Washington State University has been grafted into the middle of town, bringing with it a transient population of 20,000 or so students. God save me from ever living anyplace where minors outnumber regular people by a margin of three to one!
Within minutes we were out in the open again, heading northwest on Highway 195 driving through miles of ripened corn and wheatfields beside an unending line of stocky telephone poles.
'What about the phones? I asked, eying the drooping lines. 'Were the wires deliberately cut?
It was the question that had been chewing on me all during the hour-long flight from Seattle. I had forgotten to ask Halvorsen about it earlier on the phone.
'You bet, Halvorsen replied.
'And related to this?
'No question. Whoever did it wanted to create as big a disruption in communications as possible. They knew that if the wires were cut in just one place, the phone company would probably have been able to reroute calls from the central office and restore service in minutes. Instead, they cut wires in several places. That way, until repair crews fixed one break, they couldn't pinpoint the next.
Halvorsen took a long pull on his cigar. 'It was deliberate all right. Deliberate, methodical, and smart, and it created enough of a smoke screen that we had no idea that the problem centered at Honeydale Farm.
'And what time did they start?
'The outages? Right around ten, as far as we can tell.
'Time enough, I said.
'Time enough for what?
'For whoever it was to follow Kimi here from Seattle, learn where she lived, and figure out how to cut off all lines of communication.
'Any ideas why someone would want to go to all that trouble? Halvorsen asked.
'That one has me stumped so far. Whoever killed her father tried to cover it up by making it look as though he had committed suicide with an extremely valuable samurai sword. The killer took off and left the sword on the floor beside the body.
'So we can be relatively sure they weren't after the sword.
'That's how it looks at the moment. Not only that, at approximately the same time, someone messed with Kurobashi's company computer system. They fed a virus into it, destroying all the records. Because of that, there's no way to tell what they were after.
'What did he do?
'Kurobashi? He was an engineer doing some kind of computer stuff. I'm still not sure exactly what.
'You think maybe they wanted to lay hands on some project he was doing?
I nodded. 'Either to steal it or wipe it out of existence.
