to the Wheat amp; Barley, a reasonably upscale eatery, where the two of us dined finger-food fashion, with thick hamburgers and mountains of french fries, on the largess of the City of Seattle. After lunch, we holed up in Detective Halvorsen's Spartan shared office.
When the spoils of statehood were being parceled out here in Washington, Pullman got what was then called the Normal School, and Colfax got the Whitman County Seat. I'm sure it looked like a good deal at the time. For my money, it still is. I would choose Colfax and county government over living with a town full of kids any day of the week.
Rather than an aging relic, the Whitman County Courthouse was a modern stucco building crowned with a rampart of high-tech antennas. Crammed into a tiny office, we grabbed phones and let our fingers do the walking as we tried to learn where the wire-snipping helicopter had come from and gone to.
Using a series of information operators, we worked our way through major and minor flying services all over the state, everything from slick yuppie charters to down-at-the-heels crop-dusting outfits. To no avail.
Well into the afternoon, Andy received a call from Rita Brice, who phoned from a waiting room in Sacred Heart Medical Center to say that Kimiko had survived the surgery but was not yet out of the woods. She was still in the Intensive Care Unit and still listed in critical condition.
I know all about hospital euphemisms. Critical is one degree worse than guarded. Critical still has the potential to go either way. Both terms are a hell of a long way from satisfactory.
When Halvorsen passed the news along to me, I didn't allow myself the luxury of a spoken reply. Instead, I picked up the phone and dialed another flying service. By that time we were down to calling seat-of-the-pants outfits in podunk, off-the-wall towns. It was after five and I was almost ready to give up, but that one last call yielded a slender lead.
The number I had dialed belonged to the St. Helens Flying Service in Woodland, Washington. The woman who answered the phone did so with the frantic hello of someone who has spent hours waiting for a call that doesn't come. I heard her sigh of disappointment when she realized mine still wasn't the voice she wanted to hear, that the call she was expecting still hadn't come.
'My name is Detective Beaumont, I began.
'A detective! Oh, my God! What's happened? Where is he? Is he all right?
I hate conversations where I feel as though I'm not playing with a full deck, particularly when I'm the one initiating the call. 'Is who all right?
'My dad, David Lions, who else?
Who else indeed! I didn't know David Lions from a hole in the ground.
'Excuse me, but I'm afraid I don't know what you're talking about. I don't know anyone named David Lions, and I certainly don't know where he is.
'Didn't you say you're detective? Aren't you with the Spokane police.
'No, I'm with the Seattle police, not Spokane's.
'But the helicopter's in Spokane. They called and told me it was there. How'd he get to Seattle?
It was getting worse, not better. 'Hold on a minute, I said. 'I'm not at all sure what's going on here. I'm a Seattle police officer investigating a case, and I've been contacting charter services to see if anyone can provide information that would help us.
The woman was instantly contrite. 'I'm sorry. It's just that I'm so worried. He's been missing since this morning, you know.
I felt a quick catch of excitement in my throat. 'Miss…
'Lions, she supplied. 'Dana Lions. My father and I own the flying service together. He flies the planes. I do the books and handle the reservations.
'Miss Lions, I said calmly. 'You say your father is missing?
Across the room, Andy Halvorsen put down his phone and listened intently. Dana Lions hesitated. 'Not really. It's just that now nobody can find him.
'Tell me exactly what happened.
'He left late yesterday afternoon to pick up a charter in Seattle and ferry him to Spokane. He had flown another trip earlier in the day, so he planned to stay overnight and come back this morning. We haven't heard from him since.
'Maybe he rented a room somewhere, and he's still asleep.
Dana Lions took a deep breath. 'I already checked the Ridpath. That's where he usually stays, but he's not there. Besides, he wouldn't still be asleep at this hour. She paused. 'Dad doesn't need much sleep.
She stopped. I had a feeling there was something else, something she wasn't saying, but I had no idea what it was. I waited for her to continue.
'He came back from Vietnam in '71 and started the business in '75. After St. Helens blew up in 1980, he got the idea of doing scenic flyovers so tourists could take pictures. We did fine for a while, but in the last few years he's had some problems.
'Problems? I asked. 'What kind of problems?
'Post-traumatic-stress syndrome.
Those few words gave me a hint of what she hadn't been saying earlier.
'Periodically, if he gets a pocketful of money, he goes a little haywire.
'And you think that's what's going on here?
'When the guy called in yesterday to make the reservation, I asked him for a credit card number. We always do that in case of cancellations and no-shows, but he said he'd be paying cash and that he'd throw in a little extra. We need the money real bad right now, so I took it. I hope to God it wasn't anything illegal, was it?
I sidestepped her question by asking one of my own. 'Didn't you say you knew your father had landed in Spokane?
'We talked to them about noon when we still hadn't heard from him. Dana Lions gave me the name and number of an official at Spokane International Airport. 'Will you let me know what you find out? she asked.
'Certainly, I said, allowing my voice to sound far more convincing than I should have. If David Lions was somehow tied in with the severed telephone lines, he and his little company and his worried daughter were in big trouble, far worse than that caused by a few unpaid bills.
'Just a few more questions, I said. 'Did the man making the reservation leave a name?
'Smith. Charles Smith. I have it written down right here. Dad was supposed to meet him at the Renton Airport.
'Did he?
'As far as I know.
'Did your father file a flight plan?
'Always. You can get a copy of it from the FAA. But why do you want it? I told you, the helicopter's already safely on the ground in Spokane.
'Right, I said. As we finished talking, she gave me her home number in Kalama, and I told her how to locate both Andy Halvorsen and me if she needed to, reassuring her one more time that we'd notify her instantly if we learned anything more about her missing father.
'Looks like you hit the jackpot, Halvorsen said as I held down the switch hook long enough to get a dial tone. Reading from my notes, I dialed the number at Spokane International and talked to a man named Kyle Preston.
'Do you have a helicopter there that belongs to an outfit named St. Helens Flying Service?
'Sure do.
'I want you to post a security guard out by that helicopter, I said. 'No one is to go near it or touch it, is that clear? And if anyone tries to take off in it, detain them until we can get there.
'Wait just a damned minute! Who the hell do you think you are, ordering me around like this?
'My name's Detective J.P. Beaumont with the Seattle Police Department, and I've got a Whitman County sheriff's department detective named Andrew Halvorsen with me. We're on our way.
'What's going on here? This Lions character has been doing nothing but causing trouble all day long. First thing this morning that SOB puts down here and walks off without paying his landing fee, without saying how long he'll be here or kiss my ass. Nothing. It's like the world owes him a goddamned living. We're not running this place just for the hell of it, you know.
