“Right,” I said briskly, leaving intact his erroneous conclusion that I was some kind of school district bureaucrat. The driver, in his late thirties, was prematurely potbellied and friendly. He negotiated the steep, icy streets with the kind of casual aplomb born only of years of experience.
“What the hell’s going on?” he asked when we were stopped cold on Mercer by a scatter of emergency vehicles parked helter-skelter on the icy street. A parking enforcement officer, huddled in her curtained cart, motioned firmly for him to move on.
“Just let me out,” I told him, passing my fare across the seat. “I can make it from here on foot.”
Before the cabbie could give me my change, an impatient horn blared loudly behind us. “Hold your horses, fella,” the driver muttered under his breath while he deliberately counted out my change.
When the horn sounded again, I looked around. The driver of a medical examiner’s van was waving for us to move aside. Shaking her head with annoyance, the parking enforcement officer stepped out of her cart and was headed in my direction by the time I climbed out of the cab. Once on the slick pavement, I lost my footing and almost slid under the cab before catching myself on the door handle.
The driver of the van honked furiously a third time, but the cabbie studiously ignored him. It was a practiced pretense.
“Take care, fella,” he said to me, acknowledging my generous tip with a partial salute. “And if you need a ride home after work, be sure to give a call. I’m pulling a double shift today.”
He paused long enough to carefully place the money in his wallet before finally, deliberately, moving out of the van’s way. He slid away from the curb just as the parking enforcement officer pounced on me.
“I’m sorry, sir, but this is a crime scene. You’ll have to move along. We’re not allowing anyone beyond this point.”
I flashed my badge in her direction. She mumbled something and retreated, scuttling hurriedly back toward the welcome warmth of her plastic-enclosed cart. My slick-soled leather dress shoes filled with snow as I slipped and slid over to the sidewalk and up the hill, where, despite the steep grade, ice-crusted snow made for somewhat less hazardous footing.
Out in the street, I could see the tracks where some crazy urban winter athlete had taken advantage of the incline for a little early morning skiing. Shaking my head in wonder, I kept on walking.
The unimposing two-story building that houses the administrative offices of the Seattle Public School District on Fourth Avenue North sits on the flank of Lower Queen Anne Hill, near an invisible boundary where the city’s commercial zoning gives way to residential. Its construction of Roman brick and great expanses of glass may have been wonderfully modern years ago when the complex was built, but now, with a skeleton of dead pyracantha clinging stubbornly to its walls, it looked like a frumpy, aging dowager.
I had reached the front door and was in the process of shoving it open when Dr. Howard Baker strode past me. The white-haired head of King County’s medical examiner’s office shouldered me out of the way and lumbered into the building without any kind of acknowledgment. Doc Baker’s personal presence at the crime scene suggested that whatever had happened was probably something out of the ordinary.
Inside, although a number of uniformed police officers were scattered throughout the granite-floored reception area, the room was deathly quiet except for the occasional uncontrolled sobbing of a young woman who huddled in the far corner of the room with a Medic One attendant kneeling solicitously beside her. Doc Baker’s wide-backed frame filled the doorway of what appeared to be a janitorial closet just to the left of the front door.
As I stepped closer, I could smell the unmistakable odors of industrial-strength cleaners, polishes, and disinfectants. But underneath those innocuous smells was a hint of something else-the sharply acrid aroma of burnt gunpowder and the far uglier coppery stench of blood. Death was present in that closet as surely as mops and brooms.
I moved close enough to Baker’s broad backside so I could peer over his shoulder. At first all I could see was a woman’s bare leg extending into the room from the closet. From the position, it looked as though the closet door had been closed with her leg pressing against it. When the door had been opened by some unsuspecting person, the leg had sprung out into the room and slammed down to the floor like a grisly horror-movie jack-in-the-box.
She wore a maroon full skirt of some heavy, wool-like material and a matching long-sleeved turtleneck. The skirt was hiked up around her waist. She wasn’t wearing any panties. Graceful but lifeless fingers almost touched a. 38 Special that lay on the white tiled floor a few inches inside the doorway.
Baker knelt down to examine the gun. That’s when I saw the other leg, a man’s leg, underneath the woman’s. I moved to a slightly different angle to get a better look. Other than a pair of socks whose elastic had gone to seed, the man too was naked from the waist down. He was wearing a shirt, however, one that made me think of our own at S.P.D. Then I saw the blue striping and breathed a sigh of relief. A blue shoulder patch identified it as belonging to Seattle Security Service, one of the largest security guard companies in the city.
Baker got up quickly, nearly knocking me over in the process, and glared around the room, searching for someone. He seemed surprised to find me standing directly behind him.
“Hello there, Detective Beaumont. Have you seen that damn photographer? She was supposed to be here a long time ago.”
“Haven’t seen her,” I answered. “I’ve only been here a few minutes myself.”
Shaking his head, Baker headed for the outside door, while I took his place in the doorway of the murky, dimly lighted closet.
I stepped closer and warily examined the dead man’s face. Years before, I too had spent some time working for Seattle Security, moonlighting to earn a little extra money when the kids were young and my meager paycheck never stretched quite far enough. Further investigation might still identify the dead man as another financially strapped police officer, but for now I was relieved that his face wasn’t one I immediately recognized. The name tag pinned to his breast pocket said, “A. Chambers.” That didn’t ring any bells either.
In death, A. Chambers sat with his back propped against a deep janitor’s sink. His slack-jawed chin hung down, resting on an ample chest. A huge brown stain had spread across his lower chest and belly. Blood had pooled on the floor around and beneath him. I’ve seen enough murder scenes to know that A. Chambers had bled to death.
I turned my attention back to the woman who lay in a tangle of fallen brooms and mops, staring sightlessly at Chambers from across the small, evil-smelling closet. The almost delicate hole in her chin was in direct contrast to the spattered gore on the wall and mop handles behind her. The condition of her body had all the earmarks of a self-inflicted wound.
If the woman was a suicide, she was one of the selfish kind-unhappy people who aren’t content to go out alone. They always insist on taking one or two others along with them, the more the merrier.
That being the case, she had taken far more care with the placement of her own bullet than she had with his. The woman had died quickly, probably painlessly, while A. Chambers’ lifeblood had slowly ebbed away.
Repulsed by the woman’s strikingly calm face, which belied the shattered mess behind it, I looked down at the floor where the two sets of naked legs, one wearing pitifully sagging socks, lay both open and entwined together like those of a pair of abandoned rag dolls left behind by some forgetful child.
Baker came hurrying back with the photographer firmly in tow. Unceremoniously he shoved me aside. I let him do it without protest. I went over to a window and stood looking out at the snow-shrouded city below me. It was a glistening, blinding white-beautiful, peaceful, and serene. That pristine beauty seemed totally at odds with the terrible darkness that had exploded during the night and left two people dead in that gory closet behind me.
Who is dead, and why, are the fundamental questions at the bottom of every homicide investigation. What terrible passions and connections drive human beings to kill others and then turn the murder weapons on themselves? I know from firsthand experience that the answers to those questions, once we unravel them, wreak havoc among the living long after the dead are buried and decaying in the ground.
For some unaccountable reason, as I stood looking out at the glistening city, the lyrics from that old Ethel Merman song came bubbling into my head. It’s from Annie Get Your Gun, I think, and the words say something to the effect that you can’t get a man with a gun.
You can, actually, but if you do it with a. 38 Special, what’s left over won’t be good for much of anything.
