J. Jance - Fire and Ice

“What about him?” I asked. “Do you think he might have had something to do with it?”

“I came to Homicide from Sexual Assault,” Lucy said. “I’ve interviewed a few scumbags in my time. Leggett is divorced. He drinks too much; he’s had several DUIs and several run-ins with the King County cops over in North Bend where he lives. He’s the guy who found the body, but in my estimation, he didn’t do this. When we interviewed him, he was beyond upset. He saw what he thought was a rock and took a leak on it. But being upset doesn’t make him a killer. I would have been upset, too.”

I read between the lines. “But somebody around here does think he’s the doer,” I ventured. “Who would that be?”

“Gary,” Lucy answered. “My partner.”

“Based on what evidence?” I asked.

“On what he likes to call gut instinct,” Lucy answered.

“His gut instinct but not yours, I take it?”

“Mine doesn’t count.”

Generally speaking, getting caught in the cross fire between feuding partners is a very bad idea. It’s true in domestic-violence situations, and it’s also true when the dueling partners happen to be cops. So I backed off. I made a mental note to stop off and visit with Mr. Leggett on my own. That way I’d be able to form my own opinions about his possible involvement and about his guilt or innocence.

While we talked, Lucy had removed the cardboard lid to the box. As soon as she did so, the room filled with the odor of dead smoke, and not just plain smoke, either. There was something else under the smoke, an ugly aftertaste that lingered on the back of my tongue. I recognized it but didn’t want to acknowledge what it was.

For a few minutes, Lucy busied herself with logging in the item we’d brought back from the M.E.’s office-the broken watch-into the evidence log. The shattered watch was a Timex-relatively cheap but reliable. It wasn’t still ticking as the ads say, but the fact that the date was still visible gave us an invaluable piece of information.

“What else do you have in there?” I asked.

“Exhibit number one,” she said, handing me a small glassine bag. Inside it was what looked like a misshapen hunk of gold with a small emerald-cut stone.

“An engagement ring?” I asked.

Lucy nodded.

“Including a real diamond?” I asked.

Lucy nodded again. “My guess is that the heat of the fire was enough to melt the gold. But the diamond is real enough-three quarters of a carat, and it looks like good quality to me.

“So robbery definitely wasn’t part of the motivation here.”

Nodding again, Lucy reached into the box and pulled out a large paper bag. “This is exhibit number two,” she said. “A buckskin jacket, complete with fringe.”

Instead of handing it to me, she set that one down and pulled out another bag. “Cowboy boot,” she said. “Tony Lama. Snakeskin. Size seven. This is a man’s size seven, by the way, so I’m guessing the victim probably wore a woman’s size eight. That’s what I wear. If news about the boot and the jacket ever gets out, I imagine they’ll stop calling our victim the Lake Kachess Jane Doe and start calling her the Annie Oakley Jane Doe.”

Once again, Lucy set down the bag without letting me touch it. Then she opened the third bag for me. Inside I saw what looked like the remains of a belt.

“Our CSI guy says that the burn patterns on the belt are consistent with its being used as a restraint.”

“In other words, it wasn’t around her waist at the time of the fire.”

Lucy nodded and produced yet another bag. That one contained a collection of charred remains that were evidently the remnants of the tarp, and some frayed pieces of rope.

“We went out to the crime scene on Saturday morning,” Lucy explained. “We took along a generator and a commercial carpet dryer so we could melt the snow. The M.E.’s assistant gathered up the bones. We took everything else. The problem is, what do we do with it now?”

“What’s all this doing here?” I asked. “ Why isn’t it at the crime lab?”

“What crime lab?” Lucy returned. “We don’t have a crime lab.”

“But you have a state-of-the-art M.E….” I began.

“That’s because someone gave us a grant,” Lucy said. “Paid for the physical plant on condition that we staff it with an M.E. and an assistant. So now there’s a big budget shortfall for everything else. I’ve been trying all week to get Gary off the dime, asking him to send this batch of evidence out to the state patrol crime lab for examination. He’s been dragging his feet, though. Doesn’t want to have his name on the request that will put our department that much more in the red.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “You’ve got to be kidding me. He’s stalling on examining the evidence in a homicide investigation because he doesn’t want to sign off on a crime lab invoice? That’s ridiculous. There could be important evidence here.”

Lucy Caldwell nodded. “Yes,” she agreed. “There could be.”

Which meant that the bottom line here was…well, the bottom line. I understood that what looked like general ineptitude and stupidity was really a symptom of something else-that old bugaboo, interdepartmental fiscal warfare. I would guess that almost every big-city cop has a hopeless daydream of someday ending up working in a sleepy little hamlet somewhere-a magical place where everything is all sweetness and light and where dirty interdepartmental infighting or personality-based political agendas would be forever banished. Right. Sure they will. That’ll happen about the time pigs fly.

“So what are you saying?” I asked.

Lucy Caldwell gave me a scathing look as if I just wasn’t getting it. “You work for the AG’s office, right?” she asked.

I nodded.

“Doesn’t that mean you could get this stuff into the Washington State Patrol crime lab for analysis?”

“I’m reasonably sure I could do just that.”

Just then Gary sauntered back into the room, bringing with him a cloud of leftover cigarette smoke. Lucy’s reaction to his return was not only immediate, it was downright riveting.

“You have a hell of a lot of nerve, Beaumont!” she barked at me, slamming the palm of her hand hard on the surface of the desk. “So does your boss. What makes him think he can send his lackey over here to demand we turn over our evidence to him? That sucks, and you can tell your boss I said so.”

Her performance amounted to a remarkable imitation of Dr. Jekyll turning into Mr. Hyde. And since I’d made no such demands regarding their evidence, I was pretty much left staring at her in openmouthed amazement. I wasn’t sure why Detective Caldwell had suddenly decided to make me the bad guy here. For the sake of argument, however, I decided to play along, dropping names as I went.

“As I told you earlier, Attorney General Ross Connors is very interested in your case and its possible connection to several other cases we’ve been investigating. And I have an idea, when it comes to storing, examining, and identifying trace evidence on this kind of material…” I waved vaguely at the collection of sacks. “In instances like this, we have far more assets at our disposal than you have here.”

This was pure BS, of course. Lucy had already told me that they had no assets-as in zero, but Gary was enjoying hell out of the performance. He looked from Lucy to me and then back to Lucy with a slow grin spreading across his face.

“What’s all this about?” he wanted to know. “And what’s all this about Ross Connors?”

“Mr. Beaumont here is a hotshot who works for the Attorney General’s Office,” Lucy said. She spoke calmly enough, but she looked like she was still ready to tear people apart. “He came here today expecting to lord it over us and make a grab for our Lake Kachess Jane Doe evidence. I told him no way. This is our case, Gary. We’re primary. They’ve got no right to interfere.”