J. Jance - Name Witheld

I'm not used to joking around with reporters, but I laughed in spite of myself. "I feel the same way about outsiders who call detectives dicks," I told her.

"See there?" she said.

Phil Grimes disappeared into the building. We could both see that the group that had surrounded him was starting to break up. "Hey, Maribeth," the cameraman called. "Where'd you run off to?"

"Gotta go," she said to me. "See you around."

She trotted off to rejoin her cameraman, and I climbed into my car. Glancing at my watch, I was surprised to see that the afternoon was half shot. It was already after three. Other than finding a second body, I had accomplished very little. I still had done nothing at all about contacting Don Wolf's next of kin or about finding some kind of foolproof verification for Lizbeth Wolf's I.D. Bearing all that in mind, I headed straight for the office.

On my way to my cubicle in the Public Safety Building, I had to walk directly past Sergeant Watkins' desk.

"Wait a minute," Watty said. "Don't go down there without taking this with you."

He handed me a large white envelope with D.G.I.'s return address printed in the upper right-hand corner. The words HANDLE WITH CARE-CONTAINS VIDEOTAPES had been handwritten in huge block letters across the top of the envelope. No doubt these were the tapes Deanna Compton was going to copy and send me.

Watty looked up at me and grinned. "What is it?" he asked. "One of those Blockbuster evenings?"

"Not exactly," I told him. "I don't think any of these will be quite that good."

As I continued down the hallway I ripped open the envelope and shook out the contents. A typed memo fell into my hand along with the three tapes.

To: Detective J. P. Beaumont

From: Deanna Compton

Enclosed please find copies of the tapes you requested. I have cued them all to what I believe are the pertinent spots so you won't have to go scrolling through the whole thing.

If I can be of any further assistance, please be sure to let me know.

Deanna Compton, for Bill Whitten

For a moment, I considered calling Designer Genes International and letting Bill Whitten know what was going on, that Don Wolf's wife was most likely dead right along with her husband. But I decided against it. Just because Audrey Cummings didn't think Bill Whitten was capable of shooting someone didn't mean I had to agree. As far as I was concerned, Whitten was still a suspect.

With the tapes and note still in hand, I bypassed my own office in favor of one of the small conference rooms at the end of the hall. There, I plugged the first tape into the slot of the VCR. I had a one-in-three chance of picking the right tape first time up to bat, and I won big.

True to her word, Deanna Compton had cued the tape to the right place. When the tape came on the screen, Latty and Don Wolf were standing in the elevator. Wolf was standing next to the controls, and Latty was pressed into the far corner, with as much distance between the two of them as was humanly possible in that confined space.

I watched the whole sequence. The whole time they were in the elevator they maintained an absolute silence. "One down, two to go," I said, pulling the useless tape out of the VCR and inserting another.

The second tape was the one with the rape on it. There was no need to watch that one again. I ejected it, and inserted the third. This time, the screen held two separate, side-by-side images. Both cameras were mounted from much the same position over the front entryway door of D.G.I., but they were aimed in opposite directions. One looked out on the driveway and the busy street beyond. The other focused on the front door of the building. The readout in the corner of the screen said: DECEMBER 28, 12:06:32 A.M. That meant this was from Thursday morning, less than ten minutes after Don Wolf's assault on the girl named Latty.

Seconds later, the elevator door opened. Latty and Don Wolf came across the lighted lobby toward the door. Wolf was still dressed in his shirt sleeves; Latty still clutched his oversized jacket around her ruined clothing.

As they came toward the lobby door, a sudden movement from the other part of the screen caught my eye. Glancing there, I expected to see the arrival of a cab. Instead, the driveway area where the cab would naturally have stopped was empty. Puzzled about the unidentified movement, I flipped the remote control to rewind.

Because I don't watch television all that much, I'm not nearly as handy with what Heather calls clickers as Ron's two girls are. Naturally, I overshot the mark and came to a stop with the readout showing DECEMBER 27, 11:45:50 P.M. I had rewound beyond the place where I wanted to stop by almost twenty-five minutes.

"Damn!" I muttered aloud. "Too far."

I was about to fast-forward the tape when a car slid into the camera's viewfinder and stopped in front of the building. The headlights went off, but no one got out. From everything Bill Whitten had said, I had assumed Don Wolf and Latty had been alone in the building, but here, only a few minutes before the two of them had appeared on the screen in Don Wolf's office, someone else had made a midnight call on the headquarters of Designer Genes International.

Because the screen was separated into two simultaneous images, the picture on the department's twenty-one-inch viewing screen was very small. I leaned closer, trying to ascertain what I was seeing. And when I did, I could barely believe my eyes.

The car was an older-model Crown Victoria, vintage 1988 or so. In the distorted mercury vapor lighting, the vehicle appeared to be lavender. A car that old-what used-car salesmen always call "reliable transportation"-is the kind of vehicle that blends. It's old enough not to be out of place in some neighborhoods and new enough to fit into others. What set this one apart, however, was the distinctive, clam-shaped attachment that had been fitted to the vehicle's roof. I recognized it at once, because, except for the color, it was almost a carbon copy of the one on Ron Peters' Buick.

If it weren't for Ron, I wouldn't have known anything at all about Braun Chair Toppers. These units, resembling old-fashioned, top-of-car luggage carriers, are specially designed for carrying wheelchairs. They come complete with motorized lifts that raise or lower chairs as needed.

I know for a fact there aren't all that many Brauns around Seattle these days, because people who need wheelchair capability tend to go after one of those newer-model minivans-ones that come with either lifts or ramps. Ron Peters had bought the Braun after a single look at prices on the vans had thrown him into an almost terminal case of sticker shock. The Chair Topper had provided him with a relatively inexpensive way of converting his old sedan into a wheelchair-carrying mode of transportation. It had worked so well, in fact, that when his Reliant died an awful death as a result of a car chase through the Sea-Tac Airport parking garage, he was able to move the Chair Topper from the dead Reliant to its secondhand Buick replacement within a matter of days.

Seconds and minutes ticked away in real time while I continued to watch the video of the Crown Victoria parked in front of D.G.I. I desperately wanted to catch a glimpse of the person driving the wheelchair-equipped car. After all, Maribeth George had just told me that a woman in a wheelchair seemed to know a good deal about this case.

Get out, I found myself silently urging the unseen driver. Get out of the car and let me take a look at you.

But no such luck. Nobody moved. Occasionally, cars and headlights slid past on Western, but the parked car didn't move, the doors didn't open. Then, at exactly 12:07:00, and with no discernible warning, the headlights flashed on. The Crown Victoria pulled away from the curb, paused for several seconds, and disappeared onto Western. On the other half of the screen, Don Wolf and Latty were just emerging from the elevator. So the movement that had caught my eye had been the Crown Victoria leaving, not a cab arriving.