J. Jance - Lying in vait

So we turned off Emerson onto Twenty-third, parked in a triangular chuck-holed mire that passed for a parking lot and did an impromptu but thorough shoe-leather tour of the neighborhood. The strip of land on the far side of the railroad tracks contained a collection of small, one- and two-man businesses. We must have dropped in on ten or twelve offices and shops in the area bordered by Emerson and West Elmore. Most of them faced southwest and overlooked the railroad cut that sliced across the northeastern slope of Magnolia Bluff.

Looking out each succeeding window, I was surprised to learn that the blue tarp that seemed so exposed from directly above it was really well concealed from observers on the other side of the cut. The sheltering berry bramble that served as a tent pole not only provided support, it also offered camouflage. Only twice did we catch glimpses of the bright blue plastic. Both of those flashes were seen from businesses due east of both the tent and the crosswalk on Gilman.

Most of the people we spoke to were startled to learn that the makeshift shelter existed at all, that it lay-just out of sight-in what was, to all appearances, a permanent no-man's-land along the Burlington Northern's railroad right-of-way. I had hoped to find some observant witness able to tell us something about the tent's occupant and where we might find him. No deal.

The people we spoke to either feigned astonishment or else seemed downright uncomfortable to learn someone actually lived in a cut where hobos have traditionally hung out since the bad old days of the thirties. The issue of homelessness tends to disappear if you don't see actual living evidence of it up close and personal each and every day. The last person I talked to was a young woman who, despite the chill weather, was bundled up and sitting next to a concrete picnic table on the very edge of the bank. She clutched an oversized plastic traveling mug from the Chevron Beverage Club in one hand and a smoldering cigarette in the other.

In Seattle in the nineties, smokers are generally considered personae non gratae. People who smoke are required to slink outside with their cigarettes so they don't pollute the breathing mechanisms of their nonsmoking colleagues with their pall of secondhand smoke.

From the rim of cigarette butts that surrounded the table, this woman wasn't the only tobacco addict in the neighborhood who'd recently come here to smoke. Even in this alternating cold, wet weather, she was still sitting outside. I wondered how many of those outdoor smokers were courting the same kind of exotic pneumonia that had killed my grandfather.

When the woman saw me approaching, she pulled her coffee mug closer into her down jacket and guiltily moved the cigarette so it was below the level of the tabletop as though I were one of Seattle's smoke police. When I showed her my Seattle Police Department I.D., she seemed relieved to see I was only a homicide detective rather than some radical secondhand-smoke prohibitionist. The cigarette reappeared from under the table.

"Whaddya want?" she asked vaguely.

"Did you happen to see anyone unusual around here this morning, someone who didn't seem to fit in the neighborhood?"

She shook her head, tossing her mall-bang hair. "It was real foggy," she answered.

"Have you noticed a derelict-a tramp or street person-any time recently? Or have you seen anyone down near that blue tent on the other side of the cut?"

"What blue tent?" she asked, blowing a white plume of smoke into the air.

I pointed. "See that patch of blue over there on the face of the cliff?"

"Where?"

"Just above the timbers of the retaining wall. The blue you see is actually a tarp. It looks as though someone may be living there. I was hoping someone from here in the neighborhood might know who that person is or where I might find him."

The woman frowned. She gave me a doubtful look-as though she thought I was some kind of nut-and then looked in the direction I was pointing. "You mean somebody actually lives over there?" she asked finally. "No kidding?"

"No kidding."

"Well," she said. "I wouldn't know anything about that. Besides, why would somebody want to live down there in that hole with all those trains going past? They'd have to be crazy. What a stupid idea!"

She was young and more than slightly arrogant. She had a warm coat, wore a small diamond engagement ring on her left hand, and had enough extra money to squander two bucks per pack on her daily ration of cigarettes. Her whole attitude irked me. I suspected that she believed the reality of homelessness would never touch her personally. For her sake, I hoped she was right.

"What do you want him for?"

"There was a fire this morning over at Fishermen's Terminal, and…"

"I heard about that. Somebody died in it, didn't they?"

"Yes…"

She stood up, ground out her cigarette in the hard-packed earth beneath her feet, then pulled her coat more tightly around her. "My boyfriend will have a fit when he hears about the fire," she said. "He's from Bellevue. He keeps telling me I should find another job, someplace over on the East Side. He thinks my working in the city is too dangerous and stuff, know what I mean?"

I could have explained to her that every neighborhood has its own peculiar dangers, even ones on the East Side of Lake Washington, but her cigarette/coffee break must have been over. She headed across the street toward a tiny insurance office without giving me so much as a backward glance. No doubt there was a desk inside where she toiled away feeding letters and numbers into the keyboard and memory of some computer.

I found Sue already in the car when I showed up back at the Mustang, shaking my head in frustration. "Nothing?" she asked.

"Less than."

"Are you ready to give up and call it quits?"

"I guess," I admitted. "For the time being. We sure as hell aren't getting anywhere doing this."

By the time we got back to the Isolde, the crime-scene perimeter had been narrowed. The official off-limits area was now small enough to allow people access to other boats along the dock. While crime-scene investigation is important, it wasn't the only business that needed to be conducted on Dock 3 of Fishermen's Terminal that cold November morning.

We returned to the scene of the crime and learned that Audrey Cummings had already loaded Gunter Gebhardt's body into her gray van and had taken him back to the Medical Examiner's Office up at Harborview Hospital to await an autopsy. Janice Morraine was busy lifting prints from the guardrail of the boat. With her glasses pushed up into her hair and with her brows furrowed in concentration, Janice was making her way along the rail of the boat, examining what she saw there under a beam of light from the wand of an Alternative Light Source box.

An ALS, as it's called in the trade, is an expensive but handy crime-fighting tool that allows crime-scene technicians to locate and lift prints from places and materials-tire irons, for example-where previously they would have been impossible to detect. Everything Janice did was under the watchful eye of the arson investigator, Lieutenant Marian Rockwell.

Janice didn't seem at all happy with that arrangement. I guess it goes with the territory. I suspect she's like a lot of people I know who spend their lives peeling back progressively worse layers of humanity's dark side. Most of us are loners who don't do well when it comes to working under the scrutiny of a closely observing audience, not even an admiring one. And I knew from personal experience that Janice loses all patience with anyone or anything that gets in the way of crime-scene progress.

When Janice glanced up and caught sight of Sue and me standing together on the dock next to the Isolde, she scowled. "Now what do you two want?" she demanded irritably.