J. Jance - Without Due Process

I remembered what Junior Weston had told us about the bad man he had seen struggling with Bonnie, about his skin color being similar to mine. So the child had seen only one of his family’s attackers, not both of them. It was a chilling thought. What the hell had Ben Weston been up to that so many people wanted to see him dead?

For a moment or two, we were all three quiet. “So what do you think?” I asked at last. “Gang warfare of some kind?”

Considering Ben Weston’s position on the CCI unit, that was the most logical question, and one the whole city would be asking the moment the story hit the papers. Emma Jackson and Doc Baker both shook their heads in instant unison.

“No way,” Baker answered at once. “Not their style unless they went out and hired a pro to do the dirty work. Those kids are all playacting at being big-time gangsters. They all want to be Al Capone or some other mafioso hood. If gangs decide they’re going to kill somebody, they usually assign it to somebody as an initiation kind of thing, a rite of passage, or they want to do it in style and make like the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. This isn’t right.”

“What isn’t right?”

“You know yourself, Beau. Drive-by shootings or the guy who took a shot at you from outside on a porch. Those sound like gang activity. This is something else. Those kids may all have street names and guns, and they don’t think twice about blowing somebody off the face of the earth, but they aren’t trained killers. They don’t do silent kills. At least one of the perpetrators involved here is a highly trained professional killer.”

“What do you mean professional?” I asked.

“Military most likely. Marines maybe? Whatever, he’s dangerous as hell.”

“And I want him,” Emma Jackson added softly, almost under her breath. “Hanging’s too good for a monster like that.”

It was the only time in the whole process that Dr. Emma Jackson’s professional demeanor slipped, and it caught Doc Baker off guard. She may have been a colleague of his, a sometime insider of the M.E.“s office, but right that minute she was just another mother of a homicide victim, someone interested in vengeance, not justice.

If anyone was to be faulted in that situation, it was Doc Baker for forgetting that Emma Jackson was a mother first and a doctor second. Doc Baker’s rash disclosures in her presence had been indiscreet to say the least. In my opinion, she was a victim, and she, by God, should have been treated as such.

“You put that idea right out of your mind, Emma,” he ordered indignantly. “We’re talking about very dangerous men here. You stay out of it and let Detective Beaumont and the others handle it. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have discussed any of it in front of you.”

“Don’t worry about me, Howard,” she returned coldly. “I can take care of myself. Now, if you don’t mind, I think I want to go home.”

Dr. Emma Jackson walked out of the room and closed the door behind her, leaving Baker and me staring at each other across the stacks of papers on his messy desk.

“Thanks a whole hell of a lot,” I said. “When you screw up, you do it all the way. What in God’s name do you expect me to do with that woman now?”

In all the years I’d known him, I had never seen Dr. Howard Baker so chagrined. In a matter of minutes he seemed to have aged a good ten years. His ran his fingers through his hair, leaving his unruly white mane standing even more on end.

“Do what you can to keep her out of it,” he said.

“Right,” I said. “I’ll do my best, but thanks to you, right this minute she has more information than I do.”

Standing up abruptly, Doc Baker glowered down at me. “I already said I’m sorry, and I am, but I can’t take it back, now can I? So we’ll just have to make the best of it. You go do your job and I’ll do mine. One down and five to go.”

With that, he stalked out of his office, heading back for the lab. I followed Baker as far as the reception area, but Emma Jackson wasn’t there. I found her out in the parking lot, pacing back and forth beside the car. She was understandably agitated and upset, but I wondered if there was more to it than that.

“Look,” I said, once we were in the car, “I know how awful all this is for you, but I hope you’re not thinking about turning yourself into a one-woman posse. Forget it.”

“Why should I?”

“Why? Because it’s dangerous, just like Doc Baker said. If you tangle with these creeps, you could be killed too.”

“So?” she asked.

She didn’t say, “What’s the big deal?” but the thought was there, hanging heavily in the air between us. I glanced across the seat. Her slender jaw was set. A single tear glistened in the corner of her eye. The idea of being killed herself didn’t seem to offer much terror to Emma Jackson right about then. In fact, death may have seemed like a reasonable alternative to the ordeal she was facing.

“Things’ll get better,” I said, hoping to offer some comfort. “Don’t think you’ve got nothing left to live for.”

“That’s easy for you to say, Detective Beaumont,” she declared reproachfully. “Your son isn’t lying back there on a stainless steel slab. Mine is.”

There wasn’t a hell of a lot I could say to counter that remark. If Dr. Jackson made up her mind to become personally involved in solving the case, there wasn’t a whole lot I could do about that either. My best tactic was to try to derail her by embroiling her in some innocuous aspect of the case. I needed to give her a task assignment so she’d feel as though she was accomplishing something, making a contribution.

“You have connections with all the hospitals around town, haven’t you?”

She shrugged. “I suppose. Why?”

“The first thing you need to do is to get some rest and then you’ll probably need to work on funeral arrangements. But after that, I’d like to ask you to help me.”

“Doing what?”

“By calling each of the hospitals and checking with the various E.R. s to see if any dog-bite victims came through last night.”

“If I find anything out, what makes you think I’ll tell you?”

“You’re not stupid, Dr. Jackson,” I told her bluntly. “If the killers were tough enough to handle Ben Weston, they’d certainly be more than a match for you.”

She seemed to think about it for a moment or two. “I suppose I could do that,” she said eventually. “Check for you, I mean.”

“Good.”

We came to a stoplight. I dug out one of my cards and scribbled my home number on the back of it. “Call me any time of the day or night and let me know whatever you find out.”

“All right.”

“The department has created a task force to handle this,” I continued. “I’m only assigned to Adam’s part of the case. Later on, I’ll need to interview you in detail and, most likely, so will other members of the team.”

She nodded. “Right,” she said. “I understand.”

“But do me a favor, would you?”

“What’s that?”

“If you talk to someone named Detective Kramer, don’t mention to him that I have you checking with the hospitals for me, would you? He’s a lot more territorial about that kind of thing than I am.”

“I won’t mention it,” she said.

We headed straight back toward her house on Queen Anne Hill. We were turning off Denny Way onto Fifth North when Emma Jackson jumped as though she’d forgotten something important.

“What is it?”

“You said Junior’s all right, but you never told me where he is.”

“With his grandfather,” I told her, “Ben Weston’s father. We turned Junior over to old Mr. Weston early this morning. He came down to the Public Safety Building and picked him up.”