J. Jance - Without Due Process

“Sounds almost as political as working in Media Relations,” Ron said with a halfhearted grin that wasn’t really funny.

Ron and I had been partners in Homicide before a permanent spinal injury put him in his chair. After long months of rehabilitation, he had come back to the department as a Media Relations officer, but I knew he longed to be back home with the detectives on the fifth floor, where the action is. I couldn’t blame him for that. For my money, working with murderers is often a whole lot less hazardous to your health than working with reporters.

“By the way,” Ron said, “that’s another reason I’m here. My job. It seems Maxwell Cole has turned over a new leaf. He says he understands the Weston Family Task Force guidelines. For a change, he’s not trying to go around them. He wants me to get a quote from you-a direct quote, if possible-about how it feels to have dodged out of the way of that stray bullet yesterday morning.”

Max is an old fraternity brother turned columnist and long-term media adversary. He went to work for the local morning rag, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, about the same time I hired on with the Seattle Police Department. We’ve been on each other’s backs and down each other’s throats ever since. He’s the least favorite practitioner of my least favorite profession.

“Max wants a direct quote?” I asked.

Ron nodded. “You know him. He wants something short and punchy, but fit for publication in a family newspaper.”

“Tell him ”good.“”

“Good?”

“That’s right. You asked me how it feels, and you can tell him my answer is ”good.“ Period. That should be short and punchy enough for Maxwell Cole.”

Ron Peters grinned, a real grin this time. The shadow of a smile even flickered across Big Al’s somber face.

“Somehow I don’t think it’s exactly what he had in mind,” Ron said, “but it’ll have to do.”

I figured that now that he had what he wanted, Ron would head straight back upstairs. Instead, he moved his chair closer to our desks. “Okay, you two,” he said. “All bullshit aside, I want you to tell me what’s really going on.”

“With what?”

“With the task force. Believe me, I know the party line. I’m in charge of disseminating the party line-that Ben Weston and his family died in an apparently gang-related multiple homicide. But scuttlebutt has it that Ben himself is being investigated for some allegedly illegal financial activities-conduct unbecoming an officer, they’re calling it. I want to know the straight scoop.”

Big Al Lindstrom cut loose with one of his half English-half Norwegian streams of profanity. Having grown up in the Ballard section of Seattle, I may not know enough adolescent Norwegian to be able to cuss fluently in a second language, but I understand it well enough.

“Hold it down, Al,” I cautioned. “You don’t want Kramer or Watty to hear you carrying on like this.”

“But isn’t it just what I told you? If this gets out, and it’s bound to, they’ll end up trying Ben in the press, even though he’s the one who’s dead, for Christ’s sakes! They’ll make out like it’s all his fault that somebody killed him.”

“Maybe gangs did do it,” I told Ron, “but, if so, it sure as hell wasn’t the usual gang-type hit.”

Ron Peters nodded. “That’s what I thought,” he said. “Unless the gangs have hired some retired Marine Corps drill instructor to do their dirty work.”

“You’ve seen Baker’s autopsies then?”

“I probably wasn’t supposed to, but, yes, I have. And I’ve seen some of Kramer’s stuff too, and that’s what’s got me so puzzled. Why’s he so hot and bothered about that bank loan stuff? I mean, if I were a police officer who was going to risk breaking the law, I’d sure as hell pick something more lucrative than student loans.”

“What are you saying?” I asked.

Ron Peters looked me right in the eye. “I’m convinced those loan applications are legitimate,” he answered. “They’re too damn corny not to be. Have any of those kids been found yet?”

“Not as far as I know.”

“But I thought Detective Danielson was working on that.”

“She was, but she struck out completely when she got as far as the various registrars’ offices. They stonewalled her. Now Kramer’s pulled her away from that to go talk to some stray paperboy, an alleged witness, down at Garfield.”

“And he didn’t assign anybody else in her place with the colleges?”

“I doubt it.”

“Why not?”

“Because it was my idea, for one thing,” I told them. “Like I said before, Kramer hates my guts.”

Big Al nodded. “There’s always that, Beau,” he agreed, “but that’s not all. Kramer doesn’t want to see his pet theory blown out of the water. Those loan applications are the only chinks he can find in Ben Western’s armor, and he doesn’t want to let loose of them.”

“Maybe,” Ron Peters asserted quietly, “someone will have to pry them out of his hands.”

Saying that, Ron reached behind his chair, opened the knapsack that hangs there for ease of carrying things, and pulled out a sheaf of paper-thirty pages or so of continuous-feed computer printout. He handed the papers over to me.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“Last summer, a reporter from the Los Angeles Times called and asked me about the gang-related data base he had somehow heard we were working on up here. Supposedly, it was a data base analysis of local and visiting gang members and their various arrests and activities. He wanted to know how much of Seattle’s gang problem had been imported from California and Chicago.

“I don’t know how a reporter from L.A. heard about it, because I had a hell of a time tracking it down. As far as I could discover, no one had been officially assigned to do that kind of study and Ben Weston wasn’t exactly going around bragging about it, but eventually the trail led me to him. It turned out he was working on the project at home, on his own computer, on his own time.”

“That was well before he transferred into CCI, wasn’t it?” Big Al asked.

Ron Peters nodded. “Right. One of those labors of love, I guess. When I asked him about it, he showed me this-a preliminary copy of what he had done so far-but he told me he wanted to keep a low profile, that he didn’t want a lot of publicity on the project. So I squelched the story with the reporter, and since he didn’t need it back, I ended up keeping this. I had forgotten all about it until this morning. When I remembered, I had to dig through months of accumulated paper to find it. I’ve spent the last hour and a half going over it with a fine-tooth comb.”

“And?”

“Remember, this go-down is nine or ten months old. Between then and now, Ben transferred into the gang unit and started working on a similar but officially sanctioned project on a full-time basis. I’m sure he must have used the information he had previously gathered as a starting point, but I’m sure he’s added a great deal.”

“Have you looked at what’s there now?”

“No. Just this, but even so, even from way last summer, two of the four names on the loan applications are already here.”

“No kidding. Which ones?”

“Dathan Collins and Leonard Washburn.”

I scanned through the list far enough to locate Dathan Collins’s name. The information on him gave his given name, his parents’ names and addresses, his street name, his gang affiliation, his schooling background, his girlfriend’s name and address as well as a brief synopsis of his rap sheet. The intelligence Ben Weston had collected was surprisingly thorough. I passed the papers on to Big Al, who studied them in turn before passing them back to Ron.