J. Jance - Without Due Process

She paused and studied me with a searching look. “Am I making sense?”

I bit back the temptation to tell her to hurry up and get to the point. “More or less,” I said.

“Anyway, this kid from Garfield-Bob Case is his name-has had the same Seattle Post-Intelligencer route for three years. He says he used to see Ben Weston out running every morning at the same time, rain or shine. He claims to know most of the cars and drivers that belong in the neighborhood and what times they come and go. He says that in the past few weeks there’s been a lot of extra traffic in the early-morning hours.”

“What kind of traffic?”

“He mentioned three in particular. One is a late-model Lexus with a cellular radio antenna.”

“That doesn’t help much. I don’t remember the last time I saw a Lexus without a cellular phone, do you? All the ones I’ve seen do.”

Sue glowered at me. “Let me finish. He says he got a real close look at it the morning after the murders. Too close, actually. It almost ran him down just half a minute or so after whoever it was took a potshot at you. He heard the noise and thought it was a backfire until the guy almost ran him and his bicycle off the street three blocks away from Ben Weston’s house.”

“How come it took him until now to come forward?” I asked.

“He’s scared, Beau. He’s out on that paper route by himself every single morning. He’s afraid if whoever it was hears he’s gone to the cops, they’ll come back looking for him next. He made the mistake of telling his mother about it, and she called us.”

From a strictly survival standpoint, I had to admit the kid had the right idea. Paperboys on bicycles are sitting ducks for drive-by shootings. I took out my notebook. “What’s his name again?”

“Bob. Robert actually. Robert Case.”

“Well, Bob Case is probably right to be scared. I don’t hold it against him. Did he get a look at the driver?”

“Not really. He said it was a young black man, but he claims he didn’t get a good enough look to give us a positive ID.”

“That figures. My guess is even if he did, he wouldn’t tell us. License number?”

“Negative on that too.”

“So we have what is commonly known as a semi-eyewitness. What about the rest of the unexplained traffic you were telling me about? The news about someone seeing that speeding Lexus moments after the shooting is great, but what did he say about other vehicles?”

“Three. One is a Honda CRX driven by a young black male. On several occasions, Case saw this one driving along beside Ben Weston. The driver and Ben seemed to be chatting while Ben jogged, but the last time he saw that one was maybe as long as a month or two ago. The second is a late-model white Toyota Tercel, driven by a Caucasian male.”

Sue Danielson stopped talking and made no indication that she was going to continue.

“You said three,” I prodded. “What about the last one?”

“A patrol car.” She said the words softly and then waited for my reaction. I didn’t disappoint.

“A patrol car!” I exploded. “You mean as in a Seattle PD blue-and-white?”

Sue Danielson nodded grimly. “That’s exactly what I mean. One of our own. With a uniformed driver.”

“Well,” I said, “what’s wrong with that? That’s not so unusual. There are cop cars in every neighborhood in the city at all hours of the day and night.”

I said the words, but even as I voiced my objection, I remembered what Janice Morraine had said about the Flex-cufs and the possibility of the killer being a cop. First the cuffs and now a patrol car. I let Sue Danielson continue on with her story, hoping my face didn’t betray everything that was going on in my head.

“According to Bob Case, it’s highly unusual in his neighborhood, especially at that hour of the morning. Except for Ben Weston, who happened to live there, other cops tend to show up only when somebody hollers ”cop.“ The rest of the time they pretty much leave well enough alone. In other words, there’s usually zero police presence.”

I didn’t like the troubled look in Sue Danielson’s eyes or the stubborn set to her chin, and I wanted there to be some reasonably innocent explanation for the appearance of that patrol car, just as there had been for the Flex-cufs.

“Maybe the officers in the car were friends of Ben’s from Patrol. Maybe they stopped off now and then to chew the fat for a while before their shifts ended.”

Sue Danielson was prepared for that one, and she lobbed it right back at me. “That’s what Bob Case thought too, until the morning he saw Ben headed down the street in one direction and the patrol car pulled into the alley and stopped behind Ben’s house. The car made zero effort to follow Ben, and the kid thought it was odd. So do I.”

“Surveillance maybe? Had Ben or anyone else reported any recent break-ins or car prowls?” I asked.

“No,” Sue Danielson responded. “I wondered that myself. I already checked.”

“So what do you think?”

“I’ve been wrestling with it ever since I found out. I figure it could go any number of ways.”

I could see several myself. “Maybe whoever was in the patrol car suspected Ben was up to something, and they wanted to catch him at it,” I suggested blandly, already knowing that even Patrol would be more subtle than that. “Or maybe they had a tip that something serious was about to go down, and they were trying to protect him.”

“You’re dead wrong about one thing,” Sue said, “and that’s the ”they‘ part of the equation. According to Bob Case, there was only one person in that car every single time he saw it-a male Caucasian.“

“But graveyard uniformed officers only operate in pairs,” I objected.

She nodded. “I know. I thought at first that maybe someone had called in Internal Investigations Squad, but they usually operate in plain clothes and in unmarked vehicles, don’t they?”

“Most of the time. Did you call up to Internal Investigations and ask?”

Sue Danielson shook her head. “I didn’t have enough nerve. I’ve never talked with anyone from IIS, and I’m still not sure if there’s anything here worth bothering them about.”

Considering the presence of both the Flex-cufs and the mysterious patrol car, I thought there was, but I wanted to play those cards fairly close to my chest.

“With what we’ve found out in the past twenty-four hours,” I said, “especially the bank loan thing, I’d be surprised if they weren’t interested. As a matter of fact, maybe they already were. That would take care of the patrol car problem in a minute.”

“Except for what you said before, that IIS wouldn’t send someone out in a blue-and-white.”

“So where does that leave us?”

Sue pushed her plate away, flattened her napkin, and pulled out a pen. She reminded me of my old-time Ballard High School football coaches, hanging around Zesto’s, drawing X ‘s and O ’s on innumerable paper napkins.

“We have at least two, maybe three players,” Sue said, explaining for her own benefit as well as for mine. “The black guy in the Lexus and the black guy in the CRX who may or may not be one and the same, ditto with the white guy from the patrol car and the one from the Tercel. Since he was fleeing the scene of a crime, it’s safe to assume the guy in the Lexus is also a bad guy. As far as the other two are concerned, it’s anybody’s guess.”

I felt obliged to add my two cents’ worth. “And is the guy in the patrol car really a cop or is he somebody masquerading as a cop?”

“If he isn’t, how would he get hold of the car?” she asked.

“If he’s fake, the vehicle could be too.”

“I suppose,” she agreed reluctantly, but she didn’t sound entirely convinced. Neither was I, but the idea of an imposter posing as a cop sounded a lot more acceptable than the other alternative of a police officer perpetrator.