J. Jance - Without Due Process

“Would you stake Junior Weston’s life on it?”

Like any good investigator, Captain Freeman doesn’t ask questions if he doesn’t have a pretty damn good idea what the answers will be. Questions for him are always a means to a specific end, not a device for use in casual conversation. It took until then before I realized where his questions were going, what he was really asking.

“It’s risky as hell,” I said. “For all concerned, but, yes, I’d bet Junior’s life on Big Al Lindstrom in a minute.”

“Do you think he’d do it?”

“Damned right he would!”

Captain Freeman picked up his phone. “What’s his number? We’ll call him up and ask.”

Freeman waited with his finger poised over the number pad while my mind went totally blank. I couldn’t remember my own phone number right then to say nothing of Big Al Lindstrom’s.

“Just a second here,” Sue Danielson interrupted. “I don’t understand. What’s going on?”

“Seven eight five…” I started.

Now Captain Powell leaped into the fray. “Wait a minute. You can’t pull Detective Lindstrom back into all this. I already threw him off the case.”

Freeman put the phone down. “That’s exactly why I want him,” he returned mildly. “Because he’s off the case. No one’s going to think of him as a source of information. I asked Detective Beaumont for his opinion, but I happen to be of the same mind. I know Allen Lindstrom, have known him for a long time. Of all the people at Seattle PD right now, if I can only have one cop to guard Junior Weston, Big Al Lindstrom is the one I want.”

“Who said you can only have one, Captain Freeman?” chimed in Chief Rankin. “You can have as many as you want. All you have to do is ask.”

“Remember what I told you? This is going to be a limited incision,” Freeman reminded them, “an operation conducted with limited assets. If Big Al Lindstrom is the one guard on duty, one will be more than enough. I’m going to dial his number now and put you on the phone, Beau. Tell him you’ve just started worrying about Junior and ask him if he’d mind doing something about it overnight, unofficially, as a favor to you, but armed and with a bulletproof vest. We can take care of paying him overtime for it later, right, Larry?”

Captain Powell nodded glumly. “Right,” he said.

“Now what was that number?”

I gave it to him. In the intervening seconds, it had miraculously reappeared from my memory bank. When Freeman finished dialing, he handed the phone over to me. There’s an old Ogden Nash poem that says something about how one becomes a capable liar. If ever I wanted to be proficient at lying, this was it.

Molly Lindstrom answered the phone. “Is Al there?” I asked innocently.

“He is,” she said, “but he’s not feeling so good. He said he was going straight to bed.”

I heard the wariness in her voice, understood her wanting to protect her husband from any further hurt. “Get him up, Molly. He’ll want to talk to me.”

She slammed the phone down on the table. It was several long minutes before Big Al came on the line. In the interim, no one in Captain Freeman’s office said a word.

“ ‘Lo, Beau,” Big Al said finally. “Whaddya want?”

“I’m worried about Junior,” I said.

“Junior? What’s the matter with him?”

I heard Big Al snap to attention. It wasn’t necessary to lie. All I had to do was express my own legitimate worries and let Detective Lindstrom draw his own conclusions.

“He’s still our only eyewitness,” I said. “What if the killer hears where he is somehow and tries to take him out? I just realized everyone at the task force meeting knows where the boy is staying. If one of them happened to make a slip in front of the wrong person…”

“Gotcha,” Big Al said. “Ja sure you betcha. I can be there in twenty minutes flat. Does Kramer know anything about this?”

“Are you kidding? That schmuck would shit a brick if he even suspected I was talking to you about it.”

“Don’t tell him then,” Big Al said. “I’m on my way in my own car on my own time. No one needs to know about this but you and me.”

“By the way, Al, do me a favor. Wear your armor.”

“Right, Beau. And don’t you take yours off, either.”

He hung up and so did I. In the meantime, Kyle Lehman had rolled his apple core up in the empty potato chip bag and was looking around for a garbage can. Freeman took the bag and tossed it into a container under his desk.

“This is all very interesting,” Kyle was saying, “but what the hell am I doing here?”

He’s such an obnoxious little twit, I couldn’t understand how Freeman could tolerate him, but he did. “I was just getting around to that. I want you to do an analysis of all the blue-and-whites in the department. I want to know their locations, their usual drivers, who else may have checked them in and out. I want you to look for any discrepancies in mileage. If one has consistently more than one of the others, I want to know about it.”

Lehman nodded. “I can do that. It’ll take a while and some work, but it can be done. Anything else?”

“Yes,” Freeman said. “There is. You know that PC down in the gang unit?”

Kyle nodded again. “What about it?”

“I want you to take charge of it. Personally. Physically remove it if necessary. Say it crashed or something. Do it now before anyone else has a chance to touch it. My understanding is that as long as no one has written over a deleted file, it may be possible to retrieve the information. Is that right?”

“Pretty much. It’ll be hell on wheels finding it is all,” Lehman returned. “It’ll take time, lots of it. Why? What are we looking for? And why can’t we get the information from one of the back-up floppies?”

“The night of the murders, someone got into Ben Weston’s directory. Whoever it was went through all his files. My guess is that the critical one, the one no one wanted us to see, is missing.”

“The floppy’s gone too?”

For the first time in the entire meeting, Kyle Lehman was on his toes, both interested and irate. “You’re saying that somebody broke into one of my secured computers? I’ll break the SOB’s neck. How’d he get the password? How’d he get verified?”

Freeman smiled. “I thought you’d be interested in knowing about this. We are too. How long will it take?”

Lehman looked at his watch. “I don’t know, but I’ll get started right away. Which one do you want done first, the car analysis or the missing files?”

“The files.”

“Good. I would have done that first anyway.”

Without waiting for Freeman to call a halt, Kyle Lehman careened out of the room. The senseless slaughter of five people didn’t bother him one bit, and the fact that Seattle PD was infected with crooked cops had made no visible effect either, but the idea that someone had broken into his precious computer system lit a fire under Kyle Lehman’s scrawny butt.

Freeman turned to Captain Powell. “Larry, I want you to run interference for Beaumont and Danielson, and I want you to help me sort the misinformation we’ll be feeding to the task force. Detective Danielson, you’re to check with Kramer, visit the Crime Lab, the M.E.”s office, and anywhere you can think of. Your assignment is to gather up any new information that may have come in during the course of the day. I want the information regathered by you rather than taking whatever Kramer has at face value. What’s going into the Weston Family Task Force may very well have been tainted somewhere along the way. See what I mean?“

Sue nodded, and Freeman turned to me. “As for you, now that you’ve delivered Detective Lindstrom, I need you to do something else. You’re the one who hangs around the Doghouse Restaurant so much of the time, aren’t you?”