J. Jance - Payment in kind

“Beaumont? This is Kramer. I’m down in the garage. I finally got us a car. Come on down so I don’t have to turn loose of it. Hurry up, will you?”

Nobody had told me we were scheduled to go touring that morning, but I decided to be agreeable. “I’ll be right there. By the way, where are we going?”

“Back up to the school district office. To see Andrea Stovall.”

Another new person at the Seattle school district. “Who’s she?” I asked.

“Just get down here, would you? I told them we’d be there by nine and we’re going to be late. I’ll tell you about her on the way.”

I threw my notebook into the first available pocket, locked the school district’s bomb-threat file folder in my desk, and made my way down the stairs, bypassing the building’s more and more glitchy elevators. Detective Kramer was pacing the floor of the garage near an idling Reliant, hands planted belligerently on his hips, an impatient frown imprinted across his broad forehead.

“So who’s Andrea Stovall?” I asked again as I got in the car.

“I got her name off the logbook sheets,” he answered.

“Logbook sheets?” I asked. “We’ve got those back already?”

“I thought I told you about them last night.”

“You told me Doc Baker had preliminary autopsy reports ready for us to pick up this morning. I don’t remember anything at all about the logbook.”

Kramer fastened his belt with a shrug. “No kidding. You mean I didn’t tell you about that? I meant to. It must have slipped my mind or maybe it happened after you called. Mark Fields brought them up from the crime lab last night.” He tossed a manila envelope across the seat at me.

“They’re in there, copies of the logbook sheets, an unofficial copy of Doc Baker’s findings, and whatever the crime lab has done so far.”

“Slipped my mind” my ass! Fighting to control my anger, I opened the envelope and thumbed through the three separate sets of papers I found there. I focused first on the cleanly typed forms from Doc Baker’s office. There’s nothing like reading autopsy and crime lab reports to help whittle your own troubles down to size and make you count your blessings. The impassive technical terminology condensed Alvin Chambers’ and Marcia Kelsey’s brutal deaths down into dry, bare-bones anatomy class specifics.

Doc Baker estimated Chambers’ time of death as somewhere around midnight, although he had probably been shot well before that. He had been shot in the back and then dragged, still alive but possibly unconscious, into the closet, where he had bled to death. A. 25-caliber CCI-Blazer slug, shot at point-blank range, had severed his spine and then inflicted surprisingly terrible damage as it ripped through vital internal organs and exited near his belly button. People who don’t want to think about outlawing handguns haven’t seen firsthand the kind of damage they do.

It took a second for the information to sink in. I looked over at Kramer. “The gun we found was a. 38, but this says a. 25.”

“That’s right.”

“So we’re dealing with two weapons, not one.”

“Right again.”

I continued reading. There were signs of a blow to the head on Chambers, but it was Doc Baker’s assessment that although the blow may have rendered him unconscious, it had in no way contributed to the victim’s death. From the lividity of the body, he had been dead for some period of time before Marcia Kelsey’s body dropped on top of him.

Unlike Chambers, Marcia Kelsey had evidently died instantly, falling where she was shot. Hers was not a self-inflicted wound, although someone had gone to a good deal of trouble to make us think so. The lack of powder particles ruled out suicide once and for all.

Baker’s preliminary tests showed no sign of drugs or alcohol in either victim, but a final determination on that score would have to wait on the toxicology reports. Those take time.

“It says here Chambers was shot somewhere else and then dragged into the closet.”

Kramer nodded. “That’s right. That shows up in the crime lab report. The crime-scene team found trace evidence of blood in one of the floor seams in the entryway, near where his table and chair were set up. Liz, from the crime lab, told me they were really lucky to find it, because whoever did it stuck around long enough to do a pretty good job of cleaning up.”

“So we’re dealing with a real cool customer.”

“And somebody who’s compulsively neat,” Kramer put in with a malicious smile. I knew he was thinking about Pete Kelsey’s pristine garage. So was I.

“Did you get to the part where it says no semen?” Kramer added.

I scanned the page to where Doc Baker had detailed his sexual findings. Just as Kramer had said, there was no sign of sexual intercourse. No semen in the vagina or elsewhere.

“What about it?”

Kramer shrugged. “It’s too bad, that’s all. To get killed for nothing. I mean, if you knew you were gonna die, wouldn’t you want to go out with a bang?”

“You’re an incurable romantic, Kramer, with a real way with words,” I said sarcastically. He grinned. I think he thought it was a compliment.

It occurred to me then that Detective Kramer, who was driving the car rather than studying his own copy of the reports, had a nearly total recall of everything written there. “What did you do, memorize the reports on the way down here this morning?”

“Not this morning. I changed my mind and picked ‘em up on my way home last night after all, just in case there was something that needed our attention right away.”

I had no delusions that if something had needed “our” attention, I wouldn’t have heard word one about it until after the fact. Kramer would have handled it on his own. His silence about the logbooks was anything but the innocent oversight he claimed it to be. It’s hard to like working with somebody like that, someone you can’t afford to turn your back on. The book says you’re supposed to be able to trust your partner. With your life. Fat chance.

Letting it go, I returned to the issue of two guns. That didn’t make sense. “I still don’t understand why we have two separate weapons.”

“Who knows? Maybe the killer thought that if one gun was good, two were better.”

Convinced there was nothing more to be gained right then by rereading either one of the two official reports, I turned to the third batch of papers. These turned out to be surprisingly good copies of the Seattle Security logbook pages for December thirtieth and thirty-first and January first.

I glanced down at the second page, the one for the first of January. It had been a holiday after all, and there were only two entries on the entire page: Marcia Kelsey had checked in at eight P.M. There was no check-out time following her name. Andrea Stovall had signed in at eleven and out again at eleven-fifteen.

That certainly answered one question. No wonder we were on our way to see Andrea Stovall. The presence of her name in the register on the same day at around the time of the killings made her a person of interest, someone we needed to interview.

Without further comment, I gathered the pieces of paper together and shoved them back in the envelope. We rode in silence for several blocks, with Kramer driving and me steaming. The pattern behind his behavior was beginning to emerge. He had known about the logbook sheets being ready when he called me the night before. He had known about the logbook sheets being ready when he called me the night before. He had known the autopsy reports were ready as well and had lied to me about them on the phone. He had picked them up on the way home and must have spent much of the night studying them. Fortunately for me and unfortunately for him, the vital information he’d been searching for, details that would have given him a crack at being a Lone Ranger hero, hadn’t been there.