J. Jance - A more perfect union

"Fred tells me you're with the Seattle Police," she said, making a visible effort to control her emotions. "What can I do for you?"

She hadn't asked to see my identification, and I knew Fred hadn't examined my ID closely enough to remember my name. I decided to jump in with both feet. "I'm sorry to bring all this back up, especially since you've already been interviewed by a number of law-enforcement people, but I'd like to ask a few additional questions."

"What do you need to know?"

She came back over to the table and sat down between Fred and me. He reached over and patted the back of her hand. "Are you sure?" Fred asked solicitously.

"It's all right," she said wearily to Fred, and then to me. "Go ahead."

"A number of people seem to be operating under the assumption that your husband's death was an accident. I'm wondering if you have an opinion about that one way or another."

It was a back-handed way to start the conversation, but it struck a spark. The atmosphere in the room was suddenly charged with a surge of emotional electricity. Instantly Fred's hand closed shut around Katherine Tyree's fingers. His knuckles turned white. Fred's powerful grip must have hurt. Katherine Tyree winced but made no effort to pull away. The stricken look they exchanged told me I had unwittingly stumbled into volatile territory.

"You'd better tell him, Kate," Fred said grimly.

Katherine Tyree shook her head stubbornly. "No. I don't want to, not today, not like this."

"If you don't, I will." His words were weighted with gloomy determination.

Katherine stole a glance at me then dropped her gaze to her lap. "I can't," she murmured, her voice a strangled whisper.

Fred sat up, squared his shoulders, and looked me straight in the eye. "What she means to say is, we're engaged," he announced defiantly. He paused, waiting for a reply. When there was none, he continued, his voice somewhat more subdued. "We had planned to be married just as soon as her divorce was final. We had no reason to kill him. Logan and I were friends once-asshole buddies."

The fact that Fred assumed I was accusing them of murder led me to believe there was a whole lot more to the story than anyone had let on so far. I kept quiet, leaving an empty pool of silence between us. Fred rushed in to fill it up.

"You see," he said, "what you don't understand is that Boomer was my boat originally."

"You say you were friends? I take it that means you weren't any longer?"

Katherine Tyree started to say something then stopped.

"Nobody planned it this way. That's just how it worked out," Fred said. He shrugged. "Things sort of happened, got out of hand."

"Maybe you'd better tell me about it."

"Do you know what a boomer is?"

"Not really."

"In the trade it's a hand who knocks around the country, going from place to place, wherever there's work."

"What kind of work?"

"Construction. Working iron. That's how Logan and I met, on the raising gang down at Columbia Center. I came up here from California as a boomer and was living on the boat. Logan was interested in boats, had always wanted one. When he offered to buy mine, I took him up on it. I was tired of banging my head on the doorway every time I needed to take a leak.

"Logan and Kate here invited me out to dinner. Christmas, Thanksgiving, summer barbecues. That sort of thing. Kate and I just hit it off, didn't we."

Katherine Tyree gave a barely perceptible wordless nod.

"So that's how it started out, innocent like that. Once Logan had that boat, though, he wanted to spend every spare minute on it. He was gone a lot-on weekends, in the evening, after work. That's when things got out of hand with us, with Kate and me I mean. Like I said, we didn't intend for it to happen."

The last sentence lingered in the air for several seconds. I'm not exactly sure who Fred was trying to convince most-Katherine Tyree, me, or himself.

"Where were you two last Tuesday night?" I asked.

Fred didn't flinch or try to duck the question. "Right here," he declared resolutely. "Upstairs in the bedroom screwing our brains out."

"Fred!" Katherine Tyree wailed. "Don't!"

"Kate, honey, I've got to. Don't you see?" He let go of her hand and reached up and ran a finger tenderly along the full curve of her cheek.

"We're better off telling him right up front, hon. It would be worse if he found out later. Lots worse. Besides, we had no reason to kill Logan. In another month the divorce would have been final and we could've been married, no questions asked. I'm sick and tired of sneaking around. With Logan gone, I don't care who knows about us. It's nobody's business but our own."

Fred's forthright narrative was pretty tough to counter. My gut reaction was that he was telling the truth, that his involvement with Katherine Tyree hadn't been planned or premeditated and that he was sincerely saddened by his former friend's death.

"Tell me about the boat," I said.

Fred shrugged. "There's not a lot to tell. It wasn't new. I bought it used for a song. Gasoline boats are a whole lot cheaper than diesel ones. I'd been living on it for a couple of years when I sold it to Logan."

"What did you think about it?" I asked, turning to Katherine. "About your husband's boat."

"I hated it," she said softly. "It was the last straw. I felt like he was using it to run away from me. It was a place for him to go, to hide out, instead of doing things around here."

"Was he hiding out?"

My question heaped salt on an open wound, but that's one way to get honest answers, to ask while people are still down for the count, before they have a chance to get up off their knees and reactivate their defenses.

"Yes," Katherine said softly.

"Why? What from?"

"I don't know. We were just too different, I guess. We sort of drifted apart. We got married way too young. Everybody said so-his family, my family. He wanted to have kids, I didn't. I wanted to travel, he didn't. When I met Fred, I could see how wrong it had been the whole time. We were only staying together because we didn't know what else to do."

"There are lots of marriages like that in this world," I observed. "Most of them end in divorce, not murder."

Fred leaped to his feet and slammed a fist onto the table in front of me so hard the three coffee cups went skittering in all directions. "Goddamnit! I already told you, we had nothing to do with it!"

I ignored him and once more directed my question to Katherine Tyree. "Does the name Linda Decker mean anything to you?"

There was a flicker of recognition in her eyes, but nothing else. No hurt, no animosity. "Yes," she answered quietly. "Linda was Logan's girlfriend."

"Did you ever meet her?"

Katherine shook her head. Satisfied that I was no longer on the attack, Fred sat back down.

"When they met, he was already living on the boat. I was glad for him when we heard about it," Katherine continued, "glad he had found somebody."

"But you don't know anything about her?"

Katherine shook her head. "I do," Fred offered. "I saw Linda down at the union hall a few times. When she and Logan started dating, word spread like wildfire. She's a little mite of a thing, but tougher 'an nails. Understand she's a bodybuilder. According to everybody I talked to, she was doing fine. Then, a week or so ago, she walked off the job, turned in her union book, and quit."

"She quit the apprentice program?"

Fred nodded.

"Any idea why?"

Fred shook his head. "I thought maybe she and Logan had gotten into some kind of fight."

I took a minute to go back over my notes, checking to see if there was anything I had forgotten to ask. I returned to the boat. "Tell me more about Boomer. You said this was Logan's first boat, is that true?"

Fred and Katherine nodded in unison.