J. Jance - A more perfect union

Like so many small-town sheriffs, he had cut his law-enforcement teeth in the big city, in this case Tacoma, and then moved into small-town police work when he tired of the rat race. I had never met Harding personally, but I knew officers who had worked with him and for him. Word of mouth said he was both tough and fair. I could have done a hell of a lot worse.

"Do you mind if I put my pants on?" I asked.

He shrugged. "Those them over there?" He pointed toward my pile of belongings still on the kitchen floor.

I nodded.

"Check 'em out, Jamie. If they're clean, let him put his pants back on. Then we'll find out what he's doing half-naked in this nice lady's basement in the middle of the afternoon."

Nice lady my ass! Linda Decker wasn't a nice lady in my book, but I didn't contradict him. Harding had gone to the door of the kitchen with his deputies, and the whole group was conferring with someone outside when Jamie brought my pants.

With my hands cuffed behind my back, there was no way I could manage them myself. Jamie held them out for me to step in. I knew the little bastard was suckering me, but I wanted clothes on so badly that I fell for it. As I raised my leg to step in, he brought the pants up and caught my foot, knocking me off balance.

I toppled over backwards. I knew what the metal handcuffs would do to my body if I rammed them into the small of my back. Twisting to one side in midair, I managed to land on one shoulder with a heavy, bone-jarring thud that knocked the wind out of my lungs. I almost blacked out.

Harding whirled and came back into the room, angrily looming over me. "What the hell happened?" he demanded of Jamie who was still standing there innocently holding my pants.

"I was helping him get these on. He tried to kick me," Jamie complained.

"Is that right!" Harding said. "Leave the son of a bitch naked, then." He glared down at me. "You try anything funny again, Beaumont, and you'll be wearing a straitjacket next, understand?"

I still hadn't gotten my breath back. "I understand," I croaked.

When Harding turned away, I caught Jamie's narrow-lipped smile of amusement. The asshole. He was probably five-six and a hundred and thirty pounds soaking wet-a little guy with a big chip on his shoulder. Sneaky, weasely, true to type. He wouldn't have lasted ten minutes at Seattle P.D., wouldn't have made it past the first physical, so he had to content himself with throwing his weight around in Lewis County.

I filed his face away in my memory banks. I'm no good with names, but I do remember faces. Maybe someday little Jamie would end up in Seattle and our paths would manage to cross. He'd best be looking over his shoulder if that ever happens.

Reed Harding returned to the outside door. "Come on, Jamie. Hustle on out there. They say the car's clean. He probably stashed the stuff somewhere nearby. Davis is organizing a search. You go help with that. I can handle this character. He won't give me any trouble."

"Yes, sir."

Jamie hotfooted it out of the house and Harding came back over to me. "Okay, Beaumont. On your feet."

He grabbed me under my arms and lifted me like I was a ten-pound-bag of potatoes. W. Reed Harding was strong as an ox. He dumped me unceremoniously on the kitchen stool where Linda Decker had sat earlier to drink her coffee. I didn't object. There wasn't an ounce of fight left in me.

"Is anybody ever going to tell me what the hell is going on?" I asked wearily.

"You bet, Beaumont," Harding answered. "I'll be glad to tell you. We're going to find where you stowed the stuff and then we're going to take you off the streets for awhile, lock you up, and throw away the key. I don't like it when cops take walks on the wrong side of the law. It gives all of us a bad name."

"Wrong side of the law? What are you talking about? What stuff?"

Harding bent down, holding his face only inches from mine. "The stuff you were going to use to burn down this house."

I was so dumbfounded I almost fell off the chair. "Burn the house down? You've got to be kidding. What makes you think that, for Christ's sake?"

"Because you already did it once."

"Did what?"

"Burned down a house," he answered grimly.

"Whose house?" I asked.

W. Reed Harding didn't answer me right away. His unblinking eyes bored into mine. I know how to do that too. It's a look calculated to make creeps squirm in their seats, to get them to spill their guts.

"Whose house?" I repeated.

"Linda Decker's mother's house," he said slowly. "Her mother's dead, and her brother isn't expected to make it."

His words hit me with the weight of a sledgehammer blow. Linda Decker's mother and her brother? Jimmy Rising? The enthusiastic little guy with his stainless-steel thermos and Kmart lunch pail?

"No," I said.

Harding nodded. "And Bellevue P.D.'s got witnesses who say they saw you prowling around the house yesterday afternoon. Would you care to tell me where you were at midnight last night, Detective Beaumont? And you'd better make sure it's something that will hold up in a court of law, because you're going to need it."

Suddenly the snippet of news I had heard on the car radio, the one about the fatal eastside fire, resurfaced in my brain. Leona and Jimmy Rising. A cold chill passed over me. It had nothing whatever to do with the weather or my lack of clothes.

Somewhere outside myself I heard the words to the Miranda warning. Reed Harding was reading me my rights, as if I didn't know them already.

"So?" he asked when he finished. "Where were you?"

And that's when I remembered Marilyn Sykes. At midnight the night before, she and I had been getting it on in her Mercer Island bedroom. Dragging her into this for the sake of an alibi was out of the question.

"I want to talk to my attorney," I said. "His name's Ralph Ames. He lives in Phoenix."

Reed Harding looked at me gravely and shook his head. He seemed disappointed. "So that's the way you're going to play it?"

"Believe me," I answered, "I don't have any other choice."

That gossipy store clerk in Doty had been right. Linda Decker's house with its barred windows and doors looked a whole lot more like a jail than the new one did in Chehalis. Except for the discreet lockup and secured-entry system at one corner, the building we entered didn't remotely resemble a county courthouse.

Before they stuffed me in a patrol car somebody other than Jamie had finally helped me into my pants and put my shirt over my shoulders. Once inside the courthouse, Sheriff Harding told a deputy to take me into an unoccupied office to make my one phone call. That and removing my handcuffs were his only grudging concessions to professional courtesy. If I hadn't been a cop, I'd have been stuck out in the lobby using a pay phone along with all the rest of the scum. My escort removed the handcuffs but made sure I understood that an armed guard would be posted outside the door.

The advantage of having a high-priced attorney like Ralph Ames on retainer is that he cuts through both bullshit and red tape with equal dispatch. As soon as I got him on the phone and told him what was going on, he let me have it with both barrels.

"Wake up, Beau. Get out from under your rock. That kind of chivalry went out with the Middle Ages. You tell that sheriff, Harwin…"

"Harding," I corrected.

"Whatever his name is, you tell him to get on the horn to Marilyn Sykes and straighten this mess out before it goes any further. Is there anyone else besides her who can say for certain you were there all night?"

Sheepishly I remembered the security guard and his all-knowing clipboard. "There was somebody else," I admitted reluctantly.

"Who for Chrissakes?" Ames demanded. He wanted this fixed, and he wanted it fixed now. He wasn't about to let me hide out under a blanket of genteel niceties.