J. Jance - Long Time Gone

But nothing happened. The car door didn’t open. The knife didn’t tumble onto the driveway. Determined to help, I charged off the porch, only to be knocked off balance by someone coming toward me at breakneck speed.

“Help him, Uncle Beau,” Heather pleaded as I righted myself. “Stop them before they shoot him. Please.”

Overwhelmed to realize Heather wasn’t being held at knifepoint, I clutched her in a quick but heartfelt bear hug. “All right,” I said. “I will, but you have to go inside. Don’t come back out until we say you can.”

Without waiting to see whether or not Heather did as she was told, I sprinted forward.

“Come on, Dillon, we don’t want to hurt you,” Mel was saying. “You’re not going anywhere. Now put down that knife.”

“We shouldn’t have done it,” I heard Dillon say as I reached the back bumper of the car. “I’m sorry.”

There was a sudden flurry of movement from the driver’s seat.

“Shit!” Mel Soames exclaimed, and she wasn’t talking about the Special Homicide Investigation Team. Brad leaned inside and retrieved the knife. He emerged with both his hand and the knife dripping with blood. By then I could see what Mel had meant. Dillon Middleton sat slumped sideways in the driver’s seat with blood gushing from a self-inflicted wound to his gut.

“No!” Heather shrieked from behind me as she darted toward the car.

Seattle’s award-winning EMTs arrived within two minutes of receiving my 911 call, but I suspected long before they got there that no matter what medical magic they brought with them, it would be too little too late to save Dillon Middleton.

All hell broke loose after that. By the time the aid car took off for Harborview Hospital with Heather and Dillon on board followed by the rest of the Peters family, West Highland had filled up with cop cars and media vans. Queen Anne Hill was no longer my turf. In this instance, it wasn’t Brad’s or Mel’s, either. Temporarily relegated to the sidelines, we stood in the rain watching the proceedings just like the other neighborhood onlookers.

“I guess you heard what Dillon said.” Mel’s comment was a quiet one, but it packed a gut-wrenching wallop, because I had indeed heard what he said. “We shouldn’t have done it.”

It was pretty apparent that the “we” in question had to be Dillon and Heather. And as for the “it”? That had to be the murder of Rosemary Peters. All three of us-three sworn police officers-had heard what might well turn out to be Dillon Middleton’s deathbed confession. Dillon was on his way to a hospital and maybe a funeral home. As for Heather? If what Dillon had said was true, Heather Peters might well be headed for prison. The idea that she had played a part in her mother’s murder had been a possibility all along. I simply hadn’t accepted it. Now it was unavoidable.

“She told me she didn’t do it,” I muttered. It was difficult to speak. My heart was breaking for Ron and Amy-and for me. I was glad it was raining. With water coursing down my cheeks, I hoped people wouldn’t notice some of it was tears.

“She lied to you, Beau,” Mel said. “Kids lie all the time.”

“Are you going to arrest her tonight?”

“Probably not,” Mel said. “Tomorrow will be plenty of time. It’ll take that long to get an arrest warrant. Here.” She held out her hand.

“What’s this?”

“A present for you,” she said and handed me a spark-plug wire.

“That’s how you kept him from leaving?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Good thinking,” I said, slipping the wire into my pocket. “And good work. How did you get her away from him?”

Mel shrugged. “We didn’t dare make a move as long as Dillon was holding the knife to her throat. But when they got close to the car, he let her loose. I think he really believed she was running away with him. That’s when we made our move.”

“She probably was running away with him,” I said. “And all the time I thought she was doing what she was doing to help her parents.”

“She was helping herself,” Mel said.

Sick at heart, I couldn’t argue the point.

A tow truck picked its way through the assortment of parked cars and came to collect the Focus. I was walking over to hand the spark-plug wire over to the tow-truck driver just as a uniformed officer popped the trunk. He lurched back several paces, and I heard him gasp, “Oh my God!”

When I turned to look, I saw that a bloodied corpse had been jammed into the tiny trunk. As soon as I saw the face, I knew who it was-Molly Wright.

A pair of homicide detectives had already been summoned to the scene of Dillon’s attempted suicide. Now Captain Kramer appeared as if on cue. He didn’t bother glancing at the car or at the open trunk. Instead he made straight for me.

“What the hell is going on here, Beaumont? I thought I told you to stop screwing around in my cases.”

Mel Soames stepped out from behind me before I had a chance to respond. “Like it or not, it happens to be our case, too,” she said reasonably enough.

“My associates,” I interjected. “Melissa Soames and Brad Norton. And this is a former associate of mine,” I added. “Captain Paul Kramer, Seattle PD Homicide, but then I believe you two have already met.”

Kramer leered at Mel. “Oh, it’s you,” he said sarcastically. “So the SHIT squad is out in force-the attorney general uber alles .”

I didn’t like his tone. And even though Mel Soames’s figure was definitely worthy of leers, I sure as hell didn’t like the way he looked at her, either. For her part, Mel seemed singularly unimpressed.

“One of the suspects in the Rosemary Peters homicide just tried to off himself here in his vehicle,” Mel told him. “But it turns out he left a little something behind for you to work on, too.”

For the first time Kramer looked inside the trunk. One glance was enough to leave him stricken. Kramer always talked a good game, but he was never all that solid when it came to crime scenes and dead bodies. I figured that was one of the main reasons he had majored in paperwork-and butt kissing.

He turned on his detectives, who had caught their first glimpse of Molly Wright’s body seconds after Kramer. “Has anybody here gotten around to calling the ME yet?” he groused. “What the hell’s the matter with you guys? And get this crime scene roped off. I don’t want anyone walking around in here. That goes for you and your pals there, Beaumont. Get the hell out and stop messing up our evidence.”

I would have said something, but Mel laid a restraining hand on my arm. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s go.”

Walking away from Kramer, I headed for my car, which was parked several houses down the street. As I wove my way through the haphazardly parked phalanx of vehicles, Mel came trailing after me. She caught up with me when I stopped to unlock the car door. “Where are you going?” she asked.

“You notice Kramer didn’t ask if we knew who the victim was,” I said.

Mel nodded. “And I noticed none of us volunteered that information, either.”

“It’s going to take time for him to figure it out. In the meantime, I’m on my way to Harborview to let Amy know what’s happened. I’d rather she heard the news from a friend rather than from Paul Kramer or the ME’s office. What about you?”

She patted her cell phone. “I’m going to get on the horn to Harry I. Ball and Ross Connors-for the same reason. They need to hear about all this from us, and it can’t wait until we get around to doing our paperwork. From the looks of those satellite vans, the story will be all over the eleven o’clock news.”

“Want a lift back to your car?” I asked.