Michael Dibdin - Dark Specter

The first month they were there, it rained nonstop for twenty-three days. Shortly afterward, Francoise (“Frankie”) Warren had the first of her spaz attacks. These took a variety of forms, all of them frighteningly unpredictable, from appearing at a wedding in what looked like a strapless nightgown and no bra, to serving dinner guests a boiled pig’s head with the snout and ears still on.

Steve’s siblings had dealt with this by copping out and acting weird themselves. Georges, who now insisted not only on this spelling but also the pronunciation that went with it, was a mainstay of the Blue Moon Tavern in the U District, where he gave recitations of his poetry. Annie lived in a cabin on Vashon Island, communing with the womanspirit of Puget Sound and “invoking her intercession for our sins against the environment.”

Only Steve had possessed the grit and guts to transcend his unconventional upbringing and seize the lackluster prizes which life has to offer those who do OK: a tract home in Bellevue he’d still be paying off when he was a hundred and ten, a car he could never find in a crowded parking lot because it looked just like all the others, a wife who could walk into a strange mall and locate the Hallmark store in seconds. Some men are born to mediocrity, some have it thrust upon them. Steve Warren was one of the very few who achieve it by their own unaided efforts. Despite the almost overwhelming handicap posed by his home environment, he could look back on his life and tell himself proudly, “I did it their way.”

As a result, he felt he had the right to demand the same high standards of others, and Kristine Kjarstad had never let him down before. She could be a little snippy at times, yes, but he’d never seen her in tears.

“You all right?” he said, trying for the New Man image, concerned but not wimpy, like one of those sporty house-husbands you saw jogging around Green Lake with the baby.

“All right?” she snapped, pretending to blow her nose so that she could dab the tears away. “Sure, I’m just fine. I just got through phoning the prosecutor in the Selleck case to tell him we can’t proceed after all.”

Steve Warren dimly recalled the case she was talking about, some fourteen-year-old who’d been raped while walking home from her aunt’s house. The victim had named a local kid who denied the charges, claiming that he had keen drinking with friends at the time. The friends had corroborated his alibi, but Kristine Kjarstad had been sure they would back off once the forensic results came through.

“You mean the tests showed it wasn’t him?” Steve asked in a solicitous tone.

“The tests never got done!” Kristine exclaimed. “They’ve got a backlog of hundreds of cases down at the labs. Nothing gets processed until a trial date is set. Meanwhile the swab we took from the victim’s vagina gets stored in a fridge down in the basement, right? A few months ago there’s a power failure, and pretty soon you’ve got a couple of dozen samples of assorted bodily fluids turning green, growing legs and heading back to the farm. Result, the suspect’s alibi will stand. We know he raped a fourteen-year-old, and he knows we know. And he’s going to get away with it, and there’s not a fucking thing that anyone can do. All right? Sure, I’m just fine . No problem.”

She passed a hand through her wavy brown hair and gave a long sigh.

“So what’s new with you?”

Steve Warren held up the fax.

“This just came through from SPD. I took a look at it and …”

He broke off. The whole idea suddenly seemed flaky, maybe even slightly wacko. What if he told Kristine, and she looked at him and said, “Are you feeling all right?” Steve took several deep breaths, trying to control this crise de nerd , as his mother used to say. It was so hard to be normal all the time!

“Yes?” said Kristine Kjarstad pointedly.

“Well, I just, see, OK, like, the thing is …”

“Are you feeling all right?”

Steve Warren dropped the fax on her desk.

“Just read it,” he said, and walked out.

Kristine skimmed through the fax, wondering what had produced this rare glimpse of spontaneity in a droid like Steve Warren. The fax was a standard request for a criminal record search, commonly known as a D and B after the credit check agency, Dun and Bradstreet. This one had originated in Atlanta, Georgia, and was made out in the name of Dale Watson, a.k.a. John Flaxman. It had been sent to the Seattle Police Department, and they had routinely copied it to the King County force, whose territory surrounds the city on three sides.

Neither of the names meant anything to Kristine, but she dutifully went down to the basement and ran through the files to see if there were any rap sheets lying around from before her time. There weren’t, but on her way back she finally spotted the detail which had provoked her partner’s personality attack. It was in the section dealing with the crime itself. Kristine had skipped this first time around, having discovered that it was a street incident of no interest, the kind of thing she imagined happening all the time in places like Atlanta.

Now, trapped in an elevator which stopped at every floor, she read it through out of sheer boredom. Two sentences leaped out at her: “Subject was armed with a.22 Smith amp; Wesson revolver, as was his accomplice. They were also carrying a case with religious literature, a video camera, several sets of handcuffs and a roll of tape.”

The covering note from SPD was signed Don Krylo. Thirty seconds after she got back to her desk, Kristine had him on the phone. Krylo, a harassed-sounding sergeant in Central Homicide, was delighted when Kristine offered to deal direct with the original source of inquiry.

“You got a contact name?” she asked.

“I’ll need to look it up. Let me call you back.”

“I’ll hold.”

If she let Krylo go, she’d probably never hear another thing. While she waited, Kristine tried to get a firm grip on herself. She’d only just succeeded in putting the Renton case behind her. The last thing she needed was to open up that can of worms again to no purpose.

“Here we go,” said Don Krylo. “Guy’s name is Wingate. Lamont Wingate, Homicide Task Force, Atlanta City Police.”

“Great.”

“You think you got something on this guy?”

“I don’t know. I need to check it out a little. It’s tough for us here in the county. You know how it is, Don. We make a mistake, everyone starts cracking jokes about hayseed sheriff departments.”

Krylo, who had probably made more than a few himself, indignantly denied the possibility.

“It’s just this is the second CRS we’ve received in this name,” he said. “Both out-of-state, too. I thought maybe you might know why this guy’s such a celebrity.”

Kristine Kjarstad felt her heart racing. She took a deep breath.

“This is the second one?”

“That’s what it says here. There’s a reference number to the other request, but I don’t have it right-”

“Could you look it up?”

Her tone was eager, almost peremptory.

“I guess. Might take a little time. You wouldn’t believe the mess we’ve-”

“I’ll call you back in fifteen minutes, Don. That give you long enough? This is kind of urgent.”

“It is?”

Don Krylo sounded as though he suspected that something was maybe getting away from him here. Kristine tittered girlishly.

“No, I just mean I’m going out to lunch, right? And I’d like to get this wrapped up first. You know how it is,” she finished lamely.

“No kidding,” Krylo replied in the tone of a man who knew only too well how it was. “Catch you in fifteen.”

Kristine put down the phone with a shaky hand. Fifteen minutes to fill. A thought had occurred to her while she was talking to Don Krylo, but for a moment she couldn’t track it down. Then she remembered that she’d been meaning to call Paul Merlowitz. Her lie about going out to lunch had jogged her memory.