J. Jance - Trial By Fury

Fifteen no answers and three answering machines later, I finally spoke to a human being, a judge's wife, not a judge. She sounded more than a little dingy. According to her, all the judges she knew, including her husband, were in Olympia for a retirement banquet for one of the state supreme court justices. She would have been there herself, she assured me, but she was just getting over the shingles.

The lady must have been pretty lonely. She was so happy to have someone to talk to that she could have kept me on the phone for hours, giving me a detailed, blow-by-blow description of all her symptoms, but I was in a hurry. I cut her off in mid-diagnosis. "Where in Olympia?" I asked.

"I beg your pardon?"

"The banquet," I said, pulling her back on track. "Where is it?"

"Oh, at the Tyee," she answered. "At least I think that's what the invitation said. Since I wasn't going, I didn't pay that close attention."

I thanked her and hung up. Olympia is sixty miles or so south of Seattle.

Fortunately, the Porsche was still there when I went back outside. It hadn't been towed. It didn't even have a ticket plastered to its windshield. The parking enforcement officers must have been taking a coffee break. So was the State Patrol on I-5. I had clear sailing, and I drove like an absolute maniac-forty minutes flat from the time I left the Public Safety Building until I pulled into the parking lot at the Tyee.

I had driven the last twenty miles with my bladder about to burst, so my first priority was to find a restroom and take a leak. A dapper little guy in a suit and tie was having a hell of a time aiming. He was a little worse for wear, but I thought I recognized him.

"You wouldn't happen to be a judge from Seattle, would you?"

He grinned fuzzily. "That's right. Do I know you?"

He didn't then, but by the time he finished signing the search warrant, we were old pals. I grabbed the paper out of his hand and beat it back toward the car. I was back on the Fremont Bridge thirty-eight minutes later.

Happily, Sergeant Watkins hadn't been sitting around playing with himself in my absence. He had alerted the crime scene team and had worked out a treaty with King County for them to bring their laser printfinder along to the apartment. The King County Police crime scene van was parked in Candace Wynn's parking place.

Watty must have pulled out all the stops to conjure up that kind of interdepartmental cooperation on such short notice on a Saturday evening.

There was quite a crowd gathering between the alley and Leary Way. In the process of rounding up everybody we needed, Watty had inadvertently summoned the fourth estate. I found an unwelcome welcoming committee of reporters waiting for me behind the police barricade.

I parked the Porsche and started to make my way through the crowd. Somebody stopped me. "What's happening, Detective Beaumont?" a reporter asked, shoving a microphone in my face. "What's going on in there?"

Someone else recognized me. "Hey, Detective Beaumont, this another homicide? How many does that make this week? You guys going for some kind of record?"

Ignoring the cameras, I pushed on, wondering if there wasn't some other kind of work I could do that wouldn't put me in daily contact with the press.

When I finally reached the bottom of the stairway, I stopped to examine the motley crew Watty had assembled-two latent-evidence examiners from the crime lab, a beefy sheriff's department deputy packing what looked to be a large suitcase, a King County ID person, two night-shift homicide detectives from the department, and a uniformed S.P.D. officer. Each of them nodded to me in turn, but no one said anything.

Sergeant Watkins himself was waiting at the top of the stairs. He stood blocking the doorway, glaring down at me, arms crossed truculently across his chest. He looked like what he wanted was a good fight. "Give it to me," he demanded when I came up the stairs.

"Give you what?" I asked.

"The warrant, for chrissakes!" He held out his hand. I removed the warrant from my inside jacket pocket and slapped it into the palm of his hand. Holding it up to the dim glow of a street lamp half a block away, he studied it for a long time.

"All right," he said finally. "Break the door down."

For the first time, I looked at the door. Sure enough, while I had been driving up and down the freeway to and from Olympia, someone had jerry-rigged the door back together.

"How'd it get fixed?" I asked. "Did she come back home?"

"I fixed it, you asshole," Watty whispered through clenched teeth. "Now break this motherfucker down, and make it look good. I want a picture of this on every goddamned television station in town."

I understood then why Sergeant Watkins was at the top of the steps and everyone else was waiting down below. Watty's nobody's fool. He was looking out for my ass, and his, too. It was all I could do to keep from laughing out loud as I kicked Candace Wynn's door in one more time. Once more with feeling. Take it from the top. J. P. Beaumont does "Miami Vice."

The only problem was, I kicked the door like it was really locked, like it hadn't been wrecked only hours before. I almost broke my neck when it caved in under my foot.

Once inside, Watty motioned the rest of the troops to join us. It turned out the suitcase contained King County 's laser printfinder. The deputy, huffing, lugged the case up the stairs and put it down in the middle of Candace Wynn's living room.

The printfinder weighs around eighty pounds or so, and it works off a regular 110 volt plug-in. He fired it up, plugging it into an outlet right there in the room. The crime scene investigators dusted the various surfaces in the room with a fluorescent powder. Then, one of them donned a pair of goggles.

"Okay, you guys," the other said. "Here go the lights."

With that, he turned out all the lights in the room. We were plunged into darkness. The only illumination was the finger of light from the printfinder as it played over the glowing powder and the periodic flashes from a 35-mm camera as the other investigator snapped pictures.

I felt like a kid who had stumbled into a midnight session with a Ouija board. There was nothing to do but stand there with my hands in my pockets and wait as the investigator ran the lens in the end of a length of fiber optic cable over everything that wasn't readily movable and bagged up everything that was.

He picked up prints from everywhere-the table, the refrigerator, the bathroom counter and mirror, the couch and chair in the living room, all the while recording the prints on film for later examination. Not only did the laser pick up prints, it also located other bits of trace evidence-hairs and fiber fragments that would have been tough to find with the naked eye.

Finally, tired of doing nothing, the rest of the team went outside. The other homicide detectives gathered a series of paint scraping samples from the handrail on the stairs. I showed them which garbage can had held the painting debris I had discovered earlier in the evening when I had been looking for something to use to clean my hands.

Fascinated by the workings of the laser, I went back inside and followed the deputy around like a puppy. I was so intrigued with the process that I failed to notice when one of the crime lab boys came to the door and motioned Watty aside. Moments later, Watty switched on the lights.

"Hey, why'd you do that?" the laser operator griped.

"Can you take that thing outside?" Watty demanded. He looked more anxious, more upset, than I had ever seen him. His whole demeanor vibrated with unmistakable urgency.

"Now?"

Watty nodded.

"I guess we can finish up in here later," the tech grumbled. "But I'll have to get the van to fire up the generator. I thought we were going to be inside. Nobody told me we'd be working outside. I need a place to plug all this shit in."