J. Jance: Trial By Fury

I did feel sorry for Mrs. Browning, however. She was probably a nice enough lady, one I would never meet even though I was changing her life forever. Whoever she was, wherever she was, her world, like Joanna Ridley's, was about to fly apart. She didn't have the foggiest idea it was coming, but J. P. Beaumont was sending trouble her way.

It was just as well we would never meet.

The only thing to do was to find Candace Wynn's mother. Somehow.

I was sitting in my car with the engine running when I realized I was going off half-cocked. I waited until Ned Browning came out of the restaurant. Expecting me to be long gone, he turned like he'd been shot when I hailed him from the Porsche. He approached the car cautiously. "What now?" he asked.

"Do you have a picture of Candace Wynn?"

"No."

"Maybe not a separate picture, but wouldn't she be in a yearbook? Do you have any?"

He nodded. "I do have one of those, at school, in my office."

"Good. Let's go get it."

He started to object but thought better of it. He led the way back to the school, where a tow truck was just hooking on to Candace Wynn's Chevy. Avoiding the crowd in the parking lot, he took me into his office and handed me a copy of the current yearbook. Mrs. Wynn's picture was there, alongside her angelic crew of cheerleaders. There was another picture as well, a more formal one, in the faculty section of the book.

"Thanks," I said. "I'll bring it back."

"Don't bother," Ned Browning told me.

If I had been in his shoes, I wouldn't have wanted to keep a copy of that particular yearbook, either.

When I left him, he was standing in the middle of his office, looking at it the way someone looks when they're getting ready to pack up and move on. Ned Browning was a man who had worn out his welcome.

The next three hours were hard on me. They shouldn't have been, I suppose. After all, I'm a homicide detective. We're supposed to be tough, right?

But tracking through those hospitals, trying to locate Candace Wynn's mother, carried me back some twenty-odd years, back to my youth and to my own mother's final illness.

Maybe part of it is that you never get over your mother's death, no matter how long you live. Being in those polished corridors with their antiseptic odors and their stainless steel trays made it seem like yesterday, not half a lifetime ago.

Pain was all around. The patients had help for theirs, however fleeting the hazy comfort of drugs might be, but my heart went out to the empty-eyed visitors I found walking the halls, lingering in the rooms. There was no prescribed medication available to lessen their hurt.

I remembered only too well when I had stumbled blindly among them, holding tightly, stubbornly, to each grim crumb of hope. And then, eventually, the day had come when all hope was gone. I had resigned myself to my mother's loss, knowing the how. That was inevitable. But for three long years I had spent every resource at my disposal, delaying as long as possible the unpredictable when.

Walking the hospital halls that bright spring afternoon, knowing the difference between the budding promise outside and the burgeoning grief inside, I could relate to Candace Wynn just a little bit. Maybe, after fighting a losing war for far too long a time, she had cracked under the strain.

I started with the obvious, the Fred Hutchison Cancer Research Center on First Hill. A lady at the front desk cheerily told me they had a master list of all the cancer patients in Seattle, but without a name, she couldn't help me. She did, however, point me in the direction of the hospitals with known cancer units-Swedish, Providence, Cabrini, and Virginia Mason on Pill Hill-and later, University Hospital, Overlake, and Northgate.

I drove like a maniac from place to place, speeding on the way, leaving the Porsche in patient-loading zones with the hazard lights flashing when I went inside.

And all the while I was driving, I kept coming back to the same question: Why had Candace lied about the locker? Why had she pretended to have heard about it only the night before, and why had she encouraged Ned Browning to destroy it? She knew we knew about it. The list wasn't something that could simply be swept under the rug and forgotten. There was some reason for her telling Browning on that particular day in that particular place. I drove and wished I had the answer.

At each hospital, it wasn't a matter of waltzing up to the head nurse, showing her Candace Wynn's picture, and getting a straight answer.

Straight answers aren't to be had from either doctors or head nurses. They're usually too close to God to talk to mere mortals. I went looking for orderlies, for hospital volunteers, for candy stripers-little people who might feel some sense of importance in being asked to help.

And help me they did. They were happy to look at the picture of Candace Wynn, and over and over they shook their heads. No, they were sure no one like that had visited any of the patients who were in that hospital right then.

And with each shake of the head, with each negative answer, the icy knot in my gut got bigger. I wasn't getting any closer. A terrible clock was ticking in my head, telling me that time was running out. I tried to tell myself it was just from being in hospitals, from seeing so many people who were sick or dying or both. But that didn't help me shake it.

The lady at Fred Hutchison had given me a list of board-approved cancer units. I visited them one by one and came up empty-handed each time. By the time I reached the last one, I was pretty discouraged.

Instead of leaving the lights flashing, I searched around and found a real parking place in the lot outside Northgate General Hospital. I ignored the noisy horde of teenyboppers on their way to the latest teenybopper movie. They were having a great time, laughing and joking and shoving one another around. I wanted to tell them to shut up and pay attention, that there was a real world out there waiting for them.

Back in my car with yet another failure, I sat for a moment, resting my head on the steering wheel. I had struck out. Tired beyond bearing, I was determined to go on, if I could just figure out where I ought to go.

I tried to collect my thoughts. It was like corralling a herd of frightened, milling sheep. I kept after it, though, and gradually, as I sat there, order returned.

Going over every conversation with Candace Wynn, playing back each one in my mind, I picked out only those things she had told me about her mother. I remembered her saying she had visited her mother in the hospital during the third quarter of the game. That had to have been fairly late in the evening. After eight o'clock. Dave Rimbaugh had told us that much. To get to a hospital from Seattle Center before visiting hours ended, it must have been one fairly close at hand.

I got out of the car and walked back through the movie-going kids and into the waiting room at Northgate General Hospital. I walked up to the main desk.

"What's the closest hospital to Seattle Center?" I asked the young black receptionist. She turned to a much older lady sitting next to her.

"What do you think, Irene?"

Irene shrugged. "Group Health up at the end of Denny, or maybe Ballard Community."

I felt a faint surge of hope. Ballard Community wasn't that far from Seattle Center, and it wasn't that far from Fremont, where Candace Wynn lived, either. I charged out the door and back through the parking lot. When I started the Porsche and peeled out of the place, I left a few young high school bucks staring after me in openmouthed envy.

Parking on N.W. Fifty-third, I dashed into the hospital and was directed to their medical/surgical floor, 5-E. There, I tackled a lady in a bright pink jacket pushing a cart full of paperback books and newspapers down the hall. Her name tag said Mrs. Rasmussen-a good, old-fashioned Scandinavian name.