J. Jance - Second Watch

By late Sunday afternoon, while we were still tramping around in the blackberry bushes on Magnolia Bluff, Hannah and Eugene Wellington had driven over to Seattle from Leavenworth. They were doing a full-court press on local television news outlets pleading for information about their missing daughter. One of the guys in missing persons, David Larson, who was interviewed by a local reporter and who had seen a photo of the missing coed, happened to hear that Larry and Watty were investigating a possible homicide. David took it upon himself to bring a copy of the photo to the morgue.

By the time Doc Baker got the layer of grease washed off the body, it was clear that the girl in the photo matched the face of the victim. The Wellingtons were staying at a low-cost motel up on Aurora, and Watty was dispatched with the unenviable job of giving them the bad news that an unidentified body had been found and that there was a good chance the victim would turn out to be their daughter. Watty was also tasked with bringing the parents to the morgue to do the ID.

I didn’t know about any of this at the time because Mac and I were still too busy chowing down at Dick’s, but Watty told me much later that Eugene Wellington, all six feet six of him, wept like a baby, all the way from the motel to the morgue. Once there, he was the one who fainted dead away when it came time to identify the body. It was Hannah, the mother, all five feet two of her, who made the identification and then helped her sobbing, grieving giant of a husband out of the room.

As for Mac and me? We finished out our shift and our burgers and went home.

Back when Karen and I were in the market for our first house, Boeing was going through a world of hurt. That meant the local real estate market was in the toilet, which is how we’d lucked into and been able to afford our place on Lake Tapps.

The house was one of those Pan Abode manufactured homes, built of cut cedar logs and then put together elsewhere. Ours was one of the early models that had been built in the fifties. The original owner was halfway through a do-it-yourself remodel when he died of a heart attack. His widow blamed the house for doing him in and wanted nothing more to do with it.

That’s why we got the place for such a bargain-basement price, but some of the projects that were left unfinished by the previous owner remained unfinished on my watch, too, and that continued to be a big bone of contention between Karen and me. She had one little kid, was pregnant with another, and wanted things done yesterday. I spent all week working and didn’t want to spend my days off working on the house.

Lake Tapps is thirty-five miles south of Seattle. On a good day or late at night, I could get from downtown Seattle to the house in about forty minutes. During busy times of the day, the same trip could take an hour or longer. I used that time to decompress—to put the job away.

And that was how I used the drive that night. It was somewhere between the Public Safety Building and home that I finally realized what was wrong with the place where we found the barrel. There was no path there leading up the hill, no reason for the boys to have gone there. From the bottom to the top, the bluff had been covered with blackberry brambles. That realization brought me to a simple question: What had Donnie and Frankie been doing there?

It was an interesting question, but there wasn’t much to do about it right then. I was in my VW bug. If I called to talk to Larry or Watty about it, I’d have to make a long-distance call from our home phone. We weren’t dead broke, but with only one of us working, we were in a financial situation where pinching pennies was a necessity. Making unnecessary long-distance calls was not considered essential.

Monday and Tuesday were my regular days off. I figured the next time I went to work would be soon enough to broach that topic with the detectives. In the meantime, I did my best to put the Girl in the Barrel out of my head.

Monday was full of doctors’ appointments. Karen had a prenatal checkup. Scott needed to see his pediatrician for some vaccination or another. I had a choice: I could stay home by myself all day—never a good option in Karen’s book—or I could drive them both from one appointment to the next. So that’s what we did. By the time we got back home, Scotty was screaming his head off while Karen and I weren’t speaking. I chalked it up to a hormone malfunction and made the best of it. She went off to bed in a huff right after dinner. I poured myself a drink and then settled into my brand-new recliner to watch Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In without ever making it to the Monday-night movie.

The next day I spent pretty much on my hands and knees trying to fix an intractable plumbing problem in the house’s sole bathroom. By the time Wednesday came around, I was more than happy to go back to work. When I got to roll call, I was surprised that Mac was nowhere to be seen.

“Where’s Rory MacPherson?” I asked Sergeant Rayburn when roll call was over. “If Mac’s not here, who am I supposed to ride with?”

“Go see Detective Watkins on the fifth floor,” he said.

“But where’s Mac?” I began.

“Moved over to Motorcycles. Now get your butt upstairs like I told you.”

Arguing with Sergeant Rayburn was never a good idea, so I got in the Public Safety Building’s disturbingly slow elevators and creaked my way to the fifth floor. It was a maze of gunmetal gray cubicles surrounding a center office where Captain Tommy Tompkins held sway.

The walls to Captain Tompkins’s office were made of glass, which, despite the closed door, made everything that went on in there pretty much an open book, hence the moniker the Fishbowl.

In this instance, Detectives Watkins and Powell were sitting like errant schoolboys in the principal’s office and being given a dressing-down. After asking a passerby for directions to Watty’s cubicle, I scurried off there and hid out. Word of Captain Tompkins’s incredibly foul temper had filtered throughout the building, even as far as Patrol. If he was reading someone the riot act, I didn’t want to be within range of the captain’s notoriously sharp-tongued verbal onslaughts.

When Watty appeared at the door of his cubicle a few minutes later, he took one look at me and shook his head. It was the kind of welcome look people dish out when a new arrival has not only stepped in fresh dog crap but also walked it into the house and onto the carpet.

“Great,” he grumbled. “Just what I need this morning—a baby detective, fresh from Patrol, for me to babysit.”

I didn’t quite get it. Yes, I had taken the exam for detective, and I’d done all right on it, too—my score had been in the midnineties. That counted as a respectable score, even if it wasn’t one that made you full of yourself. I had also been told there were currently no openings in Homicide, as in not a single one.

“I don’t know who you know or what kind of strings you pulled to make this happen,” Watty continued. “And having you dropped like a fifth wheel into an already ongoing homicide case doesn’t do anybody any favors. As of right now, you’re working days. Be here by eight on the dot. Got it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You’ll go home when Detective Powell and I tell you you’re done for the day,” he continued. “We’ll give you a partner to work with when Larry and I say you’re ready to have a partner. In the meantime, you’ll be doing whatever grunt work we hand you. You will do it cheerfully, with zero complaints, starting by getting me coffee from downstairs—cream and three sugars. And by the time I see you again, I want you to ditch the damned uniform. Understood?”

I replied with another “Yes, sir.”