J. Jance - Second Watch

I doubt Chief Hamlin was thrilled when she learned that Squad B, under Harry’s leadership, would be the ones handling the investigation into her department and being responsible for pulling her bacon out of the fire—or not. After all, years earlier in her role as assistant chief, Ms. Hamlin had been the prime mover behind Harry’s being given his walking papers from that very same department.

Sometimes what goes around really does come around. Of course, Harry wouldn’t ever leave some poor street cop hanging out to dry just to get even. He insisted that the investigation be scrupulously unbiased, which is why, as soon as it came up on Friday, Harry had put Mel in charge. She had spent Saturday and Sunday in Bellingham conducting interviews, and had returned to Seattle late Sunday evening so she could be on tap Monday morning for my surgery.

“You know you can’t do that,” I said. “Harry needs you.”

“Veronica Hamlin is a witch,” Mel said. “She’d sell those two poor cops down the river in a minute if she didn’t think that ultimately it would make her look bad.”

“Which is why you need to go to work instead of hanging around here looking after me.”

“What’s the matter?” Keith asked, grinning at her. “Don’t you trust us?”

A lady waltzed into the room carrying my breakfast tray. The food looked better than it tasted. The omelet was rubbery, the orange juice was anything but fresh squeezed, the toast was unbuttered and cold, and the coffee was only remotely related to the high-test stuff we make at home, but I was hungry enough that I ate it all. And I was glad when Mel gave me a breezy good-bye peck on the cheek and then took off rather than sitting there watching me eat.

True to Keith’s word, the PT ladies appeared the moment breakfast was over. Once again, they pried me out of bed. Then they put a second hospital gown on backward to cover my backside while we hit the corridor and walked. I wasn’t as worried this time, not as much as I had been the day before. I noticed that there were lovely pieces of art lining the wall—something that had escaped my notice the day before. I also noticed that this time the nurses’ station didn’t seem nearly as far away as it had the first time we went there. I climbed back into bed, proud of myself and thinking that was it for the day.

“Oh no,” the therapist told me with a laugh. “Next up is occupational therapy. They’ll be here in an hour or so. Those are the people who will teach you to go up and down stairs and get in and out of beds and cars.”

Again, I wanted to say, “Already?” I guess it would have been more of a whine than a question, but my ringing cell phone spared me from embarrassing myself.

“How’s it hanging?” Harry asked.

I already warned you that the man doesn’t have a politically correct bone in his body.

“Better than I expected,” I said.

“Thanks for insisting that Mel come in,” he said. “I need her bird-dogging the situation in Bellingham. Can’t afford to have any screwups on that one. With you out of play, she’s the best man for the job. Do you need anything?”

“No,” I told him. “I’m fine.”

By then call waiting was letting me know I had yet another caller.

“Gotta go, Harry. My son’s on the line.”

“Hey, Dad,” Scott said. “How’s it going?”

“I’m fine,” I said. “The surgery went well. They’ve had me up walking twice so far, and the pain’s not bad at all.”

The lack of pain probably had more to do with the meds they were plugging into my body than it did with the success of the procedure, but I kept quiet about that. Most of the time when people ask how you’re doing, they’re looking for your basic generic answer. If someone asks you, “How was your root canal?” they most likely don’t want chapter and verse. That was the case here, too. Scott wanted to know how I was. He didn’t need to know the gory details about the bloody drain bags the medical folk laughingly referred to as “grenades” or about the weirdly vivid dreams that kept taking me down memory lane. Now that I thought about it, I noticed I hadn’t mentioned the dreams to Mel, either. Call it a sin of omission.

There were several more telephone calls from well-wishers after Scott’s. They came in one after another. By then the meds I had taken earlier were kicking in and I was ready to stop talking. How many times can you say “I’m fine” without sounding curmudgeonly? When the occupational therapist finally showed up with her walker, I was more than ready to leave the phone in my room and do another forced march down the hall. Once that was over, I was happy to go back to bed, where I did myself the favor of first taking myself out of circulation by pulling the plug on my bedside phone and then switching off my cell.

I slept for a while before they woke me up for lunch. At that point I was beginning to feel bored, so I switched on the TV set. Nothing was on. My iPad was under lock and key in the closet, so I asked the next nurse who came to check my vitals to get it out for me.

People who know me well understand that I had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the computer age, first protesting the existence of cell phones and then trying to cling to a typewriter when Seattle PD was switching over to computers. So the idea that I would fall in love with my iPad was not exactly a foregone conclusion, but when Kelly and Scott teamed up to give me one for Father’s Day this year, I was hooked. I’ve even taken to doing my crossword puzzles on it.

In this instance I wasn’t looking for crossword clues. I wanted to know about whatever happened to Hannah and Eugene Wellington in the years since their daughter’s lifeless body had been found in a barrel of stale grease at the bottom of Magnolia Bluff. I had met them at Monica’s funeral, and going to her memorial service in the picturesque town of Leavenworth was one of my first official detective duties when I moved up to the fifth floor.

As soon as I googled the words “Eugene Wellington, Leavenworth, Washington,” the first link was to the man’s obituary:

Eugene Harold Wellington, a lifelong Leavenworth resident, succumbed after a brief illness. For many years he and his wife operated the Apple Inn outside Leavenworth before it was lost to a forest fire. Services are pending with Wiseman Funeral Chapel. Mr. Wellington is survived by his wife of fifty-five years, Hannah; his son, James; and three grandchildren. He was preceded in death by his beloved daughter, Monica.

What rocked me about that was how little there was of it—a whole life summed up in less than a hundred words. I remembered Eugene as a tall, powerfully built man whose rugged six feet six frame seemed crushed by the terrible weight of losing his daughter. At the funeral, just as Watty had told me about the trip to the morgue, Eugene was the one who sobbed inconsolably all through the service, while his tiny wife had sat stoically beside him, like a dry-eyed sparrow poised to take wing.

Letting the iPad drop onto my chest, I lay there recalling every detail of that first grueling week, the beginning of my career in Homicide.