Without Due Process Read online

  J.A. JANCE

  WITHOUT DUE PROCESS

  To the Teddy Bear Patrol,

  people who give small comforts to small people

  CONTENTS

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  CHAPTER 1

  Back in the not-so-distant and not-so-good old days, I remember…

  CHAPTER 2

  Through some mysterious fluke of fate I happened to be…

  CHAPTER 3

  It seemed important to have Junior Weston well away from…

  CHAPTER 4

  With Junior safely on his way to his grandfather’s house…

  CHAPTER 5

  When the meeting broke up, Janice Morraine and I left…

  CHAPTER 6

  Simmons and Deddens offered to give me a lift back…

  CHAPTER 7

  Armed with Emma Jackson’s name and place of employment, I…

  CHAPTER 8

  In the years I’ve worked homicide, I’ve been through plenty…

  CHAPTER 9

  My pager woke me up an hour or so later.

  CHAPTER 10

  Kramer was ripped, both because of the speed of Reverend…

  CHAPTER 11

  I made it through dinner without falling asleep in my…

  CHAPTER 12

  I took what was left of my latte, bought one…

  CHAPTER 13

  On my way back to the department I slipped into…

  CHAPTER 14

  It was drizzling lightly as I set out up a…

  CHAPTER 15

  In my opinion, the Internal Investigations Section is a whole…

  CHAPTER 16

  I’ve never actually been in a horrible hurricane, but it…

  CHAPTER 17

  When I got back down to the fifth floor, I…

  CHAPTER 18

  Chief Rankin was not the least bit happy. While I…

  CHAPTER 19

  I drove like a maniac, but nobody pulled me over.

  CHAPTER 20

  Police officers live with the possibility of death every singe…

  CHAPTER 21

  By the time I left the hospital, there was no…

  CHAPTER 22

  At five o’clock in the morning, the sky was beginning…

  CHAPTER 23

  Captain Freeman didn’t wake up until I pulled to a…

  CHAPTER 24

  I went into the church itself. There I met another…

  CHAPTER 25

  The coffins were still being carried down the aisle when…

  CHAPTER 26

  For months now people in the media have complained bitterly…

  CHAPTER 27

  The Medic One unit came from Angle Lake. As soon…

  CHAPTER 28

  The next morning I was awakened by a strange scraping…

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PRAISE

  OTHER BOOKS BY J. A. JANCE

  COPYRIGHT

  ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Seattle and King County’s Teddy Bear Patrol is sponsored by area merchants and spearheaded by Radio Station KLSY. Anyone interested in starting a similar program in another location is welcome to contact the station in care of: Teddy Bear Patrol, 12011 N.E. 3rd Street, Bellevue, Washington 98005 for background and how-to information.

  J.A. Jance

  CHAPTER 1

  BACK IN THE NOT-SO-DISTANT AND NOT-SO-GOOD old days, I remember staying up until all hours every April 14 finishing up my income tax returns. It wasn’t because they were all that complicated because there was never that much money. No, the difficulty was always nothing more or less than an almost fatal tendency to procrastinate where income taxes are concerned. Once I had completed the dirty job, likely as not I’d reward myself with a couple of stiff belts of MacNaughton’s.

  A few things have changed since then, some of them for the better. For one, I’m trying, one day at a time, to keep away from Demon Rum. For another, thanks to Anne Corley, there’s a hell of a lot more money in my life, and as a consequence, a much more complicated income tax problem. These days, my relations with the IRS are handled by a CPA firm hired and supervised by my attorney and friend, Ralph Ames, whose presence in my life I also owe to Anne Corley. The only thing that hasn’t changed is my tendency to procrastinate.

  That’s why, on the evening of April 14, Ralph showed up around eight o’clock, bringing with him my completed but unsigned returns. The ink was still wet. Ralph, who has been through this exercise with me now a time or two, had held a gun to my accountant’s head and insisted that, no, we were not going to file for an extension.

  I fixed a pot of coffee, and for a while we sat in my living room window seat, visiting and watching the nighttime boat traffic crisscrossing the black expanse of Puget Sound. Finally, though, Ralph cleared his throat, switched on the table lamp, and handed me the weighty manila envelope. “Time to go to work,” he said.

  As I read over the return, I knew better than to expect to get anything back, but when I hit the bottom line and saw that the amount due equaled 80 percent of my annual take-home pay as a homicide detective for the Seattle Police Department, I about hit the roof.

  “You’ve got to be kidding! That’s how much I owe?”

  Ralph Ames nodded and grinned. “Can I help it if you’re making money hand over fist? We lucked into some very good investments this last year. Stop complaining and write the check, Beau. You can transfer in enough money to cover it tomorrow or the next day.”

  First I signed the return, then I reached for the checkbook. With pen in hand I paused long enough to verify that astonishing figure one last time. “What’s the point in working then?” I demanded irritably. “Why bother to show up down at the department day after day?”

  Ralph waited patiently for me to finish writing the check. When I handed it over to him, he put both the signed return and the check on the coffee table.

  “Good question.” He smiled. “Seems to me I’ve mentioned that very thing to you a time or two myself. You need to lighten up, Beau. Work less, learn to have some fun, maybe even find yourself a woman. That’s an idea. Whatever happened to Marilyn? I haven’t seen her around here for some time.”

  Marilyn Sykes, the former chief of police on Mercer Island, had been a sometime thing, someone to chum around with and take to bed occasionally until she up and turned serious on me. With a lucrative job offer from Santa Clara, California, in hand, she had come to me with an ultimatum to either get with the program as in marriage or else forget it because she was leaving. She took the job in Santa Clara.

  “She got married,” I said. “Just before Christmas last year. To some big-time electronics wizard down in California. She sent me an announcement.”

  “You’ll get over her eventually,” Ralph said.

  I shrugged. “It wasn’t that big a thing, really.”

  Ralph shook his head. “I wasn’t talking about Marilyn Sykes,” he said carefully.

  Without another word, I got up and went to the kitchen to get more coffee. Ralph Ames was one of the few people who knew just how big a hole Anne Corley’s death had torn in my heart. It’s not something I like to advertise. Years later, I still don’t much want to talk about it. Not even with Ralph.

  For a few minutes I avoided the subject by dinking around in the kitchen and making one more pot of coffee. Then, just as the coffee finished, I was saved by the bell in the guise of a timely phone call that cut off all further discussion.

  The familiar voice on the other end of the line belonged to Sergeant Watkins, the day desk sergeant in Homicide. My partner, Detective “Big Al” Lindstrom and I were on call that night, so the phone call was no particular surprise. What was surprising was
for Watty to be making the call rather than the nightshift sergeant. Not only that, he sounded genuinely relieved to hear my voice.

  “Glad you’re okay, Beau,” he said. “I’m more worried about the guys who don’t live in secure high rises. Big Al’s all right too, by the way. I just checked. He’s coming in from Ballard right now. I told him to stop by and pick you up. We need you both down at the department ASAP. I’ll meet you there.”

  That meant Watty had called me from home. His coming back into the department at night was more than slightly out of the ordinary, so something was definitely up. “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “A call came in to nine-one-one about forty minutes ago. The guy claims to have killed a police officer and wiped out his entire family. The chief has all supervisors checking with individual squad members by phone. Wherever we get no answer, we’re sending out cars to check.”

  “It must have sounded pretty legit,” I said.

  “You’d better believe it. Enough to get everyone moving in high gear. So far nothing’s turned up, but my guess is not everyone’s been called yet, either.”

  “What about us?”

  “The chief wants detectives lined up and ready to move at a moment’s notice. That’s where you and Detective Lindstrom come in. The night shift told me you two were on deck.”

  “Right,” I said. “Can you give us any more information? What exactly was said? Where did the call originate?”

  King County’s Enhanced 911 system shows a visual display of the originating address for all emergency phone calls. This allows the operators to have accurate address information to forward on to police, fire, and medic personnel.

  “Not now,” Watty replied. “No time. I’m not done with my calling yet. I’ll finish briefing you once we’re all down at the office. Gotta go.”

  The call-waiting signal on my own telephone buzzed impatiently, announcing that I had another call on the other line. “Me, too,” I told him. “That’s probably Big Al now, calling to say he’s downstairs.”

  I switched to the other line and heard the bearlike Detective Lindstrom growling into the receiver. “I’m here, Beau. Hurry it up, will you? Watty’s climbing the walls on this one.”

  Big Al didn’t sound any too happy about being out and about. As far as partners go, he’s not bad, but he tends to be surly when he’s short on sleep. After buzzing Big Al into the lobby, I put the phone down and went back into the living room, where Ralph was finishing licking the flap on the official IRS envelope. He looked up at me as I slipped on my bulletproof vest and fastened my shoulder holster in place.

  “Duty calls?” he asked. I nodded.

  “Want me to see that this gets in the mail?”

  “Thanks, Ralph. That would be great. Send it certified, return receipt requested. I don’t trust those guys any further than I can throw them, and I sure as hell don’t need Uncle Sugar on my butt for missing the deadline.”

  “When will you be back?”

  I knew that if the anonymous 911 caller had told the truth and that we really were dealing with a multiple homicide, it was going to be a long, terrible night.

  “Don’t wait up,” I said. “There’s no telling. Some asshole claims he’s killed a cop and several other people besides. With any kind of luck it’s somebody’s idea of a bad joke.”

  “I hope so,” Ralph said.

  “Me too,” I added grimly.

  He followed me to the door as I made my way into the elevator lobby and pushed the down button. “Sorry if I upset you a minute ago,” he said. “I didn’t mean to pry, but when the two of us are together, it seems like I can’t help thinking about her.”

  Until that very moment, it hadn’t occurred to me that I wasn’t the only one who hadn’t managed to get past the pain of Anne Corley’s death. And I wasn’t the only dummy she had led around by the nose, either.

  “Don’t worry about it, Ralph,” I said as the elevator door swished open. “It’s no big deal.”

  He was still standing there looking at me, when the door shut and the elevator started its descent. I usually use the twenty-five-story elevator ride as a pressurization chamber, a place to switch gears from home to work and vice versa, but I was still thinking about Anne and Ralph and me when the door opened and I saw Big Al striding back and forth across Belltown Terrace’s marbled lobby while the building’s uniformed doorman cowered nervously behind his rosewood writing desk and pretended to read a book.

  One look at Big Al’s impatient face told me he for one believed the 911 call was the real McCoy. There had been a total changing of the guard in the top echelons of Seattle PD, and the honeymoon period had been brief enough to be almost nonexistent. The new chief was rumored to be a closet racist, while word was out on the streets that someone somewhere was taking payoffs. In previously scandal-free Seattle, community relations had plummeted. Verbal abuse and threats against police officers were up as were outright physical attacks. Maybe the top brass weren’t directly affected by all this, but it was no surprise that the middle managers, people like Watty and Captain Powell, were taking this latest telephoned threat in dead earnest.

  “Come on,” Big Al said, heading for the door as soon as he saw me. “Let’s get going.”

  “You don’t think this is just some kind of a kook?”

  “Are you kidding?”

  I followed him out to the curb and clambered into the car with a knot of apprehension solidifying in the pit of my stomach. If Big Al was right, if Watty was, somewhere in the city of Seattle, a police officer was dead. Chances are, whoever he was, that cop was someone I knew.

  “Where are we going?” I asked as we started down Second Avenue.

  “To the department. Watty says they have a car waiting for us in the garage. We’re supposed to call in as soon as we’re back out on the street.”

  At night, there’s hardly ever a shortage of on-street parking outside the Public Safety Building. We left Big Al’s Ciera parked half a block away and hoofed it into the garage. Marty Sampson, the nighttime garage supervisor, was standing in the guard shack along with the attendant. They both seemed so mesmerized by something that they didn’t even see us until we were directly on top of them. It turned out they were staring at their radio.

  “Hey, guys,” Big Al said, jarring them awake. “What’s happening? Which car is ours?”

  When Marty looked up at us, his face reminded me of someone awakened from a terrible nightmare. “That one,” he said, pointing. “And hurry. An officer-down call came in a few minutes ago. Watty wants you there, pronto.”

  “Where?”

  “Down in the south end someplace. The street’s Cascadia. I don’t know the exact address. You can get that once you’re on your way.”

  Big Al and I sprinted to the car, climbed in, and shot out of the garage with lights and siren both going full blast. With Big Al driving, I ran the radio, giving our position and letting Dispatch know we were on our way.

  It was several moments before a harried-sounding dispatcher radioed back to us directly. The people who work in Dispatch, officers and civilians alike, pride themselves in maintaining professional composure no matter what, but this one was having a tough time of it. She was so choked up I could barely make out the street name, Cascadia. Once again the exact address got lost in the shuffle while she plunged on with the rest of the transmission.

  “Officer down. We’ve got uniforms and emergency vehicles on the scene. They’ve called for detectives. That’s all I can tell you so far.”

  No doubt that was all she could say over the air due to the many unofficial ears that routinely monitor official police channels, but her emotion-charged voice allowed my imagination to fill in some chilling blanks.

  By then we were careening down the far side of First Hill. “Repeat that address,” Big Al said forcefully into the radio. “We didn’t catch it the first time.”

  This time the numbers came through clear as a bell, and I thought I was a dead man.


  “Dear God in heaven!” Big Al roared, simultaneously slamming on the brakes. By a mere fraction of an inch we avoided rear-ending a hapless taxi whose oblivious driver had meandered into our path.

  “Hey, watch it,” I yelped, grabbing at the dash with an outstretched arm. “You could get us killed.”

  “No,” Big Al said.

  “What the hell do you mean ‘no’? You missed that guy by less than an inch.”

  But Big Al Lindstrom didn’t seem to be listening. “Son of a bitch!” he exclaimed, pounding the steering wheel with both gigantic hands, which meant that he wasn’t holding on with any. The whole car seemed to shudder from the force of the blow. The idea of Big Al pitching a temper tantrum at any time is daunting enough, but having him do it in a car which he was supposedly driving at the time was downright terrifying.

  “What the hell’s going on?” I demanded. “What’s the matter with you?”

  “It’s Ben. They got Gentle Ben. That’s his address.”

  The lump in my gut turned to solid ice. “Are you sure?” I asked, all the while knowing he was.

  “Yes,” Big Al replied in a snarl of rage. “I know it as well as I do my own.”

  Maybe for some people the words “Gentle Ben” evoke only memories of an old, forgettable TV series, but in the parlance of Seattle PD, they referred to just one person—Benjamin Harrison Weston, known to friend and foe alike as Gentle Ben.

  Years earlier, Big Al and Ben had worked together when they were both new detectives in the Property division. Except for the distinct difference in skin color, they might have been twins. Massively built yet easygoing, plodding but amazingly thorough, the burly Norwegian and his African-American colleague always left a singular impression on those who had any dealings with them. After six months of working together, diverging career paths had led them in different directions—Big Al into Homicide and Ben into Patrol, but a genuine affection existed between them. Through the years the former partners had stayed in touch.