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  “Or else it never happened,” I suggested grimly.

  “You mean you think that was a lie as well?”

  Gradually the full extent of Pete Kelsey's betrayal was beginning to sink into Maxwell Cole's consciousness. A friendship of twenty years' standing was tumbling down around his ears like a house of cards.

  “Why not?” I returned. “Since everything else was, why not that, too?”

  “I can't take it all in,” Max said. “I can't understand it. “I don't want to understand it.” Abruptly Max stood up. “I hope that's all the questions for now, because I need to hurry over to see Erin.” He started out of the room and then paused and looked at me. “Do you suppose she's still at the Riggs' place? That's right here on Queen Anne.”

  “You can check,” I said. “My guess is that no matter what Kelsey said, Erin stayed where she was last night. At home. And the grandparents probably stayed with her.”

  With a sigh and a shake of his head, Max continued on into the kitchen to use the phone. I followed behind. Without having to look it up in the book, he punched in the Riggs' phone number. He let it ring and ring, but there was no answer. He dialed another number, again from memory.

  “Hello, George,” he said at once. Suspicions confirmed. The grandparents were indeed still at the house on Crockett. “Is Erin there?” Max asked, and after George responded, Max added quickly, “No, no. Don't get her. This is Max. Maxwell Cole. I'm coming over to see her. Tell her to wait for me.” He paused and then added fiercely, “Don't let her listen to the radio or watch television while she's waiting.”

  There was another pause while George Riggs asked a question. “Yes, there's something wrong,” Max acknowledged reluctantly, “but I don't want to talk about it over the phone. Just have Erin wait there. It's very important.”

  I followed Max out the door and down the walk to his waiting Volvo. He moved with a wooden, stiff-legged gait, like an aging, over-weight toy soldier. I didn't envy him his errand. He was going to have to deliver the news that the last bastion of Erin Kelsey's world was collapsing.

  Not only was her mother dead and her father in jail, her father wasn't who he had always claimed to be. That meant Erin wasn't who she thought she was, either.

  Both Max and Erin had been betrayed by Pete Kelsey's web of lies and deceit. Both would be wounded by it.

  Watching Maxwell Cole drive dejectedly away through the gray and suddenly overcast day, I wouldn't have bet money either way about which one was going to be more hurt.

  It was a moment after Max had driven out of sight before I realized I was standing there aching for him, and even while it was happening, I couldn't quite believe it.

  If, two days earlier, any one of a dozen people had tried to tell me that before the week was out, I'd be standing on Maxwell Cole's doorstep feeling sorry for that poor, miserable bastard, I would have laughed in their faces and called them outright liars. Or crazy.

  But they weren't, because I was.

  Chapter 22

  It was well after five by the time I got back to the department. To get to my cubicle, I had to walk directly past Captain Powell's fishbowl. Normally his glass-enclosed office would have been deserted at that hour, but on this particular afternoon it was standing room only. Captain Powell himself was there, along with Margie and Sergeant Watkins. Detective Kramer had assumed center stage and was busy playing up-roar.

  “So I get outta court,” Kramer was noisily complaining. His voice rumbled through the open door and down the hallway as I came toward them. “I get outta court, and what do I find? Without saying a word to me, Beaumont has arrested this suspect, this Pete Kelsey character, and locked him up on some ancient charge of desertion. The booking paper doesn't say word one about what's going on with our case.”

  “And where's Beaumont in all this? Nowhere to be found, that's where. Can't raise him on the radio. Can't get him to respond to his pager. The guys who brought Kelsey in tell me they left Detective Beaumont up on Queen Anne talking to some lousy reporter. His own partner can't find out a damn thing, but he's got time to give some cretin reporter a goddamned blow-by-blow interview.”

  No one seemed aware of my stopping in the doorway, except for Captain Powell, who looked at me with one eyebrow raised quizzically. The half smile on his face made me think he was glad to see me. He nodded and gave a brief, welcoming wave, but when he didn't speak, I did.

  “I take it somebody here's looking for me?”

  Kramer swung around, his face simmering with suppressed anger. “You're damn right I am! Where the hell have you been? Why didn't you answer your pager?”

  “I've been working, Kramer. How about you?”

  Casually I reached across him and passed Margie the two reports I had completed in the Doghouse earlier that afternoon. “Make two copies of those when you have time, would you please, Margie. Give one to Sergeant Watkins and the other to Detective Kramer here. He'll want to read them too.”

  “Was your pager off, Detective Beaumont?” Captain Powell asked mildly. The captain isn't the flappable type. If he had been, I would have been bounced out of Homicide long ago.

  I took the pager out of my pocket and checked it. Sure enough, the switch had been turned to off. I turned it back on.

  “Sorry about that, Captain,” I said. “I don't have any idea when that happened. I must have accidentally switched it off the last time I used it.”

  Captain Powell smiled. “No problem.”

  “But it is a problem,” Watty objected. “The point is, you were totally incommunicado for well over an hour while people were looking for you, Detective Beaumont. Your partner was looking for you. This squad isn't set up to consist of several dozen lone wolves. Teamwork, remember?”

  Here I was, back in the wrong with Watty one more time.

  I tried to explain my actions. “Look, Watty, I was talking to Max--Maxwell Cole--trying to find out as much about Kelsey as I could before I came back down here to interview him. That's standard procedure. The more you know before you question a suspect, the better your chances are of uncovering something important.”

  Sergeant Watkins stood up with an impatient shake of his head and moved past me into the hallway, where he stopped to deliver his parting remark. “That's all very well, Beau, and I'm sure we'll see whatever you learned detailed in your reports, but in the meantime I want you to remember that you owe it to this department and to your fellow officers to stay in contact at all times. That's why the city invested all that money in electronic pagers. Leave the son of a bitch on! Do we understand one another?”

  “Yes.”

  Watty nodded curtly to Captain Powell and the others, then he disappeared down the hall-way, with Margie trailing fast on his heels. I could feel my ears glowing hot and red in the bright fluorescent lighting. Tongue-lashings should never be a spectator sport, and Detective Kramer was enjoying my discomfort.

  Captain Powell, too, must have noticed the smug look on Kramer's face. “That'll be enough of that, Detective Kramer. Sit down, both of you, and let me know a little of what's been going on today. I don't want to have to wait for written reports.”

  So I told them briefly what I'd learned from Freddie Petrie and Rex Pierson. When I started telling them about my Doghouse meeting with Maxwell Cole, Kramer began squirming impatiently in his chair. He was still operating under the illusion that Max and I were long-term best pals, but the captain knew better than almost anyone in the department that the connection between me and Maxwell Cole was anything but cordial.

  “We knew, going in, that Max has been friends with Pete Kelsey for twenty years, and with Marcia Kelsey for a lot longer than that,” I explained. “Last night, after Kelsey ditched us at the house on Capitol Hill, Kelsey went to Max's house and asked to spend the night.”

  “So your friend Cole was harboring a criminal,” Kramer said.

  “He's not my friend,” I objected, “and he was doing no such thing. Cole didn't know what had happened over on Cro
ckett, because Pete Kelsey didn't tell him. Cole knew nothing about our finding the gun, and he had no idea Kelsey was a fugitive.”

  “And I suppose next you're going to tell us that Max had no idea about Kelsey's deserter status.”

  “Actually, that's true,” I said agreeably. “He knew Kelsey, not Madsen, and Kelsey was a Canadian. Why should he think the guy's a deserter? The first Max knew about any of this was this afternoon.”

  “Sounds to me like you blabbed everything you know. The entire city will be dissecting our case over breakfast and the morning P.-I. tomorrow. Terrific!”

  Detective Kramer could piss me off in less time than anyone I know. My ears were no longer glowing, but I had an idea my blood pressure was sneaking up.

  “Look, Kramer,” I snapped back at him. “It wasn't that kind of interview. You already know that Maxwell Cole is intimately involved with this case, that he's the one who introduced Pete and Marcia years ago. He's not going to be writing a story about this. His involvement here is strictly personal, not professional. I wanted some insight into their relationship, and Max gave it to me.”

  When I realized I was defending Maxwell Cole in public, no one could have been more surprised than I was, including Captain Powell.

  “Some relationship!” Kramer snorted. “That broad was screwing everything in pants and some that weren't. What he writes about that isn't going to help our case either. People will read about it and think her husband's a hero, that we ought to give him a medal.”

  Captain Powell was losing patience. “You do have a point, Detective Kramer,” he said placatingly. “But from what you're telling us about the friendship between Cole and the Kelseys, it seems highly unlikely that Mr. Cole will put anything in his column that would in any way jeopardize the investigation. So are you two going to interview Kelsey now?”

  “That was my plan,” I replied. “I don't know about Detective Kramer. You'll have to ask him.”

  “I'm in,” Kramer said.

  Powell turned to Kramer. “Oh, by the way, did you ever have a chance to tell Detective Beaumont about what the search warrant turned up this morning?”

  With that one quiet question, Powell changed the entire tenor in the room, took me off the hot seat and put Detective Kramer there in my place. He was already squirming as he stammered his answer. “I tried, but like I said, I couldn't raise him on the pager.”

  “What?” I demanded, enjoying the idea that Powell's knife could cut both ways. We'd been so busy discussing what I hadn't told Kramer that no one had mentioned what he might not have told me.

  “A casing,” Kramer replied sullenly. “A .25 CCI-Blazer casing in the same underwear drawer where they found the gun.”

  “That's not all,” Captain Powell prompted. “Tell him the rest.”

  “And a pair of trousers, blue with light blue piping.”

  “Chambers' uniform?”

  Kramer nodded. “We're pretty sure. Charlotte Chambers' son is going to bring her down here this evening to see whether or not she can identify them.”

  “Where were they?”

  “Out in Mr. Clean's garage. The trousers had been freshly laundered, and the shoes had been cleaned and polished. The lab's checking the shoes especially for blood.”

  “And then I have some additional news for both of you,” Powell put in. “The answer to the question of why there were two guns used instead of only one. The Browning jammed on that hollow-point ammo with only one shell expended, so the killer had to find himself another weapon. Chambers' .38 was the only one available.”

  Powell finished and was quiet while I assimilated what we'd learned. “It sounds like a pretty tight case,” I said at last.

  “Tight!” Kramer yelped. “It's not just tight, it's foolproof, open and shut. Kelsey had motive and opportunity both, we found the murder weapon and some of the victim's clothing in the man's house, so will you tell me why the hell desertion is the only damn thing on his booking sheet?”

  “Because that's all we know for sure so far. How about if we go talk to the man and see if we can find out anything else.”

  “Good idea,” Captain Powell said.

  They brought Pete Kelsey/John David Madsen to one of the windowed interview rooms on the fifth floor. He was wearing jail-issue orange coveralls, matching slippers, and an air of stubborn determination.

  “Good evening, Mr. Madsen,” I said cordially as he took a seat at the bare wooden table. “Is your attorney meeting you here?”

  “I don't have an attorney,” he answered, “and my name is Pete Kelsey. That's what I want to be called.”

  “But you have been read your rights, haven't you, Mr. Madsen?” I continued, pointedly disregarding his wishes. I wanted to put the man on notice that this wasn't a walk in the park and it was high time he paid attention.

  “You know you have the right to counsel and if you can't afford one, an attorney will be appointed for you?”

  “I already know all that. Just tell me what you want to know.”

  “How long have you known your wife was having an affair with Andrea Stovall?” I asked bluntly.

  “It's always been there, in the background. The security guard was a surprise, but I've known about Andrea from the beginning.”

  “What changed?”

  Kelsey/Madsen stared at me blankly. “What do you mean, what changed?”

  “Just exactly that. Andrea tried to warn your wife that you were on a rampage because of something you'd been told. What did you know then, the night of the murder, that you didn't know before?”

  Kelsey hunched his shoulders. “I didn't want all this to come out, to become so much public gossip.”

  “What did you find out that night?” I insisted.

  “That she was leaving me. After all these years, she had decided to go live with Andrea as soon as school got out.”

  “How did you find that out?”

  Suddenly a dam broke somewhere inside the man's previously unflappable calm. He buried his face in his hands. “Oh God, I didn't want any of this to come out. Why are you insisting on bringing it out? I knew it would hurt George and Belle and Erin if they ever found out the truth, and as long as Marcia kept her part of the bargain, it didn't matter that much to me.”

  “You still haven't answered the question,” I insisted.

  “A phone call,” he said.

  “A phone call? You told us about some threatening calls, harassing calls.”

  Kelsey shook his head. “I didn't tell you about this one, because I hoped you'd never find out about it. The call came on Sunday night, quite a while after Marcia left.”

  “Who was it?”

  “A woman, I didn't recognize the voice, laughing hysterically. She told me Marcia was going to run away with Andrea, but all the while she kept laughing and laughing, like it was the funniest thing she had ever heard.”

  “You're sure you didn't recognize the voice?”

  “No. At first I thought it was Erin. I was afraid she was having car trouble and was calling for help, but it turned out not to be her at all.”

  “So who was it?”

  “I don't know. She didn't say. Wouldn't say, but what was scary was how much she knew, or seemed to know. She said Marcia wasn't working at all, that she was at Andrea's. She even told me where Andrea lived. In all the years, I've never known that, never wanted to. That's not all, either. She said that Marcia was going to break her word to me, her promise, and go live with Andrea.”

  Pete had said the words in a rush, and now he was silent.

  “Did she tell you anything else?”

  “No. She couldn't.”

  “Couldn't? Why not?”

  “Because she was laughing, Detective Beaumont, laughing hysterically! I've never heard anything like it.”

  “What did you do after the phone call?”

  “What do you think? I went to find them.”

  “Why?”

  “To try to get her to change her mind, but she was
n't there. I tried the office first, then Andrea's apartment, and later I tried the school district office again. So then I went by the school district. Nobody answered my ring the first time, and when I went back the second time, her car was gone. Actually, it's probably a good thing I didn't find her.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I didn't trust myself, Detective Beaumont. Because I might have killed her. I was right at the end of my rope. Later on, after I cooled off, I got to thinking that if the person who called was wrong about them being together at the apartment, maybe she was wrong about the rest of it too. Maybe Marcia wasn't going to leave me after all.”