Until Proven Guilty Read online

  We finally called it quits about four a.m., so tired we couldn’t make our eyes work anymore. I invited Peters to stay over with me, but he wanted to go on home to Kirkland, out in the suburbs across Lake Washington. He in turn offered me a ride home, but I wanted to walk.

  “It’ll settle me down so I can sleep.”

  I walked down Fourth. Most city dwellers avoid deserted streets late at night. They’re afraid of being mugged; but then, most people don’t pack a loaded .38 Smith and Wesson under their jacket.

  Seattle is a deep-water port situated on Elliott Bay in Puget Sound. Huge container and grain ships ply the waters just off the ends of piers that jut out at the foot of steep hills. Although the water isn’t more than five blocks from where I live, I seldom smell the ocean. That morning, though, the wind was blowing a storm in across the sound, and the pungent odor of saltwater permeated the air.

  I walked with hands shoved in pockets against suddenly chill air. Maxwell Cole came to mind as I walked. He’s had it in for me ever since I beat him out with Karen, and for the last twenty-five years of my life it seems like he’s always been around, always there to ding me. He was the reporter who covered the shooting when I was just a rookie.

  A crazy kid holed up with a gun, and I had to shoot him. He was the only man I ever killed, a boy really, eighteen years old. It tore me up. For weeks afterward I couldn’t eat or sleep. All the while my good ole buddy Max, my fraternity brother Max, was playing it to the hilt, interviewing the boy’s widowed mother, distraught girlfriend, stunned neighbors, making me sound like a bloodthirsty monster. A department review officially exonerated me, but exonerations don’t capture headlines. His coverage of that one incident created a killer-cop legend that twenty years of quality police work hasn’t dented.

  My relationship with Maxwell Cole is anything but cordial, yet, whenever I encounter him in public, he always acts like an old pal has just snubbed him. Old pal hell! As far as I’m concerned, it always takes a monumental effort at self-control just to keep from decking him. I walked into the lobby of my condo, the Royal Crest, feeling some elation that once more I hadn’t hit him and given him more fuel for the fire.

  The walk had done me good. I was glad to open my apartment door. My place is tiny, a little over eight hundred square feet, with a view that overlooks the city. Lights from Seattle’s skyline suffuse my living room with a golden glow, so much so that I often leave the lights off and just sit. Friends have told me it’s great light for thinking or screwing. I’ve done a whole lot more of the former in that room than I have the latter.

  Thinking was what I wanted to do right then. I undressed, pulled on a frayed flannel robe, and settled into my easy chair, a tall old-fashioned leather one that I managed to salvage from the debris when I moved out of the house in Sumner.

  A sense of quiet settled over me as I gazed out the window. I thought about Angela Barstogi. Angel. Probably was one now. Yesterday morning she had been a living, breathing five-year-old. This morning she was dead. What had made the difference? What had turned her into a homicide statistic?

  I thought about the people I had met during the day, turning them over in my mind one by one, trying to get a clear picture of who was involved. I thought about the men whose statements I had read, from Brodie to Jeremiah’s stepfather, Benjamin, to Thomas, Amos, and Ezra. They all seemed like dregs to me, seedy characters you’d expect to find living in a halfway house somewhere. They got my hackles up, made me wary.

  Thinking about the people involved, assessing them, trying to sort out the relationship—that’s how I get on track with a case. And in my mind that’s exactly what this was. The beginning of a case, just like any other. What I couldn’t have known that morning as the sun began to color the cloud cover outside my living room window was how much Angel Barstogi’s murder would change my life.

  I thought that after I found her killer, everything would continue as it had before. That was not to be. After poor little Angela Barstogi, nothing would ever be the same.

  Chapter 3

  I dragged myself out of the house at seven-twenty and walked to work, propping my eyes open with a cup of muscle-bound coffee from the McDonald’s at Third and Pine. The restaurant mirrors the flavor of the street, and Third Avenue in downtown Seattle is an absolute cross section of life in this country. I love it and hate it.

  I feel the same way about the fifth floor of the Seattle Police Department. That’s the homicide squad. I’ve worked homicide for almost fifteen years. I came to the fifth floor with all my illusions intact. I was convinced that murderers were the worst of the bad guys and that capturing killers was the highest calling a police officer could have. It took me a long time to lose that illusion, to figure out that murder isn’t the worst crime one human can inflict on another. Maybe part of my disillusionment was just getting older and wiser. I don’t know when I stopped viewing it as a sacred charge and started seeing it as a job. I wouldn’t be surprised to find that it happened about the time Karen left me. Most of my life went sour about then.

  But it also had something to do with the ambitious new cops showing up on the squad, the ones who see homicide as a ticket to bigger and better things, who are more concerned with how their exploits will read in the morning paper than they are about doing the job right. They are plugged full of university credits in law enforcement theory taught by professors who have never dirtied their hands with real blood. I don’t like the finished product that shows up on the force or the ones that filter up to the fifth floor, either. I think the feeling is mutual.

  All this goes to say that I don’t care for too many of the guys there these days. Ray and I had been a breed apart from the others, and it was only after he left that I looked around the floor and found out what was there. Peters is young, but from my observation, he’s probably the best of the lot. That is not to be taken as high praise, however, and even now we still hadn’t settled into a solid working relationship. Peters arrived a few minutes after I did that morning and dropped a file folder on my desk. It was a preliminary report from the medical examiner’s office.

  He said nothing when he tossed it in front of me. He stalked away, hands stuffed in his pockets. I didn’t have to look at the report to know what was coming. I didn’t need a coroner’s textbook terms to tell me that Angel Barstogi’s last few minutes on this earth were brutal testimony to man’s inhumanity to man. If anything, the technical phraseology only made it worse, more dehumanizing.

  It said that cause of death was strangulation and that the murder weapon had indeed been the twisted nightgown around her neck. Analysis of stomach contents revealed that she had eaten a hamburger within an hour of time of death. It detailed other injuries—broken bones, bruises, cuts. The medical examiner had removed bits of human tissue and other substances from beneath her fingernails. Surprisingly, she had not been raped. At least she had been spared that indignity. It was a blessing, a very small blessing.

  Peters came back and threw a newspaper down in front of me. I don’t take a newspaper. It’s a personal protest against people like Maxwell Cole. Consequently I hadn’t seen the lurid headlines above Angel Barstogi’s baby-toothed smile. One thing about newspapers, they never disappoint me. I always expect the worst. I consistently get it.

  The preliminary report was still warm in my hand, yet I could have read the same information on the front page and not bothered to go to the office at all. My phone rang before I could say anything to Peters. It was Arlo Hamilton, the public information officer, wanting to know if I had anything for his nine a.m. press briefing.

  “Are you shitting me?” I asked him. “Those assholes know everything we do. Maybe they should be giving us the briefing.”

  “Don’t growl at me, Beau. I’m just trying to do my job.”

  “Me too,” I responded, and slammed the receiver down in his ear. “Let’s get the hell out of here,” I said to Peters, grabbing up both the paper and the file. “This case has just become a media ev
ent.”

  I was pissed off as we headed for the elevator, pissed and looking for somebody to blame. Peters happened to be close at hand.

  “What’d you do?” I asked sarcastically. “Pick up the report on the way home and drop it by the newspaper just for fun?”

  Peters stopped in midstride and glared at me. “I thought maybe you did. Maxwell Cole isn’t an old fraternity buddy of mine.”

  I looked at the paper again. The byline was indeed Maxwell Cole’s. Somehow he had managed to worm his column onto the front page. He’s always there, just when I least need him.

  I backed off. “If you didn’t leak it, and I didn’t leak it, then somebody in the medical examiner’s office has a big mouth.”

  Peters looked somewhat mollified, but not totally so.

  The Public Safety Building has what are reputed to be the slowest elevators in Seattle, possibly in the Western Hemisphere. We were still in the lobby when Sergeant Watkins nailed us. “Where are you two running off to?” he asked.

  He was carrying a folded newspaper under his arm. “You’ve already read that?” I asked.

  “I’ve read it, Powell’s read it, the chief’s reading it even as we speak. You’d better come back and brief the captain before you take off. The press is going to be all over this place today.”

  Captain Powell’s office is as private as a glass fishbowl can be. We gave Sergeant Watkins and Powell a verbal rundown of what we knew, including what Jeremiah had told me about Faith Tabernacle and the good Pastor Michael Brodie. Powell took our copy of the preliminary report and read it through. “What was this Brodie character wearing yesterday when you saw him?” Powell asked.

  “Blue suit, white shirt, no tie.”

  “Long sleeves?”

  I nodded. The captain continued. “According to this, there were fragments of flesh under her fingernails. If he’s our man, there should be scratches showing.” You don’t get to be captain because you’re dumb. Powell rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “Then there’s the hamburger, too. Where do you get a hamburger that early in the morning?”

  We theorized awhile longer before we finally made our getaway from the fifth floor and picked up a car from the motor pool. The motor pool is run on a strictly first-come, first-served basis. We were a long way from first served. The television shows that have the detectives driving the same high-powered vehicle week after week crack me up. They don’t live in the real world of city budgets. It must be nice. I’ve grown immune to cars. All that’s important to me is whether or not they run and have enough leg room. This one ran all right, but the leg room was sorely lacking. That happens a lot when you’re six-three.

  Peters drove, but not far. We stopped for breakfast. I washed down bacon and eggs with coffee while Peters told me about the dangers of cholesterol and the nitrate preservatives in bacon. I enjoyed the food, not the accompanying lecture. I missed Ray. He and I shared much the same vices as far as food was concerned.

  Over breakfast we decided to tackle the leak in the medical examiner’s office. A blabbermouth there or in the state crime laboratory could blow up a case before it ever hit prosecution. We drove up to Harborview Hospital on Capitol Hill and parked behind a car with a bumper sticker that said, “Have you hugged your medical examiner today?”

  Dr. Ralph Baker is in charge. He is a full-fledged physician and also an elected official. His jurisdiction covers all of King County and includes the city of Seattle. He glanced balefully up from some papers and looked at his watch as we were ushered into his cluttered office. “You’re late,” he growled. “I expected you half an hour ago.”

  “We stopped for breakfast.”

  He grunted. He reached over and picked up a manila folder. Inside was a folded clipping of the Angel Barstogi article. It had a series of red markings on it. He sighed. “Some of this is almost verbatim,” he said wearily.

  “Any ideas?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “Two people were on duty last night. Lillian Roberts and Dan Royden.”

  “So which one runs off at the mouth?” I asked.

  Baker looked at Peters, then nodded in my direction. “That’s one of the things I like about Detective Beaumont. He has such a way with words.” He paused briefly. “You ever hear of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission?” he asked.

  I nodded. Baker picked up a stray paper clip from his desk and lobbed it across the room, where it fell expertly into a chipped clear-glass vase that sat on a bookshelf near the window. From the number of paper clips in it and the few scattered in close proximity, I guessed catching paper clips was the vase’s sole reason for existence.

  The chief medical examiner is a florid Scandinavian with a shock of white hair. His face flushed a little more violently than usual. “You ever have an EEOC grievance filed against you?”

  I shook my head. He tossed another paper clip into the vase. “I have,” he said. “In this state that’s tantamount to political suicide. I don’t see this job as the end of the line, you know.”

  As a matter of fact, the thought had never occurred to me. I thought once a medical examiner, always a medical examiner, but that shows how much I know. On the other hand, I suppose it’s a short jump from performing autopsies to political office. At least you’d have some preparation for handling the stench of corruption.

  I said, “In other words, Lillian Roberts is Deep Throat.”

  “Maybe she talks in her sleep,” he replied. “I’m not making any official accusations, mind you.”

  Peters had been pretty much left out of the conversation, but now he put two and two together. “You mean Lillian Roberts and Maxwell Cole?”

  Another paper clip clinked into the vase. Baker said nothing.

  Peters was outraged. “I’d fire her ass.”

  Baker studied Peters for a moment the way a small child might examine an ant before deliberately crushing it into the sidewalk. “You probably would,” he said, “but then, you don’t want to be King County Executive, either. Of course,” he added, “I’ll deny everything if any of this hits the street.”

  There was no point in sticking around. I had to give Baker credit for letting us know the lay of the land. He could have left us fumbling around in the dark. Besides, I wanted to get Peters out of there before he said something we would both regret. I was afraid his combination of temper and mouth would end up getting us both in trouble. I helped myself to one of Baker’s paper clips and made a pretty respectable shot, considering I’d never tried it before. “See you at the polls,” I said over my shoulder.

  I hurried Peters out the door. He was still blustering in the outer office, but I shushed him until we were outside and climbing into the car.

  “Do we let him get away with that?” Peters exploded when I finally let him talk.

  “We don’t have a whole hell of a lot of choice.”

  “It’s…” Peters stopped, totally at a loss for words.

  “It’s the way it is,” I finished for him, “and nothing you or I do is going to change it. We just have to work around it, that’s all.”

  The drive from Capitol Hill to Magnolia was hair-raising. It’s common knowledge that police forces are stocked with frustrated juvenile delinquents who have grown up and gone straight, driving like hot rodders and justifying it in their minds because they are finally on the right side of the law. We didn’t talk as we drove. I was too busy considering whether or not my Last Will and Testament was up-to-date.

  We wheeled onto Gay Avenue. “Oh-oh,” I said when I saw Maxwell Cole’s rust-colored Volvo parked in front of Suzanne Barstogi’s house. Max, Suzanne, and Michael Brodie were huddled on the front porch, deep in conversation. They broke it off as soon as we pulled up behind the Volvo. Peters didn’t recognize the car, but he swore under his breath when he recognized Maxwell’s walruslike visage.

  Max hurried down the steps toward us as though some trace of the conversation might linger in the ethers of the front porch. He checked his speed and sauntered up to th
e gate.

  “Fancy meeting you here,” I said before he had a chance. “What did they do, yank your column back onto the police beat?”

  He reddened slightly. “I’m working on the column right now, as a matter of fact.”

  Suzanne Barstogi came down from the porch and stood near the dangling gate. I ignored her and spoke directly to Maxwell for Suzanne’s benefit. “I hope you warned these nice folks that you don’t always quote people verbatim.” The good pastor came down to stand protectively, or maybe defensively, behind Suzanne.