A Perfect Grave (2 page)

Chapter Three

J
esus Christ revealed his bleeding heart wrapped with thorns in the painting above Isabella Martell’s couch as Detective Grace Garner listened to her lie about her grandson.

“No, Roberto, he no come here.”

Grace threw a glance to Detective Dominic Perelli, her partner, tapped her pen in her notebook, then exhaled her disappointment.

“And you have no idea where he is?”

Isabella shook her head, blinking behind her thick glasses while staring into her hands, nearly arthritic now from years of scrubbing toilets in the Mutual Tower. Roberto beamed from his framed high school picture atop her Motorola TV. Nothing in his grin foretold that he would become a twenty-six-year-old drug-dealing pimp, who, at age twenty-three, would do nine months in prison for beating one of his girls.

According to an informant, Roberto was the last to see Sharla May Forrest alive before she was discovered behind an Aurora Avenue pawnshop.

She’d been strangled.

She was a teenage prostitute whose corpse had been found several weeks ago. And Grace still had next to nothing. No solid witnesses. Nothing but fragments and partials of trace evidence, nothing concrete. Nothing but a tip from a rival dealer happy to tell the SPD that “Sharla May owed Roberto and people saw him with her.”

Whether the lead was valid or not, Grace needed to talk to Roberto Martell. Despite the fact that two days ago a neighbor had called police to complain about loud music coming from a Mustang with Roberto’s plates idling in the street at this address, while a man matching Roberto’s description had walked into this house, there was no way Isabella was going to give up the whereabouts of her flesh and blood.

“Hell, before she came to this country, she stared down the death squads who murdered her father,” Perelli said later into a laminated menu at a Belltown diner where Grace brooded over coffee and everything else.

The Forrest case was growing as cold as the headstone on Sharla May’s grave. It seemed destined to remain unsolved like the last three murders Grace had caught. It was the same for the other detectives. Morale was flagging. In the last twenty months, eight veteran investigators had either retired or transferred out of Homicide. The toll was written in the unit’s clearance rate, which had dropped from 80 percent to 55 percent.

“These sad stats say that killers stand a good chance of getting away with murder in this city,” a
Seattle Mirror
columnist charged in a full-bore attack on the SPD.

This perception concerned the Commission, which concerned the chief, who pressured the deputy, who told the assistant chief, who summoned the captain, who instructed the lieutenants to issue an edict to the sergeants to pass to detectives.

“I’ve been ordered to tell you the obvious,” Sergeant Stan Boulder, biting back on his anger, advised his team at the start of a recent shift. “We need a win and we need it fast.” As his people grumbled, Boulder crumpled his memo, then pulled Grace into his office for a private moment.

“We’re getting pissed on from every direction over this clearance crap.”

“You paint a pretty picture.”

“People are getting distracted, second-guessing, they need to stay focused, Grace.”

“Yeah, we get that.”

“You’re one of my brightest, it’s why we brought you on. We need to pull one out of the fire.”

“Which one? I’ll just run out and solve it, now.”

“You know what I mean.”

She did.

Grace always came at things with a fresh angle, a talent that had evolved during her teens, when her quick thinking had helped save lives during a shooting at her high school. In the aftermath, Grace knew she was going to become a cop.

She had graduated from college in the top 5 percent and considered applying to the FBI before deciding on the Seattle PD. As a patrol officer, she was decorated for tackling and disarming a fleeing robbery suspect. She soon made detective and worked in several units where she’d earned the praise of her commanders before becoming one of the youngest investigators to join Seattle’s homicide squad.

She gave everything to the job, putting in sixty hours a week, allowing nothing else in her life. She was a loner. Had been ever since the school shooting. That’s just the way it was. But over the last few years, as she grappled with death twenty-four hours a day, she didn’t think she could stand being alone much longer.

Yet her attempts to do something about it hadn’t really gone anywhere.

She went out with Jason Wade, the guy from the
Mirror
, a few times. There was chemistry, something electric between them, but work always seemed to get in the way.
Or maybe they let it get in the way.
Anyway, she broke it off before it got serious but he seemed hurt. She saw it in his face. Had she made a mistake?

She didn’t know.

Then there was her disaster with Drew Wagner, the FBI agent. Upon transferring from Boston he pursued her with animal ferocity. God, he was so smooth, so good-looking. She never saw it coming. First, he says he’s single because there’s no ring, but she points to his tan line, so, all right, all right, he admits, he’s divorced. She buys it, as he tells her about the heartache, and he does it so well. Later, she overhears him on a phone call to his wife and it’s, all right, actually he’s separated. The heartache stuff again and maybe Grace wants to believe him but she does a little checking and finally gets the truth. Turns out her all-star is only biding his time until his wife sells the house in Charlestown and
moves to Seattle with their kids.

Some detective she was.

How could she have been so stupid? she asked her reflection in the diner’s window, letting the question go into the night and back to Jason. Was she wrong not to work on something with him? There was just something about him that she liked. A brooding, brilliant honesty.

Stop it, Grace! Stop this “poor me” garbage!

Passing headlights stabbed at her for being selfish, hurling case images at her. Of Sharla May Forrest, a runaway not-yet-out-of-little-girlhood who was addicted to crack but kept a stuffed teddy bear on her bed and signed birthday cards to friends with happy faces. Of Sharla May’s naked corpse in the urine, vomit, and dog shit alley, with a metal hanger garrotted around her neck, twisted at the back with a lead pipe so tight it nearly decapitated her.

And of Isabella Martell lying about Roberto while Jesus watched.

And of Special
Lying Bastard
Agent Drew Wagner at the mall with his wife and kids. And of Grace Garner alone with her unsolved murders, trying to get a handle on it all as someone was speaking her name.

“Grace. Grace,” Perelli nudged her, holding out his cell phone, “It’s Stan, he says your phone’s dead.”

“Garner.”

“It’s Boulder. We got a fresh one and you’re the primary.”

“Cripes, Stan, we got our hands full with the Forrest case. Can’t Marty and Stallworth take it?”

“It’s yours. Take down the address, it’s near Yesler Terrace.”

Grace pursed her lips as she jotted down the information.

“Who’s the vic?”

“Anne Braxton. This will get profile. Big time.”

“Why?”

“She’s a nun, murdered in her residence.”

Chapter Four

J
ason Wade grabbed a portable scanner and took the stairs to the parking lot, hating his situation.

He couldn’t miss a story and he couldn’t turn his back on his father. His old man was fresh at war with a ghost that had been stalking him for years, but he’d refused to talk about it.

Ever.

Even as it destroyed the things he loved, he would not open up to anyone. Even when it threatened to drag Jason down with him. Like tonight, man, he had to be careful. Whenever his father was seized by his demon, he reached out to Jason to rescue him.

Jason was all he had.

The cry of a gull and lonely horn of a distant boat echoed from the bay as he approached his 1969 Ford Falcon. He’d finally gotten around to getting it painted metallic red and it reflected the city lights as he wheeled through the streets. A few blocks east, the Space Needle ascended into the night, while south, the city’s tallest buildings, Union Square, Washington Mutual, and the Columbia Center dominated the skyline. Pike Place Market was near and a little farther, Pioneer Square.

Welcome to Seattle, baby.

Jet City. The Emerald City. Gatesville. Amazonia. Java Town.

The place where Jimi Hendrix learned to play guitar.

Rolling south near the stadiums he cast a glance in the direction of First Hill and Yesler Terrace and considered a detour. To where, though? He had no specific address to check out. He wasn’t even certain anything was happening out there.

Cover yourself, man.

He called the East Precinct again. Voice mail again. He left a message. Then he alerted the editorial assistant at the paper to call him if he heard anything. He set his phone on vibrate, then slid
Layla
into his CD player. He was a disciple of classic rock and loved how Clapton’s genius blended with the scanner’s dispatches in an eerie mix against the night. He gathered speed as the song played and returned to his old man’s situation.

Henry Wade was a private investigator, an exbrewery worker, and an ex-Seattle cop. And for as long as Jason could remember, his father would not, or could not, ever bring himself to talk about the incident that had forced him off the Seattle PD and into a job at the brewery, where each day the thermos in his lunch bucket had been spiked with bourbon.

Whatever it was that he was trying to drown had ultimately cost him his marriage. Jason’s mother had worked beside his father on the bottling line but eventually she walked out on both of them. She just couldn’t take it any longer, she said in her note. The night before she left, she’d hugged Jason and her eyes looked as if she were dreading something on the horizon. In the days after, Jason rode his bicycle all over the neighborhood searching for her until his old man told him she was gone.

“But don’t you worry, Jay, she’ll come back, you’ll see.”

The scanner crackled with a warehouse alarm.

Nothing to it. He adjusted the channels, then looked toward the bay as he guided his Falcon south until the brewery loomed. Man, he hated that place with its dark cluster of brick buildings, its stacks capped with red strobe lights spearing the night, the stench of hops permeating his car, reminding him of the worst days of his life.

His mother never returned and his old man’s drinking never stopped.

Over time, it had pushed everything to the breaking point. It came just two years ago when his dad showed up drunk in the newsroom looking for him. The humiliation and shame of that night nearly cost Jason his job at the
Mirror.

A job he’d shed blood to win.

But it also got his old man to admit that he had a problem.

He quit drinking and got counseling.

Nearly two years sober now and he was doing well, emerging from his self-imposed tomb a stronger man. Jason had reminded him that for a brief time in his life, he’d been a Seattle cop, a good one, and that he should do something about it.

He did.

First, he took early retirement from the brewery. Then enrolled in a few courses. He’d become a licensed private investigator with an agency run by an old cop buddy. He did well on his cases, even helped Jason out on a few news stories. His old man finally had it all under control. That’s right, Jason thought, looking at the brewery fading in his rearview mirror, he was convinced they’d put all this crap behind them.

But here he was driving to another bar to rescue his father.

Risking everything he’d worked so hard to achieve.

It played out before him as he came upon the bluecollar neighborhood where he grew up, in the south, between Highway 509 and the west bank of the Duwamish River, not far from the shipyards and Boeing Field. It was here, ever since his mother had read him bedtime stories, that he’d dreamed of being a writer and had decided that being a reporter would give him a front-row seat to life’s daily dramas. He studied them every morning on his first job in the business, delivering the
Seattle Mirror.

Reading about other people’s problems helped Jason forget his own.

He had tried to comprehend how his mother could just leave. As years passed, his grades plunged, his writing dream slipped away, and his father got him a job driving a forklift at the Pacific Peaks Brewery. They would rise at dawn, climb into his dad’s pickup, and drive to the concentration of filthy brick buildings. For Jason it was a gate to hell and he vowed to pull himself out of it before he became a ghost, like his old man.

So, between loading trucks with beer, he read classic literature, saved his money, went to night school, improved his grades, enrolled in community college, and worked weekends at the brewery. He also got his own apartment, wrote for the campus paper, and freelanced news features to Seattle’s big dailies.

One of his stories, a feature on Seattle beat cops, had caught the eye of a
Seattle Mirror
editor, who gave Jason the last spot in the intern program after another candidate had bailed.

It was Jason’s shot at realizing his dream.

The
Mirror
’s internship program was notorious. Jason had to compete with five other young reporters, each of them from big journalism schools. And each of them had news experience as interns at places like
The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times,
and
Wall Street Journal.
They all went full tilt in a do-or-die competition for the one
Mirror
job that came at the end. After Jason had put everything on the line and broke a major exclusive, the
Mirror
awarded him a full-time staff reporter position.

It was all in jeopardy now because of the screwup over Brian Pillar and whatever awaited inside the bowels of the Ice House Bar.

Jason parked in the littered lot next to a burned-out Pacer, rotting there in the far corner where drug deals were closed and bladders relieved. He made another round of calls, left messages, and checked the scanner before switching it off. Nothing was popping on the air, yet he couldn’t put aside his nagging feeling that something was going on up in Yesler Terrace.

The bar smelled of stale beer, cigarettes, sweat, and regret. A mournful honky-tonk song spilled from the jukebox; the wooden floor was littered with peanut shells and pull tabs. An assortment of losers populated the place. Two broken-down old-timers were at the bar. One was missing an arm, and in the glow of the neon beer signs above the bar, Jason noticed that the other had a patch over his eye.

Farther back, under the glow of lowered white lights, there was a pool table and a game in progress between a gap-toothed woman whose T-shirt strained the words
DON’T TALK TO ME
across her chest, and a tall slender man, whose arms were sleeved in tattoos. Beyond the game, six high-back booths lined the walls. All were empty except the one where Jason’s father was sitting.

Alone, except for a glass filled with beer on the table before him.

It appeared untouched.

Henry Wade looked up from it to his son, who stood before him.

“You drink anything tonight, Dad?”

His old man shook his head.

Encouraged, Jason sat across from him in the booth, nodding to the white rag wrapped around his father’s right hand.

“What happened?”

“Changing the blade in my utility knife to replace a bathroom tile.”

“This is why you had the bar call me? Dad, I’m working now.”

His father rubbed his temples as if to soothe something far more disturbing than a household mishap.

“Jay, you have to help me, son, I don’t know what to do here.”

Jason squirmed in his seat, then held up his finger.

“Hang on, it’s my phone. I gotta take this.” Jason fished through the front pocket of his jeans. “Dad, whatever you’ve got going on, I want you to go home just as soon as I—Wade—
Seattle Mirror.
”

“Yeah, Wade—it’s Grimshaw at the East Precinct. Got your damn messages.”

“What’s up near Yesler?”

“Report of a homicide.”

“A homicide? Anything to it?”

“Something about a nun.”

“A nun? Can you give me an address?”

“Let me see.” Jason heard keyboard keys clicking, then the cop recited the location and Jason wrote it down in his notebook.

“Anybody else in the media calling you on this?”

“Not yet. We’re just getting people out there.”

“Thanks,” Jason hung up. “Dad, I have to go, now. It was good that you called me and didn’t drink. Now, I’m getting you home. We’ll talk later. I have to go.”