Payment in Kind (13 page)

One said: “Start school now or else this place is history.” The other: “Education delayed is education denied. Dynamite is the cure.”

“Cute,” I said, tossing the transcripts back in the file. “The guy must think he’s a comedian. It is a guy, isn’t it?”

Cummings nodded. “Young male Caucasian, that’s about all the experts have been able to tell us so far from listening to the tapes.”

Also included were Xeroxed copies of the other threats, the ones that had been tossed through the windows. The poorly spelled notes had been stitched together, some with whole words and others with individual letters clipped from newspapers and magazines, a real cut-and-paste job. One said, “Teachers should teach. Strikes waist lives. Get school open before I blow this place to peaces.” Another said, “All I need too know is available in
The Anarchist’s Handbook
. Pipe bombs rule.” Still another said, “You guys are fuking with my life. I want my education now!”

I looked up at Cummings. “This dude can’t spell for shit, and he reads too many kidnap novels.”

Sparky Cummings nodded. “If he reads at all. The more we pay for education, the less we get. Go on.”

“Whose the boss, you or the teachers?” and “I am loosing patients. Stop the strike now.”

“If he’s so opposed to the teachers’ union, how come he’s threatening to blow up the school district office? Why not the union’s office instead?”

“Beats me,” Cummings replied. “Where is it written that kooks have to be smart or logical?”

“Who sat on this report, Sparky? I need to know.”

“All of the above,” Cummings answered. “At the time it was happening, both the teachers’ union and the district asked that we not release the information because they were deeply involved in negotiations. I don’t know who had the horses to keep a lid on it after the strike was over, but of course, by then the threats had stopped as well. There probably wasn’t much reason to raise a hullabaloo after the fact.”

“Particularly not when Her Honor’s primary interest is maintaining the status quo,” I added.

Cummings shot me a warning frown. “You said that, Beau. I didn’t.”

Although the two shouldn’t have been linked, the previous year’s mayoral election had been won and lost with the school district’s future as the central focus of the bitter campaigns. A group of angry and very vocal parents, tired of years of mandatory busing, had brought in some new political blood. Much to the consternation of long-term political lights, the new kids on the block and their off-the-wall candidate had played havoc with what should have been a shoo-in election for the retiring mayor’s handpicked successor.

Elected by such a minute margin that a legally mandated recount had been necessary, the new mayor was now trying her best to keep city government running smoothly while she fought to regain lost ground among the grass-roots electorate. Meanwhile the school district was doing away with busing an inch at a time while student population dwindled, as did money, and those same disillusioned parents, beaten but still pissed, continued to take their children else-where.

Her Honor’s press aide had recently announced that Seattle was once more among the top three contenders for “The Most Livable City Award.” Participants in that kind of national competition can’t afford to wash their dirty underwear in public, and trouble in a school district is civic soil of the worst kind. If you don’t believe it, try asking the City of Boston.

Scanning through the file wasn’t telling me much of anything new. “So what did you guys finally find out about this?” I asked at last.

Cummings shrugged. “For a while the pet theory going around was that someone opposed to the teachers’ union was posing as a student and making the threats, but we couldn’t find any likely possibles. A disgruntled student was the most we ever came up with, although why a ”disgruntled student“ would be so damn eager to have school get started, nobody was ever able to figure out. After the strike was over, though, since no bombs were ever found and since no one was hurt, the case got shifted to low priority.”

“Fast?” I asked.

“You mean did it get shifted fast?” he asked. I nodded. “You bet. It was fast, all right.”

“And nothing’s happened since?”

“That’s right,” Sparky replied. “Zippo.”

“Well, something’s happened now. That security guard is dead. So’s the woman. Maybe it wasn’t love triangle at all. Maybe it was made to look that way, just to throw us off,” I suggested.

“I suppose that’s possible,” Detective Cummings agreed, “but not very likely. I still can’t let you have the file.”

While Sparky Cummings sat there waiting, I went back through the file once more and took some notes, paying particular attention to the threats themselves, which I took down verbatim, sloppy spelling and all. As I went through the exercise, something struck me as strange.

“How many kids do you know who can’t spell the word ”fuck‘?“ I asked.

“Not many,” Cummings admitted with a grin. “It goes with the territory. They usually spell it right when they spray-paint it on bridges and overpasses.”

“So how come this joker doesn’t know it’s got a
c
in it?”

“My specialty is bombs,” Sparky Cummings said seriously. “I don’t know beans about teenagers, my own included.”

I finished copying what I wanted from the file and tossed it back across the desk to Detective Cummings.

“Thanks for bringing it down, Spark. I’ll try not to make any waves for you guys, unless I have to.”

He waved. “Sure thing, Beau. Glad to help.”

I sat there for several minutes after Cummings left, thinking that it was odd for someone so eager to be in school to be such a rotten speller. The two didn’t seem to mix. People who actually liked school and wanted to be there were usually insufferable teachers’ pets, brownnoses who spelled everything perfectly.

I remembered that back when I was in school, perfect spelling was never one of my problems.

I
sat there for some time thinking about that mysterious C-less fuck, and wondered idly if it was related to Erica Jong’s zipless one. I had meandered on into some self-pitying woolgathering and was mulling about how long I had done without same, with or without the zip or the C, when my phone rang.

“Beaumont? This is Kramer. I’m down in the garage. I finally got us a car. Come on down so I don’t have to turn loose of it. Hurry up, will you?”

Nobody had told me we were scheduled to go touring that morning, but I decided to be agreeable. “I’ll be right there. By the way, where are we going?”

“Back up to the school district office. To see Andrea Stovall.”

Another new person at the Seattle school district. “Who’s she?” I asked.

“Just get down here, would you? I told them we’d be there by nine and we’re going to be late. I’ll tell you about her on the way.”

I threw my notebook into the first available pocket, locked the school district’s bomb-threat file folder in my desk, and made my way down the stairs, bypassing the building’s more and more glitchy elevators. Detective Kramer was pacing the floor of the garage near an idling Reliant, hands planted belligerently on his hips, an impatient frown imprinted across his broad forehead.

“So who’s Andrea Stovall?” I asked again as I got in the car.

“I got her name off the logbook sheets,” he answered.

“Logbook sheets?” I asked. “We’ve got those back already?”

“I thought I told you about them last night.”

“You told me Doc Baker had preliminary autopsy reports ready for us to pick up this morning. I don’t remember anything at all about the logbook.”

Kramer fastened his belt with a shrug. “No kidding. You mean I didn’t tell you about that? I meant to. It must have slipped my mind or maybe it happened after you called. Mark Fields brought them up from the crime lab last night.” He tossed a manila envelope across the seat at me.

“They’re in there, copies of the logbook sheets, an unofficial copy of Doc Baker’s findings, and whatever the crime lab has done so far.”

“Slipped my mind” my ass! Fighting to control my anger, I opened the envelope and thumbed through the three separate sets of papers I found there. I focused first on the cleanly typed forms from Doc Baker’s office. There’s nothing like reading autopsy and crime lab reports to help whittle your own troubles down to size and make you count your blessings. The impassive technical terminology condensed Alvin Chambers’ and Marcia Kelsey’s brutal deaths down into dry, bare-bones anatomy class specifics.

Doc Baker estimated Chambers’ time of death as somewhere around midnight, although he had probably been shot well before that. He had been shot in the back and then dragged, still alive but possibly unconscious, into the closet, where he had bled to death. A .25-caliber CCI-Blazer slug, shot at point-blank range, had severed his spine and then inflicted surprisingly terrible damage as it ripped through vital internal organs and exited near his belly button. People who don’t want to think about outlawing handguns haven’t seen firsthand the kind of damage they do.

It took a second for the information to sink in. I looked over at Kramer. “The gun we found was a .38, but this says a .25.”

“That’s right.”

“So we’re dealing with two weapons, not one.”

“Right again.”

I continued reading. There were signs of a blow to the head on Chambers, but it was Doc Baker’s assessment that although the blow may have rendered him unconscious, it had in no way contributed to the victim’s death. From the lividity of the body, he had been dead for some period of time before Marcia Kelsey’s body dropped on top of him.

Unlike Chambers, Marcia Kelsey had evidently died instantly, falling where she was shot. Hers was not a self-inflicted wound, although someone had gone to a good deal of trouble to make us think so. The lack of powder particles ruled out suicide once and for all.

Baker’s preliminary tests showed no sign of drugs or alcohol in either victim, but a final determination on that score would have to wait on the toxicology reports. Those take time.

“It says here Chambers was shot somewhere else and then dragged into the closet.”

Kramer nodded. “That’s right. That shows up in the crime lab report. The crime-scene team found trace evidence of blood in one of the floor seams in the entryway, near where his table and chair were set up. Liz, from the crime lab, told me they were really lucky to find it, because whoever did it stuck around long enough to do a pretty good job of cleaning up.”

“So we’re dealing with a real cool customer.”

“And somebody who’s compulsively neat,” Kramer put in with a malicious smile. I knew he was thinking about Pete Kelsey’s pristine garage. So was I.

“Did you get to the part where it says no semen?” Kramer added.

I scanned the page to where Doc Baker had detailed his sexual findings. Just as Kramer had said, there was no sign of sexual intercourse. No semen in the vagina or elsewhere.

“What about it?”

Kramer shrugged. “It’s too bad, that’s all. To get killed for nothing. I mean, if you knew you were gonna die, wouldn’t you want to go out with a bang?”

“You’re an incurable romantic, Kramer, with a real way with words,” I said sarcastically. He grinned. I think he thought it was a compliment.

It occurred to me then that Detective Kramer, who was driving the car rather than studying his own copy of the reports, had a nearly total recall of everything written there. “What did you do, memorize the reports on the way down here this morning?”

“Not this morning. I changed my mind and picked ‘em up on my way home last night after all, just in case there was something that needed our attention right away.”

I had no delusions that if something had needed “our” attention, I wouldn’t have heard word one about it until after the fact. Kramer would have handled it on his own. His silence about the logbooks was anything but the innocent oversight he claimed it to be. It’s hard to like working with somebody like that, someone you can’t afford to turn your back on. The book says you’re supposed to be able to trust your partner. With your life. Fat chance.

Letting it go, I returned to the issue of two guns. That didn’t make sense. “I still don’t understand why we have two separate weapons.”

“Who knows? Maybe the killer thought that if one gun was good, two were better.”

Convinced there was nothing more to be gained right then by rereading either one of the two official reports, I turned to the third batch of papers. These turned out to be surprisingly good copies of the Seattle Security logbook pages for December thirtieth and thirty-first and January first.

I glanced down at the second page, the one for the first of January. It had been a holiday after all, and there were only two entries on the entire page: Marcia Kelsey had checked in at eight P.M. There was no check-out time following her name. Andrea Stovall had signed in at eleven and out again at eleven-fifteen.

That certainly answered one question. No wonder we were on our way to see Andrea Stovall. The presence of her name in the register on the same day at around the time of the killings made her a person of interest, someone we needed to interview.

Without further comment, I gathered the pieces of paper together and shoved them back in the envelope. We rode in silence for several blocks, with Kramer driving and me steaming. The pattern behind his behavior was beginning to emerge. He had known about the logbook sheets being ready when he called me the night before. He had known about the logbook sheets being ready when he called me the night before. He had known the autopsy reports were ready as well and had lied to me about them on the phone. He had picked them up on the way home and must have spent much of the night studying them. Fortunately for me and unfortunately for him, the vital information he’d been searching for, details that would have given him a crack at being a Lone Ranger hero, hadn’t been there.

I was learning the nature of the beast. Look to thy butt, Beaumont, I warned myself firmly. This guy’s a weasel who’ll kick ass and take names later if you give him half a chance. I didn’t like the idea of being pitted against both a murderous crook and an untrustworthy partner at the same time. That didn’t make for very good odds. The only way to win in a situation like that is to be smarter than everybody else, cagier, so I bit back any number of caustic comments and got back to the job at hand.