Second Watch (12 page)

CHAPTER 11

D
etective Delilah Ainsworth was waiting in my room the next day when I came back from my morning round of PT. She looked utterly spectacular in a fire-engine-red pantsuit with a top underneath that showed more than a hint of cleavage. The hair that I remembered as pretty much blond was now a soft shade of brunette with a tasteful frost job.

She watched in silence as the attendant helped me into bed and relieved me of the walker. Then she stood up on a pair of amazingly high heels—the kind that usually turn up only on TV shows—and tottered over to the bed, a move that put me at eye level with some pretty spectacular scenery. Naturally, she caught me enjoying the view.

“I’ll make you a deal,” she said. “You don’t look at my boobs, I don’t look at your knees.”

It was the kind of no-BS introduction that Mel would have loved. That was my first hint that if and when my new partner and Mel ever met, they would get along like gangbusters.

“Fair enough,” I replied.

“And since neither one of us appears to be built for foot chases and/or physical combat, if we’re going to be working together, we’d better count on brains rather than brawn,” she added, pulling an iPad out of a large purse with what looked like multicolored Mickey Mouse ears all over it. “Now what’s this about?”

I admit it. I was impressed. The women I’ve known who have risen through the ranks to become detectives have all been capable, competent, and tough. But to be a homicide cop named Delilah isn’t an easy call. And to tackle the job while wearing a bright red pantsuit and scarlet nail polish and carrying an immense, brightly colored purse that screams “Disneyland” all over it? That takes balls! Have I mentioned that Mel also happens to adore brightly colored, humongous, and wonderfully expensive purses?

“How much do you know?” I asked.

“Not much at all,” Delilah replied. “When I showed up at work this morning, my captain told me to get my ass up here to meet some guy who works Special Homicide for the attorney general’s office. It turns out that would be you, although no one actually got around to explaining how or why I’m supposed to be working with someone who’s currently flat on his back in a hospital bed.”

“Did your captain tell you what case we’d be working?”

“No.”

“Did he tell you that Assistant Chief Peters and I used to be partners a long time ago?”

“No, he didn’t mention that, either, but I suppose that gives you a little pull inside the department.”

“A little,” I agreed. “How about the name Ted Bundy? Does that ring a bell?”

“Ted Bundy’s name rings everybody’s bell,” she replied.

“Monica Wellington was murdered in April of 1973. She was from Leavenworth, first kid in her family to go to a four-year college. The autopsy revealed that she was pregnant at the time she was strangled to death, but no boyfriend ever came forward.”

“So you’re saying the father of the baby could be the doer?” Delilah asked.

I nodded.

“What happened?”

“Nothing. It was the first homicide case I ever worked, and it was never solved, at least not to my satisfaction,” I told her. “My first partner and I worked it off and on for the better part of two years. When Ted Bundy was arrested in Utah in 1975, he was linked to the Wellington case by two eyewitnesses who claimed to have seen the two of them together at a movie theater in Seattle the Friday evening Monica was murdered. The problem was, we never found any additional corroborating evidence, and there was never any solid physical evidence—the kind that would stand up in court—that linked Bundy to the Wellington homicide. Even so, eventually the case was deemed closed by the powers that be. Game over.”

“Until now,” Delilah said.

I nodded.

“So what’s the point of reopening a case that has been closed since I was in kindergarten?” Delilah asked. “If we’re going to be working this case, I need to know why.”

The first rule for getting out of holes is to stop digging. The first rule for being partners is to tell the truth. This clearly ambitious young woman deserved the truth, at least up to a point, and if she chucked it back in my face, so be it.

“Because the victim told me so,” I said. “In a dream. She told me it wasn’t solved.”

Delilah blinked. “When?” she asked. “While you’ve been here and under the influence of powerful narcotics?”

She had hit that nail on the head. “Yes,” I admitted. “I was under the influence of drugs when she told me that. Still, that doesn’t mean it isn’t true.”

“So are you prone to seeing visions and having hallucinations?” she asked. “I mean, do they happen often?” I caught a tiny hint of sarcasm in her voice.

“No,” I declared hotly. “I’m not claiming premonitions, either. This is pure gut instinct—cop gut instinct. Both my memory and my conscience took a direct hit.”

I knew that if our situations were reversed, I’d be every bit as skeptical as she was. For obvious reasons, I made no mention of the Lennie D. situation. I told myself it was because that wasn’t remotely a police matter. Monica Wellington’s murder was. And just in case I haven’t mentioned it before now, I may not be an excellent liar, but I’m great when it comes to the fine art of creative rationalization.

“So when you had this little chat with our long-dead victim, why didn’t you come right out and ask her?” Delilah said. “I mean, if she’d gone ahead and told you who did it, wouldn’t that save everybody a whole lot of time and trouble?”

Delilah’s jab was deftly delivered—a polite way of making fun of me and letting me know that she thought I was pretty much full of it.

“At the time, Monica was too busy taking me to task for not keeping a promise to her mother.”

“What promise?” Delilah wanted to know.

“To find her daughter’s killer,” I replied. “The problem is, that’s a promise I made at Monica’s funeral.”

“Which was after the victim was already dead.”

“Correct.”

“So how did Monica even know about it?”

I shrugged. “You tell me.”

“But she didn’t say specifically that Ted Bundy did it.”

“No,” I agreed, “and she didn’t say he didn’t do it, either.”

“In other words, it could go either way?”

I nodded.

“Do this for me,” Delilah said. “If this Monica vision happens to show up again, why don’t you ask her? If anybody ever finds out why we reopened this case, we’re both going to look really stupid.”

I knew I was being razzed, so I was careful not to bite.

“Stupid or not, I’d like to be able to tell her mother for sure what happened to her daughter,” I answered after a pause. “Either Ted Bundy did it or he didn’t. And regardless of what brought the situation to mind, I feel honor bound to pursue it.”

That must have been the right answer. We sat there in silence again for the better part of a minute. Finally Detective Ainsworth nodded. Picking up her iPad, she used her index finger to move the slide on the screen that turned it on.

“I guess that means we’d better get started,” she said. “Tell me what you know.”

The easiest way to do that, of course, was to simply copy the list I had made on my iPad and send it to hers. We then spent the next hour going over the people on the list, discussing where they might be found these days and what, if anything, they might have to offer this reopened investigation. When we finished, Delilah gave me a searching look.

“Is there any remaining physical evidence?” she asked.

“I’m not sure,” I said. “I believe there used to be. Whether it still exists is another question.”

“Times have changed since then,” Delilah remarked. “Evidence that couldn’t yield DNA results back then might be able to now. What about her clothing?”

“As far as I know, it was never found.”

“What about Ted Bundy’s other victims?” she asked. “Were any of them found in similar circumstances?”

“As in a barrel?”

Delilah nodded.

“No, as far as I know, that would’ve been a one-off. I’m not aware of similar cases.”

“Did you check other jurisdictions?”

“We did,” I said, “but back then those kinds of checks were a lot more difficult. You couldn’t just click a mouse to look for other cases the way we can now.”

Delilah nodded. “That’s where I’ll start,” she said. “I’ll look for similar victimology.”

With that she stood up and slipped her iPad into her purse. “After that, I’ll review the murder book along with whatever physical evidence is still extant. If there’s something that might yield current DNA results, I’ll see what I can do about getting it tested. I’ll also try to get a line on everyone on this list. I’ll locate them, but I won’t interview them. We should probably do that together. How much longer do you expect to be here?”

In the preceding days my surgeon had stuck his head in the room periodically, but his visits had mostly been done in passing. When it came to real information, the nurses were the most reliable sources.

“They tell me I’m in here for another couple of days. When you do two knees at once, you qualify for extra rehab.”

“Great,” Delilah observed drily. “I’ll try to remember when it’s my turn to get in line for new knees. What about driving?” she asked. “How soon will you be able to do that?”

“Not for several weeks, most likely.”

Delilah nodded. “All right, then,” she said. “Once you’re out, I’ll be driving and you’ll be riding. In the meantime, I’ll go to work and I’ll try to keep you posted on my progress.”

She left then. I had turned down my morning pain pill. Now I was sorry. I rectified that error when they brought me lunch so I could be ready for whatever torture the PT ladies dished out that afternoon. After that I napped for a little while. I like to think it was because I had finally done enough on my part to get the Monica Wellington ball rolling that no dark ghosts from my past made unwelcome appearances that afternoon. There were dreams all right, but the one that stayed with me was of a long-ago Easter egg hunt on the shores of Lake Tapps when Kelly and Scott were little. The kids were cute. The eggs were brightly colored. And it wasn’t raining. That’s what made it a dream. It’s always raining for Easter egg hunts in the spring.

Later in the afternoon I did another session of PT and an additional session of OT, but by then I was really starting to get bored. I made up for lost time and used my iPad to do all the crossword puzzles I had missed that week. Then I ate dinner while watching the local evening news. One of the stories I saw there threw me into a tailspin. It’s the kind of story that’s been repeated countless times on TV stations all over the country in the last few years. A soldier from Fort Lewis, a twenty-two-year-old private, had been killed by an IED in Afghanistan. Forty years later in another war in another time zone, another kid wasn’t coming home from the battlefield the same way Lennie D. hadn’t come home.

Reaching for my iPad once more, I went on a virtual trip, one I’d never had the courage to make in real life. I keyed in the words “Vietnam War Memorial.” When the Web site for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall opened up, there was a place on the welcome page that allowed you to do a search for specific names. I didn’t have much to go on—Lennie D.’s last name, Davis, and the day he died, the day that was seared in my memory: August 2, 1966. It turns out that was all I needed to put in—the last name and the date. Moments later, I had the results:

LEONARD DOUGLAS DAVIS

Army—2LT—O1

Age: 22

Race: Caucasian

Sex: Male

Date of Birth: Sept. 16, 1943

From: BISBEE, AZ

Religion: ROMAN CATHOLIC

Marital Status: Single

Panel 9 E, Line 96

I sat there, staring at the words and trying to make sense of them while swallowing the growing lump in my throat. His first name was Leonard? Of course it was. Nobody names their kid Lennie. And he was from Bisbee, Arizona? If I had ever known that fact about Lennie D., I had somehow forgotten. I know very little about Arizona as a state, but Bisbee I do know. I’ve been there twice now, working with Sheriff Joanna Brady. And age twenty-two? That was what struck me now. He was so very young. So incredibly young, with a whole lifetime reduced to those few words, blazing accusingly back at me from my iPod screen.

I was still transfixed when I heard the telltale tapping of a pair of high heels coming down the hall.

Most of the people who work in hospitals wear soft-soled shoes. Why wouldn’t they? They’re on their feet all day. Only visitors wore high heels. Expecting Mel to appear at any moment, I quickly switched off my iPad, swiped away all trace of tears, and tried to get a grip on myself. But the person who swung through my doorway like a whirling dervish wasn’t Mel Soames at all. Instead, my arriving visitor was Detective Delilah Ainsworth, a very angry Detective Ainsworth.

“What the hell are you trying to do and what are you getting me into?” she demanded forcefully.

Here I was still flat on my back in bed, where I had been for days. Whatever had happened, as far as I knew I was totally blameless.

“Why?” I asked. “What’s wrong?”

“Monica Wellington’s homicide has never been turned over to the current Cold Case squad because it was officially marked closed in 1981. The evidence was then transferred to the evidence warehouse, but it isn’t there. That means the murder book is missing as well.” Delilah threw the words in my direction as though she was convinced that I was somehow personally responsible.

“What do you mean, there’s no murder book?” I shot back. “Of course there is. I wrote some of the entries myself. Look again. It’s been almost forty years. It’s probably just misfiled somewhere.”

“That’s what I thought, too,” Delilah agreed. “That it had been misfiled; I checked the paperwork. I have an entry that shows it leaving the evidence room, but no entry showing it arrived at evidence storage.”

“Does the entry say who took it?”

“It’s part of that week’s routine evidence transfer. It left the ‘active’ evidence room without ever arriving at ‘inactive.’ There’s no record of it being checked in at the other end, although the other entries listed on the transfer sheet are present and accounted for. If it weren’t for that one outgoing transfer entry, you’d think the evidence never existed.”