Second Watch (25 page)

CHAPTER 21

T
he state of Washington is divided into two parts, the wet side and the dry side. As you drive east, you drop down from the Cascades into something very close to desert. It had been sunny but chilly in Yakima while we were there, but it started raining as we were coming back across Snoqualmie Pass. A heavy downpour of rain mixed with hail succeeded in slowing Mel down to something just under the speed limit.

We mostly didn’t talk while she drove. I was too busy thinking about Monica Wellington. If Kenneth Adcock had been involved in what happened to her, how had we missed that? Yes, we had gone looking unsuccessfully for that mysterious boyfriend and the supposed blind date, but none of the interviews with Monica’s roommates had even hinted that she might have been involved with an older man, and especially not with a cop.

Mel had evidently been doing some thinking of her own. “I think we should talk to Mr. Clark.”

“Why?” I asked. “What are you thinking?”

“Remember what you told me earlier about Amelia’s possibly being a hooker? What if you weren’t wrong about that? Sweet young girl from a small farming town goes to the big city and takes up with the wrong crowd. What if the same kind of thing happened to Monica Wellington?”

“You think maybe she ended up on a similar path?”

“It happens,” Mel said grimly. “Those fresh-faced small-town girls can be worth a lot in the open market. And if one of them happened to get pregnant and was about to blow the whistle on a guy on his way up in Seattle PD, it would have been in lots of people’s best interests to take her out.”

“And you’re thinking Howard Clark might have known more of the nitty-gritty on that than Frankie would?”

Mel nodded. “Consider this. If you knew you were on your deathbed, how much of the truth about your life would you tell Kelly and Scott, and how much would you leave out?”

I opened my iPad and went searching for a phone number for Howard Clark. His listed number wasn’t hard to find, and he answered the phone on the third ring. “Clark residence,” he said.

“I’m sorry to interrupt your evening,” I told him. “My name is J. P. Beaumont and I’m with the . . .”

“I know all about you,” he interrupted. “Frankie called and told me you had stopped by. He said something about bringing up all that bad stuff from years ago. I don’t know why you have to do that after all this time.”

“A girl was murdered back then,” I answered, “and two more people who were involved in that investigation have died this week. We’re operating on the assumption that the two new deaths are related to that old one, and since your late wife was evidently acquainted with at least some of the people involved, I was wondering if there was anything you could add to what your stepson already told us.”

“Frankie’s my son,” Howard corrected. “I adopted him. He’s mine, so don’t go calling him my stepson.”

“Sorry.”

“As for the murder?” Howard continued without any further prompting from me. “I’m well aware of it. Amelia called me about it the night it happened, or at least the night the body was found. She was scared to death. She said the boys—Donnie and Frankie—had seen something they shouldn’t have, and she was afraid something awful was going to happen to them.”

“She turned to you for help?” I asked.

“I know, I know,” Howard said. “That probably sounds strange to you. At the time, we’d been apart for over a dozen years. Even so, she must have known that deep down, if she was ever in real trouble, she could count on me. You see, it was my fault Amelia and I broke up in the first place. I was an arrogant jerk back then. I broke up with Amelia because I thought I could do better. It turns out I was wrong, of course. My first marriage was a disaster, and that was long over before Mimi called me that night, asking for help.”

“You knew her situation?” I asked. “About the boys and about her somewhat questionable living arrangements?”

“You mean did I know some guy had knocked her up and that she was a kept woman?” Howard asked. “Of course I did. Not to begin with, of course, but she told me eventually. And once she clued me in as to who the boys’ father was and let me know that the guy who had threatened them was a police officer, I knew I had to do something to get all of them out of there.

“Mimi and I talked on the phone for hours that night and off and on for the next several days with me begging her to come home and marry me. When cops showed up at school to interview the boys behind Mimi’s back, that was the last straw. She figured they were probably working for the guy who had made the threats, and she suspected that they would report straight back to him, word for word, whatever Donnie and Frankie had said in the interview.”

I wanted to say that wasn’t true—that we hadn’t done anything of the kind. But without knowing it, we probably had. Kenneth Adcock hadn’t been chief of police back then, but as assistant chief, he would have had access to everything any of us wrote in the murder book. He would have known exactly how the investigation was going at any given moment. And it worked. No doubt he had kept tabs on everything from day one. Eventually the case had gone cold at his instigation, and then, with some additional encouragement from him, it had disappeared entirely.

“I’m afraid the boys’ mother was probably right about that,” I admitted. “The man in question was in a position of authority inside the department, although I can assure you, none of the investigators at the time had any inkling of his involvement.”

“How do you know that?” Howard asked.

“Because I was there,” I said. “Because I was one of the detectives on the case, and I can assure you that Kenneth Adcock’s name never came up.”

I heard a catch in Howard Clark’s voice when he spoke again. “Yes,” he said. “That’s the name she told me. I promised her that I’d never do anything that would jeopardize the boys’ safety, so I’ve made it a point to stay completely out of it, but what about now? If you’re bringing this up now because there’s no statute of limitations on homicide, what if there’s no statute of limitations on Adcock’s threats, either? What if he comes after Frankie even after all this time?”

“He can’t,” I answered simply. “Kenneth Adcock is dead. He died in a diving accident years ago.”

“Oh,” Howard said. “I’m glad to hear it. Well, not glad so much as relieved. I wish Mimi had known he was dead. It would have been a blessing for her, because she always worried about it. Once I got her out of there and home to Yakima, we turned our backs on all of it. I adopted the boys. DonLeavy’s name wasn’t on the birth certificate, so he didn’t need to abandon his parental rights, and he never paid another dime of child support.”

“DonLeavy wasn’t concerned she’d blow the whistle on him?”

“I suppose he could have been, of course,” Howard conceded, “and we considered it at the time, but asking him for any kind of help would have meant putting the boys back into that situation and in harm’s way. That simply wasn’t an option. Besides, I was fully capable of providing for them, and I was happy to do so.”

“We’re wondering if there’s a chance Amelia was somehow acquainted with the girl who was murdered, Monica Wellington. Did her name ever come up in any of the conversations you had with your wife, either at the time or later?”

“Of course the girl’s name came up,” Howard said, his voice hardening. “The man who had killed her had threatened Amelia and her boys. Naturally she was mentioned by name.”

“You never thought about reporting it to the police?”

“So that’s it? Are you trying to turn Frankie and me into some kind of accessory after the fact? Good luck with that. My wife was terrified, and if you had a rogue cop operating in your department, she wasn’t wrong.”

“I have to agree with you there, Mr. Clark,” I said. “As I said before, Amelia wasn’t wrong on that score. Not at all.”

“So the boys’ reporting the body was one turning point,” Mel said, once I ended the call. “But when you and the other detective showed up to interview Donnie and Frankie at the school, you provided another one. So maybe you didn’t solve Monica’s murder at the time, but it sounds as though you helped pave the way for Howard Clark and Amelia Dodd to get back together. That fact probably provided a stability and a quality of life for Amelia and her two sons that they never would have had if they had stayed in Seattle.”

“That’s one of the things I like about you,” I told her. “You can always find the silver lining.”

The rain had let up by the time we made it back across Lake Washington to downtown Seattle. The gated door on the parking garage closes at six, and it was now after eight. I was glad to be back in Belltown Terrace. I was tired. I was only a couple of days out of the hospital. I knew I had done too much, had been up or sitting up in one position far too long. My ankles were swelling inside the compression stockings, and the damaged nerves in my legs were on fire.

When we got out of the car on P-2, I was grateful that Mel had thought to bring the walker along as well as the canes. I was more than ready for the walker and for something sturdy to lean on.

“Are you all right?” she asked as we rode up in the elevator.

“I’m okay,” I said. “And that would be several notches under fine.”

She nodded. “Why don’t you pop another pain pill and crawl back into bed for a while. In the meantime, I’ll figure out something to have for dinner.”

I wasn’t feeling well enough at that point to argue.

We made it to the top floor. I led the way out of the elevator, leaning on the walker, while Mel came behind, carrying the canes. I slipped the key out of my pocket, unlocked the door, and opened it. As soon as I did so, I unleashed a cloud of cigarette smoke.

I was immediately pissed off. Marge! No doubt the woman had let herself into the unit in our absence and was busy smoking up the joint. I wanted to say something like “Who said you could smoke in here?” but I didn’t. I stifled it. Instead, shaking my head, I limped farther into the room, making space in the entryway so Mel could follow me. As she did so, the wind slammed the door shut behind both of us. Oddly enough, the entire unit seemed to be swathed in darkness.

Without pausing to wonder about any of it, I flipped on the entryway light switch and was moving forward into the room when Marge Herndon said, “Look out. She’s got a gun.”

Those are chilling, mind-numbing words. I shouldn’t have been moving fast enough to come to a screeching halt, but halt I did. Two women, both of them seated on the window seat, were silhouetted against the darkening sky. The larger one was Marge. The woman next to her was much smaller. I couldn’t see her well, but I had no doubt she was the one holding the gun.

“Who are you?” I demanded. “What’s going on? What do you want?”

The sun had almost completely set. The storm was over. The bank of leftover gray storm clouds on the horizon had burned blood red as day turned to night.

As my eyes adjusted to the changed lighting, I was finally able to see the gun. It was something small enough to fit inside the woman’s tiny hand. Small as it was, however, it was aimed directly at Marge Herndon’s ample chest. At that range there could be no doubt the shot would be lethal.

“I assume you both have weapons and backup weapons,” the gun holder said. Her voice was chillingly cold. Every word dripped with malice.

“Place them on the dining room table. All of them. If you try anything—anything at all—this woman will die.”

I already had Delilah Ainsworth’s death on my conscience. I didn’t need Marge Herndon’s name added to that terrible toll.

Mel and I were standing on the far side of the table. I caught her eye. “Do it,” I whispered.

She nodded.

Without another word, we began divesting ourselves of our weapons, one by one. “Why only three?” the woman asked when we finished.

“Because I just had dual knee-replacement surgery,” I said. “That’s why I need a walker. It’s why I need a nurse. I can’t wear my ankle holster right now.”

That was a lie, but I didn’t tell her that.

“You still haven’t told us who you are, what you’re doing here in our living room, or what you want.”

“Come in and sit down,” she offered. “I came here to talk. The gun is my insurance that you’ll listen to what I have to say.”

Warily, Mel and I edged our way through the dining room and across the living room, where we perched warily on chairs that faced the expanse of window over Puget Sound. The wall is made up of several different sections of double-paned glass. The three middle sections are stationary. On either side of those there are two much narrower windows that open and close with crank handles that allow for cross ventilation. Both of those were wide open. Rather than taking Marge’s cigarette smoke outside, a chill breeze off the water was blowing it back into the room.

The surge of fight-or-flight adrenaline that was speeding through my body had dulled the pain in my legs, but the cold air from the windows blew right through me. Now that we were closer, even in the darkened room, the tiny woman’s Asian features came into focus. She was so small that her legs didn’t stretch from the cushion on the window seat all the way to the floor. To my knowledge I had never met Faye Adcock before, but I knew that’s who she was—who she had to be.

“Could we please close the windows?” I asked. “It’s cold in here.”

Marge made as if to do as I asked. Faye Adcock shook her head. “Leave them open,” she ordered.

Without a word, Marge subsided back onto the cushion.

“What do you want?”

“I’m going to tell you a story.”

“What story?” I asked. “About how you murdered Delilah Ainsworth and tried to pin the blame on Mac MacPherson?”

Faye Adcock must have been well into her seventies, but she didn’t look it. Her slim figure was swathed in a dark-colored tracksuit. Her raven hair was pulled back in a neat bun. Only the sagging skin on her neck betrayed her age.

Her dark eyes met and held mine in a fathomless stare, and then she raised one eyebrow. “Since you already know that one, I don’t need to tell it to you. You never should have reopened that case.”

“Which story, then?” I asked, trying to keep my tone bemused and mocking. “What else would you have that could possibly be better than that one?”