Second Watch (28 page)

CHAPTER 24

I
called Ross Connors while Mel drove. “Hey,” he said. “All hail the conquering heroes.”

“I wish.”

“What do you mean?” Ross seemed genuinely surprised. “Everybody I’ve talked to today, including Harry I. Ball, is singing your praises, saying that you walked out of surgery and started solving cases, including one very cold one, before they even took your stitches out.”

“Staples,” I said. “They use staples these days instead of stitches. And whatever you’re hearing about that cold case may not be quite right. I’m hoping you haven’t pulled back on the crime lab doing that DNA testing for us, have you?”

“I meant to,” Ross said, “but I had a meeting with a legislative committee this morning, and I hadn’t gotten around to it.”

“Don’t,” I said. “In fact, if anything, give it a little prod in the butt.”

“Why?” Ross asked. “What’s up?”

“Mel and I drove over to Leavenworth this morning to talk to Monica Wellington’s mother. Something she said got us thinking that maybe Faye Adcock was covering for someone.”

“How could she be?” Ross asked. “And why? Since her husband was the killer and since he’s dead . . .”

“
If
her husband was the killer,” I corrected, “I’m thinking Kenneth Adcock and his wife were both covering for the same guy—their son.”

The phone went so quiet I thought for a moment that Ross had hung up on me.

“Hear me out,” I said. “Ken Adcock left Seattle PD in 1981, shortly after the Wellington case was designated closed, something that was done without Captain Larry Powell’s knowledge or approval. We have no idea when the evidence box disappeared, but as chief of police, Adcock would certainly have had access to that and to the HR records as well. But he didn’t have access to the M.E.’s office, and he had no way of knowing that at some time in the distant future, DNA would be the damning tool it is today.”

“Even if we still had the physical evidence, was there anything to link the son—whatever his name is—to the dead girl?” Ross asked.

“Nothing,” I answered.

“So even with the DNA evidence, there wouldn’t be anything to compare it to.”

“Until now,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“You get a fire lit under that DNA testing,” I urged. “Mel and I are going to go get the crime lab something to compare it with.”

“How can you? You don’t have a warrant. You don’t have probable cause.”

“No,” I said. “Maybe not, but we’re old and tricky.”

“What does that mean?”

“We’ll let you know.”

“What trick?” Mel asked when I ended the call to Ross.

“Give me a minute,” I said. “I’m working on it.”

The next person I dialed was Ron Peters, who, unsurprisingly on a Tuesday afternoon, was in his office and taking calls.

“What can I do for you?”

“Mel and I are on our way back from Leavenworth and want to be back in the loop. What can you tell us?”

“Once the tow trucks showed up, officers were able to locate Faye Adcock’s weapon,” Ron said. “I know Mel mentioned something about that.”

“What about her vehicle?”

“A parking enforcement officer found it parked illegally near the Battery Street Tunnel. Her Kia Sportage has been towed to the Big Boy Towing impound lot in Lake City.”

I knew from years past that Big Boy was one of the preferred towing companies that plied the streets of Seattle. I also knew the exact location of their impound lot. “We’re waiting on a warrant to search it,” he finished.

“So things are under control at that end?” I asked.

“Pretty much. All we need now is for everyone to get the paper-trail end of this pulled together—
i
’s dotted and
t
’s crossed. I’ll need something in writing from both of you as well.”

“You’ll have it,” I said. “Tomorrow morning if not sooner.”

“Oh,” Ron added. “Tell Mel that the IT techs downloaded what they needed from her phone, so she can get that back today or tomorrow, too. And speaking of phones, Mac’s phone records are on their way over.”

Mel hadn’t been happy—in fact, she had been pissed as hell—when a CSI tech had collected her telephone in order to examine the authenticity of her recording of the events surrounding Faye Adcock’s death.

“She’ll be pleased to hear that,” I said. “The poor girl feels naked without it. There’s one more thing I need.”

“What’s that?”

“We thought it might be a good idea if we dropped by Faye Adcock’s son’s place to express our condolences. What’s his name again?”

“I’m not sure that’s such a great idea,” Ron replied dubiously. “But his name is Kenneth James Adcock, and he lives on the east side somewhere. Used to be Kenneth Junior but my understanding is that the junior bit goes away when the old man dies.”

While Ron was still musing about that, I used my iPad and my Special Homicide access code to log on to Washington’s DMV database. Before Ron Peters and I said good-bye, I had located Kenneth James Adcock’s home address on a street in Bellevue called 132nd Avenue North.

“So are you going to tell me or not?” Mel asked. I could hear the impatience in her voice.

“I know you don’t have your iPhone, but do you still have your stylus?”

Mel Soames is one tough cookie, and she may have cleaned more than one bad guy’s clock, but when it comes to manicures, she is definitely a girly-girl. In case you haven’t tried using an iPhone of late, long fingernails and the touch screen pad are not necessarily compatible. To that end, Mel had bought a whole collection of stylus gizmos, brightly colored metal pencil-looking things topped with rounded rubbery tips that work on the touch screen.

Did I mention she’s bought several of them? That’s because they tend to get lost.

“There might be one in the bottom of my purse,” she said. “I think I saw one the other day when I was up in Bellingham and looking for my room key at the hotel.” She shoved her purse in my direction. “Have a look,” she said.

Let’s just say I do not like dredging things out of women’s purses. When I was growing up, my mother’s purse was absolutely off-limits, which accounts for my long-held phobia. This time, though, if we could make this plan work, digging through Mel’s purse might be worth it.

“You still haven’t told me,” she grumbled as I scrounged through her belongings—several tubes of lipstick, mascara, a compact, an empty tissue container, an assortment of pens and pencils, a container of Splenda, and not one but three separate hotel keys, only one of which was from Bellingham.

“Got it!” I announced at last, holding the stylus up in triumph. It was a shiny bright red, and that was the only reason I had managed to glimpse it in the dark depths of the deep black purse. “Now we’re in business.”

Moments later I was back on the phone, this time to Todd Hatcher down in Olympia. Todd, who hails from Arizona originally, got pulled into Ross Connors’s orbit and into Special Homicide when he was working on his doctorate in forensic economics. His study on the rising costs of an aging prison population had turned Ross into a devoted fan.

So yes, Todd knows his way around the world of economics, but it’s due to his uncanny abilities with computers that Ross keeps him on retainer. My best trick with electronic devices is to make them roll over and play dead—or, rather,
be
dead. Todd is able to get them to do handstands and tap dance.

“Hey, Todd,” I said, “I need some help.”

“What kind of help?”

“I need you to create a bogus form for me, one that can show up on my iPad in—what’s it called again?—a PD something.”

“You mean a PDF?” Todd offered helpfully.

“Yes, that’s the one. I need one that can be signed directly on my iPad.”

“I can do that, but what’s this bogus form supposed to say?” Todd asked.

“A vehicle belonging to a suicide victim named Faye Adcock has been towed to the Big Boy Towing lot in Lake City. I need to have something with my name on it that I can have her son sign acknowledging that he’s being notified, on behalf of Seattle PD, about the location of his deceased mother’s vehicle.”

“What kind of vehicle?”

“A Kia Sportage. You should be able to get the details on her and on the vehicle itself from the DMV.”

“Okeydokey,” Todd said. “I’ll get right on this. I love writing fiction. You want me to e-mail you the form when I finish it?”

“Please.”

“How long do I have?”

“I haven’t put the son’s address into the GPS, but I’m guessing about an hour and a half.”

“You’ve got it,” Todd said.

So did Mel. When I ended the call she was smiling. “Ken Adcock signs with the stylus. The crime lab grabs his DNA from that, and we’re off to the races.”

“That’s right. No warrant. No muss. No fuss.”

“And without having to send him a bogus envelope to lick and return,” Mel added. “Isn’t technology great!”

Todd was good to his word. My e-mail dinged with his incoming message before we even made it to Woodinville. His e-mail came with an attachment as well as with directions for opening and duplicating it that would allow for the attachment to be used in an interactive fashion.

When I opened the PDF, I was pleased with Todd’s concoction—a simple but very realistic form, stating that an illegally parked vehicle belonging to the deceased, Faye Lee Adcock, had been towed by Seattle PD to the following location, and asking for the signature of the next of kin to acknowledge that they had been told the location of said vehicle. The form came complete with all the proper legal-sounding bells and whistles, including the Kia’s VIN. At the bottom, there was a place for the recipient to sign and date, a spot underneath that for him to print both his name and his e-mail address, and a place for me to countersign as well.

As my granddaughter Kayla used to say, easy peasy.

“You do realize,” Mel admonished, “that both the stylus and the iPad will have to go in an evidence bag?”

That was the downside of this whole operation. “Well,” I said with a grin, “I guess we’ll just have to be old-fashioned and be your basic one iPad/one iPhone family for the duration.”

“Not for long,” she said. “We’re getting my iPhone back today!”

By the time we hit I-405, I had programmed Ken Adcock’s address into the GPS. Afternoon traffic was just starting to build up when we turned off at the 70th Street exit and made our way over to 132nd. We drove through a thickly forested area of the city called Bridle Trails, where the lots are what they call “horse acres” or larger, complete with backyard stables and riding trails.

Eventually the GPS directed us off 132nd and into a long driveway that swept uphill to Ken Adcock’s looming mansion. The rambling edifice took up most of what was plainly a huge lot with no sign of stables or horses. It reeked of the wealth that grew as well as trees in the Northwest’s silicon forest.

The house looked smug and opulent, and just seeing it there made me suddenly furious. I had no doubt that eventually the DNA would tell the tale. Kenneth Adcock the younger had murdered a sweet, innocent girl who had inconveniently become pregnant with his child. With cover-up help from both his parents, Adcock had continued to go to school and live the good life, amassing a reasonably sized fortune in the process. And what did Monica Wellington have to show for her life? A headstone in a Leavenworth cemetery and a mother who, almost forty years later, kept candles burning in her daughter’s memory.

Life isn’t fair.

The paved circular driveway that wound around a lushly flowing fountain was filled with the cars of sympathetic well-wishers who had evidently arrived en masse to express their condolences about Faye Adcock’s tragic death. A pair of swinging ornamental gates had been left open to allow for all the comings and goings. As far as Mel and I were concerned, things were getting better and better.

Fortunately, my Mercedes, even though it wasn’t a brand-new model, fit in with all the other spendy vehicles that included at least one chauffeur-driven Bentley. If we’d shown up in that esteemed company driving a beat-up, unmarked patrol car, I have no doubt someone would have immediately emerged from the house and sent us packing. As Cousin Vinny learned all those years ago, it’s a good idea to blend.

Before getting out of the vehicle, Mel took great pains to wipe both the iPad screen and the stylus. Then, with the cover flapped shut over both the iPad and the stylus, she carried those while I wrestled my body and my two Technicolor canes out of the car. Slowly I made my way up the smoothly paved driveway and onto the massive porch. The front door was open to accommodate the stream of visitors. We could have walked inside, but without a warrant it was best to stay on the porch.

The woman who came to the door in answer to the doorbell, clearly a caterer’s assistant, invited us inside.

“No, thank you,” I said cordially. “We know this is a difficult time, and we don’t want to intrude, but we do need to have a word with Mr. Adcock.”

Nodding, she disappeared.

When Ken Adcock appeared in the entryway a few minutes later, I felt as though I were seeing a ghost. The man was definitely his father’s son in size and build, but his face was a mixture of both his mother and his father. He had his father’s square jawline and his mother’s fathomless dark eyes.

“I understand you wanted to see me?” he asked.

Reaching into my pocket, I pulled out my badge and ID. I worried that Adcock might somehow connect my name with the location of his mother’s fatal leap, but he’d had enough interactions with cops that day that he didn’t give either of them a second glance.

“You still haven’t said what you want.”

“Sorry to bother you at a time like this, and we’re so sorry for your loss,” I said in my most conciliatory fashion.

“What’s this about?” he asked brusquely. His voice said it all. Yes, his mother was dead. That made Mel’s and my presence a necessary annoyance.

“Your mother’s vehicle,” I answered.

“What about it?” he said. “My understanding is that it’s been towed to a lot somewhere over in Lake City.”

“Yes,” I said. “That would be Big Boy Towing. Did the people who gave you that information have you sign a receipt?”