Second Watch (30 page)

At the time, seeing my daughter playing the part of the old charwoman, grieving over the loss of her pretend son, had left me breathless. I had sat in a dead-silent auditorium along with the rest of the audience, too stunned with emotion to applaud. Now, all these years later, with those two boxes sitting on the mantel in front of me, I was shocked to realize that the old woman in the play, the one who had seemed so ancient back then, must have been about the same age Bonnie Abney and I were now.

“I don’t usually keep the boxes out in plain sight,” Bonnie said, crossing the room to stand beside me. “I brought them out today to show them to you.”

We stood there looking. She didn’t touch the boxes, and neither did I.

Nodding wordlessly and searching for a way to move away from the boxes and all they meant, I glanced around the rest of the room. On a wall to one side of the fireplace was a portrait, and I stood transfixed once more, gazing up a pencil sketch of a young Lennie D. I saw again the same confident eyes and crooked smile, a handsome young guy resplendent in his West Point uniform.

Bonnie’s eyes followed mine. “I had that done for Doug’s mother the year he was killed,” she explained. “It hung in her living room for many years, and it was returned to me when she passed away some years ago.”

“It’s him,” I said with a lump in my throat. “It’s absolutely him.”

She nodded. “The flag from the coffin went to his mother,” she said. “It was in one of those ceremonial glass boxes, and I would have liked to have it, but somehow it disappeared.”

“And his West Point sword?” I asked.

“That went to one of his younger brothers, Blaine.”

That hurt. Hannah Wellington had her candles. Bonnie Abney had her medals, but she didn’t have either the sword or the flag.

We stood there in silence. After a moment Bonnie took a deep breath and seemed to recall her position as hostess. “Won’t you sit down?” she urged, pointing me toward an easy chair. “What can I get you? Coffee, tea, some wine—white or red?”

Mel sat down on a nearby couch. Crackerjack had evidently decided she was the best thing since the invention of kibble, and he was seated directly in front of her, soaking up 100 percent of her attention, and although he was seated on the floor and she was on the couch, I noticed they were almost eye to eye.

“If he’s too much, I can always send him into the other room,” Bonnie offered.

“Oh, no,” Mel said. “He’s gorgeous. I love him.”

“It’s a good thing you’re wearing black pants,” Bonnie told her. “He sheds like crazy. Now, what to drink?”

Mel and I both asked for coffee. I had spent the whole trip trying to decide if I should let her broach the subject or if I should. Ultimately I had determined that sooner was better. If it all went south from there, Bonnie could go ahead and hand us our walking papers without having to go through the trouble of serving us lunch.

With that in mind, once Bonnie disappeared into the kitchen to fetch the coffee, I reached into my pocket and pulled out those six items that seemed to be burning a hole in my pocket. When Bonnie returned to the living room, she was carrying a tray laden with mugs of coffee, cream, and sugar. By then my peace offerings were spread out on the coffee table in front of me.

Bonnie looked at them, but she said nothing as she set down the tray. After passing mugs to Mel and me, Bonnie turned her full attention to the items lying there, waiting for her. She picked them up one at a time, first the hunks of metal and then the playing cards. Holding them nestled gently between her hands, she sank down onto the couch next to Mel.

“Tell me,” she said, looking at me. “Please.”

And so I did—all of it, starting with my very first meeting with Lennie D. after I arrived in camp and his giving me the cards and the book. I told her everything I could remember about the firefight that had cost Doug Davis his life. She listened with rapt attention. I was an eyewitness. I had been there. When I explained how the book Lieutenant Davis had given me—the one I carried with me into battle—had saved my life, she began to cry. She didn’t sob. Silent tears slipped down her cheeks and dripped unnoticed onto the sweater she was wearing.

“And these are the cards he gave you?” she asked when I finished.

“The very ones,” I said.

She held them to her cheek briefly, as though some trace of Lennie D.’s touch might still linger on the smooth surface.

“They told me about you when I went to the Cacti reunion,” she said quietly.

That one stunned me. “They did?”

“Yes, they told me the story of the guy who didn’t die because he had borrowed one of Doug’s books. I never imagined that I’d have the chance to meet you and speak to someone else who was there when it happened. And I actually saw the book, by the way—
The Rise and Fall,
with three jagged holes burned almost all the way through it. Gary Fowler brought it to the reunion and showed it to me. He was the one who told me the story.”

“Lieutenant Davis was a good man,” I declared. “The best. He was brave. He was loyal. He cussed like a sailor, but he was also kind and generous, and it was his kindness in lending me that book that saved my life. I wanted you to know that. I wanted to be able to tell you so in person.”

“But why now?” she asked. “Why after all this time?”

“I had surgery on my knees,” I said. “And while I was under the influence of the painkillers, I had a dream about . . .” I had to pause for a moment to compose myself and to remember to call Lennie D. by the name Bonnie Abney used. “About Douglas,” I concluded finally. “The dream reminded me that I had never come to see you; that I had never said thank you or told you how sorry I was then and still am for your terrible loss.”

Bonnie didn’t say anything for a few moments. Instead, she used the back of her hand to wipe away the tears.

“So what have you done with your life, Beau?”

It was the same question the dream Lennie D. had asked me, and Bonnie was asking for the same reason. Her Douglas had died. I had lived. She wanted to know what had I done with my side of that bargain.

“I joined Seattle PD after I got out of the service. I spent most of my career there working as a homicide detective. Since then I’ve worked for the attorney general’s office.”

“We both do,” Mel put in. “We’re assigned to the Special Homicide Investigation Team. Sometimes we work new cases, sometimes we work old cases. That’s where we met.”

“So you’ve been together a long time?” Bonnie asked.

“Not long at all,” Mel said. “It took us a while to get it right.”

Mel and I had both finished our coffee by then. Bonnie’s cup sat untouched and cold on the coffee table, but she seemed to decide that the time had come to serve our late lunch.

“I’ll go put the food on the table,” she said. “I made a chicken salad, and this morning I baked some sourdough bread from a ninety-year-old starter my sister brought down from Alaska. That’s where my family came from originally.”

She got up then. When Mel went to see if there was something she could do to help, Crackerjack proved fickle and turned his considerable attention and charm on me. His coat was amazingly smooth and soft and brushed to a glossy high sheen. As he stared into my face, I was glad to think that Bonnie had the dog’s solid presence in this comfortable but solitary place.

When lunch was served, we sat in the dining room, again overlooking the water. The wind had come up. Even from this distance we could see whitecaps churning. “It was still this morning,” Bonnie said, “still enough that I went kayaking with some neighbors. Douglas would have loved it.”

Just that quickly, she slipped away down memory lane, telling us about the blind date in Florida that had brought them together—a soldier about to head for Vietnam and a young flight attendant; how they had walked and talked until the wee hours of the morning; how he had walked her to her airline’s operations department in Miami when it came time for her to board a flight to Rio; how he had shipped off to Ranger school for six weeks, leaving her to wonder why she hadn’t heard from him when, in truth, no calls or letters were allowed.

The story took a turn then. He had shown up, fresh out of Ranger school and wanting to visit with her before going home to Bisbee, Arizona, to see his family for Christmas. For the next several weeks, before he shipped out for Vietnam, they traveled together. It wasn’t a matter of them falling in love, because that had already happened for both of them.

During their idyllic time together, they managed to grab a few more days together in Hawaii. Then he left for Vietnam and was gone. She told of going to Bisbee and waiting in the desert for the train that brought Doug’s body home for burial. Of going to the wake and meeting a young Hispanic man who’d told Bonnie that one cold morning over that last Christmas vacation he had encountered Doug in downtown Bisbee. Doug had handed him his jacket and then walked home in a cotton shirt because he was going to Vietnam and wouldn’t need a jacket.

After that Bonnie told us about her life after Douglas—about working and eventually marrying. But that marriage had never quite worked as well as either she or her now former husband would have liked. She had been promoted to director of training at the airline, written a book, become a management consultant, and created her own company, one that specialized in executive training all over the globe. And now, after years of living and working on the road, she had retired to this little haven of a house on Whidbey Island.

I listened to her story with an ache in my heart, because I, of all people, understood. She had had her Douglas Davis; I had had my Anne Corley. The cases were so similar that it took my breath away. Anne had arrived in my life in a whirl of passion that had taken us both by surprise and turned our worlds upside down. The same thing had happened to Bonnie and Doug. Both Doug and Anne had shot through Bonnie’s and my separate lives like a pair of brilliant comets, and when the two of them were gone, Bonnie and I were left with our worlds in pieces, our hopes shattered, and our dreams in ashes.

It took me years to grow beyond the legend of Anne Corley so I could find love and comfort in the presence of someone else. It wasn’t until I found Mel that I was truly able to put what happened to me back then with Anne in the past.

Maybe that wouldn’t happen for Bonnie—maybe the legend of Doug Davis was more than she could ever put behind her—but as I listened to her story, I finally understood what I was doing there in her living room, why I had come. It was my job to listen and to be there because I was the one person in the whole world who could listen to Bonnie’s heartbreaking story and truly understand.

Mel and I stayed for hours longer than we expected to. We had dessert back in the living room. I took my next batch of pills with a dose of carb-heavy red velvet cake. Marge Herndon would have been appalled.

As we were gathering up to leave, Bonnie asked me if I wanted the cards back. “No,” I told her. “They’re yours now, along with the shrapnel.”

Nodding, she picked them up, carried them over to the fireplace, and put them on the mantel next to the jewel boxes. She had put them in a place of honor, and I was moved beyond words.

By the time Bonnie and Crackerjack walked Mel and me back out to the car, it was almost dark. My hand was on the door handle when Bonnie reached up and gave me a hug.

“Thanks for listening,” she said. “I haven’t told anyone that story in a very long time. It’s such ancient history and most people don’t care to hear it.”

“That’s what friends are for,” I said. “It doesn’t matter if they’re old friends or new friends. They’re the kind of people who will listen as long as you need them to because, sometimes, telling the story and having someone listen is the only way to figure out how to move on.”

Bonnie turned to Mel then, and enveloped her in a hug, too. “I’m happy for you,” she said. “I’m happy for you both.”

Then, with Crackerjack at her side, she turned and walked back into her solitary house. I watched her go. Watched her turn off the porch light after she closed the door.

The sky was dark overhead. Only one star—I’m not sure which one—was visible in the distance. Logically, I know that Lennie D. and that star have no connection whatsoever, but somehow, when I spoke, I believed they were both listening.

“I did it,” I said. “I hope I measured up.”

CHAPTER 26

I
n the world of scripted television shows, everything gets wrapped up in an hour of prime time—forty-two minutes of story and the rest of commercials, often for drugs where the announcers spend far more time listing dozens of dire side effects than they do singing the praises of the medication’s supposed benefits.

Life isn’t like that. DNA PCR takes time. It isn’t an instant process, but it’s not like I didn’t have one or two things to occupy my time while I waited to see if the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab could deliver the goods.

I had been up doing more than I should have been doing for a number of days. Marge Herndon was quick to point out that I was able to function that way because I was still taking far more pain medication than I realized. Soon after we got back from Whidbey, she set off on a program to wean me away from them, and that was no picnic.

For one thing, as I went through withdrawal from narcotics, I found that it would have been all too easy to once again fall prey to booze. On that score, I went to meetings and spent plenty of quality time with my sponsor. Even when Ida Witherspoon’s mandatory visits ended, I continued to do the PT, sometimes doing two and three turns around the running track at a crack, first with the walker, then two canes, then one, and, finally, on my own.

Marge finished her stint as my drill sergeant and went back home to her own place in Shoreline. In some ways, Mel and I were glad to see her go, but in terms of having food magically appear at mealtimes, we both agreed that we missed having her annoying presence bustling around the place.

Kelly flew up from Ashland to visit. She spent two nights in the visitor’s suite Marge had just abandoned. And I made arrangements to book it again when Scott and Cherisse were due to arrive in town and would need a place to stay while they closed on their new house in Burien.

By then my knees were making so much progress that I was amazed. When I went to see Dr. Auld to have my staples taken out, I walked into the treatment room carrying both of the canes. That put a smile on his face. “Hey,” he told me. “I do good work, don’t I?”

He told me the numb spots I was feeling on my legs might or might not go away eventually, but he pronounced me a great patient. I left his office feeling as though I had been given a gold star right along with my new knees.

And all the while, in the background, while I was waiting, I was also working. While my original iPad was still being held hostage in the crime lab, I had gotten a replacement, and I used that to learn everything there was to know about the second Kenneth James Adcock.

It turned out he wasn’t one of the earliest Microsofties, but he was close. He was a smart kid who had graduated from WSU with a degree in electronics engineering by the time he was twenty. He had gone on to get a master’s and a Ph.D. from UCLA before going to work for Microsoft in the early eighties.

Retired with a bundle of stock and money while still in his forties, Adcock and his wife, Yvette, were known for their philanthropic efforts in the Pacific Northwest in general and in Bellevue and Seattle in particular. There were no blemishes on Kenneth’s record—no arrests, no speeding tickets, not even so much as a parking infraction. On the surface, at least, he appeared to be a totally upright, law-abiding guy—a politically active, churchgoing model citizen.

Almost a month passed. I had more or less given up all hope of getting the answers I needed when the phone rang bright and early one morning. When I answered, Ross Connors was on the line.

“Are you sitting down?” he asked. “If you’re not, you should be, because I wouldn’t want those new knees of yours to go splat.”

“Why?” I returned. “What’s up?”

“The crime lab just called. They’ve got a match. Or rather, two of them.”

My heart started hammering in my chest. “What do you mean, two?” I asked.

“The DNA off your iPad matches the M.E.’s defensive fingernail scrapings. Adcock’s your guy!”

“Amen,” I breathed. “But I thought you said two matches.”

“I did. The DNA expert assures me that Kenneth James Adcock Junior was the father of Monica Wellington’s unborn child. How do you like them apples?”

It was what I had expected all along. It had to be. That was why Faye Adcock had been willing to commit not one but two murders and then leap to her death besides. She had been protecting the one thing she had left in the world—her son and all he stood for.

“I talked to the prosecutor’s office about this,” Ross continued. “Even with the DNA evidence, he’s not ready to swear out an arrest warrant. He wants more. He wanted to know if anyone ever looked into the kid’s involvement back during the time of the initial investigation.”

“We didn’t,” I said. “I can tell you that his name never came up, not once.”

“It has now,” Ross said. “As of now, I’m putting some of my S.H.I.T people—Mel included—on the case. I know it was a long time ago, but someone out there might know something, might still remember something. It’s just a matter of finding those people and jogging their memories.”

Ross is a smart man, and he was right. With Mel keeping me apprised of how things were going, I stayed on the sidelines while my fellow investigators combed through Kenneth Adcock’s high school chums and acquaintances. It didn’t take long to discover someone who remembered a rowdy party where a bunch of guys from WSU had gone over to Leavenworth one snowy December weekend and had used the Christmas lighting ceremony as an excuse to get hammered. Several of them remembered that Kenneth had been smitten with one of the young local girls. Yes, things had gotten pretty hot and heavy. No, no one remembered her name. They had never seen her again, but when they were shown Monica’s senior yearbook photo, three of the guys on that trip agreed that that was most likely the girl.

These days, if someone falls for someone else, there’s an instant trail of the budding romance in Facebook postings, texts, or tweets. In 1973 there was no such thing. There was no way to connect the dots between Monica’s coming to the lonely realization that she was most likely pregnant as a result of that unexpected coupling and her equally lonely decisions about what, if anything, she should do about it.

There were no hidden diary entries to tell us if what had happened between them had been consensual or if it had in fact been date rape. Had she contacted Kenneth in Pullman? Had she contacted his parents? Who knows, but by now I was convinced that one Friday evening in late March Monica left her University of Washington dorm for the last time, wearing that WSU sweatshirt, and that Kenneth James Adcock Junior was the guy who was going to be her “blind date” that night—her date and her killer.

I was still officially on medical leave on the day it was time to go pick up Adcock, but they let me be a part of it anyway. It was a Friday afternoon, late in October, when we drove up to the Adcock mansion in the wilds of Bellevue. It was raining. The streets were slick with fallen leaves. Puddles of water had backed up around leaf-clogged storm drains.

Even though I had recently been given permission to drive, Mel was at the wheel and I was in the passenger seat with the arrest warrant in my pocket. We were in Mel’s Cayman, caravanning with two detectives from Seattle PD’s Cold Case squad in their own unmarked car. They would be the officers taking Adcock into custody.

We all knew this was a big deal. You don’t pick up a murderer with those kinds of connections without running a certain amount of risk. Not life-and-death risk. I didn’t figure Adcock would come out of his house shooting. I knew it was more likely that he would immediately try to see to it that anyone connected to the case was committing career suicide.

I went along for the ride because if that’s what happened, I wanted to be his natural target.

We had thought on the way there that we might have some trouble getting in through the gates, but it turned out Adcock was a sociable kind of guy. He and his wife were having a Day of the Dead party and the front porch was strewn with brightly lit jack-o’-lanterns and weirdly posed skeletons. Considering the relatively recent death of his mother, that seemed like an odd choice, but maybe the party had been scheduled before Faye Adcock staged her very dramatic exit.

The gates to Kenneth Adcock’s mansion were wide open, and we drove right in.

When we got out of the cars, we could hear mariachis playing somewhere in the background. I have no doubt that deep inside that spacious mansion a uniformed bartender was busy handing out margaritas, but Mel and I were bringing our own particular element to the Day of the Dead, one Kenneth Adcock most likely wasn’t anticipating. Somebody else had brought the tequila. We were bringing the worm.

We rang the bell. Again, the person who came to the door was part of a catering staff, and again I asked to speak to Mr. Adcock. When he came to the door this time, he looked at me blankly, the way you do when you see someone you think you should know but can’t quite place.

“Yes?” he said, questioningly.

“Mr. Adcock, I’m Special Investigator J. P. Beaumont with the Special Homicide Investigation Team. This is my partner, Mel Soames. We have a warrant for your arrest. Please turn around and place your hands on your head.”

“Wait. What’s this all about?”

“You’re under arrest for the murder of Monica Wellington.”

He looked at me for a very long moment. In the background, I heard a woman’s anxious voice. “What is it, Kenny? What’s going on?”

Kenneth shook his head. “Call Winston,” he said over his shoulder as we led him away. “Tell him I’m being arrested. I need my attorney.”

When I closed the cuffs around his wrists, the sound of the locking mechanism was music to my ears.