Taking the Fifth (25 page)
Authors: J. A. Jance
NATURALLY, B. W. WAINWRIGHT WASN’T in the phone book. Neither was Roger Glancy. That was hardly surprising, however. Neither is J. P. Beaumont.
I called the department and asked for Sergeant James, only to be told he had left for home some fifteen minutes before. I hated calling his home and waking his family, even though he was probably still awake, but there was no choice.
Lynita James answered on the second ring. “Just a minute,” she said sleepily. “He’s brushing his teeth.”
“It’s Beau,” I said when he came on the line.
“What the hell are you doing calling me at this hour?” he demanded.
“There wasn’t any choice. Wainwright’s the ringleader.”
“He’s what? Come on, Beau. Have you been drinking, or what?”
“Wainwright’s the mastermind behind the whole Westcoast operation and he’s been running it from a catbird seat in the DEA. The whole thing just blew sky high. Richard Dathan Morris sent a tape to his mother, naming names, and Ray Holman just showed up to try to get it back. He’s in custody in Bellingham. Now all we’ve got to do is lay hands on that other son of a bitch.”
James was convinced. “So what do you need, Beau?”
“Just tell me this. Does somebody have Roger Glancy’s phone number?”
“Sure, I’ve got it. I’ve got all their numbers. I told you I was the liaison, remember?”
“Do you have it there?”
“It’s in my briefcase, in the car. Just a minute.” He put down the phone, and I could hear Lynita grumpily questioning him about what was going on. Being married to a cop is hell.
Sergeant James came back on the phone. “I’ve got it, but I was just thinking. What if Glancy’s in on it?”
“I’m worried about that too, but it’s a chance we’ll have to take. Glancy’s name wasn’t mentioned anywhere on the tape.”
“Are you going to call him, or do you want me to?” James asked.
“Let’s call him together,” I said. “Give me the number and I’ll patch us in.”
From the way he answered the phone, I knew we had awakened Roger Glancy out of a sound sleep. “This is Detective Beaumont with Seattle police, and Sergeant Lowell James.”
“Who?” Glancy mumbled.
I repeated the names. “Oh, that’s right. I remember now. What’s happening?”
“Roger,” I said slowly, “this may be hard to follow, but we need you to give us Wainwright’s address. Better yet, we need you to take us there.”
“What do you mean? How come?” Glancy was still struggling to wake up and not entirely succeeding. I figured I might as well douse him in the face with cold water.
“We have reason to believe he’s working the other side,” I said quietly. “We think he’s the one who’s been running the Westcoast operation.”
“Oh, come on. You guys are shitting me.”
Sergeant James stepped into the fray. “Look, Glancy, this isn’t a joke, and we’ve got to move on it. Where does Wainwright live?”
“Windermere,” Glancy answered. “He lives on Ivanhoe, a few blocks north of Children’s Orthopedic Hospital.”
“All right, meet us at the southwestern corner of University Village. You can lead us to the house. That’ll be faster than having us all bumble around in a residential neighborhood at this hour of the night.”
“Who all’s coming?” Glancy asked.
“I’ll be there,” Sergeant James said. “Detective Beaumont and probably a couple of squad cars. But no lights and no sirens.”
“Right,” Glancy said. “I can make it in fifteen.”
“Fifteen it is,” James responded. “See you there, Beau,” he added.
I splashed some cold water on my face. It was going to be another long night.
It was a good thing I looked at the gas gauge when I got back in the Porsche. It’s a good car, but it doesn’t run on fumes. I was close enough to the appointed meeting place that I was able to stop at a self-serve place on Denny, fill up, and still be at University Village on time.
As I drove north on Interstate 25 my sense of outrage heated up and boiled over. I’m a cop who happens to work in Seattle, not L.A., not New York or Chicago. I know about what goes on in those other jurisdictions, about the graft and corruption that turn law-enforcement officers into monsters and worse. And I know what it’s like to be a cop in a city where cops are looked on as something lower than the scum of the earth.
But Seattle’s different. That’s one of the reasons I like it. Crooked cops aren’t tolerated here, and B. W. Wainwright was a crooked cop of the first water. My gut instinct said to treat him like the vermin he was, take him out, blot him off the face of the earth. I patted my .38 Smith and Wesson for luck, just to know it was available in case I got a chance to use it. And I fully intended to use it if I could.
Sergeant James and Roger Glancy were already in the parking lot when I got there. From the look of things, James had managed to convince Glancy that we weren’t jacking him around, that Wainwright had been living two decidedly different lives.
Glancy seemed shaken, disoriented, almost. I would have felt the same way if someone had just told me that Sergeant Lowell James robbed banks on the weekend for fun and profit. When someone you’ve worked with and respected falls from grace, it’s hard to know how to go on.
“Do you just want to show us the house and then back off?” James was asking Glancy. “This is hard enough as it is.”
Roger Glancy shook his head. “If what you’re saying is true, we’ve all been played for a bunch of fools. I want to get a little of my own back.”
It made perfect sense to me.
Because we were afraid Wainwright might recognize Glancy’s car, he rode with me in the Porsche. We led the way.
“Damn,” I said as I started the car. “I’ll bet nobody thought to get a search warrant.”
Glancy patted the breast pocket of his coat. “Don’t count on it,” he said. “I’ve got a neighbor who’s a judge. His kid died of an overdose at seventeen. He told me to come see him any time of the day or night and he’d sign one for me. He lives two houses away. It only took a minute.”
I looked at Glancy with new respect. He wasn’t along for the ride, and I’m willing to bet he was grappling with his own set of crooked-cop demons.
He directed me off Sand Point Way a few blocks north of Children’s Orthopedic. I could see the wisdom of Sergeant James’s strategy the moment we turned off the arterial. The short blocks didn’t follow any particularly logical pattern. You simply had to know where you were going.
“Is Wainwright married or divorced?” I asked.
“Divorced,” Glancy answered. “It happened just before he transferred in here three years ago. According to him, she wiped him out.”
I glanced around at the imposing houses, gracious colonials and low-slung brick ramblers. “It looks like he landed on his feet,” I said.
“I’ll say,” Glancy replied grimly.
We didn’t say anything more. The house was a two-story job without a light or car showing. The three-car caravan parked and Glancy directed us around the place, arousing the ire of at least two neighborhood dogs. When we were sure all possible avenues of escape were cut off, Glancy and I approached the front door.
I stood to one side, and Glancy rang the bell. There was no answer. He waited only half a minute or so before he kicked the door in with a one-shot DEA technique that put this particular Seattle cop to shame.
With adrenaline pounding through our systems, we made a quick survey of the house, moving from room to room warily, covering one another. The place was empty. The clothes closet had been gutted. Underwear and sock drawers had been hastily emptied. B. W. Wainwright had left in a hurry, and wherever he was going he didn’t plan to come back any time soon.
When we got back to the living room, Glancy paused and sniffed the air. “Do you smell smoke?” he asked.
I followed suit. There was indeed the acrid smell of paper smoke lingering in the air. We both headed for the fireplace. I felt the bricks under the mantel. They were still warm to the touch.
“He hasn’t been gone long,” I said.
Glancy got down on all fours and moved the fireplace screen out of the way. There was a stack of curled ashes, the remains of individual papers. Wainwright had been in too much of a hurry to be thorough. One envelope was only partially burned. In the upper left-hand corner, still plainly visible, were the initials RDM.
“Don’t touch them,” I told him. “The crime lab may be able to pull something usable from this.”
Sergeant James came in the front door. “Nothing?” he asked. I nodded.
Glancy rocked back on his heels. “So where the hell is he?”
“He has a private plane, isn’t that true?” James asked.
“It’s usually parked at Boeing Field,” Glancy said.
“I’ll bet it isn’t tonight,” James commented thoughtfully.
Both Glancy and I looked at him. “What makes you say that?” I asked.
“Think about it; if you had come back from Bellingham, knowing that your life was about to blow up in your face, would you park your plane where you usually park it?”
“By God, he’s right,” Glancy said. “That’s why he had someone call a cab for him when he left the Public Safety Building.”
“When was that? He left before we did. Maybe a little before midnight.”
“Does he have one car or two?” I asked.
“One, as far as I know. A BMW. Why?”
“Because if he caught a cab home, he probably took another cab when he left here to go back to the plane.”
“That doesn’t do us a whole hell of a lot of good, does it?” Glancy sounded discouraged.
“Don’t give up. We’ve got one more card.”
By this time, I had memorized the Far West Cab Company number. I went to the phone and dialed. Larry was still there. “It’s Beaumont again,” I said. “Can we do this one last time?”
“You bet. The other guys are getting a real charge out of this. We feel like we’re playing cops and robbers.”
“You are,” I told him. I gave him B. W. Wainwright’s address.
When he came back on the line, Larry was laughing. “You’re closing in on him. He’s in a Yellow even as we speak.”
“A Yellow Cab? Where?”
“They picked him up from the address you gave me and took him down to Boeing Field. While he was there, the driver called his dispatcher to say he was heading from Boeing to the Skyport Airfield in Issaquah, so he was quitting for the night. Skyport’s evidently only a mile or two from where the cabbie lives.”
“How far ahead of us are they?”
“The dispatcher says they left Boeing Field about ten minutes ago, is all.”
“Larry, thanks. I owe you.”
I dropped the phone and raced for the door. “Come on, you guys. There isn’t minute to lose.”
“Why not? Where are they?”
“In a Yellow Cab somewhere between Boeing Field and the Issaquah Skyport.”
“How’d you do that?” Glancy asked wonderingly as we climbed into the Porsche.
“It pays to know people in high places,” I told him. “And taxi dispatchers are pretty close to the top of the list.”
WE CAME FLYING THROUGH THE MONT LAKE underpass that leads from Interstate 5 to Highway 520 and the Evergreen Point Bridge. It was two o’clock in the morning, and it should have been clear sailing.
It wasn’t.
As soon as we topped the rise, I saw the traffic backup and hit the brakes. The problem was there was no alternative, no other way to get across the great water. Interstate 90 was closed for the weekend because of work being done on the Mercer Island Bridge. Now we were stuck in a massive backup because a couple of drunk teenagers leaving a rock concert had kamikazied into the railing on the eastern high-rise part of the Evergreen Point Bridge.
I glanced in the rearview mirror to see Sergeant James waving at me frantically, gesturing for me to pull over. I did, and he swung around me. I saw him place his emergency flashers on the roof of his car as he went past. He then motioned to me to fall into line behind him.
And that’s how we crossed the bridge, in a tight little line following James’s lead, working our way along the emergency-vehicle shoulder, with my red Porsche sandwiched between James’s unmarked but flashing sedan and the two squad cars. I’m sure the police escort accompanying my Porsche raised a few hackles in the process.
“What kind of a shot is he?” I asked Glancy as we eased our way along the shoulder.
“Crack,” Glancy responded.
I winced. That wasn’t the answer I wanted to hear. It’s one thing to go up against creeps and bullies, cowardly scumbags who don’t know their ass from a hole in the ground. This was different, and everyone in the caravan knew it. Wainwright was a trained police officer, acornered trained police officer. A renegade. It wasn’t a confrontation any of us was looking forward to. The best we could hope for was to surprise him, to overwhelm him with sheer numbers.
“What kind of plane?” I asked.
“A Piper Tomahawk,” Glancy answered. “At least I think that’s what he bought. He’s only had it for six months or so. He went down to Wichita, Kansas, and picked it up from the factory.”
“Any idea what he’ll do?”
Glancy shook his head. “It’s funny. If you had asked me that question yesterday, I would have answered it in a minute. We’ve worked together for three years now. I thought I knew him like a book, but it turns out I don’t know him at all. I wouldn’t dare hazard a guess about what he’ll do.”
We didn’t make fast work of crossing the bridge, but it was far better than it would have been if James hadn’t pulled rank and dragged us through the traffic jam. The state patrol officer directing the one open lane of traffic glared at us as we went past the wreck, but he let us through.
Once we cleared the last of the emergency vehicles, we made good time. We roared down Interstate-405 and onto I-90, where we headed east. As we passed Eastgate, Sergeant James turned off his emergency lights. The squad cars did the same.
James pulled off the freeway at the Newport Way exit. We all swung into line behind him and parked in a row in the parking lot at the trail head of a hiking trail. We were a group of grown-ups playing a deadly version of Follow the Leader.
