Thicker Than Water (A Leo Waterman Mystery) (15 page)

She must have, because after taking a moment to organize her thoughts, she opened up. I could tell that she was editing herself as she went along, giving me what I needed as far as facts went and leaving out the details of Rebecca’s inner life, which, she’d quite rightly decided, I didn’t need to know.

The phone calls weren’t the beginning of it. They were just the capper. The birthday Strip-O-Gram was the beginning. What Ricky Waters hadn’t known when he gave Brett the heads-up about the dancer coming to the office was that the young lady was the daughter of one of Rebecca’s friends, and that the first thing the young lady did when she got back from Millennium was to call Rebecca and tell her that Brett didn’t work there anymore, and offer to give the money back. Said she’d made out pretty well on tips and felt bad about not being able to do what she’d been hired to do. That was the beginning of the unraveling.

“Did she confront him about it?” I asked.

“Absolutely.” She’d told Rachel how Brett spun this long involved story about how he’d been trying to surprise her with his new enterprise. How he figured he’d get the business up and running before he told her about it.

I was incredulous. “And she went for that?”

She put on her professional face. “People believe some ridiculous things when they’re trying to save a marriage. Things that they’d normally dismiss out of hand, they choose to believe, for the sake of being able to tell themselves they tried to make the relationship work.” She shrugged.

“What then?”

“Then the phone calls.”

“And that tore it.”

She nodded. “That’s when she decided to take the leave of absence.” She took a sip of her iced tea. “She said she needed to find out exactly what was going on in her life. The uncertainty was very hard for her to deal with.”

“She likes to be in charge of things,” I said.

“Which is why she decided to look into this on her own. She wanted to see for herself exactly what was going on with her husband and…” She stopped and thought about what she was going to say next.

“And what?” I pressed.

“We talked about it the last time we met,” she said.

“When was that?”

Rachel had seen her only once after Rebecca went on leave. Eight days ago, in her office, which, as far as I knew, made her the last person to see Rebecca Duval alive.

“Did…did she…” I hesitated. I didn’t want to ask the question because I was afraid I might not like the answer. “Did she say anything to you that might indicate that she was…you know, scared or apprehensive?”

“Do you mean scared as in physically threatened?”

“Yes.”

“If Rebecca had felt physically threatened, she’d have immediately gone to you.” She gave me a long, steady look.

Instinctively, I knew she was right, and felt marginally better for knowing it.

We sat in silence, each of us lost in our own thoughts. The waiter made another pass and when neither of us wanted anything, he left the check.

“What are you going to do now?” she asked finally.

“I’m going to try to get the police involved.”

“If there’s anything I can do…” she began.

I thanked her for sharing. “I know that wasn’t easy for you. If I ever get my head shrunk, I hope the shrink takes that ‘sacred trust’ stuff as seriously as you do.”

She nodded, pinched her lips against a smile. “You ever need a referral…”

“You got a team you could suggest?”

That bark again, and I had to get the hell out of there. Talk about ethical conflicts.

The sky was starting to spit rain as I hiked up First Avenue toward my car. I tried Marty again, but he was still otherwise occupied, so I decided to make another run by Rebecca and Brett’s condo over in Madison Park. What the hell, you never knew.

I beat the rain to the car, buckled up, and drove Denny straight up the face of Capitol Hill, wandering through neighborhoods and around traffic circles until I got to Broadway, where I hooked a right and rolled north for half a mile to Madison. Madison Park wasn’t on the way to anywhere. If you found yourself in Madison Park, you either were lost or that’s where you were going.

The ride down to the water was longer than I remembered and Madison Valley more gentrified than the last time I’d been in this neck of the woods. Wall-to-wall salons and shops and restaurants on the same sidewalks where fly-by-night body shops and barbecue joints used to be.

Not many years ago, the streets on this side of the city were one of the few places I’d ever seen where the very rich and the very poor lived cheek to jowl. At the tops of the hills the well-to-do looked out at Lake Washington and counted themselves lucky. Quarter mile away, down in the valleys, it was strictly “the ’hood,” where, as in so many urban areas, the poor were slowly being displaced by an ever-growing middle class in need of new and less-expensive places to live. Columbia City, Georgetown, Sodo, the Central District, it was all the same. Everywhere you looked, what had once been poor and run down and industrial was in the process of becoming hip and trendy and residential.

I chided myself for being so retro. Recently I noticed how I was beginning to resent many of the changes that were taking place around me. As the new was ushered in and the world I’d grown up in slowly faded from view, I’d come to feel as if it somehow wasn’t fair, and that the world had an obligation to match my youthful memories. Guess it’s part of growing older.

Brett and Rebecca shared a two-bedroom waterfront condo in the old money part of Madison Park. The complex was called Madison Square. No garden. Just Madison Square, an eleven-story edifice hard by the waters of Lake Washington, almost directly opposite Bill Gates’s little glass shack over on the eastern shore.

Immediately to the north, a mile and a half of overhead lights traced the graceful arc of the Evergreen Point Floating Bridge as it slithered over the lake, carrying on its back a never-ending line of traffic traversing the lake in both directions.

I turned left on McGilvra and drove it to the end, then let gravity take me to the bottom of the hill. That’s when I got lucky for the second time.

I was a block and a half uphill from the condo when what to my wandering eyes should appear but the white Cadillac Escalade, parked exactly where the signs said you absolutely, posatutely, shouldn’t park.

Apparently I’d arrived just as the drama was about to unfold. Looked like the building’s security guard had pulled open the passenger door and was reading Mr. Moto the riot act, waving his arms, pointing at the signs, and telling him to move the damn car. What the guard didn’t see was Koontz emerging from the parking garage behind him.

I put the Tahoe in reverse and backed into the nearest driveway. I doused the lights, crossed a patch of lawn, and peeked around the edge of the fence. Koontz had arrived on the scene. The security guard turned in his direction, said something, and then refocused his attention on the driver.

Without breaking stride, Koontz shouldered the security guard aside, and began to climb into the passenger seat. The guard, outraged at having been brushed aside like a gnat, reached out and put a restraining hand on Koontz’s shoulder, a move that proved to be a serious mistake.

In the blink of an eye, Koontz spun in a tight half circle. I don’t know what you call the move, but Koontz used the
spinning momentum of his body to hit the guard with the back of his fist. I winced at the sound of the impact. The guard went down in a heap, his arms bobbing, stiff and spastic.

Koontz never even looked down at the guy, just stepped up into the Escalade, and closed the door. The cavalier nature of the violence hung in the air like a noxious gas. Before I had time to process my options, the Cadillac was roaring up the hill at me.

I shrank into the wet shrubbery as they rolled by, only half of Mr. Moto’s head visible above the window frame, the dashboard lights reflecting blue on the oversized lenses of his glasses. I was seriously conflicted. Part of me wanted to go down and see how the guard was doing, maybe call an ambulance, but another part was telling me to follow them, that I wasn’t going to get another chance like this, and I couldn’t just let them drive off into the night. Not with Rebecca still unaccounted for.

I hurried over and jumped into my car. I was a block or so behind them, running with my lights off, when they turned onto Madison and headed toward downtown.

No matter how many times you’ve seen Jim Rockford do it on TV, following somebody in a car is not a one-man job. Law enforcement agencies use a minimum of three and sometimes as many as six cars in order to keep from being spotted, and even then, if the subject is even remotely wary, he probably gets wise to them sooner rather than later.

By the time they rolled to a stop, I’d nearly lost them three times and had come damn close to getting myself
killed running a red light down by Safeco Field. The only thing that kept me from being spotted was that these guys were predators, and predators generally aren’t in the habit of watching their backs.

With the chorus of angry horns still blaring in my ears and my hands more than a little shaky, I pulled over onto the graveled shoulder a quarter mile behind them, and watched as they turned into a warehouse complex on South Fidalgo Street.

I stayed put and watched their headlights bobbing up and down on the side of the building as the Cadillac negotiated the sea of potholes that passed for a road. When the lights disappeared around the back of the building, I hopped out to jog up the street. The old wooden warehouse building sat wedged between Parnell’s Custom Cabinets and Victory Plumbing Supplies. The barnlike structure may have dated from the 1940s or 1950s, but the sign on the front was brand new: Saint David’s Transport.

As I jogged along, I tried to recall who Saint David was and what he’d done to merit being a saint, or, often as not, what had been done to him. I thought maybe he was the patron saint of Wales, one of those guys back in the fourth or fifth century who was part of the monastic movement, but I wasn’t sure. I knew David was an old-time biblical name, but somehow it sounded awfully modern for a saint. What was next? Saint Tiffany, the patron saint of Bergdorf Goodman?

An approaching train whistle jolted me back to reality, reminding me that the Burlington Northern tracks ran directly behind the building and, beyond that, the pestilential Duwamish Waterway snaked its way through the industrial heart of Seattle. It crossed my mind that this wasn’t the sort
of place that a couple of Canadian thugs would know about unless whoever they were working for was somehow connected to one of the businesses in the immediate area. The train whistle sounded again, closer now, the low growl of the massive diesels seemed to vibrate the air.

I picked up my pace. The St. David building was the better part of a football field long, an uninterrupted wall of metal siding with nowhere for me to take evasive action should the need arise. Were they to come back up the road, I’d be standing there like a deer in the headlights.

I heaved an inward sigh of relief as I skidded up to the corner of the building and peeked around. A black Hummer with B.C. plates was nosed up to the Cadillac. An advertising logo and some kind of slogan were painted on the Hummer’s door but I couldn’t make them out in the gloom.

Interestingly, Koontz and Moto were nowhere to be seen. I inched closer to the corner and swept my eyes across the rear of the building. Nothing unusual other than a couple of luxury cars sitting nose-to-nose on the gravel with their engines running.

Halfway between my position and the Escalade an old dump truck was backed against one of the loading docks. The four flat tires and briars and brambles growing up and over the rusted hood suggested it hadn’t moved this century and was well on its way to full-fledged planter status. The junker truck was cover, and cover was what I needed at that point. I was trying to decide how and when to make my move, when a flash out in the distance caught my eye.

I focused on the spot for a full ten seconds before my eyes managed to pick them out—Koontz and Moto walking
back this way. Back from what? The river? That’s all that was over there. What in hell were they doing over there?