Lying in Wait (9780061747168) (2 page)

A uniformed harbor-patrol officer named Jack Casey glanced at Sue's I.D., nodded to me, and waved us through the barrier. “Any idea who it is?” I asked him on my way past.

Casey shook his head. “All I've heard from the firemen is that the stiff's too crisp to I.D.”

“Oh.”

Sue and I made our way down the dock. Even without having been told beforehand, I would have known we were walking into a fatality fire just from the appearance of the firemen we encountered along the way. They had done their job promptly and well. Not only had they managed to put out the fire, they had kept the blaze confined to only one boat—a schooner called
Isolde
. The flames hadn't spread either to the pier or to any of
Isolde
's nearby neighbors. Even the
Isolde
herself hadn't burned on the outside, although the forward portion of the boat was heavily damaged.

In terms of fire-fighting success, that should have been a clear-cut victory. But the men and women I saw rolling up their hoses were a bedraggled, disheartened-looking crew. Someone had died in the blaze. Firefighters always take fire deaths hard, as though each and every person lost in a fire is a personal affront—a needless fatality they somehow should have been able to prevent. It's an occupational hazard, I understand all too well. Murder victims affect me exactly the same way.

A few feet from the
Isolde
a husky firefighter still in yellow coveralls and heavy rubber boots broke away from his companions and hurried toward us. “You from Seattle P.D.?”

Only when I heard the voice did I realize the firefighter was a woman, not a man. Her hair was cut short. Her broad shoulders were muscular, her at-ease stance seemed to reflect some kind of military training. In her early thirties, she looked tough
but capable—the kind of woman who's instantly intimidating to a lot of men, but someone you wouldn't mind having on your side during an emergency.

“Detective Beaumont,” I answered. “And this is Detective Danielson.”

“I'm Lieutenant Marian Rockwell,” she returned. “Seattle Fire Department, Arson Investigations.”

Seattle's fire department has a team of arson investigators who carry weapons and are authorized to make arrests when necessary. Once the ashes and debris are cool enough to handle, the arson investigators are called in to do their stuff. They handle some fires entirely on their own, but when someone dies as a result of a fire, whether accidental or deliberately set, Seattle P.D.'s Homicide Squad comes into the picture. In those instances, we handle the investigation jointly.

“What's going on?” Sue asked.

“We got to it fast enough that it didn't have a chance to spread outside the fo'c'sle,” Lieutenant Rockwell said, abbreviating the word “forecastle” to the approved nautical pronunciation of “foc'sul.”

“One crew is just now finishing mopping up and checking for hot spots,” Lieutenant Rockwell continued. “We should be able to go on board fairly soon now—as soon as the investigator from the Medical Examiner's Office gets here.”

It's always a race between Doc Baker's folks and Homicide to see who reaches a crime scene first. We don't exactly keep score, but people from our squad always want to arrive before one of the M.E.'s somber gray vans. I was glad Sue Danielson had put the little Mustang through its paces.

“They'll show up eventually. Any idea whose boat this is?” I asked, taking out my notebook while Lieutenant Rockwell consulted one of her own.

“The guy who called in the nine-one-one report said it belonged to someone named Gunter Gebhardt.”

“Nice Irish name. Pretty unusual for around here,” I said.

“Why?” Sue Danielson asked.

Sue's from back East somewhere. Cincinnati, I think, so she could be forgiven for not knowing beans about Seattle's fishing fleet.

“Most of these halibut guys are born and bred squareheads,” I explained. “An occasional Dane or Swede here and there, but mostly they're lutefisk-eating Norwegians through and through.”

The soot-creased lines around Marian Rockwell's brown eyes wrinkled with amusement. “I thought so, too,” she said. “No doubt the guy who made the initial call is. Alan Torvoldsen. Is that Norwegian enough to suit you? His boat's right across the way. He spotted the fire and called for help.”

The very mention of Alan Torvoldsen's name rang a bell of memory that carried me right back to Ballard High. “You're kidding? Alan Torvoldsen? You mean good old ‘Champagne Al'?”

“That's not what he said his name was,” Marian Rockwell replied. “At least not in the report that came to me.”

The Alan Torvoldsen I remembered was a couple of years older than I was. A senior when I was a lowly sophomore, he had been the big man on campus—a high-school playboy, someone who
sported new cars, flashy clothes, and a ducktail with never a single hair out of place.

Just as Button Knudsen worked on his father's salmon seiner, Alan and his younger brother, Lars, spent summers on their father's halibut boat. The Knudsens were nondrinking straight arrows. The Torvoldsens weren't. Red Torvoldsen was never far from his flask of aquavit, and the boys were a matched set of hellions. Alan was two years older than I was, while Lars was two years younger.

Even in high school, Alan was a booze-drinking chip off the old block. According to BHS legend, “Champagne Al” Torvoldsen didn't go anywhere without at least one case of beer stashed in the back of his '56 Chevy.

The prom during his senior year was the pinnacle of Alan Torvoldsen's high school career. During the dance, he and his long-term girlfriend, Else Didriksen, were crowned king and queen of the prom. To celebrate, Alan invited everyone to an after-prom party to be held at the far north end of Carkeek Park. That infamous blowout—a party that is still spoken of in hushed tones at Ballard High reunions—came complete with fifteen cases of cheap champagne. It earned Alan Torvoldsen his lifelong nickname of “Champagne Al.” It was also his undoing.

Cops busted the party only eight or nine cases into the program. The debauch may have been broken up early, but not nearly early enough as far as some disturbed parents were concerned. Before the arrival of the cops, several highly intoxicated young women—normally prim and proper Lutheran daughters of local Ballard area gentry—had
shed not only important parts of their clothing, but several of their respective maidenheads as well.

A delegation of outraged parents descended on the principal's office early the following Monday morning. Looking for blood, they wanted someone to blame—someone who wasn't their own particular offspring. Alan Torvoldsen took the rap for everybody, and he paid big.

Despite a fair but unremarkable academic record, Alan was summarily expelled from school without ever being allowed to graduate. Within weeks, “Champagne Al” was drafted into the army and shipped off to Southeast Asia. Even at the time it had seemed like a miscarriage of justice to hold him accountable for everybody's drunken behavior, but that was the way things worked back then. Near as I can tell, nothing has changed.

Champagne Al got drafted and headed off for Vietnam. I finished up my high school career, and in the intervening years our paths had never once crossed. I hadn't even heard Alan Torvoldsen's name mentioned, not until now.

Audrey Cummings, King County's assistant medical examiner, showed up right about then, accompanied by my old buddy Janice Morraine, the second-in-command criminalist from the Washington State Patrol crime lab. Seeing them together, the old comics characters Mutt and Jeff came instantly to mind.

Audrey is your basic fireplug of a woman. Short, sturdy, stocky, no-nonsense, and a tad beyond middle-aged. Janice Morraine is tall and spare, angular where Audrey is round. Audrey is a nonsmoking vegetarian. Janice smokes like a
fiend. Both of these talented women are sharp and politically adroit. Both of them have bubbled to the top in work situations where women have traditionally been excluded rather than encouraged. Young cops of both sexes who make the mistake of not according those two ladies the professional respect they deserve do so at their own risk.

Lieutenant Rockwell cast an appraising glance around the group. “Is this everybody?”

“As far as I can tell,” Sue told her.

“This way, then.”

Marian Rockwell passed out day boots for us to wear, then led the way toward the
Isolde
, followed by the rest of us. As I attached myself to the end of the line, I realized, for the first time, that in terms of Equal Opportunity, the investigation into the death of whoever had been on board the
Isolde
was breaking new ground—even in the politically correct world of Seattle P.D. All but one of the five investigators assigned to the case were women. Four to one.

Four of them and one of me.

Marian Rockwell was the only one of the group properly dressed for the grit and grime of a fire-scene crime investigation. The other women gamely hitched up their skirts and then scrambled over the wet, soot-encrusted rail and down onto a filthy deck covered with piles of wet, ankle-twisting coils of line, meandering hoses, and evil-smelling debris.

As I watched the women clamber over the rail one by one, I couldn't help thinking, You've come a long way, baby.

Because they had. All of them.

Decks of
commercial fishing vessels make for treacherous going in the best of times. Now maneuvering on the
Isolde
's deck was downright dangerous. It was covered with water topped by a layer of slick, oily slime that left zero traction and made walking hazardous. We waded our way forward past the last of the grim-faced firemen who were wrestling with an impossible tangle of hoses.

One of the firefighters caught my eye. “Good luck, fella,” he said, just loud enough for me to hear him. I wasn't entirely sure what he meant, but I had a pretty good idea.

I smelled it almost as soon as I stepped on deck—an odor not unlike that of baked ham. As we neared the entrance to the fo'c'sle, the combination of residual smoke and charred rubber and wiring obscured the unmistakable odor of cooked human flesh.

The shattered hatchway door was the first thing I noticed. In an effort to reach the fire, someone—a fireman, most likely—had broken the hatch—splintered the middle of it, probably with an ax. But the edge of the door was still attached to the frame, held there by a metal hasp over which dan
gled a still-locked padlock. That padlock had been locked in place prior to the fire, by someone standing outside the closed hatch.

Janice and the others had gone on ahead, climbing over the sill of the hatch and disappearing down into the inside gloom. I paused outside long enough to jot a note, reminding myself to mention to Janice that the padlock as well as the remains of the hatch should be checked for fingerprints in case any had managed to survive both the fire and the firefighting.

Men my size aren't built for fishing boats any more than we're built for airplanes. I whacked my head on the hatch cover as I stepped down onto a makeshift metal ladder that had been placed in the companionway. The temporary ladder replaced the permanent one that, if not too badly charred, might well retain some critical fingerprints of its own.

Down in the darkened galley, with the interior lit only by the shallow light coming in through a fire-ax-created skylight, and with the water sloshing around my ankles, I found myself staring at a hellish scene.

It took a few moments for my eyes to adjust to the gloom. The fire hadn't burned long enough or hot enough for flesh to come off the bones. What I saw through the thick, smoke-dense air, was the still-recognizable form of an extraordinarily large man lying faceup on what was evidently the triangular, three-legged galley table. The cheeks of his face were strangely distended, like someone gathering up a mouthful of wind to blow out candles on a birthday cake.

It's funny what will strike you as odd in a situa
tion like that. The first thing I thought about was a damn birthday cake. The second thing was the table.

Why was the victim lying on the table? I wondered. It didn't make sense for someone to be there. In bed? Yes. I could understand that perfectly. And I could see how someone might end up on the deck, especially if they were crawling on their hands and knees in an effort to avoid smoke and flames.

“What's he doing on the table?” I asked, moving forward to stand beside Sue Danielson, who had been next-to-last and who stood just ahead of me in line.

“Handcuffs,” she replied, her voice tight and strained.

I saw them then, too. Three pairs of handcuffs, in fact. The man's shoulders were broad enough so that they almost covered the wide end of the three-cornered table, the part that was nearest the door. Bent at the elbow, his powerful forearms hung down beside and were fastened to the two chrome legs that supported the table's surface. Both wrists were secured to the table legs by locked metal cuffs. His legs dangled off on either side of the narrow part of the triangle with the ankles fastened together with cuffs just inside the table's third chrome leg.

Whoever had put the man there had meant for him to stay in exactly that spot. Permanently.

“Look at this,” Marian Rockwell said, coming full circle around the far side of the galley so she was back behind me. Using a flashlight, she pointed to something in the sink. “The firefighter
who found him said this was on the victim's chest. He had to move it so he could check vitals.”

We had come in single file. Since I was the last one in line, I was also the person closest to the sink. What I saw was a metal plate of some kind—a pie plate, maybe—with what looked like so many pieces of charred hot dog lying in the bottom.

“What is it?” I asked stupidly, squinting through the dim light.

“I think it's his fingers and toes,” Marian Rockwell said in a hushed tone. “All twenty of them. I think they were cut off while he was still alive and left where he could see them. In fact, they were probably the very last thing he could see.”

That announcement was followed by stunned silence. Homicide cops can't afford to be queasy, but right then a rebellious bubble of morning coffee rose dangerously in my throat. Behind me one of my cohorts made a strange, strangled noise that sounded very much like someone attempting to stifle an overwhelming urge to gag.

After first letting her breath go out in a carefully controlled
whoosh
, Janice Morraine was the one who spoke. “Okay, folks,” she said. “Let's get the hell out of here. No one touches anything at all until after we get the police photographer down here to take pictures.”

Her order was one we were all only too happy to obey. From a crime-scene-investigation standpoint, that was the only sensible solution. Too many people in a confined area at once are bound to disrupt things. In a crowd like that, someone
can easily, if inadvertently, destroy a critical piece of evidence.

But it was also a good call in terms of people. We were every one professionals in a world where evidence of man's inhumanity to man is business as usual. But the idea of cutting off some poor guy's fingers and toes and then leaving him to burn to death went far beyond the range of mere murder. This was murder with all the trimmings—murder with mayhem and mutilation thrown in for good measure. We all needed a chance to decompress.

This time I led the way. After climbing back up the ladder, I stood by the smashed hatch and offered each of the four women a gentlemanly hand up as they followed me out. Only Marian Rockwell, agile as a cat, refused my offer.

Once she, too, was out of the fo'c'sle, Janice Morraine resumed command. She herded us all off the boat and onto the wooden pier.

“I want undisturbed pictures of the entire boat before anyone else goes back on deck,” she said. “Somebody call downtown and see where the hell that damned photographer is. He should be here by now. Anybody got a cigarette?”

While she and Sue Danielson set about lighting up, I marched purposefully off down the dock, intent on tracking down Janice Morraine's missing photographer. I didn't have to go far. The “he” in question turned out to be another she—Nancy Gresham, a talented young woman who has been taking pictures for the Seattle Police Department for several years now. I met her hurrying down the dock, carrying her camera and a box of equipment.

She turned down my gentlemanly offer to carry her case. “Don't bother,” she said. “I can manage.”

“Suit yourself.”

Nancy looked up into my eyes. “I was talking to one of the firemen on the way in,” she said. “How bad is it?”

“About as bad as I ever remember,” I told her.

“Coming from you, that's saying something,” she returned.

“I guess it is,” I agreed. And it was.

She continued on down the dock toward the
Isolde
, and I made as if to follow her, but Officer Casey, one of the patrol officers, came puffing down the dock. “Hey, Detective Beaumont,” he said. “We've got a little problem here.”

“What's that?”

He motioned with his head back down the dock to where another officer was manning the barricade. “There's a woman down there,” he said.

“A woman?” I returned, trying to inject a little humor into what was an impossibly humorless situation. “Why would that be a problem? The place seems to be crawling with them. They're all doing their jobs.”

Casey looked uncomfortable. “I know,” he said in a way that told me he had missed the joke entirely. “You don't understand. She says she's his wife.”

“Whose wife?”

“The dead man's,” Casey answered. “Or at least I guess it's him. She says her husband is the owner of the boat. She wants to go on board. When I told her that was impossible, she went
ballistic on me. Would you come talk to her, Detective Beaumont? Please?”

I followed Casey back down to the barricade, where a young officer named Robert Tamaguchi was arguing with a heavyset woman who towered over the diminutive officer by a good foot. Long before I reached the end of the dock, I heard the sound of raised voices.

“What do you mean, I can't go on board?”

“I'm sorry, ma'am,” Officer Tamaguchi insisted placatingly, keeping his voice calm, reasonable, and businesslike. “This is a police matter. No one at all is allowed on board.”

“A police matter!” the woman repeated indignantly. “You don't understand. The
Isolde
is my husband's boat. My boat. I want to see what's happened to it. You have no right….”

I walked over to the barricade. “Mrs. Gebhardt?” I asked uncertainly.

A tall, thick-waisted woman with fierce, bright blue eyes and a long woolen coat to match looked angrily away from Tamaguchi and zeroed in on me.

“I want to know exactly what's going on here,” she declared. “I understand there's been a fire. I can see that. But why won't this policeman let me see what's happened to my own boat? And where's Gunter? He has to be here somewhere. His truck was out front in the lot.”

Behind the woman's heavy, angry features, there was a hint of someone I recognized, the shadow of someone I knew but couldn't quite place.

“And who are you?” she demanded shrilly.
“Are you in charge, or should I talk to someone else? One way or the other, I'm going to find out what's happened.”

Two distinct red splotches of irritation and anger spread out from both prominent cheekbones. With nostrils flaring and both hands glued to her hips, she looked fully prepared to take on all comers. She glowered at me, waiting for me to let her have her own way.

“I'm afraid I have some bad news for you, Mrs. Gebhardt,” I said quietly, moving toward her, reaching in my pocket, pulling out my I.D. I held it up to her, but she stared across it without ever allowing her eyes to leave my face.

“What kind of bad news?”

“A dead man was found on board your boat about an hour ago now. It's possible he's your husband.”

One hand flew unconsciously to her breast. “His heart,” she murmured, eyes wide. “It must have been Gunter's heart. I've told him time and again that he had to lose weight. I tried to tell him it was bad for him to go on living the way he always had with all that butter on his bread and all those mashed potatoes. I tried to tell him he needed to go to the doctor to be checked out, get some exercise….”

“I'm afraid it wasn't like that at all,” I said.

“Wasn't like what?”

“The man on the boat didn't die of a heart attack, Mrs. Gebhardt. We believe he was murdered.”

“Murdered!” she echoed in shocked disbelief. “That can't be.”

“But it is. The investigators are down there now—taking photographs, gathering evidence.”

“Else…” someone said tentatively behind her.

Mrs. Gebhardt spun around. A man stepped up out of the clutch of fishermen behind her. He was tall and lean and wearing a blue baseball-style cap with a Ballard Oil Company logo on the front. Worn Levis were held in place by a pair of wide red suspenders. The arms of his faded, still vaguely plaid flannel shirt were cut off halfway between the elbows and wrist.

“Alan?” she wailed in despair, moving toward him as she spoke. “Did you hear what he said? This man says Gunter may be dead. It isn't true, is it? It can't be true!”

“I didn't say we knew for sure,” I corrected. “It is her husband's boat, though, and there is a dead man on board.”

Else Gebhardt fell against the newcomer's chest. He gathered her to him with one hand and whipped off the cap with the other. As soon as he did so, I recognized him, even after all the intervening years. Alan Torvoldsen's ducktail was missing. In fact, only the smallest fringe of russet-colored hair remained in a two-inch-wide border from just over his ears and around the base of his skull.

“Al?” I said doubtfully. “Alan Torvoldsen? Is that you?”

He cocked his head momentarily, then a broad grin creased his face. “Beaumont? I'll be damned if it isn't J. P. Beaumont! Damned if it isn't!” He slapped the cap back on his balding head and then
reached out to pump my hand. “What the hell are you doing here?”

I held out my I.D. close enough so he could see it, and he nodded. “That's it,” he said. “You're a cop. I remember seeing the name in the papers. I kinda wondered if it wasn't you.”

“It's me, all right,” I said.

And then I looked at Else Gebhardt, sobbing brokenheartedly on Alan Torvoldsen's shoulder. I remembered Else Didricksen then; remembered her from years gone by as a tall, slender girl—a talented athlete in the days long before there had been any collegiate basketball programs for girls. There were few girl players back then, and even fewer scholarships.

I remembered that Else had started school at the U-Dub, as locals affectionately call the University of Washington, two years ahead of me, but I didn't remember ever seeing her on campus once I arrived there, nor did I remember hearing that she had finished.

“Else?” I asked. “Is this Else Didricksen?”

“Yeah,” Alan murmured. “Look who it is, Else,” he said, taking the weeping woman by the shoulders and bodily turning her around to face me.