“Yes?” said Kristine Kjarstad pointedly.
“Well, I just, see, OK, like, the thing is …”
“Are you feeling all right?”
Steve Warren dropped the fax on her desk.
“Just read it,” he said, and walked out.
Kristine skimmed through the fax, wondering what had produced this rare glimpse of spontaneity in a droid like Steve Warren. The fax was a standard request for a criminal record search, commonly known as a D and B after the credit check agency, Dun and Bradstreet. This one had originated in Atlanta, Georgia, and was made out in the name of Dale Watson, a.k.a. John Flaxman. It had been sent to the Seattle Police Department, and they had routinely copied it to the King County force, whose territory surrounds the city on three sides.
Neither of the names meant anything to Kristine, but she dutifully went down to the basement and ran through the files to see if there were any rap sheets lying around from before her time. There weren’t, but on her way back she finally spotted the detail which had provoked her partner’s personality attack. It was in the section dealing with the crime itself. Kristine had skipped this first time around, having discovered that it was a street incident of no interest, the kind of thing she imagined happening all the time in places like Atlanta.
Now, trapped in an elevator which stopped at every floor, she read it through out of sheer boredom. Two sentences leaped out at her: “Subject was armed with a.22 Smith amp; Wesson revolver, as was his accomplice. They were also carrying a case with religious literature, a video camera, several sets of handcuffs and a roll of tape.”
The covering note from SPD was signed Don Krylo. Thirty seconds after she got back to her desk, Kristine had him on the phone. Krylo, a harassed-sounding sergeant in Central Homicide, was delighted when Kristine offered to deal direct with the original source of inquiry.
“You got a contact name?” she asked.
“I’ll need to look it up. Let me call you back.”
“I’ll hold.”
If she let Krylo go, she’d probably never hear another thing. While she waited, Kristine tried to get a firm grip on herself. She’d only just succeeded in putting the Renton case behind her. The last thing she needed was to open up that can of worms again to no purpose.
“Here we go,” said Don Krylo. “Guy’s name is Wingate. Lamont Wingate, Homicide Task Force, Atlanta City Police.”
“Great.”
“You think you got something on this guy?”
“I don’t know. I need to check it out a little. It’s tough for us here in the county. You know how it is, Don. We make a mistake, everyone starts cracking jokes about hayseed sheriff departments.”
Krylo, who had probably made more than a few himself, indignantly denied the possibility.
“It’s just this is the second CRS we’ve received in this name,” he said. “Both out-of-state, too. I thought maybe you might know why this guy’s such a celebrity.”
Kristine Kjarstad felt her heart racing. She took a deep breath.
“This is the second one?”
“That’s what it says here. There’s a reference number to the other request, but I don’t have it right-”
“Could you look it up?”
Her tone was eager, almost peremptory.
“I guess. Might take a little time. You wouldn’t believe the mess we’ve-”
“I’ll call you back in fifteen minutes, Don. That give you long enough? This is kind of urgent.”
“It is?”
Don Krylo sounded as though he suspected that something was maybe getting away from him here. Kristine tittered girlishly.
“No, I just mean I’m going out to lunch, right? And I’d like to get this wrapped up first. You know how it is,” she finished lamely.
“No kidding,” Krylo replied in the tone of a man who knew only too well how it was. “Catch you in fifteen.”
Kristine put down the phone with a shaky hand. Fifteen minutes to fill. A thought had occurred to her while she was talking to Don Krylo, but for a moment she couldn’t track it down. Then she remembered that she’d been meaning to call Paul Merlowitz. Her lie about going out to lunch had jogged her memory.
The original idea had been to pass on the information about the Wallis house. Paul was the perfect networker for a deal like this, with a ton of contacts all over the country. If anyone could find a short-term tenant with a kid Thomas’s age, it was him. The problem was that Paul had this thing for her, and if she phoned him he would think she was coming on to him and she’d have to deal with the consequences of that.
In fact it was more than just a thing: he’d practically proposed to her. A lawyer’s proposal, phrased in such a way that if she turned him down, as she had, he could make it look like he’d never made a firm offer in the first place. Nevertheless, they both knew what had happened. She’d expected him to drop her after that. God knows he wasn’t short of other possibilities.
It wasn’t that she didn’t like Paul, in a way. But there were problems. For one thing, she didn’t want to end up as some hotshot lawyer’s trophy wife. For another, she didn’t feel physically attracted to him, or not enough to make the difference. And then there was his work. They had met in court, a case in which she had appeared as a prosecution witness of a man charged with the murder of his business partner plus his wife, child and mother-in-law who were all in the house when it burned down.
As Merlowitz had privately admitted to her after the acquittal, there was no question that his client was “guilty as fuck.” But he got him off by stacking the jury, working the ethnic angle-the accused was Korean-and plugging away at inconsistencies in the prosecution case and irregularities in the police investigation. None of these had the slightest bearing on the basic facts of the case, but they were enough to persuade at least one member of the carefully chosen jury that the accused’s guilt had not been proven beyond all reasonable doubt.
Kristine had never tried to tackle Merlowitz about the morality of what he was doing. She knew exactly what line he would take: every citizen has the right to the best defense money could buy, better let ten guilty men go free than convict one innocent one, etc., etc. She acknowledged the force of these arguments, just as she acknowledged the need for a nuclear defense capability, but that didn’t mean that she wanted to marry a B-52 pilot. Nor could she imagine letting into her life a man who earned obscene amounts of money dreaming up ways to free someone he himself admitted was guilty of a callous, premeditated murder.
Nevertheless, expediency won out in the end. Kristine had her principles, but she knew there was also a gray area where she could be bought. Whether or not she managed to come up with a vacation playmate for Thomas, she would certainly get a fabulous lunch. And if Paul Merlowitz didn’t come up to her exacting standards, there wasn’t anyone else around at the moment who did. She lifted the receiver and dialed.
After all her agonizing, Merlowitz wasn’t taking calls. Instead, she got to speak with a secretary who ran through a whole repertoire of moves from the elaborate tai chi of commercial intercourse, concluding with the statement that Mr. Merlowitz was “in conference.” Kristine left a message, and immediately regretted it. Now she would be waiting, if only subconsciously, for the phone to ring. Merlowitz had her on a string. She should have hung up and called again at her leisure, instead of handing him that power.
Only ten minutes had gone by, but she called the Seattle Police back anyway. Not only was Don Krylo there, he had the information she’d requested.
“I was kind of doubtful for a while,” he told her. “We’re going on-line here and everything’s ass over tit, whole boxloads of stuff I could put my hand on a week ago’ve just like, you know, disappeared. Watch it be one of those, I told myself, either that or someone’s circular filed the damn thing. Anyway, looks like you lucked out. The previous CRS on this guy originated in-you got a pen? — Evanston, Illinois. Detective Eileen McCann’s the name right here on the docket.”