Once the coffee was started, I came back into the living room. By then some of Mel’s temper had worn off. Like everyone else, she had gravitated toward the expanse of western-exposure windows and had settled on the window seat.
“If you’re working, where’s Brad?” I asked.
“His wife called. Their pipes are frozen. She needed him to come home.”
“One of the joys of home ownership,” I said.
“You know how it’s going to look, don’t you?” she asked.
“Your being out working on your own?”
“No, your going by Ron Peters’s place. It’s going to look like you went there to give Ron inside information on what’s going on in our investigation-information that you can then hand over to that slick attorney of his who, as I understand it, also happens to be your attorney of record.”
“Look, Mel,” I said patiently. “I tried to explain this to Harry this morning. Ron and I have been friends for years. Ditto Ralph Ames. The three of us have shared a lot of ups and downs over that time. It’s only natural that Ron would turn to Ralph when he was in need of legal representation. Besides, how could I give Ron information I don’t have? I know Rosemary Peters died over the weekend, but Ron himself told me that. I know blood was found in Ron’s car. Amy told me that. And I heard there had been some kind of family altercation that caused suspicion to point at Ron.”
“Where did that come from?”
Maxwell Cole was the one who had provided that last little tidbit, but I knew if I told Melissa Soames that, she’d go ballistic on me again-something I wanted to avoid if at all possible.
“Ron told me that, too,” I hedged. “And so did Tracy. Ron and Rosemary were in a legal wrangle over custody of his younger daughter, Heather.”
From the kitchen, I heard the last of the water burble into the pot. “I hope you don’t take cream,” I said. “I’m out of cream.”
“No. Black is fine.”
Minutes later, I returned to the living room with two mugs of coffee. I knew that meant I probably wouldn’t sleep very well for the second night in a row, but I wanted to appear hospitable enough to keep Mel from lighting into me again.
“You’re sure you don’t know anything more than that?” she asked as I handed over her cup.
“I understand that you and Brad took Ron someplace for questioning-to the office, presumably.”
Mel pursed her lips as if considering what, if anything, she should say. After a pause she said, “Rosemary Peters was the on-prem manager of a soup kitchen run by an organization called Bread of Life Mission at Fifth and Puyallup in downtown Tacoma, not far from the Tacoma Dome. The place is closed over the weekend. On Monday morning, when her two cooks came in to start breakfast, the back door was unlocked, with no sign of forced entry, but Rosemary was nowhere to be found. Tacoma PD was summoned to the scene. They found a few blood spatters in the parking lot, along with a single shoe. Nothing else. No brass. No usable footprints. And, since the area is paved, no tire tracks, either.
“Michael Lujan is on the Bread of Life board of directors. He’s also an attorney. He was doing pro bono work for Rosemary Peters in regard to the custody matter. She called him late Friday evening and said that after Ron Peters was served with the papers, he came roaring down to Tacoma and bitched her out. Said he’d-”
“See her in hell before he’d hand Heather over,” I supplied.
Mel looked at me questioningly. “He told you that?”
“As I said earlier, Ron and I are friends-good friends.”
“When Lujan heard what had happened, that Rosemary was missing, he called Tacoma PD and reported what Rosemary had told him about the incident with her ex. On Sunday afternoon a guy out walking with his dog along the edge of the tide flats stumbled across the body of a dead female. She was found at the bottom of the steep bank that runs along Commencement Bay just south of Brown’s Point. Tacoma PD responded to that incident as well. Sometime late Monday morning someone put two and two together and realized that the missing woman and the dead woman were one and the same. The unidentified gunshot victim was barefoot and wearing nothing but a T-shirt, panties, and robe in frigid weather. From the looks of it, she was forced into the trunk of the vehicle, probably at gunpoint, and then shot while the vehicle was still in the soup kitchen parking lot. The killer then transported the victim to a pullout along Highway 509, where he removed her from the vehicle and rolled her down a steep embankment. Fortunately she didn’t get hung up in a blackberry bramble. If she had, it might have been years before we found the body.”
I thought about the muscles in Ron’s arms and the upper-body strength that came from years of pushing his own wheelchair and lifting himself in and out of vehicles. Unfortunately, none of this sounded as if it were beyond his physical capabilities.
“No tire tracks there, either?” I asked.
Mel shook her head. “Blacktop,” she said. “But we do have something.”
“What’s that?”
“There’s a restaurant just up the road-at Brown’s Point. We checked their security camera. We’ve got a grainy but identifiable video of Ron’s very distinctive vehicle going past the restaurant northbound at eleven fifty-nine P.M. Friday.”
“His clamshell wheelchair topper is pretty distinctive, all right.” That’s what I said, but it wasn’t what I was thinking.
What time did Tracy say she heard Ron’s car return to the carport? I wondered. Two A.M. or so? That would be just about time enough to make it home to Queen Anne Hill from Brown’s Point, which is between Tacoma and Federal Way.
“Yes, it is,” Mel continued. “So based on the security tape and your report that someone had found dried blood in Ron’s car, Brad and I showed up armed with a search warrant. We also impounded his car. We found the blood, lots of it…” She paused, her eyes trained on my face. “And something else. Wedged into the wheel well, where he wouldn’t have seen it in the dark, was a single shoe-a shoe that matches the one found in the parking lot outside the Bread of Life Mission.”
I felt like all the air had been sucked out of my lungs. For lack of something to say, I took Mel’s cup and mine and headed for the kitchen. My hands shook as I poured coffee. I stayed in the kitchen until my breathing and shaking hands were back under control.
By the time I returned to the living room, Mel had kicked off her boots and had wrapped an afghan around her shoulders.
“Did your wife make this?” she asked. “It’s lovely.”
“Neither one of my wives were into crocheting,” I said. “My grandmother made that for me.”
“Oh,” Mel said.
I sat back down beside her. I had no idea what to say. Neither did she, evidently. For a time we both sipped our respective coffees in silence.
“I knew you and Ron Peters had been partners,” she said finally. “But I guess I didn’t realize how tight you were and still are.”
“Yes,” I agreed. “We’re tight, all right.” For a while I thought I was going to let it go at that, but then I surprised myself and told Melissa Soames the rest of it.
“When Ron and I first started working together, I thought he was a prissy jerk. He was a vegan, and that pissed the hell out of me. I mean, how many vegan cops do you know? I gave him a hard time about it every chance I got. Then, in the course of the case we were working on, I met this woman, an amazing woman, and fell in love with her. Anne was her name, Anne Corley. I realized eventually that she was…well, let’s say troubled…but I was in love and figured it wasn’t anything I couldn’t handle. Except she was more than troubled, so troubled she suckered me into shooting her on the afternoon of our wedding day. They didn’t call her death suicide by cop back then, but that’s what it was.”
“I had no idea,” Mel said after a long pause. “I’m sorry.”