Else was watching my face. "You do know something about those two men, don't you?"
I nodded.
"Did they have something to do with Gunter's death?"
"It's possible."
She paled. "And I let them into the house when I was here by myself? I shouldn't have done that, should I?"
"No," I agreed. "You shouldn't have. Now, where's Kari?" I asked.
"She took my mother to have her hair done. I wanted to be here alone. I wanted to do some work-some real physical work…"
"I understand all that, Else," I said. "You don't have to explain, but you really shouldn't be here by yourself right now, and under no circumstances should you allow any more strangers into the house whether you're alone here or not, understand?"
"Yes."
"And for the moment, I want you to take down the For Sale sign."
"No," Else Gebhardt said determinedly. "I'm not taking it down for you or for my mother or for anybody else. Maybe people think I'm being disrespectful by trying to sell it when Gunter isn't even buried yet, but they don't understand. My husband betrayed me, BoBo. Gunter played me for a fool. No wonder he wanted my mother with us. As long as I was locked up here in this house looking after her, he could go about doing whatever he damn well pleased."
She paused and then added, "Well, that's over. Gunter's dead, and so is his girlfriend."
The part about the girlfriend certainly wasn't entirely true since I now had proof that Denise Whitney hadn't perished in the Camano Island fire, but I didn't even attempt to interrupt Else Gebhardt's angry tirade.
"I'll do the right thing by Gunter, even if he didn't deserve it," she continued. "I'll play the part and see to it that he's properly buried, but I'm through being a doormat, BoBo. I want out of this house, and I want out of it now. This was my mother's house and Gunter's house. It's never been mine, and I won't stay here a minute longer than I have to."
Else finally ran out of steam.
"In other words," I interjected, "you won't take down the sign?"
"No! I certainly won't! Why should I? If the soldiers are all those two men were after, why would they come back?"
"You're right," I agreed. "They might not. But somebody else might."
"I don't think so," Else returned.
I'm not very good at changing women's minds, and Else Gebhardt's mind was definitely made up-too much so for me to tackle the problem directly. I simply went around it.
On my way back downtown, I took a swing by Fishermen's Terminal. There was a single light on in Champagne Al's One Day at a Time. When I knocked on the galley door, he answered with a book in one hand and a cigarette in the other.
In the course of a five-minute visit, I didn't tell Alan Torvoldsen much, only that I was worried about Else Gebhardt being alone in her house up on Culpeper Court and that I wished someone, preferably a friend of the family, would keep an eye on her. Just to be on the safe side.
From the expression on his face when I finished, you'd have thought I'd just handed a lifepreserver to a drowning man. I left the boat a few minutes later. As I headed out the door, Champagne Al was already standing in front of the smoke-filmed mirror, carefully combing into place what little remained of his flaming-red hair.
21
I understand that there are lots of people in the work force today who are into telecommuting. They work at home. I'm not one of them. I'm used to working at work. There's something about the workaday, slightly grubby ambience of the fifth floor that helps me think and focus. Since focusing was what I needed to do, I headed straight for my cubicle in the Public Safety Building.
It only took a moment to retrieve Stan Jacek's fax containing the Jane Doe autopsy findings. It took a hell of a lot longer than that to digest same.
Because the Camano Island victim's body had burned so completely, there was virtually no soft tissue remaining on the bones. Even so, many of the circumstances were similar to the ones we'd found in the Fishermen's Terminal incident. The victim's fingers and toes had all been removed and left to time-bake in a charred pie tin on top of the body. However, because of the condition of the tissue, it was impossible to discover whether the mutilations had occurred before or after the victim's death.
From my point of view, however, the biggest problem with the autopsy was that it dealt with the wrong person. If the dead woman wasn't Denise Whitney, who was she? And, for that matter, if Denise wasn't dead, where the hell was she? One more time, she had put her family through an emotional ordeal not unlike being tossed in a Waring blender. Had she done this to them herself, willingly? Or was she also among the killer's victims-a missing corpse, rotting and waiting to be discovered?
And then, of course, there was my other problem-the guys who might or might not be Simon Wiesenthal operatives. I hadn't a doubt in my mind that the two men who had paid their timely visit to Else Gebhardt, the two wheeler-dealers who had aced me out of Gunter's soldiers, were the same ones who had called on Kari and Michael up in Bellingham. So-were these characters really on the trail of Hans Gebhardt, or were they actually on the trail of the gold? Both, or neither?
The mire was so deep now that I didn't know what to think. Maybe Hans Gebhardt was still alive, and the Wiesenthal agents were doing exactly what they claimed-tracking him to ground. But there were other possibilities. What were the chances that Gunter Gebhardt's long-missing father was, in fact, long dead, and the story about searching for him was nothing more than an elaborate cover?
The Simon Wiesenthal organization. How do you go about contacting them? I wondered. After a few moments of reflection, I tried my old standby-I dialed Information-and came up winners, twice over. Within minutes I had numbers for the Simon Wiesenthal Foundation in both New York and Los Angeles. But neither office was open at five-something o'clock Pacific Standard Time on a November Saturday afternoon. And what I had to say wasn't something that could be trusted to the impersonal discretion of a taped voice-messaging system.
I could hear myself saying, "I'm a detective up here in Seattle, and I've got these two guys who may or may not be yours and who may or may not be wandering around the state of Washington killing people. Would you mind having somebody get back to me on this?"
Like hell they would!
So the question was, how to find out more about Moise and Avram without tipping my hand? If they were true-blue, then it might not hurt anything to check them out in a straightforward, official-channel fashion. But if they had gone bad-if they were renegades using their official credentials as free tickets to get away with murder-then any kind of official inquiry might be enough to send them dodging for cover.
Someone once told me that true creativity is 50 percent saturation, 49 percent perspiration, and I percent inspiration. After sitting there in the silence of my cubicle in a near-catatonic state for more than an hour and a half, after doing the hard work of turning the same questions over and over in my mind, inspiration finally struck at five minutes to six.
That's it, I thought. Picking up the phone, I dialed my old partner, Ron Peters.
As soon as he answered the phone and I heard voices and laughter and dishes clattering in the background, I remembered it was Amy's birthday. It sounded as though I had called right in the middle of a party.
"I hope I'm not interrupting anything."
"It's just family," Ron answered. "We're just setting the table."