"This won't take long, then. Do you happen to have Tony Freeman's home telephone number?"
Captain Anthony Freeman is the head of the Internal Investigations Section of Seattle P.D. He's a well-respected straight-shooter. He was also the one supervisor in the whole department who had been able to see beyond Ron Peters' wheelchair to the fact that a trained detective's abilities were being vastly underutilized in a permanent assignment to the Media Affairs section. Ron was now working full-time as an I.I.S. investigator.
I also happened to know that, despite the fact that he bore a Gentile-sounding name, Tony Freeman was Jewish. As a matter of fact, he once gave me a memorable ass-chewing that had to do with my using a Yiddish word that he personally found offensive. What he said wasn't at all mean-spirited, but it wasn't the kind of thing you forgot, either. Ever since that rebuke, the word schmuck has been excised from my spoken vocabulary.
"I have his number," Ron answered, "but it's unlisted, and I'm not supposed to give it out. Why do you need it? What's up?"
I was off on such a wild-goose chase that I wasn't eager to discuss it with anyone right then-not even Ron Peters. "It's about the boat fire at Fishermen's Terminal," I said.
"You don't think a police officer is involved, do you?" Ron asked.
"No, nothing like that. But I do need to talk to Tony. Could you maybe call him and see if you can get him to call me here?"
"Where's here?" Ron asked.
"I'm in the office," I answered. "At my desk."
"On Saturday?"
"Don't hassle me about it. Someday maybe I'll get a life."
Ron laughed. "Okay," he said. "I'll see what I can do. And if for some reason I'm not able to raise him by phone, I'll give you a call back right away."
But the person who returned my call barely two minutes later was Captain Tony Freeman himself. "Hey, Beau," he said. "I understand you wanted to talk to me. What's going on?"
"What do you know about the Simon Wiesenthal Foundation?" I asked.
It was an unexpected question, one that caught Tony Freeman slightly off guard, but there was only a brief pause. "Some," he answered. "That's the organization devoted to tracking down Nazi war criminals and bringing them to justice. What about them?"
"I think we may have a couple of them wandering around loose in Seattle at the moment," I told him. "And from what I've found out so far, they may be up to no good."
"Maybe you'd better bring me up to speed," Captain Freeman said.
And so I did, in as orderly a fashion as I could. When I finished, Captain Freeman was silent for a long moment. I could almost hear the wheels grinding through the telephone wires.
"If those two guys have turned, for one reason or another," he said gravely, "then they'll have gone to ground, and you'll never find them. If they're playing it straight, you won't have any trouble."
"Meaning?"
"Call the name-brand hotels and find out if they're registered guests under their own names, or at least under the names they gave those two kids up in Bellingham," Freeman answered. "If they are registered, most likely they'll be eating kosher meals, and that takes special arrangements. One of the local caterers that keeps a kosher kitchen would be providing the meals and delivering them, ready-to-eat, to the hotel. I could probably get you a list of the possible caterers if you like, but at this hour on a Saturday, that might be tough.
"So, if I were you, I'd start by calling area hotels. Call, ask for them by name, and see if the hotel operator puts you through to a room."
"Good idea," I said. "I don't know why I didn't think of that myself. I'll see what I can do."
"One more thing," Tony Freeman added. "I don't think the Wiesenthal group operates under any strict budgetary considerations, so I'd start at the top. Don't bother checking with Motel Six. Their expense account would do much better than that."
If you ask for advice, my position is you'd better be prepared to take it. So I started at the top, both in terms of quality and alphabet-with the Alexis. I figured I'd end up at the Westin when I hit the bottom of the list, but it turned out I didn't have to go that far. I hit pay dirt in the S 's when I got as far as the Sorrento.
As soon as the phone started ringing in a room, I slammed down the receiver. They were there, in a local hotel, and checked in under their own names-or at least under their most recent aliases. That meant Captain Freeman was right. Had Moise and Avram been crooked, they wouldn't have been nearly that easy to find. Now what?
I sat there for several minutes, pondering my next move. Should I hie myself up to the Sorrento, call from the lobby, invite them down for a drink in the bar? No, that didn't seem wise. After all, although these two men weren't really police officers, I had to believe they were trained professionals. They might take a very dim view of being tracked down in a strange city by a lone local cop who shouldn't have had any idea who they were or what they were up to. And if they decided to get physical about my interfering in their lives, no doubt they would both be fully capable of handling themselves in a crisis.
Once upon a time, I wouldn't have thought twice about waltzing up to the Sorrento all by myself, but age and wisdom and scars all go hand in hand. In this line of work, you either get smarter or you die, so after a few moments of consideration, I looked up Sue Danielson's home number and dialed it.
"'lo," a surly young male voice answered.
"Hello," I said. "Is your mother there?"
"I'm on the other line," Jared Danielson said. "Could you call back later, after I'm done?"
"No," I said. "I can't call back later."
I have very little patience with the self-appointed gatekeepers of the world, whether they be officially sanctioned receptionist types or simply self-centered teenagers who don't want to relinquish the phone to anyone else, especially to someone so undeserving as a mere bill-paying parent.
"This is business," I answered abruptly. "And it's important. I need to speak to your mother right away."
"Okay," he said. "Just a minute."
It was actually quite a bit more than a minute. It was more than two minutes, but I'll be damned if I was going to give up.
Eventually, Sue's voice came on the phone. "Hello. Is this call for me?"
"Yes, it's for you, dammit!"
"Beau?"
"Yes. I'm calling from down at the department. Tell Jared the next time he doesn't put me through to you right away, I'm going to come over and personally ream his ass."
"What a good idea." Sue laughed. "I'll pass the word. Now, what's happening?"
"Have you had dinner yet?"
"No. We spent the afternoon painting the kids' bathroom. I told the boys we'd order a pizza later on, but I haven't quite gotten around to that yet. We're still cleaning up."
"Go ahead and order pizza, but just enough for the boys."
"What about me?" she objected. "I'm starved."
"Put on your glad rags. We have to pay a call on yet another joint, but don't wear your salsa-dancing costume. I don't think the folks who hang out in the Hunt Club at the Sorrento speak salsa dancing. How long will it take for you to meet me there?"
"An hour maybe. I'll have to jump in the shower."
"I'll see you there, but tell that son of yours for me that this isn't a date, either."
When Sue hung up, I thumbed through my notebook until I found Michael Morris' telephone number at his parents' home on Mercer Island. A woman answered my ring. When I asked for Michael, I could hear the curiosity in her voice as she handed him the phone.
"Hello, Michael," I said. "Detective Beaumont. Are you busy?"
"We were about to sit down to dinner," he answered. "I'm not home all that often, and my mother invited friends over."
"What are the chances of your bailing out?"
"Maybe my mother wouldn't kill me if I told her it was urgent, but why? What's up?"