Fortunately, Chico’s lunchtime clientele was in search of good food rather than trendy surroundings. Customers lined up daily for some of Chico Rodriguez’s signature tacos, made from a recipe passed down from his great-grandmother to his grandmother, then to his mother, all of whom had spent decades cooking in various Bisbee-area Mexican eateries. When the last of the Rodriguez women retired, Chico had followed in their footsteps and opened his own establishment, one where his mother still filled in occasionally so Chico could have a day off.
Joanna and Frank went to the counter and placed their order. Taking their drinks, they retreated to a recently vacated booth, where they were obliged to clear their own table. Minutes later, Chico himself delivered their orders. The food came on paper plates accompanied by paper-napkin-wrapped plastic utensils. The shredded-beef tacos, made from crunchy homemade corn tortillas, were piled high with chopped lettuce. The lettuce was sprinkled with a generous helping of finely grated sharp cheese and topped by a dollop of tomato salsa that was more sweet than hot. It was that special combination of ingredients that made Chico’s tacos taste better than any Joanna had eaten elsewhere.
As she took her first bite, Frank grinned at her. “As soon as you’re no longer a raving maniac, tell me more about your call from the Washington State Attorney General’s Office and this so-called observer they’re sending.”
“I’ve pretty much told you what I know,” Joanna returned. “The guy’s name is Beaumont. That’s about it.”
“When can we expect him?”
“Tomorrow or Sunday, I suppose,” she said.
“And the purpose of his visit?”
“Other than spying on us and getting in the way? Beats the hell out of me. Like I said before, talking with Mr. Eyeball, as you called him, was like dealing with feds from back east. He fully expected me to spill my guts and tell him everything we know. But that isn’t going to happen, at least not until that file gets here.”
“He didn’t go into any details as to why the state of Washington is so concerned about Latisha Wall’s death?”
“No, and the longer they keep us working in the dark, the easier it’ll be for us to make that slip Harry Ball seems to be expecting.”
Frank jotted himself a note. “When we get back to the office, I’ll go on-line and find out what I can about Ms. Latisha Wall. It must be a pretty high-profile case to garner this much attention from the attorney general’s office. There may be newspaper coverage that will tell us some of what we need to know.”
“Good idea,” Joanna said. “We should also check with Casey and Dave to see how they’re doing with processing all the evidence they brought back from the crime scene.”
Frank nodded and made another note as Joanna finished the second of her two tacos. She was scraping the last of the refritos off her plate when the phone in her purse crowed.
“Hello, boss,” Detective Jaime Carbajal announced when she answered. “Sorry to bother you. Kristin said you were at a board of supervisors meeting. Hope I’m not interrupting.”
“The meeting’s over,” Joanna assured him. “Frank and I stopped off at Chico’s to grab some lunch. What’s up?”
“I still haven’t heard a word from anybody in Washington,” Jaime complained.
Joanna’s laughter barked into the phone. “I have,” she told him. “And I can tell you now, you’re not going to like it. Meet us out at the department. I’ll bring you up to date, and you can do the same.”
Jaime Carbajal was waiting in the outside office when Joanna arrived. As predicted, he was irate at the idea of an outsider prowling around on his turf and messing around in his case.
“What about the opening at Castle Rock Gallery?” Joanna asked when she, Frank, and Jaime had exhausted the topic of Ross Connors’s unconscionable interference.
“I didn’t go,” Jaime replied.
“You didn’t go?” Joanna asked. “Why not?”
“It was canceled. When I got there last night, I found a sign on the door saying the opening had been canceled due to the death of the artist. Sorry for any inconvenience, et cetera, et cetera.”
“Dee Canfield canceled the show after all?” Joanna mused. “She must have come to her senses then. The last I heard she was determined to go through with it. I wonder why she changed her mind…”
Six
AS I PULLED my Porsche 928 out of the Belltown Terrace parking garage at seven that morning, I wasn’t thinking about traffic or even about work. I was thinking about my mother and about how fortunate it was that she was dead and had been for more than thirty years. I still miss her, of course, but if I had told her about my new job with the Washington State Attorney General’s SHIT squad, she would have been obliged to wash my mouth out with soap no matter how old I was.
Somewhere in the wilds of the state capitol down in Olympia was the out-of-touch Washington State bureaucrat who had dreamed up the name for the Special Homicide Investigation Team of which former Seattle homicide detective J.P. Beaumont was now the newest member. If you say the name word for word like that – Special Homicide Investigation Team – it sounds fine, dignified, even. The same holds true if you print it out on stationery or business cards. And that’s exactly what that same dim-witted state official did. He went nuts ordering reams of preprinted stationery, forms, envelopes, and business cards.
There was, however, a fly in the ointment. The world we live in is made up of shortcuts and acronyms – the Seattle PD, the U.S. of A., the U Dub, et cetera. The AG’s (see what I mean?) Special Homicide Investigation Team had barely opened its doors for business when people started shortening the name to something a little more manageable. And that’s where the SHIT hit the fan, so to speak. While everyone agrees the name is “regrettable” and “unfortunate,” no one in the state bureaucracy is willing to take the heat for rescinding that previously placed order for preprinted stationery, forms, and business cards. So SHIT it was, and SHIT it remains.
Getting back to my mother. I don’t want you to think Karen Piedmont was some kind of humorless prude. She was, after all, an unwed mother who, in the uptight fifties, raised me without much help from anyone – including her own parents. Her total focus was on turning me into a “good boy.” To that end, “bad language” was not allowed. As far as I know, the word “shit” never escaped my mother’s lips. Her mother, on the other hand, a chirpy eighty-six-year-old named Beverly Piedmont Jenssen, loves to ask me about my job – acronym included. It’s as though, at her advanced age, she’s decided she’s allowed to say anything she damned well pleases. And does.
Woolgathering as I went, I drove straight to what locals call the Mercer Mess – the Mercer Street on-ramp to I-5. I planned to take I-5 south to I-90 and go east across Lake Washington to the business park in Bellevue’s Eastgate area, where the attorney general had seen fit to set his team of investigators up in a glass-walled low-rise building.
But southbound I-5 was where things went dreadfully wrong. I turned onto the on-ramp and stopped cold. Nobody was moving – not on the ramp, and not on the freeway, either.
This was not news from the front. Seattle’s metropolitan area is notorious for gridlock. It’s a tradition. For the last several decades our trusted elected public officials have done everything possible to limit highway construction while allowing unprecedented growth. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that this is a recipe for transportation disaster. Now that it’s here, those very same public officials alternately wring their hands and try to blame the problem on somebody else.
I have to confess that while I was both living and working downtown, the increasingly awful traffic situation was easy to ignore. However, now that I had thrown myself into the role of a trans – Lake Washington commuter, I was learning about the problem up close and personal.