I lay there for what seemed like hours, listening to the rumbling of the building’s heat pumps on the roof outside my penthouse. No longer were they an anonymous part of the building’s white noise. I was consciously aware of them now, aware of the implications behind their presence and absence-heat or cold, comfort or not. The ongoing roar was downright soothing, but I still couldn’t sleep.
For a while I kept my restless brain at bay by focusing on the case, by doing a series of mental lists about what would need to be accomplished the next day-locating the missing Volvo, interviewing the Chambers woman and Maxwell Cole, getting a look at the autopsy results, and talking to the lady at the school district.
But thinking about the case was really only a futile effort to jam my mental frequencies and hold other more disturbing thoughts at bay. Because Lars Jenssen had, knowingly or not, let one of my very own personal demons out of the jug.
“Damn you,” I mumbled aloud as I finally drifted off to sleep in the wee hours. Only, it wasn’t Lars Jenssen I was thinking about and cursing. It wasn’t him I was damning.
It was that selfish son of a bitch himself-my grandfather, Jonas Piedmont.
Chapter 10
That night, for the first time in my life, I dreamed about my grandfather.
I was in a cemetery, a cold, wind- and rainswept cemetery, not a real one, and not one I’d ever seen before. Across a wide expanse of grass, I could see a wooden casket poised over a newly dug grave, waiting to be lowered into it. Around the grave a group of men, some leaning on picks and shovels, stood waiting and talking.
Somehow I knew at once that Jonas Piedmont was lying dead in that coffin. Filled with a terrible and inexplicable urgency, I hurried toward the group of men, rushing because I knew I was late. Long before I could cover the distance between me and the grave, however, the casket began sinking slowly and inevitably into the ground. I shouted for them to wait for me, but instead, they all turned and started throwing dirt onto the vanished coffin.
I shouted again, pleading in vain for them to stop, but they wouldn’t. They kept right on flinging the heavy, wet dirt into the hole in the ground. By the time I reached the group and recognized the men as members of the Regrade Regulars, the grave was completely filled in and slivers of grass were already sprouting up through the muddy ground even as Lars Jenssen himself heaved the last shovelful of dirt onto the grave. When he saw me standing there panting, he leaned on his shovel again, pointing and laughing.
I fought my way out of the dream and found that the sheet had somehow come loose during the course of that restless night. It was bunched up and wrapped around my neck. I fought my way out of that too, throwing it on the floor beside the bed, and made my way into the bathroom. I didn’t need an interpreter to explain that particular dream. What I really needed was a steaming hot shower to wash it away.
As I shaved, the radio in the bathroom reported that another day had dawned clear and cold. There was a slight warming trend, all the way up into the low twenties-a big help for Belltown Terrace’s heat pumps, which still rumbled away outside-but the slightly higher temperatures wouldn’t make things that much better for anything else.
I was glad not to have to pay attention while the announcer went through the long list of school closures that would extend holiday vacations for most Puget Sound youngsters for yet another day. And I was relieved to hear that no new incidents of sled/vehicular fatalities had occurred the day before.
Armed with a cup of coffee, I stood at my living room window gazing across the snowwrapped city. From the penthouse level of Belltown Terrace, the snow-covered hillsides still looked picture-pretty, but that sense of beauty changed drastically once it was closer at hand.
Down on street level, standing outside in it, shivering in snow up to my calves, that seemingly pristine white stuff took on a hard and brittle texture. It was dirty and crusted over by the mottled leavings of sanding crews. I waited for the bus in front of Belltown Terrace.
With a badge and ID, police ride free on city buses. “Pray for rain,” the driver of the overloaded Metro bus told me with a cheerful grin as he glanced at my badge. “Rain’s the only thing that’s going to help.”
I was sure that was true, but despite Lars Jenssen’s prediction to the contrary, that morning’s biting cold didn’t make rain a likely possibility.
The slow-moving bus was jammed to the gills. The almost carefree holiday attitude from the day before was completely gone, wiped out by that second frigid morning. There was no lighthearted camaraderie and banter among the people pressed together in the hot, steamy bus. Those few who did talk were mostly weary mothers, comparing the logistics of hastily arranged child care. Along with unaccustomed heavy-duty coats, gloves, and scarves, people wore frowns of grim determination. This was winter, real winter for a change, and the grownups of Seattle weren’t having any fun.
Once on the fifth floor of the Public Safety Building, I went directly to my cubicle, opened Doris Walker’s envelope, and dragged out the bomb-threat folder, which, out of deference to Lars Jenssen, I hadn’t even cracked open before coming to work.
There in my office, I read through it quickly. According to the file, there had been a total of seven threats in all, starting and ending back during the teachers’ strike at the beginning of the school year earlier that fall. Most had come in at night or on weekends, two by phone on the district’s answering machine and the others wrapped around rocks and tossed through plate-glass windows. All of them had targeted the school district administration office itself.
Despite seven thorough searches, no bombs had ever been found. After the first one, round-the-clock security guards had been instituted at the office complex on Queen Anne Hill. That surveillance continued for some time, even though the threats themselves had ceased about the same time striking teachers had returned to work. Now, several months later, round-the-clock coverage had been replaced by two consecutive after-hours shifts.
I was surprised to learn that each of the several incidents had indeed been reported to the school authorities and then passed on to the proper personnel at the Seattle Police Department. The report specifically mentioned the names of several members of the Fraud and Explosive squad. Try as I might, I couldn’t remember anything at all about the case coming through official departmental pipelines. Nor, to the best of my knowledge, had there been any mention about it in the media. That seemed odd to me. Local school district bomb threats are always big news, but these seemed to have fallen into a black hole without a single reporter noticing. I wondered why.
I don’t pretend to understand media people, and when I need help in that department, I always turn to Ron Peters, the man who was my partner until a permanent back injury made his return to regular duty as a homicide detective a physical impossibility. Back on the job after months of hospital treatment and rehabilitation, Peters was now ensconced, not entirely happily, in his new job with the Media Relations Department.
Unfortunately, when I called down to talk to him, Peters was closeted in that champion bureaucratic waster of time-a morning-long meeting. He was there, and so was everyone else from his unit. Did I want to leave a message?
I’ve long held the revolutionary belief that if all staff meetings in the world were totally abolished overnight, not only would civilization as we know it survive, it would actually thrive.
“No,” I said. “I’ll call back.”
My next call was to the F amp; E squad itself, where I reached Detective Lyle Cummings, affectionately known around the department as Officer Sparky.
Lyle Cummings had been plain old Lyle Cummings for his first eight years at Seattle P.D. The Sparky handle had come to him in midcareer as the result of an unfortunate incident in which Lyle and his partner, Dave Cooper, had been out test-driving the department’s brand-new$150,000 bomb-disposal truck. Crossing the Spokane Street Bridge, a missing three-cent grommet caused an electrical short circuit in the radio wiring. Unable to summon help, the truck wound up as a smoldering ruin parked in the far righthand lane of the West Seattle Freeway.