“When did you find them?” she asked eventually.
“I didn’t. Not me personally. Somebody else did. Around eleven.”
“Eleven?” she demanded. “That long ago? Why the hell am I not finding out about it until almost twelve hours later?”
“The child wasn’t wearing any identification,” I told her. “At first we had no way of knowing who he was. In fact, we thought he was one of Ben and Shiree’s until we found Junior.”
“Junior? He’s all right?”
“He’s fine. He was hiding. The killer missed him. Junior gave us Adam’s name, but he couldn’t give us an address or tell us where you worked. And your phone number isn’t listed.”
“It still shouldn’t have taken so long,” she said. “You said yourself that it’s already been on the radio.”
“Without any names being mentioned,” I told her. “We never release names until after we’ve located the next of kin.”
“Just like good Boy Scouts,” she returned sarcastically. “Ben was always a great one for telling us that you guys did things by the book. So who killed him?”
“Who killed your son?”
“No. Adam was just a little boy. The real question is who killed Benjamin Weston, isn’t it?”
The hard edge on her question put me on notice that there was something behind it. “I don’t know,” I answered. “Do you have any idea?”
She shrugged. “A jealous husband, most likely,” she said. “That would be my guess.”
I was thunderstruck. Gentle Ben Weston? Screwing around on the side? That didn’t square with anything I personally knew about the man, but I wasn’t exactly what you could call a friend of the family either. Emma Jackson was, and she sounded quite certain.
“Do you know something about that,” I asked, “something we maybe should know too?”
“You tell me. For months now Shiree’s been complaining to me about him going to work early and coming home late with no apparent explanation. You figure it out. What’s the usual answer when that kind of thing gets started? I told Shiree that in this day and age she was stupid as a stump to look the other way and let him get away with it.”
“Shiree Weston discussed the situation with you?”
“Shiree Garvey and I go back a long way. We discussed everything. I hated him for what he was doing to her.”
The shrinks call it transference, I believe. It works the same way radar jamming does. By keeping her mental signals full of other angers and issues, Emma Jackson avoided the terrible subject at hand-the senseless death of her son. It’s a form of denial, and denial is common in the people I deal with. Nevertheless, I couldn’t afford to ignore the fact that this woman might be presenting me with both a possible motive and hence a possible suspect.
“Did she mention any names?”
“No, but it won’t be hard to find out. Men are never nearly as clever about these things as they think they are.”
“I assume Garvey was Shiree Weston’s maiden name?” Emma nodded. “How far back do you two go?” I asked.
“Grade school.”
Both my question and Emma’s initial answer seemed innocuous enough, but then she added an afterthought. “About the same age Adam is now. Was,” she whispered.
Suddenly Dr. Emma Jackson’s steely reserve shattered. She began crying quietly into her hand while I kept driving. By the time we arrived at Harborview, Emma had pulled herself together again. I would have gone around and opened the car door for her, but she beat me to the punch. She led the way into the building as though she knew it well.
“You seem to know your way around,” I commented.
“I’ve been here before,” she replied without explanation.
The lower floor of Harborview Hospital, occupied by the King County Medical Examiner’s Office, is dedicated to the dead rather than to the living. There Dr. Howard Baker reigns supreme over a small corps of dedicated employees and an ever-changing and always deceased clientele. As a Homicide detective bringing in victims’ relatives to make identifications, I’m used to taking charge at the receptionist’s desk. This time, however, Emma Jackson handled it herself.
“I’m Dr. Jackson,” she announced. “I’m here to see Dr. Baker about my son, Adam.”
The receptionist, bleary-eyed from being called in during the middle of the night, blinked in recognition at the name. “Oh, of course. Wait right here. Dr. Baker’s busy in the back right now.”
“In the back” is a medical examiner’s office euphemism that means either that Doc Baker’s really out playing golf or else he’s up to his armpits in an autopsy, a word that is seldom if ever uttered aloud in that grim little waiting room.
The receptionist jumped up and hurried through the swinging door that opened into the lab. She returned moments later with Doc Baker in tow.
Emma had walked over to the window and was standing with her back to us looking outside when the M.E. came into the room. “Hello there, Beau,” he said, nodding in my direction. “I understand you brought the mother along?”
Emma Jackson whirled around and faced him. At once I saw a look of shocked recognition cross Doc Baker’s face. “Why, Emma. It’s not your boy, is it?”
“That’s what he told me,” she said grimly. “I’m here to find out for sure, one way or the other.”
Clearly Drs. Baker and Jackson knew each other, although I had no idea how. He held out his arm, and she took it. “This way,” he said solicitously, leading her toward the swinging doors.
Maybe up until then Emma Jackson still had some hope I was wrong. But of course, I wasn’t.
CHAPTER 8
In the years I’ve worked homicide, I’ve been through plenty of identification ordeals. Seeing your own child dead in some cold, stainless-steel-furnished morgue has to be one of the worst trials a parent ever endures. The emotional devastation of that encounter strikes both men and women pretty much equally. I’ve seen more than a few men faint dead away and have to be carried out of the room. Hysterics, explosions of anger, and racking wails of despair are common occurrences that know no gender divisions at a time like that. Men and women, fathers and mothers, are both identically susceptible to grief.
Even though she’d pulled herself together so well back at her apartment, Emma Jackson’s reaction still surprised the hell out of me. It was like she slipped out of the role of mother, put on her doctor suit, and was totally professional about doing what had to be done. When Doc Baker lifted the sheet that covered her son’s face, she swallowed hard and nodded.
“Yes,” she said. “That’s him. That’s Adam.”
I excused myself long enough to call Carl Johnson at McClure Middle School. When I came back, Doc Baker was leading Emma from one victim to another. Each time he lifted the sheet, she spoke quietly for several minutes while the M.E. took copious notes. Their exchanges were conducted in guarded undertones, totally inaudible to me or to anyone else in the room. Whatever information she imparted was delivered with a quiet dignity that I found absolutely mind-boggling considering the circumstances.
Subconsciously keeping count, I was surprised when, after Ben and Shiree Weston as well as the three dead children had all been identified, Doc Baker led Emma Jackson to yet another gurney. Beneath the sheet on that one lay Spot, the Weston family’s dog. That was the first and only time I ever knew of a dog being accorded the medical examiner’s office’s full, deluxe postmortem treatment.
After that, we left the lab and retreated to Doc Baker’s private office. This, too, was highly unusual. After making the IDs, victims’ relatives are usually hustled away from Harborview as quickly as possible. They are generally excluded from any debriefings between the M.E. and the Homicide detectives working the case. When Baker ushered us into his office, I naturally assumed he was just being polite and that conversation would be strictly limited to sympathetic small talk.