Until that very moment, it hadn’t occurred to me that I wasn’t the only one who hadn’t managed to get past the pain of Anne Corley’s death. And I wasn’t the only dummy she had led around by the nose, either.
“Don’t worry about it, Ralph,” I said as the elevator door swished open. “It’s no big deal.”
He was still standing there looking at me, when the door shut and the elevator started its descent. I usually use the twenty-five-story elevator ride as a pressurization chamber, a place to switch gears from home to work and vice versa, but I was still thinking about Anne and Ralph and me when the door opened and I saw Big Al striding back and forth across Belltown Terrace’s marbled lobby while the building’s uniformed doorman cowered nervously behind his rosewood writing desk and pretended to read a book.
One look at Big Al’s impatient face told me he for one believed the 911 call was the real McCoy. There had been a total changing of the guard in the top echelons of Seattle PD, and the honeymoon period had been brief enough to be almost nonexistent. The new chief was rumored to be a closet racist, while word was out on the streets that someone somewhere was taking payoffs. In previously scandal-free Seattle, community relations had plummeted. Verbal abuse and threats against police officers were up as were outright physical attacks. Maybe the top brass weren’t directly affected by all this, but it was no surprise that the middle managers, people like Watty and Captain Powell, were taking this latest telephoned threat in dead earnest.
“Come on,” Big Al said, heading for the door as soon as he saw me. “Let’s get going.”
“You don’t think this is just some kind of a kook?”
“Are you kidding?”
I followed him out to the curb and clambered into the car with a knot of apprehension solidifying in the pit of my stomach. If Big Al was right, if Watty was, somewhere in the city of Seattle, a police officer was dead. Chances are, whoever he was, that cop was someone I knew.
“Where are we going?” I asked as we started down Second Avenue.
“To the department. Watty says they have a car waiting for us in the garage. We’re supposed to call in as soon as we’re back out on the street.”
At night, there’s hardly ever a shortage of on-street parking outside the Public Safety Building. We left Big Al’s Ciera parked half a block away and hoofed it into the garage. Marty Sampson, the nighttime garage supervisor, was standing in the guard shack along with the attendant. They both seemed so mesmerized by something that they didn’t even see us until we were directly on top of them. It turned out they were staring at their radio.
“Hey, guys,” Big Al said, jarring them awake. “What’s happening? Which car is ours?”
When Marty looked up at us, his face reminded me of someone awakened from a terrible nightmare. “That one,” he said, pointing. “And hurry. An officer-down call came in a few minutes ago. Watty wants you there, pronto.”
“Where?”
“Down in the south end someplace. The street’s Cascadia. I don’t know the exact address. You can get that once you’re on your way.”
Big Al and I sprinted to the car, climbed in, and shot out of the garage with lights and siren both going full blast. With Big Al driving, I ran the radio, giving our position and letting Dispatch know we were on our way.
It was several moments before a harried-sounding dispatcher radioed back to us directly. The people who work in Dispatch, officers and civilians alike, pride themselves in maintaining professional composure no matter what, but this one was having a tough time of it. She was so choked up I could barely make out the street name, Cascadia. Once again the exact address got lost in the shuffle while she plunged on with the rest of the transmission.
“Officer down. We’ve got uniforms and emergency vehicles on the scene. They’ve called for detectives. That’s all I can tell you so far.”
No doubt that was all she could say over the air due to the many unofficial ears that routinely monitor official police channels, but her emotion-charged voice allowed my imagination to fill in some chilling blanks.
By then we were careening down the far side of First Hill. “Repeat that address,” Big Al said forcefully into the radio. “We didn’t catch it the first time.”
This time the numbers came through clear as a bell, and I thought I was a dead man.
“Dear God in heaven!” Big Al roared, simultaneously slamming on the brakes. By a mere fraction of an inch we avoided rear-ending a hapless taxi whose oblivious driver had meandered into our path.
“Hey, watch it,” I yelped, grabbing at the dash with an outstretched arm. “You could get us killed.”
“No,” Big Al said.
“What the hell do you mean ”no‘? You missed that guy by less than an inch.“
But Big Al Lindstrom didn’t seem to be listening. “Son of a bitch!” he exclaimed, pounding the steering wheel with both gigantic hands, which meant that he wasn’t holding on with any. The whole car seemed to shudder from the force of the blow. The idea of Big Al pitching a temper tantrum at any time is daunting enough, but having him do it in a car which he was supposedly driving at the time was downright terrifying.
“What the hell’s going on?” I demanded. “What’s the matter with you?”
“It’s Ben. They got Gentle Ben. That’s his address.”
The lump in my gut turned to solid ice. “Are you sure?” I asked, all the while knowing he was.
“Yes,” Big Al replied in a snarl of rage. “I know it as well as I do my own.”
Maybe for some people the words “Gentle Ben” evoke only memories of an old, forgettable TV series, but in the parlance of Seattle PD, they referred to just one person-Benjamin Harrison Weston, known to friend and foe alike as Gentle Ben.
Years earlier, Big Al and Ben had worked together when they were both new detectives in the Property division. Except for the distinct difference in skin color, they might have been twins. Massively built yet easygoing, plodding but amazingly thorough, the burly Norwegian and his African-American colleague always left a singular impression on those who had any dealings with them. After six months of working together, diverging career paths had led them in different directions-Big Al into Homicide and Ben into Patrol, but a genuine affection existed between them. Through the years the former partners had stayed in touch.
“They just said officer down,” I suggested, trying to inject some hope into the situation. “Maybe he’s not dead.”
“It wasn’t a ”help the officer‘ call,“ Big Al pointed out. ”That means it’s too damn late for help, and you know it.“
He was right. There was no arguing that point. While Allen Lindstrom drove us through the city with terrifying, single-minded ferocity, I tried to quell the tide of unreasoning anger boiling up inside me.
Murder investigations don’t allow any room for rage. The beginning of a homicide case demands total focus and clearheaded logic. Anything else is an unaffordable luxury. Outrage would have to come later, along with grief. In the meantime, we would both have to shove aside all personal considerations and start asking the stark, necessary, and routine questions about who had killed Ben Weston and why?
The human psyche can assimilate only so much bad news at one time. For a few moments as we raced, siren howling, through the night-lit city, I thought only of Ben. Then I remembered the rest of Watty’s phone call-that the killer had bragged of killing a police officer and his entire family. In that mysterious unspoken communication that happens sometimes between husbands and wives or partners, Big Al reached the same conclusion at almost the same moment. He grabbed for the microphone.
I knew exactly what was on his mind. “Don’t bother asking,” I said. “Dispatch isn’t going to tell you what you want to know over the air.”