With an oath that was half English and half unprintable Norwegian, Big Al heaved the microphone out of his hand as though it were a piece of hand-singeing charcoal. They make radio equipment out of pretty tough materials these days. The microphone bounced off both the windshield and the dashboard without splintering into a thousand pieces.
“How many are there?” I asked.
“Five,” he said. “Ben, his wife, and three kids, two from his first marriage and then the baby, Junior.”
“How old?”
“Bonnie’s the oldest. She must be fourteen or fifteen by now. Dougie is twelve. Junior’s what?…maybe five or six. I forget which.”
“And the wife’s name?”
“Shiree. She’s good people,” Big Al declared. “I don’t know what Ben would have done if she hadn’t been there to help out when his first wife died. Ben was all torn up, and Shiree sort of glued him back together.”
I glanced across the seat in time to see Big Al swipe at a damp cheek with one of his huge, doubled fists. “Want me to drive?” I offered.
“Hell no! You wouldn’t go fast enough. I’m gonna get there in time to kill the bastard myself!”
He meant it too, and I didn’t blame him. I shut up and let him drive. When we finally reached the general area, we found that an eight-block area around the Weston family home on Cascadia was cordoned off. It was lit up like daylight by the massed collection of emergency vehicles surrounding it. Big Al snaked his way through the crush as far as possible. After that, we got out and walked.
A grim-faced Captain Lawrence Powell, head of our Homicide division, met us on the front porch and barred the way, stopping Big Al in his tracks.
“You probably shouldn’t go in there, Detective Lindstrom,” the captain cautioned. “It’s real rough-five dead so far.”
Big Al’s huge shoulders sagged and he lurched visibly under the weight of Powell’s words. Five dead? That meant that along with Ben his entire family-his wife and all three of his children-had been eradicated from the face of the earth!
“I know you and Weston were friends,” Powell continued, reaching up to place a restraining hand on Big Al’s massive chest. “I’ll assign somebody else…”
Impatiently, Big Al shook off the captain’s hand as though it wasn’t there. “Everybody who ever met Ben Weston was his friend,” Lindstrom countered doggedly. “Sergeant Watkins assigned me to this case, and I’m taking it.”
“Are you sure?”
Detective Lindstrom is a good six inches taller than the captain, and he outweighs him by a minimum of seventy-five pounds. Big Al stared down at Powell, his face contorted by grief, his skin pulsing an eerie red in the reflected glow from the flashing lights of an ambulance parked just outside Ben Weston’s gate.
“Yes,” Detective Lindstrom replied fiercely. “I’m sure.” With that, he stomped off and disappeared into the house.
Captain Powell turned to me. “You keep an eye on him, Beaumont. If Big Al can’t handle it, if he needs to be pulled from this case, I expect you to let me know immediately.”
“Right,” I said, but that wasn’t what was going through my mind.
Like hell I will, I thought as the appalling death toll continued to explode in my head. Five! Five! Five! If Captain Powell thought he could count on me to spy for him and report on the correctness of Big Al’s behavior in this case, he was on the wrong track. I wouldn’t do it, and nobody else would either. The death of Gentle Ben Weston was everybody’s business.
Concerned about public image and letter-of-the-law proper procedure, Captain Powell might very well pull Big Al from the case, but being taken off officially didn’t mean the detective would stop working the problem. Not at all. Assigned or not, every homicide detective in the city of Seattle would be walking, talking, and breathing this case twenty-four hours a day until it was over and the killer was either dead or permanently behind bars.
Cops are people too, you see. When faced with the slaughter of one of our own, we all take it very, very personally.
CHAPTER 2
Through some mysterious fluke of fate I happened to be out of town at the beginning of two of Seattle’s most notorious murder cases. I was fortunate enough to be in D.C. attending a homicide convention when eleven people were massacred in a downtown supper club. Several years later, I was vacationing in California with my kids when a certified crazy used an ax to murder his psychiatrist as well as the psychiatrist’s wife and two young children.
I was involved in those two cases only on a limited, peripheral level. My connection was primarily in dealing with the mountain of departmental paperwork that is the inevitable accompaniment of any multiple murder. To my great good fortune, I wasn’t embroiled in any of the immediate crime scene aftermath. My luck in that regard ran out completely when it came to the family of Officer Benjamin Harrison Weston.
When the Westons failed to answer Ben’s supervisor’s call, two uniformed officers were dispatched at once to check on the family. They arrived sometime after eleven and were, as a consequence, first on the scene. They walked us through the area and gave us a chilling guided tour of the Weston family’s senseless slaughter.
The killer’s trail was as easy to follow as the set of muddy footprints that marched unwaveringly up the back porch, through the blood-spattered kitchen, dining room, and living room, down the long carpeted hallway, and into two of the three bedrooms.
The first victim was evidently the faithful family dog, a big black-and-white mutt which, according to Big Al, had been unimaginatively but appropriately named Spot. We found Spot in the far corner of the backyard with his throat slit. The patrol officers theorized that the girl might have gone outside after the dog since the first sign of struggle-an overturned chair and a broken flowerpot-were both located on the back deck outside the kitchen door. I made a note to check and see if any of the neighbors might have heard noises from that deadly struggle, but the chances were good that the killer hadn’t given her the opportunity to make any noise.
We found the girl herself just inside the kitchen door. She was lying on her side in a pool of blood. Her mouth had been taped shut with duct tape. Big Al looked down at her and shook his head. “Her name’s Bonnie,” he said gruffly. “Short for Vondelle. Same name as her mother’s.”
Bonnie Weston may have grappled with her assailant on the back porch in an initial encounter, but in the kitchen itself we found little evidence of her continued fight-no broken dishes or upended chairs that indicated that a life-or-death, hand-to-hand combat had occurred in that incongruously cheerful and homey room. Perhaps, faced with her attacker’s superior strength, she had decided to comply with his wishes in hopes of somehow appeasing him. Unfortunately for Bonnie Weston, appeasement had never been part of her killer’s agenda.
Mr. and Mrs. John Q. Public, reading headline-grabbing newspaper stories over their morning coffee, may delude themselves into thinking that having your throat slit isn’t such a bad way to go, that it’s a reasonably quick and relatively merciful way for someone to meet his or her maker. One look at that gore-spattered kitchen floor would convince them otherwise. In her convulsive, drowning death throes, Bonnie Weston had floundered desperately across the yellow tile, leaving behind a muddy brown spatter of stains in which several footprints remained clearly visible.
I turned to the two uniformed officers. “Did either of you leave these tracks?”
The younger one, Officer Dunn, fresh from the academy and barely into his probationary thirteen-week Field Officer Training Program, answered quickly for both of them. “No, sir. We were real careful about that. I came up over there.” He pointed to a clean spot on the tile. “I got close enough to check her pulse and then…” He shrugged. “She was already dead. Nothing we could do.”
I glanced at Big Al. With his face a gray mask, he stood staring down at the dead girl. “This guy’s one mean son of a bitch,” he said grimly, “a real sicko.”