“I’d call them both, but especially Gary. It’s spring break in several of the school districts right now. He might have trouble getting plane reservations.”
Molly stared blankly at the telephone receiver in her hand. “How do I work this thing?” she asked.
“Punch in the number, just like you would on your regular handset, then punch ”send.“”
She did. I could tell from the number of beeps that she was taking my advice and calling Gary in California. “It’s late,” she said. “He’ll be worried sick when he hears the phone.”
He ought to be, I felt like saying. This was exactly the kind of worst-case scenario that goes through people’s heads when a ringing telephone jangles them out of a sound sleep in the middle of the night.
“Hello, Gary. It’s your mom. Something’s happened…Yes, it’s Dad. He’s in the hospital. He’s been shot…No, I don’t know how bad it is. I’m just on my way to the hospital right now…Harborview, that’s right. No, I don’t know any of that yet. I’ll call you again as soon as I find out. I’m with Detective Beaumont. Yes, he came to get me. Well, all right. Just a minute.”
She held the phone away from her ear and covered the mouthpiece. “Gary wants to know if you think he should come home.”
“On the first available plane,” I replied at once.
She looked at me for a long moment before taking her hand off the receiver. “He says for you to wait until you hear from me. There’s no sense wasting money on a plane ticket and rushing home if it isn’t really necessary. Flying is so expensive.”
I wanted to contradict her, but mothers have some inarguable prerogatives, especially ones in her precarious position. “If it’s really bad,” Molly Lindstrom was saying calmly to her son, “I’ll call you back and then you can get a reservation. I’ll talk to you again later.”
I already knew it was bad. Molly would have to learn that for herself in her own good time.
She disconnected and handed me back the phone. “What about Greg?” I asked. She tried a second number, the one in Seattle, but no one answered.
I hung up the phone for her, and we rode for a while in silence. Overcome by guilt, I could have handled her yelling at me a whole lot better than her enduring, stoic silence.
“I never should have called him,” I said at last. “I should have gone there myself and left Al out of it completely.”
“What happened?” she asked.
“Someone tried to break into Reverend Walters’s house, tried to get in through a basement window. Al evidently caught him in the act and got shot in the process.”
“The guy was trying to get to Junior?”
“We believe so, yes.”
“Is Junior all right?”
“Yes. He’s fine.”
“Thank God,” she breathed. There was a pause and then she added, “Allen never would have forgiven himself if anything more had happened to that little boy. I’m surprised he let the guy get off a shot. I would have shot him myself if I’d had half a chance. Don’t blame yourself, Beau. Allen won’t, and I don’t either.”
We wheeled up to Harborview’s emergency entrance. I paused long enough to let Molly out of the car. “You go in,” I urged. “I’ll find a parking place and be right there.”
I found her a few minutes later upstairs in a surgical floor waiting room. By then Big Al had already been in surgery for almost an hour. We were told it could be as long as two more while they repaired the damage the bullet had done to his intestinal tract.
Molly took that piece of dire news with good grace. “At least he’s still alive,” she said.
Hospital waiting rooms are terrible places. They’re not places where you see the people in extremis. What you do see there is the collateral damage, the people whose lives have been thrown into upheaval and concision by whatever is happening to the person behind the closed door of the operating room, the person under the knife.
They say that with long-married couples, if one partner undergoes surgery, they both do. Molly Lindstrom was quiet and seemingly unruffled, but her usually ruddy complexion was unnaturally pale, her breathing sounded shallow, and she gave every appearance of being in physical pain. I worried about her.
“Don’t you think you should go ahead and call Gary now?” I asked.
She shook her head stubbornly. “Not until after I talk to the doctor and know what’s really going on.”
Sue Danielson showed up about one forty-five A.M., bringing with her two very welcome cups of reasonably fresh coffee.
“How’s it going?” she asked. We had stepped outside the waiting room into the hospital corridor where we could talk with some semblance of privacy.
“He’s still in surgery,” I said. “What are you doing here, besides bringing coffee?”
“Captain Powell wanted me to let you know that as soon as he called her, Janice Morraine came right back down to the Crime Lab and is personally taking charge of the briefcase you and the chief picked up earlier. That’s the good news. The bad news is that Ben Weston’s Day-Timer is nowhere to be found. Neither is his floppy. They never got logged into the evidence inventory.”
“But I saw the Day-Timer myself. Right there on the floor of Ben’s bedroom. It even had his initials on it. How could it disappear like that?”
“Somebody took it. That’s simple enough.”
“Who?”
“Somebody who was there that night along with all the rest of us-one of the investigators, someone from the Crime Lab, who knows?”
I shook my head. I knew most of those people personally, had worked with them for years. “But I don’t want it to be one of them,” I argued. “I don’t want it to be someone I’ve worked with and respected.”
“Too bad, buddy,” Sue Danielson said. “You lose.”
“What are you going to do now?”
“Me? I’m headed home for bed. Captain Freeman wants me back in his office by eight A.M. sharp with a complete report on everything I’ve managed to pick up along the way. Considering the commute, eight o’clock isn’t a helluva long time from now. What about you?”
“I’m here for the duration,” I said. “I brought Molly down, and I’m staying until she decides to go home or spend the night or until someone else comes to get her.”
Sue left. After I finished my coffee, I went back into the waiting room. Nothing had changed. I found a quiet corner and settled in to wait and think. What the hell had become of that missing Day-Timer? And where was the floppy disk with its backup files? They had both disappeared for good reason, I decided. Was it because of the computer access code, the one Ben Weston never should have written down at all? Or did the killer’s name appear damningly in one or the other? It didn’t take a genius to figure out that the missing information was vitally important, or it wouldn’t have become necessary to run the risk of making it disappear.
I had no idea where the disk might have been, but I knew for certain that the Day-Timer had been on the bedroom floor, and only a finite number of people had had access to Ben Weston’s bedroom on the night in question. Either the person or persons who had taken the calendar were involved in the murders or they were closely connected to the murderer. Police officers or not, I intended to find them.
With motive a given, who had opportunity? Of all the people on the scene the night Ben Weston died, the Crime Lab people themselves, the ones charged with protecting the chain of evidence, were the ones with the most latitude. After that came the Homicide detectives, followed, in descending order, by everybody from the police photographers right on down to the beat cops.
I was starting to make a mental list when the waiting room door swung open and a doctor walked into the room. He looked around. “Mrs. Lindstrom?” he asked, spying Molly sitting on a couch with her eyes closed and her head resting against the wall behind her.
Instantly she sat up, fully alert. “Yes,” she responded.
“We’re finished. He’s down in the recovery room right now.”
“How is he?”