“I want this guy,” he said quietly. “I want him in the very worst way. The people of this city are all up in arms. In fact, I just got a look at tomorrow morning’s…this morning’s Post Intelligencer. Maxwell Cole is raising the roof because, according to him, Seattle PD is doing nothing to put a stop to the gangs that are running rampant in the streets and endangering the lives of the ordinary and innocent citizens of this community. As a matter of fact, I seem to remember a quote from Detective J.P. Beaumont in the article.”
“More likely a misquote,” I said.
He smiled ruefully. “What I’m getting at, is they still don’t know the half of it. Once the people of Seattle hear rumors to the effect that Ben Weston may have been tainted and that we’re investigating fellow police officers in regard to the Weston murders, there’s going to be hell to pay, but I say bring it on and let’s get it over with.
“Whatever is behind it-payoffs, protection-may have happened on my watch, Detective Beaumont, but I’m telling you it’s going to get fixed on my watch as well. I’ve spoken to Ken Rankin. From what the gang members said, this protection racket must have been going on for some time, since long before Chief Rankin came on the scene. But at least now we know about it, and I want it stopped. I want everyone connected with it brought to justice.”
He stopped speaking suddenly and stared up at the darkened ceiling above his head. “No,” he said. “That just doesn’t make sense, not any at all.”
Freeman is one of those rare people who has mastered the art of mental time-sharing and can think about more than one thing at a time. I had trouble keeping up.
“What doesn’t make sense?”
“The Motor Pool. Someone who worked there wouldn’t have enough connection with the department’s day-to-day investigative activities to be able to provide that much valuable information. In order to make a protection racket pay off, you have to offer valuable and accurate intelligence. So maybe someone there is involved, but we have to look for someone else as well, someone higher up in the departmental hierarchy who would have some idea of what was happening on the various squads in different parts of the city. They’d need to know that in order to warn the gangs away from locations targeted for increased enforcement.”
“So you’re saying someone in Patrol or perhaps in Investigations?”
“At least. Here’s the list so far. Take a look at it and see if I left anybody off.”
Freeman’s list was a Who’s Who of the Medical Examiner’s Office, the Crime Lab, and the Homicide Squad of Seattle PD. The names were there, all of them glaringly familiar.
“It makes you sick to think about it, doesn’t it?” he said, as my eyes traveled slowly down the list.
“Yes,” I agreed. “It certainly does.”
“So what are we going to do about it?”
“Can we get a list of everybody in Motor Pool?”
“Good idea,” Tony Freeman said, “I should have thought of that myself.”
He picked up the phone and dialed a number. “Hi, Kyle. How’s it going?” He listened for a moment before saying, “Good work. Keep after it. How are you doing on the car question?” Again there was a pause. “Sure, I understand that one’s tricky, but we may have a way around it. Can you get me a printout of everyone assigned to Motor Pool? Right, mechanics, clerks, everybody. Sure, if the other one is taking too much time, bring this one down as soon as you can. We’ll work on that in the meantime.”
Freeman put down the phone. “Kyle Lehman’s working on Ben’s hard drive, but he says it’s not all straightforward. He’s having to plow through a lot of junk to see if he can find that deleted file. He says he can bring up the Motor Pool list in just a few minutes.”
Within fifteen minutes Kyle himself appeared in the office door, bringing with him a hard copy of the Motor Pool list which he dropped casually on Tony Freeman’s desk. The captain picked up the list and began studying it while Kyle lounged against the doorjamb, alternately munching another bag of chips and yet another apple. The guy must have a tape-worm.
“What I want to know is how someone got into Ben Weston’s directory in the first place,” Kyle muttered. That was his area of responsibility, and his feathers were still ruffled that someone had managed to crack his supposedly secure system.
Tony Freeman looked up at him. “My guess is that whoever killed him found Ben’s computer access code in his Day-Timer. Then, if they could lay hands on a copy of Ben’s personnel record, say, they’d have the answers to many of the possible verification questions, wouldn’t they?”
“But he wasn’t supposed to write the damn number down anywhere. I tell everybody that, over and over.”
“Have you ever looked at Ben Weston’s file?” Tony Freeman asked mildly.
“When would I have had time?” Kyle Lehman returned. “I’ve been running my ass off ever since I left here.”
“The man was evidently mildly dyslexic,” Freeman continued. “He did a good job of compensating for it, but remembering random letters and numbers was something he couldn’t do.”
“Oh,” Kyle grunted, and left abruptly, taking his apple core with him. Freeman returned to the computer printout of the people in Motor Pool. He had started with the last page first because that was the one that contained the part where I calculated the S ‘s should have been, and he passed the page along as soon as he finished. There was no Sanders, Sanderlin, Sanford, or Saunders. The Motor Pool’s alphabetized list skipped directly from Rudolph to Simms without anything in between.
“Looks like we struck out,” I said, giving up.
But Captain Freeman is a lover of lists as well as a maker of same. He went to the very beginning page and hunkered down over it, reading through it name by name from square one. His finger moved steadily down the page, then suddenly he stopped and looked up at me.
“How does the name Sam Irwin grab you?”
I shrugged. “It’s not Sanders, but the doctor said he was terrible with names. I, for one, happen to believe him. Sam Irwin sounds good to me.”
Freeman picked up his phone again. “I need a set of personnel records,” he said. “The guy’s name is Samuel V. Irwin, and he’s a mechanic in Motor Pool.”
Secretarial types aren’t exactly plentiful in the middle of the night and it was almost four o’clock in the morning, but Freeman had his ace in the hole, Kyle Lehman, who could, at the drop of a keystroke, present him with a copy of almost any piece of paper churned out by the police bureaucracy. Suddenly, I had a far better understanding of how Tony Freeman could continue using his outdated yellow pad. With Kyle’s expertise available at a moment’s notice, Tony had the best of both worlds.
Once more Kyle showed up, bringing along a several-page document. He tossed it onto Freeman’s desk. “I’m getting a little tired of being a messenger service,” he complained, but Freeman wasn’t listening. His eyes were already scanning down the top page. They stopped halfway down.
“Got him!” he breathed.
“What is it?”
“Look at this.”
He handed me the papers, and I looked straight at the part where it seemed Tony Freeman’s eyes had stopped scanning, and there it was in black and white in a section headed Previous Employment. The words said United States Marines, Hand-to-Hand Combat Instructor.
“Silent kills,” Tony Freeman said grimly. “The United States Marines wrote the book on those.”
“Why’s somebody like that working as a mechanic in Motor Pool?”
“That’s the next thing you and I are going to find out,” Freeman told me. “You, actually. Use Connie’s phone.” Obligingly, I stepped outside to the other desk.
When Pacific daylight time hits Seattle early in April, it takes away big chunks of our hard-earned mornings and turns them back into night. In exchange we receive longer evenings that are great for Little League baseball and not much else. However, on that particular morning when I started my phone search at four-fifteen A.M., I was glad to find that the East Coast was already up and running.