I don’t know how Ralph Ames does it, but he always manages to ease his way through incredible tangles of bureaucracy and come out unscathed and victorious on the other side. I guess I ought to sit down with him and take lessons. My style tends to send me butting up against all manner of official-dom-in this case with representatives of the United States Marine Corps.
The young clerk I wound up talking to eventually was unfailingly polite. He did tell me that after eight years in the military, Samuel V. Irwin had been dismissed with a general discharge. A general discharge isn’t as bad as a dishonorable one, but it isn’t so very good either, and after eight years of service, the infraction must have been pretty bad for the Marines to toss Irwin out on his ear.
“How come?” I asked, wondering if knowing that would explain why Sam Irwin was working in Seattle PD’s Motor Pool and not someplace else. “What did he do?”
“I’m not allowed to divulge that information, sir,” the clerk replied. “Not without a court order.”
“But this is a homicide investigation,” I objected.
“Yes, sir. I’m sorry, sir, but the rules are very explicit.”
Arguing made no difference, and neither did my going over his head. Frustrated, I headed back into Captain Freeman’s office, where he, too, was just finishing a telephone call. “Look at this,” he said, pushing his yellow pad across the desk so I could see it. Most people scribble notes to themselves. Freeman printed his in a rapid but letter-perfect style.
“That’s from Motor Vehicles,” he said, pointing at the bottom notation. “Sam Irwin owns a 1989 Toyota Tercel. What do you think of that?”
“Bingo,” I said.
He nodded. “Bingo,” he repeated, but he didn’t sound the least bit happy.
I couldn’t understand it. If Irwin’s Toyota Tercel proved to be white, it might provide a pretty convincing link to the Weston case, especially if Irwin ended up matching the physical description of the driver Bob Case had seen skulking around the Weston neighborhood.
“What’s the matter?” I asked. “This looks like progress to me.”
Freeman got up and paced to the windows, where he stood looking out at the cleaning crew working away in the high rise across the street.
“At this point, I usually turn a case over,” he said thoughtfully. “So far, everything we have is entirely circumstantial. There certainly isn’t probable cause to make an arrest right now, but there is enough to prompt further investigation. The problem is, nobody from Motor Pool was at Ben Weston’s house the night of the murder. That means, if Irwin is in it, he’s not alone.”
I nodded. It made perfect sense to me.
He drew a deep breath. “So for now, it’s you and me and Detective Danielson. Let’s go.”
He rolled down his shirtsleeves and started putting on his jacket.
“Where?” I asked.
“We’re going to pay a call on Sam Irwin’s residence. He’s not working tonight. I already checked. Where are you parked?”
“On the street.”
“Good. We’ll take your car. I’m in the garage.”
Which is how my 928 got drafted into service for the Seattle Police Department one more time. Neither one of us thought to check with Kyle Lehman before we left the building. In fact, we probably passed each other in the elevator.
He was coming to bring us printed copies of all the deleted but still retrievable files in Ben Weston’s computer. If he had bothered to track us down at the time, it might have helped, but now that the mystery of his broken security system was solved, we had lost both Kyle’s sense of urgency and his interest. He could have reached us by pager, if he had tried. He could have called us on my cellular phone. But he didn’t.
And maybe it’s just as well.
CHAPTER 22
At five o’clock in the morning, the sky was beginning to brighten over the Cascades as we made our way out of the Public Safety Building. While we had been preoccupied with tracking things down on the eleventh floor, Chief Rankin’s early-morning press conference had evidently concluded, sending both the reporters and their quarry to ground and leaving my Porsche parked in lonely splendor on the street.
Sam Irwin’s address was on the east side of Lake Washington. I don’t subscribe to the common downtown Seattleite’s notion that intelligent life ceases at the entrance to the Mount Baker Tunnel, but I do know better than to venture into the wilds of the Eastside without a precautionary map. Once in the car, we flipped on the reading lamp and pored over my latest edition of the Thomas Brothers Guide. Irwin’s address seemed to be within the confines of Beaux Arts, an exclusive little enclave on the banks of Lake Washington. I had never been there, but I knew it to be a separate governmental entity located entirely within the boundaries of its much larger neighbor, the city of Bellevue.
We headed out. After putting in another almost round-the-clock shift, I should have been dead on my feet, but we were on the scent now, circling ever closer to some real answers. That knowledge kept me energized, focused, and alert, carrying me forward as surely as did the powerful engine of my 928.
With me driving and with Tony Freeman in charge of navigation, we headed east toward a recently opened stretch of I-90-the new Mercer Island floating bridge. Lights and siren weren’t an option, but we were making good time until we hit the tunnel. There eastbound traffic was coned down to two lanes, making way for construction vehicles and equipment parked in the far right-hand lane of the new bridge in support of the crews of workmen busily sandblasting guardrails and pavement off the old bridge deck. Now, in preparation for bringing out an additional piece of oversized equipment, a flagger brought traffic to a complete stop.
In typical type-A fashion, I fumed and pounded the steering wheel while Tony Freeman remained seemingly unruffled.
“So who’s the mastermind behind all this?” I asked. “And was Ben Weston in on it and one or more of the others decided to get rid of him?”
“Ben Weston wasn’t in on it,” Tony Freeman said quietly.
It was one of those times when somebody jolts you, but it takes a second or two to get the message. “You sound pretty certain about that.”
“Ben was working for IIS.”
I’m sure my jaw dropped a foot. “He was?”
“He came to me last summer when he started hearing word on the streets about the payoffs. He was the one who suggested he transfer into the gang unit.”
“But you engineered it?”
“That’s right.”
“So he wasn’t really in trouble on Patrol?”
“We made it look like it. We were both hoping the crooks would invite him to join them. It just didn’t work out that way.”
A sudden burst of anger left me shaken. “What the hell!” I exclaimed. “If you knew about the payoffs all along, why the hell are you just now getting around to letting anybody else know?”
“It was a one-man investigation, Beaumont. Ben Weston’s investigation into crooked cops. He didn’t know who could be trusted, and neither did I.”
“Goddamnit, you left him hanging out to dry.”
“Not knowingly,” Tony Freeman returned sharply. “Ben must have been a whole lot closer to nailing these bastards than he was willing to let on. Either that, or he himself didn’t know how close he was.”
I felt like I was on a damn emotional roller coaster. If Ben Weston was working for IIS, then I could stop being sick about him being crooked, up to a point, anyway. “What’s all this bullshit about student loans? What’s that all about?”
Tony Freeman sighed. “Beats me,” he answered. “The student loans were news to me. The first I heard about them was when Kramer turned up the applications in Ben’s desk. Those hit me from way out in left field, and I can’t for the life of me see how they fit into the rest of the puzzle.”
“But I thought you were the guy who was supposed to have all the answers.”