Until Proven Guilty - J. A. Jance [1]
“What now?” Peters asked.
“Not much doing here as far as I can tell. Let’s go get something to eat and come back for another look later.” The call had come in about eleven in the morning. It was now well after three. I’m one of those guys who has to have breakfast, lunch, and dinner, or I begin to foam at the mouth. I was getting close.
Peters gave me a reproachful look. “How can you think about food? Where are her parents? The medical examiner says she died sometime around nine or nine-thirty. Someone should have come looking for her by now.”
“Somebody will come,” I assured him. “With any kind of luck it will be after we finish eating.” As it turned out, they found us before we even got out of the car in the parking lot at G.G.“s. A marked patrol car pulled up beside ours. The officer rolled down his window. His name was Sanders. I had seen him around the Public Safety Building on occasion.
“What have you got?” I asked him.
“Missing child,” he replied. “A girl. Five years old.”
“Brown hair, in braids?” I asked him. “Holly Hobbie nightgown, pink?”
He nodded. “The call came in a little over half an hour ago. I went to check it out before calling you guys in. It could have been someone who forgot to come home for lunch.”
“She missed lunch, all right,” I told him. “And it looks as though we will too. What’s the address?”
“Gay Avenue,” he answered. “Forty-five forty-three. I’ll lead you there.”
Peters wheeled out of the parking lot behind the patrol car. “Why the hell didn’t someone call us right away?” he muttered. “We could have been there a long time ago.”
Peters sometimes reminds me of an Irish Setter—tall, reddish hair, good-looking, loose-jointed, not too bright at times. “Calling us on the radio would have been as good as taking out a full-page ad in the Post-Intelligencer,” I told him. “We just got rid of that mob of reporters, remember?”
Peters’ jawline hardened, but he said nothing. Our partnership was still new and relatively uneasy. We drove through Magnolia without the fanfare of lights and sirens.
Magnolia is set apart from the rest of Seattle by a combination of waterways and railroad tracks. On this warm day in late April, flowers in well-manicured lawns were just coming into their own. Magnolia is mostly an older, settled, residential neighborhood. Some of the houses are stately mansions with white columns and vast expanses of red brick. I think I had a preconceived notion of the kind of house we were going to, but I was in for a rude awakening. Gay Avenue was anything but gay in every sense of the word.
The patrol car led us to a hidden pocket of poverty just off Government Way a few blocks east of the entrance to Discovery Park. The house at 4543 Gay Avenue was a ramshackle two-story job that had formerly been someone’s pride and joy. It had fallen on hard times. Once-white shingles had deteriorated to a grubby gray. Here and there a missing one gaped like a jagged, broken tooth. Two giant stubs of trees gave mute testimony that there had once been a front yard. Yellowed newspapers and old tires littered the weedy grass. It was a perfect example of low-rent squalor plunked down in an otherwise acceptable neighborhood. If I had been one of the neighbors, I would have considered suing whoever owned that eyesore.
At the sound of the cars a band of barefoot, ragtag kids came racing around the house. One pressed a runny nose against Peters’ window and stared in at us as though we were gorillas in a zoo. Peters turned to me. “Well?” he asked. “Are we getting out, or are we going to sit here all day?”
I’d rather take a beating than knock on a door and tell some poor unsuspecting soul his kid is dead. I always think about how I’d feel if someone were telling me about Scott or Kelly.