Until Proven Guilty - J. A. Jance [56]
Anne stood up abruptly. “Let’s go,” she said.
Chapter 15
The bike washed up with the tide on Wednesday morning. I was still in bed sampling the sensations Anne Corley’s body had to offer when Watkins called for me to hit the bricks. He said Peters was on his way from Kirkland. I turned back to Anne. “I have to go,” I said.
“Do you have to? Again?” she whispered, her lips moving across the top of my shoulder to the base of my neck. She pulled me to her, guiding me smoothly back into her moist warmth. It would have been easy to stay.
“Yes, goddamnit,” I said, pulling away. “I have to. That’s what I get for being a cop.”
“All right for you,” she said, petulantly. She smiled and sat up in bed, the sheets drawn across her naked breasts, watching me as I dressed. It made me feel self-conscious. My body’s not that bad for someone my age, but it suffered in comparison to her lithe figure.
“What are you thinking?” I asked, sitting on the bed and leaning over to pull on my shoes and socks.
A man should never ask that kind of question unless he’s prepared for the answer. She ran her fingers absentmindedly across my back. “Do you believe in love at first sight?” she asked.
I almost fell off the bed. I turned and looked at her. “Maybe,” I said.
She smiled and planted a firm kiss on my shoulder. “I hoped you’d say that,” she murmured. I finished tying my shoe and bolted from the room. I was still trying to regain my equilibrium when the bus dropped me at Myrtle Edwards Park, eight blocks from my building.
In Seattle, if you want something named after you, you have to die first. Myrtle Edwards Park is no exception. Myrtle Edwards was a dynamo of a city councilwoman, and the park named in her honor, after she went to the great city council in the sky, trails along the waterfront from Pier Seventy to Pier Ninety-one. It consists of a narrow strip of grass, bicycle and jogging trails, some blackberry bushes, and a rocky shoreline. There is no sandy beach. The waves crash onto a seawall made up of chunks of concrete and rocks, carrying a deadly cargo of stray logs and timbers. Nobody swims in Myrtle Edwards Park, although it is a popular gathering place for noontime joggers and other fitness fanatics.
A squad car was there before me. A park maintenance worker had read a morning newspaper account of the Faith Tabernacle murders. When he saw the bike, a sturdy English three-speed, smashed beyond repair but still a relatively new and fairly expensive one, he called the department. Someone had put him through to Watkins. Not only did he talk to the right person, it even turned out to be the right bike. The tire treads matched the plaster casts taken at Faith Tabernacle.
So how do you find the owner of a bike? It’s not like an automobile where everyone has to register and license it. The few who do are mostly those unfortunates who have already been ripped off once and who know there’s no other way for them to identify and reclaim a bike if the department happens to get lucky and recover it. In other words, bicycle registration in Seattle is a long way from 100 percent.
Peters and I started at the other end of the question, going to the manufacturer and tracing the serial number to the retail outlet that sold it. The actual store was in my neighborhood, which isn’t that unlikely since my neighborhood is a big part of downtown Seattle. The store was a Schuck’s, right across the street from the Doghouse. It took Peters and me the better part of two hours of letting our fingers do the walking before we got that far. We ambled into the store about eleven-fifteen, feeling a little smug. A clerk searched through some files before he found what we needed, but twenty minutes later we walked away with a name and address on Queen Anne Hill.
It sounds simple, doesn’t it? You apply a little logic, a little common sense, and everything falls right into place. We should have known. Things were going far too smoothly. The house on Galer Street was vacant and had been long enough that weeds