Until Proven Guilty - J. A. Jance [8]
We went back to the office. For another four hours we pored over the Gay Avenue transcripts. Sergeant Watkins must have moved heaven and earth to have them typed that fast. The pattern was fairly obvious. The adults were noticeably vague about details prior to five or six months ago, although two of them indicated they had previously lived in Chicago. They all gave similar accounts of the last few days leading up to Angel’s death. I paid particular attention to the statement from Jeremiah’s stepfather, Benjamin Mason. The handprint bruise on that kid’s arm hadn’t come from a fall. No way. Like Jeremiah, all the children gave every evidence of being scared silly. In his own way, Jeremiah was just as plucky as Angel Barstogi. I hoped he wouldn’t have to pay the same kind of price.
We finally called it quits about four a.m., so tired we couldn’t make our eyes work anymore. I invited Peters to stay over with me, but he wanted to go on home to Kirkland, out in the suburbs across Lake Washington. He in turn offered me a ride home, but I wanted to walk.
“It’ll settle me down so I can sleep.”
I walked down Fourth. Most city dwellers avoid deserted streets late at night. They’re afraid of being mugged; but then, most people don’t pack a loaded .38 Smith and Wesson under their jacket.
Seattle is a deep-water port situated on Elliott Bay in Puget Sound. Huge container and grain ships ply the waters just off the ends of piers that jut out at the foot of steep hills. Although the water isn’t more than five blocks from where I live, I seldom smell the ocean. That morning, though, the wind was blowing a storm in across the sound, and the pungent odor of saltwater permeated the air.
I walked with hands shoved in pockets against suddenly chill air. Maxwell Cole came to mind as I walked. He’s had it in for me ever since I beat him out with Karen, and for the last twenty-five years of my life it seems like he’s always been around, always there to ding me. He was the reporter who covered the shooting when I was just a rookie.
A crazy kid holed up with a gun, and I had to shoot him. He was the only man I ever killed, a boy really, eighteen years old. It tore me up. For weeks afterward I couldn’t eat or sleep. All the while my good ole buddy Max, my fraternity brother Max, was playing it to the hilt, interviewing the boy’s widowed mother, distraught girlfriend, stunned neighbors, making me sound like a bloodthirsty monster. A department review officially exonerated me, but exonerations don’t capture headlines. His coverage of that one incident created a killer-cop legend that twenty years of quality police work hasn’t dented.
My relationship with Maxwell Cole is anything but cordial, yet, whenever I encounter him in public, he always acts like an old pal has just snubbed him. Old pal hell! As far as I’m concerned, it always takes a monumental effort at self-control just to keep from decking him. I walked into the lobby of my condo, the Royal Crest, feeling some elation that once more I hadn’t hit him and given him more fuel for the fire.
The walk had done me good. I was glad to open my apartment door. My place is tiny, a little over eight hundred square feet, with a view that overlooks the city. Lights from Seattle’s skyline suffuse my living room with a golden glow, so much so that I often leave the lights off and just sit. Friends have told me it’s great light for thinking or screwing. I’ve done a whole lot more of the former in that room than I have the latter.
Thinking was what I wanted to do right then. I undressed, pulled on a frayed flannel robe, and settled into my easy chair, a tall old-fashioned leather one that I managed to salvage from the debris when I moved out of the house in Sumner.
A sense of quiet settled over me as I gazed out the window. I thought about Angela Barstogi. Angel. Probably was one now. Yesterday morning she had been a living, breathing five-year-old. This morning she was dead. What had made the difference? What had turned her into a homicide statistic?
I thought about the people