“I thought we were going to stay for dinner,” Jeremy objected.
“We’ll eat at McDonald’s,” Kelly said firmly. “Kayla will like that better anyway.”
“I don’t wanna go!” Kayla said. “I want to stay here. With Gumpa.”
Lars said, “Is there a problem?”
Dutifully Jeremy began collecting things—the diaper bag, the baby carrier, and all the other little necessaries that go with being parents of young children—while Kelly simply headed for the door with the blanket-swaddled Kyle in her arms. By then Kayla was wailing at the top of her lungs and stamping her feet. “Don’t wanna go. Don’t wanna go.”
At which point the telephone rang again. “Your caterer is here,” the doorman announced. “Should I send her up?”
Why the hell not? I thought. “By all means,” I said.
Kayla was still screeching as the elevator headed for the lobby. It was enough to make me long for the old days and the relative peace and quiet of the Seattle PD homicide squad—even if Captain Paul Kramer was the guy running the show.
CHAPTER 8
The catered dinner was not a huge success. In fact, although the food itself was excellent, the company was lacking. Kelly and Jeremy did not attend. Lars wasn’t hungry. Scott and Cherisse showed up an hour and a half later than expected due to their Seattle-bound aircraft having had some kind of mechanical problem while it was still on the ground at SFO. Their food was cold. Mel didn’t show up for dinner at all. And she didn’t call.
This should probably be filed under the heading of “Just Deserts,” because if my ex-wife Karen were still alive, I’m sure she could recount, chapter and verse, the many times I missed meals—and didn’t call, either. But knowing it was payback time didn’t make me feel any better. About 9:00 p.m., when I came back from returning Lars to his digs at Queen Anne Gardens, Mel was home. I found her at the dining room table. Still damp from taking a shower and clad only in a robe, she was chowing down on leftovers.
“How’d it go?” she asked.
“Could have been better,” I muttered. “Where’ve you been?”
“Crime scene,” she replied. “Out by Mount Si. We were out in the boonies far enough that we ended up in a telecommunications black hole. Cell phones don’t work there.”
“What kind of crime scene?” I asked.
“Homicide,” she said. “What did you think it would be?”
Barring unusual circumstances, SHIT isn’t often called in on homicide crime scenes. First response usually falls to local agencies and jurisdictions.
“Whose case is it?” I asked. “And how come you took the call?”
“It happened in rural King County,” Mel explained. “But it turns out the victim is one of mine—one of my registered sex offenders, that is. So we’re running a joint investigation. The guy’s name is Kates—Allen Christopher Kates. That’s still tentative, even though it’s based on ID we found on the body. We’ll need dental records to get a positive, and we won’t have those from the Department of Corrections until tomorrow at the earliest.”
The call for dental records implied that the body had been there for a while. I’ve been to grim crime scenes like that. The fact that Mel could come from a sickening homicide investigation with her appetite for dinner still intact said a lot about who she was—and why I liked her.
“Kates lived by himself in a little camper shell out in the woods, sort of like the guy down in Oregon,” Mel continued. “He wasn’t big on friends and family, since he’d been dead for a month or longer before anyone bothered to report him missing.”
“Meth lab?” I asked.
People who live by themselves in the woods often participate in the manufacturing sector. Mixing up batches of meth is a growth industry in rural areas all over the country.
“Nope,” Mel said. “No sign of meth. He was growing plenty of grass, however.” And she didn’t mean Bermuda.
“What did he die of?” I asked.
“A single bullet wound to the head. It was fired from pointblank range. Blew out most of his skull.”
“Self-inflicted?” I asked.
“Not likely,” she answered, “since no weapon was found at the scene.”
“And how did you get dragged into it?”
“Like I said, he was one of the guys on my list. I happened to be checking on him at the same time someone else was busy finding the body.”
“That makes what, now—three of your guys, as you call them—dead? One in Oregon, one in Bellingham, and now this?”