That was a cover-your-ass subterfuge, of course. I’m guessing most everybody understood that we were working behind the scenes to give Pickles a helping hand, and they came through. As the produce guys ran their routes and as the cops talked to their contacts, a trickle of information started coming in. The details came in on Post-it notes left on my desk while I was laboring in the Evidence Room; in messages left on my office voice mail; and in some instances, with guys I knew, in phone calls to the house at Lake Tapps.
I finally stapled an oversized map of Seattle to the wallboard in the garage at Lake Tapps and began inserting little plastic beaded straight pins into the map wherever I had a report about another dine-and-dash incident. As the collection of pins grew, it wasn’t hard to see the pattern. They ranged all over town, with a gaping hole in the center of the city, from the north end of Columbia City on the south, to Capitol Hill on the east. The Doghouse was the only restaurant with any proximity to downtown.
Everybody on the fifth floor knew what was up, but no one breathed a word of it to Tatum. Instead, we gathered in the break room or in cubicles and talked about it. One of the detectives, who was married to a departmental sketch artist, took her to see the witnesses who had been at the Doghouse the day of the McCaffey shooting and to some of the other restaurants that had been victimized by the check-skipping team. Over time we developed credible composite sketches of the two guys from the Doghouse. Once we had those in hand, we made sure the guys from Patrol had copies with them in their cars; we made sure the beat guys had them, too.
It sounds like this was all straightforward, but it wasn’t. For one thing, it was an investigation that wasn’t supposed to be happening and had to be invisible. For another, almost everyone had other cases—official cases—that they were supposed to be working. Continuing to toil in the vineyards of the Evidence Room, I was one of two exceptions to that rule. The other one was Pickles Gurkey, who was now officially on administrative leave. Once he got out of the hospital, he was placed under arrest, and then allowed free on bond to await trial after his family posted his immense bail.
I had visited with him in the hospital only once, after he was out of Intensive Care. He told me what he remembered from the crime scene—that he had dropped his gun when the heart attack hit, but that he was sure he hadn’t pulled the trigger. Clearly Lieutenant Tatum wasn’t buying his story and neither was the King County prosecutor. I wanted to tell him that the guys from Homicide were working the problem and that we hadn’t forgotten him, but I didn’t dare. And I never went back to the hospital to see him again. I figured if Tatum got wind that there had been any kind of continuing contact between us, he’d be all over me.
They say luck follows the guy who does the work. In that regard we were bound to get lucky eventually. I was down in the Evidence Room one afternoon when the clerk hunted me down and said someone was waiting outside to talk to me. The guy in the hall was a uniformed officer named Richard Vega. He was holding a copy of one of the Doghouse composites—the one of the taller man with the light-colored hair.
“I’ve seen this guy,” he said, waving the sketch in my direction. “My sergeant sent me to Homicide to talk to you, and the clerk up there sent me down here.”
“Where have you seen him?” I asked.
“Hanging out down around Pioneer Square,” Vega said. “I’m thinking maybe he works somewhere around there.”
I thought about the doughnut hole in my circle of pins. Pioneer Square would be well inside it. So maybe, if the guy lived or worked nearby, maybe he didn’t want to crap in his own bed or victimize establishments where he might want to be regarded as a regular paying customer.
I knew just where to go. A few years earlier, a Chinese family had bought up a local deli named Bakeman’s. The joint was known all over the downtown area for and were doing land-office business selling sandwiches made from fresh turkeys that were roasted on the premises every night.
In regard to restaurant food, pundits often say, “You can get quick, cheap, or good. Pick any two.” As far as that was concerned, Bakeman’s was in a class by itself because they excelled in all three—quick, cheap, and good! And since they were in the 100 block of Cherry, just down the street from the Public Safety Building, plenty of cops went there for lunch on a daily basis.
Bakeman’s was one of the places without a beaded pin on my map, so I rushed there immediately, with a mimeographed copy of the tall guy’s composite sketch in hand. It was early, right at the beginning of the lunch rush. The young Asian guy at the cash register took my order: white turkey meat with cranberry sauce on white bread. Mayo and mustard, hold the lettuce and tomato. I handed over my money. When the clerk gave me back my change, he was already eyeing the next customer. That’s when I held up the sketch.
“You know this guy?” I asked.
“It’s lunch,” he replied. “Gotta keep the line moving.”
“Have you ever seen him?” I repeated.
He glowered at me. “I’m serving lunch here. I got customers.”
I held up my badge next to the sketch. The clerk sighed and shook his head. “You guys,” he said wearily in a tone that said he thought all cops were royal pains in the ass.