THE CRIME-SCENE TEAM, TWO CRIMINALISTS from the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab in Spokane, spent several hours going over the St. Helens Flying Service helicopter while Detective Halvorsen and I paced around outside on the runway like a pair of expectant fathers.
It had been an exceedingly frustrating day. When we started out, we had been only hours behind our quarry. Now, with every passing moment, we were losing more and more ground. The jet-ways at Spokane International had offered Kimi’s and Machiko’s attackers instant escape hatches to any destination in the country. Any destination in the world, for that matter.
So far, our inquiries into the whereabouts of David Lions had come to nothing. Everyone we interviewed at the airport assumed that he had been piloting the aircraft when it set down on schedule at six o’clock that morning, but no one actually remembered seeing him get off. Charles Smith, the name used by Dana Lions’ cash-paying customer, also drew a blank, but that was hardly surprising. He had doubtless used an alias when he booked the reservation. Without any kind of physical description, we had no idea who or what we were looking for.
A stiff fall wind was blowing east off the Cascades. Shivering against the chill, Halvorsen and I were almost ready to retreat into the terminal when Gary Richards and Helen Driver emerged from the helicopter, bringing their considerable gear along with them.
“That’s about all we can do for tonight,” Richards said, standing to one side while Helen strung crime scene tape across the door of the helicopter. “We’ll come look it over again tomorrow in daylight just in case we missed something important. According to Kyle Preston, they’ll have a security guard here all night.”
“Find anything?” Andy asked.
“Plenty of fingerprints,” Richards responded, “some wire snippers and this.”
He held a glassine bag up to the halo of light from one of the runway’s mercury-vapor lamps. I looked but it seemed to be nothing but an empty bag.
“What is it?” I asked.
“One hair,” he replied. “One long dark hair. Black, I’d say, but it’s hard to judge color in this light.”
Halvorsen glanced in my direction. “Kimi’s?”
I nodded.
Richards noted this exchange. “I thought you two might be interested in that. There are some other bits of trace evidence as well, but we’ll have to analyze all those before we know what we’re seeing. Where can we find you guys tomorrow in case we need to? Are you staying right here in Spokane?”
I started to nod yes and ask directions to the nearest hotel, but Halvorsen interrupted. “No, we’re headed back to Pullman tonight. You can reach us through my office in Colfax tomorrow.”
I couldn’t believe he was serious. Pullman was a good seventy-five miles away, and it was verging on eleven. I personally had already done more than enough traveling for one day. The last thing I wanted to do was take another seventy-five-mile jaunt in a cramped Colfax County K-car. Unfortunately, we were supposedly conducting a joint investigation, and Halvorsen was driving.
Helen Driver and Gary Richards left then. We were almost to the car when Kyle Preston caught up with us, bringing with him a lady from Budget Rent-a-Car.
The lady’s name was Pamela Kinder, and we had missed her in our earlier survey of airport personnel because she had been out playing bridge when Halvorsen had called and left a message on her machine.
Preston suggested we go back to his office and get in out of the cold. Forty-five or so and not at all bad-looking, Pamela Kinder took a seat next to Kyle’s desk, crossed her well-shaped legs, and gave us a winning smile.
“I wish I’d known you guys were looking for this Lions character this morning when I rented him the Lincoln. I smelled a rat, but I couldn’t prove it.”
After a day of massive effort with very little to show for it, having Pamela Kinder show up at the last minute with that kind of information was absolutely mind-boggling, a cosmic joke. “Are you sure it was him?” I asked. “Do you know the man personally?”
“Not personally, but I remember the name. Believe me, I checked his ID very carefully,” Pamela Kinder said. The certainty in her voice was more than a mere statement. Something about David Lions had bothered her, triggered her curiosity.
“Why?” I asked.
“Why did I check so carefully? Because he looked like a bum, like he didn’t have two nickels left to rub together. I wanted to be sure I wasn’t renting our vehicle to someone using fake or stolen ID. I made sure the picture on his driver’s license matched his face, and I double-checked the signatures as well.”
“What do you mean, he looked like a bum?”
“He acted sort of spacey, although I couldn’t smell anything on him. And he looked like he had spent the night in a field somewhere. He still had straw sticking to his clothes, but his Visa card worked when I called to verify his credit.”
“What did he say?”
“Hardly anything. The guy who was with him, though, was a real conversationalist.”
“You mean he wasn’t alone?”
“No. He had some jerk with him. Tall, dark, and handsome. Obviously considers himself God’s gift to women. He tried to hit oh me. At six o’clock in the morning, mind you. Asked if he came back later, could he take me out to breakfast.”
“What did you tell him?”
“What I always tell creeps like that—that my husband was on his way to pick me up.”
“Was he?”
“My husband?” Pamela Kinder laughed, a hearty, throaty laugh. “Hardly. Ralph’s been dead for almost six years.”
Halvorsen was too impatient to enjoy Pamela Kinder’s sense of humor. “Did you notice anything unusual about either one of them, anything that would help us identify them?”
“The straw. I already told you about that. And the other guy, the creep, was wearing gloves. Leather gloves, inside the terminal.” Remembering Machiko’s story, Halvorsen and I exchanged glances, but we said nothing, allowing Pamela to continue. “People sometimes do that, but usually not until after the weather gets cold. It’s still way too early. I wondered if maybe his hands were disfigured—burned maybe, or deformed. He mostly kept his hands in his pockets like he was self-conscious about them.”
She paused. “And he’s from Chicago,” she added.
“Chicago? How do you know that?” Halvorsen demanded.
“I heard him talk. Believe me, I can tell a Chicago accent when I hear one. I grew up in Downer’s Grove just outside of Chicago. He sounded like my Uncle Bill.”
“Did they give you any idea where they were taking the car?” I asked.
“No. I offered them maps. Lions said they didn’t need any.”
“Do you have any idea where they were going?”
Pamela shook her head. “The car is due back in on Saturday afternoon. Of course, for an extra charge, they don’t have to return it here.”
“Can you give us a description of the vehicle?”
She handed over a piece of paper. “I can do better than that. When Kyle told me what was going on, I stopped by the counter and made a copy of the rental agreement. It has a complete description of the car, including license numbers and all that.”
Andy took the paper out of my hand. “What say I put out an APB on this,” he said.
“Put a hold on that Visa number as well,” I told him. Halvorsen nodded and hurried away. I started after him, but Pamela Kinder stopped me.
“So this was important, then?”
To outsiders, homicide cops must appear rude at times. When we finally manage to glean some vital tidbit of information, our first instinct is to grab it and run without so much as a by-your-leave or a thank-you. A detective’s total focus on finding a killer seldom allows time for social amenities. Pamela Kinder was a nice lady, one who had made a special trip to the airport in the middle of the night in order to help us. Now she seemed disappointed that we weren’t acting more grateful.
I was instantly contrite and abjectly apologetic. “It’s very important, Mrs. Kinder,” I mumbled. “Thank you for taking the time to come down and give it to us.”
And so, exercising astonishing self-control, I sat back down, focused my complete attention on Pamela Kinder’s once more smiling face, and proceeded to pick her brain. By the time Halvorsen returned from sending out the APB, I had ascertained that Pamela Kinder had little else she could tell us. She had also made it clear that, this morning’s encounter with the creep notwithstanding, she wouldn’t have minded taking me home with her to continue the discussion.
Unfortunately, Halvorsen was still driving.
Once Pamela left, Detective Halvorsen hustled us out of the terminal as though it was on fire. To say he was anxious to get on the road would be drastically understating the case.
“How does it look?” I asked.
He shrugged. “The APB? It’s being broadcast right now, but nobody’s very hopeful. Everybody thinks they’re long gone, and as for the credit-card thing, Lions won’t be dumb enough to try using it again.”
“Let’s get a room somewhere here in Spokane. In the morning we can stop by the hospital and—”
“I already said, we’re going back to Pullman.”
“That was before we picked up a major lead. What the hell are you thinking?”
“I’m going home.”
“But what about Kimi? We still haven’t talked to her.”
“You know as well as I do that even if she’s out of Intensive Care, they’re not going to let us talk to her in the middle of the night, and probably not tomorrow morning either. We’ve already got a guard posted outside her door. Hanging around here in Spokane isn’t going to do us a damn bit of good.”
By then Halvorsen had driven us out of the airport complex and onto the freeway. When he started signaling for a right-hand turn at the Pullman exit, I made one more futile attempt at dissuading him.
“Look, turkey, I’m dead tired. What’s the problem with spending the night here?”
“I don’t want to,” Halvorsen replied tersely. Saying that, he lit up a new cigar and turned on the flashing lights. End of discussion.
If it weren’t for the badge in his pocket, Andrew Halvorsen would probably have lost his driver’s license years ago. He was a maniac behind the wheel. It was a long, wild ride through the moonlit Palouse that night, with him speeding down the straightaways and braking on the curves. Somewhere along the way, a deer leaped across the road in front of us, missing the front fender by inches.
“Jesus Christ, Halvorsen! Slow this mother down before you kill us both. What the hell’s the hurry?”
“Monica gets off at one,” he said. “I told her I’d be there to pick her up.”
“Monica?” I asked. The afternoon phone call in his office was so long ago that I had almost completely forgotten about it. “Who the hell’s Monica?”
“My wife,” he answered. “Our car’s in the shop and she gets off work at one. I told her I’d be there to pick her up.”
“But where?”
“At the University Inn in Moscow. That’s where she works.”
Most of the time I pride myself on being a patient man. Patient and reasonably even-tempered. But that just about corked it. Here we were, driving hell-bent-for-leather through the middle of the night and almost getting killed besides and all because Andrew Halvorsen had agreed to pick up his dingbat wife after work.
“You mean to tell me she couldn’t get a ride home with somebody else?”
The tip of Halvorsen’s cigar glowed dull red in the instrument lit darkness. “She probably could,” he said. “That’s why I’m going to pick her up.”
We lapsed into silence. I was too ripped to talk and too busy hanging on. It was 12:45 when we pulled into the parking lot at the University Inn in Moscow, Idaho. It doesn’t take a mathematical genius to know that seventy-five miles in sixty minutes is too damn fast!
It was time for last call for drinks. I sure as hell needed one. Instead of stopping to register, I followed Halvorsen into Chasers, where a few late-night revelers, closing-crowd lounge lizards, were still hanging on. The cocktail waitress was a blonde with an electric tan and a long slit up the side of her skimpy skirt. She was true cocktail-waitress material—lots of leg, lots of cleavage, too much makeup, and not enough brain.
“See you made it back,” she remarked coolly to Andy as she took a quick swipe across our table with a damp cloth.
If this was Halvorsen’s Monica, she was giving him a less than ecstatic greeting. He deserved better—both of us did, considering the way he had driven to get us there. Sure enough, when she came around to my side of the table, I could see her name tag pinned to the collar of the low-cut blouse. And the name tag wasn’t all I could see. Halvorsen introduced us.
“What’ll you have?” Monica asked, giving me an appraising glance. The way she asked the question, it didn’t sound as though she just meant drinks, and the way she looked me up and down while she was doing it was deliberately inviting. Monica Halvorsen may have been married, but that didn’t mean she had quit shopping around.
I glanced in Andy’s direction. The nervous tic I had noticed earlier in the day reappeared on his jawline.
The term pussy whipped has fallen into disuse in recent years, but call it what you will, Andrew Halvorsen was suffering from a hell of a case of it. Monica couldn’t have been much more than twenty-five or -six—barely half his age—and Halvorsen’s ego wasn’t wired for that kind of voltage. I could smell the smoke from blown fuses as he watched her watch me. And here I was stuck working with the poor bastard. No wonder he had been so damned eager to get home.
Monica Halvorsen walked away from the table, stopping by another one along the way to drop off an order of drinks. She stood with her hip slung to one side, the cocktail tray resting casually on her arm while she threw her head back and laughed at some wry comment from a rowdy table of late-night customers. Young late-night customers.
Andy Halvorsen never once took his eyes off her. That kind of jealous obsession is painful to see, especially when it isn’t reciprocated.
“What about tomorrow morning?” I asked, dragging his attention away from his wife and back to the case.
“What? Oh, I’ll be in the office by eight. I’ll check and see if anything’s come of the APB, then I can call you here and let you know what’s going on.”
“All right. You don’t think I’ll have a problem getting a room?”
“The vacancy sign was still lit when we drove up.”
Monica returned with our drinks. Halvorsen hadn’t ordered anything, but from the looks of the glass Monica brought him, he was probably drinking straight Seven-Up or tonic. It was just as well. He was still driving a Whitman County car.
“How much?” I asked, as she set my drink on the table.
“Five-fifty for both,” she said.
“Wait a minute. You don’t have to…” Halvorsen began, reaching for his wallet, but I already had the money out and on the table. I didn’t want anything left open to the slightest misinterpretation. I included a tip, one small enough to keep Halvorsen from getting the wrong impression.
The MacNaughton’s, when I tasted it, was particularly welcome. It had been a long, long day.
Monica collected glasses from two recently vacated tables, and took them back to the bar, where she stood leaning against the counter chatting easily with the bartender.
“What do you think?” Halvorsen asked.
At first I thought he was asking about the case, but then when I saw his eyes were once more glued to Monica’s behind, I knew the Kurobashis were the furthest thing from his mind.
“She’s very pretty,” I said.
“I think so too,” he said.
“How long have you two been married?” I asked.
“There months last week,” he answered. “We had to wait until my divorce was final.”
Electric tan, too much makeup, and a home-wrecker besides. My already low initial opinion of Monica Halvorsen dipped a few more points.
“I wish she could get a job somewhere else, but this is all she’s ever done, and we need the money. Child support and alimony. Barbara seems to think she’s got a God-given right to stay home with the kids and sit on her butt.”
That was as much as I wanted to hear. My months of helping care for the children of Ron Peters, an ailing fellow police officer, had taught me that there’s a whole lot more to taking care of kids than sitting on your tail, but I didn’t have guts enough to tell him so.
I polished off my drink in one long gulp and set the glass on the table. “I’m going to go see about a room,” I told him.
As I walked away, I couldn’t help thinking that Andrew and Monica Halvorsen may have made their three-month anniversary, but I was willing to bet money they wouldn’t make six.