I was showered, dressed, and had rousted the girls out of
bed for breakfast when the telephone rang at eight-ten the
next morning. We had planned a New Year's Day outing to
the Woodland Park Zoo, but a call from Seattle P.D.
immediately put that plan in jeopardy.
"Happy New Year," Sergeant Chuck Grayson said
jovially. "Hope I didn't wake you."
Murder doesn't necessarily observe holidays, so even on
New Year's Day, Homicide Squad shifts had to be covered.
As a single man with no local family obligations and a
take-it-or-leave-it attitude toward football, I had
volunteered to be on call the first of January. That was
long before I had accepted an overnight baby-sitting
assignment with Heather and Tracy.
"Happy New Year to you, too," I answered. "I may be up,
but I'm not necessarily at 'em. What's going on?"
'We've got a floater right there in your neighborhood.
Just off Pier Seventy," Grayson answered. "Since if s just
down the hill from Belltown Terrace, I thought it might
save time if you went there directly, rather than coming
down here first."
Sure thing," I said. "No problem."
I put down the phone and turned back to the girls, who
were happily shoveling their way through bowls of Frosted
Flakes. Under Amy's diplomatic influence, Ron Peters has
somewhat modified his stringent health food stance, but
from the ecstatic greeting the girls had given my box of
sugar-coated cereal, I had to assume that for them,
Frosted Flakes were a rare and welcome treat.
"You have to go to work, right?" Tracy asked, sighing in
disappointment.
"Yes." I drained the last slurp of coffee out of the
bottom of my cup.
"Does that mean we won't be going tothe zoo?"
"At least not this morning," I said. 'We'll have to see
about this afternoon. In the meantime, you can watch the
Rose Bowl Parade on television. That should be fun."
Heather made a face. "Parades on TV are boring. They're
lots more fun in person." Influenced by the two recently
viewed Home Alone nightmare videos, visions of my pristine
condo destroyed by child-produced mayhem danced through my
head.
"I'm sorry to leave you by yourselves like this. Your
folks have a late checkout, so they probably won't be home
before four or five. You won't get in any trouble, now,
will you?"
'We'll be fine," Tracy said.
"You know how to run the TV. I want you both to stay right
here in the apartment until I get back. There's microwave
popcom in the cupboard, bread, peanut butter and jelly..."
"And lots more root beer," Heather added.
I knew the girls to be relatively self-sufficient. For one
thing, this is a secure building, and when both their
parents are at work (Amy is a physical therapist at
Harborview Hospital), the girls do spend some time alone.
I knew, for instance, that in the event of an emergency,
they had been told to notify the doorman. Even so, I felt
that by leaving them on their own I was being somewhat
derelict in my baby-sitting duty. 'With any luck, maybe
we'll still be able to go to the zoo later this aftemoon.
The girls exchanged eye-rolling glances that said they
didn't consider that a very likely possibility. Battling a
certain amount of lingering guilt, I finished strapping on
my semiautomatic and headed out the door.
From Belltown Terrace, my condo building at the comer of
Second Avenue and Broad, to the murder scene at Pier 70 on
Elliott Bay is a straight shot of only four blocks. Some
people might scoff at the idea of my getting the 928 out
of the underground garage and driving there, but in
Seattle distances can be deceiving. Taking the glacial
ridges into consideration, four downhill blocks going down
are a whole lot shorter than the uphill ones coming back.
The few minutes in the car gave me a chance to shift
gears, to go from a cozy holiday-type atmosphere into a
work mind-set, where man's inhumanity to man is the order
of the day. I found the entrance to the pier itself was
blocked by a phalanx of official vehicles. Some were from
the department, some were emergency fire and Medic One
vans, but a fairly large number were of the ever-present
and ever-circling news media variety. Dodging through the
crush as best I could, I met up with Audrey Cummings, the
assistant medical examiner, on the far side of the yellow
crime-scene tape. The two of us walked down the thick,
creosote-impregnated wooden planks together.
The assistant M.E. was in a foul mood. "Dragging some
drowned New Year's Eve reveler out Of the drink isn't
exactly how I had planned to spend my day," she groused.
Audrey Cummings is short, stout, somewhere above the half-
century mark, and not to be trifled with. She usually
shows up at crime scenes looking far more like a lady
accountant than she does a medical examiner. This time,
however, instead of her trademark crisp blouse, WrInkle-
free blazer and skirt, and sensible heels, she wore a pair
of plaid wool slacks, loafers, and a leather jacket. For
her to appear at a crime scene dressed that casually, it
was, clear she really had intended to take the day off.
A little knot of officers was gathered along the edge of
the pier. We made our way through them just in time to see
a dripping, fully clothed corpse be lifted from the Harbor
Patrol police boat and deposited faceup on the dock. The
victim, clad in a sodden wool suit, appeared to me to be a
late thirties Caucasian male.
"What did I tell you?" Audrey said, in a supposedly
private aside to me. "That's one drowned rat if I ever saw
one."
One of the Harbor Patrol officers, Rich Carlson, clambered
up on the pier. He nodded in my direction. "Wouldn't count
on that if I were you, Doc," he said to Audrey. "Most
drowning victims I've seen don't turn up with bullet holes
in the backs of their heads."
"A bullet hole?" Audrey repeated.
Carlson nodded. "It's small enough that it can't have been
a very high caliber weapon, but at close range, it doesn't
take much."
Stepping up to the corpse, Audrey Cummings squatted beside
the sodden body, gazing at the dead man respectfully but
curiously, with the watchful, no-nonsense demeanor that,
in the gruesome world of medical examiners, must pass for
bedside manner.
"How long ago was he spotted?" Audrey asked.