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J. P. Beaumont Series, #4
5 Spot
October 2004
Featuring: Jonas Piedmont Beaumont
368 pages
ISBN: 0380751399
Paperback (reprint)
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Chapter One
The aid car was there, sitting next to the railroad track
with its red light flashing. But for the guy on the
ground, the guy lying on his stomach with his face in the
cinders and dirt beside the iron rails, it was far too
late for an aid car. He didn't need a medic.
What he needed was a medical examiner. And a homicide
detective.
That's where I came in, Homicide Detective J.P. Beaumont,
of Seattle P.D. I was there along with my pinch-hitting
partner, Detective Allen (Big Al) Lindstrom. After working
until midnight on our regular shift, we had been called
back when the body was found. Now we were standing by,
waiting for Dr. Howard Baker, King County's medical
examiner, to arrive on the scene.
Doc Baker isn't a morning person, and this was very early
morning. It was ten to five on a cool summer day, just
after the longest day of the year. Although the horizon
was hidden from view by the Alaskan Way Viaduct directly
above us, a predawn glow was breaking up the darkness
around us, and the waterfront odor, heavy with wet
creosote, filled my nostrils.
We waited in a small, hushed group until Doc Baker's dark
sedan came tearing through the parking lot and jerked to a
stop less than two feet from where we stood. Nobody
bothered to move out of the way.
"All right, all right," Baker grumbled, easing his more-
than-ample frame out of the car and taking charge. "What
have we got?"
"I'm betting on a drunk,"' Big Al told him. "Some wino,
from up by the market who got himself clobbered by a
passing freight train."
Al was referring to the Pike Place Market, which sat on
the bluff directly behind us, a hundred or so steep stair
steps above our heads.
The market is a popular Seattle tourist attraction during
the day. At night, parts of it still maintain an upscale,
touristy atmosphere. But there are other parts of it, dark
underbelly parts, that do a Jekyll-and-Hyde routine as
soon as the sun goes down. For instance, almost every
night the blackberry-bordered parking lot beneath the
market itself becomes a savage no-man's-land, a brutal
setting for beatings, rapes, and muggings that is all too
familiar to officers assigned to the David sector of
Seattle P.D.
Doc Baker glowered at Al for a moment. The medical
examiner's shock of white hair was uncombed and standing
belligerently on end. "We'll see about that," he said,
grunting, and rumbled away, dragging a train of
technicians as well as a nervous young police photographer
in his wake.
A squad car stopped nearby. Two uniformed officers got out
and walked over to us. "Any luck finding out who reported
it?" I asked.
They shook their heads in unison. "Not so far," one
answered. "The call came in to 911 from a pay phone down
by the ferry terminal about three-fifteen. Near as I can
tell, that's the closest public phone at that hour of the
night. The caller was a woman, but she didn't leave a
name."
I nodded. "That figures."
Turning away, I looked back toward Doc Baker and his group
of assistants. They were gathered in a small, closely knit
clump around the body, which was sprawled within inches of
the track itself. To one side yawned the entrance to the
Burlington Northern Tunnel, a railroad tunnel that cuts
through a rocky bluff and then burrows South and east
under downtown Seattle, from Alaskan Way and Virginia to
the King Street Station a mile away.
I felt the rumble of a train long before its warning
whistle sounded or its bright headlight flashed from deep
inside the tunnel. Doc Baker and his cohorts scurried out
of the way.
The freight train emerged from the black tunnel like a
slow-moving demon escaping the jaws of hell, with a heavy,
evil-smelling cloud of smoke, laden with diesel fuel,
boiling around it. Minutes after the caboose had
disappeared from sight, the dense smoke still eddied
around us like a thick gritty fog.
As the haze began to clear, Doc Baker charged back toward
the body. The photographer, a young woman in her mid- to
late-twenties, seemed to hang back, but Baker ordered her
forward with an imperious wave of his hand.
Al Lindstrom favored the photographer with a bemused
grin. "'She's a looker, all right," he commented, "but I
bet this is the first time she's taken pictures of a real
body. Understand she's a journalism major who just
graduated from Evergreen."
Evergreen College is an exceedingly liberal liberal arts
school in Olympia. "A journalism major!" I
croaked. "What's she doing working for us?"
"I'm of the common law-enforcement opinion that anyone
remotely connected with journalism can't be trusted. Even
the good-looking ones. Especially the good-looking ones.
"Jobs must be pretty scarce in the newspaper racket these
days," I added.
By then the young woman in question was squatted next to
the body, pants pulled taut across the gentle curve of her
backside, a detail that didn't escape any of her
appreciative audience, except maybe Doc Baker. Attempting
to follow the M.E.'s barked orders on angle and focus, she
lost her balance and tipped to one side, scrambling to
right herself in the railroad-track dirt and debris.
I didn't envy her. It's not so bad working with Dr. Howard
Baker. He accords detectives a certain amount of grudging
respect. But I think it would be hell on wheels working
for him, especially as a lowly peon.