Perfect Grave Page 2

  But there was the news photo of Pillar in handcuffs along with the undeniable fact of his arrest, which was not the same as a charge. Even though he wasn’t charged, he looked guilty in the Mirror’s photo and under that headline. The story also quoted an unsympathetic community activist. “I do not feel sorry for him. When these men are caught with their pants down, they will say anything, except the truth.”

  That morning Jason got a call from a detective he knew.

  “Nice number today on the principal, Wade. We told you he’d been cleared. It was a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “It’s not my story. I don’t know why they played it like that. I guess Cassie will have to follow this up by talking to him and clarifying things.”

  “That might be a challenge, Ace.”

  “Why?”

  “Brian Pillar hanged himself in his garage this morning with an extension cord. His oldest daughter found him, managed to cut him down with a hedge trimmer and call 9-1-1.”

  “Jesus, is he alive?”

  “Barely.”

  Brian Pillar survived and recovered, and the Mirror paid him a “six-figure amount” in a quick out-of-court settlement that also involved a front-page retraction and a presentation on journalistic responsibility to be given by senior editors to Pillar’s school board. Before all that happened, Cassie Appleton and Eldon Reep blamed Jason for the mess.

  “How can you blame me? I was never part of Cassie’s story.”

  “She called you for help,” Reep said.

  “And I told her he was not charged, that she’d better be careful.”

  “That’s not Cassie’s account. She’s informed me that you clearly told her,” Eldon picked up a legal pad with handwritten notes, “that all the men had been arrested and charged.”

  “She’s dead wrong!”

  “Are you calling her a liar?”

  Jason met Reep’s cold stare.

  Be careful, he told himself.

  Cassie Appleton was one of Reep’s hires. Reep had replaced Fritz Spangler as metro editor a few months ago. Reep was a Seattle native who’d worked at the rival Seattle Times before leaving for Toronto to help launch the new daily, the Canada News Observer. After sixteen months, the new paper and Reep’s marriage had folded. He wanted to return to Seattle, made some calls, and landed Spangler’s old job.

  Reep wanted to recharge the Mirror’s newsroom. One of his first new hires was Cassie Appleton. She’d worked at some small midwest triweekly but had won some obscure writing awards. She never smiled. She focused on her ambition to get the city hall beat, to use it as a stepping-stone to the state bureau in Olympia and then the Mirror’s national bureau in Washington, D.C.

  According to the newsroom gossip, Cassie was a home wrecker who’d been cast out of her small town following a torrid affair with her managing editor.

  Reep was rumored to have a thing for her.

  So be very careful, Jason told himself.

  “Answer me, Wade. Are you calling Cassie a liar?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you can prove this, how?”

  Jason couldn’t prove it and immediately realized what was going to happen. He was going to be the scapegoat for this.

  And he was right.

  Eldon suspended him for a week, then put him on nights indefinitely while he decided his fate, informing Jason that one missed story, or one mistake, would end his employment with the Mirror.

  “—all units…we have a report of a…”

  The scanners yanked Jason’s attention back to police matters and his desk. He adjusted the settings but was again frustrated by fragmented cross-talk coming out of the Central District area near First Hill—no wait—that’s closer to Yesler Terrace. What the heck was happening out there?

  “…report of a second car prowling…”

  Car prowling? Is that all? No story there.

  Jason was relieved, on the verge of releasing the channel and his concern when somewhere in the static storm of a broken transmission he heard, “…nun’s apartment…send it to you on your MDT…”

  Nun’s apartment? What’s going on? Jason knew there were several buildings owned by the Archdiocese. And now they were using the Mobile Data Terminal. Better try the precinct, he thought, reaching for his phone when it startled him by ringing with an incoming call.

  “Seattle Mirror.”

  “I’m calling for Jason Wade—is he at this number?”

  “You got me.”

  The stranger’s voice was coming from the din of a party crowd, the sounds of a cash register, and chinking glass.

  “I’m calling about your father.”

  “My father? What about him? Is he all right?”

  “He asked me to call, he says he needs you here right away.”

  “What, where is he and who are you? What’s going on, is he hurt?”

  “Look, I’m delivering the message. He’s here at the Ice House Bar, he said you know where it is and that it’s an emergency. I gotta go.”

  Bar.

  Jason buried his face in his hands.

  He’s at a damn bar. I don’t need this, Dad. Not now.

  The scanner crackled with another fragment.

  What was going on near Yesler Terrace?

  Chapter Three

  Jesus Christ revealed his bleeding heart wrapped with thorns in the painting above Isabella Martell’s couch as Detective Grace Garner listened to her lie about her grandson.

  “No, Roberto, he no come here.”

  Grace threw a glance to Detective Dominic Perelli, her partner, tapped her pen in her notebook, then exhaled her disappointment.

  “And you have no idea where he is?”

  Isabella shook her head, blinking behind her thick glasses while staring into her hands, nearly arthritic now from years of scrubbing toilets in the Mutual Tower. Roberto beamed from his framed high school picture atop her Motorola TV. Nothing in his grin foretold that he would become a twenty-six-year-old drug-dealing pimp, who, at age twenty-three, would do nine months in prison for beating one of his girls.

  According to an informant, Roberto was the last to see Sharla May Forrest alive before she was discovered behind an Aurora Avenue pawnshop.

  She’d been strangled.

  She was a teenage prostitute whose corpse had been found several weeks ago. And Grace still had next to nothing. No solid witnesses. Nothing but fragments and partials of trace evidence, nothing concrete. Nothing but a tip from a rival dealer happy to tell the SPD that “Sharla May owed Roberto and people saw him with her.”

  Whether the lead was valid or not, Grace needed to talk to Roberto Martell. Despite the fact that two days ago a neighbor had called police to complain about loud music coming from a Mustang with Roberto’s plates idling in the street at this address, while a man matching Roberto’s description had walked into this house, there was no way Isabella was going to give up the whereabouts of her flesh and blood.

  “Hell, before she came to this country, she stared down the death squads who murdered her father,” Perelli said later into a laminated menu at a Belltown diner where Grace brooded over coffee and everything else.

  The Forrest case was growing as cold as the headstone on Sharla May’s grave. It seemed destined to remain unsolved like the last three murders Grace had caught. It was the same for the other detectives. Morale was flagging. In the last twenty months, eight veteran investigators had either retired or transferred out of Homicide. The toll was written in the unit’s clearance rate, which had dropped from 80 percent to 55 percent.

  “These sad stats say that killers stand a good chance of getting away with murder in this city,” a Seattle Mirror columnist charged in a full-bore attack on the SPD.

  This perception concerned the Commission, which concerned the chief, who pressured the deputy, who told the assistant chief, who summoned the captain, who instructed the lieutenants to issue an edict to the sergeants to pass to detectives.

&n
bsp; “I’ve been ordered to tell you the obvious,” Sergeant Stan Boulder, biting back on his anger, advised his team at the start of a recent shift. “We need a win and we need it fast.” As his people grumbled, Boulder crumpled his memo, then pulled Grace into his office for a private moment.

  “We’re getting pissed on from every direction over this clearance crap.”

  “You paint a pretty picture.”

  “People are getting distracted, second-guessing, they need to stay focused, Grace.”

  “Yeah, we get that.”

  “You’re one of my brightest, it’s why we brought you on. We need to pull one out of the fire.”

  “Which one? I’ll just run out and solve it, now.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  She did.

  Grace always came at things with a fresh angle, a talent that had evolved during her teens, when her quick thinking had helped save lives during a shooting at her high school. In the aftermath, Grace knew she was going to become a cop.

  She had graduated from college in the top 5 percent and considered applying to the FBI before deciding on the Seattle PD. As a patrol officer, she was decorated for tackling and disarming a fleeing robbery suspect. She soon made detective and worked in several units where she’d earned the praise of her commanders before becoming one of the youngest investigators to join Seattle’s homicide squad.

  She gave everything to the job, putting in sixty hours a week, allowing nothing else in her life. She was a loner. Had been ever since the school shooting. That’s just the way it was. But over the last few years, as she grappled with death twenty-four hours a day, she didn’t think she could stand being alone much longer.

  Yet her attempts to do something about it hadn’t really gone anywhere.

  She went out with Jason Wade, the guy from the Mirror, a few times. There was chemistry, something electric between them, but work always seemed to get in the way. Or maybe they let it get in the way. Anyway, she broke it off before it got serious but he seemed hurt. She saw it in his face. Had she made a mistake?

  She didn’t know.

  Then there was her disaster with Drew Wagner, the FBI agent. Upon transferring from Boston he pursued her with animal ferocity. God, he was so smooth, so good-looking. She never saw it coming. First, he says he’s single because there’s no ring, but she points to his tan line, so, all right, all right, he admits, he’s divorced. She buys it, as he tells her about the heartache, and he does it so well. Later, she overhears him on a phone call to his wife and it’s, all right, actually he’s separated. The heartache stuff again and maybe Grace wants to believe him but she does a little checking and finally gets the truth. Turns out her all-star is only biding his time until his wife sells the house in Charlestown and moves to Seattle with their kids.

  Some detective she was.

  How could she have been so stupid? she asked her reflection in the diner’s window, letting the question go into the night and back to Jason. Was she wrong not to work on something with him? There was just something about him that she liked. A brooding, brilliant honesty.

  Stop it, Grace! Stop this “poor me” garbage!

  Passing headlights stabbed at her for being selfish, hurling case images at her. Of Sharla May Forrest, a runaway not-yet-out-of-little-girlhood who was addicted to crack but kept a stuffed teddy bear on her bed and signed birthday cards to friends with happy faces. Of Sharla May’s naked corpse in the urine, vomit, and dog shit alley, with a metal hanger garrotted around her neck, twisted at the back with a lead pipe so tight it nearly decapitated her.

  And of Isabella Martell lying about Roberto while Jesus watched.

  And of Special Lying Bastard Agent Drew Wagner at the mall with his wife and kids. And of Grace Garner alone with her unsolved murders, trying to get a handle on it all as someone was speaking her name.

  “Grace. Grace,” Perelli nudged her, holding out his cell phone, “It’s Stan, he says your phone’s dead.”

  “Garner.”

  “It’s Boulder. We got a fresh one and you’re the primary.”

  “Cripes, Stan, we got our hands full with the Forrest case. Can’t Marty and Stallworth take it?”

  “It’s yours. Take down the address, it’s near Yesler Terrace.”

  Grace pursed her lips as she jotted down the information.

  “Who’s the vic?”

  “Anne Braxton. This will get profile. Big time.”

  “Why?”

  “She’s a nun, murdered in her residence.”

  Chapter Four

  Jason Wade grabbed a portable scanner and took the stairs to the parking lot, hating his situation.

  He couldn’t miss a story and he couldn’t turn his back on his father. His old man was fresh at war with a ghost that had been stalking him for years, but he’d refused to talk about it.

  Ever.

  Even as it destroyed the things he loved, he would not open up to anyone. Even when it threatened to drag Jason down with him. Like tonight, man, he had to be careful. Whenever his father was seized by his demon, he reached out to Jason to rescue him.

  Jason was all he had.

  The cry of a gull and lonely horn of a distant boat echoed from the bay as he approached his 1969 Ford Falcon. He’d finally gotten around to getting it painted metallic red and it reflected the city lights as he wheeled through the streets. A few blocks east, the Space Needle ascended into the night, while south, the city’s tallest buildings, Union Square, Washington Mutual, and the Columbia Center dominated the skyline. Pike Place Market was near and a little farther, Pioneer Square.

  Welcome to Seattle, baby.

  Jet City. The Emerald City. Gatesville. Amazonia. Java Town.

  The place where Jimi Hendrix learned to play guitar.

  Rolling south near the stadiums he cast a glance in the direction of First Hill and Yesler Terrace and considered a detour. To where, though? He had no specific address to check out. He wasn’t even certain anything was happening out there.

  Cover yourself, man.

  He called the East Precinct again. Voice mail again. He left a message. Then he alerted the editorial assistant at the paper to call him if he heard anything. He set his phone on vibrate, then slid Layla into his CD player. He was a disciple of classic rock and loved how Clapton’s genius blended with the scanner’s dispatches in an eerie mix against the night. He gathered speed as the song played and returned to his old man’s situation.

  Henry Wade was a private investigator, an exbrewery worker, and an ex-Seattle cop. And for as long as Jason could remember, his father would not, or could not, ever bring himself to talk about the incident that had forced him off the Seattle PD and into a job at the brewery, where each day the thermos in his lunch bucket had been spiked with bourbon.

  Whatever it was that he was trying to drown had ultimately cost him his marriage. Jason’s mother had worked beside his father on the bottling line but eventually she walked out on both of them. She just couldn’t take it any longer, she said in her note. The night before she left, she’d hugged Jason and her eyes looked as if she were dreading something on the horizon. In the days after, Jason rode his bicycle all over the neighborhood searching for her until his old man told him she was gone.

  “But don’t you worry, Jay, she’ll come back, you’ll see.”

  The scanner crackled with a warehouse alarm.

  Nothing to it. He adjusted the channels, then looked toward the bay as he guided his Falcon south until the brewery loomed. Man, he hated that place with its dark cluster of brick buildings, its stacks capped with red strobe lights spearing the night, the stench of hops permeating his car, reminding him of the worst days of his life.

  His mother never returned and his old man’s drinking never stopped.

  Over time, it had pushed everything to the breaking point. It came just two years ago when his dad showed up drunk in the newsroom looking for him. The humiliation and shame of that night nearly cost Jason his job at the Mirror.


  A job he’d shed blood to win.

  But it also got his old man to admit that he had a problem.

  He quit drinking and got counseling.

  Nearly two years sober now and he was doing well, emerging from his self-imposed tomb a stronger man. Jason had reminded him that for a brief time in his life, he’d been a Seattle cop, a good one, and that he should do something about it.

  He did.

  First, he took early retirement from the brewery. Then enrolled in a few courses. He’d become a licensed private investigator with an agency run by an old cop buddy. He did well on his cases, even helped Jason out on a few news stories. His old man finally had it all under control. That’s right, Jason thought, looking at the brewery fading in his rearview mirror, he was convinced they’d put all this crap behind them.

  But here he was driving to another bar to rescue his father.

  Risking everything he’d worked so hard to achieve.

  It played out before him as he came upon the bluecollar neighborhood where he grew up, in the south, between Highway 509 and the west bank of the Duwamish River, not far from the shipyards and Boeing Field. It was here, ever since his mother had read him bedtime stories, that he’d dreamed of being a writer and had decided that being a reporter would give him a front-row seat to life’s daily dramas. He studied them every morning on his first job in the business, delivering the Seattle Mirror.

  Reading about other people’s problems helped Jason forget his own.

  He had tried to comprehend how his mother could just leave. As years passed, his grades plunged, his writing dream slipped away, and his father got him a job driving a forklift at the Pacific Peaks Brewery. They would rise at dawn, climb into his dad’s pickup, and drive to the concentration of filthy brick buildings. For Jason it was a gate to hell and he vowed to pull himself out of it before he became a ghost, like his old man.

  So, between loading trucks with beer, he read classic literature, saved his money, went to night school, improved his grades, enrolled in community college, and worked weekends at the brewery. He also got his own apartment, wrote for the campus paper, and freelanced news features to Seattle’s big dailies.