Partner In Crime

When I was a kid being raised by a single mother in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood, we were poor as church mice. One year for Christmas my mother came home from the local Toys for Tots drive with a Tinkertoy set. That’s what I got for Christmas that year – Tinkertoys and a plaid fla

But the Tinkertoys were a hit. I loved putting the round sticks into those little round knobs with the holes and making them jut out at all different angles. Telephone logs are a lot like that. The numbers are the little round knobs with holes in them. The calls that travel back and forth between them are the sticks.

The first knob was the pay phone that had been used to make the three separate calls to Wi

The next set of knobs were the two phone numbers in Illinois. Because of the volume of calls, I started with the log for the residence number first. The logs were arranged in order of the most recent calls first. I worked my way down list after list after list until I could barely see straight. Until I felt myself starting to doze in the chair. And then I saw it. The words “Olympia, Washington,” leaped off the page and brought me bolt upright and wide awake.

The call had been placed two months earlier at ten o’clock in the morning and had lasted for forty minutes. Excited now, I sca

“What the hell does this mean?” I asked myself aloud.

Actually, the answer seemed pretty clear. I remembered that long empty silence when I had told Ross about the phone calls to the Illinois law firm. Now I had to face the possibility that Washington State Attorney General Ross Co

I’ve never been long on patience. Cooler heads might have paused for a moment or two of consideration. Not me. There was a phone on a table at the far end of the conference room. I grabbed the receiver off the hook and dialed in Ross Co

“Beau,” he said when he recognized my voice. “I really can’t talk right now-”

“Sorry to interrupt your lunch, but the suspect we were looking for, Jack Brampton, is dead,” I told him. “He died this morning making a run for the Mexican border. I thought you’d want to know.”

“You’re absolutely right!” Ross Co

“Answer me one question,” I growled into the phone. “Why didn’t you come clean with me when I told you about Maddern, Maddern, and Peek? Louis Maddern is obviously a friend of yours.”

He excused himself from the table and didn’t speak again until he was outside the restaurant. “Louis really isn’t a friend of mine,” he said. “The Madderns are closer to Francine. She’s known Madeline since college, since she was Madeline Springer, in fact. The girls were sorority sisters together. Lou can be a bit of a pill sometimes, but I suppose he’s all right. Why? What’s going on?”

Sorority sisters, I thought. That might explain those widely spaced, long-winded phone calls. It could be they were nothing more than that, the totally harmless chatting of a pair of old friends, but still….

“Probably nothing,” I said.

“Well,” Co

“Sure,” I told him. “Will do.”

I put down the phone. I’ve spent most of my adult life working as a homicide detective, and I can usually spot a liar a mile away. J.P. Beaumont’s gut-instinct opinions carry about the same weight in a court of law as polygraph results do – which means they’re widely regarded as totally unreliable.

The problem for me right then was that my gut instinct didn’t think Ross Alan Co

I should have been ecstatic about thinking my boss wasn’t a crook after all, but I wasn’t. Because if his relationship to Madeline and Louis Maddern was totally harmless, then I was getting nowhere fast.

I went back to my place at the table and returned to the telephone logs. The law firm logged hundreds of phone calls a day, which meant I was dealing with a huge stack of pages. I lit into sca

That pattern was obvious almost immediately. None of the calls were placed earlier than 11 A.M. central time, which would have been 9 A.M. Pacific. And none were placed later than 5 P.M. Pacific. And, although they all went to the same number in Olympia, it wasn’t one of the numbers I had on my Ross Co

Twenty-one

ONCE BACK IN HER OFFICE, Joa

The surface of Joa

As she erased that message, Joa

Next came a call from Joa