Trial By Fury

"You're damn right about that! You need more than help. You need to have your goddamned head examined! You ever hear of a fucking search warrant? You ever hear of probable cause?"

"Watty, listen to me. That's what I'm trying to tell you. I've found something important. Remember the blue paint on the rope that killed Ridley and the chips of paint they found in his hair? I think I've found where it came from. I want a crime scene investigator from the crime lab over here on the double."

"Over where?" he asked. "To a place you've broken into without so much as a by-your-leave, to say nothing of a search warrant?"

"Did you hear what I said?"

"I heard you all right. Now you hear me. No way is someone coming over there until you have an airtight search warrant properly filled out, signed, sealed, and delivered. Understand?"

"But Watty," I objected. "It's Saturday night. Where am I going to find a judge at this hour?"

"That's your problem, buster. And you make damn sure it's a superior court judge's signature that's on that piece of paper. I don't want someone throwing it back in our faces later because it's just some lowbrow district court judge. You got that?"

"I don't want to leave here, though," I protested lamely. "What if they come back while I'm gone and find the door broken?"

"You pays your money, and you takes your choice," Watty told me. "You get your ass out of there and don't go back until you have that warrant in your hot little hand."

Watty was adamant. There was no talking him out of it. "All right, all right. I'll go get your fucking search warrant. But we're wasting time."

"You'll be wasting even more time if somebody files a breaking-and-entering or illegal-search complaint against you. Now, give me the address. I'll get somebody over there to watch it until you get back."

Grudgingly, I drove back down to the Public Safety Building, parked in a twenty-four-hour loading zone, and went upstairs to type out the proper form. When I finished typing, I grabbed the list of judges' home phone numbers and started letting my fingers do the walking. I didn't know it, but I was in for a marathon.

Fifteen no answers and three answering machines later, I finally spoke to a human being, a judge's wife, not a judge. She sounded more than a little dingy. According to her, all the judges she knew, including her husband, were in Olympia for a retirement banquet for one of the state supreme court justices. She would have been there herself, she assured me, but she was just getting over the shingles.

The lady must have been pretty lonely. She was so happy to have someone to talk to that she could have kept me on the phone for hours, giving me a detailed, blow-by-blow description of all her symptoms, but I was in a hurry. I cut her off in mid-diagnosis. "Where in Olympia?" I asked.

"I beg your pardon?"

"The banquet," I said, pulling her back on track. "Where is it?"

"Oh, at the Tyee," she answered. "At least I think that's what the invitation said. Since I wasn't going, I didn't pay that close attention."

I thanked her and hung up. Olympia is sixty miles or so south of Seattle.

Fortunately, the Porsche was still there when I went back outside. It hadn't been towed. It didn't even have a ticket plastered to its windshield. The parking enforcement officers must have been taking a coffee break. So was the State Patrol on I-5. I had clear sailing, and I drove like an absolute maniac-forty minutes flat from the time I left the Public Safety Building until I pulled into the parking lot at the Tyee.

I had driven the last twenty miles with my bladder about to burst, so my first priority was to find a restroom and take a leak. A dapper little guy in a suit and tie was having a hell of a time aiming. He was a little worse for wear, but I thought I recognized him.

"You wouldn't happen to be a judge from Seattle, would you?"

He gri

He didn't then, but by the time he finished signing the search warrant, we were old pals. I grabbed the paper out of his hand and beat it back toward the car. I was back on the Fremont Bridge thirty-eight minutes later.

Happily, Sergeant Watkins hadn't been sitting around playing with himself in my absence. He had alerted the crime scene team and had worked out a treaty with King County for them to bring their laser printfinder along to the apartment. The King County Police crime scene van was parked in Candace Wy

Watty must have pulled out all the stops to conjure up that kind of interdepartmental cooperation on such short notice on a Saturday evening.

There was quite a crowd gathering between the alley and Leary Way. In the process of rounding up everybody we needed, Watty had inadvertently summoned the fourth estate. I found an unwelcome welcoming committee of reporters waiting for me behind the police barricade.

I parked the Porsche and started to make my way through the crowd. Somebody stopped me. "What's happening, Detective Beaumont?" a reporter asked, shoving a microphone in my face. "What's going on in there?"

Someone else recognized me. "Hey, Detective Beaumont, this another homicide? How many does that make this week? You guys going for some kind of record?"

Ignoring the cameras, I pushed on, wondering if there wasn't some other kind of work I could do that wouldn't put me in daily contact with the press.

When I finally reached the bottom of the stairway, I stopped to examine the motley crew Watty had assembled-two latent-evidence examiners from the crime lab, a beefy sheriff's department deputy packing what looked to be a large suitcase, a King County ID person, two night-shift homicide detectives from the department, and a uniformed S.P.D. officer. Each of them nodded to me in turn, but no one said anything.

Sergeant Watkins himself was waiting at the top of the stairs. He stood blocking the doorway, glaring down at me, arms crossed truculently across his chest. He looked like what he wanted was a good fight. "Give it to me," he demanded when I came up the stairs.

"Give you what?" I asked.

"The warrant, for chrissakes!" He held out his hand. I removed the warrant from my inside jacket pocket and slapped it into the palm of his hand. Holding it up to the dim glow of a street lamp half a block away, he studied it for a long time.

"All right," he said finally. "Break the door down."

For the first time, I looked at the door. Sure enough, while I had been driving up and down the freeway to and from Olympia, someone had jerry-rigged the door back together.

"How'd it get fixed?" I asked. "Did she come back home?"

"I fixed it, you asshole," Watty whispered through clenched teeth. "Now break this motherfucker down, and make it look good. I want a picture of this on every goddamned television station in town."

I understood then why Sergeant Watkins was at the top of the steps and everyone else was waiting down below. Watty's nobody's fool. He was looking out for my ass, and his, too. It was all I could do to keep from laughing out loud as I kicked Candace Wy

The only problem was, I kicked the door like it was really locked, like it hadn't been wrecked only hours before. I almost broke my neck when it caved in under my foot.

Once inside, Watty motioned the rest of the troops to join us. It turned out the suitcase contained King County 's laser printfinder. The deputy, huffing, lugged the case up the stairs and put it down in the middle of Candace Wy

The printfinder weighs around eighty pounds or so, and it works off a regular 110 volt plug-in. He fired it up, plugging it into an outlet right there in the room. The crime scene investigators dusted the various surfaces in the room with a fluorescent powder. Then, one of them do