His Partner's Wife

Both men had both taken involuntary steps forward when she began to heave herself to her feet. Now they exchanged a glance.

“That’s consistent with what the home owner says.”

“Which is?”

Geoff told her about the cat that had napped on the fabric. “And the old couple down the street, the neighborhood snoops, would have been grocery shopping about then.”

“I wonder,” John said thoughtfully, “whether the Porters go grocery shopping every morning. Or the same morning every week.”

Geoff made a note. “Easy to ask.”

Dr. Koltes left after conferring with the uniforms who had been delegated to bag the body. “I can do the autopsy tonight,” she said, promising. “You’ll have my report tomorrow.”

Gazing with distaste at the corpse, John said, “Time to have a look.”

He checked back pockets—no wallet. Ditto for the pockets of the crumpled linen jacket. The jacket interested him. Men in Port Dare leaned more to denim or heavy flannel, maybe a dark suit if you worked in a bank or law office. This looked…hell, like Miami Vice.

He called for the paramedics, who put a collar on the neck to protect the bashed skull for Dr. Koltes’s benefit, and then rolled the body onto a gurney. Face-up, a man who could have been mid-thirties to forty tops stared sightlessly at the ceiling. Longish brown hair, brown eyes, a stubble of beard—this guy had stumbled out of TV land, John thought again. On a wrist that had been under the body was an obviously expensive watch, the kind that probably told you the time in Paris, the altitude and your heart rate.

Sinking back on his heels, John contemplated the face.

“Damn it, Baxter, he looks familiar.”

His partner nodded. “I was thinking the same.”

“If we know him, he’s probably not a realtor or the manager of the Rite Aid pharmacy.”

Geoff gestured toward the watch. “Drugs?”

“Could be.”

They stood back and let the photographer get full frontal pictures as well as close-ups of the face.

“I want those as soon as possible,” John said, and was answered with brisk nods.

“Fingerprints?” he asked.

“The victim’s,” he was told. “Half a dozen others. Mrs. Reed’s, presumably. We’ll need to get hers tomorrow.”

Feeling uncomfortable admitting it for reasons he didn’t like to examine, John said, “Mine will be here, too. I used that bathroom just last week when I was treating the back deck.”

To his relief, nobody gave sly or knowing glances. Nobody made an off-color joke about widows—one that would have been deeply regretted.

It helped when Baxter said, “Hell, mine’ll be here, too. Natalie had Linda and me to dinner Friday night.”

He and Baxter took their time studying the den once the body was carted out. It was a room that could have used Natalie’s lighter touch. John guessed that she stayed out of it.

Stuart had smoked cigars, or at least liked to have one clenched between his teeth curling noxious smoke into the air. The smell, faded with time, nonetheless still lingered in here. Walls were papered in a masculine navy-and-tan-striped paper. Bookshelves held Stuart’s favorite bedtime reading: Ken Follett, John Le Carré and the ilk.

A monster, the desk was one of those huge oak ones that had probably graced the office of a CEO in the 1920s. The finish was yellowing, the top covered with a blotter. In its own way, the computer that sat atop it was as much an antique, a 385, maybe a 485. Forget Pentium. No telephone line to it, which meant no internet access. No CD drive. In fact, the floppy drives were for the outmoded bigger disks. The keyboard was covered, the monitor screen a little dusty.

Using a handkerchief, John carefully opened drawers. The top one held nothing but paper clips, pencils that needed sharpening, a staple remover, markers and packing tape. The big drawer was set up with hanging files, all labeled: 1986 tax return. Ditto ’87, ’88, and so on through the year before last. MasterCard statements. Appliance warranties. Household receipts.

On the face of it, nothing of any interest to anyone but the IRS doing a back audit. And, damn, was Stuart ready. No midnight scrabbling for torn receipts for him. It was almost a shame the IRS had never, to the best of John’s knowledge, chosen to audit Reed.

The closet held boxes and plastic-wrapped clothes on hangers. A cracked leather aviator jacket, ski pants and parka, a high school letterman’s jacket. Some of the boxes were labeled: check stubs, photo albums, records. His turntable had probably given up the ghost, but he wouldn’t have given up the records. A faint musty odor lingered in here.

Baxter muttered a profanity. “Did Reed ever throw anything away?”

“Not so’s I can tell.” John eased the closet door shut again. “Nothing unusual in here, though. We all have crap like this.”

“We’d better look in those boxes.”

He grunted agreement, however much he disliked the idea. Mining every detail was their job, but usually what he learned about people’s lives was of academic interest. He made a mental jigsaw puzzle, slotting pieces in until every one fit. This time was different. Stuart Reed had been not just a fellow cop but John’s partner and friend. Even more, he hated the idea of intruding on Natalie’s privacy. “Tomorrow,” he said.

They tried the remaining houses on the street. One was still dark; at the two places where someone came to the door, shakes of the head were their answers. They’d been gone all day. Neither knew Natalie or, quite frankly, would have noticed a truck in her driveway if they had been home.

“I say we go back to the station and look for that face,” John said at last. “Even odds we have his picture in our books.”

“No point in waiting for fingerprint ID,” his partner agreed. “Tomorrow is soon enough to look hard at the house.”

Mug shots were arranged into books by theme: drug arrests, rape, B and E, and so on. That way, if a store owner was held up, say, he didn’t have to gaze at the face of every rapist or marijuana grower who had ever been arrested. He could concentrate on likely perps. This worked fine normally. In this case, however, the face could have been familiar for dozens of reasons.

John’s money was on drugs.

The next hour and a half was punctuated only by the slap of a cover closing, the abrupt departure of one man or the other for another cup of coffee, and a couple of trips down memory lane.

“Ha!” Baxter crowed once. “Remember our friend Jerry Canfield? Sending him to the pen in Walla Walla was one of the greater pleasures of this job.”

It was Geoff Baxter who found their victim. “Bingo,” he said softly. “I knew we’d met.”

John rotated his shoulders and waited until his partner shoved the book across the table. From the rows of mug shots, the sullen face jumped out at him.

“He was better looking alive,” Baxter said.

“Who isn’t? No, don’t answer that.”

Ronald Floyd had a lengthy rap sheet, starting with possession of cocaine when he was seventeen in Tacoma. Thirty-four the day he died, Floyd had stuck to his chosen career of dealing drugs and slowly risen on the ladder. The part that always amazed John was how little time a guy like Floyd ever served despite multiple arrests. The system was overwhelmed; he’d walked a couple of times because prosecutors had shrugged and decided he wasn’t worth the bother. John knew how the arresting officers had felt; after all, they’d bothered.

Memory nudged by the photo, he recalled being involved in Ronald Floyd’s last arrest, which had led to four years in the Monroe State Penitentiary. Acting on a tip, officers had been waiting when a cabin cruiser docked at the marina. The hold had been packed with plastic bags full of white powder. It had been a pretty good haul, by Port Dare standards.

Unfortunately, those standards were rising by the day. Half the border between Washington State and Canada was water: the Strait of Juan de Fuca and the Puget Sound. The rocky, wooded Canadian Gulf Islands and American San Juan Islands made the waters a maze of spectacular channels and inlets. Pods of orcas tried to elude the ubiquitous whale-watching ships. Sailors and boaters were in paradise, with every island offering hidden coves. Green-and-white Washington State ferries plied the waters between islands and Canada and the USA, while the blue-and-white Canadian ferries carried traffic between Vancouver Island and the mainland.

Paradise for sailors was a nightmare for Coast Guard and law enforcement. Boaters didn’t respect customs laws or international boundaries. Smuggling was a breeze—literally, as it filled gaudy sails on blue waters. Officers couldn’t search every boat that docked at one of the marinas or anchored in the bay, even when they knew damn well some of them were here on business. Luck and tips led to the few big busts.

Ronald Floyd must have made an enemy, because a muffled voice on the telephone had set him up. Officers had waited in the nighttime shadows at the marina while the pretty white boat eased slowly in, water lapping against the pilings. Floyd himself had bounded from the bow to the dock with the first line. The Port Dare P.D. waited until the boat was tied bow and stern and the engine snuffed. Two other men joined Floyd, all wearing jeans, deck shoes and wind-breakers. They’d talked briefly, laughed. Then the spotlight froze them as a dozen police officers packing guns and a warrant surrounded them.

“Stuart cuffed Floyd,” John said slowly, remembering. “I got one of the others.”

“I didn’t make any of the arrests, but I was there.” Baxter ran a hand over his thinning hair. “So Stuart booked the guy. That’s not much of a connection.”

“But it’s something. I’ve been asking myself, why Natalie Reed’s house? Why not the one two doors down with the new sunroom?”

Baxter shrugged. “Chance.”

“Or maybe not.” Suddenly energized, John shoved back his chair. “What do you say we have a chat with some of our stiff’s buddies?”

CHAPTER THREE

NATALIE CAME DOWNSTAIRS in the morning to the sound of a girl’s laugh and a man’s deep voice.

She felt like the walking dead. She’d been able to snatch only bits and pieces of sleep from endless wide-eyed hours. She supposed she’d dreamed, but it was hard to separate unsettling scenes supplied by her unconscious mind from the gruesome images that played behind closed eyelids when she was awake. Last night, sleepless and still in shock, she had wished that today was a working day so that she would have something to do. This morning she was intensely grateful that she didn’t have to go into the office. Coaxing bad-tempered advertisers into agreeing that a check written to the Sentinel was money worth spending was beyond her in her current exhausted state. Maybe she could take Evan and Maddie down to the spit. If she found a warm, sandy spot, she could lean against a log and watch them build castles or splash in the water.

Or fall asleep at last, which wouldn’t make her much of a baby-sitter.

In the dining room, she found John and his children seated at their places at the table, which had been nicely set as if for company, with quilted place mats and cloth napkins. As a centerpiece, asters in bright colors made a casual bouquet in a cream-colored pitcher. French doors were closed against a gray, misty day.

She stood in the doorway unnoticed for a moment, feeling as if she were outside, nose pressed to the glass, looking in at a perfect family tableau. Father and children were laughing together, the affection, humor and patience so obvious she felt a pang of envy. For what, Natalie knew quite well. Stuart had squelched her first tentative suggestion that they think about having children. On their wedding day, she had just assumed…

It hurt still, remembering Stuart’s quick, thoughtless, “What the hell would we want brats for?”

She must have made a sound, a movement, because John’s head turned sharply, his grin fading.

“Good morning.” He searched her face with grave, intent eyes even as he gestured at an empty chair.

“Mom’s making bacon and eggs. She wouldn’t let us help.” A faint smile pulled at his mouth. “We’ve been complaining about how slow the service is. My tip isn’t going to be big.”

“Daddy!” His son giggled. “Grandma doesn’t want money!”

Evan McLean was a miniature of his father: russet, wavy hair, vivid blue eyes and big feet that suggested someday he’d match Dad’s size as well. Natalie wondered if John had had freckles, too, at five years old.

From the lines in his face, she doubted he’d slept any more than she had, if at all, but he had obviously just showered and shaved. His wet hair was slicked back, the auburn darkened by water. Despite the tiredness that creased his brow and added years, he crackled with energy and the grin he gave his son came readily.

“You don’t think Grandma would scoop up a buck if I left one?”

Evan looked crafty. “I bet she’d give it to me. Why don’t you leave a dollar and we’ll find out. Okay?”

“Greedy,” his sister scoffed. Maddie McLean had her mom’s blond hair and blue eyes of a softer hue than her father’s. Gawky and skinny at this age, she wasn’t pretty in a dimpled little-girl way, but Natalie was willing to bet Maddie would be a beauty by the time she was sixteen.

“Just to see,” Evan insisted.

“Uh-huh.” She rolled her eyes. “Like you’d give it back to Dad.”

Her brother bounced indignantly. “I would!” He stole a glance at his father. “If he said I had to.”

John laughed, although he still watched Natalie. “Let’s not put Grandma to the test, shall we?” The door from the kitchen swung open and he said, “Ah. Looks like breakfast is going to be served.”

“At last!” Evan said.

Carrying a plate of toast in one hand and a heaping bowl of scrambled eggs in the other, his grandmother bent a look on him. “Young man, that didn’t sound very polite.”

Even at five, he had the grace to blush. “I’m just awful hungry, Grandma.”

“Ah.” Still sounding severe, she said, “You need to learn to think ‘at last,’ not say it. That’s the secret to good manners.”

His forehead crinkled. “You mean, I can be really rude, just to myself?”

“That’s right.” A tall woman with beautiful bone structure and gray-streaked red hair cut very short, his grandmother headed back to the kitchen. Just before disappearing through the swinging door, she added, “Truly nice people, however, don’t think rude things, either.”

“Oh.” Looking very small, Evan beseeched his father. “Is that true?”

“Here’s a secret, bud.” John lowered his voice. “I can’t imagine a single person so saintly that he or she doesn’t think rude things once in a while. Just so you keep ’em to yourself, you can be a nice person.”

Maddie sat with a very straight back and head held regally high. “But you’re boys. Girls are lots nicer. Aren’t they, Natalie?”

Weary as she was, Natalie had to laugh. “Let’s see, what grade are you in? Third?”

Maddie nodded. “He’s only in kindergarten.”

So much for the illusion of family harmony she had seen like a shimmering mirage before she stepped into the dining room.

“Right. My point is, girls are lots nicer than boys at your age. I’m pretty sure boys reach their peak of awfulness in about fourth grade. But then they do start getting better.”

“Really?” both kids said simultaneously.

“I can be awful?” Evan sounded delighted at the prospect.

“You mean, they get worse?” his sister asked in horror.

“’Fraid so,” Natalie said sympathetically. “Or, at least, that’s my recollection.”

John was laughing as his mother returned with a plate of bacon and another with sausage.

“In case anyone would prefer it to bacon,” she said, slapping down the plate. “If that’s funny.”

The laugh still lingering on his mouth, John said, “Sit down, Mom. This looks fabulous. No, we were talking about the horrors boys are capable of. Fourth grade was definitely my peak of awfulness.”

Mrs. McLean didn’t hesitate. “For all of you. No,” she corrected herself, handing Natalie the bowl of scrambled eggs to dish up. “Hugh was slow maturing. Fifth or sixth grade was his worst. Do you remember that poor girl who had a terrible crush on him and sent him a poem she’d written?”

John paused with the plate of toast in one hand. A grin deepened the creases in his cheeks. “Oh, yeah. He wrote her a poem in return. Rhymed pretty well, too, as I recall. Actually—” he cleared his throat “—I helped. Just with the rhyming. Which, come to think of it, would suggest that I was still awful in…what would I have been?”

“A freshman in high school.” His mother sounded acerbic. “I can’t believe you helped him.”

“What did it say?” Evan demanded.

“Something about her stink and, um, why she had to pad her bra and her laugh sounding like…” He stopped. “Never mind.”

“Awesome,” Evan breathed. “Uncle Hugh?”

“It was not awesome,” his grandmother snapped.

“It was cruel. Hugh was unable to play Little League that year in consequence.”

Evan’s eyes grew big. “Oh.”

“What did you do, Daddy?” Maddie asked. “When you were in fourth grade?”

He layered jam on his toast and waved the bread knife dismissively. “Oh, I was just repulsive. My idea of falling-down-funny was a fart joke or tripping another kid or somebody making a dumb mistake in an oral presentation.”

“That’s what all the boys in my class are like!” Maddie exclaimed. “My own dad was like that?”

“Yup.” He tousled her hair. “I don’t have a single excuse, kiddo.”

“Gol,” she muttered.

“If your father had been here,” Mrs. McLean began, with a sniff.

A shadow crossed John’s face and was gone before Natalie was quite sure she’d seen it. “He was here, Mom. I was in fifth grade when he died.”

“Grandad was shot, right?” Enjoying the gory idea that he had a relative who had died a bloody death, Evan shoveled in a huge mouthful of scrambled eggs and chewed enthusiastically while he waited for the familiar answer.

That same snap in her voice, his grandmother said, “You know perfectly well that he was, young man, and it’s not something we discuss in that tone.”

He immediately seemed to shrink. “I didn’t mean…” he mumbled around his food.

His father laid a big hand on his shoulder. “It’s okay. We know.” The gaze he turned on his mother was cold. “Evan is five years old. Death is very academic to him. And he never knew his grandfather.”

Her nostrils flared, and her stare didn’t back away from his. “Hugh was barely older than Evan when he lost his father.”

Tension fairly crackled between them. “And he had to deal with it. My son doesn’t.” Deliberately he turned his head, dismissing her. “Natalie, once you’ve eaten, we should probably talk.”

Aware out of the corner of her eye that his mother had flushed, Natalie nodded. “Whenever you’re ready.” She looked apologetically at Mrs. McLean. “I’m not very hungry, I’m afraid. Although this is delicious.”

“A decent breakfast will make you feel better.”

“Yes,” she said meekly. “I’m sure. It’s just that I keep thinking…” She had to swallow on a bout of nausea.

Mrs. McLean’s face softened marginally. “Perhaps a cup of tea. With honey?” She stood, surveying everyone’s plates. “Children, please eat. Evan, smaller bites.” She swept out.

“I…” Natalie tried to think of something tactful to say. “She’s being very kind.”

“In her own way,” John said dryly.

John brought a cup of coffee and Natalie her tea when they left the children with their grandmother and retired to his home office.

Family obviously wasn’t checked at the door to this room with warm woodwork, white walls and floor-to-ceiling bookcases. Childish drawings filled a bulletin board, and some action figures lay on the hardwood floor in positions that suggested they had died rather like their grandfather. A one-legged Barbie lay among them.

John nudged at the doll with his foot. “My son is bloodthirsty,” he remarked ruefully.

“Aren’t most little boys? I know my nephew is.”

He sat rather heavily in his leather office chair, his tiredness suddenly visible. “Having known the reality, my mother isn’t very comfortable with that fact.”

“How could she be?” Natalie said with quick sympathy. “It must have been horrible to lose her husband that way, and to have to raise three kids by herself.”

He made a rough sound. “I only wish she could have let us forget, just now and again, how Dad died.”

Startled, Natalie asked, “What do you mean?”

John rotated his head as though his neck was stiff. Sounding impatient with himself, he said almost brusquely, “Never mind. It’s nothing. History.” He sighed. “Natalie, we identified the dead guy.”

In an instant forgetting his unusual sharpness toward his mother, she locked her hands together. Her voice came out breathless with the anxiety that suddenly gripped her. “Really? So fast?”

“Geoff and I both recognized him. We had to hunt through mug shots to come up with a name, but we’d been in on his arrest four years ago. Stuart was the arresting officer.”

Natalie sat silent for a moment, absorbing the news that her husband had once arrested the man who yesterday had died in her house, in Stuart’s den.

“What did he do?” she finally asked tentatively.

“Was it burglary?”

“His name was Ronald Floyd. He was a midlevel drug dealer.”

A drug dealer? She groped for understanding. “But why would he have been in my house? Did he think Stuart was still alive and he was, well, looking for revenge or something?”

John reached out and covered her knotted hands with his for a brief, reassuring moment. “I doubt it. This guy has been arrested half a dozen times before. Yeah, he got put away this time for a decent prison term, but it wasn’t because Stuart had hunted him down. We got a tip. A whole crowd of us was waiting when Floyd docked at the marina with a boat hold full of coke. The fact that Stuart cuffed and booked him was just chance.”

Perhaps it was lack of sleep that made her feel so stupid. “Then…what do you think?”

He shook his head. “I’ve got to tell you, I don’t know what to think. The fact that there’s a connection between Stuart and the dead man makes me curious. I don’t believe in coincidences, and it would be one hell of a coincidence if our guy, fresh out of prison for dealing, had just happened to decide to break into your house of all others. And, oh yeah, instead of walking back out, happy, with your TV and stereo, he instead gets himself killed in your husband’s office.”

During this speech, her anxiety had sharpened into a knife blade of fear. She dampened her lips. “Then he must have been looking for something.”

“That’s one possibility,” John agreed.

“But what?”

To her dismay, he shook his head again. “I wish I knew, Natalie. Any ideas would be appreciated. Stuart didn’t brag about collecting anything valuable, did he? Stamps, coins? He didn’t tell the whole world that he had his life savings stored as gold bullion in his house?”

She was shaking her head the whole time he talked. “He played golf. He liked old car shows. He did tear stamps off envelopes if he thought they were curiosities—there are a bunch of German ones somewhere because he had a cousin in Munich, but he didn’t know anything about stamps. Or coins or…” She couldn’t even think of what else he might reasonably have collected. “And his life savings, which weren’t all that much, were in a mutual fund and a twelve-month CD.”

So casually she knew he’d been waiting to slip the question in, John asked, “What about you? Antique jewelry Stuart might have bragged to someone else about?”

Again she shook her head hopelessly. “The closest thing to a valuable antique that I have is a set of early Nancy Drew mysteries. I can’t imagine that your drug dealer wanted The Secret of the Old Clock.”

“That does seem unlikely,” he admitted.

“Besides,” she pointed out, “Stuart and I hadn’t even met five years ago. So they couldn’t have chatted about my collection of Nancy Drew. And how would they have run into each other since, if this guy didn’t get out of prison until after Stuart was dead?”