Justice Denied (21 page)

As I reached for the doorknob I knew there was a fifty-fifty chance that the door would be locked, but it wasn’t. The knob turned easily in my hand. The latch let go with what was probably only a tiny click, but the sound bore an ominous resemblance to a bullet dropping into a chamber. I waited for a moment to see if Cosgrove had heard it, but there was no movement from the couch, none at all.

Grateful that the Pergo flooring didn’t sag or squeak under my weight, I stepped into the tiny vestibule. On the far side of the living room I caught a glimpse of Mel through the glass of the patio door. She had yet to draw her weapon, and neither had I. If we could do the takedown without unholstering our weapons we’d all be better off—and a hell of a lot safer. Being shot by friendly fire is no benefit, especially if you’re dead.

I was within three steps of the couch when DeAnn Cosgrove took Mel’s and my well-thought-out plan and smashed it into a
million pieces. Without any warning, she darted past me, screaming like a banshee. “Donnie, wake up! You have to wake up!”

I tried to grab her, but she dodged out of the way. Despite the racket, though, Donnie Cosgrove didn’t move; didn’t even budge. And that’s when I saw several empty prescription-drug containers next to an almost empty vodka bottle that had spilled most of its remaining contents on the coffee table.

Mel popped the flimsy lock on the patio door, shoved it open, and burst into the room. Kneeling beside the couch, she grasped Donnie’s loose wrist. By then I had managed to grab DeAnn and hang on to her. She was screaming frantically when Mel turned to us. “He’s still alive,” she said. “Barely. Call 9-1-1.”

From the look on Mel’s face I knew the situation was serious, and there wasn’t much time. I can tell you straight out that it’s impossible to hold a desperately struggling woman with one hand while dialing a cell phone with the other. I finally gave up and let DeAnn loose in favor of calling the EMTs. DeAnn raced around the coffee table and fell to her knees at her husband’s side, shaking him and begging him to wake up. He didn’t stir.

By then it was almost three o’clock in the still of a cold March morning. I’m guessing the ambulance crew was thrilled to have something happening on their watch. They showed up in their rubber boots and waterproof jackets in something less than three minutes. When they arrived, my heart was still pounding with post-incident jitters. While I attempted to keep a shaken and sobbing DeAnn out of the EMTs’ way, they slapped Donnie onto a gurney. They wheeled him out to the waiting aid car. With a burst of noisy sirens the ambulance took off, headed for Evergreen Hospital a few miles away.

At the time they were leaving, there was no way to know if a
stomach-pumping procedure would do the trick or if Donnie Cosgrove was a goner.

“I’m going, too,” DeAnn insisted. She pulled away from me, and I let her go.

Moments later Mel and I were alone in a living room littered with the ambulance crew’s debris—muddy boot prints and discarded latex gloves.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

Mel nodded. “But you’d better take a look at this,” she said.

She was pointing at the coffee table. Next to the vodka bottle and under one of the empty prescription bottles lay a page of notebook paper covered with writing.

“Suicide note?” I asked.

“Looks like,” she said.

I moved over to the table and examined the paper without actually touching it. At the beginning of the note the penmanship was reasonably legible. Toward the bottom of the page it devolved into an illegible scrawl. The ballpoint pen still lay on the floor where it had fallen.

The note ended its illegible scrawl in midsentence. It was unsigned.

“What do we do about this?” Mel asked.

“We call Detective Lander over in Chelan and let him know that we’ve got Donnie. He may not be our suspect, but he is a potential eyewitness.”

“If he lives,” Mel muttered. “And if DeAnn had listened to us and stayed away from here, he’d be dead for sure.”

About that time there was a knock—a firm, businesslike knock—on the door and a uniformed Redmond cop entered the room.

“We understand there’s been a disturbance here,” he said. “Maybe you two would like to tell me what’s been going on.”

That took time. Local jurisdictions do not look kindly on
other law enforcement agencies conducting raids or investigations of any kind on their turf without letting the home team know what’s happening. We showed the patrol officer our SHIT ID. We told him what had transpired. It made no difference. Not only was the responding officer not impressed, he was offended. The patrol officer’s supervisor, when he arrived, was also offended. And when the desk sergeant heard about it, he was really offended. We tried explaining why DeAnn Cosgrove had summoned us instead of them, but to no avail. Nothing was going to fix it since DeAnn wasn’t there to vouch for us.

At three forty-five I finally admitted defeat and did what I should have done to begin with. I called Harry I. Ball at home and woke him up. He arrived on the scene in fifty minutes flat—all the way from the far side of North Bend. We gave him the shorthand version of what had happened.

“Fair enough,” he said. “You’ve told them all this?” he asked, nodding in the direction of the assembled local yokels.

“Several times,” I answered.

“You two go on home, then,” Harry told us. “Leave this to me. I’ll kick ass and take names later.”

Mel and I retreated to the Mercedes. As we drove away we could hear Harry bellowing into his cell phone at some poor hapless soul or other.

“There are occasions when Harry I. Ball can be annoying as hell,” Mel observed, “but there are other times when you’ve gotta love the guy.”

This was definitely one of the latter.

A
s we drove across the 520 Bridge, it was 5:00 a.m. The early-bird morning commute was already under way, and Mel and I were both starving.

Twenty-four-hour dining has almost gone the way of the dodo bird in downtown Seattle, with the notable exception of the Five Point Café at Fifth and Cedar. Smoking may have been abolished in Washington restaurants, but there’s enough residual smoke lingering in the Five Point to make an old Doghouse regular feel right at home.

While we waited for our breakfasts I dialed DeAnn’s cell phone number just to see if she had any update on Donnie’s condition. She didn’t. I also called Detective Lander across the mountains in Chelan to let him know what the deal was. We ate breakfast—no
coffee—and then staggered home to bed. At six. In the morning. To say we were both beat is understating the obvious.

Harry I. Ball called at nine and woke us up, and I was something less than cordial. What had been downright endearing at 5:00 a.m. was a lot less lovable on three hours of sleep. When the phone rang Mel didn’t even wiggle. Answering it was my responsibility.

“Time to rise and shine,” Harry bellowed into the phone, breaking my eardrum.

“Come on, Harry,” I said, “have a heart. I barely got my eyes closed.”

“And I haven’t closed mine at all,” he returned cheerily. “So stop complaining. This BOLO that just came across my desk. That would be on the guy who went off to the hospital to have his stomach pumped. Right?”

“Right,” I said.

Mel turned over on her side and buried her head under her pillow.

“And what about these phone records, the ones that were faxed to me this morning? They’re for Jack and Carol Lawrence up in Leavenworth—the two victims, presumably. What do you want me to do with those?”

I sure as hell didn’t want to drive across the water to pick them up. “How about faxing them over to me here in Seattle?” I asked.

“Barbara isn’t here,” Harry said with a growl. “Has to take her kid to the dentist. Faxing’ll have to wait until she gets in. That probably won’t be before noon.”

The truth is, Harry is one of the world’s greatest technophobes, a guy who has never sent a fax in his life. His ineptitude
makes me feel like a telecommunications genius. Besides, right about then, noon didn’t sound half bad.

“Fine,” I said. “Whenever.”

I put down the phone. It immediately rang again. “This is the doorman,” Jerome Grimes told me. “I have a Mr. Hatcher down here to see you.”

The very last thing I wanted right then was an in-house visit from Ross Connors’s pet economist, but he was already there. “All right,” I said. “Tell him to go to the deli next door for some coffee and a bagel. Tell him we’ll see him in fifteen minutes.”

Mel groaned. “See who?” she mumbled from under her pillow.

“Todd Hatcher,” I told her, giving her a whack on her down-comforter-shrouded hip. “Up and at ’em. The world awaits. Todd’ll be here in fifteen.”

He was, too, bringing with him two extra toasted onion bagels with cream cheese—in case we were hungry. We weren’t. I went to the door to let him in. Mel was still in the shower.

“You did tell me to come back on Monday, didn’t you?” Hatcher asked uncertainly.

“Yes,” I said. “I just didn’t know we’d be out all night working a case, is all. Come on in and get set up. Mel will be out in a minute.”

While Todd went about taking over the kitchen counter I muddled around making coffee. Mine isn’t as good as Mel’s, but it’s drinkable, and that’s what was called for that particular Monday morning—gallons and gallons of coffee.

Mel emerged from the bedroom fully dressed, made up, and looking far better than she should have under the circumstances.

“Didn’t mean to wake you,” Todd Hatcher apologized. To her. I noticed he hadn’t bothered apologizing to me.

“It’s okay,” Mel said. “We had to get up anyway. What have you got?”

“I spent most of the weekend working on my copies of the abstracts,” he said. “I’ve gone over all but two of them and input most of my observations. If you two could sit down and work on the rest of them this morning…”

That seemed unlikely to me. On less than three hours of sleep, I wasn’t going to be in the best condition to go searching for tiny discrepancies in a stack of old dead files. Mel gave me a look, took her stack of paper and her cup of coffee, and settled down in the window seat to go to work. I was saved by a phone call from Detective Lander over in Chelan.

“Any word on Donnie Cosgrove?” I asked.

“Not since he got to the hospital. I tried checking, but the hospital wouldn’t give me any info.”

Welcome to the world of patient privacy.

“I have DeAnn’s cell phone number,” I told him. “I’ll try reaching her. When they hauled Donnie away in the ambulance, it didn’t look too promising.”

“What do you think about this supposedly suicidal non-confession?” Lander asked. “Do you think he really wasn’t involved in the Lawrence homicides, or was he just trying to throw us off?”

I had been in the room and had seen the note Donnie had left behind as the drugs and booze took effect.

“I think Donnie Cosgrove really did mean to kill himself,” I responded.

“Does that mean he meant the rest of the note as well?” Lander asked.

“Maybe,” I said. “He doesn’t claim to have witnessed the
actual shooting. He says he saw a vehicle that could have been the killer’s drive away. At this point, even a description of the vehicle would give us a big leg up.”

“You’ll check on Cosgrove and let me know if and when I can come talk to him?” Lander asked.

“Will do,” I said.

“In the meantime, Ross Connors came through like a champ. The phone records we ordered yesterday were on my desk when I showed up this morning. Have you seen yours yet?”

The fact that Tim Lander was absolutely focused and on task annoyed the hell out of me. Obviously he hadn’t spent the whole night traipsing back and forth across Lake Washington.

“Not yet,” I said.

“They’re pretty interesting,” he continued. “They go along in a pretty predictable pattern. Most of the time the Lawrences were calling the same numbers and the same people over and over. That lasted right up until early last week. After that, we’ve got a bunch of calls that haven’t shown up on the records before. Who was that guy you mentioned to me yesterday, the one you’d said you’d left a message for but he hadn’t called you back?”

“Dortman,” I said. “Thomas Dortman. Why?”

“Because I have a whole series of calls from Jack Lawrence to Thomas Dortman starting first thing on Tuesday morning.”

“That would be the day after I first talked to DeAnn.”

“Like I said, there are no calls at all to this Dortman character until Tuesday morning. Then there are eight, nine, ten calls altogether from Jack Lawrence’s cell phone. Why were you looking at Dortman again?”

“Because in the process of reexamining Tony Cosgrove’s
disappearance, I came across an article by Dortman that mentioned Tony by name.”

“This Tony guy is DeAnn’s father, the one who disappeared back when Mount Saint Helens blew?”

“That’s right,” I replied. “Dortman mentioned Tony as a possible whistle-blower. I wondered if there might be some connection between them. They both worked at Boeing around the same time, so I thought maybe they knew each other there or worked in the same department. I also wondered if there might be a relationship between Tony’s possible whistle-blowing activities and his disappearance.”

“Which you’re thinking may not have had anything at all to do with a volcano?” Lander asked.

“Exactly. So we probably do need to talk to Dortman. I have a phone number but no street address.”

“I have his number, too,” Lander said. “In fact, I already tried calling it. No answer. I left a message. If he didn’t get back to you, I probably won’t hear from him either. I have his street address, but I don’t know how much good that’ll do. The one other oddball phone call was placed to a number in Portland to a phone listed to someone named Kevin Stock. That one—and there was only one—was made on Saturday morning from the Lawrences’ home phone.”

I know Tim Lander was talking, but I wasn’t really paying strict attention. Suddenly I had another idea.

“Hold on a second,” I said into the phone. Then I called over my shoulder to Mel. “Hey, Mel, when you looked up Thomas Dortman the other night, didn’t you tell me he had a book coming out sometime soon?”

“Something about whistle-blowers,” Mel replied. “You’re right.
I think it’s due in bookstores sometime in the next several weeks. If you need the exact date, you can always check on Amazon.”

“Give me a little time,” I told Lander. “Maybe I can figure out a way to get in touch with our friend Dortman.”

When I put down the phone, Mel was staring at me. “What?” she said.

“Supposing you were someone who had cut a corner here and there in the past. Supposing you’d done something really wrong, but as far as the world was concerned, you’d gotten away with it clean. So you’re free as a bird, with nothing but a guilty conscience. Then, all of a sudden, out of the blue, you get a call from some guy who says he works for the Washington State Attorney General’s Office. Would you be eager to call him back?”

“Not me,” Mel said.

“Me either. But what do authors need more than anything else?”

Mel wasn’t at the top of her game either. “I give up,” she said finally.

“Publicity?” Todd Hatcher asked.

“Bingo,” I said. I scrolled down my outgoing calls and handed Mel my phone. “Here’s the number, but call him on your phone, not mine. Tell him you’re writing a magazine article or a newspaper article or something and you want to review his book. Tell him you’re working on a deadline and don’t have time to go through his publicity department.”

“What good will that do?” Mel wanted to know.

“You make an appointment to talk to him, only we show up instead.”

Mel was shaking her head and giving me one of her glow
ers when Todd took the phone from me and said, “I’ll do it.”

He did, and he did a credible job of it, too, leaving a message that was flattering enough that I figured no author in his right mind would be able to resist. In the meantime I took my own phone back and called DeAnn Cosgrove. She sounded more with-it than I would have expected, and certainly more connected than I was feeling about then.

“J. P. Beaumont,” I said when she answered. “How are things?”

“Better,” she said. “The doctor was here just a little while ago. They’re going to keep him until later on today, maybe even until tomorrow. For observation.”

For a psychological evaluation,
I thought. That’s standard procedure with attempted suicides.

“Is he well enough to answer questions?” I asked.

DeAnn stalled. “I don’t think—”

“You know about the note he left, don’t you?” I interrupted.

“I know there was a note,” she said. “I haven’t seen it.”

“Your husband admitted being at the scene of the crime,” I said. “It’s possible he saw the killer drive away after that person shot your mother and stepfather. We need to talk to Donnie. We need him to tell us what he saw.”

“This isn’t some kind of trick? I mean, if he’s still a suspect, shouldn’t he have a lawyer here when he talks to you?”

“Your husband isn’t a suspect at this point,” I said. “He’s not even a person of interest. As a potential witness he doesn’t need a lawyer.”

“You’re sure? I mean, he had his gun there and everything.”

I was losing patience. “Whoever killed your mother and stepfather fired a pistol,” I said. “Your husband’s .357 is a revolver. Unless Donnie has another weapon none of us knows about, he
can’t have been the shooter. Now, can Mel and I come over and ask him some questions?” I asked. “Please?”

“Okay,” DeAnn said at last. “I guess it’ll be all right.”

I closed the phone. “Okay,” I said to Mel. “Come on. Let’s go talk to Donnie Cosgrove.”

“What about me?” Todd asked.

“Keep working,” I said. “There’s fresh coffee in the pot. We’ll be back.”

“And what if that Dortman guy calls to set up an interview?”

“Tell him where and when and then call us,” I said and gave him the number.

It was daytime. Since we didn’t need to get to Kirkland in a hell of a hurry, I drove. At the hospital, when we located Donnie Cosgrove’s room, he was still hooked up to an IV. Looking haggard, DeAnn hovered on the far side of the bed.

“This is Mr. Beaumont,” she said as we approached. “I think you talked to him on the phone. And this is his partner…”

“Melissa Soames,” Mel supplied easily, holding out her hand. “Most people call me Mel.”

In the heat of the moment, when we’d been milling around in the Cosgroves’ living room, summoning EMTs and trying to determine whether Donnie Cosgrove was going to live or die, I hadn’t taken the time to look at him very closely. Now I did. Propped up in his hospital bed, I realized he was a big man, in a flabby, flaccid kind of way. And the distended veins on his nose spoke of a man with a more-than-nodding acquaintance with the sauce. I’ve spent enough time with boozers and ex-boozers to read the signs—as in, it takes one to know one.

“They’re the people who saved your life last night,” DeAnn continued.

“No,” Mel corrected. “That’s not true. The person who saved your life is your wife. When everyone else was busy giving up on you, when everyone else was telling her to stay away, DeAnn insisted on coming back to check on you. If she hadn’t, we’d be talking about a successful suicide here, not an attempted one.”

“I’m sorry I made such a mess of things,” Donnie said to DeAnn. “Sorry I put you through so much…”

“Hush,” she said. “It’s okay. It doesn’t matter. They need to talk to you is all. Need to ask you a few questions.”

“What kind of questions?” Donnie asked.

“Tell us about Saturday—everything about Saturday.”

“I’d been thinking about Jack ever since he showed up at the house on Thursday. It just burned me up that he could come over and raise hell like that and get away with it. I wanted him to know that wasn’t okay, and I wanted to get a little of my own back. Saturday I decided I was going to go give him a piece of my mind. I told DeAnn that I had some work to do at the office, even though I didn’t, and when I left the house I put my .357 in my pocket. Did you ever meet Jack Lawrence?”