Second Watch. J. A. Jance

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СКАЧАТЬ as far as the nurses’ station and then back to my room, where they returned me to my bed. The whole excursion left me feeling inordinately proud of myself—as though I’d just run the equivalent of a marathon. Before my head hit the pillow, I was back in never-never land.

      Through the years, booze has always been my drug of choice—booze and, a long time ago, cigarettes, too—but I’ve never been tempted to wander into the world of harder drugs. For one thing, my fear of needles makes it unlikely that I’d ever manage to be a successful IV drug user. But now, for the first time, lost in the dreamland world of medicinal narcotics, I got a taste of their allure.

      For one thing, under the influence of the pain meds my dreams were astonishingly vivid and, in some cases, entirely welcome. Regular dreams tend to dissipate the moment I awake, but that was not the case here. The details stayed with me long after the dreamscape itself was gone. For all intents and purposes, it was a trip down memory lane.

      Scenes from forty or even fifty years ago danced back through my head in full Technicolor splendor and in almost 3-D detail. In one, I was standing outside a hospital nursery looking down at the sweetly sleeping swaddled baby that was my newborn son, Scott. In another, I was a callow twenty-year-old youth, still a student at the University of Washington, sitting at my mother’s hospital bedside and watching the morphine drip as she slowly, ever so slowly, lost her battle with breast cancer.

      In others I walked long-ago crime scenes in more or less chronological order with partners both living and dead. In one I stood on the sidelines while medics tried to revive Milton Gurkey when he suffered a fatal heart attack after a violent confrontation with a homicide suspect. In some I was back in the car with Ron Peters, my former partner, when he was a young, gung-ho guy as well as a newly minted vegan. At the time, he hadn’t yet taken his nosedive off a highway overpass and wasn’t in a wheelchair, and I was still trying to figure out if I could work every day with a partner who wasn’t a carnivore. In others, I was partnered with Big Al Lindstrom. In one I was even back in the elephant enclosure in the Woodland Park Zoo.

      Eventually, in the dreams, as I had in real life, I found myself working with Sue Danielson. Even in the depths of sleep, my heart filled with dread, knowing that soon I would once again find myself in Sue’s living room reliving the horror that had been part of my life from that day to this. Unable to help her, I had watched my partner and a great cop bleed to death on the floor of her own living room, gunned down by her enraged estranged husband. By the time I finally awoke fresh from the all-too-familiar scene of Sue’s fallen-officer memorial, I was exhausted, physically and emotionally, and my cheeks were wet with tears.

      That was about the time I began questioning whether I was dead or alive. Maybe I had died on the operating table and this trip through dreamland was God’s way of having a little joke with me. Maybe He was using pieces of a lifelong jigsaw puzzle to allow my whole life to pass before my eyes in one disjointed scene after another.

      But what had jostled me awake this time was the appearance of yet another nurse. This one was a beefy, much-tattooed guy named Keith who came to take my vitals, check my drains, and see if I needed more pain meds.

      Why do they do that? People are in hospitals for a reason—to get better from an illness or to recover from surgery. If patients are sleeping peacefully, why wake them up to see if they’re all right? Why not let them sleep until they wake up on their own, at which time they can ring the bell and let someone know if more medication is in order? But let’s not even go there, because that’s not the way hospitals work, and it isn’t going to happen.

      So after Nurse Keith confirmed that I was still alive, if not kicking, I tossed around for a while. Wide awake, I would have been glad to have Mel’s company about then, but when Keith had woken me up, I’d finally insisted that she go home to get some rest. She had been at the hospital all day long and would willingly have stayed longer, but I told her I was in good hands and that she was the one who needed relief. She had issued instructions to all our friends that no one was to show up at the hospital that first day. It comes as no surprise that not a single person had dared disobey Mel’s orders.

      So there I was, alone and awake, with only the haunting memories elicited by those vivid dreams to keep me occupied. Karen was always a big Simon and Garfunkel fan, and one of her favorite songs by them was “Sounds of Silence.” In this case, the sleeping vision that was planted in my brain was that of the dead body of a naked girl, spilling out of a yellow barrel in the bright afternoon sunlight. Her long blond hair was in a greasy tangle and her fingernails, poking out of the mire, were covered with garish red polish.

      Since I didn’t have anything else to think about at the moment, I walked myself back through that pivotal case that would eventually pull me out of a patrol car and drop me into a desk in Homicide on the Public Safety Building’s fifth floor.

      That Sunday afternoon it didn’t take long for Larry Powell and Watty Watkins to sort out the identity of the Girl in the Barrel. Her name was Monica Wellington. She was an eighteen-year-old honor student, valedictorian of her high school graduating class at Leavenworth High School, and a recently enrolled freshman at the University of Washington.

      On Friday night, she had gone out on what was purported to be a blind date. When she didn’t come back to the dorm, her roommates had called her parents in Leavenworth on Saturday to let them know. The parents in turn were the ones who had called in a missing persons report to Seattle PD later on that same day.

      Missing persons reports often get short shrift, but Seattle was starting to see a flurry of women going missing, particularly young coeds. We were right on the cusp of what would later be called the Ted Bundy era. If a prostitute or two went missing back then, no one paid a lot of attention, but when female students from solid families, especially girls in good academic standing, went missing, some effort was made to connect the dots. In this case, the dots were connected early on.

      By late Sunday afternoon, while we were still tramping around in the blackberry bushes on Magnolia Bluff, Hannah and Eugene Wellington had driven over to Seattle from Leavenworth. They were doing a full-court press on local television news outlets pleading for information about their missing daughter. One of the guys in missing persons, David Larson, who was interviewed by a local reporter and who had seen a photo of the missing coed, happened to hear that Larry and Watty were investigating a possible homicide. David took it upon himself to bring a copy of the photo to the morgue.

      By the time Doc Baker got the layer of grease washed off the body, it was clear that the girl in the photo matched the face of the victim. The Wellingtons were staying at a low-cost motel up on Aurora, and Watty was dispatched with the unenviable job of giving them the bad news that an unidentified body had been found and that there was a good chance the victim would turn out to be their daughter. Watty was also tasked with bringing the parents to the morgue to do the ID.

      I didn’t know about any of this at the time because Mac and I were still too busy chowing down at Dick’s, but Watty told me much later that Eugene Wellington, all six feet six of him, wept like a baby, all the way from the motel to the morgue. Once there, he was the one who fainted dead away when it came time to identify the body. It was Hannah, the mother, all five feet two of her, who made the identification and then helped her sobbing, grieving giant of a husband out of the room.

      As for Mac and me? We finished out our shift and our burgers and went home.

      Back when Karen and I were in the market for our first house, Boeing was going through a world of hurt. That meant the local real estate market was in the toilet, which is how we’d lucked into and been able to afford our place on Lake Tapps.

      The house was one of those Pan Abode manufactured homes, built of cut cedar logs and then put together elsewhere. Ours was one of the early models that had been built in the fifties. The original owner СКАЧАТЬ