“California,” I told him. “Disneyland, actually.”
I didn’t mention the infirmary part. That was none of his business.
“Harry tells me you’re due back tomorrow.”
Harry was my boss, Harry Ignatius Ball, known to friend and foe alike as Harry I. Ball. People who hear his name and think that gives them a license to write him off as some kind of joke are making a big mistake. He’s like a crocodile lurking in the water with just his eyes showing. The teeth are there, just under the surface, ready and waiting to nail the unwary.
“Yes,” I told him. “Our plane leaves here bright and early. We should be at our desks by one.”
When Mel had broached the Disneyland idea, she had wanted us to pull off this major family-style event while, at the same time, having as little impact as possible—one and a half day’s worth—on our accumulated vacation time. We had flown down on Thursday after work and were due back Monday at one.
On my own, I’ve never been big on vacations of any kind. Unused vacation days have slipped through my fingers time and again without my really noticing or caring, but Mel Soames is another kind of person altogether. She has her heart set on our taking a road trip this summer. She wants to cross the border into BC, head east over the Canadian Rockies and then come back to Seattle by way of Yellowstone and Glacier. This sounds like way too much scenery for me, but she’s the woman in my life and I want to keep her happy, so a-driving we will go.
“Mel can go to the office,” Ross said, “but not you. I want you in Ellensburg at the earliest possible moment.”
If you leave the Seattle area driving east on I-90, Ellensburg is the second stopping-off place after you cross the Cascades. First there’s Cle Elum and next Ellensburg. Neither of them strikes me as much of a garden spot.
“Why would I want to go to Ellensburg?” I asked.
“To be there when the Kittitas M.E. does an autopsy. Friday afternoon some heavy-equipment operator was out snowplowing a national forest road over by Lake Kachess where he ended up digging up more than he bargained for. This is number six.”
I didn’t have to ask number six what—I already knew. For the past two months S.H.I.T. had been working on the murders of several young Hispanic women whose charred remains had been found at various dump sites scattered all over western Washington. So far none of them had been identified. As far as we could tell, none of our victims had been reported missing. We’d pretty well decided that our dead girls were probably involved in prostitution, but until we managed to identify one of them and could start making connections, it was going to be damnably difficult to figure out who had killed them.
These days it’s routine for the dental records of missing persons to be entered into a national missing persons database. That wasn’t possible with our current set of victims. None of them had teeth. None of them! And the teeth in question hadn’t been lost to poor dental hygiene, either. They had been forcibly removed. As in yanked out by the roots!
“Same MO?” I asked.
“Pretty much except for the fact that this one seems to have her teeth,” Ross said. “So either we have a different doer or the guy ran out of time. This victim was wrapped in a tarp and set on fire just like the others. The body was found late Friday afternoon. It took until Saturday morning for the Kittitas County Sheriff’s Department to retrieve the remains. Unfortunately, their M.E. has been out of town at a conference, so that has slowed down the process. They put the remains on ice until she returns and expect the autopsy to happen sometime tomorrow afternoon. That’s where you come in. I want you there when it happens in case there’s some detail that we know about that the locals might miss.”
“Our plane’s due to depart at ten-twenty,” I told him.
“That’ll be cutting it close then,” Ross said. “God only knows how long it’ll take for you to get your luggage once you get here.”
Thanks to a legacy from Anne Corley, Mel and I had flown down to California on a private jet. All we’d have to do was step off the plane and wait for the luggage to be loaded into our waiting car before we drove it off the tarmac, but rubbing my boss’s nose in that seemed like a bad idea.
“I’ll make it,” I said. “I’ll drop Mel off at the condo to pick up the other car and then I’ll head out.”
“All right,” Ross said. “Be there as soon as you can.”
“Do you have a number for the Kittitas M.E.’s office?” I asked.
“Sure. Can you take it down?”
I had no intention of telling him that I was flat on my back in the first-aid station and I wasn’t about to ask the nurse to lend me a pen or pencil.
“Can you text it to me?” I asked.
This was something coming from someone who had come to twenty-first-century technology kicking and screaming all the way. I’m surprised I wasn’t struck by lightning on the spot, but that’s what comes of having Generation X progeny. I had learned about text messaging the hard way—because my kids, Kelly and Scott, had insisted on it.
“Sure,” Ross said. “I’ll have Katie send it over to you.”
Katie Dunn was Ross’s Gen X secretary. Knowing Ross is even more of a wireless troglodyte than I am made me feel some better—more with it, as we used to say back in the day.
I had just stuffed the phone back into my pocket when the nurse led Kelly into the room.
“How are you?” she asked, concern written on her face. “Mel told us what happened and that you needed to take it easy for a while. Are you feeling any better?”
I swung my feet off the side of the bed and sat up slowly.
“Take it easy,” the nurse advised.
But the nap had done the trick. I was definitely feeling better. “I’m fine,” I said. “One hundred percent.”
“Mel went with Jeremy. He’s taking the kids back to the hotel,” Kelly explained. “She’ll help get them fed and make sure the babysitter arrangements hold up. If you’re still feeling up to having that dinner, that is.”
That was what Mel had told Kelly, of course. And that’s what she was doing, but only up to a point. The reasons she was doing those things were a whole lot murkier—to Kelly, at least, if not to me.
Kelly and I haven’t always been on the best of terms. In fact, we’ve usually not been on the best of terms. She had run away from home prior to high school graduation and managed to get herself knocked up. Her shotgun wedding had ended up being unavoidably delayed, so Kayla had arrived on the scene before her parents had ever tied the knot. I have always thought most of this Kelly-based uproar is deliberate.
Mel takes the position that it’s more complex than that—both conscious and not. She thinks Kelly’s ongoing rebellion has been a way for her to get back at her parents—at both Karen and me. Although I didn’t know about it at the time, Kelly was mad as hell at her mother for coming down with cancer and dying while Kelly was still in her teens, and she was mad as hell at me for having been drunk most of the time while she was growing up. And now she’s apparently mad at me for not being drunk. When it comes to kids, sometimes you just can’t win.
So Mel had designed this whole Disneyland adventure, complete with inviting my son and daughter-in-law, Scott and Cherisse, along for the ride, for no other reason than to see if she could help smooth out some of the emotional wrinkles between Kelly