Second Watch

It was his turn to nod. “Bonnie and I were engaged. I couldn’t talk her into marrying me before I shipped out. We were going to get married in Japan on my R and R.”

“Sorry,” I said.

“Me, too,” he said. “I just wish she knew how much.”

Just then Mel appeared in the doorway. The moment she did, Lieutenant Davis disappeared. The playing cards on my hospital tray vanished. I hadn’t thought I was asleep, but I must have been.

“Talking in your sleep?” Mel asked, entering the room like a fast-moving storm. “How are you feeling? Did you sleep well? Breakfast is on its way. The lady with the trays is two doors down the hall.”

Just that fast, she swept away my nighttime’s worth of strange visitations.

“I heard your voice as I was coming down the hall,” she said, kissing me lightly on the forehead. “I thought the nurse might be in here with you.”

“Nope,” I said as brightly as I could manage. “Nobody here but us chickens.” I wasn’t about to tell her I had been busy having a heart-to-heart conversation with a fifty-year-old Ghost of Christmas Past.

“I’m on my way to work,” she continued. “Thought I’d stop by and check in with you before I hit 520.”

The Seattle area branch of the attorney general’s Special Homicide Investigation Team is located in the Eastgate area of Bellevue, across Lake Washington from our downtown Seattle condo. We used to cross Lake Washington on I-90, a bit south of the 520 bridge. Now, since the state has seen fit to start charging outrageously expensive tolls on 520—the Money-Sucking Bridge, as Mel calls it—traffic on it has dropped remarkably, while traffic on I-90 has gotten terrible. Since we can afford the tolls, we usually opt for less traffic.

“From here I’ll take the scenic route,” she said. “I’ll go through the arboretum.”

Nurse Keith came in just then. “Vitals before you get breakfast,” he said, slapping the blood pressure cuff around my arm. While he was inflating it, I introduced him to Mel.

Melissa Soames is very easy on the eyes under the worst of circumstances. Dressed as she was for work, she looked downright spectacular, and I did notice that her looks weren’t lost on Keith, either. Clearly my previous musings about his possible sexual preferences were totally off the mark.

“What’s on the agenda for today?” Mel asked.

She was being a little too cheerful. That meant she was still worried about me, even though she wouldn’t come right out and say so.

“Breakfast and then a round of physical therapy,” Keith answered. “Jonas here may think he’s on vacation, but he’s wrong about that. The PT team will see to it that he doesn’t just lie around getting his beauty sleep. We’ll have him up and out of bed in no time.”

“I told Harry I’d be in today,” Mel said. “I already know he wants me up in Bellingham, but I could always call him and let him know I need to take another day off.”

Harry was Harry Ignatius Ball, Squad B’s hopelessly politically incorrect leader. We generally refer to him in public by his preferred moniker, Harry I. Ball, because it’s usually good for a laugh, one Harry enjoys more than anyone else. The fact that Mel avoided using that name with Nurse Keith told me she wasn’t in a lighthearted mood. I also knew that her asking for the day off wasn’t going to work.

The previous week there had been a supposedly “peaceful” rally just outside the Western Washington University campus in Bellingham. Peaceful is a relative term, and this one had devolved into a window-smashing flash mob in which not just one but three WWU students ended up being Tasered by members of the local police department. Naturally, the errant students were claiming police brutality, even though so far the dash cams on the cops’ patrol cars seemed to back up the officers’ claims that they had considered themselves to be in grave danger at the time.

I’ll never understand why kids think it’s okay to come to “peaceful demonstrations” armed with baseball bats, but maybe that’s just me.

As soon as the police-brutality claim was raised, Bellingham’s chief of police, Veronica Hamlin, was on the phone to the attorney general’s office down in Olympia, pleading for backup and for an unbiased investigation. At that point, the police-brutality investigation could have landed with the Washington State Patrol, but Attorney General Ross Connors, as the ultimate boss of both that agency and ours, was the one who made the call to use Special Homicide.

I doubt Chief Hamlin was thrilled when she learned that Squad B, under Harry’s leadership, would be the ones handling the investigation into her department and being responsible for pulling her bacon out of the fire—or not. After all, years earlier in her role as assistant chief, Ms. Hamlin had been the prime mover behind Harry’s being given his walking papers from that very same department.

Sometimes what goes around really does come around. Of course, Harry wouldn’t ever leave some poor street cop hanging out to dry just to get even. He insisted that the investigation be scrupulously unbiased, which is why, as soon as it came up on Friday, Harry had put Mel in charge. She had spent Saturday and Sunday in Bellingham conducting interviews, and had returned to Seattle late Sunday evening so she could be on tap Monday morning for my surgery.

“You know you can’t do that,” I said. “Harry needs you.”

“Veronica Hamlin is a witch,” Mel said. “She’d sell those two poor cops down the river in a minute if she didn’t think that ultimately it would make her look bad.”

“Which is why you need to go to work instead of hanging around here looking after me.”

“What’s the matter?” Keith asked, grinning at her. “Don’t you trust us?”

A lady waltzed into the room carrying my breakfast tray. The food looked better than it tasted. The omelet was rubbery, the orange juice was anything but fresh squeezed, the toast was unbuttered and cold, and the coffee was only remotely related to the high-test stuff we make at home, but I was hungry enough that I ate it all. And I was glad when Mel gave me a breezy good-bye peck on the cheek and then took off rather than sitting there watching me eat.

True to Keith’s word, the PT ladies appeared the moment breakfast was over. Once again, they pried me out of bed. Then they put a second hospital gown on backward to cover my backside while we hit the corridor and walked. I wasn’t as worried this time, not as much as I had been the day before. I noticed that there were lovely pieces of art lining the wall—something that had escaped my notice the day before. I also noticed that this time the nurses’ station didn’t seem nearly as far away as it had the first time we went there. I climbed back into bed, proud of myself and thinking that was it for the day.

“Oh no,” the therapist told me with a laugh. “Next up is occupational therapy. They’ll be here in an hour or so. Those are the people who will teach you to go up and down stairs and get in and out of beds and cars.”

Again, I wanted to say, “Already?” I guess it would have been more of a whine than a question, but my ringing cell phone spared me from embarrassing myself.

“How’s it hanging?” Harry asked.

I already warned you that the man doesn’t have a politically correct bone in his body.

“Better than I expected,” I said.

“Thanks for insisting that Mel come in,” he said. “I need her bird-dogging the situation in Bellingham. Can’t afford to have any screwups on that one. With you out of play, she’s the best man for the job. Do you need anything?”

“No,” I told him. “I’m fine.”

By then call waiting was letting me know I had yet another caller.

“Gotta go, Harry. My son’s on the line.”

“Hey, Dad,” Scott said. “How’s it going?”

“I’m fine,” I said. “The surgery went well. They’ve had me up walking twice so far, and the pain’s not bad at all.”

The lack of pain probably had more to do with the meds they were plugging into my body than it did with the success of the procedure, but I kept quiet about that. Most of the time when people ask how you’re doing, they’re looking for your basic generic answer. If someone asks you, “How was your root canal?” they most likely don’t want chapter and verse. That was the case here, too. Scott wanted to know how I was. He didn’t need to know the gory details about the bloody drain bags the medical folk laughingly referred to as “grenades” or about the weirdly vivid dreams that kept taking me down memory lane. Now that I thought about it, I noticed I hadn’t mentioned the dreams to Mel, either. Call it a sin of omission.

There were several more telephone calls from well-wishers after Scott’s. They came in one after another. By then the meds I had taken earlier were kicking in and I was ready to stop talking. How many times can you say “I’m fine” without sounding curmudgeonly? When the occupational therapist finally showed up with her walker, I was more than ready to leave the phone in my room and do another forced march down the hall. Once that was over, I was happy to go back to bed, where I did myself the favor of first taking myself out of circulation by pulling the plug on my bedside phone and then switching off my cell.

I slept for a while before they woke me up for lunch. At that point I was beginning to feel bored, so I switched on the TV set. Nothing was on. My iPad was under lock and key in the closet, so I asked the next nurse who came to check my vitals to get it out for me.

People who know me well understand that I had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the computer age, first protesting the existence of cell phones and then trying to cling to a typewriter when Seattle PD was switching over to computers. So the idea that I would fall in love with my iPad was not exactly a foregone conclusion, but when Kelly and Scott teamed up to give me one for Father’s Day this year, I was hooked. I’ve even taken to doing my crossword puzzles on it.

In this instance I wasn’t looking for crossword clues. I wanted to know about whatever happened to Hannah and Eugene Wellington in the years since their daughter’s lifeless body had been found in a barrel of stale grease at the bottom of Magnolia Bluff. I had met them at Monica’s funeral, and going to her memorial service in the picturesque town of Leavenworth was one of my first official detective duties when I moved up to the fifth floor.

As soon as I googled the words “Eugene Wellington, Leavenworth, Washington,” the first link was to the man’s obituary:

Eugene Harold Wellington, a lifelong Leavenworth resident, succumbed after a brief illness. For many years he and his wife operated the Apple Inn outside Leavenworth before it was lost to a forest fire. Services are pending with Wiseman Funeral Chapel. Mr. Wellington is survived by his wife of fifty-five years, Hannah; his son, James; and three grandchildren. He was preceded in death by his beloved daughter, Monica.

What rocked me about that was how little there was of it—a whole life summed up in less than a hundred words. I remembered Eugene as a tall, powerfully built man whose rugged six feet six frame seemed crushed by the terrible weight of losing his daughter. At the funeral, just as Watty had told me about the trip to the morgue, Eugene was the one who sobbed inconsolably all through the service, while his tiny wife had sat stoically beside him, like a dry-eyed sparrow poised to take wing.

Letting the iPad drop onto my chest, I lay there recalling every detail of that first grueling week, the beginning of my career in Homicide.

CHAPTER 6 (#uec9eae9a-611c-55e3-8836-183bee71f574)