Stand Down (4 page)

Midway through Mel's second week in office, there had been an officer-­involved shooting in Bellingham at a lowlife bar on the waterfront, a rough place called the Fish Bowl. For most of my working life, that term—­the Fish Bowl—­ had referred to the window-­lined office on the fifth floor of Seattle's Public Safety Building where Homicide Captain Larry Powell long held sway. So the irony of the bar's name touched my funny bone. On the surface, the shoot-­out shouldn't have been all that serious. For one thing, nobody died.

Mel had been locked up in a meeting with the mayor and the city manager at the time of the incident. At the mayor's insistence, pagers and other electronic devices were not allowed inside her office. That struck me as odd all by itself. I warned Mel that anyone that concerned about electronic eavesdropping was either a conspiracy freak or else s/he had something to hide. As far as Mayor Kirkpatrick was concerned, it might have been a little of both.

Some ­people stream music on their phones and tablets. Once Mel ended up in Bellingham, I spent a lot of time tuned into a radio station there. I also programmed my iPad so breaking news alerts from there would be sent to me as they occurred. The day of the shooting, with Mel locked in the mayor's office, I knew about the incident before she did. As soon as the news alert showed up on my screen, my heart went to my throat. As police chief, Mel shouldn't have been out on any kind of patrol, still I didn't breathe easier until I had called her office, checked with her secretary, and learned that Mel was still upstairs in a meeting. Whew!

Over the course of time—­that day and subsequent ones—­the details emerged. A young cop, Officer Dale Embry, had been patrolling the waterfront area when a guy came running out of the Fish Bowl and flagged him down, alerting him to a developing domestic-­violence situation inside the bar. Embry radioed for backup then hurried inside. The bartender's estranged and enraged husband, armed with a butcher knife, was threatening to murder his soon-­to-­be-­former wife and anyone stupid enough to get in his way.

Embry entered the premises with his weapon already drawn. When Embry told the guy to drop his knife, the guy swung around and started for him. I know firsthand that when you're facing an assailant armed with a knife, you're caught in a chaotic situation, and you're not exactly thinking straight. Adrenaline is pumping; your heart is hammering off the charts, and you're hoping to God it's not your last day on planet earth.

Embry pulled the trigger. The shot should have taken the guy down. It didn't, but only because someone else took him down first. One of the customers, armed with a barstool, clobbered the irate husband and put him on the floor. The only other casualty turned out to be the mirror behind the bar, which shattered into a million pieces.

The assailant was knocked out cold. An ambulance was summoned and hauled him off to the ER with a possible concussion. When departmental supervisors arrived on the scene, a group that ultimately included Assistant Chief Manson, Officer Embry was sent home on administrative leave.

In officer-­involved shootings where a weapon is discharged, administrative leave is standard procedure. When Mel came out of her meeting, however, and learned it was a done deal, she was not pleased. Yes, she hadn't had her pager along in the meeting, but she was offended that Manson hadn't bothered to come upstairs himself or even send someone up to let her know about the incident while it was still unfolding. She took the position that, by issuing the leave order himself, Manson had undercut her authority.

In the heat of the moment, she had called Assistant Chief Manson out about it and given him a dressing-­down. Later on that day, she paid a call at Officer Embry's home, encouraging him to use his leave time constructively in a way that would turn him into a better cop. After that visit, she had attempted to apologize to Manson, but he wasn't having any of it. The damage was done. Manson was pissed, and apparently he planned to stay that way.

The problem was, I could see both sides of the issue. This was a routine situation and a routine call on Manson's part. If Mel had been a more seasoned chief, she wouldn't have felt compelled to assert her authority in such a heavy-­handed fashion. Perhaps she shouldn't have reacted the way she did initially, but now it was too late. Rather than having Manson as an ally, she had turned the man into a sworn enemy.

When Mel had accepted the job, I think she had imagined herself as being the kind of skilled leader Ross Connors had always been. The problem was, when it came to building S.H.I.T., Ross Connors had been able to go out and handpick the ­people he wanted on his team. It had been an older, wiser, and dedicated group, with little, if any, deadweight. In her new department, Mel didn't have the luxury of handpicking her ­people. She had to work with what was already there.

Two months later, Embry was back from his leave. Due to the Fish Bowl incident, Mel was stuck with both an extremely loyal but peach-­fuzzed young cop and a grizzled veteran who wouldn't give her the time of day and didn't miss a trick when it came to badmouthing Mel behind her back. In terms of departmental morale, guess which one carries more weight?

One evening, over dinner, I had made the tactical error of venturing an opinion on the subject. As a result, Assistant Chief Manson was no longer a topic of conversation between Mel and me. He was the elephant in the room—­the taboo place where neither of us dared to tread.

I was coming up on the Fairhaven exit when I tried Mel's phone one last time. By then, I was slightly annoyed. Obviously, my idea of treating her to a surprise lunch wasn't going to happen. Consequently, I turned on the directional signal. Exiting the freeway, I left another message.

“You're probably too busy for lunch,” I said. “There's no sense in my coming down to the department and being under hand and foot. I'm turning off at Fairhaven. I'll wait at the house until you get cut loose. Maybe I can take you out to dinner instead of lunch. If you're really lucky, you might even talk me into spending the night.”

I drove over to Bayside and down the steep driveway that leads to our house. Mel's Porsche Cayman was tucked in behind a massive construction Dumpster that had taken over a big portion of the concrete slab that had once been a detached garage. The rest of the garage structure, afflicted by a terminal case of dry rot, had been red-­flagged as a hazard, knocked down, and the splintered remains hauled away during the first week of our renovation efforts. Mel had worried that perhaps it was an omen about the inadvisability of the entire project. Jim Hunt had attempted to reassure her by explaining that in sixty-­year-­old wood-­frame buildings, dry rot was simply the natural order of things, especially in the rainy Pacific Northwest.

I wasn't surprised to find her car parked there. Mel had told me that when things got too stressful at work, she'd grab a sandwich from Subway and drive out to our place, where she would eat lunch in her car, take a few deep breaths, and relieve the pressure by watching the birds out on the bay. I suspected that once the workers showed up, and construction kicked into high gear, parking there for lunch wouldn't be nearly as peaceful.

Given all that, I half expected to see her sitting in the car, but she wasn't, so I walked on down to the front of the house and stepped up onto the sagging front porch. The door was locked, so I used the key and stepped inside.

“Mel?” I called into the echoing skeletal shell. “Are you here?”

She wasn't. The house was empty. Leaving the front door ajar, I went back outside and walked across the sloping front yard until I came to a halt at the fence that marked the end of our property.

“Mel?” I called down the bluff, “where are you?” Again, there was no answer.

Mel is physically fit, but clambering around on a steep hillside even in a uniform and low heels didn't seem in character unless, of course, someone else had been in trouble. Then all bets were off. For the first time, I felt the smallest frisson of concern.

“Mel,” I called again, shouting this time. I peered off down the bank. At the condo in Seattle, we keep two pairs of binoculars parked on the sill next to the window seat. We used them for occasional bits of bird-­watching, for viewing the Fourth of July Fireworks, and occasionally, during snowstorms, for being entertained while watching hapless drivers attempt to make their fender-­bender way up and down Broad. Unfortunately, I didn't have a pair of binoculars here with me now at a time and place where I really needed them.

If a boat had overturned, I knew Mel would have wanted to lend a hand, but it seemed unlikely that she would have gone down the bank on foot. It seemed far more reasonable that she would have used her phone to summon help. Besides, there was no sign of wreckage out on the water or on the steep bank at the water's edge. And no sign of life either—­no sign of movement.

There was a rough, steep trail that ran in breathtaking switchbacks down to the water. It might have been usable by mountain goats, but I didn't think it was something that should be tackled by an old codger with a pair of fake knees. When I walked over to the path and studied it closely, I saw no sign of any recent footprints. If Mel had gone down the bluff, she hadn't used the path.

I stood up and looked down at the bay again. There was a stiff wind blowing in off the water. The sky above may have been a robin's egg blue, but the sea itself was gray-­green and dotted with rolling whitecaps. It looked dangerous—­and threatening.

Genuinely worried now and still staring down the hillside for any sign of movement, I plucked my phone out of my pocket and dialed Mel's cell phone again—­with predictable results. The call went straight to voice mail. Then I dialed Mel's office, not her direct line, but the one that was usually answered by Kelly, the receptionist stationed just outside Mel's door.

“Is Chief Soames in?” I asked when Kelly answered. “This is her husband calling.”

“No, she isn't here,” Kelly answered, “and I'm a little surprised. She was supposed to do a live radio interview at one. I've tried calling her cell, but she doesn't answer. It's not like her to miss an appointment like this.”

No it's not,
I thought grimly. “If you do hear from her,” I said aloud, “ask her to give me a call.”

Before ringing off, I gave Kelly my cell-­phone number, then I hurried back up the hill. Ignoring the wide-­open front door, I headed straight for the back of the house and to the spot where the cars were parked, with mine directly behind hers. Some ancient cop instinct must have kicked in. As I approached her vehicle, rather than grabbing the door handle and pulling it open, I bent down and shaded my face enough so I could peer inside.

That's when my heart almost came to a stop. Mel's purse lay half-­open on the passenger seat. Next to it lay an unopened Subway sandwich—­her favorite, no doubt, tuna with jack cheese and jalapeños. Next to the sandwich, I caught sight of what looked like the grip of a weapon. Her Smith & Wesson maybe? There was her cell phone, too, but what really took my breath away was what I saw on the passenger floorboard—­a shoe—­a single, abandoned shoe, one of the low-­heeled black pumps Mel routinely wore to work. If she had been in the driver's seat, and the shoe was in the passenger footwell, that indicated there must have been a struggle of some kind.

I stepped away from the vehicle without touching it—­holding my hands in the air as though I'd been ordered to do so by a traffic cop. If something had happened to Mel—­if someone had forced her out of her vehicle—­I had to stop being a worried husband and transform myself into a detective. I looked around. The cars were parked below the crest of the hill out of view from the level above and shielded from the neighbors on either side by a thick screen of trees. It seemed unlikely that there would have been anyone close enough to witness whatever had happened.

Fighting panic, I fumbled to pry my cell phone from my pocket. My fingers seemed like frozen stubs as I forced them to dial.

“Nine-­one-­one,” a calm-­voiced woman answered. “What is your emergency?”

“It's my wife,” I said. “I think someone's taken her.”

“What do you mean by ‘taken?' ” she asked.

I tried to keep my voice steady. “My wife is Mel Soames,” I said. “She's the police chief here in Bellingham, and she's missing.”

“Calm down, sir. What do you mean ‘missing'?”

I wanted to reach through the phone and throttle the woman. How could she be so stupid?

“I mean her car is here. Her purse is here. Her weapon is here. She isn't. I think she's been kidnapped.”

“Where are you?” the operator asked.

Taking a deep breath to control my temper, I gave her the address. “All right,” the woman said. “I'm sending units your way. Do you have any idea how long she's been gone?”

I walked around to the front of the Porsche and leaned over close enough to the hood to hear if there was any clicking from the engine. There was nothing—­not a sound—­and there wasn't any heat rising from the hood, either. That meant that the car had been parked long enough for the engine to cool completely.

“No idea,” I said into the phone, “but probably an hour at least.”

While waiting for a patrol car to arrive and to avoid disturbing any possible evidence, I forced myself to stay away from the vehicle. I walked past the house, through the front yard, and all the way back down to the fence, where I stood stock-­still, staring out to sea. Anyone seeing me right then might have assumed I was simply admiring the water view. I wasn't. I was peering into an abyss at the appalling possibility of losing what I held most dear and knowing that if Mel was lost, I was, too.

That's when it hit me. If a woman goes missing, who's the first suspect? The husband or else the person who calls it in. In this instance, that would be yours truly twice over. I thought about how I had forced myself to sound calm during the 9-­1-­1 call, and then I thought about all the other 9-­1-­1 recordings I had heard over the years—­the ones where some chump calls to report that he found his dead wife, the wife he just murdered, lying on the floor in the living room. Usually, the killer will mention that he's tried reviving her even though the autopsy will reveal that she died hours before the 9-­1-­1 call. Instead of trying to bring her around, he's spent the interim attempting to clean up the crime scene.