When I was a kid being raised by a single mother in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood, we were poor as church mice. One year for Christmas my mother came home from the local Toys for Tots drive with a Tinkertoy set. That’s what I got for Christmas that year – Tinkertoys and a plaid flannel shirt Mother made for me. I remember hating to wear the shirt to school because other kids knew it was homemade.
But the Tinkertoys were a hit. I loved putting the round sticks into those little round knobs with the holes and making them jut out at all different angles. Telephone logs are a lot like that. The numbers are the little round knobs with holes in them. The calls that travel back and forth between them are the sticks.
The first knob was the pay phone that had been used to make the three separate calls to Winnetka, Illinois, on the day Deidre Canfield disappeared. But Frank Montoya is nothing if not thorough. Based on Harve Dowd’s observation that Jack Brampton had used the phones on numerous occasions, Frank had collected phone logs for both of the post-office pay phones over a period of several months – for as long as Jack Brampton had been in the area. Scanning through those, I found two more calls had been placed to Winnetka, Illinois – both of those to the offices of Maddern, Maddern, and Peek.
The next set of knobs were the two phone numbers in Illinois. Because of the volume of calls, I started with the log for the residence number first. The logs were arranged in order of the most recent calls first. I worked my way down list after list after list until I could barely see straight. Until I felt myself starting to doze in the chair. And then I saw it. The words “Olympia, Washington,” leaped off the page and brought me bolt upright and wide awake.
The call had been placed two months earlier at ten o’clock in the morning and had lasted for forty minutes. Excited now, I scanned faster. Three weeks before that was another call. A month before that was another. All of the calls were placed to the same 360 prefix number. Shaking my head, I extracted my wallet from my pocket and pulled out the list of telephone numbers, and there it was. That 360 number was the unlisted home number for Ross Alan Connors.
“What the hell does this mean?” I asked myself aloud.
Actually, the answer seemed pretty clear. I remembered that long empty silence when I had told Ross about the phone calls to the Illinois law firm. Now I had to face the possibility that Washington State Attorney General Ross Connors was actually involved in the plot that had resulted in the death of his own witness.
I’ve never been long on patience. Cooler heads might have paused for a moment or two of consideration. Not me. There was a phone on a table at the far end of the conference room. I grabbed the receiver off the hook and dialed in Ross Connors’s office number, only to be told he was out to lunch. Next I tried his cell phone. As soon as he answered, I heard the tinkle of glassware and the muted hum of background conversation. Connors was in a public place – some fine dining establishment, no doubt – and most likely with friends or associates. It wasn’t the best venue for me to try forcing him to tell me the truth, but I wasn’t willing to wait any longer. If my boss was a crook, I wanted to know it right then so I could deliver my verbal resignation on the spot.
“Beau,” he said when he recognized my voice. “I really can’t talk right now-”
“Sorry to interrupt your lunch, but the suspect we were looking for, Jack Brampton, is dead,” I told him. “He died this morning making a run for the Mexican border. I thought you’d want to know.”
“You’re absolutely right!” Ross Connors exclaimed. “I do want to know about that. Good work. Anything else?”
“Answer me one question,” I growled into the phone. “Why didn’t you come clean with me when I told you about Maddern, Maddern, and Peek? Louis Maddern is obviously a friend of yours.”
He excused himself from the table and didn’t speak again until he was outside the restaurant. “Louis really isn’t a friend of mine,” he said. “The Madderns are closer to Francine. She’s known Madeline since college, since she was Madeline Springer, in fact. The girls were sorority sisters together. Lou can be a bit of a pill sometimes, but I suppose he’s all right. Why? What’s going on?”
Sorority sisters, I thought. That might explain those widely spaced, long-winded phone calls. It could be they were nothing more than that, the totally harmless chatting of a pair of old friends, but still….
“Probably nothing,” I said.
“Well,” Connors said. “I should get back to my guests. I’ll be back in my office about three. Why don’t you give me a callback then.”
“Sure,” I told him. “Will do.”
I put down the phone. I’ve spent most of my adult life working as a homicide detective, and I can usually spot a liar a mile away. J.P. Beaumont’s gut-instinct opinions carry about the same weight in a court of law as polygraph results do – which means they’re widely regarded as totally unreliable.
The problem for me right then was that my gut instinct didn’t think Ross Alan Connors was lying. True, he hadn’t answered my question in front of his guests, but nowadays that was considered to be polite cell-phone behavior. Still, he had sounded glad to hear from me and delighted that Jack Brampton had been run to ground. He didn’t sound to me like someone with some dark, hidden secret.
I should have been ecstatic about thinking my boss wasn’t a crook after all, but I wasn’t. Because if his relationship to Madeline and Louis Maddern was totally harmless, then I was getting nowhere fast.
I went back to my place at the table and returned to the telephone logs. The law firm logged hundreds of phone calls a day, which meant I was dealing with a huge stack of pages. I lit into scanning them with renewed vigor, but instead of starting from the most recent ones, I decided to go to the end of the list and begin there. Halfway through the fourth page, Olympia, Washington, began appearing again. Not one call or two, but dozens of them, some only a minute or two long, some that lasted for forty or fifty minutes.
That pattern was obvious almost immediately. None of the calls were placed earlier than 11 A.M. central time, which would have been 9 A.M. Pacific. And none were placed later than 5 P.M. Pacific. And, although they all went to the same number in Olympia, it wasn’t one of the numbers I had on my Ross Connors contact list. I guessed then where this was most likely leading, but before I did anything about it, I wanted to be absolutely sure.
Twenty-one
ONCE BACK IN HER OFFICE, Joanna immediately tried reaching Governor Wallace Hickman, only to be told that he wasn’t in, who was calling, and he would call her back. Not likely, Joanna thought. She’d had previous dealings with Wally Hickman in a case that had reflected badly on one of the governor’s former partners. With that in mind, she doubted the governor would be eager to return her phone call – no matter how urgent.
The surface of Joanna’s desk was still unnaturally clean. While she waited, Joanna took messages off the machine. One was from Terry Gregovich. “Sheriff Brady, sorry I didn’t call in earlier. Kristin went into labor and there was too much happening. Kristin is fine. We think Shaundra is, too, but she had some breathing problems. Dr. Lee is having her airlifted to the neonatal unit at University Medical Center in Tucson. Kristin went with her in the medevac helicopter. Spike and I are going along, too, but we’re driving, not flying. I’ll let you know how things are as soon as I know anything.”
As she erased that message, Joanna said a small prayer for the whole Gregovich family.
Next came a call from Joanna’s mother. “Hi,” Eleanor Lathrop Winfield said airily. “George and I are planning a little dinner get-together for Friday evening. We wanted to know if you and Butch could come.”