reports with unidentified homicides in all other jurisdictions. It was cold-case work, long on frustration, short on triumphs, and even more boring most of the time than staff meetings.
When Squad B’s secretary/office manager, Barbara Galvin, poked her head into our tiny offices and announced that Mel and I had been summoned to Harry’s office, it was a real footrace to see who got there first.
Harry is a Luddite. He has a computer on his desk. He does not use it. Ross Connors has made sure that all his people have the latest and greatest in electronic communications gear, but he doesn’t use that, either. It’s only in the last few months that he’s finally accepted the necessity of carrying a cell phone and actually turning it on. He and Ross Connors are really birds of a feather in that regard—they’re both anti-geeks at heart. Occasionally we’ll receive an e-mail with Harry’s name on it, but that’s because he has dictated his message to Barbara, who dutifully types it at the approximate speed of sound and then presses the send button. The same goes for electronic messages that come our way from Ross Connors’s e-mail account. His secretary, Katie Dunn, sends out those missives.
In our unit, Barbara Galvin and Harry I. Ball are the ultimate odd couple in terms of working together. Harry is now, and always has been, an exceptional cop who was kicked out of the Bellingham Police Department due to a terminal lack of political correctness that survived several employer-mandated courses in sensitivity training. He would have been stranded without a job if Ross Connors, no PC guy himself, hadn’t taken pity on him and hired him as Squad B’s supervisor.
Barbara Galvin is easily young enough to be Harry’s daughter. Her body shows evidence of plenty of piercings, but she comes to work with a single diamond stud in her left nostril. I suspect that her clothing conceals any number of tattoos, but none of those show at work. She’s a blazingly fast typist who keeps only a single photo of her now ten-year-old son on an otherwise fastidiously clean desk. She manages the office with a cheerful efficiency that is nothing short of astonishing. She prods at Harry when he needs prodding and laughs both with him and at him. When I’ve had occasion to visit other S.H.I.T. offices, I’ve also seen how Squads A and C live. With Harry and Barbara in charge, those of us in Squad B have a way better deal.
When Mel and I walked into Harry’s office he was studying an e-mail that Barbara had no doubt retrieved from his account, printed, and brought to him.
“Have a chair,” he said, stripping off a pair of drugstore reading glasses.
Since there was only one visitor’s chair in the room, I let Mel have that one. When Harry looked up and saw I was still standing, he bellowed, “Hey, Barbara. Can you round up another chair? Who the hell keeps stealing mine?”
Without a word, Barbara brought another office chair to the doorway and then rolled it expertly across the room so it came to a stop directly in front of me.
“Sit,” Harry ordered, glaring at me.
I sat.
Harry picked up the piece of paper again and returned the reading glasses to the bridge of his nose.
“I don’t like this much, you know,” he said.
Mel and I exchanged looks. Her single raised eyebrow spoke volumes, as in “What’s he talking about?”
“I’m not sure why it is that you’re always Ross’s go-to guy, but you are,” Harry grumbled, sending another glower in my direction. “This time the attorney general wants both of you in Olympia for the next while. It’s all very hush-hush. He didn’t say what he wants you to do while you’re there, or how long he wants you to stay. He says you should ‘pack to stay for several days,’ and you should ‘each bring a vehicle,’ which leads me to believe that you won’t necessarily be working together. You’re booked into the Red Lion there in Olympia.”
“I’m assuming from that we probably won’t be staying in the honeymoon suite?” I asked.
“I would assume not,” Harry agreed glumly. “Now get the hell out of here. Time’s a-wastin’.”
CHAPTER 2
SINCE WE HADN’T PACKED TO GO TO THE OFFICE, AND since we hadn’t brought both cars, we had to go back home to throw some clothing into suitcases and pick up Mel’s Porsche Cayman. Driving into Seattle, though, we were able to be a two-person carpool in the right direction for a change. Way to go!
Packing took no time at all. We have no kids at home and no pets, either—not even a goldfish. That meant that all we had to do was turn off the lights and lock the door. Simple. Trouble-free. Then we headed south, caravanning on I-5 with Mel in the lead.
It’s a little over sixty miles from downtown Seattle to downtown Olympia. Driving directions say the trip should take a little over an hour. It actually took an hour and a half due to a semi that jackknifed for no apparent reason on a perfectly dry, straight highway just south of Fort Lewis. Driving alone gave me time to think about what Harry had said about my connection to Ross Connors. He was right. I was and am Ross Connors’s “go-to guy” for more reasons than Harry I. Ball knows.
Ross and I have dealt with similar tragedies. Anne Corley, my second wife, chose suicide by cop, although that was long enough ago that the term wasn’t in common usage at the time. Ross’s wife, Francine, was carrying on a torrid affair with the husband of a friend. In the process she let slip some information on a supposedly protected witness with fatal results for said witness. When Francine realized that the jig was up and we were coming for her, she went out into their backyard with a handgun and blew her brains out.
Ross and I had also had our difficulties with booze before those tragedies struck, and we both had to get a lot worse before we got better. Ralph Ames, who was once Anne Corley’s attorney and who is now my friend, helped get me into treatment. When Ross finally came to me for help, I did the same thing for him by personally escorting him into his first AA meeting.
-People who venture into AA are given a sponsor—someone you can call in the middle of the night when the temptation to drink is too great and you need a human voice to talk you down out of the trees. My longtime AA sponsor is Lars Jenssen, a retired ninety-something halibut fisherman who became my stepgrandfather by virtue of marrying my widowed grandmother, Beverly Piedmont. He was my sponsor before he married my grandmother and he remains my sponsor to this day, even though, in the aftermath of my grandmother’s death, he took up with another widow, Iris Rasmussen, from Queen Anne Gardens, a Seattle-area retirement home, where the two of them are evidently scandalizing all concerned by openly living in sin.
But I digress. Ross wanted me to be his sponsor. I know from personal experience that having a sponsor who’s more than an hour away is a bad idea, so I found him a group and a sponsor in Olympia. That was the part Harry knew nothing about. Mel knew because she had been privy to some of the phone conversations when Ross called me looking for help, and I know for a fact that Mel can be trusted to keep her mouth shut.
Ross must have understood that, too, I theorized, or he wouldn’t have asked Harry to send both of us, but I couldn’t imagine why. What was going on that Ross couldn’t afford to hand the case off to his Squad A home team?
It had to have something to do with politics. Ross is a political animal. He’s won reelection to the position of attorney general over and over, usually by wide margins. The last election, after the scandal with Francine, he won again, but that one was a squeaker. He had hinted to me that after this four-year term, he most likely wouldn’t run again. Those weren’t words that made me feel all warm and fuzzy. S.H.I.T. has Ross’s own particular stamp on it, and I couldn’t really see myself—or any of us—working for someone else with the same kind of personal loyalty that we all give willingly to Ross Connors.
Whatever this case was, it was also big enough to bring people down.
Harry called while I was still stuck in the traffic jam waiting for the wreckage of the semi to be towed off the freeway.
“Ross says to