Page 86 of Den of Iniquity

“You’re in,” she said. “And Ben Weston is planning on joining us, too, but for now Beau is out.”

For the next several minutes, I sat there doing a slow burn. If I was hanging around town only to be sidelined at the last minute, what the hell was the point?

The Zoom meeting broke up a few minutes later. I told Scott that since my services weren’t needed, I was going to head home. And that was my full intention, too. Sandy caught up with me before I boarded the elevator.

“Where do you think you’re going?” she demanded.

“Home to Bellingham,” I growled back at her. “Obviously I’m not needed here.”

“You’re not needed for executing the search warrants,” she said, “and as I said earlier, I’m sorry about that. Orders are orders, but I’ve got another job for you.”

“What kind of job?”

With that she held out her phone. It was turned on, and a closer inspection of the device revealed a map of downtown Seattle with a bright red dot sitting smack in the middle of the screen.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“That’s the AirTag attached to Constance Herzog’s Prius,” she said.

“Somebody found it?”

“Yes, they did, and he called to let me know so I could turn on the tracker. The Prius is parked on the second level of a parking garage at Ninth and Lenora, and I’m putting you on Prius-sitting duty. Since we don’t have an arrest warrant, I’m afraid that once we execute the search at the communications center, she’ll try to make a run for it. It’ll be your job to keep track of her and let me know where she ends up.”

With that, Sandy gave me her phone. That’s when I noticed that a Post-it was attached to the back. On it were written the numbers 551980.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“My birthday,” she answered. “It’s also my password. I’m what my dad called a Cinco de Mayo baby. The phone is fully charged, but if it happens to turn itself off, you’ll be able to use the password to turn it back on. The moment that Prius moves out of its parking place, I want to know about it.”

“If I have your phone, how do I call you?” I asked.

Sandy looked momentarily perplexed. “Call Scotty, then,” she said finally. “I’ll bet you have his number.”

My slow burn vanished.

“Roger that,” I said, stepping into the elevator and giving her a mock salute. “Happy searching.”

Chapter 40

Seattle, Washington

Monday, March 9, 2020

Seattle’s 911 call center is located in Seattle PD’s West Precinct. I have no idea why it’s called that. It’s not visibly “west” of anywhere, except maybe the I-5 corridor, and it’s smack-dab in the middle of downtown Seattle at Eighth and Virginia.

Leaving Seattle PD Headquarters, I headed uptown. Denny Regrade Parking at Ninth and Leonora wasn’t exactly inside the boundaries of what I consider to be the Regrade proper, but as with the West Precinct mentioned above, I’m not in charge of naming things. The parking facility was a low-rise, four-story affair that advertised an all-day rate of twenty bucks. It seemed to me that if someone was trying to scrape by on minimum wage in downtown Seattle, they wouldn’t be able to afford parking, even at the eight-hour rate. It would take too big a chunk out of their paychecks.

Hoping I wouldn’t be stuck there for a full eight hours and expecting to pay the shorter hourly rate, I took a ticket and drove up to the second level where I quickly located Constance’s parked Prius. Since traffic went both directions inside the garage, I knew that when it came time to exit, she’d have to go back the same way I had come. With that in mind, I parked in a vacant space five or six vehicles beyond the Prius.

I pushed the S 550’s plush leather driver’s seat back all the way, reclined it as far as it would go, and then pressed the button that heats the seat. After that I settled in for what I expected to be a long winter’s wait. It may have been a number of years since I’d last done a stint of solo surveillance, but I’d still had the presence of mind to stop in the lobby and use the facilities before turning in my visitor’s badge and leaving Seattle PD.

I remained disappointed that, after doing all the legwork on the Constance Herzog investigation, I had been aced out of participating in the execution of those hard-won search warrants. The payoff for me would have been seeing the shocked expression on Constance’s supposedly cherubic features once she realized the jig was up.

But sitting in the parking garage, the worst part for me was not knowing what was going on. Had the warrants come through? Had the warrant team showed up at the call center yet, or were they still mired down in some kind of paperwork jungle at police headquarters? For the briefest of moments I remembered the old, old days when I would have passed the time by pulling out a package of Marlboros and lighting up. But alas, those days are gone, too, right along with my reliance on McNaughton’s.

Forty-six minutes into the wait, my phone rang. I hoped it would be Scott giving me an update. It wasn’t. The caller turned out to be Kelly and she was pissed.

“What the hell?” she demanded.

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