Damage Control Read online

  Cole started to drift off, the alcohol making him sleepy, hearing intermittent bits of the news story. He concentrated on his groin. If he timed it right, he could come just before the sports. He heard cheering and opened his eyes, fearing he’d fallen asleep, but it was just some dumbass in a suit mingling his way through a crowd. About to close his eyes again, he suddenly saw the face. Then the woman’s head bobbed up, blocking the television. Cole sat bolt upright and forced her head to the base of his shaft. A chill ran through him. “Son of a bitch,” he whispered.

  The woman grunted. Cole ignored her. Then she bit him.

  “Shit.”

  Cole grabbed her by the hair and threw her off the bed, scrambling forward, holding his dick in his hands. The face on the television was gone; he was looking at the news anchor’s big head.

  The woman got up from the floor, slapping at him with both hands. “Goddammit, Marshall. Fuck you. You’re an asshole. What is wrong with you? You can beat your own self off.”

  Cole held her away with one arm, bending her wrist backward as he changed channels to search the other broadcasts. The newscast on Channel 5 went to the sports desk for a quick teaser. Then it went to a commercial.

  21

  ISWEAR TO GOD, he’s going to explode.” Linda sounded both concerned and amused as she reported to Dana on Marvin Crocket the following morning. “I just hope he doesn’t have a heart attack and need mouth-to-mouth, because if that’s the case, somebody better call the coroner.”

  For Dana to have been AWOL an entire afternoon and now tardy the following morning was, to Crocket, open insubordination. Given that he wanted to fire her, it was also ironic that his biggest fear was undoubtedly that she was out interviewing with other law firms and scheming to steal his clients. “Tell him you can’t reach me. Tell him I have my cell phone turned off.” Dana smiled, thinking about the reaction that would get. Then she ended the call and did turn off her phone.

  She stepped from the car and crossed Harrison Street in a drizzling rain, pushing through the heavy doors of the stucco building near Seattle’s city center. Drills buzzed like a horde of mosquitoes, and she detected a faint metallic odor that reminded her of the dentist’s office. Three Korean men sat hunched at cubicles, deft fingers working drill bits and blue flames over fine pieces of jewelry. Dana approached an unfinished wooden counter nicked and charred by cigarette butts and pen and pencil markings. She asked the woman behind the counter if she could speak with Kim, uncertain despite years of patronage whether Kim was the Korean owner’s first or last name. Everyone, it seemed, just called him Kim. Kim had been her mother’s wholesale jeweler and had set Dana’s engagement ring and wedding band. Each anniversary, she returned to have him add a single small diamond. Over the years he had also worked on earrings, bracelets, and a watch, repairing clasps or adding brackets.

  “Mrs. Dana.” Kim walked to the counter through a string of beads hanging over a doorway. He wore the same outfit each time she came—black polyester pants and a white shortsleeved shirt with a pen clipped to the breast pocket. The cloth above the pocket was marked with blue ink dashes. Though Kim had to be in his sixties, he had an ageless round face free of wrinkles. His eyes were magnified behind black-framed glasses from which extended an antenna-like wire to a magnifying glass he could lower over his left lens.

  “Is it time already?” Kim turned to a calendar on the wall. “Nine diamonds?”

  “No, not yet.” Probably not ever, she thought. “We have another four months to survive.”

  Kim smiled, choosing to interpret her comment as a joke. “You survive,” he said with confidence. He raised his hands and shook them. “Three years, I have many women coming to have their wedding rings made into earrings. After three years, not so many. You solid.”

  “I have a favor to ask.” She reached into her purse. “I found a piece of jewelry, and I think it might be expensive. I was hoping you could tell me about it.”

  Kim flipped the magnifying glass on the end of the wire into place, staring out at her like a cartoon character with one enormous black eye. Dana placed the earring in his callused hand, and he rolled it along his fingertips, then bounced it lightly in his palm as if he could weigh the stones by feel. He held the earring by the clasp and considered it like a very small fish. Finally, he turned on a high-wattage lamp and examined it under a bright white light.

  “Very expensive. Blue stone is tanzanite. Rare. The diamonds are very high quality, and the setting is unique.”

  “How much would something like this cost?”

  Kim looked up, propping his elbows on the counter while continuing to hold the earring underneath the light. The intensity of his concentration indicated he was adding and multiplying figures in his head. “For two?” He spoke out loud but for his own benefit. “Possibly fifty, fifty-five thousand. Maybe more.”

  Dana had expected the price to be high, but the number still surprised her. “That much?”

  “At least.” He stood up. “You see here, design is trademarked. Make more valuable.”

  “Trademarked?”

  “Only one. So price could be much higher if you have two.”

  “I’ve never heard of jewelry being trademarked.”

  “Oh, yes.” Kim nodded decisively. “I have my own trademark.” He took a pad of scratch paper near a telephone and pulled the pen from his pocket, clicking it once and scribbling what looked like a “K” within a circle. “Many pieces my own design. You wearing one of them.” He slipped the pen back into his pocket without clicking it, leaving another blue ink mark on his shirt. He handed Dana the earring and a small magnifying eyepiece. “On back you see marking. That is trademark.”

  Dana flipped over the earring and examined a small etching that, when magnified, appeared to be two “W”s interlocked by the center “V.” She knew from patent work for her business clients that there were governmental offices for the registration of trademarks. “Is there a place where the jeweler registers his trademark, Kim? Where would I go to determine the name of the artist with this trademark?”

  Kim smiled. “You would come here. Lucky you.” He laughed. “Wait one moment.” He stepped away from the counter, disappearing again through the beaded doorway.

  Behind her, Dana heard the sound of a drill and instinctively ran her tongue along the fillings of her teeth. Kim reemerged with a well-worn magazine, set it on the counter, and flipped through torn and dog-eared pages. He used an index finger blackened and scarred with tiny burn marks to scan the pages. When he found the interlocked “W”s, he traced it to a page number, then fanned the pages of the magazine. After another moment, he closed it.

  “William Welles,” he said.

  “That’s the jeweler?” Dana asked.

  Kim nodded. “That is the designer.”

  “William Welles,” she said, as if trying it out. Her decision to talk with Kim had not been such a long shot after all. “I’d like to find him. How would I do that?”

  Kim nodded and slipped the top magazine to the side, beginning the process anew with a second magazine. Dana searched through her purse for a pen, but Kim reached for the pen in his pocket and handed it to her without looking up from the magazine. She tore off a piece of paper from the scratch pad on the counter. “If he has a telephone number, perhaps I can call before I go by.”

  Kim shook his head. “You might call him today, but you not going to drive by. Not unless your car float.”

  22

  THE SOUND OF a car door slamming caused Marshall Cole to sit upright in the chair. The television chirped at him like a bird at the first light of day. He peeked through the thick curtain pulled across the hotel window and squinted at the bright stream of sunlight. He’d fallen asleep, or likely passed out. During the night, he’d gotten up and used the gap in the curtain as a portal to the parking lot, watching intently for any sign of the blond man with the dark sunglasses. It was him. Cole was sure of it. Damn sure. Shit, how could he forget? He saw the face
in his dreams every night—a fucking nightmare.

  King had said he thought the man was Special Forces or some shit like that, but now Cole was thinking maybe the guy was more like Secret Service or, worse, a mercenary. Those dudes were the real badasses; the law didn’t mean shit to them, and they were just as well trained in all the covert shit as the Special Forces guys. They just didn’t live by any rules. They made their own. It explained how the man could appear at the hotel like a fucking ghost. He’d probably been one of those tunnel rats in the jungles of Vietnam or a sniper killing all the fucking towel-heads in Iraq. And now he was intent on killing Cole. Shit. Larry King had gotten them into a whole nest of trouble. The fuckhead. Whatever was going on, whoever the dude James Hill had been, this was bad shit. They’d killed King, and they would kill Cole. They could do it, too, people in the military. They could kill people. Make them disappear, wipe out birth records, anything that said the person ever even existed. Hell, they could make your own mother and father forget you. They had drugs to do that. Cole had seen it once on an X Files episode.

  Cole turned from the window and felt a sharp pain in his neck. He rubbed it vigorously. Longneck bottles lay scattered about the carpet. One, partly full, lay on its side near a wet spot. Cole had indeed passed out. Shit. He pulled back the curtain again. The glare of the sun reflected off the windshields of the cars in the lot. Had the same cars been parked there last night? Which ones? He couldn’t remember. He had kept track of the cars for hours, afraid the man would pull another Houdini, but then he’d passed out. Now everything was a blur.

  He patted his stomach, did not feel the butt of the automatic, and fumbled along the sides of the chair until realizing the gun was in his other hand. He stood. He was losing it, starting to panic. He picked up the bottle and drank the warm remnants in two swallows. When he burped, a burning sensation filled the back of his throat. He needed some food to calm his stomach. It felt like he’d swallowed red-hot coals. Taking a shit would be like shooting flames out his ass. He shoved the automatic in his pants and walked to the bed. Andrea Bright lay facedown on top of the covers, naked, mouth open, snoring. Her left eyeball rolled back and forth beneath the lid. Her name was what people called an irony, since she wasn’t bright by any stretch of the imagination. She was dumb as a stump. But she did give a good blow job, not that Cole could appreciate it under the circumstances. He slapped her on her ass. It brought her head off the pillow.

  “Huh? What?” She brushed strands of thin brown hair from her face.

  “Get up. Time to go.”

  She put her head back down. “Too tired.”

  He slapped her again, harder. The flesh of his hand cracked like a whip. “Get up, goddammit.”

  She sat up with her arms and legs flailing and threw a pillow at him. “Fuck you.”

  Cole shut off the television, gathered his brown leather jacket, and pulled a wad of cash from a pocket. He unfolded it and counted the bills on the cheap laminate dresser. He still had more than eleven hundred, close to twelve hundred. The hotels had been inexpensive. He’d been careful how much they spent.

  “Where are we going?” The woman slipped on a pair of blue jeans without any underwear and sucked in her stomach to snap the button.

  Someone rapped three times on the door. Cole pulled the automatic, flipped off the safety, and damn near started shooting through the hollow door. He raised one finger to tell Bright to keep quiet. She rolled her eyes and flipped him the bird. He carefully pulled back the curtain. A diminutive Mexican woman stood beside a pushcart loaded with toilet paper and towels.

  “Don’t need anything,” Cole said, angry. The woman had frightened the shit out of him.

  The woman spoke through the door: “You want fresh towels?”

  Bright laughed and flopped on her back on the bed, pulling up her knees like it was a real riot fest.

  “No!” Cole yelled. “Don’t need anything.”

  “When you want me to clean the room?”

  “I don’t give a shit, Señorita. Go get a taco or something. Not now.”

  The woman frowned and pushed the cart down the concrete walkway. Cole waited until he heard the same three rhythmic knocks, followed by the same series of questions.

  Bright pulled a T-shirt over her head and struggled to find the armholes, still laughing. “What? You think the maid is gonna shoot you, James Bond?”

  “Fuck you. I said get dressed.”

  She sat on the bed, pulling on white pumps. “Where are we going, anyway?”

  “Idaho.” Cole slipped on his jacket.

  “Fuck that. Bunch of redneck hicks in Idaho.”

  “You want to stay, stay.” Cole held out his hand. “Give me the keys to the car.”

  “It’s my car, Marshall.”

  And therein was Cole’s dilemma. He would have liked to dump Bright and save himself the expenses and aggravation, seeing as how he couldn’t even enjoy a blow job, but he needed the car, and Bright was vengeful enough to call the police if he took it. “Then get your ass in the car.” He shoved her toward the door. “Move.”

  Bright bent down and picked up her underwear and bra, holding them in a ball while retrieving her jean jacket from the chair. She pulled open the hotel door. “You’re an ass.”

  23

  LOGAN SAT AT his desk sipping coffee and picking at a blueberry scone while he reviewed the lab tests on the clothes found in the Emerald Inn motel room. The lab concluded that the dirt and soil could be found almost anywhere in the state of Washington. Big help. Logan could tell them exactly where to find the dirt. It had once been in the hole in the ground at the rear of the motel. Logan was also correct that the blood on the clothes belonged to James Hill. With the advent of DNA testing, there was no doubt. The forensic team had also lifted hair fibers from the clothes that did not match either the DNA testing for James Hill or Laurence King. There were no DNA tests on file for Marshall Cole, but based on the sizes, the clothes were surely his. Of more interest to Logan was the ballistics test. The bullet that had killed Laurence King was a .22-caliber slug. The bullets pulled from the hotel wall were fired from a 9mm handgun. The technicians calculated that the bullets embedded in the wall had been shot from the adjacent room. It left one logical conclusion. Logan had been right again. Someone other than Marshall Cole had shot Laurence King. Cole was likely in the other room as King’s backup, but spooked when King got shot, and fled, firing shots at random to slow down his pursuer before he jumped out the bathroom window.

  The telephone rang. Logan answered while continuing to consider the ballistics test.

  “Mike? It’s Dana.”

  Logan smiled at the sound of her voice. The rest of their dinner at Fae’s in Rosyln had been pleasant. She had finally relented and shared his fried chicken, and he didn’t even have to tempt her with the apple pie. She ate an entire slice. They sat for over an hour, drinking coffee, and she didn’t seem in any particular hurry to get home. As the sun set, he had considered her in the fading light through the window, and it did nothing to change his initial perception. Dana Hill was a beautiful woman, and for the first time in a long time, Logan did not feel guilty for thinking it or for having taken off his wedding ring. He had felt something for her the moment he saw her, a feeling he had not felt in years. Whether she had any feelings for him was difficult to tell. Dana Hill was guarded. When she smiled, her blue eyes sparkled, but it was a brief flash that faded quickly, as if sadness inside her dulled the color. Logan knew that kind of sadness, the kind that had grayed the world and his life for so long. Dana Hill had asked him a lot of questions about himself and his career, but she had avoided asking him anything too personal. She’d also avoided discussing her personal life or her husband, another sign her marriage was not going well. No man who loved his wife would have allowed her to identify her brother’s body or clean out his house alone. And though he had tried not to eavesdrop, Logan had heard a distance in her voice when she spoke to her husband on the telephone. I
t sounded like a business conversation. Logan suspected he knew why.

  I have no doubt you’re going to get lucky. You didn’t need to be a detective to figure out that Dana Hill was giving her husband a not so subtle warning that she knew what he was up to. Then she had turned off her phone, apparently uninterested in talking with him further.

  It didn’t matter. Dana Hill was the sister of a murder victim, a crime Logan had been charged with solving. She was also a married woman with a three-year-old daughter.

  Logan cupped his ear. “I’m having trouble hearing you. There’s a lot of background noise.”

  “I’m at Sea-Tac.”

  “The airport? Where are you going?”

  “I’m taking a trip. My flight is about to leave.”

  “Good for you. Are you taking Molly?”

  “No.” He heard a hesitation in her voice. “I think I might have found a lead on the earring. I won’t know until I get there.”

  Logan dropped his feet from the corner of his desk and stood up from his chair. “Dana, hold on. I just spoke with personnel; there is no one who even remotely resembles the man you and Bernadette Georges described. Daniel Holmes is bald and five foot seven. He is not the detective who came to your brother’s house or to the real estate office. They couldn’t trace the number on the business card, and the address was a fake. Whoever he is, judging by the condition of the cabin, he knows what he’s doing or has access to people who do. That means he also likely killed King and that makes him very dangerous, Dana.”

  “Tell me, Detective, do you still think two petty thieves killed my brother?”

  “What I thought isn’t important. I needed evidence, you know that.”

  “And do you have it?”

  “We got back the lab tests on the clothes from the motel. The blood on them matches your brother’s. They belonged to Cole. He and King buried them behind the motel, and there is no plausible reason why they would have dug them back up. If we accept that premise, then the same person who shot King and left the watch also dug up the clothes. That means he probably also sent Cole and King to your brother’s house. It was a setup. He knew when your brother would get home, and he knew they would kill him because of their criminal history. Now he’s covering his tracks, and that could include finding an expensive earring. Why else would he go back to your brother’s house unless he’s looking for something? If I’m right, you’re the next logical choice of people who could have it. You were cleaning out his house.”