Damage Control Read online

  Her eyes were blank and her skin cold to the touch. Fearing she was slipping into shock, he hurried to his room and pulled a quilt off the bed. Wrapping her in it, he carried her down the stairs. He laid her on the couch in the living room and started a fire in the fireplace. Then he hurried back to the kitchen and made a cup of tea, warming the water in the microwave as his mind continued to relive that moment when he had burst through the front door and saw the bridge give way. The man had fallen as if a trapdoor had opened beneath him, plunging feet first and landing on the glass table in an explosion of lightning, thunder, and shattering glass. Still alive, he had managed to lift himself to his knees, bloodied, and looked up as if in one final plea for mercy. The suspended bridge hanging above him swung precariously by one end. Then Logan watched its weight pull it from its remaining bracket and it fell like a slab of lead from the heavens, striking the man with an immense and hideous force.

  The bell of the microwave pushed the vision from Logan’s head. He removed the mug and added the bag of tea to the hot water as he made his way back down the stairs. He sat beside her on the couch and lifted the cup to her lips. She sipped it gently. Then she leaned sideways, bracing her head against his shoulder, and they sat in silence listening to the storm.

  A POLICE CAR and Carole Nuchitelli’s Land Rover were parked in the circular drive in front of Logan’s house. The afternoon storm had passed, the dark clouds giving way to a persistent high gray and patches of blue. Logan stood at the front door, hearing birds and the chimes in the trees. The standoff at the Bartell drugstore had also kept away the reporters, and for that he was grateful. He was finishing his conversation with Nuchitelli and another detective from the North Precinct, James Fick, a former lineman at the University of Oregon who still maintained much of his playing-day build.

  Logan said to Fick, “What went out over the radio? What does the press know?”

  “Nothing, at the moment,” Fick answered. “Everybody’s dealing with the aftermath at Bartell’s. They’ve had live coverage for three hours now. Any reporters not at the scene are at their desks trying to dig up information on the gunman and his hostages. You’re all alone out here.”

  Logan nodded. “I need you to delay everything. I don’t want anything reported in the newspapers. If any reporters call to question it, tell them there was a small fire, but the trucks never made it up because of the condition of the road. The storm extinguished the fire. Can we do that?”

  Fick nodded. They had bagged the gunman’s body and placed him in the back of Nuchitelli’s Land Rover. Logan went on, “Nooch, bury the body in the reefer for a day or two until I can figure out what’s going on here. If anyone, and I mean anyone, calls about it, play dumb. I don’t know the full extent of what I’m dealing with yet.”

  Nuchitelli shrugged. “No real doubt what killed him anyway, is there? Who is he?”

  “Trust me. This time you really do want him to remain anonymous.” She smiled at him. “I won’t forget it,” he said.

  Nuchitelli looked past him to where Dana sat on the couch, the comforter still wrapped around her. Then she and Fick left.

  Logan shut the door behind them and walked back inside. He stood on the top step of the sunken living room with his hands in his pockets. Dana sat examining her bandaged hand.

  “How’s the finger?”

  She looked up at him. “It’s okay.”

  “How about the rest of you?”

  “Better.”

  “Do you want some more tea?”

  She shook her head. Then she looked at the photograph in the picture frame. “How long after you were married did you know?”

  Logan stepped down. “About the muscular dystrophy? We knew in college. We were high school sweethearts. Sarah was diagnosed at eighteen. Some relatives on her mother’s side apparently had it. She died at thirty-six. I’m grateful for those eighteen years.”

  “You knew she had the disease, but you married her anyway?”

  The question came out of the blue but did not catch Logan totally off guard. He had been asked before. Even his parents had been against the wedding. They said he’d spend the best years of his life caring for an invalid. He sat in a chair across from Dana, elbows resting on his thighs. “I loved her.”

  “But you knew she would be crippled. That she was going to die.”

  He shrugged. “It didn’t change how I felt about her. I didn’t fall in love with her just because of how she looked, although to me she was the most beautiful woman in the world. I fell in love with her because of how she made me feel. That didn’t change when she was confined to a wheelchair. She was still beautiful. She still made me feel special.”

  Dana looked up at the bridges. “You knew she couldn’t have lived here, with the lofts and staircases and everything. She had to have known that, too.”

  He nodded. “I’m sure she did.”

  She took the quilt off. Her blouse was ripped and torn, her jeans spotted with blood. “If I keep this up, I’m not going to have any clothes left.”

  “You and Sarah are about the same size,” he said. “There are some clothes left in the closet in the bedroom.” Dana shook her head. He said, “Please. They’ve been in there for five years. Sarah was a very giving person. She would want you to get out of that blouse. A needle and thread is not going to salvage it.” He started up the stairs. “I’m afraid it will have to be jeans and baggy shirts. Sarah wasn’t much of a clotheshorse.”

  Dana smiled. “I think we would have gotten along just fine, your wife and I.”

  He stopped on the stairs and looked down at her. “I think you’re right.”

  47

  THE FLOOR-TO-CEILING bulletproof windows in Robert Meyers’s office offered a sweeping view of the slate-gray waters of Puget Sound. The ferry from Seattle to Victoria, British Columbia, skidded past Bainbridge Island like a water bug, leaving behind a V-shaped wake amid several white triangles—sailboats flicking back and forth. In the distance, a freighter carried stacks of colorful cargo containers three stories tall south, in the direction of the port of Seattle. The Olympic Mountains, still sprinkled with winter snow, framed the horizon.

  Seattle was no longer the hidden gem Meyers’s great-grandfather had discovered. Much to the expressed displeasure of natives, the rest of the country had discovered the Emerald City. Weyerhaeuser and Boeing remained significant players in the region and on the national stage. Like grandfathers at the family reunion, they continued to stand for hard work, persistence, and longevity. But it had been the Internet and Microsoft, with Bill Gates’s and Paul Allen’s billions, and the high-tech craze in general that made millionaires overnight and injected the populace with the entrepreneurial spirit that anything was possible. It had transformed Seattle like the gold rush of the 1840s had transformed California, bringing not just people in search of a quick fortune but an entire cottage industry of companies to support it. They came to the Pacific Northwest for the opportunity to get rich quick, then stayed for the affordable housing and the wholesome lifestyle that revolved around the outdoors.

  The Internet, cell phones, and mobile e-mail had also made the world smaller. Where a person lived was no longer a primary factor in whether he could win a national election. A state far removed from the national political scene producing a president was no longer a pipe dream. Clinton came out of Arkansas, Jimmy Carter out of Georgia. Both were states that did not possess an avalanche of electoral votes. Robert Meyers sensed the time was ripe for a president from the Northwest. Two-term Republican president Charles Monroe would step down without much to show for his eight years in office, and the Republicans had been unable to drum up anyone to excite or even interest the American public. The powers in the Democratic Party had also been intent on marching out the same old tired names. They had implored Meyers to wait his turn, offering him positions of power and prestige in the Senate to appease him. They hinted that he was too young and too inexperienced. They said losing would tarnish him for futur
e campaigns. Meyers, however, remained defiant. He had no intention of losing. He responded that Americans wanted an America that was once again bold and innovative, and the most recent polls, the results of which sat on his desk, suggested he was right. In the week since he had announced his candidacy, the percentage of Democrats indicating they would vote for him had jumped to 38 percent. He was confident that number would increase as his campaign reached full swing.

  But he had always been confident, it was another quality his father had instilled. When he inherited the family compound, he added a steel and concrete structure connected to the house by a seventy-foot sandstone-covered colonnade that the newspapers referred to as the West Coast West Wing. It included his office, offices for seven assistants, secretarial stations, a conference room capable of seating fifty, a movie theater/media center, and a ballroom and dining room for entertaining nearly four hundred guests. Inside the complex, Meyers’s and his wife’s whereabouts were monitored from a control center in the basement that used a state-of-the-art security system to deploy a team of security personnel, most former Army Rangers or Navy SEALs. Getting accustomed to the Secret Service detail that, upon his election, would follow them the rest of their lives would not be a problem.

  Casually dressed in a cashmere sweater, jeans, and penny loafers, Meyers sat at a desk hand-crafted from the timbers of a ship abandoned in arctic waters. When it was found by American whalers a century after it disappeared, attempts to raise the ship had been unsuccessful, but they had managed to salvage the wood. The desk and other ornate pieces in Meyers’s office had been crafted from it.

  Meyers looked up from the speech he would give to his supporters at the Fairmont Olympic Hotel Saturday night and reconfirmed the time by the clock on the mantel. He reached for the telephone and pressed a preprogrammed button. “Has Mr. Boutaire arrived yet?”

  The shift leader of his security staff advised that Peter Boutaire had not reported in, and attempts to reach him on his secure cellular phone had also been unsuccessful.

  It was not like Boutaire to be out of touch. “Send someone to check his apartment. When he arrives, have him report to me immediately.”

  Meyers hung up and returned his attention to the speech, but he found himself reading and rereading the opening sentence.

  48

  SHE TOOK A HOT shower, allowing the water and steam to soothe her aches and pains. She also relented and took one of her painkillers. It and the water helped to take the edge off the hurt. As she stepped from the shower, the bathroom mirror provided a full assessment of her newest bumps and bruises, cuts and scrapes. It wasn’t pretty.

  Dana slipped gently into the clothes Logan had provided for her. Sarah Logan had been an inch or two taller and maybe a few pounds heavier before her illness left her gaunt and weak. The extra inches made it easier for Dana to slip the pants and shirt over her assortment of bandages and bruises. With some difficulty, she rolled up the pants and pulled on socks and her own tennis shoes.

  With the suspended bridge out, she had to walk around the perimeter of the house and enter the kitchen from the opposite side. Logan had his back to her; he was slicing fruit on a wooden block to accompany two turkey sandwiches and glasses of milk. He said, “I don’t care if you’re not hungry. The hospital released you to my care, and you are going to need—”

  Dana was tying her hair in a ponytail when she realized Logan had stopped talking and was staring at her. “I’m sorry,” she said, feeling uncomfortable in the clothes. “Maybe I should put on something else.”

  “No. No, it’s okay.” Logan put down the knife and wiped his hands on a white towel. “I just haven’t seen those clothes in a while. It’s time they were worn again. I’ve been planning to take them to Goodwill. Are you hungry?” He finished cutting the apple and scooped the slices into a bowl with slices of banana and orange.

  “Starving.”

  “Good. Sit down. I’ll fill you in on what I’ve found out.”

  She took a seat at the pine table. In front of her, Logan set one of the sandwiches, the bowl of fruit, and a glass of milk. He stood taking a bite of the second sandwich. “The man’s name is Peter Boutaire. He was a marine, so his background check was relatively straightforward. He was forty-one, single, never married. Born and raised here in the Northwest. He and Meyers grew up together.”

  Dana stopped chewing.

  “Boutaire joined the military shortly after dropping out of high school—a female student accused him of rape. The charges were eventually dropped, and the story died. Because the woman was underage, everything was sealed. Boutaire served in Desert Storm and Desert Fox and was part of a United States advance force in Yugoslavia. After the marines, he returned to Seattle and briefly joined the police force but didn’t make it out of the academy. Meyers hired him to run his security staff. The man I met at McCormick’s was in the motel the night Laurence King was killed. Classic case of being in the wrong place doing the wrong thing at the wrong time, but he got a good look at Boutaire—one I don’t think he’ll ever forget. A few nights later, he’s was watching the news and just about had a coronary when he saw Boutaire standing in a crowd at Meyers’s side. Let’s just say it jump-started his conscience. He identified Boutaire from videotaped newscasts.”

  Dana shook her head. “What do we do now? Boutaire’s dead.”

  “Yes, but we have a guy who will swear Boutaire killed King, and Boutaire is closely connected to Robert Meyers. That should rock Meyers’s neat little world.”

  “I don’t want to rock Robert Meyers’s world. That’s a false justice. I want him convicted for killing my brother.”

  Logan put down his sandwich. “I have an address for Boutaire—an apartment in Belltown. I tend to believe, given his relationship to Meyers, that he was acting alone and not part of a group of renegade security guards, but I don’t know that. I’ve asked the medical examiner to keep the death quiet. It may give us some time to find out more before Meyers has a chance to cover Boutaire’s tracks.”

  “Don’t you need a warrant for that?” she asked.

  He shrugged. “That would mean considerable paperwork and rousting a judge from bed to tell me I don’t have enough probable cause.” He took another bite of his sandwich. “Besides, we’re just going to look. You feel up to taking a drive?”

  “No. But if we wait until I do, the whole place will be as clean as the cabin in Roslyn.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

  PETER BOUTAIRE’S APARTMENT was in a secure building on Second Street in Seattle’s Belltown. Just north of the financial district, Belltown had been cleaned up considerably over the past five years. Developers had built chic condominiums with views of Puget Sound, new apartment complexes, and upscale restaurants. The renovation had not, however, been able to remove all of the rough elements. A few corner liquor stores and bars remained. So did drug dealers and Seattle’s many homeless, protected by a liberal King County Code that did not include laws against vagrancy.

  A guard sat at a security console in a white-tiled lobby with potted ferns and a glass-bead chandelier. The guard directed Logan and Dana to the manager, a thin, prematurely gray man who answered the door of his apartment dressed in a purple University of ?Washington sweatshirt, pajama bottoms, and slippers.

  “Never had a bit of trouble out of him.” The manager spoke with a hint of a Louisiana accent as he led them down a hall lit by candle wall sconces. “Is he in some kind of trouble?”

  Logan nodded to Dana. “His sister is worried about him. He hasn’t called in a couple of days. We just want to take a look.”

  The manager turned to Dana as they stepped onto the elevator. “I hope he’s all right.”

  “What’s an apartment here run?” Logan asked.

  “Twelve hundred dollars and up, depending on the view. The apartments on the top floors facing west go for twenty-four hundred.”

  They stepped from the elevator onto the twelfth floor, to the apartment second on t
he left. The manager used a master key, and they walked into a sterile marbled hallway that led to a living room with a white carpet and little else. Furniture consisted of a straight-back couch and a table. There were no pictures on the walls or on the mantel over the fireplace. The built-in bookshelves were empty. There was no television or stereo. In the attached dining room, a gold-plated chandelier hung suspended over an empty space reserved for a table. The appeal of the apartment was clearly the view. Sliding glass doors opened onto a balcony that looked out over Elliott Bay and the lights of homes on Bainbridge Island.

  Logan turned to the manager. “How long did you say he lived here?”

  The man seemed equally perplexed by the meager furnishings. “He signed the lease about a year ago. I guess he wasn’t one for a lot of possessions.” He directed the comment to Dana.

  In the kitchen, the white tile counters were spotless, the oak cabinets empty. Logan wasted little time there. He moved down a hallway to a bathroom on the left. A closed door at the end of the hall was locked with a deadbolt. None of the other doors had one.

  The manager shook his head when Logan inquired about a key. “He must have put that on himself.”

  Logan stepped back, braced his back against the wall on the opposite side of the hallway, raised his leg, and smashed his shoe against the door. It took three kicks to knock it in. “Bill him for that,” he told the manager.

  “I’m going to have to,” the manager said.

  The room looked like a command center for a war. Multiple computer screens and keyboards were aligned on long folding tables. Beneath the tables were hard drives and a mass of computer cables, printers, fax machines, at least two shredders, a laminating machine, and other equipment whose immediate function Logan could not determine. He turned to Dana. “I’ll bet this explains Detective Dan Holmes’s credentials and scrambled telephone number.”