3 a.m. (Henry Bins 1) (18 page)

She continued down and I reluctantly started
after her. When I caught up with her, I said, “That’s a pretty
spiffy sweater. I’d take it off if I were you.”

“
How ‘bout
not.”

“
Worth a try.”

“
Stop trying.”

“
Noted.”

I thought perhaps Erica would have let me
take the lead seeing as how 1)I’d done this only hours earlier, 2)
this was my backyard, 3) I knew the best path to the water, and 4)
I had a penis. She veered off to the left and found a trail. I
guess not.

I said, “It’s better to stay in the trees.”
It was more difficult and time consuming, but if you fell in the
trees there was something to hang onto.

Erica cut her eyes at me and said, “Thanks,
but if I want your help, I’ll ask for it.”

Yikes.

After two or three minutes, Erica had a
substantial lead on me. I could see the beam of her flashlight
bobbing and weaving thirty feet below me. I grabbed hold of the
trunk of a large madrona and lowered myself down a couple feet. The
soil was slippery and I nearly lost my footing. When I righted
myself, I noticed the beam of Erica’s flashlight was no longer
visible. I called her name but only a dull echo responded. I’m not
sure if she was physically unable to answer or if her pride was
caught in her throat.

I picked my way down to where I’d last seen
her and continued to shout her name. After a couple seconds, I
heard a faint, “Over here.”

I headed in that direction. After about
thirty seconds of “Marco, Polo,” I found her. I shined my
flashlight in her face. She squinted her eyes against the light.
“You okay, sport?” I tried for my most concerned tone.

She’d slid about twenty feet down and was
hanging onto an exposed root jutting from the ground. Half her body
dangled off a steep drop-off. I watched as she attempted to pull
herself up, but the incline was too steep and she couldn’t get a
footing.

I inched closer and shined
the flashlight down on the terrain below. If she lost her grip she
was going to go for quite the tumble. It would go something
like
crash, bang, slice, snap, splash,
gurgle, eulogy.

She forced a smile. “Never better.”

“
Really, because you don’t
look like you’re all right.”

She made a noise.

“
Did you know you’re
dangling off a fifty-foot drop-off?”

“
I’m aware of that.” She
had an underlying defiance in her voice that I didn’t
appreciate.

“
Have you ever seen
The English Patient
?”

“
The movie?”

“
Yeah, the movie
The English Patient
. The
one where the guy goes to the desert and gets sick.”

“
Sure. Yeah. Sounds
familiar.”

“
Man, does it take him
awhile to die. What, like, almost four hours?”

“
Uh. Yeah, long, uh, long
movie.” She glanced at her fingers, they appeared to be
tiring.

“
What do you suppose he
had?”

“
Who?”

“
The guy from that movie.
What do you suppose he had? You know, to make him
so
sick?”

She opened and closed her eyes a couple
times. I could tell she was really wracking her brain for this. Or
maybe she was getting exhausted from hanging off a cliff. Probably
a combination of the two. Finally she said, “Um, he had cancer.
Yeah. Some sort of cancer.”

“
Cancer, huh. You sure?
I’m thinking it was some sort of pox. Chicken or small.”

“
Could have been.” Her
fingers were going frantic, slipping, readjust ting. She looked up.
The defiance was gone, swapped for pure and utter panic. She said,
“Um, listen, do you suppose you could lend me a hand
here?”

I bent down, grabbed her arm, and pulled her
up. She was surprisingly light.

Her flashlight had come to rest about six
feet from her. I plucked it from the mud and wiped the lens clean
with my sleeve. I handed it back to her, gave her a soft pat on the
shoulder, and started picking my way down the bluff. Through the
trees, of course.

From that point on, Erica followed behind
me.

Chapter 5

After a couple minutes of silence, I turned
and asked the detective, who was nipping at my heels, “Do you mind
my asking how old you are?”

“
Yes.”

I waited for her to elaborate. She did
not.

I turned and stared at her.

She said, “I’ll be 26 in two weeks.”

“
You’re 25?”

She nodded.

“
Isn’t that pretty young
for a detective?”

She shrugged. “I guess so. The rule of thumb
is usually three years working the beat, but when the position
opened up I was the obvious choice.”

I knew the rule of thumb. “And when was
this?”

“
About ten days
ago.”

I stopped and turned. “Are you shitting
me?”

“
Nope.”

I wanted to tell Detective Erica Frost what
I used to tell my students on the first day of class. “Don’t do
this. Walk out that door right now and find something else. It will
ruin you. It will eat you up from the inside. It will rip out your
heart and poison your brain. You’ve all seen Ghostbusters? It’s
like where they put all those ghosts. You store them in this little
part of your brain. A part you can’t see, a part they don’t have a
name for, a part that won’t show up on a CAT scan, and you lock
them away. Now, it might be thirty years from now, but eventually
something is going to flip that switch and let all those ghosts
loose. And you can’t put them back. You can’t ever lock them up
again. Do yourself a favor, get up, walk out that door, and never
look back.” In three semesters only one kid left. He became a real
estate agent. Then one of his clients killed him. Life’s funny
sometimes.

Erica snapped me from my reverie. “And what
do you do for a living?”

“
I’m retired.”

“
Well, what is it you used
to do?”

 “
I used to be a
party planner.”

“
Really? You don’t strike
me as the type.”

“
Yep. I specialized in
Retirement and Going Away.”

“
You’re
serious?”

“
Yeah. Why? You need
something planned? I also do Graduation and Coming Out.”

“
Not right now. But if I
do you’re the first person I’ll call.”

We made it to the small landing where I’d
stopped earlier. We both swept our flashlights over the dark water.
The tide had gone out and had taken the white water with it. Erica
moved her flashlight to the area just to our right and said, “Is
that a wallet?”

She knelt down and pulled my wallet from
where I’d hid it just an hour earlier.

“
It’s probably the
killer’s.” Figured I’d throw that out there.

She ignored me.

She flipped the wallet open and shined her
flashlight on the license. She looked from the license to me, then
back to the license, then back to me. “Six foot. Brown hair. Blue
eyes. 180 lbs.” She flipped the wallet closed and handed it to me.
Then she said with a smirk, “Consider yourself a suspect, Mr.
Prescott.”

I smiled, took the wallet from her, and put
it in my pocket.

The body was where I’d left it. Erica sidled
up to what was left of the woman, training her flashlight on the
partially devoured flesh. She went down on her haunches, wrinkling
her nose in the process. I guess the smell was getting to her. She
looked up at me and asked, “What do you suppose happened to
her?”

“
Probably some killer
whales nibbling on her. There’s a bunch of other stuff out there.
Sharks, sea dogs, giant salmon. All kinds of weird stuff.” Just ask
Captain Nemo.

Erica pulled a latex glove from her pocket
and slipped it onto her right hand. She grabbed the woman’s chin
and gently lolled it to the side. She looked up at me, then back at
the woman. Her mouth was gaping and I prodded, “I’m guessing you
know who she is?”

“
You don’t?”

“
If I knew who she was, I
wouldn’t have referred to her as
the dead
lady with the bullet hole in her forehead.
”

“
This is Ellen
Gray.”

“
No way.”

She nodded, and an evil smile lit her face.
I knew that smile all too well. Without her saying a word, I knew
she’d just caught the case of a lifetime. A career maker.

I asked, “Are you sure this is Ellen
Gray?”

“
Positive.”

“
I can’t believe
it.”

“
Yep. It’s
her.”

“
Can I ask you one
question?”

“
Sure.”

“
Who the fuck is Ellen
Gray?”

She gave me an inquisitive
glare. “You
really
don’t know?”

I
really
didn’t and shook my
head.

“
She’s the governor of
Washington.”

We both looked at the body
and I said, “You mean
was
.”

Chapter 6

The wheels were in motion. Thanksgiving was
about to end for a whole lot of people. The plan was for me to hike
back up to the house and wait for the cavalry to arrive. Then play
Sherpa. Which of course I wouldn’t do. I’d done my part. I’d found
the body. Called the authorities. Passed the buck. My hands were
clean. I would have to give a short statement to the crime scene
recorder and then I could forget all about my thirty-third
Thanksgiving, Erica Frost, and Ellen Gray.

Speaking of Ellen, after Erica had made a
couple phone calls, she’d spent the next few minutes filling me in
on the ex-governor of Washington.

According to Erica, Ellen Gray had been the
governor of Washington the past term and had been up for reelection
this fall. Which means she was first elected four years after I’d
bid the Evergreen State farewell.

Apparently, on October 15—roughly six weeks
before—the governor went for a Sunday afternoon hike in the North
Cascades, a weekly routine during which she allowed no one—not her
daughters, her husband, any of her closest friends, not even
someone from her security detail—to accompany her. She’d been
chided for this repeatedly, but she wouldn’t budge. It was her
single, solitary, block of time away from the public, from the
demands of family, friends, and the entire state of Washington.

Governor Gray had not been seen again.

Within hours of her disappearance, the
largest search and rescue operation in Washington history was under
way. Thirty helicopters, a thousand uniformed men, one hundred
public officials, and an outreach of citizens so overwhelming they
had to start turning people away. Twelve hours into the search, the
governor’s backpack was found, nestled in a bush at the edge of a
glacial ravine six miles deep into the mountains. It contained a
Ziploc bag of trailmix, a North Cascades map, a disposable camera,
some Benadryl, and a bottled water. No other traces of Ellen would
be found.

The search went on for days, then weeks.

She’d vanished.

For the first couple weeks, Erica said, you
couldn’t escape the story. It ran on every channel, every minute of
every day. The public demanded answers. Was it an accident? People
went missing and died in the treacherous North Cascades all the
time. Had she slipped and fallen into one of the many raging
rivers? Did she fall into one of the many glacial ravines as her
backpack would indicate? Had she been attacked by a bear or a
mountain lion?

These were the most logical of answers, but
the many conspiracy theorists felt Governor Gray had been
kidnapped. Or murdered.

As always, the husband had
been the primary suspect. But Adam Gray wasn’t your ordinary
husband; he was a lawyer, a lawyer who according to Miss Frost had
just this September been named as one of
Forbes
100 Most Powerful
People
.

Adam was used to the spotlight and
flourished in it. He had a solid alibi, but the overall consensus
from folks was that he was still somehow involved in his wife’s
disappearance. But over time, as no evidence surfaced, people began
to accept that their beloved governor had died in a tragic
accident.

Finally, on the second Tuesday of November,
a funeral for Ellen Ann Gray was held. A small private ceremony for
friends and family was held, as well as a public funeral at Qwest
Stadium. Every seat of the 72,000-capacity stadium was occupied
with another 40,000 watching on the telescreen at nearby Safeco
Field. A reported three million people tuned in at home. Schools
were canceled. Businesses closed for the day. A city mourned.

Forty-three days later, Ellen Gray’s body
was found.

. . .

A Seattle Sheriff’s Department patrol car
was parked in my drive when I reached the house. Its red and blue
lights danced in the moonlight and its windshield wipers sloshed to
and fro in a losing battle with the returning rain.

I rapped on the driver’s side window and two
cops stepped out. Both wore blue windbreakers and mustaches. Their
names were Bill and Ted. Seriously. I was tempted to ask them where
their phone booth was but decided against it.