The young woman shook his hand. "Detective Beth Anne Polemus, Seattle PD."
"Welcome to Portland," he said.
She gave an ironic shrug, took the handcuffs he held and cuffed her mother's hands securely.
Numb from the cold rain--and from the emotional fusion of the meeting--Beth Anne listened as Heath recited to the older woman, "Elizabeth Polemus, you're under arrest for murder, attempted murder, assault, armed robbery and dealing in stolen goods." He read her her rights and explained that she'd be arraigned in Oregon on local charges but was subject to an extradition order back to Michigan on a number of outstanding warrants there, including capital murder.
Beth Anne gestured to the young OSP officer who'd met her at the airport. She hadn't had time to do the paperwork that'd allow her to bring her own service weapon into another state so the trooper had loaned her one of theirs. She returned it to him now and turned back to watch a trooper search her mother.
"Honey," her mother began, the voice miserable, pleading.
Beth Anne ignored her, and Heath nodded to the young uniformed trooper, who led the woman toward a squad car. But Beth Anne stopped him and called, "Hold on. Frisk her better."
The uniformed trooper blinked, looking over the slim, slight captive, who seemed as unthreatening as a child. But, with a nod from Heath, he motioned over a policewoman, who expertly patted her down. The officer frowned when she came to the small of Liz's back. The mother gave a piercing glance to her daughter as the officer pulled up the woman's navy-blue jacket, revealing a small pocket sewn into the inside back of the garment. Inside was a small switchblade knife and a universal handcuff key.
"Jesus," whispered the officer. He nodded to the policewoman, who searched her again. No other surprises were found.
Beth Anne said, "That was a trick I remember from the old days. She'd sew secret pockets into her clothes. For shoplifting and hiding weapons." A cold laugh from the young woman. "Sewing and robbery. Those're her talents." The smile faded. "Killing too, of course."
"How could you do this to your mother?" Liz snapped viciously. "You Judas."
Beth Anne watched, detached, as the woman was led to a squad car.
Heath and Beth Anne stepped into the living room of the house. As the policewoman again surveyed the hundreds of thousands of dollars' of stolen property filling the bungalow, Heath said, "Thanks, Detective. I know this was hard for you. But we were desperate to collar her without anybody else getting hurt."
Capturing Liz Polemus could indeed have turned into a bloodbath. It had happened before. Several years ago, when her mother and her lover, Brad Selbit, had tried to knock over a jewelry store in Ann Arbor, Liz had been surprised by the security guards. He'd shot her in the arm. But that hadn't stopped her from grabbing her pistol with her other hand and killing him and a customer and then later shooting one of the responding police officers. She'd managed to escape. She'd left Michigan for Portland, where she and Brad had started up her operation again, sticking with her forte--knocking over jewelry stores and boutiques selling designer clothes, which she'd use her skills as a seamstress to alter and then would sell to fences in other states.
An informant had told the Oregon State Police that Liz Polemus was the one behind the string of recent robberies in the Northwest and was living under a fake name in a bungalow here. The OSP detectives on the case had learned that her daughter was a detective with the Seattle police department and had helicoptered Beth Anne to Portland Airport. She'd driven here alone to get her mother to surrender peacefully.
"She was on two states' ten-most-wanted lists. And I heard she was making a name for herself in California too. Imagine that--your own mother." Heath's voice faded, thinking this might be indelicate.
But Beth Anne didn't care. She mused, "That was my childhood--armed robbery, burglary, money laundering . . . . My father owned a warehouse where they fenced the stuff. That was their front--they'd inherited it from his father. Who was in the business too, by the way."
"Your grandfather?"
She nodded. "That warehouse . . . I can still see it so clear. Smell it. Feel the cold. And I was only there once. When I was about eight, I guess. It was full of perped merch. My father left me in the office alone for a few minutes and I peeked out the door and saw him and one of his buddies beating the hell out of this guy. Nearly killed him."
"Doesn't sound like they tried to keep anything very secret from you."
"Secret? Hell, they did everything they could to get me into the business. My father had these 'special games,' he called them. Oh, I was supposed to go over to friends' houses and scope out if they had valuables and where they were. Or check out TVs and VCRs at school and let him know where they kept them and what kind of locks were on the doors."
Heath shook his head in astonishment. Then he asked, "But you never had any run-ins with the law?"
She laughed. "Actually, yeah--I got busted once for shoplifting."
Heath nodded. "I copped a pack of cigarettes when I was fourteen. I can still feel my daddy's belt on my butt for that one."
"No, no," Beth Anne said. "I got busted returning some crap my mother stole."
"You what?"
"She took me to the store as cover. You know, a mother and daughter wouldn't be as suspicious as a woman by herself. I saw her pocket some watches and a necklace. When we got home I put the merch in a bag and took it back to the store. The guard saw me looking guilty, I guess, and he nailed me before I could replace anything. I took the rap. I mean, I wasn't going to drop a dime on my parents, was I? . . . My mother was so mad . . . . They honestly couldn't figure out why I didn't want to follow in their footsteps."
"You need some time with Dr. Phil or somebody."
"Been there. Still am."
She nodded as memories came back to her. "From, like, twelve or thirteen on, I tried to stay as far away from home as I could. I did every after-school activity I could. Volunteered at a hospital on weekends. My friends really helped me out. They were the best . . . I probably picked them because they were one-eighty from my parents' criminal crowd. I'd hang with the National Merit scholars, the debate team, Latin club. Anybody who was decent and normal. I wasn't a great student but I spent so much time at the library or studying at friends' houses I got a full scholarship and put myself through college."
"Where'd you go?"
"Ann Arbor. Criminal justice major. I took the CS exam and landed a spot on Detroit PD. Worked there for a while. Narcotics mostly. Then moved out here and joined the force in Seattle."
"And you've got your gold shield. You made detective fast." Heath looked over the house. "She lived here by herself? Where's your father?"
"Dead," Beth Anne said matter-of-factly. "She killed him."
"What?"
"Wait'll you read the extradition order from Michigan. Nobody knew it at the time, of course. The original coroner's report was an accident. But a few months ago this guy in prison in Michigan confessed that he'd helped her. Mother found out my father was skimming money from their operation and sharing it with some girlfriend. She hired this guy to kill him and make it look like an accidental drowning."
"I'm sorry, Detective."
Beth Anne shrugged. "I always wondered if I could forgive them. I remember once, I was still working Narc in Detroit. I'd just run a big bust out on Six Mile. Confiscated a bunch of smack. I was on my way to log the stuff into Evidence back at the station and I saw I was driving past the cemetery where my father was buried. I'd never been there. I pulled in and walked up to the grave and tried to forgive him. But I couldn't. I realized then that I never could--not him or my mother. That's when I decided I had to leave Michigan."
"Your mother ever remarry?"
"She took up with Selbit a few years ago but she never married him. You collared him yet?"
"No. He's around here somewhere but he's gone to ground."
Beth Anne gave a nod toward the phone. "Mother tried to grab the phone when I came in tonig
ht. She might've been trying to get a message to him. I'd check out the phone records. That might lead you to him."
"Good idea, Detective. I'll get a warrant tonight."
Beth Anne stared through the rain, toward where the squad car bearing her mother had vanished some minutes ago. "The weird part was that she believed she was doing the right thing for me, trying to get me into the business. Being a crook was her nature; she thought it was my nature too. She and Dad were born bad. They couldn't figure out why I was born good and wouldn't change."
"You have a family?" Heath asked.
"My husband's a sergeant in Juvenile." Then Beth Anne smiled. "And we're expecting. Our first."
"Hey, very cool."
"I'm on the job until June. Then I'm taking a LOA for a couple of years to be a mom." She felt an urge to add "Because children come first before anything." But, under the circumstances, she didn't think she needed to elaborate.
"Crime Scene's going to seal the place," Heath said. "But if you want to take a look around, that'd be okay. Maybe there's some pictures or something you want. Nobody'd care if you took some personal effects."
Beth Anne tapped her head. "I got more mementos up here than I need."
"Got it."
She zipped up her windbreaker, pulled the hood up. Another hollow laugh.
Heath lifted an eyebrow.
"You know my earliest memory?" she asked.
"What's that?"
"In the kitchen of my parents' first house outside of Detroit. I was sitting at the table. I must've been three. My mother was singing to me."
"Singing? Just like a real mother."
Beth Anne mused, "I don't know what song it was. I just remember her singing to keep me distracted. So I wouldn't play with what she was working on at the table."
"What was she doing, sewing?" Heath nodded toward the room containing a sewing machine and racks of stolen dresses.
"Nope," the woman answered. "She was reloading ammunition."
"You serious?"
A nod. "I figured out when I was older what she was doing. My folks didn't have much money then and they'd buy empty brass cartridges at gun shows and reload them. All I remember is the bullets were shiny and I wanted to play with them. She said if I didn't touch them she'd sing to me."
This story brought the conversation to a halt. The two officers listened to the rain falling on the roof.
Born bad . . .
"All right," Beth Anne finally said, "I'm going home."
Heath walked her outside and they said their good-byes. Beth Anne started the rental car and drove up the muddy, winding road toward the state highway.
Suddenly, from somewhere in the folds of her memory, a melody came into her head. She hummed a few bars out loud but couldn't place the tune. It left her vaguely unsettled. So Beth Anne flicked the radio on and found Jammin' 95.5, filling your night with solid-gold hits, party on, Portland . . . . She turned the volume up high and, thumping the steering wheel in time to the music, headed north toward the airport.
INTERROGATION
He's in the last room."
The man nodded to the sergeant and continued down the long corridor, grit underfoot. The walls were yellow cinderblock but the hallway reminded him of an old English prison, bricky and soot-washed.
As he approached the room he heard a bell somewhere nearby, a delicate ringing. He used to come here regularly but hadn't been in this portion of the building for months. The sound wasn't familiar and, despite the cheerful jingling, it was oddly unsettling.
He was halfway down the hallway when the sergeant called, "Captain?"
He turned.
"That was a good job you guys did. Getting him, I mean."
Boyle, a thick file under his arm, nodded and continued down the windowless corridor to room I-7.
What he saw through the square window: a benign-looking man of about forty, not big, not small, thick hair shot with gray. His amused eyes were on the wall, also cinderblock. His slippered feet were chained, his hands too, the silvery links looped through a waist bracelet.
Boyle unlocked and opened the door. The man grinned, looked the detective over.
"Hello, James," Boyle said.
"So you're him."
Boyle'd been tracking down and putting away murderers for nineteen years. He saw in James Kit Phelan's face what he always saw in such men and women at times like this. Insolence, anger, pride, fear.
The lean face, with a one-or two-days' growth of salt-and-pepper beard, the eyes blue as Dutch china.
But something was missing, Boyle decided. What? Yes, that was it, he concluded. Behind the eyes of most prisoners was a pool of bewilderment. In James Phelan this was absent.
The cop dropped the file on the table. Flipped through it quickly.
"You're the one," Phelan muttered.
"Oh, I don't deserve all the credit, James. We had a lotta folks out looking for you."
"But the word is they wouldn't've kept going if you hadn't been riding their tails. No sleep for your boys and girls's what I heard."
Boyle, a captain and the head of Homicide, had overseen the Granville Park murder task force of five men and women working full-time--and dozens of others working part-time (though everyone seemed to have logged at least ten, twelve hours a day). Still, Boyle had not testified in court, had never had a conversation with Phelan before today, never seen him up close. He expected to find the man looking very ordinary. Boyle was surprised to see another quality in the blue eyes. Something indescribable. There'd been no trace of this in the interrogation videos. What was it?
But James Phelan's eyes grew enigmatic once again as he studied Boyle's sports clothes. Jeans, Nikes, a purple Izod shirt. Phelan wore an orange jumpsuit.
Anyway, what it was, I killed her.
"That's a one-way mirror, ain't it?"
"Yes."
"Who's behind there?" He peered at the dim mirror, never once, Boyle noticed, glancing at his own reflection.
"We sometimes bring witnesses in to check out suspects. But there's nobody there now. Don't need 'em, do we?" Phelan sat back in the blue fiberglass chair. Boyle opened his notebook, took out a Bic pen. Boyle outweighed the prisoner by forty pounds, most of it muscle. Still, he set the pen far out of the man's reach.
Anyway, what it was . . .
"I've been asking to see you for almost a month," Boyle said amiably. "You haven't agreed to a meeting until now."
Sentencing was on Monday and after the judge pronounced one of the two sentences he was deciding upon at this very moment--life imprisonment or death by lethal injection--James Kit Phelan would be permanently giving up the county's hospitality for the state's.
" 'Meeting,' " Phelan repeated. He seemed amused. "Wouldn't 'interrogation' be more like it? That's what you have in mind, right?"
"You've confessed, James. Why would I want to interrogate you?"
"Dunno. Why'd you put in, let's see, was it something like a dozen phone calls to my lawyer over the past coupla months wanting to 'meet' with me?"
"Just some loose ends on the case. Nothing important."
In fact Boyle kept his excitement under wraps. He'd despaired of ever having a chance to talk to Phelan face to face; the longer the captain's requests had gone unanswered the more he brooded that he'd never learn what he was desperate to know. It was Saturday and only an hour ago he'd been packing up turkey sandwiches for a picnic with the family when the call from Phelan's lawyer came. He'd sent Judith and the kids on ahead and sped to the county lockup at 90 m.p.h.
Nothing important . . .
"I didn't want to see you 'fore this," Phelan said slowly, " 'cause I was thinking maybe you just wanted to, you know, gloat."
Boyle shook his head good-naturedly. But he also admitted to himself that he certainly had something to gloat about. When there was no arrest immediately following the murder, the case turned sour and it turned personal. Chief of Homicide Boyle versus the elusive, unknown killer.
The contest between the two adversaries had raged in the tabloids and in the police department and--more importantly--in Boyle's mind. Still taped up behind Boyle's desk was the front page of the Post, which showed a picture of dark-haired, swarthy Boyle glaring at the camera from the right-hand side of the paper and the police artist's composite of Anna Devereaux's killer from the left. The two pieces of art were separated by a bold, black VS., and the detective's was by far the scariest shot.
Boyle remembered the press conference held six months to the day after the murder in which he promised the people of the town of Granville that though the investigation had bogged down they weren't giving up hope and that the killer would be caught. Boyle had concluded, "That man is not getting away. There's only one way this's going to end. Not in a draw. In a checkmate." The comment--which a few months later became an embarrassing reminder of his failure--had, at last, been validated. The headline of every story about Phelan's arrest read, of course, CHECKMATE!
There was a time when Boyle would have taken the high ground and sneered down the suggestion that he was gloating over a fallen enemy. But now he wondered. Phelan had for no apparent reason killed a defenseless woman and had eluded the police for almost a year. It had been the hardest case Boyle had ever run, and he'd despaired many times of ever finding the perp. But, by God, he'd won. So, maybe there was a part of him that had come to look over his trophy.
. . . I killed her . . . . And there's nothing else I have to say.
"I just have a few questions to ask you," Boyle said. "Do you mind?"
"Talking about it? Guess not. It's kinda boring. Ain't that the truth about the past? Boring."
"Sometimes."
"That's not much of an answer. The past. Is. Boring. You ever shot anybody?"
Boyle had. Twice. And killed them both. "We're here to talk about you."
"I'm here 'cause I got caught. You're here to talk about me."
Phelan slouched in the chair. The chains clinked softly. It reminded him of the bell he'd heard when he entered the interrogation room corridor.
He looked down at the open file.
"So what do you want to know?" Phelan asked.