A Perfect Grave Read Free Page A

there.
    Jason was relieved, on the verge of releasing the channel and his concern when somewhere in the static storm of a broken transmission he heard, “ …nun’s apartment…send it to you on your MDT… ”
    Nun’s apartment? What’s going on? Jason knew there were several buildings owned by the Archdiocese. And now they were using the Mobile Data Terminal. Better try the precinct, he thought, reaching for his phone when it startled him by ringing with an incoming call.
    “ Seattle Mirror. ”
    “I’m calling for Jason Wade—is he at this number?”
    “You got me.”
    The stranger’s voice was coming from the din of a party crowd, the sounds of a cash register, and chinking glass.
    “I’m calling about your father.”
    “ My father? What about him? Is he all right?”
    “He asked me to call, he says he needs you here right away.”
    “What, where is he and who are you? What’s going on, is he hurt?”
    “Look, I’m delivering the message. He’s here at the Ice House Bar, he said you know where it is and that it’s an emergency. I gotta go.”
    Bar.
    Jason buried his face in his hands.
    He’s at a damn bar. I don’t need this, Dad. Not now.
    The scanner crackled with another fragment.
    What was going on near Yesler Terrace?

Chapter Three
    J esus Christ revealed his bleeding heart wrapped with thorns in the painting above Isabella Martell’s couch as Detective Grace Garner listened to her lie about her grandson.
    “No, Roberto, he no come here.”
    Grace threw a glance to Detective Dominic Perelli, her partner, tapped her pen in her notebook, then exhaled her disappointment.
    “And you have no idea where he is?”
    Isabella shook her head, blinking behind her thick glasses while staring into her hands, nearly arthritic now from years of scrubbing toilets in the Mutual Tower. Roberto beamed from his framed high school picture atop her Motorola TV. Nothing in his grin foretold that he would become a twenty-six-year-old drug-dealing pimp, who, at age twenty-three, would do nine months in prison for beating one of his girls.
    According to an informant, Roberto was the last to see Sharla May Forrest alive before she was discovered behind an Aurora Avenue pawnshop.
    She’d been strangled.
    She was a teenage prostitute whose corpse had been found several weeks ago. And Grace still had next to nothing. No solid witnesses. Nothing but fragments and partials of trace evidence, nothing concrete. Nothing but a tip from a rival dealer happy to tell the SPD that “Sharla May owed Roberto and people saw him with her.”
    Whether the lead was valid or not, Grace needed to talk to Roberto Martell. Despite the fact that two days ago a neighbor had called police to complain about loud music coming from a Mustang with Roberto’s plates idling in the street at this address, while a man matching Roberto’s description had walked into this house, there was no way Isabella was going to give up the whereabouts of her flesh and blood.
    “Hell, before she came to this country, she stared down the death squads who murdered her father,” Perelli said later into a laminated menu at a Belltown diner where Grace brooded over coffee and everything else.
    The Forrest case was growing as cold as the headstone on Sharla May’s grave. It seemed destined to remain unsolved like the last three murders Grace had caught. It was the same for the other detectives. Morale was flagging. In the last twenty months, eight veteran investigators had either retired or transferred out of Homicide. The toll was written in the unit’s clearance rate, which had dropped from 80 percent to 55 percent.
    “These sad stats say that killers stand a good chance of getting away with murder in this city,” a Seattle Mirror columnist charged in a full-bore attack on the SPD.
    This perception concerned the Commission, which concerned the chief, who pressured the deputy, who told the assistant chief, who summoned the captain, who instructed the