Even if the evening is dead, it is almost always resuscitated around one in the morning. Shields and other cops of the night knew that. The last hour before the bars shut down the exodus of the drunk begins. The hardy party folks make their woozy attempts at demonstrating sobriety—direct steps to their car, the key ready, the door pulled open without a false move. All police officers, from the parking-lot rent-a-cop to the seasoned veteran called back into late-night patrol, know that although it may be the dead of the night, things happen after one in the morning.
At the Des Moines marina, Shields was used to the after-midnight revelers who leave the bars and are drawn to the waterfront to continue the night. Sex and drugs are the usual reason. Kids come down to the water to maraud, smoke, and screw while their parents drift off to sleep in front of the soft blue glow of television sets that never seem to find a respite from use. Sticky, spent latex condoms sometimes pockmark the parking lot like the remnants of a water-balloon fight.
The tide was way out and in the warmth of the June evening Dave Shields could smell the salty, rotting mud that passes for a Puget Sound beach. He barely needed a jacket; the air was warming. His uniform was a light blue shirt, with a “City of Des Moines” patch on the shoulders. His pants were black and a duty belt dangling with a radio, flashlight, and pepper spray hung around his waist. Dave Shields looked the part of a cop.
He parked his silver and blue security-issue bike and followed the source of loud music down the ramp to the guest moorage in front of the harbormaster's office. When the tide was out, it brought the boats low and widened the beach. The music—some eighties junk—played from a stereo and bounced off the bank of condominiums that fringed the east side of the parking lot. Dave Shields knew the partiers—“old guys, some in their late thirties, even forties”—hadn't meant to be a nuisance. The sound carried across the black water and hung in the still air. They turned the volume way down and apologized and Shields headed back up the ramp to his bike.
But at the top of the ramp, something caught his attention. Bursts of red, then white. Dave Shields fixed his clear hazel eyes into the darkness, and in an instant he saw lights flash on a blue Plymouth Voyager with Alaska plates parked in one of the darker areas of the parking lot. The van was facing west. The brake lights tapped again.
Some guy's getting a blow job, he thought. It happened a lot at the marina. Shields and other officers well knew the shadowy form of a man leaned back from the wheel, touching the brakes with an errant foot, while a head popped up into view.
From the top of the moorage ramp, he watched it for a second, and the van started up, backing into a landscape island planted with junipers and Saint-John's-wort before rolling a tire up over the curb. The van rolled forward, but when it backed up once more it hit the curb and ran into the island again. The driver was a slight figure, a young boy, Shields thought, though later he was not so sure.
By now, Shields was suspicious. He watched the van, sure that it was a DUI. The van rolled forward and drove slowly, walking pace, through the parking lot. He cocked his head to his lapel microphone, called dispatch with a possible DUI, and walked along the bushes, not wanting to lose the van by returning for his bike.
The young officer continued walking in the shadows thirty or forty feet behind the van as it crawled south along the edge of the parking lot abutting the cliff of condominiums. The van turned right, followed along the docks, then turned left again, toward Anthony's Home Port. The restaurant was closed and the parking lot nearly empty. The pace of the van was odd, because it was so slow. The officer wondered how the van had enough momentum to make it over the speed bumps that interrupted the asphalt every few yards.
The van stopped for a few seconds, and went around the restaurant's waterfront eating deck before circling back around once more.
What are they doing? he thought. Did they see me?
The van pulled into a spot in front of a cyclone fence on the edge of the restaurant parking lot and its lights went dark. On the corner of the lot, just in front of the condos, Dave Shields waited for Des Moines's finest to show up.
Blond-haired, light-complected, Rich Niebush arrived first and checked in with the young security guard. Niebush was a favorite of Shields's, the kind of officer that he aspired to be: direct, professional, and even-keeled. Dave filled in the officer on what he had seen. As Rich Niebush and another officer, Bob Tschida, approached they fixed a spotlight on the van. Niebush could see a woman move from the back and slide into the driver's seat. By then Sergeant Robert Collins was there, too.
The officers pulled closer to the van and turned on their flashing lights. Niebush got out and walked toward the woman driver. A swipe of light from his flashlight also revealed the figure of a boy under a sleeping bag. The officers exchanged glances. Bob Tschida went to the driver's side to talk with the woman. Niebush stayed on the passenger side.