“Don’t touch them,” I told him. “The crime lab may be able to pull something usable from this.”
Sergeant James came in the front door. “Nothing?” he asked. I nodded.
Glancy rocked back on his heels. “So where the hell is he?”
“He has a private plane, isn’t that true?” James asked.
“It’s usually parked at Boeing Field,” Glancy said.
“I’ll bet it isn’t tonight,” James commented thoughtfully.
Both Glancy and I looked at him. “What makes you say that?” I asked.
“Think about it; if you had come back from Bellingham, knowing that your life was about to blow up in your face, would you park your plane where you usually park it?”
“By God, he’s right,” Glancy said. “That’s why he had someone call a cab for him when he left the Public Safety Building.”
“When was that? He left before we did. Maybe a little before midnight.”
“Does he have one car or two?” I asked.
“One, as far as I know. A BMW. Why?”
“Because if he caught a cab home, he probably took another cab when he left here to go back to the plane.”
“That doesn’t do us a whole hell of a lot of good, does it?” Glancy sounded discouraged.
“Don’t give up. We’ve got one more card.”
By this time, I had memorized the Far West Cab Company number. I went to the phone and dialed. Larry was still there. “It’s Beaumont again,” I said. “Can we do this one last time?”
“You bet. The other guys are getting a real charge out of this. We feel like we’re playing cops and robbers.”
“You are,” I told him. I gave him B. W. Wainwright’s address.
When he came back on the line, Larry was laughing. “You’re closing in on him. He’s in a Yellow even as we speak.”
“A Yellow Cab? Where?”
“They picked him up from the address you gave me and took him down to Boeing Field. While he was there, the driver called his dispatcher to say he was heading from Boeing to the Skyport Airfield in Issaquah, so he was quitting for the night. Skyport’s evidently only a mile or two from where the cabbie lives.”
“How far ahead of us are they?”
“The dispatcher says they left Boeing Field about ten minutes ago, is all.”
“Larry, thanks. I owe you.”
I dropped the phone and raced for the door. “Come on, you guys. There isn’t minute to lose.”
“Why not? Where are they?”
“In a Yellow Cab somewhere between Boeing Field and the Issaquah Skyport.”
“How’d you do that?” Glancy asked wonderingly as we climbed into the Porsche.
“It pays to know people in high places,” I told him. “And taxi dispatchers are pretty close to the top of the list.”
CHAPTER 25
WE CAME FLYING THROUGH THE MONTLAKE underpass that leads from Interstate 5 to Highway 520 and the Evergreen Point Bridge. It was two o’clock in the morning, and it should have been clear sailing.
It wasn’t.
As soon as we topped the rise, I saw the traffic backup and hit the brakes. The problem was there was no alternative, no other way to get across the great water. Interstate 90 was closed for the weekend because of work being done on the Mercer Island Bridge. Now we were stuck in a massive backup because a couple of drunk teenagers leaving a rock concert had kamikazied into the railing on the eastern high-rise part of the Evergreen Point Bridge.
I glanced in the rearview mirror to see Sergeant James waving at me frantically, gesturing for me to pull over. I did, and he swung around me. I saw him place his emergency flashers on the roof of his car as he went past. He then motioned to me to fall into line behind him.
And that’s how we crossed the bridge, in a tight little line following James’s lead, working our way along the emergency-vehicle shoulder, with my red Porsche sandwiched between James’s unmarked but flashing sedan and the two squad cars. I’m sure the police escort accompanying my Porsche raised a few hackles in the process.
“What kind of a shot is he?” I asked Glancy as we eased our way along the shoulder.
“Crack,” Glancy responded.
I winced. That wasn’t the answer I wanted to hear. It’s one thing to go up against creeps and bullies, cowardly scumbags who don’t know their ass from a hole in the ground. This was different, and everyone in the caravan knew it. Wainwright was a trained police officer, a cornered trained police officer. A renegade. It wasn’t a confrontation any of us was looking forward to. The best we could hope for was to surprise him, to overwhelm him with sheer numbers.