Free Without Due Process by J. A. Jance Page A

plots at once was a bit of a stretch. That being the case, then the second scenario was far more likely—a vicious murderer was out to do in any number of Seattle’s finest and their families as well.
    Which brought me abruptly to the question of why me? Out of the fifteen hundred or so police officers in the city of Seattle, why had the gunman shot at me? It seemed likely that fate alone had cast me as a potential victim since Simmons, the officer left guarding the front door, would have been far more likely to open it.
    I remembered how we had sprinted down the sidewalk after the gunman’s car disappearing in the early-morning darkness. Almost all the law enforcement vehicles in the neighborhood had been gone by then, and the crime scene tape had not yet been strung across the gate. If it had been, Simmons, Deddens, or I would have stumbled over it in our race to the car. With that in mind, it was conceivable, then, that whoever did the shooting still believed that Ben Weston was the only possible person who would open his own door at that ungodly hour of the morning.
    Which brought me full circle and right back to Ben being the target of two totally separate murder plots at the same time—unless, as Janice Morraine had suggested, the killer really was a cop who knew full well that Ben Weston was already dead, who understood exactly what was going on, who had an accurate count of who was still inside the house, and who could make a pretty good guess which of those was most likely to open the door.
    Around and around I went, my thoughts chasing themselves like so many stupid dogs, endlessly pursuing their own tails.
    Janice Morraine climbed into the van and started the engine while I jolted myself out of my reverie and settled into the rider’s seat. “Where to?” she asked. “The department?”
    “Sure. That’s fine. I need to pick up a car.”
    We drove in silence for a few blocks. “Sorry about tonight,” I said. “I was out of line.”
    “We were all tired,” she returned. “When people are running on nerves like that, you can’t expect everyone to be on their very best behavior.”
    “You may be right,” I said quietly. “Not about Big Al, but about the murderer being a cop out to kill other cops.”
    “Forget it,” she said. “I’ve changed my mind about that, too.”
    “You have?”
    “We found six Flex-cufs in Ben Weston’s nightstand drawer and two in the kitchen. Maybe he was collecting them. God knows how many others he had stashed here and there around the house, but a cop wouldn’t have made all the mistakes.”
    “What mistakes?”
    “The footprints, for one thing. If we once find that pair of shoes, believe me, we won’t have any trouble matching them up. And the hair for another.”
    “The hair stuck between Shiree Western’s fingers?”
    She nodded. “That’s right. Any cop in his right mind would have noticed and had brains enough to get rid of those.”
    “What about fingerprints?”
    Janice shrugged. “Naturally, we found those all over the house, but until we have a record of all the family members’ prints, there’s no way to tell which ones, if any, are strays.”
    By then we were pulling into the garage at the Public Safety Building. “Thanks for the ride,” I said.
    “No problem.”
    “And no matter what I may have said before, for a criminalist, you’re not bad.”
    She grinned back at me, and I knew I’d been forgiven. “You’re not bad either,” she returned lightly, “for a boy.”
    Touché.
    I went upstairs long enough to pick up my messages and to receive a hug from Margie, my clerk, who seemed delighted that I hadn’t been shot to pieces. Then I hurried back down to the garage, checked out a car, and went home.
    It was only eight o’clock. I could smell the coffee and bacon as soon as the elevator door opened on the twenty-fifth floor. Obviously, Ralph Ames was making himself at home. I don’t know what kind of metabolism the man has, but he