Free JP Beaumont 11 - Failure To Appear (v5.0) by J. A. Jance

if the dead man hadn’t turned out to be someone else I knew from Seattle. It seemed as though the whole goddamned city had jumped in their cars and followed me down 1-5 to Ashland. I half expected my old hometown nemesis, Maxwell Cole—the intrepid, walrus-mustached columnist from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer —to turn up any minute for an impromptu interview. I was surprised he didn’t.
    An hour and a half later, after the emergency-room doctor finished stitching my wrist back together, I found myself closeted in a small conference room in Ashland’s Community Hospital while Gordon Fraymore, Ashland’s sole police detective, swallowed Tums by the fistful and gave me a going-over.
    Fraymore was older than I by a good five years, which meant he had been a cop that much longer as well. Since we were both long-term police officers, it seems reasonable that we would see eye-to-eye. We didn’t. Not at all. He took an instant dislike to me. Just because cops are sworn to uphold the peace doesn’t mean some of them won’t be assholes. That’s how Gordon Fraymore struck me—a born asshole.
    “Tell me again how it is you happen to know this Martin Shore character,” Fraymore said, drumming his fingertips impatiently on the smooth Formica tabletop.
    The murder victim’s identification had been accomplished through picture I.D. discovered on the body. As soon as Detective Fraymore mentioned Martin Shore’s name aloud, I realized I knew him.
    “I already told you.”
    “Tell me again.”
    “Shore had his own private-investigation firm up in Seattle. Specialized in criminal-defense-type work and some insurance claims. We ran into each other now and again, usually at the court-house. I knew him, but just in passing. We weren’t friends by any means.”
    I neglected to mention the degree to which Martin Shore and I weren’t friends. His offices were in a run-down part of Georgetown, a neighborhood in Seattle’s South End. Scuttlebutt had it that Shore was an ex-cop who had been drummed off the force in Yakima, Washington, where he was alleged to have been moonlighting as a porno distributor. He weaseled out of the charges without even having to cop a plea. Given that kind of history, I don’t know how he managed to come up with a P.I. license, but then, I don’t work for the Department of Licensing.
    I’m not fond of private investigators, so Martin Shore started out with one strike against him. In my book, porn dealers are the scum of the earth. Strike two. Since this was a murder investigation, it seemed best to keep those very personal opinions well under wraps. Rat or not, Martin Shore was dead, and Gordon Fraymore was the detective charged with finding his killer. Fraymore was casting his net in every direction, and I didn’t want to wind up in it. Actually, Fraymore already had himself one convenient scapegoat—Derek Chambers, the unfortunate driver of the Duster, who was still waiting and agonizing somewhere in the hospital.
    From a few things he said, I suspected Fraymore was somewhat confused, that he had inadvertently mixed up exactly who had been driving what. He was off on a wild tangent, thinking the woman had been driving the Duster and Derek Chambers the Cutlass. And while Fraymore blundered around in total ignorance, Derek and his worried parents were isolated in a hospital room down the hallway with a uniformed cop standing guard outside the door.
    I wish I could say those kinds of mistakes never happen. I can’t. I’ve made a few of them myself. In the heat of a new investigation, when a cop is working under incredible pressure, one piece of a puzzle unaccountably gets shifted to the wrong side of the board. With any kind of luck, the detective realizes where he went wrong and corrects his mistake, straightening out both his mind and his paper before any harm is done.
    As an impartial observer of events in Ashland, I found it easy to see what was happening. I wondered how long it would take