Second Watch by J.A. Jance Page A

you a lesson in doing homicide interviews.”
    Our first stop was at Seattle Rendering, located in the Columbia City neighborhood. The plant was a sprawling redbrick warehouse in a collection of similar redbrick warehouses. On a wooden loading dock I spotted a dozen yellow fifty-gallon drums that were dead ringers for the one Donnie and Frankie Dodd had found on Magnolia Bluff.
    Watty and I made our way up the stairs leading to the loading dock and then let ourselves inside. The smell hit me at once—the odor of stale grease, only this time without the underlying hint of a dead body. A bullnecked man with the name STEVE embroidered on the pocket of his blue coveralls cut us off before we made it three steps inside. He was a huge, rawboned guy with hands as big as platters. He looked as though he could have taken on both Watty and me at the same time without so much as breaking a sweat. His beaky nose had apparently been broken more than once, and he was missing several front teeth. Looking at the guy, I wondered how an opponent had ever managed to get close enough to land even one of those blows.
    “You got an appointment?” Steve asked, barring our way.
    Watty held up his badge. “We’re looking for the owner,” he said.
    “Name’s Harlan Bates. He’s back in the office,” the guy said. “Follow me and I’ll take you there. He don’t like strangers wandering around out here unaccompanied.”
    Harlan’s office was at the far back of the building, closed off from the rest of the warehouse by an unpainted plywood partition. Entry to the office was through a flimsy door with a single windowpane in it. As soon as our guide opened the door, a cloud of cigarette smoke flooded out into the warehouse. I hadn’t had a cigarette since before my hurried trip to the Bon, and I breathed in the welcome taste of secondhand smoke with no small amount of gratitude.
    Harlan Bates appeared to be shorter and wider than Steve, but he shared the same general physique and facial features. I guessed the two men were either brothers or cousins.
    Harlan sat at a scarred wooden desk under a flickering fluorescent bulb, poring over a handwritten ledger that was open before him. The desk was as grubby as the rest of the office. An immense overflowing ashtray sat stationed at the man’s elbow, while a burning cigarette was clamped between his lips.
    Harlan gave Watty and me a hard-eyed once-over. “Who’s this, Stevie?” Harlan demanded, speaking through clenched teeth and without bothering to let go of his cigarette. “Salesmen of some kind? You know I don’t talk to salesmen before noon.”
    “We’re not salesmen,” Watty interjected, holding up his badge. “We’d like to talk to you about barrel number 1432.”
    There were two torn and scuzzy metal-and-vinyl chairs positioned in front of Harlan’s battered desk. Without waiting to be invited, Watty took a seat on one of them, and I followed suit with the other.
    In response, Bates lowered the remains of his unfiltered cigarette from his mouth. Leaving a trail of ashes across both the ledger and the desk, he returned the smoldering butt to the ashtray and ground it out, spilling more ashes as he did so.
    “What do you want to know about it?” he asked.
    “Where was it last?”
    Shaking his head in obvious irritation, Bates slammed shut the open ledger. Then, spinning around on his decrepit wooden chair, he returned the first book to a dusty shelf behind him and pulled out another. The second one looked very much like the first. He dropped it onto the desk and opened it.
    Dampening his tobacco-stained fingers with spit, he thumbed through worn, yellowing pages that were covered with neatly handwritten columns. Finally settling on a single page, he pulled on a pair of reading glasses and peered at the page with studied concentration.
    “Dragon’s Head Restaurant, in the International District,” Bates said. “We dropped off drum number 1432 on Tuesday two weeks ago. Chin