Thriller 2

by Clive Cussler

  The man’s face had contorted into a full flood of surprise and excitement.

  Rastus turned to see why: three more giant splashes. Had to be whales, the way the water shot up.

  His uncle was running the boat right into the same area, having goosed the mighty engine and thrown something of a duck tail into their now violent wake. The man hoisted a pair of binoculars and surveyed the distant splashes—for now there were three more. Then five. And suddenly the water was boiling all around them—ten, twenty, fifty.

  His uncle dropped the glasses, let go of the wheel and ran to the railing. He hurled vomit into the water—a man who had never been seasick in his life.

  Rastus looked down into the water as a white fish, dead and floating, passed incredibly close. The boat struck the next.

  It wasn’t a fish at all: it was a naked woman. Big, and flabby and disgusting. Her skin around her chest and pelvis as white as bone; a patch of wet black hair where her legs met. And there, not twenty yards away, a man. Also naked. Faceup. Arms at his sides.

  The sky was raining dead bodies.

  A dozen a second now. Two dozen.

  Rastus heard a tremendous explosion. He looked to where his uncle had been at the rail. There was nothing but a splash of red there now and a deep dent in the metal decking.

  “Uncle!” Rastus screamed. “Uncle?”

  Six more bodies streamed by the boat, now running out of control.

  All naked. Every face locked—or were they frozen?—in an unforgiving expression of pure terror.

  The fifth that passed by was unmistakable.

  It was his mother.

  As he’d never seen her.

  Nine years later

  The Joke’s on U was a comedy club in Seattle’s university district, on Friday and Saturday nights, a haunt for college kids, but during the week an escape for aging software wizards, Green-party candidates, some white-haired hippies wearing bifocals and, on this evening, an oversize man at the beat-up piano on stage, a long-in-the-tooth police lieutenant—or former police lieutenant, he wasn’t sure—plugging through a killer rendition of an Oscar Peterson arrangement.

  The establishment had moved around town, mostly along 45th Avenue, occasionally changing or at least modifying its name, trying to retain its former clientele while simultaneously skating on some existing debt. It’s owner, Bear Berenson, was a fiftysomething hempie, round in the middle and pallid in the face, a man with a contagious laugh, an agreeable disposition, and a bad left hip. He’d fallen off a bicycle two years earlier, riding at night, without any light, while royally stoned and busy trying to do some math in his head. “The hip has never been right since,” he liked to say, counting how long it took whoever would listen to realize it was a pun. Those who missed the pun altogether were people that didn’t interest Bear. The man at the piano had not only gotten the joke the first time he’d heard it—of many—but had been quick enough to finish the sentence, and therefore the joke, for him. It was just this kind of person that interested Bear—fiercely intelligent, yet humble; nimbly facile, but reserved. Able to leap small buildings—with a ladder and rope.

  Lou Boldt kept the song going with his right hand while he sipped some very cold milk, using his left. It was a good happy-hour crowd, all things considered. Some pretty coeds had wandered in, no doubt expecting stand-up, but had stayed the better part of an hour, were presently on the back end of several rounds of margaritas and, without knowing it—or maybe they did—were providing eye candy for the true jazz aficionados who populated the lounge.

  Boldt brought the bass line back into the improvisation, but didn’t have time to wipe his mouth so he wore a Who’s Got Milk mustache for as long as it took him to lean into his own shoulder and drag his lips across the white button-down oxford. If you looked closely, you could see the JCPenney fabric tag escaping the starched collar for it was half-torn off and trying to act as a small flag beneath the buzz cut, graying stubble of head hair that held the texture of a kitchen scrub brush. Boldt smiled and grimaced when he played, his face a marvel to watch as it reacted to the shapes of the sound and the story his fingers told, as if surprised himself by what he heard. Enigmatic in conversation and generally not known for talking much at all, here at the piano, Lord of the Eighty-Eight Keys, Lou Boldt shined. For ninety minutes, once a week—sometimes twice—he revealed things about himself that only his closest friends understood. Bear Berenson was one of those friends. So was Phil Shoswitz, a former lieutenant himself, then a captain, now a deputy commissioner. He wasn’t a regular to these happy-hour performances, but he was no stranger, either. His presence at the moment, however, signaled something else to Boldt. Boldt had been black-balled by anyone of equal or higher rank within the department during his suspension, a leave of absence now in it’s third month. Only his homicide detectives treated him humanly. The inquiry had seen to that. Internal Investigations. Unsubstantiated charges of criminal misconduct meted out in a brutally partisan moment of city politics—as far as Boldt was concerned. I.I. looked at it a little differently—they believed they had proven that Boldt had sneaked nearly ten thousand dollars in cash back into the property room in an attempt to save a former homicide detective’s “past, pension and future,” who’d been stupid enough to “borrow” it in the first place.

  For the past forty-three minutes—but who was counting?—Boldt had been assuming that Shoswitz had been sent here to dole out his sentence, to deliver the ruling, to answer the one question that had been hanging over Boldt’s head for the past eighty-seven days.

  Did he, or did he not have a job?

  For him it wasn’t about guilt or innocence, because he knew the truth. It was about how far I.I. could wear that stick up their ass and still sit down at the table. It was about ignoring fact for fiction, the exact way so many young detectives chose to do when first on the job—on Boldt’s homicide squad. People like Barbara “Bobbie” Gaynes, who was also in the crowd, but back in a dark corner staying away from Shoswitz as if the man were an AIDS carrier. The two had gotten along once—Gaynes and Shoswitz—back when Boldt had promoted her into the ranks of homicide detective, breaking a glass ceiling that still had shards on the floor.

  You learned to tiptoe on the job. Gaynes was as good, or maybe better, at it than most. Than most of the most. A clear thinker and possessing single-minded determination, she fit the qualifications that Boldt sought for any and all of his teams. His staff. His bloodhounds. Her being here didn’t surprise him: she loved jazz piano, or claimed to. But she kept her eyes on Shoswitz the same way that Boldt tried not to. She knew. He knew.

  But what did Shoswitz know? And when the hell was he just going to march up to the slightly raised platform and “Deliver us from evil,” as Boldt thought of it.

  It was either a pardon or a pattern. Boldt was resolved to it being either. But the waiting. God…the ninety-minute set had never—not ever—dragged on for this long.

  This was pain.

  The call that came into the Seattle Police Department’s Broadway substation set off a controlled series of events that echoed through the halls of the sound-dampened Public Safety building, bouncing from one department to another over a series of three days that would later be put onto the official books as a period lasting precisely forty-nine hours. It wasn’t often the clocks were adjusted inside SPD, and it would take weeks for the adjustment to be made, but by then “the damage had been done,” as Lou Boldt put it to the press. Boldt, who had nothing to do with making three days look like two, could only reflect on what might have been had his department been informed of the missing person some twenty hours earlier. Perhaps nothing, he mused. But then again, maybe several lives would have been saved.

  “What are you doing here at this hour?” the woman asked from the open doorway to his lieutenant’s office, one of two such offices in Crimes Against Persons. It was day three since the call had come in—the exact hour that the report had first appeared on Boldt’s desk. “I thought you
were playing happy hour.”

  “Was. Yes.”

  “But you headed back downtown.”

  “I did.”

  Daphne Matthews had a radiance about her. His compass pointed to her true north; always had, always would. He’d sensed her before she’d spoken, the way a bird knows to signal dawn before the night sky lightens a single lumen. Some of this he could put off to her unusual, though plain, beauty—a combination of girl-next-door and smoking hot babe that she could ignite with a look or a stance or a new texture to her sultry voice. But only some. Most of the attraction came at a level that neither of them understood well enough to voice, something subcutaneous, like an agreeable infection.

  “Is it going to be twenty questions?” she asked.

  “The lieu was there,” he said, referring to Shoswitz by his former rank; Boldt had never fully adjusted to his own role of lieutenant, nor to Shoswitz having moved upstairs.

  “I’m sensing anxiety. Hostility. You’re closed off from me.”

  “Once a psychologist…” he said.

  “Too close to home?”

  “Don’t leave.”

  She had turned to go.

  “Please,” he added.

  “You sure?”

  “It’s not directed at you. None of it is meant for you.”

  “For Phil?”

  “I’m to take Reamer’s place,” he told her.

  “Reamer,” she said. Her eyes rolled as she scanned her mental Rolodex. “Your Reamer?” She had a look like she’d been punched.

  He felt that same thing in his belly.

  “My Reamer.”

  “Kansas City?” she asked.

  “St. Louis,” he answered. “Which leaves his desk open beginning next week.”

  “Reamer’s a sergeant,” she said.

  “Now you’re catching on.”

  “No way,” she said more boldly, now stepping inside.

  “I’m told it’s never happened at my pay scale,” he said. “I think that was intended to make me feel better, but it didn’t work.”

  “You’re moving back to the sergeant’s desk?”

  “If I want to stay on, I am. I could have taken my twenty nearly a decade ago. We both know that. They know that. They obviously want me to take it now.”

  “And you?”

  “I don’t golf. I have two kids in elementary school who will go to college someday. If I sit around at home, I’ll eat my service revolver. So what do you think?”

  “Jesus, Lou.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Are you seriously going to take it? You could get a rep to—”

  “No. This is their ruling. No more hearings. No more of this.”

  “But they’re false charges. We all know that. There’s no way they ruled against you in this.”

  “They just did. Of course they’ll say they ruled in my favor. Phil…he can’t say what he’s thinking, but he all but did. They want me out. While respecting the record, they don’t want the baggage.”

  “It’s because so much of the force looks up to you. Hell, you’re a living legend. That must scare the pee out of them.”

  “You know I hate that. Why do you do that? You, of all people?”

  “You are what you are. You can swim in de Nile, or you can make for shore and climb out. But don’t lay it on me. I don’t mean ‘legend’ in the sense of superhero. I mean, the rank and file looks up to you in a way few, if any around here—I would say none—are looked up to. That’s your burden, and that’s a threat to everyone above you. Everyone but Phil because he gets it.”

  “I’m not saying I’m buying that.”

  “I’m not selling,” she said. “And as to that, you’ve never bought in to it, but that’s because you can be as blind, deaf and stubborn as a mule at times. Brilliant at others. Right now you’re sitting on the pity pot, and it’s your pot to sit on, but dammit, Lou, when people around here fear you, you’re doing something right. Carpe diem.”

  “I was never comfortable looking out the window.”

  “You invented ways to get yourself onto investigations. The brass knows that about you. They’re doing you a favor. Long-term, this is a favor. You just can’t see it yet.”

  “Nearly a thirty percent pay cut.”

  “That hurts. That’s supposed to keep you from accepting it.”

  “Shorter vacation. Back to a pool car.”

  “Ditto and ditto.” She stepped even closer to him. It felt dangerous and warmer at the same time. “Did Phil give any opinion? Did he steer you one way or the other?”

  “He said he wished they’d let him take my desk. That the only real police work is on the streets. Always has been. Says it’s more like a corporation upstairs every day.”

  “That’s a nice compliment, don’t you think?”

  “LaMoia and I the same rank,” he said. A loaded statement because she’d been living with LaMoia for nearly a year now. The world’s oddest couple, and yet they were still together. A rocky year, he thought, looking on from a distance. They’d struggled with Social Services to maintain guardianship of a young girl. There was no way it was going to happen. They weren’t married. They weren’t in the system for adoption. But LaMoia knew enough judges and had enough friends to keep pushing back the decision a week here, a month there. It was all thumbs and toes in the dike at this point. They were about go get washed downstream and he had a feeling the whole thing would go if the child led the way.

  “He won’t treat it that way. You know that. You walk on water for him.”

  “Anything but.”

  “It’ll be your squad. Both teams. I pity the lieu who comes in above you.”

  “You make it sound as if my decision’s been made.”

  “Hasn’t it?”

  There were times, like right now, that he wanted to take her by the hips and pull her close to him. He wanted to experience her. Not so much sexual as just a physical contact to bridge all the words that flowed between them. Liz, his wife, would never understand. LaMoia would never understand. But he felt they would—he and Daphne. They would get it. They wouldn’t abuse it, or misuse it or push it. But it wasn’t to be. Not today. He’d learned to contain it, like locking up the neighborhood dog. He muzzled its bark. He tried not to feed it, hoping it would just roll over and die. But it never did.

  Not ever.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I suppose it has.”

  “Can I help you move your things across the room?”

  “I’d like that,” he said.

  “Do you need to call Liz?”

  “Do you need to call John?”

  They were maybe a foot apart. Her chest rose and fell more quickly than only a minute earlier. There was mirth in her eyes—he could swear there was—and invitation on her lips, and God, he didn’t dare look below her waist. He’d been there once, a long, long time ago, but he remembered it like they were still tasting the other’s skin. How could time stand still like that, while the world rushed by?

  The phone at the sergeant’s desk rang.

  His desk.

  It rang and rang, and Lou Boldt marched toward it with both reluctance and hunger, the same way he would have marched toward her—just this once—if she had dared to ask.

  “Get used to it,” Boldt said. He was standing outside an office high-rise at the northern end of Third Avenue where no local had ever foreseen a high-rise taking root. He addressed John LaMoia, who wore his trademark deer-skin jacket, so soft and supple it looked like a chamois, and the pressed jeans above the exotic cowboy boots. He couldn’t see Daphne pressing the jeans as other girlfriends had done for him over the years; it meant he had to send them out, had to actually pay to have them that way, and the thought of that amused Boldt to no end.

  “I’m good,” LaMoia said. “Welcome back, Sarge.”

  Technically, the graveyard was Boldt’s shift—another disincentive Shoswitz had thrown at him. LaMoia would be the day sergeant for CAP for the next month. But apparently D
aphne had said something, and a phone call had followed, and just as Boldt had been about to tap one of his team to join him, LaMoia had volunteered “for old time’s sake.”

  “So?” LaMoia said.

  “Call’s been on the books over two days,” Boldt said. “How that happened has to be looked into, but the fact is, a woman’s gone missing and we’re now officially past the first forty-eight—”

  “So we’re screwed.”

  “We’re challenged,” Boldt said.

  “And we’re here because this is where she was last seen?”

  “We don’t know if she was seen. We’re here to check the surveillance cameras because work was all the boyfriend gave me.”

  “You brought him in?”

  “Phone call.” Boldt answered LaMoia’s questioning look. “I wanted to expedite things. The extra day and all.”

  “All that time behind a desk,” LaMoia said, “can’t help a person’s game.”

  “One phone call,” Boldt said. “It saved us something like two, three hours.”

  “I’m not arguing,” LaMoia said. But he clearly disapproved of Boldt’s cutting a corner, and Boldt marveled how quickly his world had turned upside down: LaMoia—the rogue of all time—questioning his practices!

  “I’d like to find her alive.”

  “Would the boyfriend?” LaMoia asked, knowing that statistics put the crime squarely on the man.

  “Who knows? He sounded genuine enough, but maybe he’s taking Internet acting classes.”

  Boldt called into the high-rise over his mobile and they were approached moments later by a uniformed guard. As the man worked to open the doors, LaMoia spoke.

  “How can we gain access to security tape at this hour?”

  “Frankie Malone’s the top guy.”

  “No way.”

  “I called him at home. He gave us the keys to the store.”

  “When it works, it works,” LaMoia said.

  They were ushered in and taken to the security department and shown an hour of tapes. They had the missing woman arriving two days earlier. Had her going out to lunch with friends. Back in the hallways and elevators upon her return. Couldn’t find her leaving the building. Boldt asked the tapes be set aside and that half-inch copies be sent over to Public Safety by noon the same day.