Thriller 2

by Clive Cussler

  “A piece. A wig.”

  “Yes. And we’ve got a smudge of lipstick in the vic’s hair along with traces of blood. Not her blood, but it is female and it is rich in stem cells.”

  “Stem cells?”

  “Menstrual blood.”

  “On her head?” LaMoia said. “Are you just being gross, Sarge, or is this going somewhere. Is this some stab at me and—”

  “No,” Boldt said, cutting him off. “We have hair evidence. We have contradictory evidence of menstrual blood in her head hair. We have two women that simply vanished from their office buildings. Is any of this clicking yet?”

  “Two Asians. The polymer. A wig?”

  “Well done.”

  “But the blood?”

  “Where would such bl—”

  “A bathroom. A women’s room.”

  “And how could a woman possibly get it on her head?”

  LaMoia drove through three more sets of lights, dodging angry traffic. He was just pulling up in front of the office tower with the lake view as he barked out his answer. “A trash bin in a woman’s restroom.”

  “Our boy goes in drag,” Boldt said. “It has to be damn convincing. He’s wearing an Asian wig—hair from several women. He’s cleaning sinks, mopping floors, waiting for that moment it’s just him and a woman that looks right to him—has to be a certain look.”

  “He thumps her,” LaMoia said, “dumps her into one of those waste bins, those giant things on the rollers.”

  “Covers her with waste product,” Boldt said. “Including, in this case, some used feminine products. She’s unconscious in there and can’t be seen from the outside.”

  “And he wheels her right out past everyone. Down to an alley or a parking garage, someplace innocuous but convenient. And lays her out in the trunk. Changes back to a man in the car—”

  “And is gone,” Boldt completed.

  “Jesus H.! The way your mind works.”

  “Fine line,” Boldt said, making a point of meeting eyes with LaMoia.

  “We’re here,” LaMoia said, “to look at security tape.”

  “We weren’t looking for housecleaners the first time,” Boldt said.

  “We go back and review parking-garage tape.”

  “I think we’d have caught it. Has to be the alley. No cameras in the alley—at least from this building.”

  “You think a neighboring building?” LaMoia asked.

  “Or maybe a CCTV. You check that out while I put up with these security guys.”

  LaMoia was twenty yards away when he called back enthusiastically. “We’re close, Sarge.”

  Boldt held up his hand to his ear indicating he wanted LaMoia to call him.

  Security guys could really drag things out.

  Cynthia Storm had been working Health and Human Services for Public Safety for two years. It was a long way up from Social Services, where she’d had to deal with teenage miscreants of every variety. Since the publication of a series of teenage vampire books, and a movie, Seattle had played host to a flood of teenage runaways. A city that typically saw far more than its fair share of vagrant minors, the number had nearly doubled in the past eighteen months, and as far as anyone could tell the only common denominator was that the vampire series had been set in the Pacific Northwest. Portland had seen a large increase, as well. Cynthia was more than happy not to have that on her watch; give her the meter maids and the men in uniform any day. But she hadn’t been promoted to the badges yet. She still mostly dealt with the service staff—all of whom had to be vetted to work Public Safety, and their absences had to be accounted for.

  Today, she was chasing down Jasmina Vladavich, a Bosnian housecleaner who’d failed to show to work for two days, had not answered her phone and, as it turned out, had not been seen by her cousin, the woman she’d listed as her emergency contact. Jasmina had a good track record with the department, but was rumored by the cousin to be in the early stages of pregnancy. She was unmarried and distraught about it. Cynthia and her supervisor had decided Jasmina worthy of a house call, to make sure that the baby had not led to prenatal depression or illness.

  She rang the bell. It was an apartment complex twenty minutes south of the city, near SEATAC, a neighborhood known for strip joints, drugs and borderline import/export businesses. Laundry hung from wires on half balconies attempting to dry in a climate that dictated otherwise. The sound of televisions competed. Jasmina didn’t answer the bell—no surprise there—but Cynthia used her credentials to talk the super into having a look. The elevator had not worked for three years, she was told. She trudged up five flights, down a hall marked with graffiti and was let into 514.

  “Jasmina?” she called out. The super waited at the door. “Hello?”

  She heard the groan. It came faintly from the back, barely heard over an episode of In Living Color playing next door. “Stay there!” she told the super, who looked ready to bolt.

  “Hello?” She followed the soft groans into a back bedroom where a woman was hog-tied and lying on her belly. She’d soiled herself, and her face was streaked with tears and mucus. A nylon knee sock had been used to gag her. She was wearing only underwear and a bra, and there were raw bruise marks—she’d been rocking on her legs, rolling around the room.

  “Call 911!” she hollered. “We need an ambulance right now!”

  She approached the woman cautiously. Jasmina looked a little wild around the eyes. “I’m going to help you, okay?”

  Jasmina nodded.

  “I’m going to remove the gag and the ropes. Jasmina? Do you hear me?”

  But the woman had lapsed into unconsciousness.

  Cynthia got the gag off and Jasmina sucked for air and came back awake.

  “Baby…” the woman moaned.

  “We’ll get you the hospital! Who did this to you, Jasmina? The father of the baby?”

  “No. Was my card,” the woman moaned. “My card.”

  “It’s all right. It’s all right.” She was talking nonsense, Cynthia realized.

  “Man…took my card. My ID card.” With her hand free now, she touched the plastic ID card that Cynthia had fastened to her own belt. “Public Safety card.”

  Cynthia didn’t care about any work card. Her concerns were dehydration, malnutrition and the condition of the baby inside this woman. “We’ve called an ambulance,” she reminded.

  “Why this for stupid card?” Jasmina groaned. She shook as she began to cry.

  Why indeed? Cynthia now thought as she focused more on what she was being told. She reached out, somewhat reluctantly because of the filth, and cradled the crying woman in her arms.

  Why indeed?

  Daphne had been briefed over the phone by an energetic Lou Boldt she had not known for the past three years. When he locked onto a case he not only possessed, but emitted a contagious energy, a force field of curiosity, optimism and bizarre self-confidence that she found utterly intoxicating and physically stimulating. She responded to his passion bodily, so privately that were her condition ever known to others it would have proved embarrassing. Her skin prickling, she stepped around the yellow Wet Floor cone and entered the women’s washroom to relieve her bladder and check her makeup. She feared her chest was likely flushed, along with her face.

  A cleaner was doing the sinks. She had a large brown trash canister behind her and appeared to be emptying the trash containers of used hand towels.

  Bothered by an earring that hadn’t sat right all day, she un-hooked it from her ear.

  “Okay if I…?” she asked the cleaner, motioning to the stall.

  “Mmm.” The woman nodded back at her.

  Daphne took two steps and felt a shock of electricity so powerful she could neither scream nor move. Her mind flashed unconscious, but only for a split second.

  “Shit! Shit! Shit!” she coughed out softly, the pain so intense, so immobilizing and overpowering. She wanted desperately to blink; her eyes stung. But instead her eyelids fluttered, partially open, as if
the juice were still flowing through her. She gasped for air.

  The woman picked her up then, and Daphne understood from the strength and the way the person cradled her, that this wasn’t a woman after all. It was a man in drag.

  It was the man Boldt had just described to her.

  She was his captive.

  He folded her into the trash can and then began stuffing newsprint and damp paper towels on top of her. The next blast from the stun stick connected with her neck. Again she passed out. When she came awake, the trash canister was moving—rolling across a hard floor. A stone floor.

  Public Safety.

  The guy—it had to be a guy—was taking her out of the building.

  She tried to raise her voice, to say something—anything. Tried to call out but either her lungs or vocal cords were in full disconnect. Her brain told them to shout. They did nothing. Her body had disowned her.

  An elevator grunted and jerked—it could only be a service elevator by how poorly it was operating.

  Her heart beat so strongly in her chest she feared it might stop beating altogether. Surely no heart could take such abuse. It was as if all the adrenaline summoned by the thousands of volts of electricity had concentrated into the center of her chest and was now looking for a way out.

  She moved her mouth to say the word help but nothing came out.

  A dark purple cloud loomed at the crown of her head, a massive headache like an avalanche awaiting release. It shifted like Jell-O, an amorphous orb of unconsciousness. Now a black goo as thick as tar pitch.

  It flowed down toward her ears, as well as into the vacant space behind her forehead where her sinuses should have been. But nothing was right. It was only this oozing purplish black wave of silence that descended.

  Then, it owned her, and she was no more.

  “Where’s Matthews?” LaMoia asked Bobbie Gaynes, a detective who’d worked his squad for the past few years. “She was supposed to pull together the squad and get the Command Center ready for us.”

  “No clue,” answered Gaynes, returning to what she considered a stupid report. She was a terrible typist, and her own limitations frustrated her. Seeing Boldt in the office, she rolled her chair away from her terminal and leapt out of the chair, and just stopped herself short of hugging the lieutenant-turned-sergeant. “Welcome back…Sarge!”

  “She said she would pull the Command Center together for me,” Boldt said.

  “Little girls room, I think,” Gaynes said. “I saw her in the hallway heading that direction.”

  “Go check, would you? We need her, you, and everyone we’ve got in the building who’s a detective. Command Center. Five minutes.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Boldt raised his voice and made an announcement. Bodies started moving immediately.

  The coach was back. The game was on. And everyone in the room knew it.

  The players assembled in the Command Center briefing room. Designed like a college lecture hall, it could seat fifty, all with Internet access, all facing a lectern and PowerPoint projection screen, five 42-inch LCD HD monitors suspended from the ceiling and two large white boards. There were eleven detectives facing Boldt and LaMoia, who quickly brought the others up to speed. Most had read their daily briefings, as charged, and needed nothing more than to be caught up on the discovery of the bridge and the connection to the killer’s use of disguise as a women’s restroom attendant.

  Teams were created to chase down specifics: other area bridges to consider; the traffic cams that might reveal a vehicle going out to Deception Pass bridge; area retail stores that sold Asian wigs; costume shops or tailors that might have provided the coveralls specific to the office buildings where he/she had preyed on his victims. They were smart cops and barely needed instruction to get started. Within minutes, the Command Center hummed with conversation. Some teams stayed. Some broke off to other parts of the building. But a machine had been started with Boldt and LaMoia sharing the driver’s seat, and that machine was intent to narrow down various aspects of the case and begin to focus on suspects.

  When Bobbie Gaynes stepped into the center and shrugged across the room at Boldt, Boldt felt his hackles raise. He pulled out his cell phone and speed-dialed Daphne. It went immediately to voice mail, indicating the phone was turned off.

  “Why would Daffy have her phone off?” he asked LaMoia, her lover.

  “She wouldn’t.”

  “She does.”

  LaMoia pulled out his mobile and gave it a try. “No,” he said, disconnecting. “Must have forgotten to charge it or something. Her office?” He raised his voice across to Gaynes. “Her office?”

  “Not there.” Gaynes looked worried. “And her car’s downstairs. I checked.”

  LaMoia dialed another number, presumably his loft apartment where Daphne now lived with him. He disconnected, his skin a shade grayer.

  “I’d like to say that there’s a reason for this, but we both know her too well,” he said.

  “This is not like her,” Boldt said.

  “No.”

  “So?”

  LaMoia stepped to a landline. “Let me check my office voice mail.” He did so. No message.

  Gaynes had joined them. “I’m sure she was headed to the bathroom. Earlier. When I last saw her.”

  Photographs of the two women victims: one deceased, one still missing, played on the center LCD TV overhead. It was here that LaMoia looked. “Oh, shit,” he said.

  Boldt looked up, as well.

  “Hair color. Eyes. You and Daphne said—”

  “She said. Not me. Yes,” Boldt interrupted. “A similarity between his victims.”

  “You see the resemblance?”

  “I do. It’s unmistakable.”

  “But it’s just not possible,” LaMoia said. “Not with our level of security.”

  “If I may?” Gaynes asked somewhat timidly.

  “Go ahead,” Boldt said.

  “You’re suggesting that Lieutenant Matthews shares a certain look with the two prior victims?”

  “We are. Yes.”

  “And that…well…” She stepped up to the computer that ran the various overhead displays. She called up the daily alerts that opened with one filed by Cynthia Storm of HHS.

  Boldt and LaMoia spun around to read the alerts on the overhead screen.

  “My eyes suck,” Boldt said anxiously. “What the hell does it say?”

  LaMoia’s voice broke as he read aloud, summarizing. “One of our staff…a housecleaner…Jasmina Something-avich…was found tied up in her apartment. This is like, three hours ago. She’d been there, left that way for nearly…forty-eight hours. Thirty-nine hours,” he corrected himself. “She said the doer…it wasn’t burglary or sexual assault. He wanted…he confiscated her photo ID. Her Public Safety ID.”

  The three moved as a unit, a team, as they first walked and then ran from the Command Center, down the hall with such intensity that everyone moved out of their way; others jumped up from their desks and peered into the hallway to see what was going on. Gaynes knocked, but LaMoia didn’t wait for an answer. He pushed through the door.

  “Men inside,” he announced.

  A woman cursed and complained from inside a stall. A toilet flushed.

  Boldt went to the janitor’s closet. “It’s locked! I want this unlocked!”

  Gaynes hurried from the bathroom, shouting for a key.

  LaMoia dropped to a knee, stood and started opening stalls. He banged on the locked stall from where the woman had cursed. “Open it! Now.”

  “I’m a little busy here.”

  “Open the fucking door!” LaMoia ordered.

  The woman leaned forward and threw open the lock and covered her legs as LaMoia swung the door open.

  He stared at the tile floor.

  His voice rasped as he said, “Finish with your business. Stick to this panel as you stand. You go out to my right. You understand?”

  “You have no right—”

  “Shu
t up and do as I say.”

  The woman came off the toilet, pulled up her underwear and pants and was holding them as she nudged by LaMoia and then Boldt, who was by now looking over LaMoia’s shoulder.

  The toilet flushed automatically.

  “It’s just not possible,” Boldt whispered gravely.

  “You and Matthews,” said her lover, “your photos were in the paper two days ago. She brought it home to show me. Her photo. He saw her photo. He knew she was looking for him. He’s a sick fuck. That much we know already.”

  “Are you sure it’s hers?”

  The two men had not stopped staring at the tile floor where a wire hoop earring lay.

  “I bought it for her,” LaMoia said. “The six-month anniversary of her moving in. It was the last really good night we had,” he said.

  Boldt didn’t want to hear such things.

  Gaynes returned with the closet key in hand, out of breath.

  “S.I.D.,” Boldt said to her. Scientific Identification Division. “Get them up here.”

  “What is it?” Gaynes said desperately.

  “Get them up here,” Boldt repeated, his head beginning to spin.

  Boldt had been through this once before, back when the fires had been hotter between them, back when he’d been younger and less experienced with the overlap of personal and professional. He had that behind him now, had that to build upon, but still felt his knees weak with terror and his mind a runaway train careening down memory and emotion toward an unknown abyss.

  He couldn’t think about her. That was the point. He had to make the disconnect to give her the best chance of being found alive. Regulations called for LaMoia to step aside. Boldt wouldn’t force the issue, but John knew enough to keep his mouth shut and his ideas to himself. He could share them with Boldt in private, but to actively push his own agenda would only drive himself out of the wheelhouse. He was an observer now, not even that if he misstepped.

  There was no time to pull the threads together. Boldt had done the best he could: he turned up the heat on the team trying to identify area bridges; he doubled the man power reviewing traffic cams and assigned two other detectives to review Public Safety surveillance video to locate the imposter housecleaner and follow him to wherever he’d gone. He worked Shoswitz to provide the department’s helicopter, either to race him and a small team to possible sites, or for use as air surveillance if they got a bead on what vehicle the man was driving.