Thriller 2

by Clive Cussler

  Boldt fought to remain focused, to forget about who was riding in a trunk or the back of a van, to forget about the cadaver he’d seen so recently he could still smell the room, about the victim being stripped naked and trussed and thrown off a bridge.

  Not this life. Not her. Not on his watch.

  The worst moment came as the Control Center lulled into a library silence, as the initial adrenaline subsided, giving way to police work—the often monotonous, repetitive process of attempting to move from wide angle to telephoto.

  LaMoia spoke up for the first time in ten minutes. “It’s been on the skids for months. I told you that, right?”

  Boldt didn’t answer.

  “I don’t know if it was…you know…the little one, or just a mismatch or what, but we’ve both known it was over for way too long. Funny how you hold on to things you know are broken. Right? Like you’re going to find the glue. You’re going to find out how to fix it? And we both did that. She did it, too. And the thing is, we never said a thing about it. It was all done with looks and silences and fake smiles and forced sex—”

  “That’s enough,” Boldt said.

  “I’m just saying…shit, I don’t know what I’m saying.”

  Boldt heard him sniff.

  “We’ve got video!” Taggart shouted from across the room. “Screen two.”

  Everyone in the room watched a housecleaner pushing a garage bin down the hall. It looked heavy and difficult to control. The person stopped in front of the service elevator. It took Taggart another five minutes to call up the elevator’s interior in the correct time frame. But there was the housecleaner looking calm and easy, the trash can beside her. She wheeled it off the elevator.

  Another five minutes to pick up the parking garage.

  “He found himself a dark enough corner,” Boldt said. The video showed nothing of his transferring Daphne to the car. They couldn’t be sure that a transfer had ever happened.

  “Get S.I.D. down there,” Boldt called out.

  “Done!” Taggart answered.

  The car pulled out. Taggart and his team did a phenomenal job of freezing the picture at just the right moment where the camera afforded the best clarity. It was an older model Ford Taurus. They had a partial plate: 43 2. The photo suggested a number preceded the four, but no one could be certain. Not knowing the position of the plate numbers increased the database exponentially.

  The machine of the Seattle Police Department continued to roll forward. The description of the vehicle went out along with the partial. The same information was transmitted to King County Sheriff’s Department and other regional law enforcement. Police cruisers across five jurisdictions were mobilized to inspect and station themselves on all area bridges. In the Control Center the deployment of personnel was kept track of on screen 4. Bridge by bridge, they accounted for those now under the observation of law enforcement.

  Boldt watched all this as a disconnected observer. As, one by one, the area bridges were accounted for, a feeling welled up in him that he couldn’t shake, and he’d been here too many times before to ignore such feelings.

  “It’s Deception Pass,” Boldt said aloud, speaking to no one. Then he turned to LaMoia to press his point. “This guy isn’t creative enough to reinvent the wheel. He showed us that today and we’ve not paid any attention. He went about this in the exact same way as he did before. The same MO. Daphne called this—she said he’d throw them at sunrise before traffic of any sort developed. She said he might change his location if we made our knowledge of the bridge public, but we never did that. We made our knowledge of the killing public, yes, but we left the bridge out.”

  “He’s keeping her overnight?”

  “Yes, he is. Either in the vehicle or at a home or apartment or trailer. Keeping her. Daphne said how this is some kind of ritual for him. The preparation. The trying to make her fly. It’s reverential. That’s why he didn’t assault them, didn’t harm them. Bottom line, John—we have time. The one thing we didn’t have with the other two. We have that here. She has time. We can keep people on the bridges but move them to where they can’t be seen so easily. We can lay some traps. He’s giving us the time we need to be in position.”

  “But where?”

  “Daniels!” Boldt called out.

  “Sarge?”

  “I need a name attached to that partial plate registration.”

  “Working on it.”

  “I’ll take ten names. I’ll take twenty. But zero isn’t going to cut it.”

  “We’ve got more like seventeen hundred at the moment. We’re working to narrow it down.”

  “Run it through Skagit,” Boldt said.

  “How’s that?”

  Calling across the room had raised some heads. Boldt was making a nuisance of himself.

  “Skagit County—a Taurus with that same partial. You want to narrow it down? Narrow it down.”

  Some in the room laughed. Not Daniels. He sank back into his chair and picked up his telephone receiver.

  “Because of the bridge? Deception Pass?” LaMoia asked.

  “She said he wouldn’t want to move them far. It’s a long way from here—nearly two hours when the traffic’s bad. That doesn’t fit with what she told us.”

  “You’re telling me she’s running this thing from wherever she is?” LaMoia sounded skeptical.

  “Who are you going to trust more?”

  It hit LaMoia in the chest. He sat down, looking wounded.

  Five minutes passed feeling like twenty. Twenty, like forty.

  “James Erwin Malster,” Daniels said from behind Boldt.

  He placed a photocopy of a driver’s license in front of the sergeant.

  “Fifty-one years old. Caucasian. Male. Registered with the pipe fitting union. Member of the United Association—”

  “Pipe fitters. Plumbers,” Boldt said.

  “Exactly. Retired in good standing nine years ago, following the death of his wife. Health complications.”

  “This is who the car is registered to?”

  “Correct.”

  “But it’s not correct,” Boldt said. “She gave me a profile. Twenties. Thirties at the oldest. Is this the father?”

  “It’s his car.”

  “It’s not him.”

  “A pipe fitter,” LaMoia said. “So he knows how to rig things.”

  “It’s not him,” Boldt said.

  “She could have had the profile wrong,” LaMoia said. “Guy loses his wife, spends years grieving…comes apart at the seams.”

  “There’s a son,” Boldt said to Daniels. “Find the son.”

  “I’m not showing—”

  “Find the son,” Boldt repeated.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You have the location of residence?”

  “Oak Harbor.”

  “Christ,” LaMoia said.

  “I say something wrong?” Daniels asked.

  “Oak Harbor’s only a few miles from Deception Pass,” Boldt said. He turned to LaMoia. “She called that one right.”

  “She also said he’d change bridges once we publicized the death, and we publicized the death.”

  “Which is what got us in trouble. Is that what you’re saying, John? Are you laying this onto me, because I can take it. But it isn’t going to do a damn thing in terms of bringing her back.”

  “She said he’d switch bridges.”

  “She was wrong about that,” Boldt said.

  “Because? Which is it, Sarge? Was she right or wrong, because I don’t think you can have it both ways.”

  Boldt had been having it both ways for years: part of his heart left behind while the rest of him loved and stayed with his family. He’d built a Great Wall between his true emotions and the Presentable Parent to where no one could see the other side, not even him most of the time. But LaMoia had loosened the lid with that last comment. Contents may explode under pressure.

  Boldt said, “He’s going to throw her off Deception Pass bridge. His an
gel is going to fly this time. He’s screwed this up twice. If it is the pipe fitter, he’s not a give-up guy.”

  “You’re not the psychologist, she is,” LaMoia said, his arms crossed, his voice hoarse.

  “Father or son? Pipe fitter, or who knows what? You’re all over the map, Sarge.”

  “I’ll disregard that,” Boldt said.

  “LaMoia,” Daniels said in a cautionary tone.

  “You think she was wrong, John?” Boldt asked. “Then what if she was wrong about his doing this at sunrise. What if sunset works just as well for him?” He eyed LaMoia up and down. “You want to sit here, or you want to take a ride in the chopper?”

  Daniels squirmed, caught in the crosshairs. “Sarge?” he said.

  “Call a prosecuting attorney named Rickert up there. Mount Vernon. Tell him to rally the best guys his sheriff’s office can muster and to have them put eyes on the residence. We want an open channel with our dispatch. Real time updates. You getting all this?”

  “I got it.”

  “I can be up there in twenty, twenty-five minutes.” Boldt looked over at LaMoia. All the bravado was gone, the luster, the very sense of who John LaMoia was. Someone, something, now inhabited his body.

  “You coming?”

  LaMoia looked up through fixed eyes. “I hate helicopters,” he said.

  “That’s been…the mistake,” Daphne told him. It took all of her courage, and more than a little part of what energy she could summon. He had her tied to a narrow wooden-slat table, a scratchy rope across her bare chest, her hands connected by a rope beneath the table, another rope at her knees and yet another holding her ankles apart, also connecting under the table. She was naked, her legs spread, at once both horribly embarrassing and making her feel incredibly vulnerable. He could do whatever he wanted to her; there would be no stopping him.

  She was in a dreary, dimly lit room. The windows were small and high on the wall and covered in soiled, decaying curtains. The pungent oily, stale-salt smell told her water was close.

  She was not blindfolded; he had no fear of her seeing his face, her being able to identify him. This increased her panic.

  He hovered over her, paying her nakedness no mind, preparing to administer a pill and what smelled like cough syrup. He was intending to drug her. He would then either leave her here to sleep it off, or walk her to his car while she was numb and transport her.

  He was a soft-looking man, with piggish, squinting eyes smudged with a horrid blue eye shadow, and a pallor to his facial skin.

  Her comment stopped him. She seized upon his hesitation.

  “You broke her back. She…was too relaxed. The drugs…whatever it is you’re about to give me…it’s what killed her…what will kill me. If you…take away my strength to resist the force of the fall…you’ll break my back.”

  He stared at her expressionless. He seemed to be thinking: How could she read my mind like this? How could she possibly know…?

  “You want them to fly…want me to fly, don’t you?” she said, gaining some strength to her voice, though not much. The lingering effect of the stun stick was a massive migraine, a dry throat and pain radiating throughout her body. On top of that she was absurdly cold, chilled to the bone, a kind of chill that might be chemical, or a response to shock, but was unlike anything she knew.

  “I can’t fly if you drug me. The harness…must dis-tri-bute the force of the fall better. Shoulders to hips. Bigger harness…maybe.”

  He held up a series of nylon straps and buckles. It look liked he’d made it himself—there were nuts and bolts where a harness might have had stitching or grommets.

  “You don’t need…to drug me…to put that on,” she said. “I won’t fight. I want…to help you…be the first to fly.”

  She watched his eyes mist. She’d triggered something painful in him. She clawed through the purple and black orbs that threatened on the sides of her vision, that warmth flowing down from her skull, trying to overtake her.

  He looked her over, head to toe, his eyes lingering where a woman always felt men looking. She thought perhaps she didn’t fit the look—the look that he sought. The victim they’d seen had been slightly heavier, wider in the hips. Maybe he was considering rejecting her. Maybe she’d spoken too much. But speaking was her living. Her life…depended on it.

  “To make this work,” she said, “we must be a team. The two of us.” She thought that more than anything he missed whatever angel he was trying to recreate, that to include him, to embrace him, to let him in was the secret to unlocking him.

  “What do you know about the two of us?” He appeared bewildered and confused.

  She understood she had caused this. Had her mind been clearer, she could have had more tools at her disposal, but her education took a backseat to instinct—it came down to getting him to loosen the ropes; everything depended on his loosening the ropes.

  “We should…try on the harness. You think?”

  “You didn’t know her.”

  “I’d like to have.”

  “Shut up.”

  “She meant a great deal to you.”

  “I said shut up!”

  He lashed out with the harness, whipping her bare skin across her middle and raising welts.

  She shut up. She looked away, her arms beginning to shake from the fear. She hated herself for giving this away, for feeding him this. She must not, at all costs, give him a connection between him beating her and her fear. She fought herself, her desire to hide, to retreat. To stay silent was to ask him to strike her again; to speak was most likely the same invitation; but she could control her speech whereas he controlled her silence and this was a very big difference to her.

  “You didn’t mean to do that,” she said. “I forgive you.”

  His gaze locked onto her.

  “I forgive you for all of this. I can see it stems from your pain. I will fly for you. I will help you. But if you drug me, you’ll break my back. You’ll kill me. Now…what about the harness? Shouldn’t we get the harness on?”

  She had him. She fought through the goo, the descending veil of approaching unconsciousness long enough to understand she’d gotten through to him. As a psychologist, she’d learned to spot these moments. To seize upon them.

  His arm moved toward the knot that tied one ankle to the other, but it was a motion filled with suspicion and distrust.

  Come on! she silently pleaded.

  The man untied the first knot.

  Five khaki-clad sheriff deputies stormed the Malster residence with a precision Boldt had not expected. He and LaMoia, wearing flak jackets, followed closely behind.

  “Dead body,” Boldt said, knowing that smell.

  The deputies quickly swarmed through the rooms, shouting, “Clear!” within seconds of one another.

  “Got something!” a voice called out.

  LaMoia and Boldt slipped down a narrow hallway to one of the home’s two bedrooms. It was a small room, crowded with a double bed and a low dresser. Atop the dresser were several photographs of a younger woman wearing clothes and a haircut from a decade earlier.

  “Burrito,” LaMoia said.

  A human burrito. A wrap of thick plastic tarp secured with a half roll or more of duct tape. Whoever had done the job had tried to seal the body inside, but the putrid smell overcame the room.

  “Weeks,” Boldt said, his gloved hand pressing the plastic closer to where the face should have been. The corpse was in a high degree of decay, squirming larvae smeared the plastic from inside.

  “Oh…crap,” LaMoia said. “This guy is sick.”

  “This guy is trying to hold on to the one parent he had left,” Boldt said. “Daphne said the doer would be living with a single parent.”

  “So where is she?”

  “He’s not living here,” Boldt said, back in the hall now, looking around. The place had been cleaned up. The kitchen was immaculate but a wire strainer had left a rust ring in the sink, suggesting the passage of a good deal of ti
me. “This is his mausoleum.” He indicated the small living room where two of the deputies stood awaiting instruction. There were no fewer than twenty framed photographs of the same woman spread around the room.

  “We gotta find him,” LaMoia insisted, stating the obvious. “How’re we going to do that, Sarge?” He sounded on the edge of tears.

  “We’re good,” Boldt said. “Basement?” he called to the deputies.

  “Clear,” a deputy answered.

  Boldt stepped into the living room, studying the various photographs more closely. Answers weren’t handed you; you had to extract them.

  “It’s here somewhere,” he told LaMoia. “Start looking.”

  LaMoia joined him. They worked the house: drawers, closets, cabinets.

  Boldt made a phone call and announced himself to his Skagit Sheriff’s Office counterpart with whom he’d been dealing for the past hour and a half. “We need to check tax records for other properties, a trailer or mobile home. A boat? Someplace he could have taken her…Yes. Okay. As soon as possible.”

  He called out for LaMoia to bring him the photos from the bedroom. Even with the front and back doors open it reeked inside the small house, but Boldt wasn’t going anywhere.

  Together the two lined up and rearranged the nearly three dozen framed photographs. Then they reshuffled them several times.

  “These five,” Boldt said, rearranging them yet again. All were taken in bright sunlight. In three of the five, water could be seen behind the woman’s head. One was clearly taken on a boat, but not a pleasure craft.

  LaMoia turned to say something but Boldt’s phone rang. It was his contact at the Sheriff’s Office.

  “We struck out on the tax records, at least for this guy, but we did pick up tax records for a commercial trawler, registered to Norman Malster. It’s in arrears, but until about a year ago it had been paid up regularly for nearly twenty years.”

  “A brother?”

  “Not a common name,” the sheriff’s deputy said.