Middle of Nowhere

by Ridley Pearson

  “So we clear one,” she said, “and the other heads for a black hole.”

  “Do not say that,” Boldt scolded. Gaynes suggested he head inside while she caught back up to the ambulance driver for a final word. Boldt seized the chance to see the crime scene for himself.

  A burglary assault committed in the middle of the day. Technically a violent crime, minor injuries or not. M I D D L E O F N O W H E R E

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  The Blue Flu was lending the criminal element courage. While the cat’s away, the mice do play. Bright sunshine broke loose from behind quickly moving dark clouds, the wind steady and warm. Summer struggled to be rid of spring. Boldt struggled to be rid of the Sanchez crime scene; he didn’t want one influencing the other, but it proved almost inescapable. What he wanted was some good, solid evidence. Something valuable. Something to kick this thing in the butt and help get someone behind bars. Before another. Before the press descended like locusts. Before the looming black hole of Sanchez’s unsolved case widened.

  “What do we have?” he asked sharply of the first officer, a young woman who, judging by her crisp uniform and pronounced nervousness, was more than likely one of the police academy trainees temporarily promoted to patrol. Her quick-footed effort to keep pace with him, and a strained voice that cracked when attempting a reply, belied the stiff shoulders and confident chin. This stop-gap action taken by the chief to maintain a patrol-level presence on the streets had been written up in the press and condemned in the Public Safety coffee lounges. If a minimum number of uniforms could not be mobilized, the governor had threatened, or promised (depending which side of the argument one took), National Guard troops and curfews—political disaster for the mayor. But so-called “freshies” had no place behind the wheel of a cruiser, or as first officer at any crime scene, much less on an as-52

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  sault. For all his experience and wisdom, this new chief was out of his mind.

  “Single female.”

  “I’ve got that,” he said. Impatience nibbled at the center of his chest. He needed some basic information, but he longed to be left alone with the crime scene.

  “Living with a sister who stays here every couple weeks.”

  “Didn’t have that,” Boldt admitted. “The scene?”

  “Exterior doors all found locked.”

  He interrupted, “You’re sure?” This information registered in Boldt, for the back door of the Sanchez home had been left unlocked.

  “She placed the nine-one-one call, so maybe she locked up.”

  “Security system?”

  “The home has one. Yes. But apparently the answering machine was engaged, keeping the line open—

  she remembers the indicator light on the downstairs phone. The guy must have had a tape recorder on it: sending out a single beep every five seconds, so the machine kept recording and didn’t hang up. Tricky stuff, Lieutenant. Smarter than just snipping the line, which instantly sounds the alarm. With the primary line engaged, the security system couldn’t dial out. Gives him time to get inside and bust up the alarm’s speaker.”

  “So it never did dial out,” Boldt said.

  “Not that we’re aware of, no.”

  Boldt noted yet another contradiction to the Sanchez scene. Sanchez’s home security system had dialed M I D D L E O F N O W H E R E

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  the provider—not that it had done her any good; Kawamoto’s had been prevented from doing so.

  “What else do we know?” Boldt questioned her.

  “Personal property reported missing. Vic’s name is Cathy Kawamoto. Banged up a little but—”

  “I’ve got that already. How ’bout a description?” He felt like an instructor now, slipping out of his primary role. Freshies needed so damn much help. Chief was out of his mind.

  “Female. Japanese/Brit. Early thirties. Book translator.”

  The

  woman

  skipped along, rushing her

  thoughts, like a kid trying to avoid the cracks in the sidewalk. “Working out of a home office in the basement. Thought she heard something upstairs. Investigates. Takes a blow to the chest at the top of the stairs. Goes down hard.”

  “Evidence of anything sexual?” he asked, still trying to keep Sanchez out of his head.

  “No, sir.”

  “Not to your knowledge,” he corrected.

  “Not to my knowledge,” she agreed.

  “No clothes torn off, anything like that?”

  “Nothing like that, Lieutenant.”

  “Ligatures? Tied up in any way?” he inquired.

  “Negative.”

  “Which stairs?” he asked, returning to her earlier statement.

  She told him.

  “What’s the extent of the personal property loss?”

  “Looks like he may have been after a PC, a cable 54

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  box and a thirty-seven inch. But that’s just the bedroom. Who knows what else he had in mind?”

  “He didn’t lift any of it?” At the Sanchez scene, despite the assault, the burglary had gone through. Perhaps that pointed to timing. Perhaps it pointed to yet another inconsistency. He wanted evidence: a shoe print to compare to the one lifted off Sanchez’s coat; a knot to compare to the shoelaces found bound to her wrists. Something. Anything.

  “No, sir. The suspect apparently fled immediately following the assault.”

  “Good work,” Boldt offered. He felt distracted by his concern for Liz and the kids, suddenly wondering if they were safe at the Jamersons, where they were staying temporarily until Liz and he could figure out how much danger they were actually in. What if the Blue Fluers meant for the families to suffer? he wondered.

  “How’s your wife, sir?” the recruit inquired in a moment of uncanny timing. “If you don’t mind my asking?” This one was looking for immediate promotion. To answer truthfully, his wife was upset, angry, though not necessarily at him. The relocation to the friend’s home on Mercer Island was a temporary fix at best. To keep trouble from following them, Boldt would sleep at the family house, only visiting the Jamerson home for the occasional meal. A workable but undesirable arrangement that obviously challenged a husband and wife who relished being together, who needed each other. In truth, he was deeply worried about his family, worried to the point that he hadn’t eaten in at least ten M I D D L E O F N O W H E R E

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  hours. The blue brick had shattered more than the window—it shattered certain limits too. With it, Boldt’s work had come home in a way he’d vowed would never happen again. Previously, they had endured threats of arson, the kidnapping of their daughter: Each time the family had rebounded, though not without scars. The brick had reopened those wounds. He saw no immediate fix. He and Liz would talk. There wouldn’t be any simple, fast answers, but they would find them. Liz’s blood was on the living-room rug. No matter how small the stain, the damage was immense and permanent. He counted on Krishevski to identify those responsible—not just a scapegoat. But he wasn’t holding his breath.

  “She’s better,” Boldt finally answered. His private life was nobody’s business. “Did Ms. Kawamoto get a decent look at him?”

  “No, sir. The offender was apparently moving pretty fast. Shoved her down the stairs and took off. That’s about it for the blow-by-blow.”

  “Breaks and bruises for the most part,” he repeated, attempting to reassure himself. He stopped so that he could ask this before they entered the home, before he might be overheard by anyone. “SID?” he asked.

  “Has been notified. Yes.”

  “How many have been inside?” Boldt inquired.

  “Me and my partner,” she said, pointing through the open door to another recruit who stood at the bottom of the interior stairs. The uniformed officer reminded Boldt of a Boy Scout. What was a roll-call 56

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  sergeant doing teaming two freshies in the same radio car? Was
the department that hard up? He’d heard that another twenty to thirty uniforms—patrol officers—had failed to show up for work this morning. But this pairing of two freshies indicated the situation was far worse than he imagined.

  “The two EMTs,” she continued.

  “Other than that, we’ve got a good scene.”

  “Well done, Officer,” Boldt said, wondering if he might have been the first to address her in this manner, for her face lit up.

  “Thank you, sir!”

  He felt like a den mother. “The victim was fully conscious after the fall?”

  “Not as far as I know, sir. I think maybe she passed out briefly.”

  “She saw him leave? Heard him leave?”

  “Not to my knowledge. I believe she only heard him upstairs and went to take a look. A sister lives with her part time. He surprises her and shoves her down the stairs. I think the situation got the better of her. Maybe she fainted—passed out for a minute or two. It scared her pretty bad.”

  “He left the premises how?” Boldt asked, still thinking about the timing of the crime. Daylight. A day after Sanchez. No shoelaces around the wrists. He didn’t want so many differences between the two crimes.

  “No idea. Front and back doors were locked tight when we arrived.” She touched her breast pocket.

  “Made note of that specifically.”

  “Locked,” he confirmed.

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  “Correct.”

  Boldt opened the front door and inspected the mechanism. “No night latch,” he said. “Keyed dead bolt and keyed knob.”

  “If I may, sir?” the young woman officer inquired.

  “Go ahead.”

  “Upon being admitted through the back, my partner and me found this particular door’s dead bolt in place. That is, a keyed dead bolt as you’ve pointed out. Subsequent inspection of the back door—the door through which we had entered the premises—indicated the same basic arrangement. The victim, Ms. Kawamoto, could not recall if she had thrown that particular dead bolt or not. So my assumption was he both entered and departed the premises via that back door.”

  She took a breath and dared to submit speculation.

  “I’m thinking that subsequent to the offender’s departure our vic locked the door—whether or not she’s currently aware of that fact.”

  “It’s a kitchen door?”

  “No, sir, the kitchen door accesses the garage. This would be off the living area, sir.”

  So the doer watched the house, Boldt thought. Knew which door to hit—a back door typically left unlocked. And it had to be from a vantage point that provided a view of that back door. “I’ll keep your partner assigned to the front door,” Boldt said loudly enough for the other officer to hear him too. “You will canvass the neighbors with an eye toward anything. The of-58

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  fender, his vehicle, anyone seen parked around here in the last couple days.”

  “Yes, sir.” The recruit seemed thrilled. Boldt had little choice: he didn’t have much of a pool from which to draw.

  She left through the front door, passing Gaynes, who was on her way in. As the Boy Scout opened his mouth to speak, Boldt lifted a finger and said, “Not now, okay, unless it’s a top priority. I need quiet. Your job is to keep everyone and anyone out until either Detective Gaynes or I give you the nod. Okay? First one through that door is to be SID, but only on our say-so. No matter what, you remain outside along with everyone else.” Reading the nameplate pinned to the uniform, he said, “You okay with that, Helman?”

  The kid had the wherewithal to nod sharply rather than open his mouth again.

  “Good,” Boldt said.

  Gaynes said, “I’ll take the basement and the ground floor, L.T. You’ll take upstairs.” Ordering around her lieutenant was an uncomfortable act at best. “If that’s good with you?”

  “Fine.”

  “The assault happened up there on the stairs. She came to rest on the landing.”

  “I’ll tread lightly,” Boldt offered.

  M

  Despite the dozen cases back on his desk, and the dozen more that would be assigned in the coming days, M I D D L E O F N O W H E R E

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  the Sanchez assault and the Kawamoto break-in were what interested him. Any investigator liked a clean case that cleared quickly. But Boldt had worked dozens, perhaps hundreds of such cases; he lived now for the challenge—not the black holes that would never be solved, but the cases that both meant something and offered contradictions.

  Sanchez

  and

  Kawamoto appeared

  vaguely related—burglaries gone bad, women assaulted. They presented an urgency, both for the sake of the public, and the media.

  There was no apology to be made, no words that would return Cathy Kawamoto’s sense of safety. She would never fully trust this city again, would never feel safe, even behind the locked doors of her own home. This weighed heavily upon him. Boldt felt that as a peace officer, his role was to preserve a sense of safety, and yet Cathy Kawamoto would have none now, he knew.

  Boldt felt the case closing in on him—it just wasn’t coming together. He carefully climbed the stairs, on the one hand wanting a few minutes alone to immerse himself in the crime scene, on the other wanting the differences sorted out and the offender in lockup by evening, well before the news dumped it on the dinner plates.

  A crime scene, alone, in silence. Lou Boldt felt alert and alive.

  As an investigator, Boldt experienced no prescient sense from the perspective of the offender. He could not transport himself into this role as some investigators 60

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  suggested was possible. He saw the crime scene from the role of the victim—often viscerally, but exclusively from this side of the crime.

  Boldt headed upstairs in the footsteps of Cathy Kawamoto, a woman about to disturb a thief. He assumed the thief was a planner—not some junkie kicking in doors and stealing a purse or string of pearls. And here comes Cathy Kawamoto up the stairs, chasing noises. He stopped briefly to study the landing because the freshie had told him the victim had recovered consciousness on the stairs. This was supported by the drying bloodstain he saw there, the result of a bloodied nose. If the offender had shoved her downstairs and yet fled the premises, he had jumped right over her. This thought coincided with Boldt’s observation of a long, black rubber smudge on the wall that seemed to fit with a person in a hurry jumping over a body on the landing. He made a note to have the SID techs sample the rubber smudge, and to analyze it. “No stone unturned,”

  he mumbled to himself, well aware that the press and the public would attempt to connect this to Sanchez—

  and perhaps even Carmichael—and that on top of the Flu, public concern would figure politically in both investigations, demanding immediate arrests. He found the offender’s apparent target in the bedroom: A corner hutch that faced the victim’s bed. A television, VCR and one of those all-in-one music centers with CD player, double tape system and stereo receiver. The offender had not had time to steal the electronics—Kawamoto had headed upstairs at an M I D D L E O F N O W H E R E

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  inopportune time. But the man had moved the hutch from the corner in an effort to free wires. Boldt peered behind. The television had been unplugged, its wire neatly coiled and fastened. What kind of person took the time to neatly coil wires before heisting a television? More than the coil of wire, it was sight of the white plastic loop secured around the coil that intrigued Boldt. A sophisticated version of a garbage bag tie. Had any such ties been inventoried at Sanchez’s, he wondered. Another contradiction? The other wires were snarled in a tangle and covered with dust. Who was this guy? What kind of burglar showed such confidence? Daphne would have a heyday evaluating such a personality. Then a second thought occurred to him: If the thief had possessed plastic ties at the Sanchez break-in, why not use them to
bind her wrists, instead of shoelaces? Why shoelaces and not the plastic ties? He took notes, albeit unnecessarily—he wasn’t about to forget any of this. Perhaps the Burglary unit had files on record that mentioned white plastic ties being used. He had in hand the physical evidence he’d hoped for.

  Now, he had to connect it to a suspect.

  C H A P T E R

  8

  “Ineed help, Phil. I need the names of who did this to Liz, and I also need your Burglary files for the past month. I thought you might be able to speed things up for me on both counts,” Boldt said. “Unless you’re ‘too busy,’ ” he added. He needed to connect the white plastic ties to earlier burglaries, to establish a pattern crime, to widen the scope of evidence and increase the number of leads to follow. Captain Phil Shoswitz seemed the means to that end.

  “Are you suggesting I’m intentionally slowing things down around here?” Shoswitz questioned defensively. In point of fact, some of the lower brass had effected a slowdown, and Shoswitz was probably part of it. The man paced his cluttered office. A baseball fanatic, the captain of Crimes Against Property (which included Burglary) had bookshelves overflowing with intramural trophies and major league souvenirs. A bat autographed by Junior. A hardball scrawled upon by the entire Mariners team. A photo of himself taken outside Safeco Field on opening day, his ticket proudly displayed. He rubbed his throwing elbow—a nervous tic that indicated both deep thought and irritation. “I detest what M I D D L E O F N O W H E R E

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  happened to Liz. You know I’m with you on that—everyone’s with you.”

  “Are they?” Boldt had come up through the ranks with Phil Shoswitz, had spent nearly a dozen years serving under the man in Homicide, over eight of those years as sergeant to Shoswitz’s lieutenant. Now that Shoswitz carried a captain’s badge in Crimes Against Property, and Boldt a lieutenant’s shield in Crimes Against Persons—CAProp and CAPers respectively—

  Boldt suspected the man had a touch of envy despite the higher rank. Homicide remained the golden egg, the most prestigious posting on the department. Shoswitz had sacrificed that posting for his captain’s badge promotion and higher pay.