Middle of Nowhere

by Ridley Pearson

  “Appetite for data,” Boldt repeated. He had other appetites going. He tried to quiet them.

  “And the guys on the other side of the room are booking travel plans. You can’t hit the homes while they’re out of town—it’ll lead us right back to you—

  but you could scout them, make your plans. Hit one or two, maybe, but far enough apart we don’t connect the dots.”

  “I’ve got one!” he announced a little too loudly, drawing the attention of the diners at the next table.

  “Brooks-Gilman is down as having been called by an 216

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  inmate identified as number forty-two,” he informed her.

  “Number forty-two,” she repeated, running her finger down the column that indicated which inmate in the private commerce program had placed the phone solicitation. “Brumewell!” she exclaimed excitedly, matching a phone number. “Number forty-two did Brumewell too.” She was radiant when excited like this, one of those people who generated an electricity, a palpable, physical, sensuous energy that sparked across the table and infected Boldt. He felt that energy run wildly through him—though he didn’t like where it landed, where he felt it the most. He shifted in his chair, relieved at the approach of the waiter. They both put the faxed pages aside.

  They ate their salads slowly and in silence. He felt like skipping the main course. He wanted to get back to the faxed pages.

  Boldt caught Daphne’s eye, read her mind. “It’s all right that we enjoy ourselves,” he suggested, trying to sound convincing. “No harm in that.”

  “No harm whatsoever,” she echoed, though clearly not convinced.

  Another minute passed before he spoke. “The thing about us—”

  “Yes?”

  “The silence isn’t uncomfortable.”

  “No.”

  “It’s fine. It feels good, even.”

  The salads were withdrawn, replaced by pewter-M I D D L E O F N O W H E R E 217

  domed entreés. As the lids were whisked off in unison, rosemary and garlic stirred the air.

  “It’s comfortable is all,” he said, once they had been left alone.

  “That’s not all, and you know it,” she replied.

  “No, maybe not,” he conceded.

  “We’ve been there, Lou. And we’ve had plenty of opportunities since then to revisit, and we don’t, which is good, I think.”

  “You think or you know?”

  “Her illness. . . . The cancer—it pulled you two even closer together.”

  “Yes, it did,” he agreed.

  “It’s making the most out of a bad situation. You two did that. It’s admirable.”

  “Thank you,” he said sincerely. “It doesn’t mean I care for you any less.”

  She reached out across the table and took his hand in hers. “I know that. And it goes both ways, you know.”

  Their eyes met, smiling. He lifted his water glass.

  “To private commerce caller number forty-two. I’d say we’ve got a suspect.”

  “I’d say we’d better get through the rest of that list tonight. If we can connect Mr. Forty-two to more of the victims, our case is only that much stronger.”

  “Agreed.”

  “My room? Or yours?”

  “Yours, it’s bigger,” Boldt answered. She pushed back her chair and excused herself 218

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  without looking at him, and hurried across the dining room in that graceful movement of hers. When she returned, he felt her urgency to leave the table.

  “How about one dance before dessert?” she asked. A jazz trio in the hotel bar. Boldt had tried to block out the music because it could so overpower him and demand his full attention. So could a dance. He was thinking it was a bad idea.

  She added that she’d taken care of the tab, charging it to her room, making it impossible for him to stall.

  “Why not?” he said, his mouth working against his better judgment.

  M

  A mistake. Boldt knew it the moment he put his arm loosely around her and felt the warm indent of her back in the palm of his wide hand. Secrets were lost in such moments. Kingdoms fell. With Daphne in heels, they stood nearly the same height. She pulled herself closer and their chests made contact. “Okay?” she asked, her breath warm on his neck.

  “You know what I think?” she asked, this time in a hoarse whisper that sent chills down him. Their hearts beat contrapuntally.

  “Extraordinary,” he said, marveling at the sensation. She placed her head gently on his shoulder, and answered herself. “I think this is dangerous.”

  “Feels that way to me,” he admitted, not letting her go.

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  “Song’s over.”

  So it was. He hadn’t noticed. Only the one song, or had they stayed out there longer? He took her by the hand and led her off the dance floor.

  They walked together down the long corridor of rooms. She used her electronic key to open the room door and Boldt found himself reminded of the prison’s security. She leaned a shoulder against the door and it opened. “This is all right? Right?”

  “Right,” he answered, not taking his chance to back out. The faxed pages bulged in his coat pocket. She reached up, lightly stroked his cheek, then playfully took him by the necktie and said, “Into my room, big boy.”

  But her words were lost to the kiss that Boldt delivered more out of reflex than conscious decision. He kissed her on the lips, not the cheek. Right there in the hallway; she, holding his tie. Brief, but delivered like he meant it.

  The kiss stunned her, but she didn’t falter. She pulled him through the door by the tie, turned once inside and returned that kiss with all her enormous powers. They kissed hard and hungrily, a kiss that had fermented for years.

  His fingers worked the tiny buttons to her blouse, the silk melting away and exposing her chest as she unknotted his tie. A car backfired, and they both froze intuitively, and then, looking at each other in the early stages of undress, one of them started to laugh and the other followed until the laughter grew, by which point 220

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  her blouse was buttoned and her face red behind a girlish blush.

  “Maybe we go through the fax tomorrow morning,”

  she suggested nervously.

  Boldt felt awkward. Devastated. “I—”

  “Don’t say anything,” she pleaded, placing a warm finger to his lips and holding it there too long. Her blouse was buttoned incorrectly. His shirt was partially open, his tie hanging from his button-down collar.

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  The Jefferson County Corrections Facility appeared somehow otherworldly as they approached, the sprawling sand-colored facility surrounded by silver waves of razor wire, all of it pushed out into the scrub of high desert. The ride had been unusually quiet. Daphne rolled a Starbucks cup between her palms, as if warming them. It was eighty degrees outside the air-conditioned car, the sky a blue found only in the mountains.

  Boldt felt a little blue himself. He found it difficult to focus on the investigation, which was, after all, the purpose of the trip. This, despite the fact that before going to sleep he had connected inmate 42 with another four of the burglary victims’ phone numbers. He and Daphne were on their way now to have a little chat with number 42.

  Boldt turned left onto a long gravel road that led toward the shimmering facility. Dust rose behind the rental in a growing plume that colored the sun. He said,

  “Listen, Daffy. I’ve thought about that kiss for a long time. Now that it’s behind us, maybe we can make it another five or six years.”

  “No harm, no foul?” she questioned.

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  “I don’t want you mad at me.”

  “Is that what you think?” she asked. “You know, for being such a good detective, sometimes you don’t have a clu
e.”

  “True story,” he said.

  He mugged a smile for her, squinting eyes giving him away. He pulled the car up to the first of three guard booths, and slipped his ID wallet out of his blue blazer. Daphne did the same, and the conversation ended.

  Boldt and Matthews sat across a speckled vinyl tabletop in an employees’ cafeteria. Boldt read from the folder in front of him. “Inmate number forty-two, as listed on the phone solicitation sheets. David Ansel Flek—no ‘c.’

  Serving a three-year sentence—get this—for grand larceny. He’s been part of the private commerce telemarketing program for the past eight weeks.”

  “Right about when our robberies started,” Daphne said.

  They had half the connection: Flek had been the telemarketer who had spoken to each of the burglary victims. Before interrogating Flek, they needed the other half: contact with the outside. They awaited the warden.

  When the man arrived, Boldt noticed that some of his military composure had worn off. He understood the implications of all this for his facility. Nothing less than his job was at stake. Yet he was on orders from Etheredge to cooperate—a private facility refusing to M I D D L E O F N O W H E R E

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  cooperate with law enforcement would sound a death knoll for state prison contracts.

  “Our pay phones here are owned and operated by an Etheredge subsidiary,” he began.

  “Never leave a dime unturned,” Daphne said.

  “The home office is still working with the database of calls placed from those pay phones. The attorneys will eventually have to sort out the first amendment issues. Many, if not most, of the calls made from our pay phones are placed using calling cards owned by relatives or friends on the outside. We can get these numbers from the various carriers, I’m told, but it will take some time. In the meantime, I have this.” He handed Boldt a stack of twenty faxed sheets. “They are not sorted by area code,” he apologized.

  “We’ll live,” Boldt said.

  “But I did have my secretary highlight any directdial calls made to the two-oh-six area code.” He added somewhat proudly, “And she put a check by four of the calls that could have been made by inmate number forty-two.”

  “Determined how?” Daphne inquired, pulling her chair next to Boldt’s and looking over his shoulder. Boldt pointed to the top sheet. “By time.”

  “Schedule,” the warden said. “It’s not open access. Pay telephone time is closely controlled.”

  Boldt said, “So how many others had access to the phones at the same time Flek did?”

  “There are five pay phones,” the warden explained.

  “We give each inmate fifteen minutes a day.”

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  “So four other guys,” Boldt suggested. It was a nice, narrow field, something he could work with. He recognized the prefix of the highlighted 206 number as a cellular prefix. He would call LaMoia and have the owner of the cell phone identified. He would make sure David Flek made no more calls. If they got lucky, they’d have their burglar. He wasn’t holding his breath; it was rarely that easy.

  Daphne tested him. “So our chances are one out of five that Flek called Seattle and passed along the names and addresses of possible burglary targets?”

  “He doesn’t know that,” Boldt answered. To the warden he said, “I think it’s time we meet Mr. Flek.”

  “We can arrange that. But first, you mind explaining how all this works? My people are going to ask me, and I’m going to look a hell of a lot smarter if I know what I’m talking about.”

  Boldt thought it sounded fair enough. “Flek is supplying names to someone on the outside. Through the phone solicitation, this survey conducted by Consolidated through Newmann, he identifies homes that have a couple computers, a high-end stereo or a couple TVs. A nice bottom line.”

  Daphne had returned her attention to the original fax of phone numbers called by the phone solicitation team.

  Boldt continued, “He calls out on the pay phones—

  probably to this cell phone number—and supplies the names and addresses of potential high-end targets. At M I D D L E O F N O W H E R E

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  that point it’s in our part of the world. We get a burglary call.”

  Daphne, her nose still in the fax, said, “Lou!

  Granted, three of the burglary victims are not anywhere on this list from last night. Maybe they were placed a week earlier than the records we’ve been provided. Maria’s not on the list either.”

  In his excitement over the connection to inmate 42, Boldt had neglected to search out Sanchez’s number in the database. It was such a simple oversight, but suddenly the absence of her number from the phone solicitation’s master call sheet loomed largely over their efforts.

  “She could have been called earlier as well,” he suggested. The closer they came to the interrogation of a possible suspect—even an accessory to the fact like David Ansel Flek—the more Boldt dreaded the possibility of discovering that Maria Sanchez had never been one of the burglary targets. The implication would then be that Maria’s assault had been cop on cop, the same way he feared his own assault had been. Now that he approached whatever truth existed, he did so cautiously, well aware that on rare occasions, some truths were better left undisturbed.

  “No,” she said, shaking her head. “In every case the burglaries come within ten days of the initial phone solicitation. That being the case, she’d be on here.”

  “Erased?” Boldt inquired of a confused warden. He 226

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  and Daphne exchanged glances, and he could see her concern as well.

  “To my knowledge,” the man said, “the system does not allow it. You can’t erase any information from the private commerce database. That’s one of the stipulations. Just in case something like this ever happened.”

  To Daphne, Boldt stressed, “We need Flek to implicate whoever was doing these burglaries. If that guy was not at Sanchez’s . . . if he never hit Sanchez’s place . . . if we can confirm it . . . prove it . . . then maybe we have the ammo we need to go knocking on I.I.’s door and get a look at whatever they know.”

  She nodded, though her concern, like his, was palpable. To the warden, Boldt said, “We need to speak to Flek right now!”

  M

  The prison’s interrogation room still smelled of the glue used to fasten down the vinyl flooring. It ranked as the cleanest interrogation room Boldt had ever seen. Better than even the FBI or BATF. A video camera looked down on the occupants. Built into the wall was a twin cassette tape recorder that kept track of every spoken word, every sound. The twin cassette concept, borrowed from the Brits, ensured that no one could later edit the content of the interrogation to fit his needs; one tape went with the officer in charge, the other was filed in a vault accessed only by the warden—

  a failsafe against corruption.

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  David Ansel Flek wore the demeaning zebra suit, his number EJC-42 on a patch sewn onto the right breast pocket and on another that ran shoulder to shoulder across his back. “Forty-two,” the guards called him, never using names, never personalizing or humanizing the process. A team of privately contracted criminal psychiatrists had advised Etheredge Corporation on how to treat the prisoners in order to maintain discipline and keep peace, so it came as something of a shock to the man in the jumpsuit when Boldt and Matthews addressed him by his Christian name. It also served to mark the two as outsiders—exactly as Matthews had advised Boldt.

  “Who are you?” the man inquired. Flek’s boyish face and blond surfer-dude hairstyle, his blue eyes and white teeth reminded Boldt of one of the Beach Boys, or Tab Hunter in a Fort Lauderdale movie. His smallish frame had been beefed up in the gym. Boldt knew the ordeal such looks suffered in any prison. They called them babes, wives, soapies—the young men forced to lie on their stomachs for the rulers of the pen. But
to his surprise, Boldt did not see the steely-eyed resentment he associated with the abused. The more he studied Flek, the more he believed the man had somehow escaped the role of girlfriend, either a credit to Etheredge’s management of the facility, or testimony to the ruthlessness of Flek himself.

  “We’re your only hope,” Daphne said.

  Boldt clarified, “Your only hope, unless you like it here.”

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  “Unless you’re thinking of turning fifty in here,”

  Daphne said. Dates or age had a way of shaking up any inmate—the passage of time was the only god in such places, the only redeemer. According to his file, the man was twenty-nine years old, and Boldt’s comment seemed to hit home.

  “What’s it about?” he asked.

  “The harder you make us work for it,” Boldt informed him, “the fewer years we trim off what’s going to be added to your sentence. You want to get out of here by forty? Thirty-five? Then don’t play dumb.”

  His ice blue eyes searched them both. They favored Daphne, and for a little too long.

  Boldt cautioned, “There are no second chances, Flek. We leave, and we take twenty years of your life out the door with us.”

  “I requested my public defender,” the man reminded.

  “And she’s on her way, as I understand it,” Boldt said. “You know how busy they are.”

  “So we wait,” Flek said confidently.

  Boldt and Matthews exchanged glances. Daphne spoke to the inmate. “I’m not advising you one way or the other, David—”

  “Ansel,” he corrected a little too quickly.

  “You’re somewhat new to the system,” she said. He winced; he didn’t want to be told that. “We’ve seen your file. First offense, light sentence. They were lenient with you. You’re lucky in that regard, as I’m sure you found out once you took up residence here.”

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  “You have a little over a year left to go,” Boldt reminded him. “So why add ten to twenty to that?”