Middle of Nowhere

by Ridley Pearson

  The Quik Stop gas station teemed with activity. Some customers pulled up to the pumps; others parked, shopping for a soda, a bag of chips, or a quart of milk. But by his count, every customer arrived and left by automobile. He observed no bicycles, no pedestrians. This latter realization prompted a second study of the back of a big man already a half block behind the Quik Stop and moving away. The man wore a thigh-length leather jacket, blue jeans and high-top running shoes. The telltale sign that got LaMoia’s adrenaline pumping had M I D D L E O F N O W H E R E

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  nothing to do with clothes but instead, the lack of anything carried. No paper or plastic bag. No soda. It seemed conceivable the man had purchased a pack of cigarettes or something small enough to be pocketed—

  it was no crime to leave a Quik Stop on foot—but his recollection of the case file suggested otherwise: The burglar was believed to monitor police radio bands, probably on a portable scanner, and LaMoia had impetuously cleared the area around the Quik Stop by ra- dio, naming the gas station’s location. Foremost on LaMoia’s mind: Where had this guy come from? He had not seen anyone arrive on foot in the last few minutes. More to the point, according to his criminal records, Bryce Abbott Flek stood six foot one, and weighed in at two hundred pounds. That fit well with the man now nearly a block away.

  LaMoia needed someone to watch the blue van while he pursued its apparent owner on foot, but he didn’t want the car’s police radio to communicate about it. The real Flek, whether or not he was the man on foot, might be listening in, wandering the aisles of the Quik Stop, wondering how to play his situation. Realizing he had to take a chance, LaMoia grabbed the radio’s handset and informed the dispatcher he was switching to one of the four “secure frequencies” used by SPD. Illegally modified scanners could not intercept these digitally secure frequencies. He requested the dispatcher to assign a patrolman from the nearby cruiser to take up a position with a view of the blue van and to report any activity. Naming the cross street behind the 244

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  Quik Stop—the intersection where the blue-jeaned pedestrian was headed—LaMoia requested that two cruisers position themselves as backup, bookending the street. This done, he took off on foot. He did not run, but instead walked with a brisk, long-legged stride, calculated to quickly close the distance between himself and his mark. He had not thought to bring along a portable radio from the squad room, and so he was on his own—“cloaked,” “in the dark.” Only his cellular phone connected him to the world outside of Bryce Abbott Flek—if that was in fact whom he was following.

  By the time his suspect reached the intersection and turned right, LaMoia had closed the gap to half a block. Following several weeks of inactivity, LaMoia felt awash, invigorated by the pursuit, hungry for confrontation. He loved his job. There was nothing quite like slamming a mope up against the wall and slapping a pair of bracelets around his wrists, taking another piece of infectious waste off the streets, out of the game. Duty called. He felt positively electric with anticipation. The first blow came from behind—a devastating show of force, unexpected and overpowering. An openpalm smack to the back of his skull, delivered with such ferocity that his chin bruised his chest, and a whole series of muscles at the nape of his neck ripped loose. He heard his gun clink to the sidewalk, the dull sound of metal on cement, useless where it lay. That blow to the head stunned the muscles of his upper back and numbed his spine to where his arms suddenly weighed M I D D L E O F N O W H E R E

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  upon him like sandbags. He attempted to turn around to fight back, but his arms hung at his side, swinging like gorilla limbs, and the man behind him directed him otherwise, smashing his face into the brick wall twice and then working a volley of rabbit punches from just above his hip points into the center of his back ribs. The man hit, intending to do harm, intending to quickly eliminate LaMoia from the field of play, swinging through the punches at the brick wall, with only LaMoia’s flesh and bone in between. The man’s knee bruised LaMoia’s coccyx, and the heel of his foot found LaMoia’s instep to where, as he let go, the sergeant sank to the sidewalk, bloody and broken, a mass of misfiring nerve endings, his lungs burning, his legs unable to support him. He never even saw the man’s face.

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  Shying from the obnoxiously bright light, Boldt rushed through the emergency room’s automatic doors, met there by the on-call physician who had tended LaMoia’s injuries. Daphne spoke to a nurse. Upon being informed of the assault, they had made the drive from SEATAC in just over ten minutes—roughly half the usual time, even in good traffic. The doctor spoke breathlessly, also trying to keep up with the lieutenant. “Fluid in the right lung, bruised kidneys, contusions, partial concussion, fractured ribs, bruised coccyx. If I hadn’t gotten the report from the officers who delivered him, I would have said he’d been hit by a vehicle from behind.”

  They stepped into the oversized elevator and the doctor hit a floor button. Boldt felt ready to explode.

  “So nothing permanent,” he said. “Nothing disabling.”

  “A good deal of pain, a long convalescence, and he’s back to normal,” the doctor said. “The guy’s got a hell of an attitude, Lieutenant. He’s making jokes as we’re wiring his jaw shut.”

  “His jaw?” Daphne said.

  “Didn’t I mention that?” the doctor asked as the elevator toned its arrival. “Broken mandible.”

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  “Jesus,” Boldt hissed.

  Daphne reached out and squeezed his forearm in support. He turned to face her. “I’m the one who put him there,” he wanted to say. He charged out of the elevator, and hurried toward room 511. M

  A powder blue blanket hid most of him. Lying flat on his back, without a pillow. A variety of monitors. A dozen bright yellow numbers, some flashing. At first Boldt thought they had the wrong room because he didn’t recognize the man lying there. Then he realized they had shaved LaMoia’s mustache to deal with the cuts and abrasions, and to stitch up a spot where a tooth had come through his cheek. Boldt had to look away, he was so overcome with emotion. Boldt didn’t always deal well with his anger, and he was very angry now. A rational thinker, he tried to avoid anger altogether by compartmentalizing explanations and analyzing situations, though he frequently failed. LaMoia was too close a friend for Boldt to see him solely as a wounded sergeant. Boldt had connected Ragman to LaMoia—and from the sketchy details he had, Boldt believed himself responsible for the injuries.

  “How long like this?” Daphne whispered to the doctor, but so that Boldt could overhear. She wanted to bookend this for Boldt, to show him it wasn’t forever, to make it finite.

  “The lung will keep him here for a day or two. We’ll get him pretty healed up by then. He’ll be home with 248

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  just a couple bumps and bruises in no time. Six to eight weeks, it never happened.”

  “Try telling him that,” Boldt said.

  “Medically speaking,” the doctor replied. The body in the bed grunted, its bloodshot eyes open now and fixed on Boldt, who slowly made his way to the injured man’s bedside. Boldt saw a familiar morbid humor in those eyes, and for some reason this made his anger all the more palpable. How dare LaMoia make light of this! How dare he try to forgive him—

  Boldt knew what that attempted humor was about.

  “Flek?” Boldt asked.

  The man’s lips moved, but Boldt couldn’t hear. The doctor warned, “He shouldn’t attempt to speak. Please. In the morning, maybe.”

  But LaMoia grunted, drawing Boldt’s ear closer to his lips.

  “Good drugs,” the man whispered.

  Boldt felt tears spring from his eyes. “Jesus, John, I’m sorry.” He dragged his arm across his face, trying to hide his reaction.

  LaMoia just grunted in response. The doctor pulled Boldt away and checked the monitors.

  “It’s res
t for you,” he said to LaMoia, addressing an I.V. pump and increasing the rate of flow. “And stop flirting with the nurses,” he added.

  “Never,” LaMoia whispered, meeting eyes with Daphne, and trying to smile.

  “Healthy as ever,” Daphne said.

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  “The Flek brothers,” Daphne said. “You want to hear this?”

  Boldt sat at his office desk, still preoccupied by his hospital visit to LaMoia. He nodded yes, all the while thinking about LaMoia’s empty office cubicle just around the corner.

  “We have a pretty classic Svengali here. Bryce Abbott Flek, the older brother, has been in and out of trouble— in mostly—since he could ride a bike. The bully in school. Truant. Petty theft—bicycles, cigarettes from the candy store. A couple juvie arson arrests. Possession of a switchblade. Grand larceny auto at the ripe age of fourteen. Liquor store robbery, fifteen.”

  “Model citizen.”

  “One troubled kid. Trailer park life in the Colorado oil fields. Statutory rape charges when he was eighteen—turned out it was consensual, charges dropped. He beat up a lot of people. One hell of a volatile personality. It’s endless.”

  “You don’t need to sound so excited,” he said. Daphne’s professional curiosity about the criminal mind exceeded one’s reasonable expectations. She was 250

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  always looking for ways to interview suspects ahead of their arrest—while they still showed their true colors. She cast him a disapproving look and continued, saying, “In and out of youth detention facilities, corrections. Six months for this, eighteen for that—minimum or medium facilities, never the big house. Fast forward: He’s thirty-three years old, he has two recent felonies on his dismal sheet, one aggravated assault, one grand larceny.”

  “File that for a moment,” she said, motioning for Boldt to set Bryce Abbott aside. “Rewind. David Ansel Flek. Little brother. Same trailer park, same parents, same schools. But no truancy. No arrests until he’s seventeen, and that one’s for loitering and curfew violation following a winter flood that takes out the family trailer and Mom along with it. It’s sketchy at best, but a Denver Post article I pulled from the Net mentions her by name—Adrian Abbott Flek—electrocuted when the flood hit. Got to be the mother. Father blew off the sons and headed to the Alaska fields. David drifts south, although he never leaves Colorado—his brother’s influence can hardly be said to be positive. David enlists in the Army, makes it two years, goes AWOL. Is arrested on one of his brother’s robberies. Turned back over to the Army. Serves a couple months in the brig, serves out his stint and is dishonorably discharged at twentythree. State tax records show him employed briefly with a computer software firm. Mail room or programmer, we have no idea, but he’s basically on the straight-andnarrow. It’s during this period that brother Bryce is M I D D L E O F N O W H E R E

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  making his mark with the local blues, one arrest after another, increasingly violent. Make note of this: David’s next job is with a discount electronics retailer, a Best Buy type. He moves up to manager in a two-year period—he’s twenty-five, twenty-six now. There’s a breakin at David’s store right after a major delivery—two dozen TVs, VCRs, twice that many computers. David is busted and eventually confesses. His first felony, he goes down for two to seven.”

  “In Etheredge,” Boldt said.

  “Correct.”

  “He’s out in two with good behavior,” Boldt said.

  “Correct. Which means we have all sorts of leverage. If we convince younger brother David that with both the Sanchez and LaMoia assaults, Bryce faces bullets from the first uniform to make him, maybe he gives us a lead. Or maybe we simply hold the threat of an added ten years over him, although that sure didn’t work the first time.”

  “I like playing him for the brother’s safety. The only thing is, we don’t have either brother for Sanchez—no phone solicitation records, remember?—and we don’t have Bryce for LaMoia. He never saw his attacker’s face. So we’re looking at burglary at best, unless Kawamoto can make him.”

  “Someone walked away from that blue van and never came back. How difficult is it for a judge or jury to see that?”

  “It’s circumstantial. When and if we catch up with 252

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  Bryce, he’ll tell us the van was stolen an hour before. We can’t disprove that.”

  “What about the convenience store’s security camera? Did it pick up his face?”

  “The system’s VCR was lifted a month ago and never replaced by management. There is no tape. We can’t put Bryce Flek at that gas station.”

  She said, “What exactly are you saying?”

  “David is our way to find Bryce. We find Bryce, maybe we wrap this thing up.”

  “Maybe,” she said. “But Bryce would have to confess to Sanchez to get any decent charges to stick.”

  Boldt answered, “Maybe not.” He hoisted a blackand-white mug shot of Bryce Abbott Flek and turned it to face Daphne. “What if Sanchez can ID him?”

  Boldt’s private line rang, and he took a call. Hanging up a moment later, a satisfied grin playing across his lips, he informed her, “We found the apartment where Flek has been staying.”

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  BryceAbbottFlek’sphotowasrecognizedbyaguitar maker. The rented room, one of five that occupied the two floors above Fletcher Brock’s custom instrument shop, consumed three SID field technicians who combed it floor to ceiling. LaMoia’s assault could be felt here too—normally Boldt would have been lucky to get even one tech to a potential suspect’s abode in under an hour.

  “What have we got?” Boldt asked a SID tech from just inside the doorway. He wore latex gloves and a snarl. The place was a pig sty.

  “Stroke mags, beer drinker, junk food, dirty laundry. Three cellular phones, all apparently working. Could be a college dorm room, if I didn’t know better.”

  “The phones? Clones?” Boldt said.

  “Three of ’em? Probably.”

  “Weapons?”

  “Negative.”

  “Prints?”

  “A lot of lifts—mostly the same guy. Maybe a woman, by the size of the others. Box of Tampax on the floor by the toilet. Blond pubic hairs mixed in with 254

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  the more abundant darker ones, collected from the sheets, toilet rim, and shower drain—platinum blond.”

  “Shoes?”

  “Pair of high-top sneakers, is all.”

  “Nike?” Boldt asked, recalling the shoe at his own assault. Had that been brother Flek?

  “Converse. We’ve already bagged and tagged the clothes. We’ll go over them for hairs and fibers. If there’s anything that links this place to Sanchez or your other sites, you’ll hear about it.”

  “Drugs? Alcohol?”

  “Valium and amphetamines in the bath. Street grade. No prescription bottles. The beer. Some Cuervo Gold. That’s about it. Purely recreational stuff.”

  “Not in combination,” Daphne said softly into Boldt’s left ear. “Two bennies, one Valium, and a shot of Gold. That’s a street cocktail they call a glow plug. A couple glow plugs and a guy’ll think he’s bulletproof.”

  “As in beating up a cop from behind?” Boldt suggested to her.

  “That would certainly fit.”

  He turned to the tech and asked, “Electronics? Parts? Computers? Anything in that category?”

  “Just the three cell phones.”

  “Any of these?” he said, pulling from his pocket one of the plastic ties he’d recovered from the Kawamoto crime scene.

  “Not here, but in the van,” the man answered.

  “You did the van?”

  “The blue van. Colorado plates? All three of us,” the M I D D L E O F N O W H E R E

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  tech replied, indicating the woman and man still busy behind him. He stepped forward and picked the white pl
astic tie from between Boldt’s fingers. “Must be a couple hundred of these lying around loose in that van.”

  Boldt looked over his shoulder at Daphne and said,

  “That’s a start.”

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  Revisiting the hospital wasn’t easy for Boldt. This time he was there to see Officer Maria Sanchez. He perked up the moment he and Daphne entered the room, as the woman lying there was able to somewhat jokingly wave hello to them with her toes. Movement had returned to the digits of both feet, and with a great deal of concentration, her left ankle could be flexed. Though she remained paralyzed from the knees up, the woman’s hopefulness and enthusiasm now filled the room like warm sunlight, replacing the fear and terror that had so recently been in evidence.

  “We have a suspect,” Daphne announced. The woman looked right, signaling “yes.”

  “Not yet in custody,” Boldt added. “We would like to show you a photo array. You know the drill, Officer.”

  Another “yes.”

  Daphne explained, “There are six faces in the array, all numbered. If you recognize one of the individuals as your assailant, we would like you to blink the number to us. Number two—two blinks, et cetera. Is that okay with you?”

  “Are you up to this?” Boldt asked.

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  “Yes,” came the indicated reply.

  “If you have doubts,” Boldt continued, “we’ll get to that. For the moment, we simply need to know if any of these faces looks familiar to you.”

  The woman looked right with her dark eyes. “Yes.”

  “Good,” Daphne said, checking with Boldt who nodded to go ahead. Daphne pulled the array from her shoulder case. Sandwiched layers of heavy stock, the six head shots sat behind equally sized cutout windows, a number below each. Four were black-and-white, two color. She held it an arm’s length from Sanchez’s pillowed head, and knew within seconds that the victim did not recognize any of the men in the photos. Then she reminded herself that Sanchez was incapable of facial expression, and because of this, she held out hope. Sanchez closed her eyes.