The Body of David Hayes

by Ridley Pearson

  “Yes.”

  “You the only one with this clearance?”

  “Hardly.”

  “How many others?”

  She had called for the meeting and yet they were working his agenda. “I’m not sure.”

  “Not sure or won’t tell?”

  “You’ll have to go above me for that. Sorry.”

  “We don’t want to get into this, do we?” His eyes drilled into her. Whatever past they’d shared was briefly forgotten. “Me, explaining how it was that Hayes came to you before anyone else?” He waited. “It’s a simple enough question, Liz.”

  “And I’m forbidden from answering it. I signed documents. What you’re asking is something I cannot do-consequences be what they may.”

  Foreman set down the clean and reassembled weapon and pushed back from the table.

  She filled the resulting silence. “My point in calling you was to let you know that an opportunity exists to make a deal with David.”

  “Your point in calling me,” Foreman corrected, “was to find out how much I know.”

  “He’s clearly terrified at the moment, and I would think you’d want to jump on that.”

  Foreman steamed, still not recovered from her refusal. “I’m on your side. Don’t make me jump through hoops just to understand the way this works. Understanding it is one thing. Stopping him is another. And it’ll be impossible if I don’t know what he knows. And he worked there, Liz… at the bank. That puts me at a distinct disadvantage from the get-go. How can I protect the other people with this clearance rating if I don’t know who they are?”

  “You’ll have to go above me.”

  “Goddamn it!” Foreman slapped the table. The gun jumped. So did Liz. “Sorry,” he said, composing himself.

  His display of temper rattled her; she didn’t know this side of Danny Foreman. How on earth did this case get so personal for him? “Cut a deal with him, Danny. If you use me, use me to bring him that deal.”

  “I’ll work on it.”

  “And do it quickly, because I’m going to lay this all out for Lou, and after that… You know Lou.”

  “Give me a day.”

  “Can’t. I’ve got to tell him tonight.”

  “There are channels to go through.”

  “At the bank, too.”

  “Give me a break.”

  She offered him her own deal. “I’ll explore permission to turn over what you need… our classified information… if you’ll put together that deal.”

  “Once Lou is involved he won’t let you within a mile of David Hayes. Don’t kid yourself.”

  “So we’ll both work quickly,” Liz proposed. “There are still a few hours left in the day.”

  “I don’t know about you, but my guys don’t move that fast. This is the government, don’t forget.”

  “Try.”

  “As if I have a choice,” he said, and acknowledged with a sly grin that Liz had won the first round.

  FOUR

  UNACCUSTOMED TO SUCH THINGS, LIZ suffered a bout of depression as she rode an elevator toward the fifth floor of the Public Safety Building and her husband’s office. Revisiting the Affair-capital A-was certain to disturb and disrupt Lou, was certain to strain and test their marriage, and just the thought of that made her skin clammy, her neck tense. She’d never once been called to the principal’s office, but now she knew how it felt.

  Like this old public building, there had been an earlier time when their marriage had shone in all its glory. Now the place existed in a ponderous state of absolute cheerlessness. She hoped their relationship was not destined to suffer a similar fate.

  Required to check in with an attendant outside of Crimes Against Persons, Liz indirectly alerted Lou to her arrival and he was waiting for her as she was buzzed through the door. To her relief, he looked neither troubled nor angry, and just seeing him made her feel better.

  “Hey, you,” she said.

  He said nothing, escorting her into his office and shutting the door. Seeing their children’s artwork taped and tacked to the walls and corkboard alongside crime scene photos and photocopied memos twisted Liz into a knot. She wanted-needed-to keep this businesslike yet personal, honest and yet not too specific, keeping in mind his feelings above her own. He was certain to take this as being as much of a shock as she had when she’d received that first call from David. She remembered her own reaction as breathless and frightened, and wanted to remember to give him a chance to recover, regardless of what his steeled exterior revealed. As a cop, Lou Boldt could hide anything going on inside him.

  She sat down, and to her great relief Lou turned a chair to face her, forgoing his regular chair behind the desk. “Hey there yourself,” he finally said.

  She kept in mind that he questioned people for a living. He turned them around on themselves to where they would confess to what they had no intention of revealing. Both a good listener and quick on his feet, Lou was not to be challenged. She schooled herself not to get competitive or defensive.

  “We need to go back several years,” she began, “to the embezzlement.”

  “Okay.” But it wasn’t okay and he knew that, for it also marked another event in their lives.

  She plunged in. “In all this time, you’ve never asked me with whom I had the affair.”

  “You’ve never told me,” he said, making a point of his impression of the proper order of things.

  “I can’t tell you how much I respected you for that. Appreciated your leaving that choice to me. I know it can’t have been easy.”

  “None of this has ever been easy,” Lou said, “for either of us. I wanted to know so I wouldn’t keep guessing every time we attended a bank function. I didn’t want to know because comparisons were inevitable, and I didn’t want to carry my own inadequacies around, didn’t want to face where I’d failed you, didn’t want to judge you for your taste in lovers and hate you for it. For the record, I’m over that stuff now. It’s history.”

  He had a tendency to speak like this, adopting phrases from his work-“for the record”-and subjecting her to them.

  “It’s David Hayes.”

  She watched as the news hit him, actually glad to see he couldn’t carry this off with a stone face and calm exterior. He paled, nodded. “The embezzler. Danny Foreman’s stakeout.” He nodded again, pieces fitting together for him.

  “He was with I.T. Back then. This is before I was promoted to oversee the department.”

  “Did you know anything about it at the time? The embezzlement?”

  The similarity of this question to that of Danny Foreman bothered her.

  She rehashed for him the known facts of the embezzlement-the wire fraud, the missing seventeen million, the belief that the money still resided somewhere on the bank’s servers, and Danny Foreman’s determination to intercept any attempt to retrieve the stolen funds and the software responsible for hiding it, and to identify the people whose money it had been. Her husband stayed with her, never interrupting, his ear turned slightly toward her, his eyes fixed as if she’d winded him.

  “David contacted me at the office yesterday, and I went to see him.”

  Lou nodded. She wanted more from him than this, any expression of his internal emotions. Anything but talking to a robot.

  She described the threats Hayes had received, the physical beating he’d taken, and her insistence he go to the authorities to make a deal. “I took all this to Danny Foreman today,” she described. “We made a deal that I’d try to get permission to release some of the classified bank information to him if he’d work on a deal to get David and his mother relocated.”

  Boldt said calmly, “There’s a saying in witness protection: The difference between deal and dead is one letter.”

  “Right, well… what I want to say is I’m embarrassed and ashamed by all of this, by everything that’s happened, back then, now, the fact he contacted me. But I can’t hide it, won’t hide it. And I won’t give anyone the chance to use that ag
ainst me, against us.”

  “I know how hard this must have been for you. Coming here. Explaining this. But if you expect me to thank you-”

  “I don’t expect any such thing. Do I want you to thank me? No! But a reaction would be nice. Shout at me, scream at me, be angry with me. What are you feeling in there, and why won’t you show me?”

  “I’m thinking you’re the one that needs protection.”

  “Not thinking,” she complained. “Feeling. What are you feeling?”

  Lou straightened up and waited for her eyes to meet his own. “I don’t feel in this office. This is not a place for that. I work here. I process facts. I process death. I occasionally allow myself to feel when I get into my car and head home, but even then I turn the radio up real loud, put the windows down, and stay quiet about it. You feel for about the first six months on this job. That would be a while ago for me. After that you try not to let emotion overcome reason. Not that you’re always successful. You’re not.

  “What am I feeling now?” he continued. “Hurt. Trapped. Concerned for you. Worried about Danny Foreman being involved because he’s famous for what we call a Lone Ranger attitude and I don’t want you caught up in that. At the same time I’m grateful to be included, I do thank you for that, and while I’d like to be feeling more, at least for your sake, I find myself instead trying to jump ahead and get this thing contained, because you’re my wife and I don’t want you in the middle of this.”

  “Trapped?”

  “Did I say trapped?”

  “You did.”

  “I don’t know what I meant by that.”

  Despite his outward façade of complacency, she recognized his fixed stare. He was lost to thought. She felt this kind of information was better doled out in doses than dumped all at once as she had done, but she’d had little choice.

  “So what do we do?” she asked.

  “I talk to Danny. We sort this out.”

  “And me?”

  “We handle it from here, Liz. If he contacts you again, then that’s where you’re involved again. But that’ll be by phone only. You’re not to make any kind of physical contact with him again.”

  Any kind of physical contact; she resented him including that. “I wasn’t the one who made contact. I thought I explained that.”

  “You went to see him,” Lou reminded. “You cooperated. That wouldn’t look good to a judge or jury.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “What if it comes down to his word against yours that you had nothing to do with the original crime?”

  “We’re past that. We’re way past that. Don’t you think that just might have come out in the original trial?”

  “How is the bank going to feel about you taking a meeting in secret with a convicted embezzler? Was the bank notified?”

  “It’s none of their business!”

  “It’s exactly their business. It’s none of your business, or shouldn’t be.”

  She processed this and knew he was right, and this filled her with an added dread.

  “I’ll talk to Danny,” Boldt said again.

  She didn’t want Lou comparing notes with Danny Foreman, but any thought of containing this was long gone.

  “Who else has access to I.T. the way you do?”

  “That’s what Danny wants too.”

  “I’m not Danny.”

  “I do. Tony does, of course. Phillip-goes without saying.”

  “Maintenance?” he asked. “Programmers?”

  “A dozen or more for the UNIX system, sure. Not the AS/400s. Tony’s the only programmer we have who works with the AS/400s. Typically we outsource that work to IBM anyway. They’re their own worlds, the AS/400s.”

  “So, in some ways, Tony LaRossa is more important to Hayes than you.”

  “Except that David has a past with me. He thinks he can use it to his advantage. He’d have to strong-arm Tony or try to bribe him, and neither of those is even a remote possibility.”

  “Either is a possibility,” Lou said. “These people drugged Danny. You said they pulled a couple fingernails off Hayes. They killed a dog. Threatened an old lady. What makes Tony LaRossa immune?”

  “Okay,” she said. “So Tony’s in the picture as well. I’ll call him.”

  “No,” Lou said sharply. “You’re discounting the possibility that Tony was involved from the beginning.”

  “Tony? He’s my director of I.T.!” She said this but felt a worming sensation overcome her. “Tony? We barbecue with Tony and Beth. The twins-”

  “… were an expensive adoption,” Boldt interrupted, finishing her sentence for her. “The failed in-vitros must have run in the tens of thousands. Where’d Tony get that kind of money?”

  “He makes a good living.”

  “He’s worth a look.”

  “We all get favorable loan rates. Don’t lump Tony in with David Hayes. He’s not that kind of person.”

  “And you are? Stay clear of Tony, Liz. Not a word until we’ve had a chance to run some background.”

  “I didn’t come here to turn the investigation over to you, Lou. I came here to be honest with you, to include you.”

  “Consider me now included.”

  “Not like this.”

  “What’d you expect? I’d let Danny run you?”

  “No one’s running me.”

  “Hayes is running you. Or trying to. Going to Danny before coming to me… How am I supposed to feel about that?”

  She hadn’t considered his professional pride might be more wounded than his husband’s pride. Then, realizing the two were impossibly intertwined, she resigned herself to the fact that she’d botched the whole thing from the start. Without thinking, she asked, “Are you alright with this?”

  “‘Conflicted,’ I think it’s called.” Sarcasm was misplaced in him, like a preacher swearing. “I obviously failed you as a husband. No matter how far in the past, that kills me. Your taking this to Danny before me also hurts and, I might add, makes it all the more difficult for us both. Unlike Danny, I put your safety first, the investigation second. Whether or not I can make that happen at this late date is anybody’s guess, but it has to happen because I am not exposing you to this guy again.”

  “I won’t have his mother’s murder on my conscience, Lou. That might not make any sense to you, but I want you clear on this. I will be involved, at least to the extent David thinks I’m involved. I want to be cooperative, I want to work this out, yes, but as wife and husband, not informant and detective.”

  “I can’t make any promises. At least not the one you’re asking for. I’ll need to make some calls.”

  She felt a victim again, much as she had after the meeting with David. Lou had boxed her into something she’d not seen coming, and she deeply resented the way he felt it was his right to make decisions for her.

  “I’ll try to do whatever you and Danny ask, Lou, but I will not be excluded from the decision-making process. You, or someone, is going to offer David a deal. I will bring him that deal, if necessary.”

  “We’ll protect the mother if we can. Depending on where she lives.”

  “California, somewhere.”

  “That’s more problematic, but not impossible. As I said, I need to make some calls.”

  She felt the principal had dismissed her, but she wasn’t done. “As far as I’m concerned, the worst thing that can happen is that we allow this to drive a wedge between us.”

  “Which is why Danny and I are now in charge,” Lou said. “Because that’s not the worst. Truth be told, it doesn’t even come close.”

  Alone now, Boldt wondered why her affair had to resurface, why Liz had to remind him that he should feel something more than his general sense of numbness allowed. Over the past six years, he’d figured out how to hide much of this behind a carefully erected wall. Now, despite all his emotional masonry, that wall had crumbled down around him. Around them both.

  Boldt phoned Danny Foreman, prepared to feel imp
otent and the source of another’s unspoken amusement. Cuckolded. He lacked a cohesive strategy but knew time was of the essence. Danny would already be working angles that he, Boldt, had yet to see. To wait too long was to be completely excluded. Liz had put herself in the center of this, and now Boldt needed to extricate her as quickly as possible.

  Foreman didn’t pick up at his office, nor did he answer his mobile. Boldt left a pair of messages, but he knew in advance that there was good reason for Foreman’s silence.

  Danny Foreman was already hard at work, and Boldt was playing catch-up.

  It was an unspoken rule in the Boldt home that police business not be discussed, and so the collision of these two worlds caused repeated violations, begun the previous morning with the discussion of Danny Foreman’s assault and continued now through the post-dinner kitchen cleanup. As Liz patrolled the table and countertops, Boldt parked himself in front of the sink and splashed his way through a pile of pots and dishes, most of which were on their way to the KitchenAid dishwasher to his right, a noisy, prehistoric contraption that needed replacement. The thing would outlive most dogs without ever failing, but its churning, swishing, and occasional grinding amounted to an invasion of privacy, as far as Boldt was concerned, so he didn’t turn it on when the time came. Instead, he eavesdropped on his son, Miles, practicing piano.

  “It’s beautiful,” Liz said, finishing off a countertop with a damp sponge. He sensed in her the desire to reestablish their lives as normal.

  “It’s astonishing,” Boldt said. “His age… and as little training as he has had.” He was wondering what came next and how he could work to separate Liz from the investigation.

  “Chip off the old block,” Liz said. “Off the old bolt,” she corrected, amusing him. For a moment, even to him, they felt like husband and wife again.

  “I don’t have a tenth of that kind of talent.”

  “He got it listening to you. Watching you practice as much as you do.”

  “I’d love to take credit for any of that, believe me. But that’s more your department… more divine intervention than learned behavior. He’s special.”