The Body of David Hayes

by Ridley Pearson

  Boldt said, “The combination probably came sometime around the second fingernail.”

  “How’s that?” Captain Espresso had not seen Foreman’s left hand.

  “It’s nothing,” Boldt replied. “Develop prints if you can, inside the safe and out, and keep alert for cigar or cigarette ash anywhere in the house. Check all the trash cans, the sinks, the perimeter outside. I’d love an extinguished butt if we can find it.”

  “Got it,” the SID man replied.

  “This guy’s in the family. On the job. You understand that?”

  “I got it, Lieutenant. We’re all over this.”

  “Tell Bernie Lofgrin I’m lead.”

  “You, Lieutenant?”

  “My squad.” Boldt would have to put this off on someone; lieutenants didn’t run cases. “But I want Bernie calling me.”

  “Got it.”

  “And try eating some red meat,” Boldt said. On his way out of the small bedroom Boldt thought he heard the guy mumble “Fuck you” under his breath, but didn’t return to challenge him. He deserved it.

  Danny Foreman had not deserved it, however, and Boldt resolved to bring somebody in for gluing wrists together and using vise-grip pliers to extract fingernails. And also to learn whatever it was that his former friend and colleague, Danny Foreman, wasn’t telling him.

  EIGHT

  LIZ SKIPPED HER RUN, GOT the kids up and fed, and dropped them off at school with little fanfare, one of their better mornings. At work now, she felt the presence of her cell phone weighing on her purse, hoping it might ring, that she might hear from Lou about Danny Foreman being a “victim” and what that meant to the investigation. Still caught up in the events of Friday, culminating in the discovery that Hayes had used her maiden name on his safe-deposit box, she felt hypersensitive to her surroundings and the goings-on within the bank. Asked to turn over the list of names of bank employees with security clearance to the UNIX and AS/400 servers, Liz also felt obligated to personally notify all five of them of this development, not so much as a warning but as a courtesy, one colleague to another.

  She spoke to Phillip in person, clearing both her release of the names and letting him know that she intended to make the calls herself. His reaction was positive, though guarded. As WestCorp’s CEO, he wanted his employees and his computer systems protected, but he reminded Liz no less than three times of the impending merger and how any negative publicity could affect the company’s stock price. With equity markets tanking, many a merger had been put off or canceled outright. WestCorp could ill afford any such setback this late in the game.

  Liz’s first warning was to go out to Tony LaRossa, her director of Information Technology, seemingly a target for Hayes since Tony knew the bank’s computer systems inside and out and was one of a select few who could program an IBM AS/400. She decided to see Tony in person as well, using her security pass to allow her access to the twenty-fifth floor. The elevator doors slid open and she stepped through to the quiet chaos of the busiest division in the company: hers. With the technical transfer of the merger only days away, her people were basically working around the clock. And they showed it.

  “Two-five,” as Liz’s I.T. team referred to this floor-never “twenty-five”-was of an open floor plan: eleven office cubicles with walkways between them. All but two were currently occupied. To her right, a meeting was under way in the larger of two corner conference rooms. To her left, the entire north end was now screened off by a wall of thick shatterproof, bullet-resistant glass and the buffed steel girders to support it. This dividing wall had been erected after the fact, post-9/11, and offered but a single door, accessed by one of the now infamous electronic palm-scanners. Inside this glassed-in room there was also a door accessing a second server. To her left was Tony’s private office, one of two executive offices on this floor.

  Liz approached Tony’s secretary, a sweet-faced Hispanic woman who favored a good deal of makeup. “Can he see me?” She barely hesitated, already moving toward his office door.

  “He could if he were here,” the secretary responded.

  Liz checked her watch and then the wall clock: 9:20. Tony LaRossa was typically the first to arrive and the last to leave.

  Liz teased, “He’s not allowed to be sick this week. Call the CDC.” But then the more dreaded conclusion seeped into her consciousness. “When you say he’s not here, since when?”

  “Not here, since all morning.”

  “You’ve called home? Spoken to Beth?”

  “Called home, of course. No answer. And his cell. Voice mail. He missed a very important conference call with MTK. No one ever heard from him, which was when I heard about it. And believe me, I heard about it.”

  Liz clarified, “Beth didn’t answer the home phone?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “The twins,” she said. “The twins must be sick.” Beth and Tony had adopted Russian twins less than six months earlier.

  “You all right, Mrs. Boldt?”

  “Fine,” Liz said. “Concerned is all.”

  “I’m sure he’s all right.”

  “No answer on his cell phone?”

  “No.”

  “You paged him?”

  “I did. Twice now.”

  Liz couldn’t help but wonder if the money drop had not been more than just a distraction away from the bank. Had David, or whomever, used it to abduct Tony LaRossa at the same time? Liz scribbled out her cell phone number on a yellow Post-it and passed it to the secretary. “I want to know the moment you hear from him. Okay? And have Tony call this same number as well. I want to be the first to speak to him after you.”

  “Sure thing.” The secretary picked up on Liz’s jumpy nerves and interrupted her departure. “What’s going on, Mrs. Boldt?”

  She avoided giving an answer, understanding then how practiced Lou had to have become to endure bad news without the slightest indication, how he must have learned to quash his own emotions, to keep himself out of it, and this went a long way to explain him to her. It struck her as odd that she was still learning things about him, that it had taken hardship to open her eyes.

  She crossed the room to Tommy Ling’s cubicle. She’d had a lot of dealings with Tommy over the past year because his bailiwick was computer/security integration. Tommy’s Chinese American heritage put him a third-generation American, with not a twinge of Asian accent. He wore a sumptuous dark green wool suit and a shiny black tie against a gunpowder gray shirt with an English spread collar. He looked to be in his early twenties, but she knew from his employment records that he was pushing forty.

  “Tommy,” she said, “you can set it up to have the system alert you when Tony enters the building, can’t you?”

  “If you say to.”

  “I’m saying to.” She wrote down her office extension and cell phone number, to save him having to look them up. “The moment he enters. Okay?”

  “Is there anything wrong?”

  She considered how to answer. “I have some really good news for him, for the whole department, and I want him to be the first to hear.”

  The answer clearly satisfied, even pleased, Ling.

  She returned to the executive floor before trying to reach Lou. By now her heart was working a little harder than normal, her chest warm, her face flushed. She peeled off the gray suit jacket hoping to cool off, the phone pinched at her shoulder.

  “It’s Tony,” she told her husband, without introductions. “He’d be right at the top of my list, in terms of people with access to the system.”

  “What about him?” She heard concern in his voice; she knew she was speaking too quickly, but couldn’t control herself.

  “He’s not in.”

  “So?”

  “You know what they call him on Two-five? The Rooster, because he’s up before everyone else. It’s nine-thirty, Lou!”

  “Liz, I’m going to say something, and I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but when you get excited or nervous you beat around the b
ush, and you’re doing that now, and that’s getting me nervous and excited. So please just take a second to settle down and tell me what it is you want me to come away with from this call.”

  The reprimand and Lou’s instinct toward professionalism had their desired effect. She felt her frustration sink and her thoughts clarify. She also felt a little ticked off at him for being so blunt, but knew she deserved it. “He’s not answering any of his phones. More puzzling, Beth isn’t picking up at home. Tony has already missed an important conference call and a meeting. That’s not like him.”

  She knew to allow Lou time to think.

  “An emergency with the twins?” Boldt suggested.

  “I know,” Liz said. “That’s what I thought, too. But his cell phone and his pager? His secretary can’t find him. Tony LaRossa? He’s the most wired-in guy there is.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay, what?” she asked, feeling the heat return.

  “I agree it’s significant. I can send a patrol unit out to their house. Make inquiries. But more than likely they’re just broken down in a tunnel or on a bridge-somewhere that interferes with reception. Hospitals require you to shut off phones and pagers, which brings us back to the twins. Or maybe it’s batteries. It happens. There’s usually a pretty simple explanation for things like this.”

  Either he was trying to calm her or he believed this, she didn’t know which. She told him about having asked Tommy Ling to watch the system for Tony’s use of his access card.

  “That’s good thinking,” Lou said. “You must be married to a cop.”

  “You’ll send somebody?”

  “I’m on it.” He paused and then said, “That’s what you wanted all along, wasn’t it, me to send a unit over there?”

  Her breath caught. Busted, she thought. She said, “I’m getting Miles and Sarah, don’t forget.”

  “Don’t change the subject on me. You just worked me.”

  “Thanks for this.” She hung up before giving him a chance to vent.

  At 9:55 A.M. her office phone sounded the intercom tone and she picked up.

  Tommy Ling said frantically, “Main entrance!”

  “Tony’s here?”

  “He’s had a heart attack or something. You’d better get down there.”

  There were times Liz marveled at the speed and ease of elevators, but this was not one of them. She arrived on the ground floor to a sea of security shirts bent over a pair of legs she assumed to be Tony’s, a throng of employees lined up trying to get in, and chaotic shouting of nearly everyone involved.

  She pushed her way through the attendants, enough to first identify and then get a better look at Tony LaRossa. His face was a pale color she’d never seen before, his lips a faint blue. He was either unconscious or dead. He’d made it through one of the two metal detectors, and had collapsed. A black nylon webbed briefcase lay unzipped and opened on the security inspection table. It was common practice for security to search every bag. It appeared that Tony had collapsed in the middle of just such a search.

  She established that an ambulance had been called, verified by the sudden distant whine of a siren that grew progressively louder. One of the attendants got Tony’s feet elevated as a woman began CPR on his chest. A male guard pinched off Tony’s nose and administered mouth-to-mouth, a handkerchief placed over Tony’s lips. A low, steady voice counted, “One-two-three-four… ” and Liz felt her chest swell and her eyes challenged by tears as this team of trained people tried to save him. Tony’s life seemed to be passing before her eyes, and she silently whispered prayers that Tony not be harmed. She removed all fear, all claims that the images before her could in any way harm him. She fought this her way, while they fought theirs, giving no thought to calling Lou or to anything outside the sphere of this immediate need.

  The EMTs swarmed inside with their equipment and wheeled stretcher, and took over the CPR without missing a beat. It looked to Liz so rehearsed and choreographed, and she realized that there were people in this world who did nothing but save other people. Or try to. She marveled at how strange it must be to rise every morning and put on a gray-striped shirt and know you will see death and injury before the sun sets.

  “What happened, Dilly?” she managed to ask the guard she knew only by his first name. She saw him twice a day, every day. Dilly was middle-forties and beer-bellied, with an easy disposition.

  “Mr. LaRossa. Same as always: got the green light, stepped up to be checked, but tripped the mag going through.” He indicated the metal detector. “And, I don’t know, just something came over him, like. He pulls out his cell phone. No big deal, but something hammered him. He just stared at it, tried to pass it off, and keeled over. Dropped like a stone. Three of us here, not one of us got to him in time to catch him. Went down hard. Thunked his head pretty good.”

  “That’s the cell phone?” she asked, stepping so easily into the role of inquisitor, understanding the rush that Lou felt doing this. A blue Nokia sat on the scratched vinyl-topped table that security used for searches. Liz stepped up to the open briefcase. Papers. Pens. Several small computer disks. A laptop. A Palm Pilot device. A second cell phone: a small Motorola flip.

  Liz glanced back and forth between the two cell phones. Two, not one. Before she even placed the call to Lou, she knew this addition to be of significance to Tony’s heart attack. She knew it all had to do with David and his determination to get at this money. Tony LaRossa? she thought in stunned disbelief.

  She caught Lou on his way back to work. He’d followed the Foreman crime scene with a meeting at the bank looking over safe-deposit logs. Speaking to Lou over the phone, she said, “We have to find Beth and the kids. Something terrible has happened.”

  NINE

  LIZ CAME THROUGH THE LAROSSAS’ front door timidly, knowing she was on Lou’s turf, and feeling strange about it. Her job, her “assignment,” was to get Beth to talk. Lou had offered to drive Beth to the hospital, but all she would say was that Tony had told her to stay here.

  In all their years together, Liz and Lou had never crossed over like this-Lou investigating the bank; Liz walking into one of his crime scenes. That was how it felt to her: a crime scene; not Beth and Tony’s house, where she and Lou had attended a christening reception only a few months earlier. She thought of this living room the way it had been then: loud voices, laughter, beer and the smell of cigarettes on a passing suit. Kids running around in their Sunday best. Elton John on the stereo. Beth’s tight dresses that reminded Liz of Sophia Loren in an old film-much too low at the neck, tailored at the waist to cling to her swaying hips, too retro to qualify as retro, as if she shopped the Salvation Army. But Tony wasn’t much for fashion either, so that visiting them left Liz feeling as if she’d stepped into an old black-and-white television show. The LaRossas had never left the late sixties.

  Beth and Lou occupied the room’s love seat, a plush white, fuzzy carpet spongy beneath Liz’s shoes. She saw several patrolmen gathered in the kitchen. The twins were not in sight, though a distant crying pulled Liz’s attention toward the second floor. “Who’s with the twins?” Liz asked.

  “They’re upstairs with Mary,” Beth said to Liz. Judging by Lou’s relieved expression, Liz had extricated the first words of significance.

  “They’re both okay?” Liz asked.

  “Fine,” Beth said. Dazed, she told Liz, “Tony said to stay right here.”

  Beth had been run over by the events. Her reddish, shoulder-length hair, usually worn with a severe flip and needing gobs of hairspray, hung lifeless and tangled. Her large brown eyes that typically animated her speech dimmed in a squinted, gloomy sadness. Her high cheekbones looked sunken, and her plucked eyebrows, always arched too high, lay flat behind a scowl. But nothing limited the beauty of her Italian skin. It possessed an almost artificial luminescence that knocked ten years off her thirty-eight.

  Liz couldn’t tell how long she’d been in her clothes-a white turtleneck and casual black pants with an elastic wais
t. It might have been all night. She had that weary look about her.

  On a nod from Lou, Liz said, “You understand that Tony collapsed, Beth? At the bank. We’d like to get you to the hospital.”

  “They said not to go anywhere. That they’d call when it was okay to leave.”

  “Who?” Boldt asked.

  “There were two of them,” Beth said in a tight whisper, her eyes locked in a stare as she relived events. “Stayed with us all night. Tony was supposed to do something at the bank for them. They said they were staying with us until it was done. Then, later, one of them got a call on his cell phone, and they just up and left. In a hurry. Told me not to leave the house, not to use the phone until Tony came home.”

  Liz asked, “What was Tony asked to do for them, Beth?”

  She shook her head back and forth, a child not supposed to reveal a secret. “They gave him a phone and a disk. That’s all I know about it.”

  Boldt wrote on the pad, faster than Beth was supplying answers, and then tore the piece of notepaper loose and, leaning across toward Liz, left a laundry list of questions sitting in front of her.

  Descriptions?

  Timing?

  Exactly what happened?

  Demands?

  Two cell phones?

  Liz thought there might be something to the order he’d written them in. She felt privileged to be included and wanted to do this right. She and Beth could not be considered best friends, but Beth had, on several occasions, unloaded onto her about her fertility problems, talking extremely personally and graphically. Every relationship was viewed differently by those involved. Lou took her affair with David much more seriously than she ever had; Beth might believe them far closer friends than she did, so Liz proceeded, combining sympathy with a forced intimacy.

  She asked Beth what “they” looked like, and when Beth stammered and began sliding back toward emotion rather than reason, Liz salvaged her by prodding with descriptions of her own: tall, fat, loud, dark?