The Body of David Hayes

by Ridley Pearson

  He sounded so detached, as if he’d already let go of the pain associated with her sordid past.

  “I hear the detective speaking, but I’m wondering about the husband.”

  “He’s out of the office,” Lou said.

  “Can you compartmentalize so easily?”

  “Who said it was easy?”

  “There’s more,” she said, bringing herself to a place she’d been unable to face alone.

  “More.” It came out of him as a gasp, a blow to the chest.

  “You’ll find out anyway,” she said. “Better we discuss it now. But please, please remember that this never had anything to do with inadequacy. Don’t jump to that conclusion, okay? It was revenge, I think, for all the time I never got. We’ve talked about this before. It was my shortcomings, not yours.”

  “Takes two,” he said.

  “I know it does. And that’s generous of you to say. No… what I have to tell you involves the date.”

  “The date.”

  “Yes.” Here she was, about to explain something even she didn’t fully understand. Dangerous territory. She took a deep breath. “When all this happened… back then… We talked through it. I agreed to call it off.”

  “I remember.”

  He clearly didn’t want memories forced on him, but she didn’t know how else to approach this.

  He said, “We picked up, and we started again.”

  “It wasn’t over,” she blurted out. “There was one more time-only one-about three months after our agreement. He called, and… I don’t know. One of those mistakes for all time. I know by the date that this was the time he videoed. I don’t know why he did it. Why I did it.”

  “You’re better off if you let it go,” he advised, and now she understood just how angry he was, knew he was boiling inside. She couldn’t broach this issue with him feeling this way.

  “I can’t do this right now,” he said, as if reading her thoughts.

  She’d dreaded this moment ever since committing the act-and she’d known all along this moment would someday come, as it now had. She’d wounded him; she’d invalidated the sense of trust that had taken so many years to rebuild. She felt awful, and yet she felt a selfish relief that she feared he sensed and would only make matters worse.

  The truth, like a razor, could cut painlessly at first. She feared what would happen between them as he started to bleed.

  It rained all of a sudden. One minute a fine mist and then torrential. The two of them on that bench, unable to move and run for shelter.

  The rain on his face looked like tears to her. Maybe a combination, she thought, paralyzed by the pain she’d inflicted. She understood now that she would continue to suffer for her actions, as she had for nearly six years. But suffer together, not alone. A part of her had hoped sharing this might mitigate some of that internal pain, but she’d lied to herself about that as well. Pain couldn’t be shared. Pain was a very private thing.

  They drove in the dead of night, two people uncomfortable with the silence as well as the expectation to fill it. She wore the evidence of an impossibly long day in the form of bloodshot eyes and redistributed makeup. He carried the deadened countenance of a man poisoned by grief. The steady sloshing of the wipers worked like background music. She wanted to be home in bed, the victim of a temporary, eight-hour suicide, her brain all but used up.

  “I miss them already,” she said. They had left the kids off an hour ago.

  “They’re safer there.”

  “I know that, but it doesn’t make me miss them any less.”

  He said, “After what happened to Beth and Tony, we don’t have a choice.”

  He kept telling her things she already knew. She let it go. “Did you see their faces?” she asked. Tears and confusion, a hopeful pleading that Mama and Daddy were not going to drive away and leave them.

  “They were laughing and playing by the time we were out of the drive. Count on it. They love Kathy. And knowing my sister, she’ll spoil them rotten. It’s a match made in heaven.” Lou’s sister, unable to have children of her own, doted on Sarah and Miles as if they were royalty. Liz didn’t think it the best for anyone.

  “We need to think about getting him tested,” he said. “His music aptitude. It’s something we need to think about. When to do it, what it means to him, to us, in terms of some home schooling. And there’s the cost, of course.”

  “I can’t do this now,” she said honestly. “I can’t pretend all’s well like this. Between us, I mean.”

  “What would you rather talk about? Broken promises? If we don’t pretend it’s normal, it’s never going to be.”

  She turned toward the car’s rain-streaked side window studying the bars of silver and black, like a cage. “This is coming apart on us, Lou.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  They worked through another few minutes of silence. Lou reached for the radio at one point but apparently thought better of it. He pulled the car off the highway into a service station close to the on-ramp to buy himself a cup of tea and her a bottle of water.

  “I didn’t mean to go back to him and I should have told you right away. I know that.” She waited to say this until he was closing his door to head inside.

  “Uh-huh,” he said after the door was shut.

  Back on the highway, he told her, “I’m ready when you’re ready.”

  “I know that,” she said.

  “Doesn’t have to be now.”

  “It can’t be now. Not when I’m this tired. And you… you look sick with grief.”

  He didn’t respond.

  “Please don’t give up, okay? Don’t shut me out. So much has changed. So much good has come into our lives. That’s worth fighting for.” She waited for him to say something. Anything. When he did not, she said, “I think I’d like it better if you yelled at me or something, got angry, if you let out whatever’s inside of you. How can you be so calm?”

  “I am not calm.”

  “Then show it. Do something. Say something.”

  “I need to hear it from you,” he said. “Whatever excuses you have, I need to hear them. Just confessing it isn’t enough. I have to understand it.”

  “He tricked me. He used sympathy. He probably did it just to make the tape. He played me-that’s how you would put it-and I gave in. I regretted it at the time, and I regret it now.”

  She saw anger pass across his face with the oncoming headlights.

  “So you got drunk rather than tell me.”

  The bars of the cage bent with the speed of the car. She cried privately, not allowing him to see. He dug out a handkerchief, offered it across the seat to her and she rejected it, angry that he would attempt such a gesture.

  He said, “You came home and made love with me and pretended it hadn’t happened? How could you have done that?”

  “I don’t know,” she answered honestly. Slap, slap, went the wipers. “For what it’s worth, with him it was never ‘making love.’ It was sex. An escape. Nothing more.”

  “That’s not worth anything. Not to me,” Lou said, “though I’m certainly glad you made that important distinction.”

  Mile markers slipped past, the distance between them growing.

  “I miss them already,” she said.

  “Yeah. Me too.”

  TWELVE

  BOLDT’S DASHBOARD CLOCK REGISTERED 7:04, the colon between the numbers flashing as it counted off the seconds in the evening darkness that enveloped the car’s interior. Less than twenty-four hours earlier he and Liz had dropped off the kids, and now the events of this day occupied him as he navigated around the streets clogged with traffic, inventing a route that might speed his arrival to what he had been told was a bloodied cabin and possible crime scene.

  He had not slept well, if at all that prior night, laboring under the strain of their discussion in the car, wondering about their future, feeling betrayed by their past. The early morning, derailed without the routine of the kids, had presented them with too m
uch time together, too much opportunity to speak, and nothing to discuss. They settled on a truce of silence, each reading a different section of the morning paper, or in Boldt’s case, pretending to read.

  Work that day had been paint-by-numbers: one of the only times he welcomed a lieutenant’s paperwork, the administrative meetings, the indulgence of actually reading the group e-mails. Anything to occupy him without discussion, without human contact. He had swum around the fifth floor like a fish in the wrong school.

  Now a call from Danny Foreman summoned him to a cabin in the woods, a cabin that Foreman claimed to know about because Liz herself had provided its location. Boldt’s head spun with possibilities.

  Earlier, he’d been thrown into turmoil over a call he’d received from Dr. Bernie Lofgrin, the civilian director of the police department’s crime lab.

  “You got a minute?” Lofgrin had asked.

  “I’m signing off on overtime vouchers and desperate for distraction,” Boldt said. Not that he would have ever put off a call from Bernie, who was both a close friend, a fellow jazz enthusiast, and the sole source of all things evidentiary. Among several dozen active cases, the lab was currently working both the Foreman crime scene evidence and Liz’s videotape for Boldt, and the call could have concerned either or both. Boldt had been eager to learn about one, extremely reluctant to hear about the other.

  “The tape’s a second-generation copy.”

  “Dubbed from the original,” Boldt clarified.

  “Correct. And not to worry about content. For viewing I digitally obscured a central panel allowing only a half inch border to show. I sampled the first thirty seconds of sound for bandwidth and signal. Also supports the determination of it being second generation. Those half-inch borders don’t reveal any live action, only the setting, a darkly paneled or log room, and a time-and-date stamp. I suspect the location is a bedroom, and I’m not asking questions. I’m the only one who handled the tape and it remains in my possession. No case number has been assigned, which means you owe the taxpayers for about an hour of my time.”

  Boldt thanked him, knowing when Bernie needed to hear it. The man had taken several key steps to protecting the tape.

  “I developed four good latent prints and six partials off the videocassette itself. Ran them through ALPS,” he said, meaning the computerized comparison, automated latent print system, “and struck out with known felons, convicted or otherwise. No hits.”

  The bubble of Boldt’s building optimism burst. He’d hoped against hope that some of the prints would come back for David Hayes, a registered felon and ex-con. The letdown was severe. “Well, I don’t mind saying that’s a disappointment.”

  “So I ran it through WSW,” the Washington State Workers database that included all day care instructors, public school teachers, most health care personnel, all firemen, policemen, politicians, their spouses, and in some cases their children’s prints as well, “and I nailed down two. Then on to the State INS database,” Immigration and Naturalization Service, “and a hit for one of the partials, but I’ve got to caution you, it would never hold in court in case that’s a consideration. You got a pencil?”

  Boldt assured him he was already taking notes-something Bernie always wanted to hear.

  “The partial comes back one Malina Alekseevich-that’s a male name, by the way: Malina. I double-checked. But as I’ve said, we ain’t gonna prove it’s him anyway.” Like many in the department, Bernie slipped into street speak whenever a situation called for it.

  “Did INS happen-”

  Bernie cut him off, interrupting. “Employment is listed as a driver for S &G Imports.”

  “Never heard of them.”

  “Your department, not mine, I’m happy to say.”

  “And the two positives from WSW?” Boldt asked. He assumed one of these two identities would prove to be Liz, although in reconstructing events Boldt knew she claimed to have never handled the tape. If her prints were on it, that would need explaining-yet another uncomfortable discussion between husband and wife. The deeper he involved himself, the worse it got.

  “Daniel Foreman and Paul Geiser.”

  Lost in thought, recalling the conversation now, Boldt nearly drove off the road. Danny Foreman and Paul Geiser. Foreman he understood. The tape could have once been in Foreman’s possession. But a prosecuting attorney’s prints? How was that to be explained? Added to this was that the request Boldt had received to drive out to the log cabin, a possible crime scene, had come from Foreman. Things were getting interesting.

  His cell phone emitted a single beep, indicating a text message. One eye on the road, one eye on the phone, Boldt read the message as it scrolled across the phone’s tiny screen:

  From: B. Lofgrin: Cig. ash IDed from Foreman CS: Proletarskie (Russian). More 2 come-BL

  It didn’t surprise him that Bernie was working late; the man kept all hours depending on the lab’s workload. He assumed Bernie had become excited by the discovery of Foreman’s prints on the video and then went back and pushed his crew to work the Foreman crime scene. Nor did it surprise him that Bernie had not telephoned him. His friend would assume Boldt was home with the family, and would not have wanted to disturb him. Sending a text message allowed Boldt to make the choice to read it or not, think about it or not. Boldt was certain he’d find a carbon copy on his office e-mail in the morning, hopefully along with the “more to come” information. The point that Bernie seemed eager to make, and one that required Boldt to read between the lines, was the connection between a Russian with temporary immigration papers identified by a partial fingerprint left on the videocassette, and a Russian brand of cigarette found in the form of ash at the Foreman torture. As the pieces both began to take shape and to fit into place, Boldt found himself excited, his senses heightened. The Russian seemed a promising lead to follow, someone to interview and look at closely, no matter that the evidence remained circumstantial. But it was Foreman’s role, as victim, as another person found to have handled that video, as the man who had called Boldt out on a misty, dark evening, that currently intrigued him. Suspicion worked its web. Boldt had to weigh how much to give Foreman and how much to withhold, how much to explore and how much to place aside. Pieces fitting was one thing. The picture those pieces were a part of, the story they told, quite another.

  Boldt drove into the dense woods that led to the cabin. He pulled the car forward and parked alongside Danny Foreman’s sparkling new Escalade, wondering why anyone would dump so much money into a luxury vehicle. He could see there was someone inside the cabin, and he assumed it to be Foreman, but despite the presence of the man’s car, he wasn’t taking any chances. There were too many fingernails lying on the ground in this case for him to be careless. Too many questions now surrounding both Foreman and Geiser.

  Boldt reached the edge of the trees and worked his way around back, the blood pressure building in his chest and surging past his ears as a low whine. He paused along the way to allow his ears to stretch and his eyes to scan.

  The backyard was small. Ankle-high field grass and weeds ran up to a poured concrete patio that housed a rusted barbecue grill and twin beach chairs that had seen better days. A frayed patio umbrella listed above the chairs, anchored in a stack of rock and brick. A can of charcoal starter caught his eye. Concrete steps led up to a back door that had been left open an inch. Not taking his eyes off the door, he withdrew his weapon, crossed the spongy backyard, and eased the door fully open. Using the jamb as cover, he called out.

  “Danny?”

  “In here.”

  It was Foreman’s voice.

  “I’m at the back,” Boldt announced, playing it safe, not wanting to walk into a trap. Let him come to me.

  Foreman entered the kitchen casually. He looked tired. He wore a disposable glove on his right hand but not on his left because of the two heavily bandaged fingers. “Hey.”

  “Hey,” Boldt echoed, returning his gun to his belt holster.

  Foreman led
the way through the tiny kitchen. “Guy used this place as his hang. Belongs to a friend. When Liz mentioned it, I knew exactly where she meant. We did some surveillance out here back during the embezzlement.”

  Some surveillance. “What kind of surveillance, Danny?”

  “Meaning?”

  Boldt didn’t answer. Like an emcee, Foreman swept his left arm out, indicating the room before them. The cabin’s central room was contaminated with spilled blood. Boldt slipped on gloves and squatted and touched a droplet on the floor. It was tacky, not wet, but not dry. Less than four hours old.

  “Another one,” Boldt said, noticing the two fingernails on the cabin floor next to the leg of a blood-covered wooden chair to which the victim had been taped with duct tape. All of this came into his mind effortlessly. He didn’t merely surmise the crime scene, he saw it as an eerie black-and-white moving image. A man in the chair struggling. Gagged, blindfolded. Another man in front of him, a pair of vise-grip pliers in hand. Boldt shook this image out of his head and continued to collect information.

  “I don’t know about that,” Foreman said. “It certainly looks like another one. Hayes, then me, now this. Similar. But I don’t know… something’s not right. It’s almost like me and Hayes were clinical, you know? Whereas this one… this looks emotional. Angry. The guy doing the deed lost it and got all wild like.”

  Boldt took in the carnage. “I don’t know. At your scene we found blood on the ceiling as well. The walls.”

  “Yeah, but look at this place!”

  Boldt recalled that Bernie Lofgrin’s Scientific Identification Division had determined that Foreman had probably been beaten using a plastic bag filled with wet sand-this theory supported by forensic evidence recovered at the scene. At some point the bag had torn open, spraying sand into the bloody mix and matching the splatter patterns. Boldt carefully dodged the chair and examined some blood splatter on the far wall. He didn’t see any sand mixed in. Foreman had been here longer, had a head start.