The Body of David Hayes

by Ridley Pearson

  He realized too that she was right about her choice of methods. Any detective from OC visiting a Homicide lieutenant was going to be noticed, even if they took a minute together in a conference room. The safest way was to force an encounter outside the offices, but Boldt went from his car to his office to his car and home. He didn’t offer a person like Olson much chance to corral him.

  “Okay, I’m listening,” he said.

  “Your inquiry this morning: Rohypnol, duct tape, and fingernail extraction. You’re not going to get anything out of OC on that.”

  “I’m not,” he said, trying to follow her.

  “No. You’ll nudge us again in another few days and we still won’t have an answer for you.”

  “I don’t have a few days.”

  “I know that. I’m in the cubicle next to Marcel. I overheard your request.”

  Marcel Malvone, on OC nearly as long as Boldt had been Homicide. Boldt had taken the request to Malvone directly, knowing that penetrating OC’s hierarchy could be difficult at best.

  Olson glanced quickly toward the men’s room door, as if expecting an interruption. She then turned on the water in the sink to increase the background noise.

  Boldt felt his palms sweat. He dried them on a fresh paper towel.

  “The thing about OC,” she said. “We’re worse than Internal Investigations half the time. We live by the covenant no one can protect you better than you can protect yourself. It’s not so much about misinformation as it is disinformation. When someone pushes a hot button we make sure that information is lost.”

  “I pushed a hot button,” Boldt said, working with what she was telling him.

  “No one’s going to give you this. If I’m proved wrong, so much the better. But when I overheard your time constraints, I decided to act. Maybe you repay the favor someday.”

  “Will if I can.”

  “That signature you’re looking for would come back for a CI,” civilian informant, “that’s currently working a case for us. No way anyone’s going to give him up for you and yours.”

  “No one but you.”

  “But me,” she confessed. “My sister’s stepson.” Here it comes, Boldt thought. Olson had the favor ready at hand. “He’s on the buying end of a drug deal in the backseat of a car when the skel riding passenger decides to pull a piece and blow away a corner dealer. Car’s pulled over and everyone in the car is charged with manslaughter except the shooter, who wins himself a capital murder charge. My nephew’s a good kid. Wrong place, wrong time. Drugs. He deserves a bad rap, maybe some time, but not the manslaughter.”

  Boldt actually knew of the case. He promised to look into it, to do his best.

  “That’s all I ask.”

  “Done.”

  “This CI is planted deep. It’s a joint effort in-house with Special Ops. U.S. Attorney’s Office and INS are even in on it. But this signature you described… I know for a fact he’s into manicures,” she said, meaning the extraction of fingernails. “The Rope, that’s news to me.” She meant the use of Rohypnol. “So maybe it just skews to him but isn’t him. I can’t say. That will be Malvone’s justification in not sharing him with you-if you ever bring it back onto us. The Rope is not part of his gig, not on his sheet. They can withhold him from you for this reason. But the tape and the manicures-that’s him, for sure.”

  “The case?”

  “These guys are into everything, Lieutenant. We’re talking fraud, smuggling, black market retail. Money exchange. Money laundering. Anything and everything to do with a buck. No drugs, no prostitution, nothing for Narcotics or Vice. But racketeering? Shit, Lieutenant, this guy-the boss, I’m talking about, not the CI-when they wrote the definition for racketeering, they had him in mind. They run a fucking empire. This guy is the fucking Brando of the Russian immigrant community. And he’s Dangerous, capital D. That would be another reason they wouldn’t steer you into this: It’s a fucking one-way street to the graveyard to mess with these people. Our guy, our plant, he’s a gold mine. Constantly funneling information. Reliable, bankable, good information. Compromising him would be a serious setback. We’re picking up foreign networks, massive laundering. The mother lode. That’s how I know you’ll never get him out of us.”

  A crashing sound as someone banged into the door expecting it to open. This was followed by a sharp knocking. “What the fuck?!” came the complaint.

  “A name?” Boldt asked, his heart dancing in his chest. The Russian community, she’d said. Russian cigarettes from the ash found at Foreman’s torture. A Russian name on a partial print from Bernie Lofgrin. Click, click, click, went the pieces. He loved this job.

  She lowered her voice so that even Boldt could barely hear her above the rush of water into the stained sink. “Yasmani Svengrad. The Sturgeon General.”

  “Sturgeon General,” Boldt clarified the irregularity.

  “He imports caviar. Or did… ”

  “Let me guess,” Boldt said. “S &G Imports.”

  She leaned back, impressed. “Well… yeah.”

  More banging on the door. Boldt shouted for the guy to cool it. He said to Olson, “Your CI. He’s called Malina Alekseevich.”

  Her lips parted in surprise. She had nice teeth.

  “How’d you know that?”

  “He’s sloppy,” Boldt answered.

  He told her to take a stall and lock the door. He’d knock on the bathroom door when the coast was clear.

  Boldt then unlocked the main door to a disgruntled detective who quickly changed his attitude in the presence of a lieutenant. Boldt hovered by the water fountain in the hall until this detective left the men’s room. Boldt knocked, and Olson slipped into the hall, walking quickly away, never looking back.

  The mother lode, she’d said. And that was how Boldt thought of it.

  Most of Seattle’s former canneries and icehouses, the brick boathouses and sail-making workshops, had long since been razed and replaced with co-op housing, restaurants, or tourist traps. A few structures remained, some rusted, some crumbling, the majority along the northern shore of Lake Union’s ship canal, the last salty smell and briny taste of a history that would never return. Computer chips had replaced tins of smoked salmon; software, for soft-shelled crabs. Boldt rode in the passenger seat of John LaMoia’s Jetta as LaMoia turned down an alley. The southernmost boundary of Ballard was a seawall containing the canal and the seagull-white-stained wooden pilings supporting it. The empty lanes of litter-encrusted blacktop running between vacant buildings were reminiscent of the tumbleweeded streets of the Old West. The wind that rose off the water whispered like sirens in Boldt’s ear.

  “That’s the place.” LaMoia pointed out a set of barely legible numerals above a rust-red door on the side of a corrugated-steel building with a tin roof.

  Boldt removed his department-issue Glock, a weapon that had replaced the Beretta 9mm two years earlier. He checked out the gun, an uncharacteristic act.

  LaMoia had spent the ride over going on and on about his terrorism seminar, part of a continuing education course, once again expressing his concern over the devices believed to be in terrorists’ hands. Nearing the end of the course, he had one last session late afternoon that he described as a “field trip” to watch demonstrations of some of the explosives and triggering devices. “But the weirdest weapon puts out something called Electromagnetic Pulse, EMP.” LaMoia’s enthusiasm could make anything sound interesting.

  “You tried to explain this before,” Boldt interrupted. He was interested in technology only if it fit his own needs-he didn’t need to try to understand everything that was out there. He dumped water on LaMoia’s flames before suffering an explanation of EMP. Thankfully the water rolled off LaMoia’s back.

  “Liz was sleeping with this guy David Hayes,” Boldt said. “Six years ago, when it all fell apart on me? That was Hayes. There’s a videotape. A sex tape. This guy, Svengrad, may have it. So if that comes up in the discussion, that’s why. I don’t want you looking surpri
sed.”

  LaMoia sighed, glancing away uncomfortably.

  “You’re allowed to be surprised now.”

  “I am.”

  “It would be nice to keep it off the Internet, off the evening news, out of the bank’s next board meeting.”

  “I imagine it would.”

  “And you might think that’s why we’re here.”

  “I might.”

  “It isn’t. We’re here to bring Alekseevich in for questioning. We have a partial-never mind that it’s inadmissible.”

  “Doesn’t bother me.”

  “We not only have a Russian brand of cigarette but, as it turns out, S &G, Svengrad’s company, has the exclusive import contract for the entire West Coast. What we want, what we need, is to put a pack of those cigarettes into Alekseevich’s pocket. That, and the partial, give him to us.”

  “He might come voluntarily.”

  “Right,” Boldt said with a snort. “That’s a strong possibility.”

  “If things go south in there?”

  “No matter how badly this goes, we talk our way out. We walk out. The people behind this-and maybe that’s Svengrad-have gone to great lengths to avoid class A felony charges. That speaks volumes, I think. They’re not going to hassle two cops. They’re extremely careful. We do our job. We grab up Alekseevich if he’s in there, and we leave.”

  “Not my style,” LaMoia said. “I’d rather shoot it out.”

  Despite the various burdens weighing on Boldt’s shoulders he found room to laugh.

  “You’re a bundle of laughs, Sarge.”

  “That’s what they say.”

  “No… that’s not what they say.”

  Boldt flashed him a look. “Then what do they say?”

  “I think I’d like to keep my job.” With that, LaMoia popped open the door and headed toward the building.

  As they approached through a light drizzle, Boldt said, “Seventeen million reasons for lying to us, don’t forget.”

  “You think?” LaMoia asked, wondering if the embezzlement trail led to this rusting building.

  “We’ll find out soon enough.”

  LaMoia knocked and they entered a small office area containing a pair of ancient gunmetal-gray steel desks loosely shaped into an L, a woman receptionist in her late forties with big hair and red nails, some whiteboards on the wall scribbled with colorful reminders, and four large color posters, all showing busty women with pink tongues. Caviar ads, but oddly targeting readers of Playboy. The receptionist called through on the telephone. Boldt could hear an extension ring out back.

  “Silicon Valley,” LaMoia said, pointing to one of the girly posters, a nearly naked black woman barely out of her teens working a jackhammer on a city street. The implants grafted to her chest accounted for LaMoia’s comment. She wore a yellow hard hat that bore the American flag. The words above her read: “If it smells fishy… ” The jackhammer aimed into the seam of a superimposed can of caviar, beneath which it read: “… you’re in the right place-Svengrad, Beluga Negro.”

  They were admitted into a cool warehouse that smelled sour with fish. Their escort was a well-dressed, darkly complected man in his early thirties with a fairly thick accent. Not Alekseevich, according to the sheet in Boldt’s inside coat pocket.

  Steel mesh shelving was crowded with carefully arranged cardboard boxes. The shiny gray concrete floor was marked with bright yellow lane lines courtesy of OSHA, while overhead mercury vapor lights lent human skin a sickly green tinge. To Boldt’s disappointment, the warehouse was quiet, void of human activity.

  “It isn’t every day we get a visit from Seattle’s finest,” their escort said.

  He had the right lingo and had done a good job of wearing down the edges of his accent, all of which told Boldt he’d probably been in the States for some time. The nice suit was somewhat unexpected though not surprising, given Beth LaRossa’s description of the two who had pressured her husband. The man led them across the warehouse floor to a glass box of an office from where a muffled recording of a soprano’s voice carried. Boldt liked opera.

  Their escort opened the door for them but did not enter himself.

  The office reminded Boldt of his own-a space within a space, and little more. It was a place of business, heaped with paperwork. The man behind the desk was broad-shouldered with pinprick black eyes, a barroom nose, and a salt-and-pepper beard, carefully trimmed. He too wore a dark, tailored suit, but a pair of more workmanlike, rubber-soled black shoes revealed themselves from below the large, leather-top desk, a piece of furniture incongruously out of place. Boldt knew better than to automatically assume this man was Svengrad. A manager perhaps. An employee.

  Fan lines edged his eyes as he rose and introduced himself. “General Yasmani Svengrad.” He made no offer for them to sit down, and remained standing himself. “Let me guess,” he said. “You’ve lost something.”

  Boldt picked up a trace of British in his speech. The man sucked air between his two front teeth-either a tic or an attempt to fight a painful tooth. Boldt felt taken aback and slightly intimidated, not an easy feat. Svengrad was a perfectly proportioned, enormous man. He stood six foot four or five, with hands like baseball mitts. But where some men looked big, Svengrad’s proportions confused the eye. A trompe l’oeil of a man, like someone from Alice in Wonderland.

  But it was more than the personage. Prior to coming here, Boldt had taken what little had been passed him in the men’s room and had dug first into S &G Imports and then into its notorious owner, quickly reading up on the man courtesy of the Internet. The picture that unfolded explained OC’s desire to turn an employee as a state’s witness and catalog the steady flow of information that resulted. Yasmani Svengrad would not fall easily.

  A decorated naval officer, Svengrad had proved himself a shrewd politician as well. With the collapse of the former Soviet Union, Svengrad had unexpectedly transferred to oversee naval operations in the Caspian Sea, considered an undesirable posting without political clout. It was only later his true motivations had been recognized. As the senior military officer in charge of the Caspian, he had seized control of its waters and filled a power void as management of the Caspian slipped from Mother Russia’s firm grasp. With no fewer than five newly formed governments claiming rights to the Caspian and her all-important sturgeon, Svengrad brutalized his way to dominance, quickly owning the Caspian’s lucrative, multimillion-dollar caviar business. Svengrad’s friends back in Moscow allowed this, even encouraged it, as poachers nearly ended the caviar trade by slaughtering immature fish for their famous eggs and pushing the sturgeon toward extinction. No doubt, Svengrad made sure his friends in Moscow both ate and lived well for allowing a monopoly that continued to this day. From what he’d read, Boldt considered Svengrad both a man of vision and one unafraid of using force to get what he wanted. Many a poacher vessel had been “lost at sea” during the early years of Svengrad’s power grab.

  He’d settled in the United States seven years earlier and had been granted citizenship not twelve months ago, a discovery that made Boldt suspect either the intervention of diplomats or the exchange of hard cash. Svengrad had nonetheless never personally been arrested, had never spent a single night in so much as a drunk tank. Most such “Teflon thugs” found themselves targets of federal or state undercover investigations at some point, and as far as Boldt could determine, Svengrad’s time had now come.

  Boldt played it carefully. They came without a warrant, and he kept this firmly in mind-if asked to leave they would be obliged to do so. “Lost something? We’re just a pair of public servants doing a favor for INS.”

  “A Seattle Police Department lieutenant and sergeant doing a favor for INS?” So the man knew how to read. He handed back the credentials, still not offering them chairs.

  “You don’t think our captain, doing a favor for the feds, is going to send a detective to see you, do you?” He could see that Svengrad actually considered this, though not for long.

  “
How long do we keep this up?” Svengrad asked.

  Boldt threw his hands out in an inquisitive gesture that asked, How should I know?

  “If you have business here, state it,” Svengrad said. “Or should I play along? What can I do for INS, gentlemen?” He asked this in a schoolgirl voice that instead of comical, Boldt found threatening. “Remind me: Don’t you need a subpoena, a writ, a warrant? Should I call a lawyer?”

  “Why so jumpy?”

  “We’re here informally,” LaMoia said, jumping into the fray.

  “You are at that,” said the man wearing the designer suit as he looked them over. “Do you press those yourself, or send them out?”

  LaMoia’s infamous blue jeans finally took a direct hit; if Boldt hadn’t been working to understand, and possibly undermine Svengrad, he might have celebrated the moment.

  Boldt calmly removed Malina Alekseevich’s INS sheet and placed it in front of Svengrad. “You’re listed as the employer of record.”

  “As I should be,” Svengrad said, not batting an eyelash. “Were that I was.”

  Boldt thought he was actually doing OC a favor by making Alekseevich into a suspect, and therefore above consideration as a double agent. Never mind that entities like OC and Special Operations and the INS liked to run control on their civilian informants; Boldt didn’t see much harm coming of this.

  Svengrad continued, “Malina’s a hard worker. A good man. He might even have avoided being laid off if Fish and Wildlife had played fair.”

  “Laid off?” LaMoia inquired.

  Boldt paled. Played fair? Fish and Wildlife? Depending on when Alekseevich had indeed been laid off his job, they had little or no way to connect Svengrad to the tortures of Hayes and Foreman, even if Alekseevich were responsible. Svengrad would simply claim that, unemployed, Alekseevich had resorted to his old ways. More’s the pity. Boldt quickly looked for a bridge that might keep himself and LaMoia in the room long enough to stir the pot. He didn’t see anything obvious.