The Body of David Hayes

by Ridley Pearson

  Boldt requested any and all reports of breakdowns or accidents for late afternoon into the early evening hours of Wednesday on highway 520-the day Hayes had apparently been tortured-and Foreman had allegedly been stuck in traffic on state highway 520. A few minutes later he received the report. He disconnected the call and hurried back to the Crown Vic.

  His phone purred as he climbed back inside behind the wheel.

  “It’s me.” Liz.

  “Hey.”

  “Everything okay?”

  “In a manner of speaking. He… or someone else, has the software now. He did it smart, and we’re not going to trace it.”

  “He?”

  “We believe it’s Hayes. There’s only one thing left they need now.”

  “Access,” she said. Her.

  “Yes.”

  “That’s why I’m calling,” she said. She detailed Foreman’s visit, leaving out nothing, including the Palm Pilot. “They made it look like torture and then they hid him. Danny’s convinced they can bring in whoever’s money it is, and then that’s that. He suspected I’d tell you, but needs it kept confidential. Says Geiser will deny knowledge of any of it.”

  “SID found tooth chips, an excessive amount of blood, and pieces of two fingernails at that crime scene,” Boldt told her. “That doesn’t fit with what you’re telling me.”

  “They wanted it to look right?”

  “Maybe,” Boldt allowed. Foreman and Geiser would both know the details of the other tortures. It suddenly explained to Boldt why he’d felt so uneasy about the Hayes crime scene-the lack of cigarette ash and shoeprints among the missing pieces.

  “The thing is,” Liz said, “if I am involved, if I do make this wire transfer for someone, and I send the money to an account Danny specifies, where’s that leave us if Danny doesn’t catch Svengrad? The tape? The kids? You said these people are not to be toyed with.”

  “That’s right,” Boldt said, his head throbbing as he tried to set this straight in his thought. Once the tape went public, their lives-quite possibly their children’s lives-would never be the same.

  “I’ll think of something.”

  “Danny was off, Lou. Wasn’t himself.”

  “Pressuring you couldn’t have been easy. It was right of you to tell me.” Boldt figured Geiser had put him up to it. Paul Geiser was pulling the strings now. “Thank you for that.”

  “You don’t sound convinced.”

  “You’re going to get the call,” he said. “We have to prepare for that.”

  “There’s not much to prepare for. I wait and see what it is they ask me to do.”

  “There’s a call I need you to make,” Boldt said. “It’ll have to be from your cell phone.”

  “What’s going on, Lou?”

  “Not now,” he said, imagining his home line tapped. “Call me back from your cell phone.” He took a moment to sign off politely and cradled the mobile phone in a cup holder.

  He no longer trusted his own people.

  There had been a time when rousting LaMoia, morning, noon, or night, would have been easy. Here was a cop who seemed to approach the job, each day, with youthful enthusiasm. The tougher the work, the better. The more risky, the better. But home life had changed all that, and Boldt resented Daphne Matthews taking that part of LaMoia from the job. Now LaMoia wanted to be home with Daphne and Margaret, a toddler who seemed destined to be swallowed by the state’s child protection laws despite the loving care she was receiving from Matthews, who’d been assigned temporary guardianship. Only a state government could consider over fourteen months of daily care “temporary.” But LaMoia felt the pressure, along with Matthews, of the child possibly being taken away, and the result was a man who never wanted to leave his loft condominium.

  Boldt finally laid out his suspicions to LaMoia in a desperate act he’d hoped to avoid. It wasn’t his way to voice those suspicions until he had more to go on than hunches. But none of this was going “his way,” and so he resorted to outright manipulation, knowing LaMoia wouldn’t be able to resist.

  “Two visits in the same day. To what do I owe the pleasure?” Dressed in blue jeans and a plaid flannel shirt, Paul Geiser looked nothing like the attorney who occupied the small office in the Justice Building. He’d become so predictable in his gray suits, white shirts, and conservative ties, that this alter ego at the front door surprised Boldt. Geiser looked at them over a pair of dime-store reading glasses perched on the end of his nose.

  He admitted Boldt and LaMoia with no reference to the late evening hour, no questions on why the surprise visit. “Beer? Coffee? Tea for you, Lieutenant?” He motioned for them to follow him when they failed to answer. Geiser might have lost the suit but not the swagger of confidence that epitomized prosecuting attorneys.

  The room smelled of airplane glue, a potent odor that took Boldt back to his youth. “Models?”

  “Close,” Geiser said, impressed that Boldt had picked this up at such a distance.

  The trio passed through another door and into a leather-and-mahogany paneled library that belonged in a faux English manor, not in this clapboard two-story with aluminum windows. The built-in stacks ran floor to ceiling, a trick chair unfolded into a small ladder in the far corner. But all of it looked purchased from a catalog instead of inherited. It was a would-be world in the heart of middle-class suburbia.

  A dark leather globe stood in a stand next to the reproduction desk. Newsprint had been laid down to cover the desk, atop which a green glass bottle rested on its side. The first pieces of a ship’s hull could be seen inside it. A set of long tweezers lay at rest, accompanied by a magnifying glass, spools of thread, a small pile of dark wood the size of toothpicks, a razor knife, and a stack of wood-sticked cotton swabs.

  “Who is she?” Boldt asked, easing into an uncomfortable leather captain’s chair facing the desk. LaMoia fit himself into the other, looking all around.

  “The Francis and Elizabeth. Seventeen forty-two, Rotterdam and Deal to Philadelphia.”

  “Impressive,” LaMoia said, unconvincingly.

  Geiser picked up the magnifying glass and studied the beginnings of the ship inside the bottle, then set it down and addressed his visitors. “I apologize for continuing this, but I can’t stop in the middle. I have glue drying.” He scooted the reading glasses back up his nose, picked up a pair of forceps, and displaying impossibly steady hands, delivered a structural element to the side of the tiny ship’s hull.

  “Our glue’s drying too, Paul. And we can’t stop in the middle either.”

  “So talk,” Geiser said, never taking his eyes off the model.

  Questioning a DPA about his personal involvement on a case was dangerous ground and Boldt knew it.

  “We need to know where he’s being kept.”

  “Who?” Eyes on the model.

  “We need to know now,” Boldt said. “We can’t do the dance. Not tonight.”

  “How can we even dance if you won’t share the music? I don’t know what you’re talking about, Lieutenant.”

  There was no forcing the man, so Boldt thought he might try to break him down a piece at a time. This had not been entirely unexpected. LaMoia was in attendance primarily as a witness. It occurred to Boldt that Geiser had figured that out already, and if so, he was already on notice that Boldt’s visit was formal.

  “What did you leave out about the proposed meet with Hayes?”

  “I told you: It failed to materialize,” Geiser said. “Am I supposed to waste your time?”

  A legitimate reply, but not to Boldt’s satisfaction. “You said something came up.”

  LaMoia said, “You didn’t even watch the bridge? Like from a distance, or a building, or something?”

  “I did go to the bridge, in fact. I parked where I was told to park. But when Foreman informed me he was stuck in traffic, I got the hell out of there.”

  Boldt asked, “Do you happen to remember if Danny told you where he was when he let you know he wasn’t going t
o make it?”

  “You want me to provide an alibi for Danny Foreman?” Incredulous, Geiser carefully wiped the tips of the forceps with a cotton ball and solvent. He placed them down and looked up at Boldt for the first time. “Or perhaps you want an alibi for me as well, eh, Lieutenant?”

  Boldt felt himself flush with heat. He told Geiser what the man knew already. “SID is processing the cabin.”

  “Good for them.” Geiser went back to his model.

  Boldt repeated, “Did Foreman mention where he was when he was stuck in traffic?”

  “He was on highway five-twenty, I think. Construction backup. Rush hour. A breakdown in the opposing lane. Same old, same old.”

  This roughly matched what Boldt had been told. In another witness Boldt would have questioned the degree of accuracy, the level of detail, but attorneys guarded their facts. “The Pine Street overpass? Your choice, or the voice that called you?”

  Geiser hesitated, either to attend to his model, or because he was considering how to answer, and this bothered Boldt. The man bothered Boldt. The resolute calm.

  “Are you laying traps for me, Lieutenant? Do you not trust me?”

  That didn’t answer the question, but for Boldt to press a DPA, treating him like a suspect, would be a mistake.

  Geiser sat up and pushed back from the desk admiring his handiwork, the model still a long way from looking like much. “Listen, can’t you people check this kind of thing?” Looking between the two cops, he said, “I’m sure Foreman mentioned construction and something about a car in the breakdown lane. Somebody’ll have that, right?”

  Foreman had mentioned traffic problems to Boldt as well, and Boldt had already made the call, but Geiser didn’t need to know that. Boldt stuck his neck out as far as he dared. “An attorney and an investigator… working together… could make a whole hell of a lot of trouble if they wanted.”

  “One hell of a team,” LaMoia said.

  “Now wait just a goddamned minute,” Geiser said, not taking any time to catch on to the suggestion.

  LaMoia said, “They could sequester a state witness for instance.”

  Boldt added, “Covering their tracks by leaving a bloody crime scene behind but with the body missing.”

  Geiser’s narrowing eyes tracked back and forth between the two. “Give me a break. Do you have any idea of the hoops we’d have to jump through to pull that off? Do you honestly believe the U.S. Attorney’s Office or my own office would condone misleading an investigation in order to sequester a witness?” He could see on the men’s faces he wasn’t gaining ground. “We start down that road and when would we ever mend that fence? Huh? You tell me. SPD would never cooperate with our office again. Not ever. And who could blame you? Listen, I’m not saying we might not try something like that. It’s pretty ingenious, you ask me. Damn good ruse. But it would be in concert with you guys-someone in your department would catch wind of it well before it ever went down. You’ve got to see that, right?”

  It made sense to Boldt, but he was loath to admit it. Horrified even to think that his captain, Sheila Hill, or some other gold badge would cut a deal with the attorneys and leave him in the wind. But his wife was involved, and that might account for any number of things. A sense of near panic filled him. Was his own department running him around in circles while they had plans of their own?

  He found himself believing Geiser, and it bothered him. He said, “I need to know if something like that is in play.”

  “I imagine you do.”

  “Do you believe Danny Foreman was stuck in traffic at the time he called you?”

  “Well, now we’re getting to the heart of it, aren’t we, Lieutenant? The hell of it is, there’s no way I can know that, is there?”

  “Would you know if Hayes had cut a deal for protection?”

  “I should. It should go through my office. Absolutely.”

  “But it wouldn’t have to.”

  “It could just as easily go through the U.S. Attorney. Maybe more likely, you think about it. The USAO can negotiate with Treasury for witness protection. I can’t offer that.”

  “Danny Foreman told my wife that you and he had Hayes under protection and that you’d deny it ’til hell freezes over.”

  “Well, he’s right on one account, isn’t he?” Geiser said. He scooted his chair up to the desk again and met eyes with Boldt. “You’d better move before your glue dries, gentlemen. You can find your way out.”

  Paul Geiser was in the middle of a tricky bit of business on his model when his kitchen doorbell rang only minutes after Boldt’s departure. Angry that Boldt would play the “oh, I forgot something” technique on a seasoned attorney, Geiser hurried through the house to the kitchen’s back door, ready to give Boldt a mouthful. His glue was indeed drying. He yanked open the door, already mid-sentence. “This is the oldest game in the book-” but cut himself off, not recognizing the two men in the suits who faced him. FBI, by the look of them. Treasury, he thought, reminded again of the discussion of witness protection. Boldt had been followed, or the house had been watched. Fucking feds were full of such tricks.

  Seeing two strangers at his back door was jarring; he had expected Boldt and LaMoia. In those few seconds it took his facile mind to clear the slate and begin again, one of the two stepped through the door and hit him with two open palms squarely in the center of his chest. Not federal agents after all. The impact not only threw him across the kitchen like a puppet, it froze his lungs and vocal cords in a nerve-deadening spasm.

  One of them spoke to the other, his words clouded by an unfamiliar accent. Only then did he fully register what was going on. Only then did his thought finally catch up to real time, the specter of Boldt and LaMoia fading like the orb left behind by a camera’s flash.

  Thugs, goons, a dozen different names. Geiser called them “apes” around the office. One was dropping the blinds while the other was shoving a damp and smelly kitchen rag down Geiser’s throat, pulling him by the hair and standing him up while wrestling his arms behind him. If his feeling had returned sooner, he might have fought them both, given his training.

  The interrogation was conducted by mobile phone so that Geiser never saw his questioner-a walkie-talkie feature that allowed use of a speakerphone so that it didn’t need to be held to Geiser’s ear, and so the two men could follow instructions where necessary as well. The advantages of modern technology. His back ached from the way they’d bound his torso to the chair, sitting up so perfectly straight, hands out in front of him, also taped to the arms of the chair. They’d moved him into the basement by simply throwing him down the stairs, part intimidation, partly a way to keep him physically stunned. They knew their work well.

  When he answered questions incorrectly, the big one shoved the musty kitchen rag back into his mouth as the smaller guy pulled a Leatherman out of a belt case and worked the polished metal multi-tool device into a pair of pliers.

  “Please… no,” Geiser gagged, tape wrapped around his head holding the rag in his mouth. His words came out as only deep grunts, nearly indistinguishable, except in volume, from the cries of pain that followed.

  “Where is he?” the voice asked over the phone’s thin speaker.

  Geiser shook his head. He had no idea.

  “Nyet,” the ape said for the sake of the interrogator, which caused Geiser to loosen his bowels.

  The voice on the other end of the phone wanted answers he didn’t have. He understood the frustration of such a position from his years of working as a trial attorney. There were times he’d wanted to use these same methods on some of his unforthcoming witnesses. Wild with desperation-that ape stepping closer, the pliers extended like a prosthesis designed with only one purpose in mind-Paul Geiser understood that it promised to be a long night.

  EIGHTEEN

  WHEN BOLDT DROPPED LAMOIA OFF at his building, John offered his round-the-clock services, an expression of fraternity that implied there would be no overtime filed for, nothing on the books
if Boldt wanted it that way. This reaching out by his former partner, a man Boldt had personally trained to follow in his path, meant the world to him.

  “I may take you up on that.”

  “Do it. And I can safely volunteer Matthews as well.” Boldt found it amusing that John still referred to Daphne by her last name.

  He was about to pull away from the curb when a woman’s figure stepped out of a doorway and headed directly for his car. Boldt couldn’t imagine prostitutes working this neighborhood, but he prepared his shield to display and drive her off to another corner.

  The woman opened Boldt’s passenger door, and he had dropped his credentials wallet onto the seat and had his gun in hand by the time he recognized her.

  “Maddie Olson,” she reminded him. “We met in the men’s room.”

  “If I were the paranoid type,” Boldt said, “I’d say you were lying in wait for me.”

  “Word gets around,” she said. “Drive please.”

  Boldt pulled the Crown Vic into traffic and started taking random turns through an old part of town where traffic was moderate. “You’re not serious,” he said, when she failed to instigate conversation, “about knowing I’d show up.”

  “Sure I am. I knew you had snatched up LaMoia. I’m telling you, there’re no secrets.”

  “Geiser,” he guessed.

  “… is in the Emergency Room at Swedish Med Center, Central district.”

  “I was with him an hour ago.”

  “Our guy, the same guy you’re never going to speak to-”

  “Alekseevich,” Boldt supplied.

  “-got word to us that the shit was flying. Geiser had been scheduled for a manicure. Foreman’s up next, if they can find him.”

  “Damn.” Boldt was not surprised to hear Foreman’s name. He’d just fed it to Geiser himself.

  “You don’t sound surprised,” she said.

  “Two nights ago Danny Foreman led me to a crime scene.” He went on to explain the blood in the cabin. “It made me suspicious of him.”

  “Because?”

  “Danny had missed an important meet. Claimed he was stuck in traffic. Gave me the same excuse that he gave Geiser. I made some calls. Followed up on those calls just now. We look for patterns, right? I had one I thought worth pursuing, and come to find out, the highway where Danny was stuck in construction traffic while watching a car get towed turns out to be an area watched by a traffic cam. We live and die by the details. Danny tried too hard, said he’d seen a broken-down car to both me and Geiser. Too much information. When Geiser gave me that, my antenna went up.”