The Body of David Hayes

by Ridley Pearson

  “Yes,” Boldt said, “but at least I called. That’s got to count for something.”

  “Not much,” Mahoney replied. In fact, officers could and did kick doors based on probable cause without ever applying for the proper paperwork. Boldt knew that maybe sixty percent of the time evidence collected in such raids actually made it to court. He didn’t want to lose evidence, but he didn’t want to leave Foreman or Hayes inside this building another minute, and so he made a hasty and difficult decision to give LaMoia a thumbs-up from his place below the man in the alley. Part of his reasoning should have included that they weren’t even sure they could reach the impounded property from that broken window, and that argument might have held up if it had been anyone but LaMoia climbing that fire escape. But as Boldt gave the signal, he moved immediately back toward the building’s locked front door, knowing that at any minute LaMoia would appear there, a shit-eating grin on his face, a wisecrack ready on his lips.

  “Welcome to the Hyatt. May I check your reservation?” LaMoia asked.

  “I knew you’d have something cute. You just can’t leave it alone, can you?”

  “I have a reputation to live up to,” LaMoia said.

  Boldt stepped through into a vast, empty space that smelled of cat urine and feces. A poured concrete floor stained from spilled ink, papered with litter. It was dark. Both detectives used small Maglites to light their way.

  The central space looked to be about the size of a basketball court but beneath a low ceiling. Boldt experienced an immediate sense of dread, an early-warning sign he’d come to trust over the years and felt inclined to do so now. This “sense” usually proved to be no sense at all, but his picking up on evidence subliminally, evidence that didn’t jump out at first. When Boldt stopped walking to take in the vastness of the space, LaMoia knew better than to challenge him, or even speak. Boldt trusted the man to put the wisecracks away and knew it would be so. Despite all his antics, LaMoia was a serious cop on the inside. LaMoia squatted, also looking around, sweeping his own flashlight across the floor.

  LaMoia’s light stopped moving, illuminating a wedge-shaped cone of concrete. “Is that what you’re looking for?” His light held on two thin hash marks, black, like skid marks from a bike tire. Not one, but two of them, and nearly parallel.

  “Good work, John.”

  The men followed the irregular black lines across the floor. Fat to narrow. Long to short. Boldt discerned the direction of movement from their shape and pattern. “Heel marks,” he said, following them across the cavernous space. A body being dragged. Boldt’s temperature increased and he worked to control his breathing, to fight the adrenaline that wanted to own him. The deeper they moved into this room, the darker, the more dependent they were on the small flashlights. Boldt knew they could be following the markings of a machine being dragged across the print shop or a cart with black rubber tires or a hand truck. But he believed otherwise. A body, his internal voice cautioned. The body of David Hayes, his first thought.

  “This is SPD turf, and that gives us jurisdiction to investigate that busted window. We’re cool, Sarge. This isn’t coming back on us.” LaMoia said all this for himself, knowing instinctively as did Boldt that they were on to something, and not wanting to face that they could lose by technicality whatever lay at the end of these skid marks. But both men had experienced such loss enough times to know the truth. They’d taken a gamble. The admissibility of whatever they might discover here remained in question.

  They followed the skid marks around a wall to a missing door and a wide set of steel and concrete stairs leading down. Reflexively, LaMoia grabbed for his handgun, checked the weapon for operability, and gripped it along with the flashlight, both hands extended before him. Boldt remained half a step back, avoiding any line of fire, but did not take up his weapon. He checked it once, hooking his sport coat behind its bulge, so that he could withdraw it at a moment’s notice, and only then if LaMoia needed backup. John LaMoia was a crack shot. If anything moved down here without fair notice, Boldt knew the outcome.

  The bottom of the stairs presented them with a closed door, and LaMoia tugged it open, standing to one side to screen himself. A pitch-black space faced them, slowly illuminated by their flashlights. This basement level was crowded with discarded printing presses, stacks of white plastic, five-gallon drums, junk of every shape and size, all stacked together without logic or organization. The floor failed to yield the telltale skid marks of a body being dragged, and so the two split up, Boldt heading to the right, LaMoia to the left. Using hand signals they communicated a rendezvous point at the far end of a space that remained so dark that the light they carried died in blackness before reaching a distant wall. The operating theory was that it had to end somewhere, and when it did, they would find each other. Meanwhile, Boldt kept glancing over his shoulder to keep track of LaMoia’s ever-dimming light.

  The junk was piled in heaps that created a few aisles to Boldt’s left, and the larger aisle that he continued to walk. He squared a corner, discovering a side wall, and felt tempted to call out to LaMoia when, at that same instant, he felt a vibration travel up his legs, resonate through his body, and he guessed that a vehicle had either just passed by the building or had parked alongside.

  Boldt’s skin prickled as he hurried his pace, checking a number of side storage rooms. He had his weapon out now, in hand, and wasn’t sure when that had happened. He reminded himself that he had a Kevlar vest in the trunk of the Crown Vic and that Miles was almost seven and Sarah just four and that they deserved to have a daddy well into their childhoods. He also reminded himself that he had applied for the lieutenant’s shield to raise his pay, but that Liz saw it as a means to keep him out of situations like this, and he struggled with the irony that Liz herself had put him into this situation. It seemed it was always at moments such as these that memories and considerations tried to overrun his thoughts, an involuntary invitation of images that challenged his ability to stay focused and made the job all the more difficult. As a young cop, such images never plagued you; experience had its downside.

  The fourth door that Boldt tried failed to open, and his flashlight revealed a shiny new hasp and padlock at head height. He whistled once, and LaMoia whistled back, and at the same instant a muffled voice came from the other side of the door, and Boldt felt his bowels rumble. When it came to victims, Homicide cops rarely dealt in the living.

  The muffled cries continued from the other side of the door.

  “You feel the shake and bake?” LaMoia asked in a forced whisper, coming up behind Boldt.

  “I did,” Boldt said, snapping on a pair of latex gloves before tugging on the lock.

  “Visitors?”

  “We knew it was a possibility.” Boldt added, “It could be our own guys trying to catch up to us and update us on Foreman’s status.”

  LaMoia nonchalantly located a section of pipe amid the debris as they talked, leveraged the lock and hasp, and split the wooden doorjamb as the screws pulled loose and the hasp gave way. Still locked to itself, the hardware hung from the door. Boldt twisted the doorknob and eased the door open an eighth of an inch, aware there could be trip wires rigged to an explosive or incendiary device. If the work of Foreman, as an investigator he knew to destroy evidence and leave a few surprises for visitors. LaMoia leaned in close as Boldt held the door, and without a word of instruction searched the open space carefully with his flashlight held to the crack.

  “Nada,” he said.

  Boldt pushed the door open another two inches, and LaMoia reached inside this time, his fingers gently inspecting the gap. He shook his head. “No.”

  Both men paused as they heard the unmistakable sound of someone entering the building upstairs.

  LaMoia whispered, “You did lock the door behind you, right, Sarge?”

  Boldt nodded. “Whoever’s up there had the key.”

  “Not our guys,” LaMoia said, trying it out as a joke, or releasing tension, or both. The flip rem
ark bothered Boldt, who pushed and held the door open another three inches, allowing LaMoia’s head to fit through. LaMoia sized up the room’s interior, still looking for booby traps.

  “It’s Hayes,” he said softly. “Looks in decent shape.”

  “The door?”

  “Clear,” LaMoia said, tapping Boldt’s hand and swinging it open further.

  Boldt glanced only briefly to confirm it was Hayes. The man was gagged and bound to a metal chair in a room filled with cluttered shelves. His left hand had been roughly bandaged and his mouth and face looked bruised and swollen.

  “What about our friends?” LaMoia asked.

  “Exits?” Boldt asked. He slipped past LaMoia, leaving him to guard the room. He freed Hayes but did not untie the man’s mouth, unsure whether the man would keep silent.

  He heard footfalls overhead and guessed there were at least two of them. He didn’t need or want a confrontation where the prize was a man capable of delivering seventeen million dollars. Those kinds of stakes made men stupid, and stupid men did stupid things.

  “I passed one, yeah,” LaMoia informed him, “though I can’t vouch for it.”

  “Let’s go.” Boldt pulled Hayes out of the chair by the arm. The man stumbled under cramped legs, and LaMoia stepped inside and took the other arm. The room smelled of excrement and urine, and Boldt realized Hayes had fouled himself long before.

  “Motherfucker,” LaMoia said, getting a close whiff as the man came out of the chair.

  They guided Hayes through the door, his weight hanging between them like that of an invalid. Boldt saw the first sweep of light on the stairs and motioned LaMoia to lead them. They turned and hurried down an aisle created between the stacks of industrial junk. Boldt could feel the pressure of whoever was back there, knowing they drew closer with every step. He shook his hand vigorously, pointing ahead, trying to pick up their speed, and LaMoia responded by carrying more than his fair share of the weight.

  LaMoia steered left at the end of the long aisle.

  Boldt checked behind him to see through the tangle of metal what appeared to be two lights. They’d reached the bottom of the stairs and now faced the same indecision that he and LaMoia had faced only minutes before. One light went left, and one right, in a mirror image. Boldt looked ahead hoping for an exit sign, but couldn’t see more than a few feet. LaMoia trained his light toward the concrete floor, as did Boldt, all three of their heads aimed down in order to overstep obstacles and avoid making noise.

  The visitor on the left turned the same corner that Boldt had, and when he called out, it was in what sounded like Russian, and Boldt felt his legs suddenly move that much faster. He didn’t consider himself scared of anyone; he’d spent too many years on the job for that-they were usually afraid of him-and yet the sound of that particular language, associated with all means and methods of violence, turned his blood cold and he experienced a pang of fear. LaMoia, no coward to anyone or anything, picked up his pace as well. Perhaps it resulted from the burden of Hayes carried between them, and their vulnerability, but whatever the motivation, they moved in unison. Even Hayes seemed to find his feet with the first echo of that foreign tongue. The three reached a rusted steel door bearing an emergency warning not to open it, and Boldt wondered if it was to be their luck that the one thing that still worked in this building was the emergency exit alarm built into the box attached to the door.

  No matter what, their attempt to open this door promised to make noise: Old, rusty steel didn’t move quietly. Presently subterranean, they had to hope the stairwell-that presumably led up into an alley-was not also piled with debris, either blocking the door or preventing them from climbing out once through.

  LaMoia checked with Boldt in the dim light, his right hand on the door’s panic bar. He was looking for permission from Boldt, and with the moment of truth at hand, Boldt wondered if this was indeed the best course of action. Without a doubt, their departure would attract attention. To do so unnecessarily seemed a ridiculous risk to take. But as the light to the right flickered and died, far closer to their aisle than Boldt had imagined, he gave the nod and LaMoia shoved on the tarnished panic bar.

  The door came open with a horror-movie groan of metal on metal, not merely calling attention, but shouting. LaMoia swung it open, and it stuck. He let go of Hayes, threw a shoulder into it, and won enough room for them to pass. The shouting from behind also rose in Russian, followed immediately by hurried footfalls. Boldt, the last to pass through, braced himself for the sting of a bullet, or the pain of a club to his head.

  LaMoia awaited him with a bent and battered discarded trash can that looked like an oversized crushed beer can. He rudely knocked Boldt out of the way and braced the can beneath the door’s outside handle, wedging the door shut.

  They hurried up the stairs, the first loud bang on the door and the agonized sound of the trash can’s tin bending. Boldt didn’t like the idea of running from thugs, and he knew without asking that LaMoia felt the same. The thing to do was ditch Hayes and stand their ground and make arrests based on breaking-and-entering. But if these two were backed by two more, if SPD backup failed to arrive quickly, with seventeen million on the line, things could get dicey.

  “So?” LaMoia asked hopefully, nowhere near as out of breath as Boldt felt.

  “We can’t,” Boldt said.

  Hayes got his feet under him and no longer needed much assistance. His mouth remained gagged, silver tape holding the gag in place. Bug-eyed he shouted to communicate but neither Boldt nor LaMoia was interested.

  “Where to?” LaMoia asked.

  “The Slumberjack,” Boldt proposed, naming a run-of-the-mill motel that SPD used occasionally.

  “Lucky you,” LaMoia said, forcibly taking hold of Hayes now by his collar and throwing him ahead to keep him moving. “Free HBO and the taxpayer pays.”

  “It’s not exactly how it’s going to work, John,” Boldt informed his sergeant, his mind already playing through his and Liz’s needs over the next forty-eight hours. “I’m paying for this one. Let’s keep it between the three of us. Foreman’s got to have access to anything we’re doing, either officially or through his pals. We can’t risk that.” These lies came so effortlessly now, he nearly believed them himself. He wondered if they made it past LaMoia as well.

  Hayes appeared nonplussed at the mention of Foreman’s name, leaving Boldt to wonder who had been responsible for the man’s abduction. That, or Foreman had thought to use Rohypnol to erase the man’s memory of the event, and to further tie the abduction to the earlier tortures. Boldt had slipped the name into the explanation hoping for a response, and felt the wind knocked out of him when it failed to register.

  Hurrying toward the Crown Vic, Boldt dragged along this man who’d had sex with his wife, his only real wish to find a legitimate excuse to kick Hayes squarely in the balls. Start kicking and never stop.

  NINETEEN

  BOLDT’S CELL PHONE, PLUGGED IN and recharging, cut a shrill tone through the bedroom’s darkness at exactly 2 A.M. Liz stopped snoring and sat up as if hearing a fire alarm, still in a dream state. “The kids?” she asked Boldt, who was already out of bed. Then she remembered the state of affairs, sank back to her pillow, and said, “Oh,” as she realized it was only another of his late-night summonses. Another part of the same nightmare.

  A woman’s voice said into Boldt’s ear, “He’ll talk to you and your guy, but only you and your guy. No wires. No tricks. Half hour from now-two-thirty. He’ll give you ten minutes, tops. Nothing on the record.” She named the location-the Pink Lady-a strip joint on First Avenue. “If there’s no objection, we’ll see you there.”

  After some struggle, he identified the voice as that of Maddie Olson. He said, “No objection.” Both he and LaMoia could reach the club within fifteen minutes. She disconnected the call without ceremony.

  Boldt dialed John. He felt tempted to go it alone, but LaMoia was street-smart, willing to play tough off the books, and handy to have ar
ound as backup. He had to consider the possibility, however remote, that Olson was leading him into a trap.

  Matthews answered and passed the phone to LaMoia, and from somewhere inside Boldt came the need to look across through the gray haze of a dark bedroom and see his wife’s head on the pillow. The sight pleased him, and it occurred to him that he didn’t harbor any hatred or resentment for her affair with Hayes, at least not at that moment. He worried over the videotape, and what it would do to Miles and Sarah if their teachers, and the parents of their friends, saw pieces of it on the evening news. There were no secrets for anyone in public service, especially a veteran Homicide cop whom so many would love to see knocked off his pedestal. But something about dragging Hayes from that abandoned building, about placing him in the motel under the watchful eye of Bobbie Gaynes, had lessened the mystique surrounding the man. Bloodied and beaten down, Hayes had struck him as a sad excuse, a pitiful kid gone bad.

  “But, Sarge,” LaMoia whined, “a downtown strip joint? How about someplace a little less distracting?”

  Boldt marveled that even just wakened, LaMoia not only had his sarcasm intact, but was willing to say such a thing in front of Matthews.

  “Fifteen minutes.” Boldt hung up without dignifying that with a response.

  The Pink Lady seethed neon lighting and loud music, a sweet-and-sour smell of male excitement and cheap cologne mixed with the tang of salt-rimmed margaritas. It was nineteen-year-old girls, not women, in negligees serving drinks, and another up onstage, naked and with a shaved pubis, rubbing herself against a stainless steel pole and trying to look anything but pained to be there.