The First Victim

by Ridley Pearson

  ‘‘One of these days that mouth of yours is going to get you into more trouble than it can talk itself back out of,’’ Boldt warned.

  ‘‘This mouth of mine ought to be registered as a weapon, what it can do to a woman.’’

  ‘‘You’re not scoring any points, John. Go inside and take a chair. You want to stare at Stowle? Permission granted. At least Iwon’t have to listen to you.’’

  LaMoia occupied the chair in the far corner for two hours, wondering why it was that waiting rooms offered only grossly outof-date magazines and wall clocks the size of pizzas. He was bothered by how young the people using the free clinic were, and how much of its traffic seemed involved, one way or another, with drugs 291

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  and addiction. Only seven people had arrived as a result of Stevie McNeal’s broadcast.

  Each of the seven times, Stowle had signaled all four of the undercover cops inside, and Boldt in the control van. The lavaliere microphone was hidden in her dark hair, its wire running down the back neck of her dress. Seven different people, all seeking the RH-340 flu shot—all health care workers or dockhands who had been on the scene of the container recovery.

  The eighth time Laura Stowle signaled LaMoia it was for a tall Hispanic male wearing a dark sweatshirt with a hood. LaMoia buried his face into a six-week-old copy of People; the janitor with the bucket and mop kneeled down to work a piece of gum from the stone floor; a wiry-looking woman in hot pants and platform shoes pulled out her lipstick and used the mirror of her compact to get a good look at the door behind her; a woman in civilian clothes, typing at a station behind Stowle, took her fingers off the keyboard and took hold of her weapon, beneath the table.

  The big man was told to wait. He took a seat two chairs away from LaMoia, who had the audacity to turn to the man and say, ‘‘How ya doing?’’

  ‘‘Feel like shit, man,’’ the other said, his nose running, his voice rough.

  ‘‘Ihear that,’’ LaMoia said, returning to his magazine. After five minutes the Hispanic male was handed a form to fill out. He looked at it with contempt. Standing in front of him, Stowle explained in a bored voice, ‘‘We need your name, place of employment, if any, and relevant phone numbers for notification of follow-up. They’re very important. If you need the Spanish form—’’

  ‘‘Yeah,’’ he grunted.

  She returned with a different clipboard and spoke Spanish. ‘‘You can skip the insurance part because the treatment you’ve requested is free. Fourth line, date of exposure, is extremely important because it will determine the extent of treatment you receive and therefore the

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  effectiveness of that treatment. Repeated exposures don’t matter to the physician. It’s the initial exposure that is critical to proper diagnosis and subsequent treatment. If there’s anything I can help you with—’’

  ‘‘You could speed things up a little,’’ LaMoia said, interrupting in English. ‘‘Or maybe a drink after you’re through here.’’

  Stowle glared at him.

  The Hispanic sniffled, coughed and scribbled his name onto the top of the form in crude but legible handwriting: Guermo Rodriguez. Stowle returned to her place behind the counter. LaMoia was called a few minutes later under the name Romanello.

  ‘‘ ’Bout time,’’ he said, placing the magazine down. ‘‘Good luck, man,’’

  he said to the other. ‘‘You’ll be a couple years older by the time they call you.’’

  Rodriguez stood simultaneously and returned the clipboard and form to the receptionist, who passed it on to the officer at the keyboard station behind her, the woman’s loaded weapon still available on the shelf by her knees.

  LaMoia passed into the back and took up a position in the examination room adjacent to the room where Rodriguez would be examined, effectively blocking any use of the building’s back exit. They had him cornered now. LaMoia waited impatiently for information back from downtown. The keyboard operator’s input of the outpatient form was not headed for the clinic’s medical records but instead was connected by modem to the department’s criminal records bureau. The name Guermo Rodriguez came back negative: no criminal arrests or convictions. The system also failed to kick a driver’s license or a registered vehicle. Guermo Rodriguez did not exist. He was, however, a man who might ride the city buses. Rodriguez had more than likely listed a bogus address on the clinic’s form, as well as a bogus phone number. Rodriguez was probably himself an illegal, a connection that could easily put him into service for a corrupt INS official.

  ‘‘He’s gotta be our guy,’’ Boldt announced over the radio. ‘‘The sweatshirt matches what we saw on the videos. We go with it.’’

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  A few minutes later Rodriguez was given an injection of a placebo, told to take aspirin and drink plenty of water, and released. By the time Guermo Rodriguez left the clinic, SPD had fifteen officers in ten vehicles assigned to his surveillance—the largest surveillance operation conducted by the department in the past eleven months.

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  WithSPD monitoring his everyfootstep, nearly his everybreath, Rodriguez was carefully followed, first to an all-night pharmacy where he bought a bottle of aspirin, some cough syrup and a head cold decongestant, and subsequently to ‘‘A place on Military Road in Federal Way,’’ as LaMoia explained to Boldt, who had returned to the office to oversee and direct the surveillance from the situation room.

  ‘‘He climbs up into an eighteen-wheeler cab—a flatbed—and takes a two-hour nap. Igot a hunch that truck’s his home for the time being. But then he fires it up and drives off. What’s that say to you, Sarge?’’

  ‘‘Mama Lu was right about the new moon,’’ Boldt answered.

  ‘‘There’s a shipment coming in. Tomorrow? The next day? Soon! ’’ The truck was intended to move a container.

  ‘‘So then he drives a couple miles, parks it and takes a lawyer’s lunch at a greasy spoon—only it’s after midnight. He’s in no sign of being in any hurry.’’

  ‘‘We know for certain he’s in there?’’ Boldt pressed.

  ‘‘Cranshaw is getting his fill of cherry pie and coffee. We got a visual.’’

  ‘‘Waiting for a meet?’’ Boldt proposed.

  ‘‘That or a call. Got to be. You want Ishould bring him in for a chat?’’

  ‘‘Negative,’’ Boldt stated. The evidence they had against Rodriguez was entirely circumstantial. ‘‘Icould try for a trap-and-trace on the diner’s pay phone—’’

  ‘‘Now there’s a long shot.’’

  ‘‘Never get it,’’ Boldt admitted.

  ‘‘Let’s hope this guy’s girlfriend doesn’t have a thing for the inside 295

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  of truck cabs or something. Ihope to hell we’re not wasting our time here.’’

  ‘‘Is sex the only thing you think about?’’ Boldt asked.

  ‘‘No way!’’ LaMoia answered without missing a beat. ‘‘I’m pretty fond of money, too.’’

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  At 3:00 A.M. Wednesday morning the flatbed semi with Rodriguez behind the wheel finally left the diner’s gravel lot. Boldt was awakened from a nap in a storage room where a bunk bed offered detectives a chance to lie down. Surveillance was tricky at th
at hour, and with Boldt’s request for a phone warrant denied, all the police could do was guess at the call Rodriguez had been seen making from the diner and to follow him at a comfortable distance.

  Thirty minutes later he used a bolt cutter to enter the gates of a naval storage depot that proved to have been part of the 1988 base closures that had caused a brief downward blip in King County’s otherwise stellar economy. Rodriguez pulled the flatbed down to a dock area where a pair of towering cranes pointed up toward the night sky. It was those cranes that caught everyone’s attention. Fifteen minutes later, as LaMoia and two other detectives made their move to get a better vantage point, Rodriguez was spotted crossing through the navy yard’s side gates on foot. A moment later he dragged a motorcycle out of the weeds and took off without lights, catching the surveillance team by surprise and LaMoia in the midst of cutting a chained gate accessing a dark spit of land that looked directly across a small thumb of water at the navy yard. Detectives pursued in unmarked cars, but Rodriguez took the cycle off-road and disappeared.

  ‘‘Eluded?’’ Boldt roared into the phone.

  ‘‘We screwed up, Sarge.’’

  ‘‘And then some,’’ Boldt said.

  ‘‘Didn’t expect the bike.’’

  ‘‘Don’t try for sympathy from me. You lost our prime suspect.’’

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  vage something from his loss, ‘‘and the two cranes. Gaynes is still on Coughlie. He paid a visit to KSTV. He took a brief ride on a city bus. You got that, Sarge? A city bus!’’ He added cautiously, ‘‘This navy yard has got to be the place. It’s perfect. The cranes, for Christ’s sake!

  I’m gonna issue a Be on Lookout for Rodriguez. We’ll set up out here. If we’re right about this drop, Sarge, we had better be prepared for an all-out war. I’m thinking Mulwright and Special Ops.’’

  ‘‘I’ve got to report it to Hill, John.’’

  ‘‘Iunderstand.’’

  ‘‘Hang in there.’’

  ‘‘Right.’’

  As the sun crawled into a slate gray sky looking like a bug light held behind a curtain, three men pushed a step van out onto their surveillance point to avoid having to run the van’s motor and risk its being overheard. LaMoia and two technicians climbed into the back of that van, dog-tired, hungry and humiliated. They took turns with twenty-minute catnaps, but nothing helped LaMoia. Failure was the worst kind of fatigue.

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  The barren spit of land with its rough gravel and broken glass was littered with the skeletons of commercial fishing equipment: buoys, engine parts, booms, cranks, winches and miles of coiled and damaged fishing net wound onto enormous spools. Water slapped against a sea wall of boulders, chunks of former roadway and the rusting carcasses of dead automobiles and railroad boxcars. The seawater, a murky green, moved like mercury. A light but steady breeze colored the air with a salty ocean spray.

  At 6:00 A.M. that Wednesday morning, LaMoia received word over the radio that they had trouble at the gate. He slipped out the back of the van wondering when the trouble would stop. Every time he turned around there was a screwup or a problem.

  The problem this time was a rent-a-cop with a company called Collier Security. He wore a gray-blue uniform with a can of pepper spray where on a cop the gun would have been. The Collier logo on

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  the arm patch tried too hard to look like SPD’s. The name badge pinned over the right pocket read Stilwill.

  ‘‘Mr. Stilwill, what’s the problem?’’ an exhausted and agitated LaMoia inquired.

  ‘‘What I’m telling the officer here is that I got me a job to do, Lieutenant.’’

  ‘‘Sergeant,’’ LaMoia corrected.

  ‘‘Cops or not, you can’t be here on this property without the owners knowing about it.’’

  ‘‘We will handle notification,’’ LaMoia assured him. ‘‘For the time being it would be whole lot better for everyone if you just continued your rounds. Forget about us. We aren’t here. That would save us all a trip downtown and a lot of lawyering.’’

  ‘‘Yeah, but like, you can’t be in here. See? It’s private property. And the equipment on it is private property. You got a warrant?’’

  ‘‘I’ve got probable cause. This is an active investigation,’’ LaMoia said dryly, his patience running thin. ‘‘You have a clear choice here, Stilwill. It’s your call to make, right or wrong.’’

  Detective Heiman crossed the road from an unmarked car and hurried over to LaMoia. Out of breath, he spoke a little too loudly for the situation. ‘‘Port Authority has six freighters scheduled for arrival over the next twenty-four hours. Three of them listing Hong Kong last port of call.’’

  ‘‘Give me a minute here, Detective,’’ LaMoia said, well aware the security man had overheard.

  Stilwill looked out over the water and clearly took note of the cranes. ‘‘That container thing?’’ he asked. ‘‘You’re on that container thing?’’

  ‘‘It’s an undercover surveillance operation, Mr. Stilwill,’’ LaMoia explained, avoiding a direct answer. ‘‘You want me to say good things about you, you’ll just pick up and move on. ’Cause otherwise I’m gonna rain down shit on your parade so deep you’ll drown in it.’’

  Stilwill glanced around nervously, outnumbered.

  ‘‘What you need to do,’’ LaMoia repeated, ‘‘is move on and forget about this. Are you listening, Mr. Stilwill?’’

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  ‘‘Ihear ya,’’ he said, his attention remaining on the view of the naval yard. ‘‘That over there has been deserted for years. Ain’t never seen nothing over there. Where’d that flatbed come from anyway?’’

  ‘‘You need to think about our little situation here.’’

  ‘‘What situation?’’ Stilwill asked, intentionally naive, offering LaMoia a shit-eating grin.

  ‘‘That’s better,’’ LaMoia said, but inside he didn’t trust the man.

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  W E D N E S D AY , S E P T E M B E R 2 1 6 D AY S M I S S I N G

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  Early Wednesday morning, Live-7, second in ratings to Channel Four news, led off its Morning Report quoting a ‘‘reliable source’’

  that ‘‘police are involved in a massive surveillance operation directly linked to the illegals investigation.’’

  The report infuriated everyone from Sheila Hill, upset over the apparent leak, to Jimmy Corwin, annoyed that KSTV had been scooped by the competition. Adam Talmadge complained vehemently through legal channels that the INS had not been informed of, nor included in, any such surveillance.

  By 8:30 that morning, the trailing network affiliate identified security guard Clarence Stilwill as the source of the information. On the ‘‘advice of attorneys’’ Stilwill was in hiding, and unavailable for comment.

  KVOW, public radio, reported not only that a possible suspect had been lost during the surveillance but that the King County medical examiner’s preliminary autopsy report on the most recent Hilltop Cemetery cadaver, �
��‘Jill Doe,’’ was due out that same day and was said to contain additional information pertaining to the illegals investigation. Political shock waves ran through the system as denial upon denial was issued, no-comment upon no-comment echoed through the media and filtered down to coffee shops and the office copy room. Melissa Chow’s disappearance and possible abduction had become an emotionally charged issue stumped by would-be politicians running for office in November, and as word spread that police were possibly closing in on the people behind it, the radio talk shows buzzed with various leaks.

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  Boldt and LaMoia felt this pressure on both professional and personal levels. They were told to stop the leaks and solve the case. Sheila Hill summed it up for them both, ‘‘Get us something in time for the six o’clock news that will make both the mayor and the PA look good, something to feed the beast and satiate it. If you can’t come up with something, I’m going to feed them your reassignments, gentlemen, so don’t take this lightly.’’

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  Their pagers sounding, Boldt and LaMoia left Hill’s office and headed directly to the ME’s basement offices in the Harborview Medical Clinic. The bear of a man led them with huge, hurried strides into his office and closed the doors.

  ‘‘Idon’t know where that leak came from,’’ he apologized, ‘‘but if Ifind out, that person will never work again. Not ever! Not anywhere!’’

  Not a man to lose his temper, this particular Ronald Dixon was a rare sight.

  ‘‘Ithought you said it was the leaks you wanted to talk to us about,’’ Boldt complained. Although LaMoia was scheduled to return to the naval yard surveillance, there had been no activity at the location since Rodriguez’s escape. ‘‘As you can imagine, John and Iare a little busy this morning, Dixie.’’

  ‘‘No, not leaks like that . . .’’ Dixon corrected, losing his anger to a smile. ‘‘Leeks!’’ he said. ‘‘The kind you eat.’’

  ‘‘Leeks,’’ LaMoia repeated.

  ‘‘Exactly,’’ said the medical examiner.

  ‘‘Exactly what?’’ Boldt asked.