No Witnesses
Page 27
Adler sprang for the door, but Daphne blocked him with a straight arm and ordered him to lock the doors behind her. “It’s you he wants. I’m going for Corky.”
“To hell with that,” he said, shoving her aside abruptly. He threw open the door and ran for the tunnel.
Daphne followed, but failed to catch him. The concrete tunnel consisted of two long subterranean passages that met outside the wine cellar’s vaultlike steel door. The passage to the main house was noticeably older, its lights more widely spaced and therefore darker.
When she did catch up to him, he was in Corky’s room, his arms wrapped around his eleven-year-old, who was caught halfway between waking and dreaming.
Corky wrestled loose of her father’s constraints, jumped out of bed, and assaulted Daphne, leaping into her arms, “Daffy!” she exclaimed, using Boldt’s nickname for her that followed her everywhere.
Carrying the heavy child, who hung from her neck awkwardly, Daphne edged to the windows and pulled the drapes. Seeing this, Adler helped her, and the darkened room became darker still.
“What now?” he asked her, helping Corky off her.
“You stay right here,” Daphne said defiantly. “I’ll get the lights and lock up.”
This time Adler nodded.
“Are you cooking breakfast?” Corky asked her. This was the euphemism they used when Daphne spent the night.
“No, not tonight,” Daphne answered. She met eyes with Owen. His eyes were filled with tears.
Boldt understood immediately the difficulty he faced. If he descended on Adler’s estate with ten patrol cars and the entire late-shift ID unit, and if the estate were being watched, the involvement of the police would be rather obvious. On the other hand, if the Tin Man were somewhere on the property and Boldt passed up an opportunity to contain him and apprehend him, then he was throwing away innocent lives.
He checked his watch: His squad’s shift had ended at midnight, forty-five minutes ago.
He reached LaMoia at home, and ten minutes later, Bobbie Gaynes at her apartment. He tried Danielson’s apartment, failed to reach the man, and had the dispatcher page the detective, hoping for a call back on the cellular. He called in five patrol cars, each with two uniforms, and deployed them roughly around the perimeter of Adler’s estate—not an easy task given the terrain and layout of the Loyal area. One officer from each team was to stay with the car, the other to make ready to work his or her way toward the main house, if requested.
He roused Shoswitz and prosecuting attorney Michael Striker and informed them of the developments. It was during his conversation with Shoswitz that he learned that two different ATMs had been hit that night and yet another three thousand dollars withdrawn.
Boldt arrived at Adler’s nine-thousand-square-foot home ahead of either of his detectives. He pulled Daphne aside and the two talked over Boldt’s plan for several minutes. “It’s pretty low-profile at the moment,” Boldt explained. “In case things change and we need it, Shoswitz is arranging for KOMO’s traffic chopper for air surveillance.” The news radio chopper—its services often lent to SPD—would also carry a SWAT sharpshooter, but Boldt left that part out. Daphne abhorred the entire approach of SWAT—shoot first, talk later.
He was shown to Adler’s sumptuous office, which was hidden behind a moving bookshelf. The decor reminded Boldt of an English manor home. The office window faced out to the water and the precipitous terrain leading down to Daphne’s unseen car parked far below in Golden Gardens Park. “The only point of view into this office,” Boldt observed, “would be from the lawn or one of those trees.”
They looked out at the broken teeth of the jagged horizon. In private, Daphne told Boldt about her encounter with Mackensie in those very woods, and Boldt weighed what to do about it. As Gaynes and LaMoia arrived separately, but nearly at the same moment, Boldt was on the phone to Fowler. The security man dodged any direct answer about the estate’s surveillance and said he would look into it. Boldt, furious, advised that he look into it quickly. “We’re going into those woods with our safeties off,” Boldt explained. “You had better get your people out of there.”
By the time a nervous and perspiring Boldt had quickly briefed his two detectives, Kenny Fowler called back. “There’s no one currently deployed,” Fowler told him. “But we have a slight problem on this end—might be technical. Might not be. We can’t seem to raise Mackensie.”
With Daphne’s help, they searched the house thoroughly, checking every possible hiding place, and then locked it up tightly and armed the security system. Outside, LaMoia took the high ground, assigned to check the gardens and shrubs and landscape. The three of them used secured police-frequency radios that connected them to one another and with the perimeter patrol personnel, who were put on an armed-and-dangerous alert. Boldt and Bobbie Gaynes took the hillside, while Daphne patrolled the home’s interior.
They started down the steep hillside trail together, but quickly separated, because it became obvious that the only trees offering a view of Adler’s office were perched near the very top of the incline. Boldt went left, Gaynes right.
He checked behind him frequently, watching for the beam of her flashlight as it swept the trees and ground cover. From training, he mentally divided the area into a number of grids and approached his search as he would a homicide crime scene. Methodically, he moved from grid to grid, patiently alert for some sign of recent activity.
He found just such a sign about twenty yards into the thicket—deep enough that when he turned, he could no longer see the light from the efforts of Bobbie Gaynes. The stems of a large plant were crushed, and a few feet farther along he noticed a skid mark where a boot or shoe had recently kicked a rut into the fallen brown pine needles. Beyond this, he encountered yet another swath of broken twigs through a thicket. It smelled moldy deep in the woods; it smelled of decomposition and too much moisture and not enough sunlight. Boldt used the radio to softly announce that he had picked up signs to follow. He advised Gaynes to return to the main trail and descend slowly, alert for indications of where the man may have departed from it. LaMoia was to stand guard at the top of the trail in case they flushed the suspect.
Boldt moved slowly now, painfully aware of the easy target he offered by carrying a lit flashlight. Within a few yards his trail ended at the trunk of an extremely climbable tree. The bark was scarred pale where a clambering shoe had scraped it clean. Boldt shined the light up the tightly spaced branches. Considering himself too big and too clumsy for such acrobatics, Boldt nonetheless snapped his weapon in tightly, stuffed the light into his coat pocket so that it aimed up, illuminating his ascent route, and began to climb.
He did not have to climb far. Fifteen feet up, he got his first look at the house. He could see LaMoia pacing impatiently at the top of the trail steps near the guest house. He climbed up higher and discovered a large, heavy branch that ran nearly level and probably offered a fairly comfortable perch. The flashlight revealed that here the dark tree bark was excessively shredded yellow. Someone had spent some time here. He did not climb up onto the branch, for he wanted to leave it for ID, who were waiting for a call while parked only a few blocks away. But there seemed to him little question as to the quality of the unobstructed view this offered of Adler’s home office.
He aimed the light back down to the ground, with a little voice calling to him never to look down, and experienced a brief sensation of vertigo. But it was as he was planning his descent through the branches that his eye caught the flash of something bright. Suddenly his planned route meant nothing to him. He descended out of the tree as effortlessly as would a chimpanzee.
From above they had looked like yellow pine needles, and yet unnatural and misplaced. Boldt counted three of them—not pine needles at all. Each chewed to a pulp on both ends—discarded as the Tin Man had sat patiently up in this tree biding his time, waiting to place his call. Toothpicks. Three of them. Freshly chewed—damp to the touch at one end, dry on the other.
Boldt covered his own flashlight and saw the beam from hers reflected in limbs of the trees. “I’ve got you.” He took note of his surroundings so he could find this same spot again. He contacted Bernie Lofgrin’s ID crew and told them to come onto the property and to wait with LaMoia at the top of the trail. LaMoia copied.
Boldt contacted Daphne and asked her to relay to prosecuting attorney Michael Striker that they needed an immediate access to the calling logs of all the area cellular phone companies. If it had been Caulfield in that tree, and if he had made the phone call from up there, then it had to be from a cellular phone. If Caulfield had a cell phone, then he had an account; if he had an account, he had a mailing address. Striker was to contact Boldt the moment he located a record of any such call.
The park trail was rough going at a run. Boldt punched through a railroad tie, crashed, and recovered himself, but not without winning some bruises to show for it.
Gaynes was fifteen yards off the trail into the woods, in an area that seemed to Boldt nearly directly beneath the observation tree. As Boldt approached, she asked, “Did you have dinner?”
“No.”
“Well, you’re lucky. I just left mine in a bush over there.”
Boldt did not think of Gaynes as having a tender stomach. He reached her. He could smell the metallic bite of fresh blood in the air well before he saw the body. She lowered her light onto Mackensie’s corpse. The branch that had been used to cave in his face was lying a few yards from the twisted wreck of a body, and Boldt thought that the man might have survived that blow had his hands not been cleaved from his arms at the wrist with something incredibly sharp. But there they lay—at the ends of his arms looking like a pair of deerskin gloves. Mac Mackensie, knocked unconscious by that branch, had bled to death, his face now the color of a bedsheet.
A few minutes later when LaMoia arrived, he said to Gaynes, “Come on, help me. I think we should give him a hand.”
At three in the morning, Boldt drove Daphne down to where she had parked her car in the picnic area.
“You’re awfully quiet,” he said.
Daphne nodded.
“You’re just tired,” he tried. “It’s late.”
“I’m wide awake,” she answered. She could not think how to explain what she felt to another person; she barely understood it herself. As a psychologist, she wanted to be strong and able to quickly overcome such pain—to adapt. But as a woman, a human being, she ached not for Mac Mackensie, but selfishly, for herself. Then she thought that Lou Boldt, of all people, would understand. “Five minutes either way,” she whispered hoarsely, her voice giving her away.
Boldt pulled the car next to her Honda and left it running. “And it would have been you,” he said.
She nodded, and she felt the choking sensation in her throat, she felt the tears, and she hated herself for this reaction. She leaned forward and Boldt put his big hand on her back and rubbed her there, and it comforted her. “That was too damn close for me,” she said, sobbing now. “And it’s me I care about, not Mac Mackensie—can you believe that? And you know how he went out? He went out being a jerk. A real goddamn prick. And that’s the last thing he ever was—a jerk. A real jerk. Listen to me!”
He continued to rub her back, and when his hand reached her neck, she felt the tension spill out of her and she found her self-control again. “Sorry,” she said.
“Whenever a cop—someone I know—goes down, my first sensation is gratitude. Glad it wasn’t me. My turn. I always felt guilty about that—until now. I’ve never talked about it with anyone, never shared that part of me. Not even with Liz. My second thought is for the deceased—it’s not that I don’t care; but my first reaction is a huge sense of relief. I dodged another one—something along those lines.”
“I was there,” she said softly. “I heard someone in the woods. First to my left, then below me, then later to my right. I heard two people, not one. He was there. For all I know he was coming for me when Mackensie caught up to me. For all I know he was right there.” She looked over at him then with surprise in her eyes. “For all I know it’s been him following me all along.”
“Or Mackensie for that matter,” Boldt suggested.
“No,” she said, “Mackensie was just doing a job. After he left me, he didn’t make it far.”
“He probably heard something. Wandered into the woods. Caulfield jumps up and hits a home run into the side of his face. The hands were an afterthought, I think. Maybe Mackensie tried for his piece. Maybe he grabbed for a radio or something. I think Harry used the hands to buy himself time—no time to tie him up, so he cuts them off. Something that simple. The question I have to ask is what the hell kind of knife is he carrying around?”
“You’re trying to say there was nothing I could have done. You’re trying to make it right.”
“It wasn’t you who disobeyed the signs.” Boldt pointed through the windshield to where the headlights caught the parks department sign. It read: FOR YOUR OWN SAFETY, PLEASE STAY ON THE TRAIL.
Daphne parked her car down the street and across from the houseboats in a space for which she paid seventy-five dollars a month. It was a well-lighted lot, which lately made her appreciate it all the more. She turned off the car, locked it, and made the trip to the houseboat at a brisk pace. It was after three-thirty in the morning and all of her neighbors were locked up and dark.
She reached the door, unlocked and opened it, and headed directly to the home security box that she found flashing its violation, indicating her entry. She rekeyed the device, locked the front door, and turned on more lights than necessary, keeping her purse at her side while she made a full trip around every room, checking coat closets, even under the bed, and confirming to herself that she now qualified fully as a paranoid.
She convinced herself that at this hour any sane person would head straight to bed, but on this night it was not for her. She considered a bath, but not tonight. Sleep would not come for another hour or so, and to try to force it would only delay it more.
She unbuttoned and unzipped her pants, slipped off her bra without taking off her shirt, washed her hands twice in a row, and poured herself a glass of Pine Ridge.
She set down the wine, pulled out the stool, climbed up onto it, and let out a long and meaningful sigh. She was in the middle of a second sip when her heart fluttered. She felt her eyes go wide, and acting on instinct, she was suddenly off the stool, pants still unfastened, over to her purse … her shoes … the alarm … out the door … lock it! Feet not fully in the shoes … running … shoes flapping … refusing to look behind her … running … up the gangway … past the mailboxes … down the street toward her car … A dog lunged from a shadow, and Daphne screamed at the top of her lungs and ran faster … faster. Into the parking lot … straight for the car … unlock it! Inside! Relock it! Start the engine … She pulled out of the lot, spinning gravel behind her tires, and fastened her seat belt on the fly. Ran a red light, horn sounding … Ran another …
She would take a hotel room. Charge it to the department, for that matter. She would not return to her own home until it was light again. She would not tell anyone if she did not find some other piece of evidence. And perhaps—she allowed herself to believe, now that she found herself in the safety of the vehicle—perhaps she remembered wrong.
But the image in her mind stung her with certainty: She had left the mechanical pencil pointing at a word. What was the word? What was it?
Intractable—she remembered!
And now that same pencil was sitting alongside her papers. Pointing nowhere. Which was not how she had left it.
And that was wrong.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Boldt stood before the bathroom mirror shaving when he heard Liz climb out of bed. Miles was still asleep. As he shaved, she slipped off
her nightgown and pressed her warm, sleepy body against him.
“Honey?” he said cautiously.
“I have something for you.” She reached around him, grabbed a hair band, and put her hair back. She meant business. Elizabeth did not let her hair down before sex, but put it up instead. Reaching around him, she unfastened his pants.
“I’m going to cut myself,” he warned.
“Be careful,” she said, teasing his chest in a way she knew he liked.
“I have something for you,” she repeated. He dropped the plastic razor into the water and it splashed into the islands of shaving cream. She led him over to the counter, sat up on it, and wrapped her legs around him. “Come and get it,” she said.
Later, she leaned her head back against the wall, but refused to let him go. She was sweating and her eyes looked dreamy.
She allowed them to separate then, and her legs sank down, but she did not move until Boldt finished shaving—and then only once she had talked him into running the shower for her.
Drying her hair in the living room, a white terry-cloth robe cinched tightly around her waist, and watching her son, who was now awake, she said to Boldt, “They had a similar case in London,” which won his attention.
“Who did?”
“The London authorities. A kidnapping. Ransom by ATM machine. I told you I had something for you.”
“I thought you meant—”
“No,” she corrected. “That was for me.”
“Liz?”
“They paid out one hundred and eighty-five thousand pounds over a ten-month period. If your case goes on for ten months, I figured we would end up divorced, so it was in my best interest to get to the bottom of this.” He moved closer to her. She smelled good. “From what I can tell, it was incredibly similar to what you’re facing. The guy moved from one ATM to another, one town to another, making withdrawals, and no matter how fast the police responded, he was always long gone.”
“That’s us exactly,” Boldt replied, anxiously awaiting whatever else she had to tell him. Elizabeth could not be rushed. She had her own timing—in everything.