The Art of Deception b-8

by Ridley Pearson

  A damp, heavy air surged through the open crack. It smelled like a swamp in there.

  Reaching for a pair of latex gloves, Boldt said, “You’re going to have to close the southbound tunnel. Make an excuse.”

  “Like hell!”

  “In about ten minutes, this place is going to be crawling with lab personnel.” Boldt checked his cell phone service. No signal.

  “I’ve got to get to the surface,” he said anxiously. “In the meantime, we lock this up. You and I go out together. No one touches anything. And if anyone asks, you tell them it flooded again.

  Whatever you want, I don’t care. But I want no mention of police, no mention of my visit, no mention of the lab guys. You screw it up, I’ll not only have your job, I’ll have you in for obstruction. Are we clear on that?”

  “I got it,” Iberson said. He glanced back at the partially open wall panel and shook his head. “If I hadn’t seen it with-”

  “You didn’t see it,” Boldt said.

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  “You didn’t see it,” Boldt repeated sternly.

  “The hell I didn’t,” Iberson said. “I gotta put my boss into the loop. You want, I can put you two in touch directly. Closing down a tunnel, that’s serious business.”

  More serious than you think, Boldt nearly said. “I saw pay phones on that upper level.”

  Iberson checked his pants pockets as he shut the EER behind them. “You got any quarters?” he asked.

  Running Blind

  Four out of the six available patrol cars were stationed around the section of downtown defined by Second and Third Avenues and Columbia and James, respectively. The officers on duty in these cars had been issued a Be On Lookout for any individual, most likely male, fleeing any door or trapdoor that could be construed to be a part of any building in that block or adjacent to that block. Basically, if anyone or anything looked or moved suspiciously, he was to be taken into custody immediately and brought to Public Safety’s central booking.

  The remaining two cars cruised the immediate area. These two “rovers” also monitored the city bus dispatch radio channel on handheld walkie-talkies, in case a bus driver reported anything unusual.

  The pieces in place, and with Boldt turning over the underground hallway to SID, he and Detective Second Class Bobbie Gaynes, a member of LaMoia’s CAP squad and the department’s first female homicide detective, lowered themselves through the space created by the removal of the steel panel in EER 19 and slipped into the darkness of a section of Underground that had likely seen few living people in well over a hundred years.

  Boldt might have preferred three or four specially trained urban warriors from the Emergency Response Team-ERT-as backup, but such a request would have required a formal appeal to Special Ops and would have wasted too much time. Boldt’s impatience had worn thin as it was, it having taken nearly an hour to do what he’d been ready to do the moment he’d pulled that panel off.

  The air, extremely cool and smelling dank and musty, hit Boldt in the lungs and he nearly coughed. He and the detective both carried flashlights with theatrical red gel taped over the light, casting a dull, reddish purple light that carried only about eight feet, helping to protect their approach.

  They ducked and crawled through infrastructure-gas pipe and a tangle of wires. Boldt shone his light behind them, illuminating an imposing stone and mortar wall that rose beyond the abilities of his flashlight. They climbed over a small mound of chipped and broken brick. Boldt thought he heard rats scurrying but didn’t want to think about it. Not his favorite house-hold pet.

  He and Gaynes emerged onto what had once been a city sidewalk on what had once been a different level of Third Avenue or whatever they’d called the street in the late 1800s. The sidewalk consisted of short, heavy redwood planking, some of it now rotten, most amazingly strong and intact. To Boldt’s right, he saw the old storefronts, ghostly and disturbing. Overhead, more of the clumsy network of pipes and cables braided into an unforgiving mess. LaMoia had described some of this in his report on the arrest made at the church. There really was another city down here, Boldt realized, and the student in him found it somewhat fascinating.

  Overhead, steel I-beams shouldered a huge pipe that he assumed to be the water main. After another ten or fifteen yards, the sidewalk gave way to several inches of imposing mud-an area that proved to be the edge of the flood wash from the broken main. He trained his flashlight’s red glare down onto the mud, where he saw a series of tracks-shoe or boot prints. A disadvantage of the red light was that it blurred edges. With his heart fluttering in his chest, Boldt leaned closer. Recent tracks, without a doubt. Chen? he wondered. The EMTs? Or did these belong to someone else, the very person Boldt now pursued?

  As they waded into the ankle-high muck, the sucking sound proved noisy and concerned him. Boldt led the way, careful not to disturb the existing prints that he wanted preserved for collection by SID. He was not one to believe in prescience or su-pernatural gifts; it was true that he, at times, possessed an uncanny ability to place himself inside the head of the victim, to experience the crime from this point of view in a visceral, almost tangible way, but he attributed this to the database of experience he had collected in his head, not to an otherworldly spell. It was also to this experience that he attributed his and others’ ability to sense when the trail was hot, a skin-prickling rush of adrenaline that forewarned the hunter of the proximity of the prey. He had this feeling now-a keen sense of forebod-ing, as if a hand might strike from the shadows at any moment.

  Ahead of them, the narrow tongue of mud-covered sidewalk opened up, where, to their right, a section of the hundred-year-old brick wall had collapsed. Here they could see through and into the subterranean complex, viewing a cross-section of its history. Over the course of decades past, walls had been torn down, concrete poured, steel beams installed. Sandra Babcock and her archaeology team would celebrate a find like this for years to come. But for now Boldt signaled Gaynes ahead, leaving the deep mud behind as they continued to follow the busy path of shoe prints. He stopped and listened every few yards, his hearing more sensitive than most. He heard a hissing that he couldn’t put a direction onto. Overhead? Behind them in the bus tunnel?

  The dull red glow from his flashlight caught the delicate lacework of cobwebs both to his left and right, and he realized there were no such obstacles in his path-someone had been through here recently enough to clear out the spiderwebs. With no more shoe prints to follow, the mud now well behind him, Boldt followed scratch marks on the concrete, directing Gaynes with hand signals through an open door to the left, down a hall, and then through another door to the right. Without a doubt the hissing sound grew louder. Closer. Boldt touched his ear and Gaynes nodded agreement-she heard it, too.

  He caught himself not breathing, the tension in the air suddenly palpable. He took a long controlled breath, and Gaynes followed suit. She reached for, and armed herself with, her Beretta, though she did not chamber a round for the noise it would cause. Every hair, every nerve ending, told Boldt that something, or someone, lurked nearby.

  Having paused long enough for his eyes to fully adjust, Boldt experimented by turning off his flashlight. Gaynes did the same.

  His instinct had been correct: Enough ambient light existed for him to vaguely see a gray patchwork of the door and wall beyond. This patchwork was barely anything more than absolute darkness, and yet it was not absolute darkness, and this held considerable significance for Boldt, for it implied the existence of a source of light, and that, in turn, suggested something, someone, human.

  At that moment, the hissing made sense to him: a Coleman lantern. He leaned forward, peering around the corner of the rotten doorjamb and down a long corridor, several doors to either side. The charcoal gray progressed to an elephant gray and, by the far end of the hallway, a pigeon gray-these were the colors that Sarah would name, and he thought of his children and family as he rounded the corner and stepped into the hallway, Gaynes c
lose behind. Neither he nor Gaynes wore a vest, and he thought it a foolish oversight. He’d long ago promised Liz and himself to avoid harm’s way whenever possible, understanding the importance of keeping their family whole. Susan Hebringer had drawn him down into the Underground. Had clearer thinking prevailed, he might have sent LaMoia or Heiman or someone else.

  The hallway seemed to dim, though so faint was any light that he couldn’t tell. Gaynes tapped him on his shoulder, switched on her gel-covered flashlight, and holding it in her left hand, quickly formed a fist around it. Boldt stopped, as the hand signal directed. She touched her ear. For a moment Boldt could hear only the rhythmic pulsing at his temples and the high-pitched whine of blood pressure. Then, he understood why: The hissing had stopped. He heard a hinge creak, and this, he thought, was what Gaynes had wanted him to hear.

  At the same instant, their two-way radios crackled and screeched-a broken signal of code calls from the patrol cars overhead. Neither Boldt nor Gaynes had thought to turn their volumes down. They might as well have shouted out a warning to whatever, or whoever, lay up ahead.

  That door creaked again, followed by the unmistakable sound of a person running.

  Boldt, and Gaynes as well, took off, dodging fallen objects, ducking out of the way of hanging pipes, his head a knot of pain, his throat dry. Those promises made to Liz raced to the forefront of his thought-he was a father, a husband, he owed people his safety. But at the same instant, Susan Hebringer was being dragged down the hallway that he now ran, and there was nothing to stop him. He rushed through an open doorway and turned left, throwing his right hand out in front of him to send Gaynes straight into another huge room.

  They split apart.

  The sound of the person running came from farther away, not closer.

  He felt he was in some central hallway shared by the back of what had once been stores. Huge sections of plaster and lathe walls were missing, exposing rooms of all sizes, shelving, over-turned furniture, and piles of junk. He made a wrong turn and found himself in a small room, instead of another hallway. He turned around and tried another door, trapped yet again. A maze.

  Retraced his steps, pushed on a door-a hallway, at last. He charged forward at a run.

  “Lieu?” Gaynes, her voice muffled by walls.

  “Here!”

  “Lost him!”

  His radio carried her voice then, as she attempted to alert the patrols up top to keep an eye out. Boldt’s radio picked up her signal with ease, but the lack of acknowledgment from above indicated the signal was blocked and had not reached anyone else.

  Boldt hurried ahead, making a series of wrong choices, landing in dead ends, in rooms cluttered with dusty junk. The enormity of an entire city block underground registered in him. He’d lost his way entirely, suddenly facing a series of windows, the dirty glass still intact, finding himself looking out onto yet another section of sidewalk. He used the radio, whispering to try not to give away his position. “Gaynes. I’m facing a section of sidewalk. Looking south, I think. Your ten-twenty?”

  “Right here, Lieu. Center of the building, I think. A big room. A bar, or drugstore maybe.”

  “Anything?”

  “Nothing.”

  He waited, straining his ears to hear, well aware the person who had fled could easily still be down here, crouching, hiding, waiting for a chance to slip away.

  “I’m going to work west and then north, circling back toward you,” he told the radio. “You hold, all eyes.”

  “Copy.”

  “Lights on,” he said, ensuring they could discern one another from the person they pursued.

  “Copy.”

  Boldt carefully negotiated his way around the perimeter of the enormous underground city block, backtracking and retrac-ing his steps where necessary. He crawled under fallen timbers, stepped through vacant window holes, and eased his way through doorways, alert for rotten beams or other debris raining down onto him unannounced, alert for his suspect to spring up from behind, unexpectedly, and take a swing at him. He found himself in a full sweat, damp and burning up from head to toe, the toxin of fear escaping.

  All at once there was more mud, Boldt wondering if he’d gone full circle. He stepped through the goop, reaching a doorway, and scrambled over a hill of metal that had once been a fire escape. His flashlight found Gaynes looking back at him bewildered.

  “Gone,” she said. “He vanished.”

  “But who? A homeless person? Susan Hebringer’s abductor?

  Chen’s killer?” He tried the walkie-talkie again, to nothing but static. He said, “Maybe they got him up top.”

  “You can’t see five feet with these things.” She tore off the flashlight’s colored gel. Boldt did the same. They made their way back, Gaynes in the lead.

  “That hissing we heard,” Boldt said, announcing what they were after.

  “Yes,” she agreed.

  It took them twenty more minutes of false turns and opening doors, of hallways and storage closets and more discarded junk and litter than seemed possible, before Boldt carefully pushed open a door, revealing a cluttered, lived-in room, twelve by fifteen feet. The former storage room had red brick walls and no windows, a mattress with blankets, plastic milk crates containing cardboard boxes of food. Boldt’s gloved fingers triggered a battery-powered fluorescent and the room came to life. This hideaway was an investigator’s treasure chest.

  Its conversion into a living space included a door on cinder blocks that held a camper stove, several white plastic tubs filled with water, and a box of books. Boldt picked up immediately on the cleanliness to the air, the musky stink of the basement barely discernible. Only then did it dawn on him that the light in this room was battery-powered, not Coleman gas, and his eyes drifted slowly behind him as he spun around to see a half dozen four-foot-tall pressurized tanks. Green tanks. Oxygen tanks. One of them with its valve cracked open and hissing.

  “Lieu?” Gaynes asked. She knew that perplexed look of his meant he had thought of something she had not.

  Boldt said, “Suddenly, the elevated oxygen level in the late Mr. Chen’s blood gas makes a hell of a lot more sense.” Boldt reached down into one of the milk crates and came up with a New Year’s Eve party favor, the kind that uncurls when you blow into it. “I think our Mr. Chen might have spoiled someone’s party.”

  Misplaced Affection

  With little or nothing to do without her suspension first being lifted, Matthews made Margaret her top priority once again, unable and unwilling to take the downtime for herself. She knew this obsession with filling her time went beyond accepted limits, knew she had real problems when it came to allowing herself to relax, knew that at some point such obsessions came to a head and stung you, usually when you could least afford it. Most of all she secretly knew that downtime would allow her the opportunity to take stock of herself, to examine her goals and aspirations, to come to grips with the fact that she had none beyond getting through the day. She had no idea what she wanted for herself-a man, a family, a career, time off, independence, a hobby, a cause? If she took time to stop and think of it, she feared the emptiness of her current existence might prove too overwhelming. Currently, she lived to solve other people’s problems, whether at Public Safety or the Shelter. Facing her own was nowhere on her radar, and this, in turn, led her back to finding Margaret and doing something to help her.

  A call to the Shelter confirmed what she already knew, because even if Margaret had been thinking of staying there, by mid-morning the place was virtually deserted, the girls back on the street. There were any number of haunts where she could look for her: Pioneer Square, the Market, the area in front of the Westlake Center, several of the malls. Sometimes these girls just rode the bus routes, back and forth, sitting in the last row, talking, hours at a time. As pregnant as she was, Margaret wasn’t stripping, wasn’t hooking, but she might be drugging, and this Matthews wanted to prevent at all costs. The girl had mentioned eating

  pizza crusts-�
��I’m eating Italian”-but Matthews couldn’t remember a particular pizzeria. She walked a few more blocks until locating a pay phone that actually had the phone book intact. She was flipping through the Yellow Pages under Italian restaurants, hoping to jog her memory, when her cell phone rang. She turned the face of the phone so that she could read it: BLOCKED CALL. A sharp shudder passed through her.

  “Matthews,” she answered.

  “I thought we had a deal.” Walker.

  “We do,” Matthews said, gripped briefly in a moment of panic, the result of surprise. She tried not to be too obvious about her looking around for him, but felt her senses winning out as she rotated a little too quickly, inspecting every corner, every shop window, every vehicle. Where the hell are you? The temperature felt like it had dropped about thirty degrees. Then, a calm overcame her as she reminded herself that she need not allow him any authority over her. The eye of the beholder, she thought. She warmed. She had a job to do-Boldt wanted her to bring him in by accepting his earlier offer. This, while allowing him to believe he still maintained the upper hand.

  Walker said, “Sure doesn’t seem like it to me. Let’s see …

  I offer to help you, and you agree … then all of a sudden you take off from your place, half dressed, like some ghost is chasing you … then you hook up with Dirty Harry. What is wrong with you?”

  “I think we should get together and talk about it,” she said calmly, her experience and training finally able to separate out her personal stake in this. Their discovery of the peepholes at the Shelter had profoundly affected her, forcing her concern away from herself and onto the girls. Her determination now was to bring Walker in for questioning, as Boldt wanted.