The Art of Deception b-8

by Ridley Pearson

  Movement shifted into an eerie slow motion, an awkward street ballet choreographed for a mugging gone south. She knew well enough that no matter how fast one reacts, the blade or the bullet always reaches the victim unexpectedly fast. She also knew that 99 percent of mugging victims reacted defensively and afraid.

  Matthews said, “You don’t want to do this!” Then she lowered her right shoulder and charged into him, struggling to get her purse open at the same time.

  Boldt shouted something about “Hands over your head,”

  though it existed only ephemerally for her-a drone in the buzz behind her. The purse slipped off her shoulder, falling to the sidewalk, its contents lost. From all around her, a convergence of special assignment officers. She felt them running toward her.

  Heard the chaos over the handheld radios.

  She leaned her weight into the center of Hollie’s chest, just below his sternum, and drove into the unforgiving stone edifice of Public Safety, knocking the wind out of him. She would not be a victim. She would not succumb to the fear. She screamed with the move, part aggression, part reaction, backed off the pressure, and then slammed into his chest a second time. A bone cracked beneath her effort. Hollie groaned as he gasped and sank to the sidewalk.

  She lifted her knee into his crotch as he went down-sharply, like a move in step aerobics. Boldt pulled her away and tackled her, covering her, just as two undercover officers arrived. He lay on top of her, his face filled with rage.

  She witnessed Boldt’s thought process as he realized she was all right and took appraisal of Hollie. He rolled off her and came to his knees.

  Hollie’s hand was yanked out of his coat pocket on its way to a handcuff. A piece of paper rose like a bird, fluttered, and returned to earth.

  Not a gun, after all, but his eviction notice. The weapon she had feared was nothing but a piece of paper.

  Boldt was walking her around to the front of the building when her cell phone rang from within her purse. He’d offered to have her join him at the lab for Lofgrin’s report on the Underground, but she didn’t feel up to it. She wanted her office. A cup of tea.

  Her phone’s caller-ID displayed: PAY PHONE #122.

  “Hello?” she answered, pressing the phone to her ear.

  “I wouldn’t have let anything happen to you. You know that, don’t you?” Her throat constricted. The voice was too breathy to identify. Purposefully difficult to identify, she thought.

  She stopped abruptly and Boldt clearly sensed the dread that washed through her.

  “P-a-y p-h-o-n-e … WALKER?” she mouthed, looking in all directions at once. She mouthed the word “pay phone” again and held up her fingers: one, two, two.

  Boldt grabbed for his own phone, speed-dialed a number, and turned away from Matthews so he wouldn’t be overheard.

  “Boldt. I need the location of pay phone one twenty-two, one-two-two. I’ll hold.”

  The breathless voice continued in her ear, “Tell your friend they don’t need to worry about you. You’re in good hands.”

  “Who is this?” she asked calmly.

  “I won’t let anything happen to you.” The phone went dead.

  She spotted a pair of pay phones down on Third.

  But Boldt pointed in the opposite direction, up to the corner of Fourth Avenue. “There!” he said, still waiting for identification from dispatch.

  Matthews followed his outstretched arm to where a man hung up a pay phone receiver and stepped away from the open booth.

  “Oh my God,” Boldt gasped, as the man’s face could be seen.

  It was Lanny Neal. He turned his back on them and disappeared at a leisurely pace around Fourth Avenue.

  Boldt took a step in that direction, but Matthews snagged him by the arm. “What, Lou?”

  “It’s Neal!”

  She agreed: It had looked like him.

  “He had my cell phone number? Do we really think so? Are we sure? Where’s the foul?” she added, slipping into LaMoia’s vernacular. Little pieces of him rubbing off on her-she’d have to watch that.

  Boldt broke loose of her grip.

  “There’s no crime, Lou! It’s a phone call is all. Besides, that guy-if it was Neal-hung up too late. My guy had already disconnected.”

  “We don’t know that,” Boldt argued. He stopped, two paces into the street, his ear pressed to the phone. His head spun around sharply, and she thought he was looking at her, but more likely he was receiving confusing directions. He then turned back and crossed the hill toward that empty pay phone at a near run. “Which corner?” she heard him say into the phone. “Give me the compass point! North … south … what?”

  “I think it was Walker,” she said, blurting it out, keeping up as they crossed through traffic. “Psychologically, it fits perfectly for Walker.” Was he even listening to her? she wondered.

  He called over his shoulder. “You’re telling me that Neal being at a pay phone is coincidence?” The word, so distasteful to him, barely came off his lips. He kept the phone pressed to his ear.

  “It was Walker,” she repeated, this time more convincingly.

  “The protective role fits him perfectly. It’s the last logical step, Lou, before-” but she cut herself off, slipped through two parked cars, and joined him on the opposite sidewalk. She didn’t want him hearing what she was thinking.

  “Before what?” Boldt climbed the hill, leaning toward the far street corner like Blue straining at his leash.

  She didn’t answer. He glared at her.

  Traffic noise and a ferry’s horn filled the resulting silence.

  “What?” Boldt barked angrily into the phone. He caught Matthews’s attention and shook a pointed finger at the street corner diagonally across from them. Based on the Neal look-alike-or had it been Lanny Neal? she wondered-they’d crossed to the wrong set of phones.

  Boldt snagged the com-radio and rattled off the coordinates of the pay phone: “Suspect spotted on southeast corner of Fourth and Columbia! Pursue and detain!” With the streetlight green and the resulting traffic, which included a tall delivery truck, they hadn’t spotted Walker, but that was Boldt, she thought-he trusted the system more than any other cop.

  A pair of patrol cars and three plainclothed officers converged on the street corner, seemingly out of thin air. Over the rooftops of vehicles, Ferrell Walker was seen running three steps before throwing his hands over his head and leaning up to the chain-link fence of a construction site. Pedestrians collected like bluebottle flies on a corpse.

  “Abduction,” Boldt said, supplying the word Matthews had avoided.

  They met eyes. Matthews found it impossible to speak.

  Boxed In

  “She betrayed me,” Walker said to LaMoia across the interrogation table in the Box.

  “Where have you been?” LaMoia asked flippantly. “She’s a woman, Walker. Get used to it.”

  The edge of the table carried the regimented brown larvae of cigarette burns despite the NO SMOKING sign on the wall. A cassette machine ran two tapes recording simultaneously. Two yellow pads. Two pencils.

  Dressed in an orange county jail jumpsuit, Walker looked older and in a bad way. She and Boldt observed this initial exchange from the other side of the one-way glass in the narrow, dark closet that served as the observation booth. Boldt explained apologetically how he had to take the meeting with Lofgrin.

  “That skeleton key came back clean,” he told her, “but he’s got the prelim on the Underground for me-I was due down there a half hour ago-and he’s got this set of high-level meetings later on that he can’t beg out of.”

  “John can handle it, Lou. He’s one of the best. We’re fine.”

  She didn’t take her eyes off Walker.

  “We’re the best-you and I,” he said. But it sounded to her more like he was testing her, even fishing for a compliment.

  “Interrogations, I’m talking about.”

  She knew perfectly well what he was talking about. Jealousy belied his
intentions. She broke her attention off the Box for the first time, met eyes with Boldt, and said again, “We’re fine here.”

  Boldt nodded, though in such a reserved fashion he might as well have shook his head no instead.

  “We’re running both audio and video, Lou. You won’t miss a thing.” He would miss it, of course, but she couldn’t bring herself to care.

  “We’re holding him overnight,” Boldt said.

  “I think it could be a mistake,” she said.

  “He threatened you.”

  “Yes, but listen, a teakettle is one kind of threat, Lou. All that boiling water inside … but you spill it out, and that’s a different kind of hot. We tip this guy over … we don’t know what’s going to happen.” Again, she wondered who was doing the talking. Her eyes left Walker and settled on the other guy across from him. It was time she took a hotel room. She felt discouraged, even sad. Walker consumed by grief, Boldt by jealousy, she with her fear-and LaMoia with his resolute calm.

  She envied him that, and hoped her face didn’t reveal her thoughts.

  “It’s harassment. We can make that stick for twenty-four hours, which gives us time to pursue a court order to get his clothes down to SID.”

  “You don’t really think he’s the one living in the lair, do you? You honestly think the hairs and fibers on his clothes are going to come back for that? For Chen?”

  They entered into a staring contest, neither about to back down.

  She said softly, “I know you think you’re helping, Lou, and I love you for it. But not this guy. Not this way.”

  He never broke the eye contact. “Well,” he said hesitantly, “I guess I’m out of here, then.”

  “Bye,” she said, lifting her hand in a half wave, her full attention back on that room. She heard him leave and felt relief and wondered what was going on between them. Was she using him, thriving on his confusion over her and LaMoia? If so, to what end?

  “Let’s get down to brass tacks,” she heard LaMoia say, his voice made nasal by the small speaker.

  She thought it impossible, but Walker looked another ten years older all of a sudden, probably the result of the tube lighting-inkwells beneath both eyes, a pasty bluish tone to facial skin stretched by a self-imposed starvation. He hardly moved in the chair, and when he spoke it was with a controlled calm that troubled her, leaving her wondering what they’d gotten themselves into. Who was running whom?

  “My father used to say that,” Walker said. He directed himself to the pane of glass that inside the Box was a large mirror.

  “Is she listening? Are you there, Daphne?”

  “Hey!” LaMoia fired off, trying to win Walker’s attention but failing.

  “I’m so disappointed in you,” Walker said.

  She felt her stomach turn. He seemed to know exactly where she was standing. She moved to her left, his eyes seemed to follow. It was an uncanny display of empathetic behavior.

  “Tell me about the skeleton key,” LaMoia said.

  Walker continued to stare at the mirror-at her.

  “Hey!” LaMoia reprimanded for a second time, “I’m talking to you.” He stood and came around the table.

  Walker’s head jerked up to intercept the man. “You lay a finger on me, and this is in the hands of the lawyers.”

  It stopped LaMoia like he’d hit an invisible shield. “You’ve been watching too much Court TV.”

  “Uh-huh,” Walker said, fixated on the mirror again, “in all my free time at the country club.”

  “A comedian?” LaMoia asked.

  “That’s me,” Walker answered. He spoke more loudly, “Tell him, Daphne.”

  “Her part of the deal was putting Neal into that lineup. Your part was the key … but a key needs a door.”

  “I don’t know anything about any key,” Walker said-deliberately unconvincingly? — bending to look past LaMoia, who attempted to block the man’s view of the mirror, “but I’m sure you’ll figure it out.” He looked up into LaMoia’s eyes. “You don’t need my help with everything, do you?”

  “I don’t need your help with anything,” LaMoia snapped.

  “You’ve got that turned around, friend.”

  “The deal was to put Neal away. He gets put away, maybe you find that door.”

  “It could work the other way,” LaMoia proposed.

  “Could it, you think?” Walker asked.

  “It’s a two-way street.”

  “Is it?” Walker let the animal loose then. He bared his teeth, his eyes rolling white into the back of his head, his neck a fan of tight wires from jaw to collarbone. “We … had … a … deal!” he screamed, actually driving LaMoia back a step.

  His raw voice distorted the observation booth’s small speaker.

  Spittle dripped down his chin. He wiped it off on his shirt-sleeve. He had never taken his eyes off Matthews, reconnected now by LaMoia’s movement.

  LaMoia said, “We get this thing right without you, and you’re buried.”

  “Nice choice of words, Detective. Tell him, Daphne.”

  “You’re a fucking freak show,” LaMoia said, approaching Walker once again. He leaned in closely and said, “You leave her out of this, Walker. It’s me you’ve got to worry about.”

  Keeping his eyes directly on her, not on LaMoia, Walker said, “She wants out of this, she’s out of this. Simple as pie.

  Mary-Ann wanted out, and look what happened to her.” He found LaMoia again, back on track, a sail filling with wind.

  “Look what Neal did to her.”

  LaMoia said, “The church has doors that take skeleton keys.

  The church at the Shelter. We’re checking that entire section of Underground as we speak.” He repeated, “We solve it without you-”

  Walker interrupted, “And I’m buried. Yeah, I got that the first time.” He threw open his arms. “Bury me, Detective. At least charge me. Do something other than just harassing me, would you please? Ask her what she wants. Ask her what comes next. She knows, Detective. Do you? I don’t think you have a clue.” He stood out of his chair and pointed, “But she does! Is it over, Daphne? Is it?” To LaMoia: “She’s living with you now.

  You ask her.”

  LaMoia shoved the man down hard, returning him to his chair. He leaned into the man’s ear and whispered softly enough to avoid the recorder. “You ever set foot in my place again, Einstein, and I’ll rip you a new asshole and make you eat your own shit.”

  He stepped back. Walker blanched, his lips wet with saliva, his eyes watery and hard. “We’ll see,” he said.

  “Yes, we will,” LaMoia said.

  “You ask her,” Walker said. “She knows what comes next.”

  Magoo

  “Here’s what we’ve got so far,” said Dr. Bernie Lofgrin, a squat, balding man with eyes so magnified by his goggle-sized glasses that they looked more like hard-boiled eggs cut in half when he got excited. He was a favorite among the SPD detectives, his nickname an appropriate Magoo.

  As the civilian director of SID, Lofgrin had worked cases with Boldt for more than a decade, his forensics lab supplying the technical pieces of the puzzle so necessary to an investigation and the subsequent prosecution. An arrest might come from information supplied by a snitch or a witness, but convictions came from evidence supplied by the lab. Where some detectives worked their contacts, their informants, their resources, Boldt chose to rebuild the life of the victim just before death, and to rely upon the physical evidence to tell the real story of what had happened. Every investigator did this to some degree, but Boldt had made his own science of it, and as such, had formed both a partnership and a deep friendship with Lofgrin.

  Both jazz aficionados, the currency of their exchanged favors was rare recordings or treasured masterpieces. Building one’s collection was as important as growing one’s IRA. Boldt’s collection of more than ten thousand LPs dwarfed that of Lofgrin or Doc Dixon, and as he was typically the one in need of favors at the office, his cassette recorder w
as the one that was more active.

  Lofgrin loved to hear himself talk. He was meant more for the university than the laboratory. “We patched together a full set of latents from the one hundred and thirty-seven lifts we developed down there. You can be fairly confident that a high percentage of those are all from the same individual. More to come.

  “There was no apparent effort to keep the place wiped down,” he continued. “Your resident wasn’t thinking he’d have visitors. And yes, we’re running the latents through the state database and we’re passing them on to the nationals as well.”

  He recited, “If this guy’s ever been printed, we’re going to know about it.” His stained smile revealed he’d taken up smoking again. The smoking concerned Boldt: Lofgrin’s heart suffered inside a nervous, agitated body.

  SID had failed to locate the suspect’s escape route out of the Underground, leaving more questions than answers.

  “Did we check the prints against-”

  “Ferrell Walker?” Lofgrin interrupted. “I read my e-mails, Lou. The answer is yes, Matthews got Walker to roll some prints for us. If he was ever in that lair we’re never going to prove it.

  The prints aren’t his.”

  Lofgrin gained energy when Boldt took notes, so sometimes Boldt scribbled things into his notebook just to appear active, as was the case now.

  Boldt said, “At this point it wouldn’t surprise me if this guy Walker goes down for several of our open cases. The more we look at him, the more it looks that way-to me, to LaMoia, even Daffy.” When an investigator pushed the lab in one direction, it tended to prejudice and speed up results, but Boldt-who rarely used such ploys-couldn’t be sure if Lofgrin had even heard him.

  “I won’t bother you with the Home and Garden tour, but I’m telling you: The prints aren’t his. It was pure oxygen in those tanks as you suspected. It’s your job to find out where he stole them.”

  “Could they be one-half of an oxyacetylene rig?” Boldt asked.