The Art of Deception b-8

by Ridley Pearson

  “Welding? Absolutely.”

  “As in construction sites?”

  “Are you going somewhere with this?” Lofgrin asked.

  “Our hotel peeper … the construction site.”

  Lofgrin nodded slowly. “Ah-so,” he said.

  Boldt’s scribbling was for real, as he made a note to check all recent downtown construction sites for reports of stolen oxygen. When things began to come together on a case, an investigator could feel the momentum shift his way. It brought on an almost childish giddiness sometimes-a visceral high that was one of those things you lived for, the way a marathon runner knew when he’d hit his stride and the training was finally paying off. The Big Mo was in this lab with him, and Boldt took it for a ride.

  “Go,” he encouraged.

  “Hairs and fibers workup,” Lofgrin said, aiming his distorted eyes toward Boldt. “I caution that this is all prelim, but we did lift seventeen black hairs from a five-gallon tub of wastewater, presumably where this guy washed up. Head hairs. We also ran all the clothing we found into the scrape room and collected a sizeable amount of fiber evidence. Initial examination of the black head hairs was conducted both macroscopically and mi-croscopically. Cell structure confirms they’re from an Asian. We picked up chromosomes on the sheath material from one sample that confirms it’s male hair. This particular Asian male had smoked pot within the last month. That shouldn’t be too hard to confirm for your Mr. Chen, should it?” Boldt’s pen went to work. “We’ve asked Dixie for comparison head hair samples from Chen. If we get a good probability, and I think we will, then we’ll perform STR-short tandem repeat-DNA analysis.

  It’s quick and reliable, and cheaper than the old RFPL. I could have something for you by tomorrow or the next day.”

  Boldt mentally assembled the pieces. In all likelihood Chen had had physical contact with whomever had been in residence at the underground hideout. This, in turn, implied the obvious.

  He asked, “Blood evidence?”

  “You’re a pushy son of a bitch. You know that? Phenol-phthalein test was positive. And check out the Luminol.” He handed Boldt a color photo that showed blobs of blue where the Luminol had reacted with any residual blood in the converted storage room. A special fluorescent light was used to highlight the Luminol. The pattern suggested footprints.

  “These were developed by the doorway?” Boldt asked.

  “We fluoresced the whole room, but yes, this photo was shot near the door. The blood had been washed with soap and water or maybe something a little stronger.” He presented another photo, also revealing Luminol stains on the lip of a container.

  “Again, this is the same wastewater plastic tub.”

  Boldt said, “He washed his hands of the blood and some hair came off in the process.”

  Lofgrin nodded.

  “If you were a woman, I’d kiss you.”

  “I’d file for harassment.” Lofgrin handed Boldt yet another photo, this time showing a pair of workman’s coveralls, also photographed in the dark under the illumination of fluorescent black light. The discoloring indicated blood splatter, like a volley of cascading tears.

  “Oh, God,” Boldt muttered.

  “Yes. Exactly. Jackson Pollock this isn’t.” Before Boldt could ask, Lofgrin answered. “This was also washed, but in a heavy detergent. No way to type it, no chance for DNA. Could be the guy butchered an elk.”

  “Or a couple missing women,” Boldt said.

  Lofgrin said, “He wears size ten-and-a-half shoes. About six feet tall. Hair color brown, but it’s dyed-from a sandy blond.

  He’s on a strong dose of doxycycline.”

  Lofgrin was probably not describing Ferrell Walker, Boldt realized. Dyed hair? Nathan Prair, perhaps-although that also felt like a stretch.

  “Are you telling me we found a ’script bottle down there?

  Are you holding out on me, Bernie? Do you happen to have a name from that prescription?”

  “No prescription, no bottle, either. His hair, the dyed hair, the predominant hair sample found down there in that room,”

  Lofgrin answered, “revealed the doxycycline. You are what you ingest. Most of it goes into your hair.”

  “He’s fighting an infection,” Boldt said. The use of hair coloring bothered the detective in him. Women, sure. But a man using hair coloring suggested more than vanity to a cop-if the occupant of that room had changed his looks, the possibility existed that he’d done so in an effort to outrun a criminal record.

  Boldt’s pen wrote down: Ex-con? Escapee?

  “Are we done here?” Boldt asked, anxious to work the evidence.

  “What do you think?” It was Lofgrin’s way to hold some cherry for the end of such prelims. The hair coloring and doxycycline had seemed the punctuation mark to Boldt-the exclamation point-but the lack of Lofgrin’s proud-as-a-peacock, I’m-smarter-than-you superior attitude had left him thinking there might be more.

  “Out in the hallways as we were looking for his escape route we came across some recent bus ticket stubs.”

  “I entered through the bus tunnel emergency route, Bernie.

  We already know he had access.” Boldt added, “And you knew that, too, because it’s how your guys got in there, so what’s going on?” Lofgrin appreciated being challenged, or Boldt wouldn’t have been so aggressive. Friendships within the department were both a curse and a blessing.

  Lofgrin dug around on the lab bench and produced an evidence bag that contained a rectangular piece of paper-a receipt, or stub. “ATM receipt. SeaTel.” Boldt knew that SeaTel was the bank on the corner, the basement of which he’d toured with the maintenance man. “You’re interested in the date.”

  Boldt snatched the bag from Lofgrin, his chest tight. He pressed the plastic of the bag against the receipt, trying to read the date. He fumbled and dropped the bag. Lofgrin spoke as Boldt collected the bag off the floor. “One of my guys-Michael Yei-his sister’s a teller at SeaTel over in Capitol Hill. The account comes back a sixty-year-old woman named Veronica Shepherd. I doubt seriously Ms. Shepherd is living below Third Avenue.”

  Boldt had the bag in hand again. He pressed, and the date printed on the receipt came into focus. It was a date emblazoned in Boldt’s memory, the date Susan Hebringer had gone missing.

  Boldt experienced both a pang of hurt and one of exhilaration simultaneously.

  “Cash machines,” Boldt said hoarsely, his voice choked with emotion. He’d found the connection between the tourists who’d been peeped and the two missing women. “The common de-nominator is cash machines.”

  He was out the door before he had a chance to witness Lofgrin’s self-satisfied grin.

  Boldt double-parked the department-issue Crown Vic, its emergency flashers going, on the steep incline outside SeaTel. He approached the corner entrance to the bank at a run, but stopped abruptly at sight of the small lighted sign: ATM. Any investigator worth his salt questioned himself when the facts became known. You wondered why and how something so obvious now had seemed so insignificant then, how the brain could overlook something so important, so glaring.

  It was a small glassed-in room-a glorified booth-that fronted Columbia Street and contained two ATM machines side by side, a wall clock, and a small blue shelf with pens attached to chains. Mounted to the doorjamb, an electronic credit card reader provided restricted access for the sake of security, admitting only legitimate cardholders.

  Boldt pressed his face to the glass, cupping his eyes. Littered across the floor at the foot of both machines he saw several paper receipts, their size and shape now familiar to him.

  Of all things, he didn’t own an ATM card-he still cashed checks at the teller window-and therefore couldn’t gain access.

  He caused a brief moment of alarm inside the bank as he pushed to the front of a small line, polite but determined to gain admittance to that room. Now that he’d seen the room, he could also picture Susan Hebringer inside it, her purse slung over her arm, her bank card slipping i
nto a slot on one of the two machines.

  Already planning his next move, Boldt intended to pull whatever favors necessary to gain immediate access to Hebringer’s and Randolf’s bank records. It seemed inconceivable to him that both women might have used their ATM cards on the dates they disappeared without him knowing about it. He felt like a burst dam, unable to contain himself, spilling out a flood of anger and confusion. His people had run the financials on both victims-he knew this absolutely. So where had the mistake been? How could they have missed this?

  A nervous bank officer swiped a card through the outdoor reader. Boldt entered a warm room that smelled bitter. Initially he dismissed the bank officer but then quickly changed his mind and asked him to stand outside and prevent anyone from coming in and disturbing him.

  Boldt then studied the room, including the two wall-mounted cash machines, their small screens glowing with a welcome message. He noted the alarmed exit door in the corner, leading into the building-a fire code requirement. He collected himself, slowing his breathing, trying to get beyond the emotion of the moment. He focused on those two machines and tried to put Susan Hebringer into this room. The imagined scene then played before his eyes, black-and-white and jittery. He saw her from the back, dressed in the clothes that she’d been described wearing by both her husband and coworkers on the day of her disappearance. He saw her remove her ATM card from her purse, look up as she heard a man come through that door through which she herself had just entered. Would she have said hello?

  He thought not. She’d gone about her business.

  But who? A street punk wanting the cash? A well-dressed man in a suit-someone she’d never suspect of the foul play that was to come? A bank officer? A deputy sheriff?

  He took a step closer to the machines but stopped as he felt something stuck to the bottom of his shoe. He picked the receipt off his shoe sole, knowing then how one could find its way into the Underground, and immediately lifted his eyes to the alarmed exit door.

  He recalled the steel exit door in the hallway on his earlier tour. “It sounds an alarm,” the maintenance man had warned.

  He got the bank officer to open it for him.

  “Let me guess,” Boldt said as the man searched a cluttered key ring for the proper key, “you-bank officers, that is-and your security guards both have keys to these alarmed doors.

  Who else? Housecleaning?”

  “No.” The man cowered slightly, swinging the door open for Boldt. It led to the hallway, as expected.

  “Maintenance?” Boldt asked. Another logic jump struck him that should have come earlier: the oxygen tanks, the maintenance man’s horrible wheezing. Boldt remembered the name because Sarah had a friend with a similar last name: Vanderhorst. His own internal alarm was going now. He saw a listless Hebringer being dragged through this same door. Leaning over her, Vanderhorst wore a set of coveralls, soon to be bloodied.

  “Yes, maintenance too,” the man confirmed.

  Boldt entered the hallway and looked right, recalling the stairs that led down into the bank’s basement. The maintenance man, Vanderhorst, had told him the exit door went out to the street; he had failed to mention the ATM machines on the way out. Vanderhorst had played dumb about the existence of access to the Underground.

  Dyed hair? A doxycycline prescription for his clogged lungs.

  “I’m declaring this a crime scene,” Boldt informed a surprised bank officer. “Stand back, and keep your hands in your pockets.”

  “Lieu, shouldn’t we be watching the Greyhound station or something?” Bobbie Gaynes occupied the Crown Vic’s passenger seat.

  Boldt said, “We are watching the bus, and the ferries, and the trains, and the northern border crossing with Canada. Rental car agencies clear down to Tacoma have a fax of his bank ID.”

  The last few hours had been his busiest in recent memory. He felt incredibly good. “What’s the problem, Bobbie?”

  “But why here?” she asked, still frustrated with him. “Vanderhorst called in sick today. That should tell us something, right? He split. We’re wasting time here.”

  The Crown Vic pointed downhill and away from the corner office building occupied by the SeaTel Bank. Boldt had both the rearview and driver door mirrors aimed with a view of the corner-one set for his sitting height, the other for slouching.

  Boldt’s silence bothered her. “So explain to me what good it is watching the bank?”

  “It closes for the weekend in ten minutes.”

  “And by my figuring that means he’s another ten minutes farther away.”

  “Why do people kill, Bobbie?”

  She sighed, letting him know she wasn’t up to his quizzes, his schooling her. It grew old after awhile. “For love and money.” She made her voice sound like a schoolkid reciting her math tables. “For country and revenge,” she added into the mix.

  Outright annoyed now, she added, “For the smell of blood, or the scent of a perfume, or because God or their dog told them to and they forgot to take their pill that day.”

  “We got lucky is all,” Boldt said. “Sometimes you get lucky.”

  “Lucky?” she asked, exasperated. “He’s halfway to Miami, or Vegas, or Tijuana by now. How is that lucky?”

  A crackle came over both Boldt’s dash-mounted police radio and the handheld resting in his lap. A male voice said calmly, “We have joy. Wildhorse is headed out the north stairs of the bus station.”

  “No fucking way,” Gaynes mumbled. “Wildhorse is …?”

  “I only had a minute to come up with a handle.”

  “Vanderhorst is Wildhorse,” she said.

  “Too obvious?” he asked, peering intently out the windshield now.

  She said, “You’re telling me you put six cruisers and, including us, ten plainclothes dicks out on the streets, and you were counting on luck?”

  “The first part of that luck is that we discovered that lair yesterday, on a Thursday. The second, and much more important half, is that today, Friday, happens to be SeaTel’s biweekly pay-day.”

  “Payday,” she whispered, almost worshiping him now.

  “Who’s going to pass up a two-week paycheck? He wasn’t about to quit. I knew he’d be back when they told me he’d called in sick this morning. I mean, why bother otherwise?”

  “His four-one-one?”

  “All invented. No such address. No such phone. The security firm is going to fry: If they ran a background check, it was pitiful.”

  “Typical,” she said. “Big Mac’s inside?”

  “Mackenzie’s posing as a customer. We had to play it that way. Vanderhorst knows the layout, knows the normal personnel, including security and the tellers. We add someone to that mix and he’ll sniff it out.”

  “So-”

  But Boldt interrupted. “Heads up!”

  Boldt had his own image of Per Vanderhorst, both from the tour of the bank basement and from the man’s security ID photo.

  Neither matched up perfectly well with the lean, lanky, un-healthy silhouette of the man reflected in the mirror.

  Gaynes asked, “Do we have the confirm yet on the cash cards?”

  Never taking his eyes off the approaching suspect, Boldt said, “We now know that neither Hebringer nor Randolf received any cash from those machines. What we’re trying to determine is whether or not either of their cards ever logged on for the two days in question.”

  “They can do that?” she asked.

  “Supposedly any attempt, even a canceled session, registers with the system.”

  “He nabbed them before they ever got their money,” she suggested.

  “Who’s going to think anything of some guy in blue coveralls wearing a security tag on his chest pocket? He’s sweeping up the room. So what? They use their card to enter, turn toward one of the machines, and take his broomstick to the back of the head. He’s got them through that emergency exit door before they’re even half conscious.”

  “But it’s a glass room, Lieu. It’s a well-lit g
lass room.”

  “Guys like Vanderhorst, they thrive on that moment. Just ask Matthews. For those few seconds he’s dragging the body toward the door, he’s as high as he’s ever been.”

  “You creep me out sometimes, Lieu.”

  “No, not me, Bobbie. It’s them.” Boldt motioned her down, and slouched himself.

  She scootched down and reached for her door handle. “We grab him on the way out, or back up Big Mac, or what?”

  Vanderhorst paused ever so briefly in front of the bank and gave the block a once-over. He failed to make anything of the steam cleaning panel van across the street, the homeless guy with his guitar case open playing a horrible rendition of “This Land Is Your Land,” or the tall black woman walking the German shepherd, who was himself a member of the K-9 unit.

  “What the hell?” Gaynes asked, eyeing the mirror.

  “He just convinced himself it’s safe.”

  “That motherfucker’s got some loose screws, Lieutenant.”

  Boldt hoisted the radio’s handset. “All units: We play this exactly as I laid it out in Situation.”

  “Affirm,” came the voice of Dennis Schaefer from the steam cleaning van. Schaefer, a Special Ops dispatcher on the force, had the combined role of play-by-play sports broadcaster and team captain. It still left Boldt the coach.

  He plugged an earpiece jack into the radio and filled his right ear with its ear bud.

  The moment Vanderhorst entered the bank, Boldt and Gaynes headed directly to the ATM room, where Boldt swiped a borrowed card admitting them. He felt unusually warm as they passed through what was typically the alarmed exit door without a sound.

  He’d been advised that it would take Vanderhorst between three and ten minutes to both retrieve and cash his paycheck at the teller window. Boldt was told he could count on the maintenance man standing at the counter for that length of time.

  Mackenzie, at a stand-up check writing desk, would alert dispatch if actual events inside the bank varied from this.

  Boldt had assigned one uniformed officer to stand guard on the other side of the loose panel discovered in the bus tunnel’s emergency exit. He had another four uniforms at possible street-level exits suggested by Professor Babcock. He had radio cars forming a perimeter. The safe money said to pick up Vanderhorst the moment they had him confined. It was not like Boldt to play chances, but that’s what he had in mind, and Gaynes had clearly sensed this. If it went south on him, the review board would rule that he’d allowed personal pressures to influence his decision making, to dictate actions taken, to cloud his judgment.