The Art of Deception b-8

by Ridley Pearson

  “What? No! It’s me … my stuff,” he said. He stood and the dog rallied. “Come on, you idiot.” He petted Blue’s head.

  “Would I be in the way?” she asked.

  “You still don’t have it figured out, do you, Matthews?”

  “Probably not.”

  “You’re not in the way.”

  “Okay.” She fought back a flicker of anger. At herself? At him? She wasn’t sure.

  He turned toward the couch, looking away momentarily.

  “What you said just now … self-medicating …”

  “Was stupid,” she interrupted.

  He had sadder eyes than Blue. “Listen, Matthews … I stole two caps from your bathroom on my last visit. I tucked them away in my pocket and I walked around with them there for days, and I never said a thing to you, to Boldt. At the meetings.

  Nothing.”

  Somehow this scared her more than Walker had. Her words caught in her throat. “Did you … take them?”

  “No, I tossed them, but I was this close to taking them,” he said. “I stole from you, and I didn’t tell you. I lied to myself that tossing them made it fine, but it didn’t make it fine. It sucks.

  What an asshole I am. The worst of it is that I haven’t stopped thinking about them. I keep thinking how stupid it was to toss them.”

  “You tossed them, John. That’s the point.”

  “Listen, Matthews, this is as much about you as it is about those caps.”

  “I understand that,” she said.

  “Do you? I don’t think so. You don’t know the half of it.”

  Indicating Blue, she said, “I think he’d rather we continue this outside.”

  LaMoia found a slight grin. She thought: That’s better.

  They moved toward the front door, the three of them. He hooked her arm and said, “The guys in the cruiser out front.

  They’ll see us. You know they’re gonna talk if we walk armin-arm.”

  “So they talk. They’re already going to talk.”

  “It’s not like we’ve done anything,” he said.

  “No, it’s not,” she agreed.

  His words hung in the air on the way out.

  They passed the cruiser and LaMoia waved.

  “Well,” he said to Matthews, “I guess it’s all downhill from here.”

  Downhill, but a slippery slope, she thought.

  Blue found a hydrant and watered it down.

  Matthews knew she would sleep alone that night, but catching herself even thinking about this had her wondering what she was getting herself into.

  The Door

  She loved it like this: She, LaMoia, and Boldt as a team, descending the Public Safety fire stairs so fast she could hardly keep up.

  “What’s going on?” she asked, rounding a landing and continuing down with them. Boldt had nearly everyone on CAPs in the offices on a Saturday. SID was on its way in. Special Ops had been placed on call. Everyone awaited orders, knowing this was the moment for the Hebringer/Randolf case. She’d been told to leave her office and rendezvous with them on the stairs. She was to have a coat with her, which she did.

  Boldt had this amazing charisma that instilled energy in everyone around him, an uncanny leadership quality that accounted for the uncompromising devotion of his squads, to where even a wise-ass like LaMoia stayed reined in under his command.

  “We’re holding Vanderhorst under the state terrorism act, based on his having oxygen tanks in his possession, any one of which could cause a massive explosion. Together, they’re more like a small nuke.” For a big man, he moved fluidly, the railing slipping through his left hand used more as a guide than a support.

  “But we released Walker?” LaMoia asked, clearly voicing a complaint. “What’s with that?”

  “The bloodstains on his clothing are corrupted-some fish, some human, but none of it’s going to tell us anything specific, no matter what tests we run. The fiber workup failed to connect him to the lair, which is understandable since it’s clearly Vanderhorst’s lair.”

  “But can’t we hold him on something?” LaMoia said, trying to keep Boldt focused on his own complaint about Walker.

  “What if he still has it in for our friend here?”

  At the next landing, Boldt looked back at him. “You tell me what we hold him on, and I’ll be the first to consider it.”

  “Obstruction!”

  “We can’t prove it,” Boldt returned.

  LaMoia pressed, “Then let’s at least keep Matthews on a wire.”

  “No way!” she said.

  Two floors to go. It seemed impossible, but Boldt was moving even faster now-taking three stairs at a time. She didn’t have that reach. Both men moved ahead of her, but only briefly.

  She took two stairs, but outran them, and quickly caught up.

  Boldt said, “Consider it done. Daffy, you’ll wear the wire whenever you’re out of this building.”

  “Lou,” she protested.

  It wasn’t up for discussion. Boldt changed subjects, “I got Babcock a photo of that skeleton key, which she subsequently determined was late nineteenth, early twentieth century-at least twenty years past the construction of the section of the city that’s currently beneath the church.”

  “Twenty years?” she asked, not following what this determined.

  “Construction spread uphill after the great fire.”

  “As in Columbia and Third?” LaMoia asked.

  “Granted,” Boldt said, finally reaching the building’s garage level, “any lock could have been put in any door at any time.

  But if we’re playing percentages, then that lock is more likely from this area of town-right where we’re standing, for that matter, than down the hill toward Pio Square.”

  “And that’s where we’re headed?” she asked. “Across the street?”

  “Each level of the Underground is over a hundred thousand square feet. That’s three football fields or so. At this point, SID

  has been through ninety percent or more of that level where we found Vanderhorst’s lair, and so far no sign of Hebringer or Randolf.”

  He held the door for them.

  “We put a pair of K-9s into that space about an hour ago, each scented for one of the missing. They led us straight back to the elevator shaft. A drain. Vanderhorst had sealed it with black plastic so the smell couldn’t escape.”

  “He put them down a drain?” LaMoia asked. “In one piece?”

  Boldt held up the skeleton key, still in the evidence bag. “The drain leads down to yet another level of Underground,” he said.

  “That’s why the jackets. We’re going to be the first inside, and I’m betting it’s chilly down there.”

  It felt damn near freezing to her. She wasn’t sure if that was the actual temperature or her own heightened anxiety over what they expected to find, but the coat didn’t help, and that was her first big clue. Preparing to lower themselves through the open storm drain at the bottom of the elevator shaft, itself now lit by halogen lights running off extension cords lowered from the bank’s basement, Boldt passed out latex gloves and shared a tube of Men-tholatum to smear above the lip to help mask the smell. The rituals of homicide came painfully. All three knew that odor, and “it ain’t dead rats,” as LaMoia had put it.

  Squeezing through the open drain into a dark, damp space in which the stench was far more concentrated felt to Matthews like willfully entering a portal into hell.

  She interviewed them, she counseled them, she analyzed them, she predicted them, and she evaluated them, but she would still never fully understand why human beings treated their own species with such willful disdain, disrespect, and distemper.

  The going was relatively dry underfoot. For all of Boldt’s rapid descent in Public Safety, he moved down this hallway at a snail’s pace-mindful of every footfall, stepping this way and that and indicating for the two others to follow in his exact footsteps, the protector and keeper of evidence in all its possible forms. Ancien
t gaslight fixtures held to the crumbling red brick walls. This subterranean area had either been stables or cold storage back in the days of the Yukon gold rush, when Seattle rose from a tiny fishing village to a commercial metropolis nearly overnight. In those days, when a nickel or dime would buy a man a dinner, each and every prospector was dropping nearly two thousand dollars to be supplied for a year in the northern prov-ince, as twelve months of provisions were mandated by the government before anyone would be allowed aboard a ship heading north. Basements like this ran full of beef jerky, oats, sugar, and salt. Cattle and swine, horses and mules. Now it was empty space behind locked doors, and it was in front of one of those doors that Boldt stopped, having nearly walked past it, his nose turning him around, as well as a keen eye that picked up the drizzle of key oil staining the wood beneath the wrought iron of a keyhole.

  Three flashlights found that keyhole at once. It was a heavy wooden door that hung on hinges pounded flat by the muscle of a blacksmith.

  “No one enters until we get a good look,” Boldt told them.

  He broke open the evidence baggie that contained the key left by the tooth fairy beneath Matthews’s pillow.

  Boldt inserted the large skeleton key into the lock. He met eyes with Matthews in the dim light. She thought she saw his lips barely moving and she wondered if he was praying-beyond reason, it seemed to her-that Susan Hebringer had been spared. The key turned with a loud click of the tumblers. For Matthews, his turning that key was to expose a part of the human condition that would kill off yet another fraction of the optimism she maintained that mankind could and would someday work through its problems.

  Not likely, she thought, finding herself only able to moan as she witnessed the scene before them.

  The sterile light from the flashlight revealed the corpses of two women. They were still partially clothed, but their breasts and pubic symphyses were exposed. They both hung by their wrists from nylon strapping, secured to large iron rings mounted to the rock wall. Massive yellow and brown bruises cried out from their chests, rib cages, and swollen faces. Their legs had been bent back at the knees, ribbons of silver duct tape binding their ankles to their thighs so they could neither kick nor fight their attacker’s intentions to repeatedly rape them.

  Evidence suggested he had kept them alive: There was packaged food discarded on the floor, some of which had spilled down their clothes or adhered to their skin. He had revisited them, a fact that would contribute to the profile Matthews would later build. He had kept them awake, used them up, one at a time until replacing them became necessary. He had kept them on the wall like trophies.

  “ ‘Strung up like marlins,’ ” Matthews quoted. “I remember Walker saying that. Walker, not Vanderhorst.” This revelation clearly stole Boldt’s attention briefly from the bodies. Walker had supplied the key as well, but this was Vanderhorst’s scene-Boldt said so in a whisper.

  He added, “The ATM connection was Vanderhorst’s, not Walker’s.”

  “Oh … God … no …” They heard a gurgle and splat behind them. Babcock, the university professor, had somehow talked her way down here. Heads would roll. But in the meantime they had her vomit to deal with.

  “Help her out,” Boldt instructed Matthews, refusing to move himself, refusing to break his train of concentration. She understood the importance of everything Boldt took in now, before he steeled himself to the sight and smell, before the SID techies stuck little paper flags around the room making it into a parade route, now, before any other living person, except one (the killer), experienced this horror for what it truly was. The crime scene offered insight into the events that had taken place here, insights that could prove invaluable to the prosecution of Per Vanderhorst. Boldt’s latex gloved fingers slipped out his notepad and she watched as he began to sketch. “John?” he said. “The camera?”

  LaMoia had brought along the department’s pocket-sized digital camera as well as a handful of evidence bags.

  “What the hell’s going on here?” Babcock moaned.

  “Shhh.” Matthews attempted to console the woman. “He’s working the scene.”

  Double Team

  For several hours Boldt and his team managed to keep their discovery confidential, avoiding the inevitable media stampede that promised both to steal their focus and to give Vanderhorst’s defense attorney information the PA’s office didn’t want him having. Knowing that even on a Saturday such a news blackout wouldn’t last forever, Boldt had asked Lofgrin to pick his two most trusted SID technicians to work the site. Boldt had also tasked his information technology squad to work the National Crime Information Center’s database for like crimes, and they had already produced results. Three of the seven pages he now carried were crime scene photographs gleaned from an advanced search on the NCIC database. Filling out a detailed database query that included such information as the use of duct tape, the sustaining of the victim’s life, the blood type of the secretor (semen had been collected from both Hebringer and Randolf, and was currently being DNA-typed), the age and specifics of the two victims, SID-IT had matched the Hebringer/Randolf murders to three other similar unsolved cases. These results, once the product of weeks, months, or even years of interstate detective work, had been accomplished in less than forty minutes.

  “So far, so good,” Boldt put to Matthews when asked how things were going. “Though that may be about to change.”

  She indicated the door to the interrogation room, on the other side of which sat Per Vanderhorst, waiting. “You can’t honestly think that Walker was any part of these murders.” Following the trip into the Underground, she’d changed into a pair of blue jeans that she normally reserved for weekends and, tucked in at the waist, a white, oversized, tailored shirt belonging to LaMoia.

  She had the shirt’s starched sleeves and cuffs rolled up on her forearms nearly to her elbows.

  “Walker delivered the key. That puts him in this, like it or not.”

  “There’s an explanation for that,” she said.

  “Not that I’ve heard, there isn’t.”

  “So Vanderhorst will explain it to us now,” she said.

  “He’d better. No matter what, Walker faces obstruction charges. At the very least, he knew about that death chamber.

  If Vanderhorst doesn’t sort it out for us, I’m going to tie them both up in this.”

  “Lou, that’s preposterous, and you know it! Walker stumbled onto this in the Underground, nothing more.”

  “The various sections of Underground don’t connect, Daffy.

  You’ll need a better explanation than that.”

  “Maybe they do somehow and we just haven’t found it yet.”

  Reading his wristwatch, Boldt signaled the end of the discussion, telling her, “In twenty-five minutes Tim Peterson from the U.S. Attorney’s office is going to be arriving here to meet with Mahoney and Tony Shapiro.”

  “Shapiro?”

  “There’s a report he took the case pro bono as of about an hour ago. That’s why I said I think things may change. If Shapiro has taken the case, then it’s going to be a media circus. The guy lives for it. Worse, he’ll sew Vanderhorst’s lips shut and feed him through a straw.”

  She understood then that this hurried effort to interrogate Vanderhorst resulted from Boldt’s hand being forced-they were about to lose their suspect to the wheels of television justice. The time frame of twenty-five minutes seemed laughable-typically barely enough time to get a couple cups of coffee into the Box. Win a confession in that amount of time?

  “Lou?” she said.

  “Listen, the PD must not like Shapiro’s grandstanding any more than we do, or he wouldn’t have advised his client to sit down with us. I’m not sure who to fear more, Shapiro or the feds. Peterson’s a good guy, and I know he thinks he’s helping us by putting out the possibility of extradition to a death penalty state, but all it really means is we’ll lose Vanderhorst, and I just don’t like that idea.”

  “So it’s a full-cou
rt press,” she said. Another LaMoiaism.

  Boldt’s expression registered complaint.

  “Something like that,” he said. About to throw the door open, he said in a whisper, “In any case, it’s show time.”

  With the out-of-state crime scene photos in hand, Boldt stepped into Homicide’s conference room A-the largest of three such rooms-Matthews close on his heels. She gently shut the door. Initially, neither of them acknowledged Vanderhorst’s presence on the far side of the small table. Instead, they moved chairs around, Boldt took off his sport coat and hung it on the back of a chair like a man ready to spend the rest of the day here, and Matthews switched off her cell phone and took a seat alongside Boldt-the combined impression that of two people digging in.

  Vanderhorst, transferred from lockup, wore the humiliating orange jumpsuit issued by county jail, manacles on his ankles and a waist harness that secured the chain of his handcuffs to where his hands were free to move but their motion limited.

  Boldt started the double-cassette tape recorder, introduced himself and Matthews, and naming the suspect, stated that Vanderhorst had requested counsel, had met with counsel several times over the past twenty-four hours, and that counsel had been notified of this interview and was “expected any minute.”

  Boldt carefully placed the seven pages facedown in front of Vanderhorst and, like a Vegas card dealer, then rolled three of them over, as deliberately and dramatically as possible. With no time to waste, he had to forgo the usual “warm-up” of introducing the suspect to the roles that would be played, of the small talk that often began such an interrogation in an effort to establish a rapport. There was no time for a rapport. This was to be the emotional equivalent of slapping the man around.

  Stabbing each in succession with a determined index finger, Boldt said, “Fort Worth, Little Rock, Santa Fe.” The victims hung from walls, their ankles taped to their thighs with duct tape, their garments torn, their chests and crotches exposed.

  Boldt had hoped for the power of shock value. He saw no response. He yielded to Matthews, who said, “You remember each of these as if it happened yesterday, don’t you, Per? Is it all right that I call you Per?” she asked rhetorically, not allowing him to respond. “The way the air smelled just before you abducted them … that incredible rush as you overpowered them …”