The Art of Deception b-8

by Ridley Pearson

She worked with something Neal had told them, saying over her shoulder, “You begged her for money … to go back out on the boat with you. It’s not what she wanted. She wanted a life.

  What did you expect, Ferrell?”

  “I … sav ed … her,” Walker said. “She … owed … me.”

  She stopped, turned. “Saved her from Lanny Neal, from herself,” she purposely hesitated, wanting this next thought to sink in, “or from you? That part of you that thought about her in ways that brothers aren’t supposed to think about their sisters.”

  Walker stepped close enough that she could smell his familiar stench. “From him!” he said, as agitated as she’d ever seen him. “I saved her from him.” His eyes darted to the left, and she knew he regretted having revealed whatever it was he’d just revealed.

  Without meaning to, Matthews gasped aloud. She’d missed the catalyst all along. It had been right there in front of her-practically handed to her by LaMoia-and she’d moved right past it. Now the pieces fell into place for her like a row of dominoes tumbling over in perfect succession. Now, it finally all made sense, the discovery charging her with a renewed strength and sense of purpose. She had him; he was all hers.

  She said, “The drowning … It wasn’t an accident.”

  Walker’s face tightened, a mass of pain, and she expected tears from his eyes. But he proved far stronger, far more resil-ient, than she’d expected. He’d already processed some of this, and that brought Matthews back to his confrontation with Mary-Ann. Raising the knife between them, he said, “Accidents happen.”

  59 Chasing a Cry

  The first scream turned LaMoia in the right direction. Prior to that, he’d been following the city storm sewer out toward Elliott Bay. But that cry, a woman’s cry, spun him on his heels and he rapidly retraced his steps, his cell phone immediately in hand.

  When the phone proved useless, its signal blocked by his depth underground, he debated climbing back up the chimney of concrete to the manhole through which he’d come-he was passing by this exact same spot again-debated enlisting the support of Special Ops, but recalling her request to avoid tying up her rescue in department-dictated procedures, something she had somehow foreseen, he passed beneath the manhole entrance, ignoring it, determined to follow the sound of her voice before he lost it, and her with it.

  Heading in this direction, his flashlight picked up two pairs of muddy shoe prints that, a few minutes later, led to a woven metal grate in the wall of the storm sewer’s concrete tube. He pulled on the grate, and it came free in his hand. He stuffed the small flashlight into his mouth like a cigar and used both arms to set the grate aside so he could climb through. The muddy tracks continued on the other side-a low horizontal shaft that reminded him of a mining tunnel. The thing looked ancient …

  and then his mind seized upon what he was looking at. He knew next to nothing about storm sewers and tunnels, and yet the detective in him believed that in all probability this was the smugglers’ tunnel the minister had mentioned.

  A voice shouting came from far away down the tunnel-barely audible. This voice was male.

  Ferrell Walker.

  LaMoia’s chest tightened painfully. He trained the Maglite into the dark. He ducked through the hole and stepped inside that tunnel. It smelled familiar-like death, he thought.

  “I’m coming,” he whispered under his breath, already moving quickly into the dark.

  A Matter of Trust

  In all his visits to Mama Lu, Boldt could remember seeing her out of that rattan throne only twice, surprised once again by how short she was. Not small, he thought, but short.

  “I appreciate this, Great Lady,” he said. He and Babcock, Mama Lu and her two trained polar bears in the black garb stood behind the butcher’s meat counter where a crippled stairway led down into the glare of overhead bare bulbs. The Korean grocery smelled of fresh ginger and exotic spices. Korean talk radio played from a nasal-sounding AM radio behind the cash register at the other end of the room.

  “This been family secret many generations, Mr. Both.”

  “We understand.”

  “You, I know, I trust. Yes. But woman? Mama Lu no know.”

  “You’ve nothing to worry about,” Babcock said.

  “I give you my word,” Boldt said, knowing the commitment that statement represented.

  “Police no know this. Nobody know.”

  Boldt said, “Understood.”

  “Only because this friend of yours.”

  “Matthews,” Boldt said.

  “I do this only for you. For her. You good man, Mr. Both.

  You clear Billy Chen’s good name.”

  He didn’t want to have a twenty-minute discussion about it, but he knew her ways. “We’ll eat a meal together,” he said.

  “We’ll celebrate.”

  She grinned across lipstick-smeared teeth. “But later.”

  She knew him better than he thought.

  “Yes, later.”

  “Show them,” she said to the larger of her bodyguards. To Boldt she said, “Saved my life three times, this secret. Maybe save your friend, too.”

  Boldt nodded, a frog caught in his throat. “Thank you,” he said. He ducked his head, and the three descended the cramped stairs to the storage room below.

  “This is old,” Babcock informed him excitedly, well before the bodyguard pulled on the gray boards of built-in pantry shelves, opening and revealing a narrow passageway into darkness. “This is it.”

  Boldt nodded to the big man and led the way through to the damp smells and pitch-dark. “Let’s hope so,” he heard himself say.

  Seeing Double

  Sitting on a damp ledge in total darkness, Walker having turned off the flashlight to save batteries, Matthews adjusted the broken piece of bottle glass in her left hand. To make the laceration count she would need a good deal of pressure, and this made her realize she needed her own hand protected or she might let go of the glass as it also cut into her.

  Walker turned the light back on, surprising her, and took her right hand in his, examining her cut. “It’s not so bad,” he said.

  He pulled a soiled rag out of a back pocket-she didn’t want to think where it might have been-and he stuffed it into the hand to stem the bleeding. Without knowing it, he’d just passed her a shield for her piece of glass.

  She tried to understand his patience. Why wasn’t he in a hurry? Did he fail to realize that half the city’s police department was by now out looking for her? Or was it simply that he trusted these tunnels-virtually untraveled by all but the homeless for the past hundred years-to protect him from discovery? Or was it something much worse, that he wanted to put off what he had in mind for her for as long as possible?

  Hostage negotiators never pushed the abductor into making hasty decisions. Walker’s obvious patience came to her as a blessing. He might know the tunnels beneath the city, but she knew the tunnels of the human mind.

  Consumed in total darkness once again, she prepared to move the chunk of glass to her right hand. “How did it start … the idea of him having an accident?”

  “Leave it.”

  “That’s not something that comes out of nowhere. That builds over time. What was it: He criticized you? Thought he’d taught you to be a better fisherman than you were? Something like that?”

  “You don’t know anything.”

  “But isn’t that why we’re here?”

  “We’re here because I wanted you here,” he said. “We’re here because I helped you and I wanted to show you-”

  She cut him off. “No, you wanted to test me.”

  “And you failed the test.”

  “I’m here because I understand you, Ferrell.” She got the glass set in her right palm. “Take a good long look at your reasons, because that’s why I’m here. It was your decision, not mine, and you need to face this.”

  She allowed the resulting silence to settle around them, like listening for animals in the woods.

  “Was i
t Mary-Ann?” she asked in a whisper. “Something he did to Mary-Ann?”

  The flashlight popped back to life. He scooted away from her, and she resented not having taken a swipe at him while she’d had the chance.

  “Something you saw him doing to her. Something you heard him doing to her. What? Out on the boat, where you couldn’t escape it? Where she couldn’t escape it?”

  No indignant rage, no shouting protestations. Ferrell Walker looked over sadly in the dull yellow of the weak light and she knew she’d scored a hit.

  “Let’s go,” he said, waving her up.

  “Where to?” She would need that flashlight of his after she cut him. If she lost it to the mud … Without the flashlight she’d be lost down here, forever banging into the mud walls and rotting timbers.

  “What you’re feeling, Ferrell … it isn’t something you can escape through a few tunnels. Hurting me is only going to make it worse.”

  “You betrayed me,” he said far too calmly, too sadly. “You both betrayed me.”

  “You want to talk about both of us? Answer me this: How would Mary-Ann have felt if you’d put her in this same situation? Dragging her through the mud. And for what? To play some game of yours that’s supposed to justify what you did to your father? Would she have played along, Ferrell?”

  They moved in the same direction, heads ducked beneath the sagging timbers. She guessed north, back toward the heart of downtown. The Shelter? That room where Vanderhorst had hung the bodies? Where?

  “You saved her, didn’t you?”

  “Shut up.”

  “Saved her from him, and I don’t mean Lanny Neal.”

  “You don’t know anything about it.”

  “Don’t I? He would drink himself blind, wouldn’t he? Criticize your handling of the boat, of the fish, when all along it was his incompetence that hurt the catch. His, not yours. And then Mary-Ann grew up, developed into a beautiful young woman, and the three of you out on the boat. He took advantage of that, didn’t he? Advantage of her. Drunk as he was. And you on the other side of a bulkhead were made to listen to the whole demeaning thing. And the next morning, that dead look in her eyes, and you with a rage you’ve never felt. But he’s a big, ornery man, and you aren’t about to cross him. You even suggest something and he hits you upside the head. You both carried bruises, you and Mary-Ann, didn’t you? Badges of honor, those bruises. How long did it go on, Ferrell? Months? Years?”

  She paused, realizing he’d stopped several paces behind her, his small light aimed down at his feet, head hung in defeat.

  She’d scored another direct hit. She capitalized on it, taking a step back toward him, careful to conceal her weapon. “Someone had to do something to stop it. You only did what was necessary.” She hesitated, this the most dangerous ground of all. “The only reason it tore you up inside, Ferrell, the reason it wouldn’t go away, kept coming back to haunt you, is because you’re a good person. The bad people don’t feel anything. But you felt bad for what you’d done, despite the fact it helped her, despite the fact you saved her.” Amid the silence, a steady drip of water somewhere off in the dark. “And of all the ungrateful things, the minute you save her, she leaves you.”

  “She wanted me to tell them,” came the man’s voice faintly.

  Matthews felt both victory and dread. She had assumed Mary-Ann’s act of betrayal had been moving in with Lanny Neal. Now she knew she’d had the catalyst wrong.

  “Keep moving.”

  “You can’t outrun this. You can run me over, you can throw me from a bridge, it’s still going to be inside your head.”

  “It just happened,” he said. “Accidents happen.”

  “You backed over her, Ferrell. That doesn’t just happen.

  That’s going to stay in your head until we get rid of it.”

  “There is no ‘we.’ Not anymore there isn’t.”

  “There’s two of us here, Ferrell. Look at me. Touch me if you want. I’m still here.” She wanted to lure him closer.

  The piece of glass begged. This was the moment-when she’d filled his head with enough images to slow his reaction time. But her knees wouldn’t obey.

  “No more talking,” he said. “We’re all done talking.”

  “She wanted to help you, too,” she said. That was the connection between Mary-Ann and her. Not looks, not tone of voice or sexual fantasies. Mary-Ann had wanted to help him and-accidents happen-he’d killed her for it. She, Matthews, had been his chance to try again, and once she understood he’d killed his father and sister, she’d demand what Mary-Ann did: Turn yourself in, Ferrell. Let us help you.

  “Keep moving.”

  “No.” She stood her ground defiantly. She would not be willingly marched off to her death. Mary-Ann had clearly run this boy’s life, either directly or indirectly, until he’d killed her. She had to succeed where Mary-Ann had finally failed. “I can help you, Ferrell. I can make it go away. But we both have to see it for what it was. Tell me about the accidents. Share it with me.

  Please,” she added, no longer feeling the same blood lust. She didn’t want to kill him. Wound him. Escape. Yes. But she felt him as much a victim as herself.

  “You don’t need the knife,” she said. “I’m not going anywhere, am I?” she indicated the tunnel’s tight confines. The truth was, she wanted him confined-an easier target. This cramped tunnel was perfect for her needs.

  A thought occurred to her and she found herself with no desire to analyze it, to preconsider its every possible angle, its every possible argument. In that fraction of a second where she elected to speak her mind rather than preprocess the thought, she spoke it the moment it came to her: “You could have had me any number of times. If you intended to abduct me, why now?”

  Walker waved the knife. “Walk.”

  “No. Do it here. Right here. Right now.” She threw her arms open, the chunk of glass still gripped in his handkerchief.

  “It’s not about betrayal,” she answered, knowing perfectly well it was, but wanting to steer him away from this. “Don’t kid yourself. It’s about power. Control. And I’ll tell you something: You won that game with me for a while. I gave into that.

  Sure, I did. I played along.”

  “You’re wasting yourself on this, Anna,” he said. “Everything’s decided. Save your breath.”

  Her teeth chattered. The son repeats the father’s sins. He wanted her on a boat with him. He wanted the past back. He wanted what his father had had. The present, the future, were no good to him any longer. “I’m Daphne, Ferrell. I am not Mary-Ann. Mary-Ann is dead.”

  “We’re going to spend time together again. That’s all that matters.”

  “I can help you out of this,” she pleaded. “I can make your father … whatever happened out on the boat … go away. You don’t believe that now because you think you’ve tried everything, but it’s true. I’m your passport out of those nightmares.

  You don’t sleep, do you, Ferrell? You can’t. You don’t eat much-I can see that just by looking at you. He still owns you, Ferrell. I can make him go away. I can make it right again.”

  “That’ll never happen.” He stepped even closer. “Now walk.”

  The batteries were dying, and her chance of escape along with them. If she was going to use that piece of glass on him, it had to be soon.

  “Then tell me about the other accident-Mary-Ann’s accident.”

  He said, “You like everything neat and tidy. Shipshape. But it doesn’t always work out that way. We’re going to have plenty of time to talk, Daphne.” He actually smiled. “There’s light at the end of the tunnel. You’ll see.”

  More likely a boat at the end of the tunnel. Something he’d scouted already. Steal the boat, make for the open sea. Fisher-men could stay weeks, even months, at sea. The thought paralyzed her. They’ll never find me.

  62 Closing the Distance

  I’ll never find her, LaMoia thought to himself as he faced a bend in the tunnel, its floor covered in a slopp
y mud that made tracking difficult if not impossible. For all he knew the prints he was following were sixty years old. But then, the moment he had this thought, he spotted a cluster of prints up ahead, like a group of pigs had stirred the mud.

  He caught his foot at the very last second, his heel connecting with the packed dirt, toe about to rock forward-a sense of dread, like a soldier about to step on a land mine. He moved his foot cautiously and trained his light into the chips of broken glass where a tiny piece of gold sparkled back at him. A second later, he stood holding her earring. I’m right behind you, he caught himself thinking. Hang tough.

  As he closed the distance toward that disturbed area of tunnel floor he picked up the enormous wash to his left, a hole cut out of the wall. Another tunnel? he wondered. An exit back up to the surface, or into another storm sewer?

  He slipped his pistol out of its holster beneath the deerskin and quickly chambered a round. “I’m armed,” he called out, but only loud enough to carry a few yards. He contained the flashlight beneath the pistol, took three long strides, and extending both the weapon and the light, lit up the hole.

  “Jesus Christ.” His stomach turned in shock at the sight of the headless deputy. It took him a moment to even locate the head lying on its side and identify it as Prair’s.

  He caught himself thinking as both a cop and a psychologist.

  This, too, surprised him. Escalation. Walker had sacrificed Prair for her-this he knew with all certainty. Killing the man would have been one thing; decapitation signaled a quantum shift, a different paradigm. He checked the cell phone reception yet another time-still nothing. He tried the phone’s “radio” function.

  Dead as well.

  Standing perfectly still as he was, he picked up the faint sound of voices. Like an insect in a dark room. He couldn’t clearly identify its direction. He took a step forward, then back.

  He turned around, trying a different ear.

  He left Prair behind him, back in that hole. Good riddance.

  North! He had it now. Then it faded again and he couldn’t be sure if he’d had it at all. But yes. There. A woman’s voice, no question about it. Closer than he thought. He moved quickly toward that sound, staying to the edge of the narrow tunnel and out of the slop in its center, moving as quietly as possible.