The Art of Deception

by Ridley Pearson

  “Blackmail?”

  “Influence can take many forms.”

  “It’s an LBO.”

  “Hostile or favorable?”

  “I refuse to think—”

  LaMoia interrupted. “Thankfully, you don’t have to. That’s why you brought me in on this—us—we do the thinking for you.” He offered her his well-practiced smile. “We consider everything—every possible scenario—and then go about eliminating them, one by one. The more options we eliminate, and the more quickly we eliminate them, the sooner we’re on the most probable set of circumstances, the sooner we’re on a suspect and putting that person away for this. It’s as simple as that.”

  “All parties involved support this buyout,” she said. “This has nothing to do with that.”

  LaMoia was inclined to believe likewise but also didn’t want to jump to the conclusion that she’d just been peeped by a serial kidnapper responsible for Hebringer and Randolf. He thought about Boldt, wondering why his lieutenant hadn’t returned his call.

  LaMoia considered bringing SID techs into the room to determine the likely line of sight; that, in turn, might suggest the exact spot the perv had been standing. From the suite he could see his guys scouring the construction site across the street.

  Dunkin saw this too, and for the first time it occurred to her that the police were working a little hard for a simple peeper report. “Hey,” she said, “what’s with all the guys over there anyway?”

  “They’re looking for evidence.”

  “I understand that, but why, exactly?”

  Matthews said, “Hopefully to help identify the person responsible.”

  “You do this for a peeper? A sergeant and a lieutenant? An evidence team? Am I in some kind of trouble here that I’m not aware of?”

  “Maybe you’d better sit down, ma’am.” LaMoia indicated the padded bench at the end of the bed.

  “This may take a minute to explain,” Matthews said.

  Dunkin kept looking out the window. Several more officers had arrived to pull yellow tape around an area of the construction site.

  “There have been some disappearances,” LaMoia said.

  “Women,” Matthews added.

  Melissa Dunkin sank to the edge of the bed and listened in stunned amazement.

  It wasn’t long before the hotel bedroom hosted an elaborate setup of tripods, measuring sticks, and a portable laser meant to re-create the angle from which the perv would have been able to view the room.

  A Japanese-American SID tech wearing a Don Henley World Tour T-shirt called out for LaMoia. He showed him the setup and explained that the laser would “lay a frozen rope” out the window, across the street to the construction site. He switched on the laser, allowed it to warm up, and then sprayed a fine powder into the room. A tiny stream of bright green light hung in the dusty air.

  “You do the voodoo very well,” LaMoia said.

  The radio crackled. “Got it,” a deep voice reported. One of the guys across the way had located the beam and was waving back at them as he spoke on the radio.

  LaMoia said, “I want the mirror shot out of the bathtub as well. Combine them and have that section of the platform over there dusted for prints, photographed, you name it.”

  “No problem.”

  “It is a problem,” LaMoia corrected. “It’s just not your problem.”

  Less than an hour later, LaMoia, Matthews, and two SID techs stood on the fifth floor of the construction site. The laser work had identified a square yard of floor space where the peeper had stood. On the edge of that area, delineated by crime scene tape, a tiny plastic stand held a two-inch, yellow plastic triangular tag bearing the numeral 7 that indicated several small piles of geometric mud and dirt presumed to be, because of the vague pattern it formed, discharge from a shoe or boot sole.

  The construction elevator stopped, clanged open, and a silhouette of a fairly big man emerged. LaMoia identified Lou Boldt by the determined stride of his brisk walk.

  “Hey, Sarge.” LaMoia continued to address his lieutenant by his former rank, the same rank, the same job that LaMoia now occupied. Even in the relative dark of the construction site, Boldt looked tired and worn. LaMoia put this off to Susan Hebringer’s disappearance. Some said he was having trouble at home; others claimed he was sick. But LaMoia knew the true source of Boldt’s physical decline, whether his colleagues understood it or not.

  “Good work, John,” Boldt said, shaking hands with his sergeant as they met. He nodded cordially at Matthews.

  “Shoe treads,” said the evidence guy, a little overeager for recognition. Boldt had a Norman Schwarzkopf reputation within the department. Newcomers always sucked up to him.

  LaMoia said, “Maybe it’s nothing more than some hump working his joystick.”

  Boldt looked to Matthews for confirmation. “He stayed in here a long time. He had at least a couple of opportunities for full frontals of her. Lots of time with her stretched out on the bed—also naked. If it was masturbatory, as John’s implying, it would have been over much sooner.”

  “Maybe the guy’s on Viagra,” LaMoia said.

  Fighting a grin, she said, “Another explanation would be that it wasn’t masturbatory at all—but a collection phase, subsequent to trolling and prior to—”

  “Abduction,” Boldt said, completing her thought.

  “A possibility is all,” she said, “but yes.”

  Upon learning, after the fact, that Susan Hebringer had reported a Peeping Tom to police just prior to her disappearance, CAP’s homicide squad had worked closely with Special Assaults to chase down each and every reported incident of sexual harassment and voyeurism, focusing a great deal of attention on any such reports in the downtown corridor, or filed by downtown residents. Uniformed patrols had been alerted to pay special attention to vacant buildings, billboards, parking garages, and construction sites—all possible viewing platforms for the peeper. Private security firms directly responsible for these same structures were contacted as well.

  “Do we have any idea how long he was up here?”

  LaMoia held his flashlight between his teeth while consulting his notes to make sure he had it right. Boldt liked it right the first time. “The vic personally witnessed him out here for twelve minutes. Digital alarm clock on the bedside,” he explained. “Could’ve easily been a lot longer than that, since she was in the tub for over twenty and on the bed snoozing for an undetermined time.”

  “Any fluids or emissions up here?” Matthews asked the SID technician.

  “Nothing to the naked eye so far. We could Luminol and the like, if you want.” Under black light, when reacting with the chemical agent Luminol, human blood glowed green. Other tests existed for bodily fluids of so-called secretors—people whose blood contained a set of specific blood proteins.

  LaMoia answered, “We want.”

  Boldt added, “Please. Any tricks you’ve got to detect saliva or semen. And if we come up with anything, I’d like it DNAed and run against the state and the fed’s databases. Whether you get a hit or not, I want everything kept on file, and full written reports.”

  “Got it.”

  “Along with every girder up here, I want you to dust for prints on the stairway railing at every landing, both sides of the turn.” He answered the technician’s curious expression: “It’s where people take hold. Just do it.”

  He signaled LaMoia and Matthews to step away, and the three shared a moment of privacy.

  “Anything?” Boldt asked.

  LaMoia looked across to Dunkin’s hotel room. The Japanese tech was waving at him. LaMoia felt stupid waving back but he did so. These lab guys would never be cops.

  “She’d done tourist stuff,” LaMoia answered. “Some shopping.”

  “Anything specific in the shopping? Lingerie, swimsuit, anything that would have had her outside of a changing room partially clothed or at least wearing less than her street clothes?”

  “I should’ve asked that,”
LaMoia was ashamed to admit. Boldt had been a paper shuffler for a couple years now yet still had better instincts than any two street detectives combined.

  “Was it random?” Boldt asked.

  “The million-dollar question.”

  “Your gut check?” Boldt requested.

  Matthews shook her head no. LaMoia said, “Not random. Deliberate. But I got serious problems with that: Even if he trolls the tourist spots, even if he follows ’em to their hotels or their condos, how the flock does he know what room she’s in?”

  “Unless it’s the other way around,” Boldt suggested.

  They’d worked these angles raw back at the Public Safety Building. For the sake of hearing it aloud, LaMoia said, “He spots ’em from up here—wherever—then waits for them to leave the hotel, and knowing what they look like, he stalks them. For whatever reason, at least twice he grabbed them.”

  Matthews said, “Timing and location—those are your reasons. Nothing more complicated than that, which opens up the possibility—depending on why he took off—that our Ms. Dunkin just made his list.”

  LaMoia told Boldt, “She leaves town tomorrow. Taxi, straight to the airport. He won’t be following her.”

  “Lucky for her. Too bad for us,” Boldt said.

  “We could still bait him,” LaMoia suggested. “Install some babe on one of our squads to strip in front of windows.”

  Matthews said, “I wonder who’d be volunteering to oversee that operation.”

  LaMoia mugged at her.

  Boldt was not happy. “The problem is it’s not a specific hotel, a single building. Hebringer and Randolf both lived here. Ten blocks apart. You can’t bait every town house, every hotel.”

  They’d been around this track enough times back in the situation room. Weeks, even months of it now. Boldt was in rough shape, under fire from the press, the brass, the families of the missing women, and even his own wife.

  “So maybe Hebringer getting peeped was nothing but shitty coincidence,” LaMoia said, referring to what they knew about the missing woman. “Drawing a look from us when it doesn’t deserve it. Maybe it’s got us by a nose ring when it’s nothing but a black hole. Maybe I walked into that tonight.”

  “Maybe not, John,” Matthews said. “We don’t ignore this,” she told Boldt. “His sticking around—that counts for something.”

  “Keep it up,” Boldt told them. Pointing to the cordoned-off area, he said, “Make him talk to us, would you, please?” He added with a snarl, “A confession would be nice.”

  9 Room with a View

  Doc Dixon, a big bear of a man with hooded eyes and a wide face, signaled Matthews and won her attention before pointing toward his receptionist, who manned a sliding glass window looking out onto the medical examiner’s waiting room. His sign meant Langford “Lanny” Neal, the possible boyfriend of their Jane Doe, had just arrived and was being kept waiting.

  Matthews acknowledged, checked the wall clock, and debated calling LaMoia one more time, resigning herself to the fact that a phone call wouldn’t help the traffic situation. Nothing would help Seattle’s traffic, not even an act of God.

  Feeling obliged to do so, she’d left a message at the fish dock where she’d met with Ferrell Walker, providing the time and location of the identification at the medical examiner’s office, hoping the message might not reach the grief-stricken brother in time. But one eye continually tracked to the reception window, wondering if Walker might appear.

  Matthews had never liked the medical examiner’s office and avoided it whenever possible. Dixon ran the ME’s more as a doctor than a bureaucrat, displaying a keen interest in each and every body that passed through his doors and the legal system that claimed control of them in death. Matthews didn’t have the same kinship or friendship with Dixon that Boldt shared, but through Boldt she had acquired a profound respect for the man. Where most of the homicide detectives had developed at least an uneasy comfort at the ME’s, Matthews, a rare visitor, found the basement setting, the medicinal smell, and the overpowering silence repulsive. Perhaps her feelings stemmed from the doctor-office look of the place: tube lighting, gray carpet, white lateral filing cabinets, the efficient young men and women spanning Seattle’s ethnic palate, all dressed in white lab coats, some carrying clipboards, some answering phones. It felt too normal. One expected something more dismal and final—sweating rock walls and bars on the window, a doctor with a speech impediment, a nurse with a limp. This felt more like her OB-GYN’s office. This setting didn’t work for her at all.

  LaMoia entered, his sergeant’s shield clipped to the pocket of the deerskin jacket. He winked at the receptionist, an African American woman who had to be in her sixties, low-fived one of the young docs who made a point of catching up to him, and took Matthews around the waist, steering her toward the double swinging doors that led into the “meat locker”—the primary receiving room that housed twenty-one refrigerated drawers and sported three stainless-steel autopsy tables with drains, lights, and video cameras. There was at least one other autopsy room that she knew of—more of a private surgery suite where Dixon or his chief assistant occasionally tackled a sensitive or particularly gruesome case. She abruptly put on the brakes, not allowing LaMoia to escort her through those doors before it was necessary, and her effort had the unintended effect of turning LaMoia toward her and briefly making contact with her. They bounced off each other, gently, and for a moment there was only that contact lingering in the nerve endings of her skin.

  “That our guy out there?” LaMoia stepped back from her, keeping it business.

  “Yes. Langford Neal,” she said, giving her jacket a small straightening tug. “Boyfriend, or former boyfriend, if it’s Mary-Ann Walker in there.”

  “And the doc thinks it is.”

  “The doc got hold of a better driver’s license photo than I did. One of her eyes, the left, I think, is still where it belongs, and it’s apparently a match for color: blue. Height’s about right. Weight could be right, discounting for saturation and bloat. I’ve got a call in to the brother to try to locate dental records for her.”

  LaMoia glanced in the direction of the reception area. “Let me tell you something about our little angel, Neal. Two convictions as well as a number of complaints from previous love interests. This guy plays rough. He served thirty days in county for one of the convictions. The second, he was in for six months, out in four.”

  The news moved Neal up the list in both their minds. She understood the added spring to LaMoia’s step now—he loved having the jump on information. “That certainly helps,” she said, “but we shouldn’t lose sight of the brother, either.”

  “Ten-to-one she was killed in or near the boyfriend’s pad, given the underwear, the bare feet, and the rest of it.”

  “The brother could have harbored jealousy and anger over his being deserted for Neal. That’s powerful stuff.”

  “Neal has two convictions for knocking women around. You kidding me? Not losing sight of the brother, that’s okay. But we focus on Neal. If he does, in fact, ID the body as her, then from what you were saying, your take is to run him straight up to the bull pen and have a go at him. Is that right?”

  “That, or use a conference room here.”

  “You’re thinking that this viewing may put him off-balance— her being so ripe and all—and that we pounce while we have the opportunity.”

  “You’re a lot smarter than you look.”

  He took it in stride. LaMoia had his timing down to an art form. He kept it business—for the time being. This put her on edge, her defenses at the ready.

  “You want to sit this one out, I’m okay with that. You’re way too . . . sweet . . . for a floater. Especially one that’s been in the meat locker for a few extra days.”

  She knew she could handle it, she’d seen plenty of dead bodies, some in dreadful condition, but it didn’t mean she wanted to. “I’ll take that as a compliment. I think.”

  “You think too much,” he
said, meeting her eyes to drive home his point. LaMoia had large brown eyes and knew how to use them to effect.

  “Meaning?”

  “You gotta teach yourself to feel, Matthews.” He leaned against one of the two swinging doors. He wasn’t going to make her follow inside. “You’re all engine. It’s the handling that counts.” Everything came down to cars for LaMoia. “You get that down, you’ll be just about perfect.”

  “Who said I wanted to be perfect?” But he didn’t answer her. He left her there to think about it. The door flapped shut behind him. Timing was everything.

  Decades earlier, in municipalities across the country, medical examiner and coroner offices had learned to separate the individual making an identification from the room containing the body, as the smell tended to cause fainting and vomiting. Some used video, some a window—most used both, as did the King County Medical Examiner’s Office, where a color TV was mounted to the left of a narrow window that housed a venetian blind controllable from the inside.

  Lanny Neal was handsome in a ski bum kind of way, cocksure of himself judging by the rigid shoulders, the smug expression, and his willingness to blatantly check out Matthews, leveling his gaze and drinking her in, head to foot.

  She knew she should wait to question him, but he’d fired the first salvo with that rude survey of her topography, and she fell victim to the challenge.

  “When did you last see Mary-Ann?” she asked.

  The question didn’t rattle Neal in the least—although LaMoia looked a little uncomfortable. Neal remained calm and collected, as if he were there applying for a job. This further irritated Matthews.

  “Couple nights ago.”

  “How many nights ago?”

  “Saturday, I guess.”

  “You guess, or you know?” Matthews pressed.

  “Saturday night. Late.”

  “You weren’t worried about her?”

  “Pissed was more like it.”

  “You didn’t report her missing. Why’s that?”