The Art of Deception

by Ridley Pearson

  “A cry for help,” he said, repeating a possible explanation of Walker’s behavior that she had raised at an earlier meeting.

  “If I have it right—and remember, I may not—then there’s a psychological progression Walker’s going through, a decline that has everything to do with what is more than likely confusion over his relationship with his sister; Neal’s stealing Mary-Ann from him; Neal’s abuse of Mary-Ann; the subsequent murder; and then Walker’s transference of his need to protect Mary-Ann over to me. Transference comes in all flavors, John, from lite to extra-strength. He latches on to me. He follows me. For reasons known only to him, he has chosen me to represent Mary-Ann in his life. Maybe he’s just trying to gather the courage to tell me something. I don’t know. Maybe he saw more of the murder than he’s shared with us. That wouldn’t surprise me—his guilt over watching them in the first place preventing him from telling us exactly what went down. It would also explain his conviction to see Neal put away for this crime.”

  “But Hebringer and Randolf?”

  “I’m not pretending I have the answers,” she said, unbuttoning her pants and tucking in her shirt, the act itself implying an immodesty that clearly surprised him. “I could be way off base with any of this. My original thinking was that he didn’t know anything more about Hebringer and Randolf than what he’d read in the papers, but that he recognized a way to bait me into meeting him.”

  “I’m still camping on that side of the river,” LaMoia said.

  “But the way he made this meet—preempting what was to be an attempt on my part to arrange something inside, something contained, something that worked better for us . . . and the fact that Lou likes Walker being positively IDed for having been in the Underground, and then this guy getting away from Lou and Bobbie down there . . . and Lou never liking coincidences and suddenly thinking Walker could either have something on Hebringer and Randolf, or might even be a part of it himself . . . and here we are.”

  “Here we are,” LaMoia echoed.

  She felt his objection to her playing this role and appreciated his restraint in not verbalizing it. Doing her damnedest to appear collected and composed, she said calmly, “Listen, John... I think we pushed him over the edge with Neal walking away from the probable cause hearing and with my subsequent attempt to distance myself from him. It was a bad judgment call on my part. If he misses Mary-Ann as much as I think he does, then at some point he will come after me. This level of obsession leads to abduction. It’s my turf. I know what I’m talking about,” she said, answering his head shaking no. “It could be for something as innocent as a confession—confiding his guilt about knowing more than he’s told us—or something . . . more serious. And if he should get me—”

  “He will not get you.”

  “—you need to think unconventionally, something you’re good at. Neal’s apartment is a possibility. The family home— this place he lost when the business went bad. A trawler is entirely possible.” She met eyes with LaMoia and lowered her voice. “These places hold significance for him. He’ll take me to someplace that holds significance.”

  “He will not—”

  “If you guys lose me,” she interrupted, “I’d check those places I just mentioned first. The Aurora Bridge after that.”

  “Jesus . . . you’re as sick as he is.”

  She continued in her businesslike tone, “If I go missing, John, don’t do it by the book. Promise me that. Time’s the enemy, okay? He’s an organized personality. He knows what he’s doing. He lives to control the situation. When he senses he’s lost control, as he did earlier, he takes action. That alone separates him from what you guys think of as ‘loonies.’ Trust me, if he should get me and then lose control of the situation . . .” She couldn’t complete that thought, even in her own head. “Just find me, John. And fast. However you have to do it, just find me.”

  “Cross my heart,” said the all-time rule breaker.

  LaMoia opened his arms, an improbable invitation from a guy like him. She stepped forward cautiously, afraid he might make a joke of it. But he didn’t, and so she held herself close to his chest, the thumping of his heart like timpani. She tried to think of something amusing to say, to cushion the moment for them both, but the feeling of his arms around her, of that absolute sense of safety, lodged a walnut in her throat and she couldn’t get a word out. She squeezed, and he squeezed her back, and for a fleeting moment there was absolute peace in her world.

  Driving now past the ALL NUDE storefronts, a wino walking unsteadily behind a grocery cart filled to overflowing, the tourists intermingled with the city’s subculture, neither acknowledging the other, she marveled at the tolerance, at the coexistence of two such diverse cultural strata. She felt herself being injected into this, like a vaccine into tainted blood, down through Pioneer Square where groups clustered around street musicians, where gray-haired hippies sold trinket jewelry from the tops of cardboard boxes and college kids waited in lines outside the music clubs.

  “Test, one, two,” she said into the empty car.

  Her dash-mounted Motorola squawked and called back, “Copy that, Decoy.”

  She hadn’t liked the moniker assigned her for this operation, but it wasn’t her place to comment on it.

  A few turns later, she pulled into the church lot marked PRIVATE PARKING STRICTLY ENFORCED—VEHICLES WILL BE TOWED, and slipped the cardboard permit onto her dash before locking up. She wore her hair over her ears in order to cover the tiny ear bud that carried the network of radio traffic surrounding her surveillance. She tested the gear once more as she dumped her keys into her purse. “Okay, boys, I’m all yours.”

  “Copy that, Decoy,” the calm voice returned softly in her ear. No jokes from dispatch. No humor. These radio operators were the grumpy librarians of police work.

  She reached the overhang and the door in the side of the church that led down to the Shelter at five minutes before ten, five minutes ahead of schedule. The sky opened up with a drizzle that felt like the misters over vegetable stands in supermarkets. She thought sarcastically how perfect it was to further complicate things with the added hassle of the rain—traffic would slow, long-distance surveillance would be more obscured, and any right-thinking person would seek some kind of shelter from it, making the undercover roles harder to play effectively without standing out.

  She listened in her one ear to the radio reports from the observation points outside her houseboat, for Boldt didn’t put it past Walker to use the meet to buy himself a chance to get inside her houseboat, either souvenir-seeking or in order to await her return there. The rain was apparently stronger over Lake Union, and one of those keeping surveillance reported a red-and-black umbrella on the dock, unable to identify the person holding it. “That’s a neighbor,” Matthews said, barely moving her mouth in case she was being watched by Walker. The red-and-black umbrella belonged to Robert, a man who could have played stunt double to Ernest Hemingway. If they hassled Robert, she’d hear about it for months to come.

  Location by location, the four undercover detectives and the leader of the ERT squad reported into dispatch, confirming their positions, reporting sightings considered “possibles” for Walker, filling the radio with activity where no such activity existed in the real world. She knew that LaMoia had parked the Jetta on the second floor of the car park, engine out, and was sitting in the car’s backseat (making it more difficult for others to spot him), keeping an eye on her through the car’s back window. She felt the attention of all those eyes and ears, both onstage and exposed for all to see. If and when her moment came with Walker, it would be recorded, videoed, and analyzed, as would any subsequent interrogation. She felt uncomfortable in the spotlight, even a little sick to her stomach, as it didn’t feel much different to her than walking around her houseboat certain someone was watching. Someone was watching—many someones—and for a person accustomed to doing the watching, she found the reversal of roles unpleasant, going on vulgar. Walker himself was no doubt watch
ing as well, and she could only hope he couldn’t see or sense the swarm of protection that had been created around her, for she felt certain it would put him off and prevent him from approaching her.

  When she needed to speak to dispatch, she would fake a small cough, fist to mouth, and quickly talk. “Nothing so far,” she reported, immediately identifying it as an amateurish comment, tagging herself a desk jockey for all in the communications truck to laugh at and make fun of her. She felt tempted to just stomp off and forget about this whole thing—let them find some other way to collar Walker. But a bigger part of her wanted this resolved, both for her own sake—to get Walker off her case—and for Boldt’s, because she thought he was putting too much faith in Walker’s connection to Hebringer and Randolf.

  Standing there in the light rain, the object of so much attention, she felt an added pressure to reassemble the various parts into something that made sense, something that explained Hebringer and Randolf, and felt maddeningly frustrated when she failed after repeated tries. What could Walker tell her that they didn’t already know? Did Prair’s lurking about—his possible stalking of her—have to do with his infatuation with her or his involvement in Mary-Ann Walker’s life prior to her going off that bridge? How could anyone consider a man with Lanny Neal’s past an innocent in all this? Round and round she went, the minutes ticking by. Walker was late, or out there studying her along with the others—the reports in her earpiece identifying first a homeless man on the street corner behind the church and then, finally, “possible solid heading for Decoy from southeast corner of lot.”

  Matthews saw the figure coming, still at a considerable distance—he was the approximate height of Walker, blue jeans, a dark sweatshirt with a hood covering his head. He walked with purpose, either to reach Matthews in a hurry, or to get out of the rain. She tensed and warmed with his approach. She found the radio traffic in her left ear distracting, as dispatch calmly assigned new positions to two of the undercover detectives in the field, placed ERT on alert to the suspect’s current location, and asked the sharpshooters to stand down their rifles until further notice. Matthews knew this meant nothing more than that they were ordered to keep their fingers off the trigger—no sharpshooter took his eye off the sight, orders or not.

  She resolved to do as little talking as possible—Walker had wanted the clandestine meeting . . . let him do the talking.

  The closer that figure drew, the less Matthews thought he looked right for Walker, and the greater her sense of dread. His hips moved a little too fluidly, the gait of this person’s walk didn’t feel like Walker at all. He’d sent a surrogate, someone to deliver a message.

  Her muscles had frozen; she wished like hell that rattle in her ear would stop—couldn’t they just shut up? The approaching person’s right arm lifted, and both she and that voice in her ear had the same thought at the same moment: a knife. The sharpshooters were readied, ERT was assigned a “red alert.” But nothing glittered in the pale cast of the overhead bulb; no metal sparkled. The hand grabbed hold of the hood and stripped it off the head. Short hair, but spiked. Smooth skin. A nose stud. It was a young woman heading for the Shelter, nothing more.

  “You on a break?” the girl asked Matthews, who held out faint hope she still might be a messenger.

  “Something like that. Waiting for someone.” Matthews vaguely recognized the face—Carmine? Caroline? Carley?

  “In this piss?” the girl asked.

  “Is it Carley?”

  “Yeah. You’re Matthews, right? The cop.”

  Word got around quickly. Her reputation as a cop could distance her from these girls forever. Or—it occurred to her a beat too late—was Carley testing that she had the right person for the message?

  “That’s right.”

  “Is it full?” she asked, pointing to the door. Sometimes the Shelter posted a volunteer out here at the entrance to notify late arrivals of the lack of occupancy. There was a sign that served the same purpose, but the girls rarely paid it much attention.

  For the first time in the last fifteen minutes, her earpiece mercifully went silent. The Com Officer had switched it off, both to allow her to think clearly and to ensure the suspect didn’t hear any ambient high-pitch chatter coming from it. Matthews hadn’t bothered to check inside, but she told the girl there were still beds available, her nerves on edge that Walker’s message was yet to come.

  “I didn’t know you smoked,” Carley said, mistaking Matthews’s electing to stand barely protected from the rain. “You’re okay, Miss Matthews.”

  Carley reached for the door handle—a large wrought-iron ring. Matthews stepped out of the way, asking, “Is there something you want to tell me?” Carley looked at her strangely. “A message from someone, maybe?” Matthews pressed.

  Carley paused, and Matthews could feel it coming. The girl hesitated, the door open now, and said, “Margaret got herself that place south of the Safe. Her and this other girl. Is that what you mean?”

  Margaret. Again, that same pang hit her in the chest. “Oh,” was all she managed to say. Carley stepped through the door, her footfalls on the stone receding into the basement enclave.

  The earpiece popped and Matthews heard dispatch stand down a number of the participants in the surveillance operation. These commands were nearly immediately followed by a male voice interrupting and identifying itself only as “Gray.” (With police radio codes a combination of numerals, operatives were given a variety of different “handles,” from animal names like Wolf and Dumbo, to nicknames like Sparky and Hooter, to colors of every kind.)

  “We got ourselves a cross-dresser, people. Heads-up. KCSO-eighty-nine is incoming from Yesler.”

  “Eighty-nine?” Matthews clarified, forgetting to try to cover her speaking for the sake of the mike.

  “Eight, nine, affirm,” Gray replied.

  CO dispatch: “Let’s run a check on that, South.” The instruction was back to Public Safety—the south precinct—and the SPD radio dispatcher monitoring the radio traffic. Normally the Commanding Officer would monitor from there as well, but she knew Boldt was more than likely in the command van.

  “Unnecessary,” Matthews said. She glanced toward the second level of the parking garage and the area where she knew LaMoia was sequestered, longing all of a sudden for some kind of contact with him, a sardonic turn of phrase, a comforting look, something to make this okay, because this did not feel okay. She allowed herself to believe she saw movement up there, at the back of one of the cars. Her imagination? She wondered.

  LaMoia’s voice came urgently from a handheld radio, through the dispatch communications and into her left ear. She allowed herself to believe he’d somehow sensed that longing she’d felt. “Listen, Decoy, he’s on bus detail over at SO. We know this for fact, right? So he could have made your ten-twenty in the course of the job. Do not jump to conclusions. You got it? Hang in there. Treat it as a right thing. Let the fish come to you. Acknowledge.”

  “Copy that,” she said, her fist to her mouth once again, slipping back into her role effortlessly. Why just the sound of his voice should calm her, she had no idea, but it had and she wasn’t asking any questions.

  Gray: “He’s pulling over. One block north on Yesler.”

  This struck her as odd, if this was the normal course of duty as LaMoia had suggested, but she endeavored to stay calm.

  CO dispatch: “Officer on foot, heading south. Decoy, he’s yours in five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . .”

  She picked up Prair’s large silhouette as he passed a hedgerow and walked into the parking lot on foot. He walked with his usual confidence, stiff spine, and military demeanor.

  “Lieutenant,” he said, avoiding use of her first name—a first.

  “Deputy Prair,” she said, for the sake of the tape recorders out there.

  An uneasy silence settled between them as he stepped up to her, only a few feet away. “What is it you want?” he asked.

  “What are you talking about?�
�� she said.

  “The message.”

  “What message?”

  “The message said you’d be waiting here at ten P.M., that you wanted to see me.”

  “You want to try again?”

  “I got the message, Lieutenant.”

  She said, “I don’t know what you mean, but you could start by explaining your presence at the end of my dock last night.”

  A gust of wind tossed her hair. Prair’s face tightened, and for the first time he glanced around, as if sensing the surveillance. The wind blew again, a mixture of rain and cold air this time, and as he reached out and moved her hair off her neck, a move that briefly terrified her, she realized he hadn’t sensed anything: He’d spotted the wire from the earpiece.

  “What the hell’s going on here? You got a thing going here?”

  “You stepped into that thing,” she said. “You squirreled it.”

  “I was told to meet you here.”

  “What is it with you, Deputy?

  “I . . . got . . . a . . . message, said you wanted to see me.”

  “A written message?” she asked.

  “Central took it while I was on patrol.”

  “I bet they did.”

  “Listen, Lieutenant—”

  “Save it,” Matthews said. “We’ll have a chat over at Public Safety, sort this all out.” Such were the instructions she received from dispatch through the earpiece.

  “I’m on ten minutes lost time,” he complained.

  “Well, we’ll make it an hour,” Matthews said.

  “I got a message. Check it out. Central will have a record of it coming in.”

  She stepped up to him, her anger rising. “You’ve got all the bases covered, don’t you?”

  He held up his hands like he wanted no part of it. “I don’t know what’s going down here, Lieutenant. But if I squirreled things, I was set up.”

  “Blue!” Boldt’s voice hollered over her earpiece. “Blue: Crash the nest. On my authority, you crash the nest right now!”