Trying to reach Boldt in his office, but missing him, Matthews took twenty minutes of lost time to walk a letter of appeal addressed to Social Services the block and a half over to the King County Courthouse, in hopes that Mahoney could read it and advise her on its legality. Her request to Social Services was for that agency to approve her personally assuming a temporary guardianship of Margaret (“last name to be determined”). If successful, she hoped to shepherd the girl through the birth of the baby, attempting to eventually place her in a state-sponsored program for teen mothers. A long shot, she went through with it anyway, explaining her situation and leaving the letter with Mahoney. She was determined to help this girl, come hell or high water. News that Margaret had taken a room south of the Safe did little to make Matthews feel better—that room had to be paid for; the neighborhood was lousy; the employment opportunities for near-delivery-date pregnant teens seemed slim. Intervention seemed the best way to protect the mother and child.
Returning from the courthouse, Matthews tried her best not to think about Walker out there watching for her, or the surveillance team assigned to look for him—all of this focus on her—but instead to remain focused on Margaret, and someone else’s needs.
Eradicating Walker from her thoughts proved a little like trying to talk oneself into falling asleep. Only the idea of rescuing Margaret provided the necessary distraction.
It surprised her to spot Boldt’s back as he entered a Seattle’s Best Coffee just north of Public Safety. She’d been under the impression he’d been down with Bernie Lofgrin looking at the prelim on the underground lair. That meeting was either over, or yet to come, and she decided to go ask which, in case she could join him for it.
She paused, alone at the corner, waiting for the pedestrian light.
“You . . . ruined . . . my . . . life.” The deep male voice came from behind her, and the sound of it nearly dropped her to her knees. She saw herself stabbed and bleeding out on the street corner, traffic passing by, oblivious.
She thought of the lavaliere microphone she’d clipped to her bra that same morning, the fact that somewhere, someone had just listened to her appeal to Mahoney for Margaret’s rescue. She tried to speak, to raise the alarm, but as he took her shoulders and spun her around, no words came out. She raised her arms defensively, expecting a blow, a wound. She saw the man’s face, recognized it even, but it wasn’t whom she’d expected, and her brain malfunctioned because of this.
It was the guy who’d stopped to “help” her outside Safeco Field. They’d brought him in for questioning.
“Mr. Hollie,” she sputtered. “Take your hands off me!”
But he grabbed her wrist as she reached for her purse, and he bruised her in his grip.
My John Lennon moment, she thought, wondering if a handgun was next, marveling at the irony that her focus for the past several days had been incorrectly on Ferrell Walker.
“What did I ever do to you?”
She heard the emotion in his voice, strangely on the edge of tears, and welcomed it—self-pity was easier to work with than anger—believing she had a decent chance at salvaging the situation. In the back of her brain a little voice reminded her that Boldt would by now be hearing over his radio that she was “in need of backup,” that he’d be coming out of that coffee shop any moment. Another part of her realized that she’d wanted to be rescued for years, that this was part of the attraction to LaMoia. And then the next thought that rattled through her brain at that moment was that she was in fact attracted to LaMoia, and this dumbfounded her. Her mouth went dry. Her head throbbed. She looked around for help. “This isn’t the place,” she said dryly. If she could keep him talking, if she could buy time, she might diffuse his purpose, whatever it was. The terror she felt at that moment was the culmination of all the pent-up fear associated with Walker.
“I stopped to help you, you ungrateful bitch!” The change in tone alarmed her.
“You’re angry.” The absolute wrong thing to say. She knew it the moment it left her lips.
“Angry? Is that what I am? It made the evening news, the morning paper. My name! I lost my job. My neighbors dumped their trash at my door.” He stepped back, arms dangling limply at his side. “Angry?”
She tracked his right hand as it moved slowly into the pocket of the trench coat. Then, movement to her right. Boldt, oblivious to traffic, his weapon drawn. A car braked, narrowly avoiding hitting him.
Movement shifted into an eerie slow motion, an awkward street ballet choreographed for a mugging gone south. She knew well enough that no matter how fast one reacts, the blade or the bullet always reaches the victim unexpectedly fast. She also knew that 99 percent of mugging victims reacted defensively and afraid.
Matthews said, “You don’t want to do this!” Then she lowered her right shoulder and charged into him, struggling to get her purse open at the same time.
Boldt shouted something about “Hands over your head,” though it existed only ephemerally for her—a drone in the buzz behind her. The purse slipped off her shoulder, falling to the sidewalk, its contents lost. From all around her, a convergence of special assignment officers. She felt them running toward her. Heard the chaos over the handheld radios.
She leaned her weight into the center of Hollie’s chest, just below his sternum, and drove into the unforgiving stone edifice of Public Safety, knocking the wind out of him. She would not be a victim. She would not succumb to the fear. She screamed with the move, part aggression, part reaction, backed off the pressure, and then slammed into his chest a second time. A bone cracked beneath her effort. Hollie groaned as he gasped and sank to the sidewalk.
She lifted her knee into his crotch as he went down—sharply, like a move in step aerobics. Boldt pulled her away and tackled her, covering her, just as two undercover officers arrived. He lay on top of her, his face filled with rage.
She witnessed Boldt’s thought process as he realized she was all right and took appraisal of Hollie. He rolled off her and came to his knees.
Hollie’s hand was yanked out of his coat pocket on its way to a handcuff. A piece of paper rose like a bird, fluttered, and returned to earth.
Not a gun, after all, but his eviction notice. The weapon she had feared was nothing but a piece of paper.
Boldt was walking her around to the front of the building when her cell phone rang from within her purse. He’d offered to have her join him at the lab for Lofgrin’s report on the Underground, but she didn’t feel up to it. She wanted her office. A cup of tea.
Her phone’s caller-ID displayed: PAY PHONE #122.
“Hello?” she answered, pressing the phone to her ear.
“I wouldn’t have let anything happen to you. You know that, don’t you?” Her throat constricted. The voice was too breathy to identify. Purposefully difficult to identify, she thought.
She stopped abruptly and Boldt clearly sensed the dread that washed through her.
“P-a-y p-h-o-n-e . . . WALKER?” she mouthed, looking in all directions at once. She mouthed the word “pay phone” again and held up her fingers: one, two, two.
Boldt grabbed for his own phone, speed-dialed a number, and turned away from Matthews so he wouldn’t be overheard. “Boldt. I need the location of pay phone one twenty-two, one-two-two. I’ll hold.”
The breathless voice continued in her ear, “Tell your friend they don’t need to worry about you. You’re in good hands.”
“Who is this?” she asked calmly.
“I won’t let anything happen to you.” The phone went dead.
She spotted a pair of pay phones down on Third.
But Boldt pointed in the opposite direction, up to the corner of Fourth Avenue. “There!” he said, still waiting for identification from dispatch.
Matthews followed his outstretched arm to where a man hung up a pay phone receiver and stepped away from the open booth.
“Oh my God,” Boldt gasped, as the man’s face could be seen.
It was Lanny Neal.
He turned his back on them and disappeared at a leisurely pace around Fourth Avenue.
Boldt took a step in that direction, but Matthews snagged him by the arm. “What, Lou?”
“It’s Neal!”
She agreed: It had looked like him.
“He had my cell phone number? Do we really think so? Are we sure? Where’s the foul?” she added, slipping into LaMoia’s vernacular. Little pieces of him rubbing off on her—she’d have to watch that.
Boldt broke loose of her grip.
“There’s no crime, Lou! It’s a phone call is all. Besides, that guy—if it was Neal—hung up too late. My guy had already disconnected.”
“We don’t know that,” Boldt argued. He stopped, two paces into the street, his ear pressed to the phone. His head spun around sharply, and she thought he was looking at her, but more likely he was receiving confusing directions. He then turned back and crossed the hill toward that empty pay phone at a near run. “Which corner?” she heard him say into the phone. “Give me the compass point! North . . . south . . . what?”
“I think it was Walker,” she said, blurting it out, keeping up as they crossed through traffic. “Psychologically, it fits perfectly for Walker.” Was he even listening to her? she wondered.
He called over his shoulder. “You’re telling me that Neal being at a pay phone is coincidence?” The word, so distasteful to him, barely came off his lips. He kept the phone pressed to his ear.
“It was Walker,” she repeated, this time more convincingly. “The protective role fits him perfectly. It’s the last logical step, Lou, before—” but she cut herself off, slipped through two parked cars, and joined him on the opposite sidewalk. She didn’t want him hearing what she was thinking.
“Before what?” Boldt climbed the hill, leaning toward the far street corner like Blue straining at his leash.
She didn’t answer. He glared at her.
Traffic noise and a ferry’s horn filled the resulting silence.
“What?” Boldt barked angrily into the phone. He caught Matthews’s attention and shook a pointed finger at the street corner diagonally across from them. Based on the Neal look-alike—or had it been Lanny Neal? she wondered—they’d crossed to the wrong set of phones.
Boldt snagged the com-radio and rattled off the coordinates of the pay phone: “Suspect spotted on southeast corner of Fourth and Columbia! Pursue and detain!” With the streetlight green and the resulting traffic, which included a tall delivery truck, they hadn’t spotted Walker, but that was Boldt, she thought— he trusted the system more than any other cop.
A pair of patrol cars and three plainclothed officers converged on the street corner, seemingly out of thin air. Over the rooftops of vehicles, Ferrell Walker was seen running three steps before throwing his hands over his head and leaning up to the chain-link fence of a construction site. Pedestrians collected like bluebottle flies on a corpse.
“Abduction,” Boldt said, supplying the word Matthews had avoided.
They met eyes. Matthews found it impossible to speak.
44 Boxed In
“She betrayed me,” Walker said to LaMoia across the interrogation table in the Box.
“Where have you been?” LaMoia asked flippantly. “She’s a woman, Walker. Get used to it.”
The edge of the table carried the regimented brown larvae of cigarette burns despite the NO SMOKING sign on the wall. A cassette machine ran two tapes recording simultaneously. Two yellow pads. Two pencils.
Dressed in an orange county jail jumpsuit, Walker looked older and in a bad way. She and Boldt observed this initial exchange from the other side of the one-way glass in the narrow, dark closet that served as the observation booth. Boldt explained apologetically how he had to take the meeting with Lofgrin. “That skeleton key came back clean,” he told her, “but he’s got the prelim on the Underground for me—I was due down there a half hour ago—and he’s got this set of high-level meetings later on that he can’t beg out of.”
“John can handle it, Lou. He’s one of the best. We’re fine.” She didn’t take her eyes off Walker.
“We’re the best—you and I,” he said. But it sounded to her more like he was testing her, even fishing for a compliment. “Interrogations, I’m talking about.”
She knew perfectly well what he was talking about. Jealousy belied his intentions. She broke her attention off the Box for the first time, met eyes with Boldt, and said again, “We’re fine here.”
Boldt nodded, though in such a reserved fashion he might as well have shook his head no instead.
“We’re running both audio and video, Lou. You won’t miss a thing.” He would miss it, of course, but she couldn’t bring herself to care.
“We’re holding him overnight,” Boldt said.
“I think it could be a mistake,” she said.
“He threatened you.”
“Yes, but listen, a teakettle is one kind of threat, Lou. All that boiling water inside . .. but you spill it out, and that’s a different kind of hot. We tip this guy over . . . we don’t know what’s going to happen.” Again, she wondered who was doing the talking. Her eyes left Walker and settled on the other guy across from him. It was time she took a hotel room. She felt discouraged, even sad. Walker consumed by grief, Boldt by jealousy, she with her fear—and LaMoia with his resolute calm. She envied him that, and hoped her face didn’t reveal her thoughts.
“It’s harassment. We can make that stick for twenty-four hours, which gives us time to pursue a court order to get his clothes down to SID.”
“You don’t really think he’s the one living in the lair, do you? You honestly think the hairs and fibers on his clothes are going to come back for that? For Chen?”
They entered into a staring contest, neither about to back down.
She said softly, “I know you think you’re helping, Lou, and I love you for it. But not this guy. Not this way.”
He never broke the eye contact. “Well,” he said hesitantly, “I guess I’m out of here, then.”
“Bye,” she said, lifting her hand in a half wave, her full attention back on that room. She heard him leave and felt relief and wondered what was going on between them. Was she using him, thriving on his confusion over her and LaMoia? If so, to what end?
“Let’s get down to brass tacks,” she heard LaMoia say, his voice made nasal by the small speaker.
She thought it impossible, but Walker looked another ten years older all of a sudden, probably the result of the tube lighting—inkwells beneath both eyes, a pasty bluish tone to facial skin stretched by a self-imposed starvation. He hardly moved in the chair, and when he spoke it was with a controlled calm that troubled her, leaving her wondering what they’d gotten themselves into. Who was running whom?
“My father used to say that,” Walker said. He directed himself to the pane of glass that inside the Box was a large mirror. “Is she listening? Are you there, Daphne?”
“Hey!” LaMoia fired off, trying to win Walker’s attention but failing.
“I’m so disappointed in you,” Walker said.
She felt her stomach turn. He seemed to know exactly where she was standing. She moved to her left, his eyes seemed to follow. It was an uncanny display of empathetic behavior.
“Tell me about the skeleton key,” LaMoia said.
Walker continued to stare at the mirror—at her.
“Hey!” LaMoia reprimanded for a second time, “I’m talking to you.” He stood and came around the table.
Walker’s head jerked up to intercept the man. “You lay a finger on me, and this is in the hands of the lawyers.”
It stopped LaMoia like he’d hit an invisible shield. “You’ve been watching too much Court TV.”
“Uh-huh,” Walker said, fixated on the mirror again, “in all my free time at the country club.”
“A comedian?” LaMoia asked.
“That’s me,” Walker answered. He spoke more loudly, “Tell him, Daphne.”
“Her part of the
deal was putting Neal into that lineup. Your part was the key . . . but a key needs a door.”
“I don’t know anything about any key,” Walker said— deliberately unconvincingly?—bending to look past LaMoia, who attempted to block the man’s view of the mirror, “but I’m sure you’ll figure it out.” He looked up into LaMoia’s eyes. “You don’t need my help with everything, do you?”
“I don’t need your help with anything,” LaMoia snapped. “You’ve got that turned around, friend.”
“The deal was to put Neal away. He gets put away, maybe you find that door.”
“It could work the other way,” LaMoia proposed.
“Could it, you think?” Walker asked.
“It’s a two-way street.”
“Is it?” Walker let the animal loose then. He bared his teeth, his eyes rolling white into the back of his head, his neck a fan of tight wires from jaw to collarbone. “We . . . had . . . a . . . deal!” he screamed, actually driving LaMoia back a step.
His raw voice distorted the observation booth’s small speaker.
Spittle dripped down his chin. He wiped it off on his shirtsleeve. He had never taken his eyes off Matthews, reconnected now by LaMoia’s movement.
LaMoia said, “We get this thing right without you, and you’re buried.”
“Nice choice of words, Detective. Tell him, Daphne.”
“You’re a fucking freak show,” LaMoia said, approaching Walker once again. He leaned in closely and said, “You leave her out of this, Walker. It’s me you’ve got to worry about.”
Keeping his eyes directly on her, not on LaMoia, Walker said, “She wants out of this, she’s out of this. Simple as pie. Mary-Ann wanted out, and look what happened to her.” He found LaMoia again, back on track, a sail filling with wind. “Look what Neal did to her.”
LaMoia said, “The church has doors that take skeleton keys. The church at the Shelter. We’re checking that entire section of Underground as we speak.” He repeated, “We solve it without you—”
The Art of Deception Page 29
