The Art of Deception

by Ridley Pearson

  “Payday,” she whispered, almost worshiping him now.

  “Who’s going to pass up a two-week paycheck? He wasn’t about to quit. I knew he’d be back when they told me he’d called in sick this morning. I mean, why bother otherwise?”

  “His four-one-one?”

  “All invented. No such address. No such phone. The security firm is going to fry: If they ran a background check, it was pitiful.”

  “Typical,” she said. “Big Mac’s inside?”

  “Mackenzie’s posing as a customer. We had to play it that way. Vanderhorst knows the layout, knows the normal personnel, including security and the tellers. We add someone to that mix and he’ll sniff it out.”

  “So—”

  But Boldt interrupted. “Heads up!”

  Boldt had his own image of Per Vanderhorst, both from the tour of the bank basement and from the man’s security ID photo. Neither matched up perfectly well with the lean, lanky, unhealthy silhouette of the man reflected in the mirror.

  Gaynes asked, “Do we have the confirm yet on the cash cards?”

  Never taking his eyes off the approaching suspect, Boldt said, “We now know that neither Hebringer nor Randolf received any cash from those machines. What we’re trying to determine is whether or not either of their cards ever logged on for the two days in question.”

  “They can do that?” she asked.

  “Supposedly any attempt, even a canceled session, registers with the system.”

  “He nabbed them before they ever got their money,” she suggested.

  “Who’s going to think anything of some guy in blue coveralls wearing a security tag on his chest pocket? He’s sweeping up the room. So what? They use their card to enter, turn toward one of the machines, and take his broomstick to the back of the head. He’s got them through that emergency exit door before they’re even half conscious.”

  “But it’s a glass room, Lieu. It’s a well-lit glass room.”

  “Guys like Vanderhorst, they thrive on that moment. Just ask Matthews. For those few seconds he’s dragging the body toward the door, he’s as high as he’s ever been.”

  “You creep me out sometimes, Lieu.”

  “No, not me, Bobbie. It’s them.” Boldt motioned her down, and slouched himself.

  She scootched down and reached for her door handle. “We grab him on the way out, or back up Big Mac, or what?”

  Vanderhorst paused ever so briefly in front of the bank and gave the block a once-over. He failed to make anything of the steam cleaning panel van across the street, the homeless guy with his guitar case open playing a horrible rendition of “This Land Is Your Land,” or the tall black woman walking the German shepherd, who was himself a member of the K-9 unit.

  “What the hell?” Gaynes asked, eyeing the mirror.

  “He just convinced himself it’s safe.”

  “That motherfucker’s got some loose screws, Lieutenant.”

  Boldt hoisted the radio’s handset. “All units: We play this exactly as I laid it out in Situation.”

  “Affirm,” came the voice of Dennis Schaefer from the steam cleaning van. Schaefer, a Special Ops dispatcher on the force, had the combined role of play-by-play sports broadcaster and team captain. It still left Boldt the coach.

  He plugged an earpiece jack into the radio and filled his right ear with its ear bud.

  The moment Vanderhorst entered the bank, Boldt and Gaynes headed directly to the ATM room, where Boldt swiped a borrowed card admitting them. He felt unusually warm as they passed through what was typically the alarmed exit door without a sound.

  He’d been advised that it would take Vanderhorst between three and ten minutes to both retrieve and cash his paycheck at the teller window. Boldt was told he could count on the maintenance man standing at the counter for that length of time. Mackenzie, at a stand-up check writing desk, would alert dispatch if actual events inside the bank varied from this.

  Boldt had assigned one uniformed officer to stand guard on the other side of the loose panel discovered in the bus tunnel’s emergency exit. He had another four uniforms at possible street-level exits suggested by Professor Babcock. He had radio cars forming a perimeter. The safe money said to pick up Vanderhorst the moment they had him confined. It was not like Boldt to play chances, but that’s what he had in mind, and Gaynes had clearly sensed this. If it went south on him, the review board would rule that he’d allowed personal pressures to influence his decision making, to dictate actions taken, to cloud his judgment. They would be right, of course, though he’d vehemently deny it. Susan Hebringer ran this operation by proxy. Once Vanderhorst was officially under arrest, statistics said that their chances of ever finding his victims were greatly reduced. Sometimes perps rolled over in interrogation. But with nothing but circumstantial evidence—an ATM receipt and some compromised blood evidence, with no clear way yet to connect the ATM room to the Underground, and, more important, to show Vanderhorst’s knowledge of that connection, Boldt could foresee Vanderhorst walking out of Public Safety a free man.

  He and Gaynes reached the bank’s second-floor offices winded. He knocked on a door marked PRIVATE and was welcomed a moment later by an attractive young woman in a smart gray suit and, beyond her, two men in private security garb manning a bank of five black-and-white television monitors, all of which were hardwired to hidden cameras.

  Each screen offered a variety of looks at various parts of the bank, including the main lobby, the ATM anteroom, and the downstairs hallway through which they had just passed.

  Gaynes asked Boldt, “Are you telling me we already have him on camera abducting these women?”

  “Twenty-four-hour loops are reused after seventy-two hours,” Boldt explained in whispered disappointment. “Long since erased.”

  “Yeah?” she said, gesturing toward the bank of monitors, “Well, we’ve got him now.”

  Vanderhorst stood at a teller window to the right of the large room, his back to the camera. Detective Frank Mackenzie maintained his position at the check writing counter, close to the main doors and the only exit to the streets.

  Boldt’s plan revolved around Mackenzie’s ability to deliberately slip up while attempting to act the part of undercover cop. Mackenzie, a big tree trunk of a man with seventeen years on the force, had been selected for this role in part because of his legendary reputation as a thespian. In the summers, he took time off to join the Ashland, Oregon, theater troupe responsible for that city’s Shakespeare festival. As a lieutenant and team leader, Boldt’s responsibility was to make the most of his assets.

  The screens lacked any sound, and so the commotion that followed on the bank’s main floor played out on the one television screen silently, making the action all the more eerie and disconnected. Boldt listened to SPD dispatch in his right ear, mentally dialing it into the background.

  “Can we hold on number four, please?” Boldt asked as he and Gaynes stepped closer.

  She whispered, “I’d rather be in the movie, than watching it.”

  “Stay tuned, we may be yet,” Boldt informed her. “First, we see how smart Vanderhorst is.” He lifted the handheld, tripped the TALK button, and issued the order he knew he’d be held responsible for: “Okay, let’s do it.”

  “Affirm.” Dispatcher Dennis Schaefer’s reply passed thinly through Boldt’s earpiece. Mackenzie was ordered to “lay the bait.” The rest of the team was put on high alert. Like most operations, after several hours of waiting, the real-time event was likely to play out in a matter of seconds or, at the most, a few minutes. For those few precious moments, disparate players, several city blocks away from each other, had to move, think, coordinate, and act in harmony. Anything less, and Vanderhorst was likely to escape. Denny Schaefer was the stage manager, but Lou Boldt was the playwright, and as such, he listened and watched carefully.

  On the small screen Frank Mackenzie unplugged his earpiece from his radio and then fiddled with a knob, turning up the volume.

  The mess
age from dispatch: “Suspect is in the building,” played over Boldt’s radio at the same time it did Big Mac’s— as planned. The message spilled into the bank lobby, turning heads.

  This was it. Boldt leaned in and watched. Vanderhorst, along with everyone else in the lobby, overheard Mackenzie’s radio. The suspect cocked his head slightly in that direction, but he did not overreact. His left hand pocketed the cash from his paycheck. Mackenzie did a convincing job of playing the buffoon. He dropped the radio, turned the volume back down, and tried to look like nothing had happened. He then took a couple obvious steps toward the entrance, clearly planting himself to block the main doors. A colorful sign there advertised the benefits of home equity loans.

  Vanderhorst abandoned the teller window and walked incredibly calmly, Boldt noted, toward the EMPLOYEES ONLY door that led into the back hallway. But Vanderhorst stopped at that door, studying Mackenzie, who had his back turned.

  Boldt spoke loudly into the crowded security room, “Open the door, Vanderhorst.” On the screen, Vanderhorst continued to look like he was weighing his options. “Through that door! Now!”

  Vanderhorst disobeyed, taking several steps toward Mackenzie and the bank’s main entrance.

  “We’re losing him!” Boldt shouted into his handheld.

  Denny Schaefer calmly instructed Mackenzie, “Phase two, Big Mac.”

  On the screen, Mackenzie spun on his heels, looked in the direction of Vanderhorst, and reached inside his sport jacket, revealing his holster and weapon.

  Crack the whip. Vanderhorst turned, shoved a key into the side door, and hurried through.

  “Okay!” an elated Boldt shouted much too loudly for the small room, “let’s do it like we talked about.”

  The guards busied themselves throwing switches, and the monitors displayed new views: the back hall, the ATM room, the stairs to the basement, and several angles of the basement itself.

  “Go . . . go . . . go!” Boldt shouted at the screen like an armchair quarterback. Into the radio’s microphone he shouted, “More pressure, more pressure!” as Vanderhorst paused in the hallway outside the door that led into the ATM room. Boldt didn’t want that door an option.

  Dispatch barked another order, and although the monitors had no sound, Boldt knew that Mackenzie was now pounding on that hallway door. Vanderhorst reacted in a mechanical, nervous way, looking first in that direction and then taking off down the hall and into the stairs leading to the basement.

  “Yes!” Boldt shouted excitedly. He grabbed Gaynes by the arm. “Get ready to run. You first. The basement.”

  “Copy,” she said, moving toward the security room’s door.

  Behind them, the image of Vanderhorst moved one monitor to the next, as if he were jumping from screen to screen. As he reached the last, with the flip of a switch, the monitors displayed several different views of the basement.

  Special Ops had added these cameras at Boldt’s request.

  Gaynes understood Boldt’s plan then for the first time. “You’re stinging him into showing us the way into the Underground,” she said.

  “We hope,” he answered.

  With that, as if instructed, Vanderhorst moved quickly across three of the screens and used a master switch to lower the elevator.

  Boldt mumbled, “Not possible. I checked that elevator myself and—” But he interrupted himself as Vanderhorst boarded the elevator, stepped inside, and—after a brief but unexpected monitor glitch that left Vanderhorst off-camera momentarily— keyed open a back panel on the elevator car intended for emergency evacuation.

  “Oh, shit,” Boldt barked, a police lieutenant who took pride in rarely swearing. Vanderhorst stepped through and pulled the elevator’s panel closed behind him.

  “Keys!” Boldt shouted at the security men, as if rehearsed, which it was not.

  One of the guards tossed him an enormous ring of keys, saying, “The small, silver one does the panel. The green dot does the elevator override.”

  Susan Hebringer had been pulled through that panel. Patricia Randolf before her. Boldt could see it play out, as if watching one of the monitors.

  Boldt and Gaynes took off at run, Boldt shouting instructions into a handheld that he knew would lose contact once he was underground. “Contact lost. Repeat, Wildhorse contact lost!” Dispatch copied. Boldt shouted, “We want him alive, people! For God’s sake, let’s take him alive.”

  46 Into the Dark

  Boldt and Gaynes descended the stairs two at a time, reaching the basement only seconds after they’d left the security room. At the most, Vanderhorst had a half minute lead on them.

  Boldt keyed the elevator open, then tossed the keys to Gaynes, who was first into the car. She keyed open the back panel as Boldt stepped through. “Sixty seconds,” Boldt said, checking his watch.

  They climbed through the open hole, descending a ladder of rebar that protruded from the chamber’s concrete wall. The space between the shaft’s wall and the car was narrow. Gaynes descended effortlessly, while Boldt had to flatten himself, his jacket hanging up on the car’s mechanics. The thick air smelled heavily of grease and electricity. Gaynes switched on a Maglite well before she reached the bottom rung, making the short leap to the shaft’s dirt floor. Boldt followed immediately behind her.

  “Lieu!” The Maglite’s beam revealed the inside of a cast-iron coal chute door about two feet square. A false wall of bricks had been stacked to create an illusion, from the Underground side, of an enclosed coal chute. Gaynes kicked down the dry stack, pushed the iron door open further, and squeezed through. Boldt followed, again straining to get his girth through the small space.

  Boldt heard a crackle in his earpiece, and the broken voice of Denny Schaefer as a few radio waves managed to briefly penetrate the depths. He couldn’t understand a word that was said: They were on their own.

  They stood in one of the dark underground hallways, vaguely familiar from the previous foray into the underground city block. Boldt used sign language to direct Gaynes, indicating that they would split up. She would take this hallway, Boldt would move south and search for another. Gaynes acknowledged. Boldt’s fists came together: They could reunite at the far end of the underground space.

  Boldt got his flashlight lit. Ninety seconds had elapsed since they’d lost Vanderhorst.

  They heard a crash in the distance—wood and then glass. Too far away to discern someone running.

  Boldt took off into the dark, through a huge, empty room. He found a second hallway and turned left, his mind searching for explanations for that noise. Certainly Vanderhorst, if their man, would know this city block of the Underground intimately, an area the size of several football fields. So what, or who, had made that noise—and was it worth following? Boldt slopped through mud and debris, believing that by then Gaynes would be passing close to the lair. She would take a few seconds to inspect it. In that time, Boldt found himself at the end of the hall.

  He took the door to the right, into and through a former barbershop, the beam of light catching his own reflection in the dusty mirrors, still intact. He jumped back from his own reflected image, stumbled over a barber chair, and fell down, the chair noisily spinning on rusted joints. Boldt clambered to his feet, dodged debris on his way out yet another door, and found himself in a section of Underground sidewalk he hadn’t seen on his earlier exploration. The sidewalk was caved in ahead, choked with earth and stone, reminding him how fragile an environment this was. He took the first doorway to his left that he encountered, working his way judiciously through a room filled with discarded washing machines and tooling equipment that had to go back forty years.

  Through this door he reached another short hallway, and up ahead a tangle of yellow police tape. He paused here, aware this had been what he’d heard only moments before—Vanderhorst had been tripped up by one of their yellow tapes. Blood beat loudly in his ears, his mouth dry, his body damp with sweat. He thought of his promises to Liz to stay behind the desk, of his kids and their
bright faces. But then in his mind’s eye he saw Susan Hebringer’s unconscious body being dragged down this hallway, a face now attached to the man dragging her, and he inched forward, following the unmistakable sound, an uneven scraping—something dragging—through a door to his right.

  He followed that sound, careful of his own footfalls. He’s limping. Vanderhorst had hurt himself in the fall caused by the crime scene tape. Boldt moved more quickly, seizing the opportunity, aware all of a sudden of footfalls approaching rapidly from his left. Gaynes. He cupped the flashlight. This was the horror house in the amusement park, where goblins and witches and skeletons jumped out at you. Boldt braced himself for surprise, his nerves electric with anticipation.

  He crossed through to a smaller room, fully covering the flashlight’s lens with his fingers and issuing darkness. He could smell the man now—the sour human fear. He’s close.

  He heard the whoosh to his left, and credited his sensitive hearing with sparing him the blow. As he ducked, a piece of lumber cut just above his head, and that promise to Liz loomed all the more clearly. He slipped his fingers off the flashlight, and the beam swiped the side of Vanderhorst’s face like the slice of a sword. Boldt saw fear and determination. He saw what Susan Hebringer would have seen as she’d come awake in captivity. The timber caught Boldt in the gut on its return.

  Boldt bent over and fell back, but kicked out mightily as he went down, connecting with the side of the man’s knee and causing Vanderhorst to cry out as he careened into a shelf of rusted paint cans and spilled them in a waterfall of tin to the floor. Vanderhorst clawed and picked his way through the debris to the far end of the room, delivered a chair through what remained of a window, and was following through himself when Boldt got a hand on him. He pulled the man back, so that Vanderhorst’s head and shoulders struck the floor. Boldt swung a paint can and struck the man in the head. The lid popped off, a thick red sludge melting down the side of Vanderhorst’s face and shoulder, looking like fresh blood.