The Art of Deception

by Ridley Pearson

  The stairway entrance to the apartments was outside the take-out door and to the left. She glanced across the street to where Gaynes had parked the car. In theory, Gaynes was making every attempt to raise Prair. Matthews bootlegged her weapon on the way up the dingy and dirty stairwell, choking on the smell of urine. In situations like this—tenement busts—it was surprise that cost cops their lives. Reaction time proved longer than the thought process. Twelve-year-olds with water pistols took a bullet.

  The upstairs hallway was empty and dimly lit. Either her man downstairs had cleared the area, or she’d gotten lucky. The gun felt an inappropriate way to greet Margaret, but it wouldn’t feel right in the handbag, either. She let it fall to her side and knocked. “Margaret, it’s me,” she announced. Either that registered or not, she wasn’t calling out any more details.

  She heard footsteps approaching the door and found herself relieved that Margaret could walk, was not prone on the bed delivering the baby prematurely. For this had been her most recent thought: contractions. Margaret about to give birth.

  “Just a minute.” The sound of the girl’s voice filled Matthews with gratitude. She resolved not to abandon her, to stay with her until whatever was the problem was fully resolved.

  She heard a pair of locks come off the door. She felt herself grip the handgun more tightly and braced herself for bloodshot eyes, jaundiced skin, the girl’s water having broken—whatever terror she next confronted. The apartment door came open. She’d been crying, her face blotchy, her nose running, her cheeks silver with tears. She wore torn leggings, a loose dress from Goodwill. She trembled head to toe with fever, her forehead beaded with perspiration. Or maybe it was toxic shock or a reaction to some drug she’d taken. The girl could not bring herself to look at Matthews, eyes downcast. Embarrassed, Matthews thought.

  A combination of horror, sympathy, and righteous indignation charged her system, and again she promised to see this through. Hebringer and Randolf were dead—they could wait awhile. This girl still had a chance.

  “It’s okay,” Matthews said. The door fell fully open. She peeked through the crack before stepping inside. The room was empty. “You did the right thing in calling me.”

  “I don’t know about that.”

  The sad, cheerless room was barely bigger than a bathroom stall. Soiled sheets covered a thin mattress on a steel-framed bed. If three women lived here, they shared that bed, nearly on top of each other. A corner sink housed a faucet that dripped, a teardrop of green patina below. The toilet had to be down the hall. A wooden closet bar sat across the corner diagonally holding a handful of empty wire hangers. The room’s only window looked barely big enough for egress. The room smelled of girls, of mildew, and of sweat, all overpowered by the nauseating aroma of tomato sauce and something burning.

  Margaret sat down, paralyzed on the edge of the bed. She began crying again. “I’m so sorry,” she moaned, repeating it over and over.

  Matthews secured the weapon and stored it in her purse. She eased down alongside of the girl. Matthews said, “Well . . . it’s good to see you’ve got a roof over your head.”

  Matthews heard footsteps out in the hall draw closer. She experienced a jolt of heat like hormones gone bad. Margaret looked up, struggled to sober up, her eyes clearly fixing onto Matthews as she whispered hoarsely, “He said he’d kill the baby.”

  “Who—?” But in that instance, Matthews felt her eyes refocus on a tiny hole freshly drilled through the room’s side wall. The plaster’s white dust had settled on the floor like a tiny pile of snow. She rotated her head toward the door. Unlocked! She realized the oversight too late. She’d answered her own question: a fisherman. The department had hung her out as bait for Walker, but he’d baited her instead. Despite her earlier planning for this possibility, the minute or two with Margaret had pushed all that aside.

  Ferrell Walker came through the door, catching Matthews flat-footed and a beat behind. She grabbed for her purse, but his knife severed the leather strap and it fell to the floor, where he kicked it away. The knife was familiar. The curved blade a deceptive dull gray from hours of hand sharpening.

  Suddenly the door was shut and Margaret in his grip, the knife held below her bulging belly.

  “Who’s the friend in the Ford?” he asked, the first words out of his mouth. He leaned forward, cheek to cheek with Margaret. “She betrayed you,” he said. “Just like she betrayed me.” He met eyes with Matthews as he took Margaret in a choke hold, the knife suddenly at her belly. If he used it, she’d come open like a piece of ripe fruit.

  “They have me under surveillance,” she said. Rule number one: Never lie in a hostage situation. For the sake of Bobbie Gaynes, monitoring her every word, she added hastily, “Put the knife down, Ferrell.”

  He backed up to the window and glanced furtively outside. “Shit! Call her off.” Below him, no doubt, Gaynes was already on the move.

  “How do I do that, Ferrell?” Matthews asked, stalling. She pointed to the door. “Should I go out—”

  “YOU CALL HER OFF!” He tightened his grip on Margaret, pulling the knife lower.

  “My purse. My cell phone,” Matthews said.

  Walker eyed the purse on the floor . . . back to Matthews . . . the door to the room . . . out the window.

  She was thinking that peepers don’t kill and that Walker was clearly a peeper from the Underground, a person satisfied with phone harassment, a grief-stricken lost soul who’d lost his way. Only then did she notice what looked like fresh blood on the man’s sneakers and the bottoms of his pants. Only then did she realize she’d played this wrong.

  He said, “So we give them something to keep them busy.” With that, he dragged the knife across Margaret’s belly, muffling her cry with his left hand, and let her sag to the floor in a pool of the impossible.

  Matthews screamed out and charged, but took the butt end of the knife in the forehead and her lights dimmed. As she struggled up to consciousness, she felt him pulling on her arms, dragging her across the floor. Margaret’s crimson cry huddled beneath the window, the fingers of her right hand dancing like a typist’s in an erratic, bloodless twitch.

  “You son of a bitch,” she groaned as she threw up just outside the door. Walker pulled her to her feet and pushed her. She stumbled forward down the hall, leading the way. “She’ll bleed out,” she said, trusting Gaynes to hear. “Where’s this hallway lead?” Again, for the sake of the microphones.

  He pressed the point of the knife into her back, and she felt it cut through her skin. “What’s that blood on your clothes?” she asked. “Did you harm Lanny Neal?” She hoped to hell Gaynes was getting this. Her vision blurred, but she tried to keep watch for the detective, tried to prepare to make a move that would allow a shot. With his next shove, Walker encountered the bulge of metal hardware taped to her back. His arm suddenly came around her throat as he tore the device loose, wires and all, and smashed it under his right heel. The shirt of LaMoia’s that she wore ripped from her armpit to her waist.

  This was not the Ferrell Walker she had ever expected. The psychologist in her looked for the telltales she’d missed, the source of the violence he displayed. Twice now he’d mentioned her betrayal of him. He’d made that connection between Mary-Ann and her—both “leaving him” for someone else. LaMoia, in her case. A spark of dread filled her as she realized she’d warned LaMoia and Boldt of this very event—her abduction. So here it was, nothing like she’d imagined it.

  He pushed her again, and she wobbled forward on unsteady legs.

  They were two steps down the slanting staircase when a winded Gaynes rounded the landing. Without hesitation, as if he’d practiced this a hundred times, he let go of Matthews, shoving her off balance so that she tumbled down the stairs, knocking into Gaynes like a bowling ball chasing a pin. Gaynes, two-handing her weapon during her ascent, aimed the gun low and swiveled to avoid Matthews, but went down hard. Walker, showing no interest in the gun, kicked it away and then smashed his f
oot down on the detective’s wrists, first the right, then the left. He dropped a knee squarely onto her chest, seized her by the hair, and smashed her skull down onto the flooring, rendering her unconscious. This was a man who could pin a squirming four-hundred-pound halibut.

  He dragged Matthews by the arms until she scrambled to walk under her own power, her legs riddled with splinters. He led her to and through a door that opened up on the back side of the building, where a kid in a white apron smeared with tomato sauce leaned against the brick smoking a joint. That apron reminded Matthews of the first time she’d met Ferrell Walker. It seemed like a year ago now. Hopefully, she thought, not a lifetime ago.

  “Get the fuck out of here,” Walker said, making no attempt to disguise his holding Matthews captive.

  The kid mumbled “Fuck off” as he snubbed the joint and rolled to his right, turning his back on them. A street assault was nothing new to him.

  Walker stopped her at the corner, peering out into the mostly deserted street. A pair of delivery trucks lumbered past. He slipped the bloodied knife away with the expertise of a swordsman, held her firmly by the arm, and said, “You stay close, or I feed you to the crabs.” He fought with her as he led her across the street. In regaining her feet, in being set into motion, she awoke from the stupor brought on by Margaret’s evisceration. It was one thing to respond to crime, quite another to witness it, this act of his catching her squarely in the crosshairs. She understood in those few hurried moments of crossing the street, of heading down yet another litter-strewn alley, that her very survival depended on her ability to quickly and accurately pinpoint Walker’s mind-set, the motivations and factors that had turned him from a benign mourner into an unpredictable, homicidal killer. Some trigger had been thrown, and she believed her continued existence turned on her ability to identify it, expose it, and manipulate it to her advantage.

  As if hearing her internal thoughts, he turned to her halfway down the alley and said with wild eyes, “Don’t worry, you’re going to like this.”

  That made her worry all the more.

  They stopped in front of a steel-plate manhole marked SWD—Seattle Water Department. Walker retrieved a crude tool fashioned from bent rebar that he’d hidden behind a pile of soggy cardboard boxes. The reinforcing rod was bent like a giant meat hook. He instructed Matthews to sit down on the pavement, and she obeyed, ill prepared to try to outrun the man. He slipped the hook end of the bent rod through a ventilation hole in the manhole cover and hoisted the heavy lid. It came off the exposed hole with a rattle of metal. As he did so, she used the cover of the noise to reach behind her, grope down her backside, and tear loose the small tag inside her panties. She let it fall onto the pavement. Leave them crumbs, she thought, her cop’s mind beginning to separate from her personal emotions.

  A flicker of light swept through the looming darkness that seemed to overwhelm her at that moment. She was letting him win without intending it. She said to him, “We found the room, Ferrell. The bodies. We know all about it.” She saw disappointment crease his face—she’d guessed the contents of the gift before allowing him to unwrap it for her.

  He told her to get to her feet. He pointed down the black hole in the pavement. “Ladies first,” he said.

  54 Circling the Drain

  The early reports of the situation were sketchy at best, and Boldt tried not to overreact. His tendency, when hearing one officer was down and another missing, was to assume the best while preparing for the worst. The job rarely involved much good news, and he’d developed a fairly thick skin, but one learned not to creatively interpret a simple radio code.

  That this call involved members of his own unit—one a protégé and friend, the other his friend and former lover—proved the exception to the rule. He fell to pieces with the news. Monitoring the tense radio traffic, he determined that ambulances were headed to the scene. Reports included a woman—quite possibly a civilian—badly cut and bleeding out. The pit in his stomach grew to nausea as he caught himself hoping that the vic was a civilian, a line he had no right to cross.

  He rushed down the hall to the men’s room, the nausea escalating to where he felt his stomach preparing to void. In all his years on the job he’d never vomited over an earful of radio traffic.

  He put out the fire with a dose of cold water to the face, and it worked. The nausea receded into a world of anger and frustration. What the hell had Daphne been thinking? She’d skipped out of Public Safety without notifying Special Ops. In a gust of ill temper, he slammed his palms down onto the sink with such force that he knocked the entire fixture off the wall. Water sprayed from broken pipes. Boldt jumped back, as the ceramic sink broke into several chunks that echoed as a small explosion.

  Detective Gerald Millhouse rushed into the room fearing he’d be calling the bomb squad. “Shit, Boss. I’d thought we’d lost you.”

  Boldt moved back and away from the encroaching flood of water on the tile floor. He heard Millhouse and knew well enough he should respond, but instead he found himself locked into a trance as he watched that floor water coil in waves as it formed an ever-tightening spiral and slipped down the floor drain.

  Inevitably, you overlook the obvious, he thought, recalling the clichéd line lectured to all rookie detectives. It was a Boldt version of Murphy’s Law that he’d seen in action more times than he liked.

  “Lieutenant?” It was Millhouse again, trying to win his attention.

  Boldt flushed crimson with embarrassment, not over his having broken a sink, but for having overlooked the simple law of gravity.

  His instruction to Millhouse was oblique, for his mind was working too quickly to form a perfect sentence. “Dr. Sandra Babcock, Archaeology Department at the U.” He racked his brain for the name of the bus tunnel maintenance man. Couldn’t find it. Then, there it was. “And a Chuck Iberson over at WS-DOT . . . Third Avenue bus tunnel maintenance. Find them both and get them over here to the Pioneer Square station, A-SAP. No tears.”

  Millhouse lowered his voice and said tentatively, “But Boss, you heard about Matthews and Gaynes, right?”

  “You’ll be chalking tires if those two aren’t in that bus tunnel in ten minutes,” Boldt replied matter-of-factly.

  Millhouse fled the men’s room in a panic.

  Boldt fought to keep emotion out of the decision-making process, fought the urge to fly down the fire stairs, climb into the Crown Vic, and race to the crime scene. He put the victims first, and one of them was missing. An extremely important one.

  The water, collected on the floor, kept “circling the drain,” police-speak for all hope being lost. But Boldt knew he wasn’t lost at all—he’d just found the missing piece to the puzzle.

  55 Darkness, My Old Friend . . .

  The space—an old tunnel of some sort—was wet, dark, and cramped. They had reached it fairly quickly by following a city storm sewer north a good several blocks. Walker had removed a large grate mounted in the side of the storm sewer and pushed her through. Matthews now walked hunched over, stepping sometimes through gooey mud, sometimes ankle-deep in extremely cold water. It smelled of earth and loam and vaguely of the sea. She paid little or no attention at all to the slimy objects in her path, which to her spoke volumes of the more pressing need to find a way out of this situation, for normally she would have reeled at the tangled contact with cobwebs and the awful sensation of the disgusting, unseen objects sucking past her bare ankles.

  Walker remained behind her, egging her on with sharp jabs of his fingers in the small of her back, the first few of which she had thought were the knife. She had long since lost all sense of direction. His small flashlight provided the only light—it amounted to her shifting shadow stretching long and thin on the tunnel’s earthen walls.

  Somewhere behind and above them lay Margaret with her abdomen sliced open and Gaynes, unconscious. A by-the-book detective, Gaynes would have called in a “510” requesting backup before she moved on the building. By now, Matthews could assume t
hat backup was already on the scene. Lou would have been consulted. John would have been informed. A controlled but professional panic was sweeping through Public Safety, and she was the focus of it all. She had to stall Walker in order to buy herself time. She had to get to the surface. She possessed the facilities to accomplish both goals, as long as she kept herself collected and focused. The mind tended to jump almost randomly from one thought to another in such situations—the professional in her was very much aware of this. She needed focus. She needed clear, linear thought.

  The floor of the tunnel dried to packed earth—they were on dirt now. At first she thought the crunching beneath her feet was gravel or rock. She encountered areas like this every twenty yards or so; there was no predicting when, or how much. Then she realized it was crushing under her footfalls, not merely shifting as gravel might. The dirt floor suddenly sparkled to life, a thousand jewels, and she realized they were walking atop broken glass—broken bottles, to be more accurate—the smugglers’ tunnel.

  With no idea where she was headed, she nonetheless knew where she was, and this tiny seed of knowledge strengthened her, emboldened her to begin the task of breaking him down, piece by piece.

  “This is kind of fun,” she said strongly, gathering in her strength and forcing it out her lungs. When the flashlight flickered away from her, she dropped a gold stud earring onto the dirt floor. Another crumb, she hoped.

  Walker stumbled behind her, and she mentally marked one down in her column. The first of such marks. Hopefully, not the last.

  56 The Tag

  LaMoia stared at the rear bumper of KCSO patrol car #89, the phalanx of police and emergency vehicles only a block behind him. The pregnant girl was critical. Gaynes was conscious but in extreme pain, and was being carted off to Emergency. At that moment, he might have believed Nathan Prair had abducted Matthews, except for Gaynes having told him it was Walker. Now he came to believe the obvious: that Prair had either responded to the same cry for help from the girl that Matthews had received, or that he’d intercepted the 510, the SPD radio call for backup, and had responded in hopes of rescuing Matthews himself.