The Art of Deception

by Ridley Pearson

  The batteries were dying, and her chance of escape along with them. If she was going to use that piece of glass on him, it had to be soon.

  “Then tell me about the other accident—Mary-Ann’s accident.”

  He said, “You like everything neat and tidy. Shipshape. But it doesn’t always work out that way. We’re going to have plenty of time to talk, Daphne.” He actually smiled. “There’s light at the end of the tunnel. You’ll see.”

  More likely a boat at the end of the tunnel. Something he’d scouted already. Steal the boat, make for the open sea. Fishermen could stay weeks, even months, at sea. The thought paralyzed her. They’ll never find me.

  62 Closing the Distance

  I’ll never find her, LaMoia thought to himself as he faced a bend in the tunnel, its floor covered in a sloppy mud that made tracking difficult if not impossible. For all he knew the prints he was following were sixty years old. But then, the moment he had this thought, he spotted a cluster of prints up ahead, like a group of pigs had stirred the mud.

  He caught his foot at the very last second, his heel connecting with the packed dirt, toe about to rock forward—a sense of dread, like a soldier about to step on a land mine. He moved his foot cautiously and trained his light into the chips of broken glass where a tiny piece of gold sparkled back at him. A second later, he stood holding her earring. I’m right behind you, he caught himself thinking. Hang tough.

  As he closed the distance toward that disturbed area of tunnel floor he picked up the enormous wash to his left, a hole cut out of the wall. Another tunnel? he wondered. An exit back up to the surface, or into another storm sewer?

  He slipped his pistol out of its holster beneath the deerskin and quickly chambered a round. “I’m armed,” he called out, but only loud enough to carry a few yards. He contained the flashlight beneath the pistol, took three long strides, and extending both the weapon and the light, lit up the hole.

  “Jesus Christ.” His stomach turned in shock at the sight of the headless deputy. It took him a moment to even locate the head lying on its side and identify it as Prair’s.

  He caught himself thinking as both a cop and a psychologist. This, too, surprised him. Escalation. Walker had sacrificed Prair for her—this he knew with all certainty. Killing the man would have been one thing; decapitation signaled a quantum shift, a different paradigm. He checked the cell phone reception yet another time—still nothing. He tried the phone’s “radio” function. Dead as well.

  Standing perfectly still as he was, he picked up the faint sound of voices. Like an insect in a dark room. He couldn’t clearly identify its direction. He took a step forward, then back. He turned around, trying a different ear.

  He left Prair behind him, back in that hole. Good riddance.

  North! He had it now. Then it faded again and he couldn’t be sure if he’d had it at all. But yes. There. A woman’s voice, no question about it. Closer than he thought. He moved quickly toward that sound, staying to the edge of the narrow tunnel and out of the slop in its center, moving as quietly as possible.

  It was all he could do to contain himself, to keep from shouting out her name.

  63 Unzipping the Truth

  The consumptive darkness played tricks on her equilibrium, making her dizzy. Walker directed her down to her hands and knees and they crawled under a pair of pipes that bisected the tunnel. As she stood, he pushed her forward and held her to the muddy floor. He shined the yellow light into her eyes.

  “She fell,” he said. “That’s all it was: an accident.”

  “An accident?” she asked. “You ran her over, Ferrell. Help me through that.”

  Still straddling her, his eyes went distant and he shook his head violently. In doing so, he gave her the opening she needed, but she didn’t take it—couldn’t take it. She needed the answers. He spoke so fast, so softly that she could hardly keep up. “She pushed me . . . shouldn’t have done that . . . went off the fire escape . . . thought she was dead down there . . . had to move her . . . the car. That key . . . the back axle.”

  “You had to move her,” she repeated, directing his focus for her own gain. “That makes sense.”

  “I backed it up to get her. She was dead. And there she was .. . sitting up like that all of a sudden.” His voice trailed off, and she knew he was completely consumed in the memory. “She’d say I pushed her. But it wasn’t like that. I told her to get away from me, but she wouldn’t. She smelled .. . of him .. . of it.”

  “Like the boat,” Matthews allowed.

  Walker lowered his head and looked out the top of his eyes at her. He nodded.

  “When I saw her sitting up like that . . . I knew what I had to do.”

  “All this,” she said softly, “everything you’ve told me, it’s all understandable.” She left out any discussion of Nathan Prair. “Let me help you—not like Mary-Ann had planned. Not like that at all.”

  The flashlight dimmed. It had only minutes left. To attempt an escape in the dark was unthinkable. Instinctively, she shifted the grip of her right hand, exposing the glass and its razor-sharp edge.

  She pushed up to one elbow. It had to be now! She wanted tears in his eyes, his vision blurred. She needed to work him like a lump of clay. “She loved you very much, Ferrell. No matter what happened between her and Neal it never came close to what you gave her. She wanted to help you because she loved you. Why else would she have kept trying the way she did?”

  His face tightened.

  “And you loved her too, didn’t you?”

  Walker’s shoulders shook. “No one knows how much,” he said hoarsely.

  The jaundice of the flashlight painted him in a milky light as he flexed his legs to stand. That was the distraction she’d waited for.

  Her left hand stole the flashlight from his right, a look of astonishment overcoming him. With her right hand she pulled the curving piece of glass from collarbone to navel, like trying to open a stuck zipper.

  Locked in disbelief as much as physical shock, Walker looked down at the wound as if it belonged to someone else. In doing so, he unintentionally protected his throat as her second effort failed. The glass cut his neck below his ear, but only superficially. Walker reared back, stumbled, fell to one arm, and then lifted himself to standing. He screamed like a wild animal.

  Matthews struggled to her feet and ran, the light blinking on and off in her hand.

  To her astonishment, she heard him clomping along, right behind her.

  64 Echo

  When Boldt heard the scream, it came so faintly that he might have mistaken it for something from the street far overhead had it not been for his musical ears. Had it not been for his heightened senses caused by being confined in a damp earthen grave.

  “You hear that?” he asked Babcock.

  “No . . . what?”

  “Behind us,” Boldt said, turning and aiming his flashlight past her.

  She turned to look back as well, as if they might see something more than earth and rotten timbers.

  “We’re going in the wrong direction.”

  “But the city . . . the Underground . . . it has to be this way.”

  “We’re going the wrong way,” he said, pushing past her and starting off in the opposite direction.

  Babcock stood her ground, allowing him to pass. “You’re making a mistake.”

  Boldt called back to her, “It’s mine to make.”

  With that, she hurried to catch up to him.

  65 Running Below Graves

  LaMoia had a cop’s eye, a cop’s nose, and a cop’s instincts, but he had the heart of a man, and when the faint voices he’d been following stopped abruptly—one now clearly a woman’s—he feared he’d lost her.

  He abandoned his effort at stealth, charging up the tunnel at a reckless speed given his hunched posture. No witticism filled his head longing to escape his lips, no wisecrack; he was briefly all muscle, adrenaline, and determination.

  Feelings for others often reveal th
emselves in strange ways. It took a tunnel, the stench of death, and dying voices to illuminate his heart’s unwilling truth: Her life was precious. She was to be saved at all costs.

  The tunnel looked ready to come down in places, the century-old railroad ties bulging under the weight and pressure of a city built atop them. He passed through sections of warmth and then cold, of foul odors followed by none at all. Graves were dug shallower than this. He was running below graves.

  A wall of pipes up ahead briefly appeared to seal off passage, and he thought, to have come all this way only to find it blocked. But as he approached, the light revealed the illusion—there was plenty of room to duck beneath the lowest.

  Tucking himself through this space, LaMoia heard a scream—a man’s scream—a scream that was the result of physical pain, not anger.

  And then, the wet slop of running. Not one person, but two, the detective ascertained. Not toward him, but away. From himself? he wondered. Had Walker seen the beam of his flashlight, heard his approach?

  Or was it, more likely, Matthews running away from Walker, as that scream he’d just heard might suggest? He broke into a sprint, tempted to call out but afraid of giving himself away.

  When his halogen bulb caught the blood-red rag and the jagged piece of glass it contained, he didn’t cringe but warmed with hope. Was Walker clever enough for that? He thought not. Had Walker severed a head with a piece of glass? He thought not.

  She’d tricked him. Goddamn it—she’d tricked him!

  66 Rotten Luck

  A fantail of the faint yellow light indicated either a sharp turn up ahead or the tunnel’s dead end. Her mind stuck on that thought: dead end. Had Walker ever intended to kill her, or only to present her with the body of Nathan Prair as his “peace offering”? Had she brought all this upon herself by going for Prair’s gun?

  Her next thought was that Walker, cut badly and desperate, had purposefully allowed her to charge ahead because he knew she was boxing herself in. At once, the flashlight failed. Shaking it did nothing to revive it. She worked off the last image she’d seen, now fading off her retina like a projector’s bulb going dim. A pile of debris a few yards ahead and to her right. Walker, too, had slowed, the moment the light died, probably suspecting a trap. She eased ahead, hands stretched in front of her. Slowly the absolute black lost a tiny amount of its edge. A faint amount of light was coming from somewhere up ahead—not yet enough to see by, but enough to give her hope.

  She knelt and felt around and formed her fingers around a brick. Holding it tightly, she turned and pressed her back against the cold mud wall alongside what she felt to be the post of a rotting, crumbling, vertical railroad tie.

  No means of death frightened her more than the idea of being buried alive. She tried to slow her breath to hear better, but the blood pounding in her ears blotted out all sound.

  She could imagine him approaching but could not see him or sense him. Her eyes adjusted further and she could make out the silhouette of the post she hid against. Light meant air. Air meant the surface.

  Accidentally leaning some weight against the post caused a chunk to break loose. It fell to the floor, and with it, some dirt rained down from the tunnel roof.

  Walker lunged out of the total darkness, misled by the faint light, and stabbed his fishing knife into the soft post. Dirt and debris cascaded down on both of them as Matthews cried out and jumped back, her feet catching on another pile of debris. She went down hard, falling backward, her hands groping to cushion the fall, her head striking yet another post. A large chunk of mud fell into her lap, followed by a volley of rocks. Walker staggered toward her, seen only as a looming shape—a dark mass. She swung the brick at his head with the force of a tennis serve, but it impacted his shoulder as he, too, tripped over that pile of debris. She swung again and clipped him squarely in the ear, and separated a piece of his scalp.

  “Fuck!” he shouted, his reaction time much faster than seemed possible as the knife flashed in the darkness and she felt her left forearm burn. He cut her again, higher on the arm.

  He staggered forward, and she delivered the brick again, but his eyes had adjusted, and he careened out of the way, falling against the wall, smashing into another post with enough force to dislodge it. An overhead beam cracked loudly, spraying splinters and chunks of wood. It swung down toward the wall as if hinged and slammed into Walker, knocking him back and pinning him half standing. He fought to get it off him as Matthews heard it—a sound she understood before its effects were felt.

  She took two steps backward but was stopped by sight of a flashlight beam. It appeared out of the darkness, well beyond Walker, who broke the fallen beam and shoved it to the side.

  “Matthews!”

  John! She burst into tears at the sound of his voice. She yelled a warning only seconds before the ceiling caved in, earth and wood and rock, like water from a burst dam. She dived back, rolled, came to her feet, and scrambled away, the ceiling disintegrating. Looking back, she lost sight of LaMoia and his light as the earthen roof rained down.

  She screamed again for him, but the world came down as if a dump truck had dropped its load from above. The fantail of light she’d seen ahead was suddenly a beam, and then a spotlight, and then the sky, as the collapsing tunnel ripped open a section of street or alley. As fast as she could scramble, the debris filled in around her and under her. It briefly overcame her, winning the race, covering her, burying her. She dug out frantically, gasping for air, struggling for purchase, then suddenly lifted by a giant wave of moving earth. She climbed, slipped, and ripped her way toward the crest of the wave. As it broke and settled, reversing its direction, sucking her back down, Matthews clawed out and grabbed hold, a moment later finding herself dangling, clinging to a buried pipe and a lattice of tangled wires.

  Air. Lights.

  Behind her, below her, was nothing but dirt, and mud, and asphalt, and wires and broken pipe, all formed in a giant V pointing down from where she’d come.

  No other voices. No other sign of life.

  67 A Dog in Sand

  Boldt and Babcock reached the back end of the cave-in only minutes after it had happened, his radio miraculously sparking back to life seconds before a plume of dust billowed down the tunnel and briefly overcame them. Dispatch called a general alarm over the radio that an officer was down, buried in a cave-in. An address was called out. Babcock, reading a GPS in hand, said to Boldt, “That’s us.”

  Then, from somewhere ahead, they heard the sound of rock against rock. Someone was digging!

  Believing Matthews buried, Boldt dived into the pile and started tossing anything large enough to grab. Babcock called him off, condemned him for nearly burying them as well, and instructed him to carefully remove the larger debris and only from the tunnel’s very edge—to stay below the cover of an overhead beam whenever possible. By directing him in a controlled and determined manner, she saved John LaMoia’s life.

  When they reached him, LaMoia was frantically digging in the wrong direction—into the collapse. Boldt seized his legs and pulled. LaMoia gasped for air, retched, and coughed. Dazed and disoriented, he would not stop digging—as frantic as a dog on a beach.

  Again Boldt pulled at the man’s legs, finally stopping him. “John! Daffy!” he shouted.

  “I saw her,” LaMoia said, returning to his chaotic digging. “Saw her!” He turned his mud-caked face toward Boldt and shouted manically, “Help me!” as he once again clawed into the pile, pathetic in his determination.

  Over the radio, a male voice: “Shield nine-twenty is ten-forty-five-A, en route to Harborview.” Boldt heard it: 10-45A— Condition of Patient Is Good.

  LaMoia heard this too, and finally stopped digging. Boldt held the man by the ankles, in an attempt to drag him out of there. They met eyes in the light of Babcock’s flashlight. Something communicated between them, as it can only communicate between two men who love the same woman.

  “Nine-twenty,” LaMoia breathed, the white of hi
s teeth showing behind a smile. Her.

  “Yeah,” Boldt said. “I heard.”

  68 Faint Hope

  As two male nurses rushed Matthews through Emergency into a curtained stall where blue-clad physicians awaited her, Matthews asked, “Was there a girl . . . a pregnant girl . . . ?”

  One of them aimed a small light into her eyes and pulled at her forehead, stretching and lifting her eyelids. She blinked furiously.

  “You’re in Harborview Medical Center’s emergency room,” a man’s voice reported calmly.

  She took the doc by his surgical scrubs and pulled his face down to hers. “A girl . . . a knife wound . . . pregnant.”

  The doctor separated himself, barked a few orders for injections, and then checked with his nurse, a gentle-eyed black woman. This nurse shook her head gravely at the doctor while eyeing Matthews. “She didn’t make it. I’m sorry.”

  “The baby?” Matthews asked. Someone pricked her skin with a needle. She winced. The clear plastic tubing of an IV rig was quickly untangled. A fluid dripped, followed by a warm wave of relaxation and peace. A sedative. The feeling threatened to consume her.

  “We’re going to stitch you up,” she heard the doctor say. “We’ve given you something to help with pain.”

  “The baby?” she whispered at the nurse.

  The nurse leaned into her, her face suddenly much more gentle. “They were going to try to deliver the baby postmortem.”

  She could barely keep her eyes open. Sleep pulled her down. But she managed to reach out and find the nurse’s hand. The woman leaned in closely. Matthews said, “LaMoia . . . police officer . . . is he okay?”

  The woman looked at her with soft eyes. “Rest,” she said peacefully.

  “No drugs,” Matthews said.

  “It’s just something to relax you.”