“We met outside of work,” Emma further explained. To Foreman she said, “And here I am with my hand on your heart.”
“Wish our situations were reversed.”
“It’s the medication loosening his tongue,” Emma said. “Next thing he’ll be proposing. Good part is, he won’t remember any of this.”
“Seriously?” Boldt asked.
“Doubtful. He’ll sleep soon, and when he wakes he’ll have lost most of the last few hours.”
“Good God.”
“Bullshit,” Foreman said. “I’m as clear as day.”
“Starting when?” Behind him Boldt heard the ambulance’s engine rev and a handful of half-assed cheers.
“I’ve got a vague recollection of thinking a dog had bit me, or a bee stung me. That’s about it.”
“A stakeout?” Boldt inquired. “A solo stakeout?”
“Budget cuts.”
“Meaning you will, or will not, share the identity of whoever it was you were watching in that trailer?”
“I’ll need a kiss before I can answer that.” Foreman added, “From her, not you.”
“Fat chance,” the medic said.
As they strapped Foreman into the stretcher, Boldt collected more bits and pieces: Foreman had gone off-radio while on duty, which had eventually caused his own people to go looking for him. BCI had called King County Sheriff, asking for a BOL— Be On Lookout. A patrol unit had found Foreman’s car—a brand new Cadillac Escalade—which had eventually led to discovering Foreman out cold in the bushes. Boldt was told the house trailer held “a good deal of blood evidence.”
While the EMTs loaded Foreman into the ambulance Boldt conducted a quick examination of the trailer. A tube-frame lawn chair in the center of the small living room looked to be the origin of most of the blood. The scarlet stairs radiated out like the spokes of a wheel. Dirty dishes filled the sink and the television was on, tuned to a rerun of Con Air.
The gloved forensics guy told Boldt the only thing they’d touched was the mute button on the remote. “The volume was deafening.” Boldt filed this away as important information.
Several pizza boxes were stacked on the counter, the cardboard oil-stained, indicating age. In the back bedroom, a room about eight by ten feet, he took in the unmade bed and clothes on the floor.
“We seem to be missing a body,” Boldt said.
KCSO CSU was stenciled across the back of the man’s white paper coveralls, the crime scene unit of the King County Sheriff’s Office.
Boldt repeated, “Do we have a body?”
The man turned around. He wore plastic safety glasses over a pinched face. “We’re told we have an earlier ID made on the possible victim by the surveillance team. One Peter Hayes. Male. Caucasian. Thirty-four. Our guy claims Hayes was observed inside this structure earlier this evening.” Boldt experienced a small stab of anxiety; he knew the name, yet couldn’t place it. Another unpleasant reminder of his being on the other side of forty.
“Your guy, or BCI’s guy? Are you talking about Agent Foreman?”
“We are. We do BCI’s forensics,” the technician clarified. Boldt had forgotten about the arrangement between BCI and the Sheriff’s Office. SPD had their own lab and field personnel.
The ambulance driver wouldn’t let Boldt ride along, so he followed in the Crown Vic. Once at the hospital, while they awaited processing, Boldt found himself a sugar-and-cream tea and joined Foreman in the emergency room. No one seemed in any great hurry to help.
“A pro job by the look of it,” Boldt said.
“Sounds like it.”
“Who’s Peter Hayes? And why is his name so familiar to me?”
“It’s a case we’re working.”
“We? Are you sure about that, Danny? Because I may have squirreled things for you there, without meaning to. I called your lieu on the way over here. He said they’d assigned CSU to your assault. He didn’t know anything about any stakeout, anything about a bloody trailer. You put CSU into that trailer when they showed up, Danny, didn’t you? This is before you lost your breath and went unconscious. Isn’t that right?”
“Hayes was paroled from Geiger four days ago. Two years in medium, two in minimum.”
“And someone wanted him more than you did. Why’s that?”
“Seventeen million reasons.”
The light finally went off in Boldt’s head. “He’s the guy—”
“That’s right.”
A wire fraud case involving Liz’s bank, six or seven years earlier. Seventeen million intercepted electronically. Not a penny recovered. “A Christmas party,” Boldt said.
“How’s that?”
“I met the guy, Hayes, at a Christmas party. For Liz’s bank.” Sparks firing on top of sparks. “You were with us at the time.”
“I was in my fifth year with Fraud. Yeah. Before Darlene’s illness. Before everything. Like eighteen-hour shifts for me.”
“It was wire fraud, right?”
“Fucking black hole is what it was.” Police used the term to define an unsolvable case. “We collared Hayes—by luck, mostly. We never recovered the software he used, and we never found the money. More important, we never uncovered whose money it was. We knew it was headed offshore, but it never got there. That means someone had seventeen million bucks he was willing to lose rather than identify himself. That’s what interested us.”
Boldt considered this and offered unsolicited advice. “A cop pulling an unauthorized stakeout on a guy who helped steal seventeen million dollars is going to get asked some questions, Danny.”
Foreman said nothing.
More of the case came back to Boldt. It had been a bad time for him and Liz. He remembered that especially. “So we put the bloodbath in the trailer down to the rightful owners of the seventeen mil coming after Hayes,” Boldt speculated.
Foreman changed the subject.
“We couldn’t prove the money ever left the bank. Bank figured it got deposited into some brokerage account, papered over by Hayes. Still inside the bank’s system. There, but not there. A real whiz kid, our Peter Hayes. A real wunderkind,” he said with the animosity of a scorned investigator. Boldt knew the feeling. “He was twenty-two at the time, and the bank had basically given him control over anything with a chip inside it. They even called him that: ‘Chip.’ His nickname.”
“Did you write this up? The stakeout?” Boldt brought it back to the here and now.
“No one in BCI gives a shit about a cold case like this. Ask around. I guarantee you this isn’t anywhere on SPD’s radar either.”
“Tell me you’re not pulling a Lone Ranger, because you know that’s how this is going to play.”
“Do I want the money? Yes. For me personally? Come on. This is about closing a black hole, nothing more.”
“And you think that’s how it’s going to play?” Boldt repeated. “What the hell were you thinking?”
“We connect the dots on this, Lou, it’s going to prove me out.”
“We?”
“You’re investigating my assault, right? SPD is in on this now.”
It almost sounded as if Foreman had planned it that way. He wouldn’t put it past him. “You took a dive in order to get a five-year-old embezzlement case reopened?”
“It’s not like that.”
Part of Boldt wanted to congratulate the man if this were the case. Any cop taking a hit, even a Lone Ranger, was certain to awaken the sleeping giant of the SPD bureaucracy. The other part of him didn’t want to give Foreman that kind of credit, didn’t want to see a friend misuse the system, didn’t want to believe the assault had been anything but a surprise to Danny Foreman. Most of all, he didn’t want to think that Danny had caused that bloodbath inside the trailer and then done damage to himself in order to cover it up.
“Remember, Lou, this was Liz’s bank. Still is, right? Tell me they don’t want their money back. Or maybe you don’t remember. I promise you Liz remembers.”
Boldt felt stung by t
he comment, and he wasn’t sure why. He remembered plenty. Just seeing Foreman’s face and hearing his voice triggered any number of memories. The cancer ward at University. Darlene Foreman’s funeral. A wake for her while Liz healed and grew stronger. A growing distance between them as Foreman stopped calling and stopped returning calls.
“What the hell happened to us?” Boldt asked.
“Liz lived,” Foreman answered, as if he’d been waiting to say this for years. And perhaps he had. “Resentment. Envy. Hang any name on it you want—that’s what happened. And I’m supposed to tell you I’m sorry, but I’m not. I still can’t bear the thought of being around you two. Throws me right back into all my shit. Seeing you now, it’s a good thing, don’t get me wrong. But not with her. Not the two of you. Not together. I feel cheated, Lou, and my guess is it’ll never go away.”
“You want me to pass this off to someone?” Boldt wanted nothing to do with the case, nothing to do with old wounds like these.
“It isn’t like that.”
“I’d offer LaMoia but he’s tied up in a seminar. Two weeks of counterterrorism.”
“Heaven help the enemy. Nah. My guys’ll take care of this in-house. I realize it falls within city limits, but cut us some slack and we’ll save you the paperwork.”
“That doesn’t sit right with me. You’re saying you don’t want me to open this up?” Was Foreman playing him? Taking it away so that Boldt would reach all the harder for it? And why was he suckering into it?
“It’s open now, isn’t it? I know how you are. Leave it be, Lou. Be a pal and pass it off to my guys.”
It still felt like an attempt at reverse psychology. The paperwork finally came through and Foreman was officially admitted. An X-ray orderly arrived to escort Foreman to the “photo booth.” Boldt stayed seated in the uncomfortable chair, a three-week-old copy of People magazine dog-eared in the Plexiglas rack, Stephen King looking at him sideways.
Boldt called out, “I’ll wait and see if you need a ride home.”
Foreman trundled off, his walk giving away the lingering effect of the drugs. Boldt felt a knot in his throat, still stunned that friendship could go so far wrong, guilty for getting all the breaks while Danny Foreman had gotten none.
He hunkered down for a long wait, thinking to call Liz so she didn’t wait up. Liz lived. Boldt heard the words echo around in his head. Like it was some kind of crime.
Contents
1. The Ride of a Lifetime
2. Of Mice and Spiders
3. The LaMoia
4. Bridge Over Troubled Waters
5. Pretty in Pink
6. Bowing to Buddha
7. Hide and Peep
8. Catch, As Catch Can
9. Room with a View
10. The Debt
11. A Drowning Is a Drowning, a Fall, a Fall
12. The Gift
13. Now You See Him, Now You Don’t
14. Old Friends, New Enemies
15. The Discovery Process
16. Voice Male
17. Two Peas in a Pod
18. Chumming
19. Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained
20. A Wallet and a Watch
21. Silhouettes
22. Knock, Knock. Who’s There?
23. If the Shoe Fits
24. Of Bridges and Badges
25. Buried History
26. The Hearing
27. Three Blocks North of Safety
28. Throwing the Net
29. Voices
30. Snuffing the Flame
31. Ancient Doors
32. Voices in the Dark
33. A New View of Things
34. Hitting the Wall
35. Running Blind
36. Misplaced Affection
37. Allie-Allie-in-Come-Free
38. Alone Again
39. Blurred Vision
40. Working the Room
41. Hatred of the Father
42. A Tight Leash
43. The Lineup
44. Boxed In
45. Magoo
46. Into the Dark
47. A Slippery Slope
48. The Door
49. Double Team
50. Without a Prair
51. Lost Time
52. A Good Shooting
53. Five Minutes from Prosperity
54. Circling the Drain
55. Darkness, My Old Friend . . .
56. The Tag
57. Another Level
58. The Offering
59. Chasing a Cry
60. A Matter of Trust
61. Seeing Double
62. Closing the Distance
63. Unzipping the Truth
64. Echo
65. Running Below Graves
66. Rotten Luck
67. A Dog in Sand
68. Faint Hope
69. Winning the Yes
70. Old Friends
71. Life’s No Picnic
The Art of Deception Page 41
