The First Victim lbadm-6

by Ridley Pearson

  ‘‘I understand.’’

  ‘‘Hang in there.’’

  ‘‘Right.’’

  As the sun crawled into a slate gray sky looking like a bug light held behind a curtain, three men pushed a step van out onto their surveillance point to avoid having to run the van’s motor and risk its being overheard. LaMoia and two technicians climbed into the back of that van, dog-tired, hungry and humiliated. They took turns with twenty-minute catnaps, but nothing helped LaMoia. Failure was the worst kind of fatigue.

  The barren spit of land with its rough gravel and broken glass was littered with the skeletons of commercial fishing equipment: buoys, engine parts, booms, cranks, winches and miles of coiled and damaged fishing net wound onto enormous spools. Water slapped against a sea wall of boulders, chunks of former roadway and the rusting carcasses of dead automobiles and railroad boxcars. The seawater, a murky green, moved like mercury. A light but steady breeze colored the air with a salty ocean spray.

  At 6:00 A.M. that Wednesday morning, LaMoia received word over the radio that they had trouble at the gate. He slipped out the back of the van wondering when the trouble would stop. Every time he turned around there was a screwup or a problem.

  The problem this time was a rent-a-cop with a company called Collier Security. He wore a gray-blue uniform with a can of pepper spray where on a cop the gun would have been. The Collier logo on the arm patch tried too hard to look like SPD’s. The name badge pinned over the right pocket read Stilwill.

  ‘‘Mr. Stilwill, what’s the problem?’’ an exhausted and agitated LaMoia inquired.

  ‘‘What I’m telling the officer here is that I got me a job to do, Lieutenant.’’

  ‘‘Sergeant,’’ LaMoia corrected.

  ‘‘Cops or not, you can’t be here on this property without the owners knowing about it.’’

  ‘‘We will handle notification,’’ LaMoia assured him. ‘‘For the time being it would be whole lot better for everyone if you just continued your rounds. Forget about us. We aren’t here. That would save us all a trip downtown and a lot of lawyering.’’

  ‘‘Yeah, but like, you can’t be in here. See? It’s private property. And the equipment on it is private property. You got a warrant?’’

  ‘‘I’ve got probable cause. This is an active investigation,’’ LaMoia said dryly, his patience running thin. ‘‘You have a clear choice here, Stilwill. It’s your call to make, right or wrong.’’

  Detective Heiman crossed the road from an unmarked car and hurried over to LaMoia. Out of breath, he spoke a little too loudly for the situation. ‘‘Port Authority has six freighters scheduled for arrival over the next twenty-four hours. Three of them listing Hong Kong last port of call.’’

  ‘‘Give me a minute here, Detective,’’ LaMoia said, well aware the security man had overheard.

  Stilwill looked out over the water and clearly took note of the cranes. ‘‘That container thing?’’ he asked. ‘‘You’re on that container thing?’’

  ‘‘It’s an undercover surveillance operation, Mr. Stilwill,’’ LaMoia explained, avoiding a direct answer. ‘‘You want me to say good things about you, you’ll just pick up and move on. ’Cause otherwise I’m gonna rain down shit on your parade so deep you’ll drown in it.’’

  Stilwill glanced around nervously, outnumbered.

  ‘‘What you need to do,’’ LaMoia repeated, ‘‘is move on and forget about this. Are you listening, Mr. Stilwill?’’

  ‘‘I hear ya,’’ he said, his attention remaining on the view of the naval yard. ‘‘That over there has been deserted for years. Ain’t never seen nothing over there. Where’d that flatbed come from anyway?’’

  ‘‘You need to think about our little situation here.’’

  ‘‘What situation?’’ Stilwill asked, intentionally naive, offering LaMoia a shit-eating grin.

  ‘‘That’s better,’’ LaMoia said, but inside he didn’t trust the man.

  WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 216 DAYS MISSING

  CHAPTER 61

  Early Wednesday morning, Live-7, second in ratings to Channel Four news, led off its Morning Report quoting a ‘‘reliable source’’ that ‘‘police are involved in a massive surveillance operation directly linked to the illegals investigation.’’

  The report infuriated everyone from Sheila Hill, upset over the apparent leak, to Jimmy Corwin, annoyed that KSTV had been scooped by the competition. Adam Talmadge complained vehemently through legal channels that the INS had not been informed of, nor included in, any such surveillance.

  By 8:30 that morning, the trailing network affiliate identified security guard Clarence Stilwill as the source of the information. On the ‘‘advice of attorneys’’ Stilwill was in hiding, and unavailable for comment.

  KVOW, public radio, reported not only that a possible suspect had been lost during the surveillance but that the King County medical examiner’s preliminary autopsy report on the most recent Hilltop Cemetery cadaver, ‘‘Jill Doe,’’ was due out that same day and was said to contain additional information pertaining to the illegals investigation.

  Political shock waves ran through the system as denial upon denial was issued, no-comment upon no-comment echoed through the media and filtered down to coffee shops and the office copy room. Melissa Chow’s disappearance and possible abduction had become an emotionally charged issue stumped by would-be politicians running for office in November, and as word spread that police were possibly closing in on the people behind it, the radio talk shows buzzed with various leaks.

  Boldt and LaMoia felt this pressure on both professional and personal levels. They were told to stop the leaks and solve the case. Sheila Hill summed it up for them both, ‘‘Get us something in time for the six o’clock news that will make both the mayor and the PA look good, something to feed the beast and satiate it. If you can’t come up with something, I’m going to feed them your reassignments, gentlemen, so don’t take this lightly.’’

  Their pagers sounding, Boldt and LaMoia left Hill’s office and headed directly to the ME’s basement offices in the Harborview Medical Clinic. The bear of a man led them with huge, hurried strides into his office and closed the doors.

  ‘‘I don’t know where that leak came from,’’ he apologized, ‘‘but if Ifind out, that person will never work again. Not ever! Not anywhere!’’ Not a man to lose his temper, this particular Ronald Dixon was a rare sight.

  ‘‘I thought you said it was the leaks you wanted to talk to us about,’’ Boldt complained. Although LaMoia was scheduled to return to the naval yard surveillance, there had been no activity at the location since Rodriguez’s escape. ‘‘As you can imagine, John and I are a little busy this morning, Dixie.’’

  ‘‘No, not leaks like that. .’’ Dixon corrected, losing his anger to a smile. ‘‘Leeks!’’ he said. ‘‘The kind you eat.’’

  ‘‘Leeks,’’ LaMoia repeated.

  ‘‘Exactly,’’ said the medical examiner.

  ‘‘Exactly what?’’ Boldt asked.

  ‘‘Jill Doe,’’ Dixon answered. ‘‘It’s always the first victim,’’ he ruminated. ‘‘The mistakes, the haste.’’

  ‘‘What mistakes?’’ Boldt answered.

  Pointing to Boldt, Dixon said to LaMoia, ‘‘Take lessons from him. He’s the best there is. Knows when to interrupt and what to ask. Knows when to keep his mouth shut and let a man talk.’’ He looked at Boldt. ‘‘So let me talk.’’ He moved to behind the security of his large gunmetal gray desk. ‘‘They froze her, same as Jane. But they had more time. They froze her hard. . solid, and I’m guessing they forgot to take that chain off ahead of time, so that by the time they realized, if they realized, it was still attached, they had little choice but to leave it there. They then buried her over ten feet deep in relatively cool soil, a week, maybe even two or three ahead of Jane Doe. You see where I’m going with this?’’

  ‘‘She stayed frozen,’’ Boldt guessed.

  ‘‘Gold star. For a whi
le. Yes. And that helped not only preserve her, but severely retard her decomposition.’’

  ‘‘She stayed frozen down there?’’ LaMoia asked.

  ‘‘Are you listening? No, she didn’t. But she was in forty-degree soil. Her extremities thawed first, followed by the epidermis in general. The heat moved from both ends toward the center like defrosting a leg of lamb. But you know how long that takes: You put a twenty-pound turkey or a six-pound leg of lamb on a seventy-degree kitchen counter and it takes all day-sometimes longer-to defrost. Try putting it inside a forty-degree refrigerator! You pull it out the next day, the thing has barely begun to thaw. Now try it with a hundred-andseventeen pound human being-’’

  ‘‘Pass,’’ LaMoia said. ‘‘Do we learn anything from all this fascinating detail?’’ he quipped.

  Dixon said sadly, ‘‘In other ways, you’re more like him every day.’’

  ‘‘The Cliff Notes, Dixie,’’ Boldt said.

  ‘‘Stomach contents relatively intact. Plenty of organic matter to work with.’’

  Boldt wondered if he’d wasted his morning.

  Dixon continued. ‘‘Did it occur to either of you brilliant investigators that if these people have a hundred women locked up sewing polarfleece pullovers for a dime a day, they still need some way to feed them?’’ He grinned widely. ‘‘Ah, ha! I can see it did not! No, you overlooked the obvious, did you not? So locked, like me, into the dead-the dead evidence, the dead witnesses, the dead ends, that you never extrapolated the situation out to the obvious: These women have to eat. And this woman, Jill Doe, did eat. Not only did she eat, but she ate a tuberous root, an edible bulb, similar to our own leek. She also apparently consumed brown rice. But it’s this leek that interests you, this leek that’s the best evidence you’ve had in this case. Asian, and not sold in your typical Safeway if the few phone calls we’ve made are any indication. We can’t find one for comparison.’’

  ‘‘Asian groceries,’’ Boldt muttered, stung by this information.

  LaMoia followed suit. ‘‘Mama Lu is the Asian grocery queen. What do you want to bet that she has the contract to provide the food for these people? That’s how she knows so much about it and yet isn’t directly involved to where she has to fear us.’’

  ‘‘A humble businesswoman,’’ Boldt repeated at a whisper. ‘‘She kept flaunting it right under my nose.’’

  CHAPTER 62

  "Ms. McNeal, it’s Roy,’’ a familiar but unidentifiable voice said over her cellphone. Stevie was more interested in the ice cream she had ordered from room service than the phone call. ‘‘Roy?’’

  ‘‘Traffic?’’ the man inquired, identifying himself.

  Chopper Roy they called him. Drive-time traffic reports for both the morning news and N4@5. Once she made the connection, the voice was all the more recognizable.

  ‘‘Yes, Roy.’’

  ‘‘Station gave me your cell number. Hope you don’t mind. I thought you’d want to hear this.’’

  ‘‘Hear what?’’ She sat forward on the couch and pushed the ice cream aside, her heart beginning to beat more strongly in her chest. What was the traffic guy calling about?

  ‘‘Friend of mine, Sam Haber, works over to the FBO, handles Seven’s SkyCam.’’

  Channel Seven, he meant. The competition. She didn’t like this already.

  ‘‘Their chopper. Yeah. Sam does their maintenance. Also does their outfitting. Calls about canceling a Mariners game we had planned on account Seven has him outfitting their bird with some high-tech infrared shit that has something to do with hunting down a ship. Tonight, we’re talking about. He overhears one of the guys with the gear saying they’re going to scoop us on our story on account the cops have been asking all sorts of questions at Port Authority. Thought you ought to know.’’

  ‘‘A ship,’’ she repeated, scribbling down notes on a white linen napkin. ‘‘Our own story.’’

  ‘‘Scooping our own story. Yeah.’’

  ‘‘Know anything about this gear?’’

  ‘‘Only that it’s not standard issue. Ultrasensitive infrared. Sam said some professor type from the university was the one installing it. They had to black out the hangar to even pull the lens cap and test the gear-it’s that sensitive. Daylight will fry the thing. Guy blew up at Sam over opening a door because of the light. Pissed Sam off, I’ll tell you what. If he hadn’t, maybe Sam wouldn’t have told me. Sam’s kinda like that: doesn’t like someone shouting at him, you know?’’

  ‘‘They’re hunting down a container ship,’’ she stated. ‘‘Is there any way we can mess them up on this?’’

  ‘‘Does the Pope shit in the woods?’’ the helicopter pilot replied.

  ‘‘Get the bird ready.’’

  ‘‘She’s being refueled as we speak.’’

  As Stevie was about to hang up she was trying to think of some way to lose her various guards and surveillance. ‘‘Roy,’’ she asked, ‘‘are there any downtown buildings where you can land on the roof?’’

  ‘‘Can you get over to Columbia SeaFirst?’’

  ‘‘Give me a number where I can reach you,’’ she said. ‘‘I’ll call from there.’’

  CHAPTER 63

  LaMoia was not above circumventing existing law to get what he needed, but he did so only by working with detectives willing to forgo overtime pay and to keep silent about their actions. Chief among these was Bobbie Gaynes, so fiercely loyal to Boldt that she had no problem with the assignment to place a federal agent under round-theclock surveillance despite the fact that any such surveillance required special notification. It was nothing new for LaMoia-coming up through the ranks his nickname had been Stretch, for how he dealt with the law. Everyone wanted what LaMoia could get for them- snitches, bank accounts, tax records-but not one of them wanted to know the details. It was okay with him; it helped perpetuate the myth, and the myth was now what defined him. The Myth. It controlled him as well, dictating his actions, and he knew that couldn’t last forever. He moved through women like a drunk through booze-in part to maintain that image. He drove fast and lived that way, too. But the wax, melting from both ends, shrank ever smaller, and John LaMoia identified with it more clearly every day.

  LaMoia had no physical evidence against Brian Coughlie, only a deep-rooted suspicion prompted by a number of unexplained coincidences. Without evidence, he had no case to build. But as a point of law, it was not explicitly illegal for any person to follow or watch any other person, so long as the person being watched did not feel threatened or have his or her expectation of privacy violated. Washington State did have a tough stalker law in place, but it required certain criteria to be met that Gaynes and LaMoia avoided without any effort whatsoever.

  Gaynes called from a pay phone in order to avoid the open airwaves of cellular telephones and the lurid intentions of police radio-band scanners. LaMoia and Gaynes maintained a relationship of respect-at-a-distance, his womanizing so legendary that she skillfully avoided him; her investigative abilities and position in Boldt’s inner circle crucial to his squad’s all-important high clearance rate. They rarely played politics with each other and never socialized.

  ‘‘Go ahead,’’ LaMoia acknowledged, having moved into the passenger seat of the surveillance van still parked with a view of the naval yard. Despite the media blitz earlier in the day, as far as LaMoia and others could determine, the press had yet to cotton on to the actual physical location of the naval yard surveillance.

  ‘‘I think I lost him.’’

  ‘‘Lost him?’’

  ‘‘That’s what I said,’’ she fired back angrily. ‘‘He parked it and went into City Hall,’’ she reported.

  ‘‘City Hall?’’

  ‘‘That’s what I said,’’ she repeated. ‘‘It’s been half an hour. I’m thinking he burned me. Must have gone out a different door. Left his car.’’

  ‘‘You tell Sarge?’’

  ‘‘You’re lead,’’ she reminded.

  LaMoia d
idn’t feel like the lead detective. He wasn’t sure he ever would. And he didn’t know if that was because of Boldt, or his own personality. He had followed in the man’s footsteps for too long to give it up. Only that past year when Boldt had worked Intelligence had LaMoia felt like his own man. But now, the two reunited at Crimes Against Persons, title or not, rank or not, the Sarge ran the show and no one was complaining, least of all LaMoia. Never heavy-handed about it, Boldt simply had an instinct to lead, a nose for the next avenue to pursue. The man owned an eighty-eight-a ten-year clearance rate that seemed likely to stand for all time. LaMoia was a sixty-four, and proud of it; there were guys down in the mid-forties. Gaynes was a seventy, though she didn’t flaunt it. As the one and only woman wearing a gold badge on the fifth floor, she was smart enough not to flaunt any of her assets. She dressed to hide her body, had a tongue on her that could keep up with anyone, and could drink as much beer as the next dick. LaMoia liked her, though he hoped it didn’t show. When it came to investigations he didn’t always feel like the lead, but in terms of his squad, he was the sergeant, the one in charge, in command. In this regard, he was unflinching.

  Thinking aloud, he said, ‘‘Half an hour in City Hall is nothing. Those drones? He could easily still be in there.’’

  ‘‘Could be. Could also be that he took this morning’s news to mean we might have him under surveillance. Could be guilt working him, making him take precautions. You want me to look around?’’

  ‘‘Nah, don’t move. Keep an eye on his wheels. I’ll be there in a few. We’ll double. I’ll check inside. What’s your location?’’

  She told him.

  LaMoia sneaked out of the surveillance van and was on his way back into town.

  LaMoia started with Vital Statistics, thinking death certificates offered the most direct route to forge a new identity and that perhaps Coughlie was hoping to reinvent himself and get the hell out of Dodge.