The First Victim lbadm-6

by Ridley Pearson

  The description of the man failed to register with the Asian woman behind the desk, and only then, upon hearing her thickly laced accent, did it occur to him that any one of these minimum wagers could be in cahoots with an INS agent.

  He tried state property tax records next, only because it was the next door down the hall. One door to another: the workers behind the counters Asian, Hispanic, Black; not many whites. LaMoia had no problem with the melting pot, so long as everyone working City Hall spoke English, drove fifty-five, and paid their taxes same as him. He didn’t support the concept of welfare and frowned at food stamps-too much corruption for anything like that to work. You took your shovel or your pen and you went to work, same as the next Joe. That was the America he wore his badge for. A trip down the halls of city government could shake a person up.

  Coughlie was nowhere to be seen.

  The next floor held five more doors-all the same thing. Too much paperwork, too many stamps of approval, too many hands under the table grabbing for the same cash. It depressed him.

  Another flight up the polished marble stairs. Who the hell could afford marble anyway?

  Permits. The idea did not jump out at him; he heard no trumpets or voices guiding him.

  The door to Permits was blocked only by a rubber wedge. A matronly black woman who knitted her own sweaters and chose not to color her vaguely gray hair stood behind the long counter. She had the cheerful air of a first grade teacher or public librarian.

  ‘‘Police,’’ he introduced himself, displaying his badge. He began his description of Brian Coughlie only to be interrupted.

  ‘‘The INS agent who was just here,’’ she said.

  ‘‘Yes.’’ Coughlie had made his INS identity known to the woman. LaMoia took this as a bad sign, for it supported the man’s innocence. He wanted Coughlie defined-on or off his list of suspects-he didn’t want to keep guessing.

  ‘‘His interest here?’’ LaMoia asked.

  ‘‘Building permits,’’ she said. ‘‘Must have spent a half hour going over them.’’

  ‘‘Current? Past?’’

  ‘‘Current. Said that construction sites often employed illegals- illegal immigrants, you know? — for the manual labor, the ‘grunt jobs,’ I think he called them. Said construction permits were a great resource for the INS.’’

  This made sense. LaMoia sank a little lower, his suspicions dashed. ‘‘Then you’d seen him before?’’ he inquired, thinking to ask.

  ‘‘Me? Oh, no. Never once. Not ever.’’

  ‘‘You’re new to this department?’’

  ‘‘Aren’t you the one for compliments!’’ she said. ‘‘Eighteen years I’ve worked here behind this counter.’’

  ‘‘Other INS agents?’’

  ‘‘Here? Never. Not so as they identified themselves, anyway.’’

  LaMoia considered all this carefully as he asked to be shown the same material Coughlie had viewed.

  LaMoia spent twenty minutes reviewing the exact same construction permits as had Brian Coughlie but failed to connect any importance to his case. He considered every angle: location of the sites; any possible connection to Mama Lu. He found nothing.

  He asked a dozen questions, including if Coughlie had focused on any particular permit, if he had asked for any specific qualification. The woman couldn’t help him.

  He could feel the connection staring back at him but could not see it. He decided to let it go, hoping it might make sense to him later, the way that sometimes happened.

  ‘‘Where to from here?’’ Gaynes asked.

  ‘‘I gotta get back to the surveillance,’’ LaMoia replied from the passenger seat of her Chevy. He didn’t see the point in wheels like this. No style. Nothing to offer.

  He’d brought her a cup of mocha coffee, and she had seemed touched that he knew the way she took it.

  ‘‘Me?’’ she asked.

  ‘‘Try his crib. Try his office. Make up some bullshit if you have to. Try to find him. Keep me up to speed. If you strike out, when you get back to PS check with the lab. The Doc said he passed the Jill Doe evidence on to Lofgrin. Where’s it at? How come we don’t have it?’’

  ‘‘The Sarge?’’

  ‘‘He’s doing the dance with Mama Lu. He may have something- providing we ever see him again.’’

  ‘‘Don’t joke around like that,’’ she chastised him. ‘‘That shit bothers me.’’

  ‘‘Who’s joking?’’ LaMoia replied, taking one last noisy sip from the cup’s plastic lid before venturing back outside.

  CHAPTER 64

  "We’re working together, right?’’ McNeal asked Boldt from the other end of a cellular call.

  ‘‘Far as I’m concerned.’’ His mind was on Mama Lu-the location of that sweatshop. If the Great Lady wouldn’t cooperate, then, as far as he was concerned, their one and only chance of finding Melissa, of busting the sweatshop, came down to the shipment expected that same night. Stevie McNeal, and her world of problems, was far from his thoughts.

  ‘‘Together as in: Whatever I have, you have and vice versa.’’

  ‘‘As in,’’ Boldt confirmed, his attention still drifting.

  ‘‘This surveillance that was reported,’’ she said, waking him up some. ‘‘What are your chances of making this bust?’’

  ‘‘Until they reported it, our chances were pretty good, I think.’’

  ‘‘And now?’’

  ‘‘Not so good,’’ he answered.

  ‘‘There’s something going down,’’ she stated. ‘‘A container shipment?’’

  His mind sprang fully awake. Where had she gotten that? ‘‘It’s possible,’’ he admitted. ‘‘We don’t know exactly when, although any time around the new moon makes strategic sense for them.’’ He added, ‘‘We thought the drop was going to be at a naval yard-that is, until things leaked this morning. That hurt us. Now, quite honestly, we’re not so sure.’’

  ‘‘Your plan?’’

  His mind briefly prevented him from discussing it-do not share this with the press! But his tongue overruled. ‘‘Had been to intercept the drop fully cloaked and to follow the shipment wherever it led. We believed that would include not only the sweatshop and those people

  responsible, but quite possibly Ms. Chow as well.’’

  ‘‘And now that it has leaked?’’ she inquired.

  ‘‘One step forward, two steps back. We’re still watching our location, but I’m guessing we’ve been sandbagged by the leak.’’

  ‘‘So you’re tracking all arriving freighters,’’ she stated. Reporters and cops thought the same way.

  ‘‘Freighters, tankers, trawlers.’’ He hesitated. ‘‘Any ship making port in the next thirty-six hours. Of special interest are any that made port in Hong Kong. I’ll be down at Port Authority. We’ll be tracking every ship closely,’’ he confirmed, though his jaw was tight and his voice sounded foreign even to him. ‘‘Three in particular, due in later tonight, all made port in Kowloon. That matches with the Visage. None due in from Hong Kong scheduled for tomorrow or Friday, so we’re leaning on tonight. We play the high-percentage hunches.’’

  ‘‘So do I, and my hunch is you’re about to be sandbagged again,’’ she warned. She explained what she had found out about Channel Seven’s SkyCam crew.

  Boldt remained silent trying to clear his thoughts, suddenly a tangle of confusion and outright anger. The press no longer reported cases, they intervened and destroyed them.

  ‘‘We haven’t much time,’’ she warned.

  ‘‘I’m listening.’’ His throat dry and scratchy, his temper flaring.

  ‘‘No one-not you, not the mayor-can stop a news crew from reporting.’’

  ‘‘Believe me, I’m aware of that,’’ he said.

  ‘‘Competition is a wonderful thing. The infrared technology has its limits: It doesn’t like light. If we-my team, I’m talking about-were to aim enough light toward that infrared camera, we’d blind the equipment. We’d pi
ss them off, sure-but we wouldn’t be breaking any laws, just one news crew out to scoop the other. You see how this works?’’

  ‘‘You’re going to sabotage a live news feed?’’

  The open line hissed with static. ‘‘I’m going to improve Melissa’s chances,’’ she said. ‘‘They expose this freighter, and who knows what

  happens? When people panic, they make poor choices.’’

  ‘‘Agreed.’’

  ‘‘If you’re going to be at Port Authority, then that helps. I need you to provide me the exact locations of these three freighters,’’ she suggested. ‘‘Maybe we can mislead Seven’s chopper.’’

  Boldt paused, his mind whirring.

  She asked, ‘‘You’ve got to trust me on this.’’

  A week earlier he might not have, but they were two pieces of the same puzzle now. Boldt said, ‘‘Let me have your number again. I’ll call you from Port Authority.’’

  CHAPTER 65

  LaMoia pulled up to a red light. A dozen ways existed that he might have made the connection between Coughlie and the purpose behind the man’s stop at City Hall. He might have used a detective’s cunning or logic or some complex strategy born of his years of experience. Instead it was simply that red light. The Camaro idled alongside a high-rise construction site. LaMoia, ever on the lookout for a nice set of legs or a chest to fix his eyes upon, noticed a construction crane in the process of hoisting a pallet of steel beams. The light changed. He pulled to the side of the street, set his flashers to blinking and thought it through. What if they were right about Coughlie being involved? What if the man suspected the reported police surveillance was on his drop point, the naval yard? With only hours to go before the arrival of the container ships, a new container of illegals, with crane rentals being carefully watched by SPD-information to which Coughlie was privy-how would he select a backup location? The answer was now obvious to him: Look for a waterfront construction site that had a permit to operate a crane, and therefore, a crane on-site. He popped open his cellphone and dialed: They could have surveillance in place on any such sites in a matter of minutes.

  CHAPTER 66

  Light rain struck the traffic helicopter’s plastic bubble sounding like pebbles on tin, heard even over the ferocious roar of the chopper’s blades. Stevie McNeal could not get used to the empty space of the clear plastic beneath her feet. She floated high above the white chop of the water and the wickedly fast gray wisps of cloud that raced past underfoot, half nauseous, half adrenaline rush.

  Boldt stood over the Port Authority radar, its circular black scope fully refreshed every seventeen seconds, returning images of any vessel with a deck taller than six feet above the waterline or carrying a radar reflector, as most pleasure craft did. Radar installations rimmed Puget Sound’s coastline, all feeding data into this one facility, two miles south of downtown. There were four such scopes in all, covering every shipping lane from the Strait of Juan de Fuca to the Elliott Bay waterfront. The six men and women in this darkened room tracked the movement of commercial ships into the Port of Seattle ‘‘twenty-four, seven.’’ Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

  ‘‘As they enter the system,’’ the man with the military haircut explained to Boldt, ‘‘they identify themselves and we tag them, much the same way air-traffic control would with an aircraft. The only difference here-these ships move a lot slower,’’ he said, trying but failing to evoke a response from the lieutenant. ‘‘But being as they’re tens of thousands of tons set in motion, tens of thousands of tons that take anywhere from one to three miles to come to a complete stop, they bear our attention. Most, if not all, have contracts with tugs to be picked up and moved into port. We track where and when that is to happen to remove any possibility of collision or bottle-necking. On top of the commercial shipping lanes we have over two dozen commercial ferries on regular schedules through these waters, an impossible number of cruise ships, military craft, Coast Guard and tens of thousands of registered pleasure craft. It keeps us busy.’’

  ‘‘The SS Hana, Zeffer and Danske,’’ Boldt quoted, cocking his notepad to catch some of the limited light in the windowless and blackened room. ‘‘They’re all in the system. The reason I’m here-’’

  The military cut nodded. ‘‘Yes. The SS Hana is reporting equipment failure and has requested to leave the lanes and hold closer to shore.’’

  ‘‘Is that common?’’

  ‘‘It happens, sure.’’

  ‘‘But it’s not common,’’ Boldt pressed.

  ‘‘Listen, with you guys breathing down our necks, we take everything just a little more seriously, okay? Anything you can name, it has happened out there: fires, explosions, collisions, you name it. If an equipment failure threatens to slow down traffic or bottle us up, we’re only too happy to get that ship out of traffic.’’

  ‘‘The Hana stopped in Hong Kong,’’ Boldt verified.

  ‘‘All three: Hana, Zeffer and Danske, just as we reported to you.’’ He pointed to a small blip on the screen, below which was a six-digit number. ‘‘Hana was the first of the three into the system. She’s number six thousand, four hundred and twelve this year. She’s done everything by the book, and we’ve got no complaints against her. Some of these captains can be real assholes, believe me. Double-hulled egos, I’m telling you. She wants out of the lane, she’s got it.’’

  ‘‘She’s a container ship.’’

  ‘‘That’s correct.’’

  ‘‘And once she’s out, what then?’’ Boldt asked.

  ‘‘To be honest? Our concern is with the lanes: keep the traffic moving. On a typical night, we’d pay little or no attention to her once she’s down in speed and picked up by a tug and out of our way.’’

  ‘‘But she’s on your screen,’’ Boldt reminded.

  ‘‘Of course she’s on the screen! But all I’m saying is, out of sight out of mind. You know?’’

  ‘‘And if she made an unscheduled stop? Would you guys spot that?’’

  ‘‘Why the hell would she make an unscheduled stop?’’ the man asked.

  ‘‘I need an exact location. A GPS fix, if you’ve got it.’’

  ‘‘You learn quick,’’ the man said, clearly impressed. He grabbed a piece of paper and scribbled down a string of numbers. Like a bat, he was used to working in the dark. Boldt couldn’t see a thing.

  When the dim but visible lights of SS Hana appeared off the chopper’s port side as a faint cluster of pale color in an otherwise blackened backdrop, the pilot banked the chopper left, rendering his passengers briefly weightless. ‘‘Contact,’’ he said with confidence. Channel Seven’s SkyCam, heard occasionally over the air-traffic control radio, became visible for the first time-a set of blinking lights pointed out by the pilot. He deftly brought the tail around to give him a better view and then sideslipped his craft through the rain, down and to the right, a kite lost to the wind, falling, falling, falling.

  ‘‘Will they see us?’’ she asked into her headset. ‘‘The freighter mustn’t see us! We mustn’t spook them.’’

  The KSTV technician, who had crowded the chopper’s backseat with gear, reported, ‘‘I’ve got their feed.’’ He passed Stevie a small color screen the size of a paperback book, a single wire running from it. On the tiny monitor Stevie saw the ship’s shape as a collage of iridescent colors-a yellow-orange wake spilling away from the stern of the ship like a paper fan set afire. She couldn’t look at the screen very long without added nausea.

  Below her the freighter grew in size from a child’s toy to something large and menacing as the rain fell harder and the collapsing ceiling of thick clouds swirled like water headed down a drain.

  Fully loaded, the SS Hana carried twelve hundred containers the size of railroad boxcars. Stacked five high on deck, a few hundred of these were secured by chain with links as wide as a man’s leg and leveraged turnbuckles that required two strong men to set or remove them. With containers rising fifty feet from its deck, the s
hip looked ready to capsize.

  The technician warned, ‘‘They’re getting ready to go live, or they wouldn’t be transmitting images.’’

  Stevie asked the pilot, ‘‘Can we get between them and the ship, and still avoid being seen?’’

  ‘‘Not with our lights on,’’ he said, flipping a switch and making them dark. No strobes whatsoever.

  ‘‘Is this legal?’’ she asked.

  ‘‘Hell no.’’

  ‘‘Could you lose your license?’’

  ‘‘Hell yes.’’

  ‘‘Is it safe?’’

  The helicopter dove so quickly that Stevie reached out for a grip.

  ‘‘Depends,’’ the pilot answered, talking loudly into the headset.

  ‘‘On what?’ she asked nervously.

  ‘‘On what they do,’’ he answered, indicating the neighboring helicopter as they passed below it.

  ‘‘Stand by,’’ the technician said, ‘‘I think they’re going to broadcast.’’

  ‘‘Get between them!’’ Stevie instructed. She could not have Seven revealing the ship and spoiling Boldt’s efforts. Melissa! she thought. ‘‘Oh my God!’’ she hollered. ‘‘Hurry!’’

  The screen in her lap showed the water as a dark green, the ship’s outline boldly as black, its wake, a flaming orange roil, its onboard lights pale yellow and tiny.

  She asked her technician, ‘‘What’s that red blob at the stern?’’

  ‘‘I’m thinking engine room,’’ he answered. ‘‘Those engines will be cooking. The bright yellow dots are probably some of the crew out on deck. Same with the darker yellow just forward of that-most likely the pilothouse.’’

  ‘‘And this?’’ she asked, indicating another much larger mass of pale yellow slightly forward of midship.

  ‘‘That’s coming from a container,’’ he confirmed.

  ‘‘As in people inside a container?’’ she asked.

  ‘‘Warmth,’’ he answered. ‘‘The source? We don’t know.’’ He touched his headset. ‘‘Hang on! They’ve gone live. Listen up!’’ He threw a switch and Stevie’s headphones filled with a reporter’s introduction. On the screen, the ship appeared against the blackness of the water, a large rectangular shape of unexplained color. Sparkles filled the screen.