Thriller 2: Stories You Just Can't Put Down

by Clive Cussler

They were ushered in and taken to the security department and shown an hour of tapes. They had the missing woman arriving two days earlier. Had her going out to lunch with friends. Back in the hallways and elevators upon her return. Couldn’t find her leaving the building. Boldt asked the tapes be set aside and that half-inch copies be sent over to Public Safety by noon the same day.

  Boldt and LaMoia walked the hallways. Rode the elevator. Repeated what they’d seen.

  “I doubt it was here,” Boldt said.

  “I’m with you.”

  “But then how’d she disappear?”

  “That’s quite a crush at the end of the day.”

  “True enough.”

  “We might have missed her.”

  “You think?”

  “No.”

  “Me, neither.”

  “So it was here?” LaMoia ventured.

  “Don’t see how. But, yeah, maybe.”

  “Locked in a closet somewhere? Down in parking in a trunk?”

  “Dogs?” Boldt asked.

  “Expensive.”

  “We’re past the forty-eight,” Boldt said. “We’ve cut the probability of finding her alive by—”

  “Fi’ty, sixty percent. I know the stats, Sarge.”

  “If we did miss her in the crowd, then it was between here and home.”

  “And the boyfriend gets a much closer look either way,” LaMoia said. “Did you search for similars?”

  “With the number of missing persons reports we get? I didn’t have all night.”

  “We do now,” LaMoia said.

  “Don’t you have to get home to the baby?”

  “Let’s not go there, okay?”

  The men were outside the building now, the background whine of rubber on I-5. A jet just behind the Space Needle, on final approach to SEATAC. A motorboat was cutting across Lake Union. Some rowdy voices echoed from a half block away. The city stayed up later and later. It was in its adolescence. Boldt felt as if he’d known it from birth.

  “Two-thirds…hell, more like ninety-five percent, are going to be underage, or just overage girls,” LaMoia said. “We toss them, the database is manageable.”

  “You know me and computers.”

  “I got it, Sarge,” LaMoia said. “We can crunch this data in minutes. Trust me.”

  He would never fully trust LaMoia again. With Daphne he’d made his peace, but LaMoia’s going after her would never sit right. He let it pass. For now.

  An hour later they were sitting alongside one another, staring at a flat-screen display. It was nearing midnight.

  “Should we run it again?” Boldt asked.

  “That’s the third time, Sarge. It ain’t lying to us.”

  “How could this have slipped through? They put me on leave and no one mans the shop?”

  “It was DeFalgo. You know how he is. He’s waiting out his twenty-two. It’s all done with mirrors with him anyway. Always has been.”

  “Buddy DeFalgo couldn’t figure out a scratch-and-win lotto card,” Boldt said. “What are they doing putting him in my chair?”

  “It’s more like a corporation upstairs,” LaMoia said. “That’s what I hear.”

  Boldt wanted to smack him. Had Daphne told him that as she’d gotten home?

  On the screen was a woman’s face. Attractive. Early to middle thirties. A driver’s-license photo, but one that Boldt assumed would be on every morning news show in town by 6:00 a.m.

  It was on.

  They weren’t trying to find a missing woman.

  They were trying to find two.

  The facts of the reports were far too similar to put it off to chance: last seen at work. Never made it home.

  “Maybe not the boyfriend,” Boldt whispered, his throat dry, his chest painful.

  “Yeah, “LaMoia said. “I was just thinking the same thing.”

  Rastus Malster applied the finishing touches. This was no dab-on-some-blush exercise. The fact that he had to accomplish it inside a restroom stall only added to the thrill. He heard the unique, whistling stream of a female peeing from the adjacent stall and looked low to see a wide, black leather toe-end of a shoe pointing toward him to where he swore if he’d bent over he could have seen his face in its polish. But he kept his eyes, if not his mind, on the work before him—the small mirror hanging from a wire thrown over the coat hook on the back of the door. Every line was carefully applied. If he didn’t like his work, he used a moist towelette to clear the slate, and tried again. A great deal of admiration went into his work; he took time to study and appreciate his expertise. Transformation took time; Rome wasn’t built in a day. The soiled, white leather work shoes helped him—in case Miss Hissy Thighs next door was looking at his footwear the way he was looking at hers. But no: she was in and done, up and gone before the automatic flusher had a chance to catch up with her. Besides, even if she had glanced his way, he’d Naired both legs the night before to baby-bottom-smooth; he might look a little thick at the ankle, but not everyone fit into a size two.

  The trick now was to time his exit well. He’d entered when there was no one in here; he hoped to leave the same. Long on patience—for he would never have taken on any of this without his mother’s patience—he found himself in no hurry. He waited for the last click of a heel, the last spray of a toilet flushing or the electronic peal of the automatic paper dispenser. Then he gave it an extra thirty seconds. Twenty-eight…twenty-nine…

  And, having collected his small mirror and his bag of goodies, he swung open the stall door to behold true artistry at work.

  He slipped out the printout of the Intelligencer’s Web page from his pocket, took one last look at it, memorizing both the face and the name, and crumpled it up. He disposed of it immediately in front of him. She had a royal, almost equestrian look about her—a high princess, a lady-in-waiting. He looked like a corn-fed Midwesterner with a graying buzz cut.

  If they wanted to make comments about him to the press, then they deserved the opportunity to meet him. They’d earned it.

  When a uniformed woman entered the restroom, Rastus startled, his heart racing.

  “Hello,” she said.

  Reconsidering his location, he heaved a sigh of relief as the woman slipped into a stall and immediately was heard unzipping her pants—all without waiting for any kind of reply from him.

  Rastus moved along the sinks, pleased as punch she’d never given him a second glance.

  The piece of paper he’d tossed into the trash uncurled slightly, like the dancers at the beginning of Swan Lake. Not enough to catch the face again. Only part of the two names:

  oldt and Lieutenant D. Matthews, seen here at a DARE fund-raiser in 2006.

  The first body surfaced at sunrise, bobbing up out of murky depths of Bowman’s Bay like a decomposing mermaid. Phen Shiffman was who spotted her as he motored out for his morning work of checking the hatchery. He’d been enjoying a smoke and a fresh cup of strong coffee when her breasts arched out of the water, followed by the dark trim between her legs. It was like one of those synchronized swimming moves he’d seen on the Olympics—“only she was naked as a jaybird, not wearing any kind of bathing suit or undies or nothing,” as he would later tell Mike Rickert, the prosecuting attorney whose desk the case landed on. Though he hadn’t seen it, he supposed her head had surfaced first, led by her arms, maybe. Whatever the case, she’d continued in a graceful, back arch, like a dancer: head, shoulders, chest, groin, knees, feet, and she was under again. If he’d been drinking the night before, or he’d been smoking some rope on the way out, as he sometimes did, he might have considered saying nothing about her because once she was gone she was gone. But on the other hand, he knew this was serious—she was as dead as a salmon, bruised and fed-on some, as pale as the silver flash of a trout. This, he had to call in.

  Boldt read about it on a briefing page that arrived on one’s computer screen at the start of every shift. The victim’s toenails had been elaborately painted in a way that suggested city li
fe, not Skagit County. Rickert, for his part, had done his homework; he knew of the missing Seattle women. He posted the information and made a few calls suggesting SPD might want to visit the county morgue, or might want some dental records sent down—the crabs had gotten half her face. By midafternoon, Boldt and Daphne had made the ninety-minute drive north together, arriving at the county hospital. Dental records had confirmed the deceased’s identity: the second of the two women who’d gone missing.

  Dressed in surgical kits, and wearing paper masks over their faces, having smeared Mentholatum liberally beneath their noses—because floaters were the worst of the worst—they studied the rotting corpse. At one point Boldt looked over at Daphne and wondered if the stains on the mask beneath her eyes were tears of emotion or from the Mentholatum vapors getting in her eyes.

  They worked with a young pathologist who seemed to know his stuff. Boldt longed for his longtime friend, Dr. Ray, but the man had retired and would likely never stand under the lights again.

  “Her spine is broken,” the pathologist explained in a toneless voice. “Cracked clean in half, which might explain the dance the fisherman saw in the water when she surfaced. There are severe ligature marks, here and here. Two more on both shoulders. Her vaginal and rectal area are torn, though from the same ligature, I’m suggesting.”

  “She was trussed,” Boldt said.

  This won a sharp snap of Daphne’s neck as she looked up at Boldt.

  “Couldn’t have said it better,” the pathologist said. “Bound and trussed…and…well, maybe not.”

  “Please,” Boldt said.

  Daphne’s eyes said, “Please don’t.”

  “It’s just…if I had to guess…and this is only wild speculation with only a small amount of science to support it…Nah…I shouldn’t.”

  Boldt encouraged him yet again.

  “Conjecture is all. There is at least some circumstantial evidence to suggest the binding was a flexible material. In several weight-bearing places it appears to have pinched the skin.”

  “Weight-bearing,” Boldt repeated, for the term caught his ear.

  “Yes. That’s the conjecture part,” the man answered. “If I had to guess I would say she was trussed facedown. The ligature was jerked or tugged severely, and was improperly arranged so that maximum stress came here—” he pointed to her shoulders “—and here.” He pointed to her crotch. “It was excessive force, enough to shatter L7 and L8 and to sever the cord.”

  “Could she have been dropped?” Daphne asked.

  “Dropped? Yes, I suppose that would account for it, but it would have had to have been from a very great height.”

  “The elastic cord,” Boldt said. “Could it have been bungee cord?” He leaned in for a close look at the rope burns on her side.

  “Indeed,” the doctor said. “Are you telling me she was bungee jumping? The clothes came off during her time in the water?”

  “Is it possible?” Boldt asked.

  “She was naked,” Daphne said with authority. “He threw her off…I don’t know…a bridge?”

  “Threw her?” the doctor asked, “or was it accidental? Too much alcohol, a stupid idea gone wrong.”

  “Was alcohol found in her system?” Boldt asked.

  “Blood workup will be a day or two, minimum.”

  “He threw her,” Daphne repeated, her voice softer. “We’re going to find that the position is important to him. The angel pose. Flying like that. He’s Roman Catholic, or was raised Roman Catholic. Single. Lives or lived with a single parent. He’s under thirty, over eighteen. Uses mass transit, but has a driver’s license. Probably cross-dresses, though not in public.”

  “We’re going to need every hair and fiber, every X-ray, every detail of this corpse before it degrades any further.”

  “Threw her?” The doctor could barely get out the words. “You’re sure?” This, meant for Daphne.

  “He wanted the angel to fly,” she said, having not taken her eyes off the dead woman for the past few minutes. “But he got it wrong, tied it wrong, from what you tell us, and he broke her back instead. Who knows how long he might have kept her alive if she’d have only flown for him?”

  The doctor stepped back, as if a few feet might separate him from the truth.

  “And the first one?” Boldt asked, also staring at the cadaver.

  “I imagine that one went wrong, as well, or he wouldn’t have failed so miserably with her. Poor her,” she whispered. “If she’d only known how to fly.”

  The drive back began in silence. Traumatic death had a way of making anything else seem inconsequential and of no importance, even if the discussion was to be the solution of that death. A black hood pulled down over all existence. The road ran before them, people racing to pass, to maintain a position, and to both of them it seemed so insignificant, though neither spoke of it directly. Life’s uglies revealed themselves at such times, man’s clambering for space and position.

  “Maybe you should have quit,” she said.

  “Then I wouldn’t be in a car with you.”

  “Don’t start.”

  “Way too late for that,” he said.

  “What is it with us?”

  He grinned. Didn’t mean to, but it was irrepressible.

  “Do you think we’ll ever—”

  “No!” he said, cutting her off. “I try to not think about it.”

  “—catch him,” she said, finishing her thought. “But thank you for sharing.”

  The grin was vanquished. “Oh,” he said.

  “And as to that other thing, I couldn’t disagree more. I, too, try not to think about it, but I find I’m not very good at it.”

  “We’ll get this guy,” Boldt said.

  “But the window of time…”

  “Has closed. Yes. We’re way behind the eight ball. No question about it. But it’s you and it’s me. What chance has he got?”

  “You sound like John,” she quipped.

  “Him, too,” Boldt said. “I’ve got a guy at the U-dub. Dr. Brian Rutledge. Oceanography. He’s going to make a careful study of this and tell us—” the car rounded a bend and faced a long bridge with a dramatic drop, so Boldt slowed the vehicle “—that she was tossed off this bridge. Deception Pass. He’s going to tell us what day, and at what time she went off, because it’s what he does. We’re going to back up and use traffic cams to spot every car that left the highway for this road at the appropriate time. We’re going to box this guy in.”

  He pulled to a stop and the two wandered out on to the bridge. Again, they were gripped in silence—in part because of the majesty of the view, gray water and green island shrouded in a descending mist, in part because of what had happened here. They both could visualize it: the body coming out of the trunk, already roped up. He ties a knot; he throws her over.

  “Early, early, morning,” Daphne said.

  “Because?”

  “First light. No traffic—he’s got to hope for no traffic. But there’s no way this guy is tossing her in the dark. He wants to see her fly. This is about satisfying some need in him. His sister jumped off the barn roof and died when he was a kid. His mother fell from a ladder, broke her back. There’s a payoff here that’s fundamental to the crime.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  “More than you wanted?”

  “From you? Get a clue.” He walked farther, into the very middle of the bridge. He squatted, examining the thick metal rail from a variety of angles.

  “I doubt bungee jumping is anything new to this bridge,” he said.

  “No.”

  “So he can take his time tying it. Rigging it. Getting it just right. It’s pulling her out of the trunk, that’s the trick.”

  “A public appeal?” she said.

  “That’s what I’m thinking, yes. Someone saw his car. Him. Thought nothing of it. Maybe we jog a memory.” He surveyed the surrounding area: rocks and water and nothing but beauty. He found it difficult to think in terms of crime. “Di
d he use this same bridge for the first one?”

  “Yes, I believe he did,” she said. “It wasn’t the location, it was his rigging that failed. Probably failed a lot worse the first time.”

  “So we check the waters.”

  “Your oceanographer may be able to help you, from what you’ve said.”

  “Yes. Odds?”

  “That he sent the first one off this bridge? High. You want a number?”

  He spit a laugh. “No. I see your point.”

  “With two failures, he may now blame the bridge. If you elect to involve the press, then he’ll certainly abandon the area.”

  “So we look for other, isolated locations with significant drops.”

  “Maybe with some distance parameters. He’s got a woman alive in his trunk. He doesn’t want to test that, to push that. It’s a means to an end—the trunk. It worries him having her back there, and not just out of fear of being caught. He has more respect for the victim than we’d understand. It’s the sister, the mother, the girlfriend. This isn’t a hate crime. Quite the opposite—it’s reverential, a form of worship for him. He wants to bless her with flight. He wants to give her a chance at resurrection.”

  “I can look at dead bodies all day long. But I talk to you for five minutes and I’ve got chills.”

  She laid a hand on his shoulder. “Glad to hear it, buddy.”

  A flight of gulls cawed overhead as they played in the wind. Boldt followed behind Daphne back to the car, watching that machine of hers drive her forward.

  Could have walked all day.

  With the lab work expedited, Boldt had the building blocks for a possible modus by midday the following day, a Wednesday. He was supposed to be working the graveyard, but had already used up several favors to get someone to sub for him—this, in his first week of duty as CAP sergeant. He and LaMoia, who technically was the shift sergeant, rode in LaMoia’s mid-size pool car, a replacement for a series of Trans-Ams and Cameros he’d owned and driven proudly through the years.

  “You gonna explain it?” LaMoia asked.

  “Several strands of human hair that weren’t hers. All Asian, but consisting of two different DNAs.”