No Witnesses lbadm-3

by Ridley Pearson

  His intention had been to mow Boldt down with the facts and figures, and he did just that. Four hundred thousand withdrawals a day. The number fifty million rang in his head.

  “Have we met before?” Perch asked, as if Boldt had just walked through the door.

  “No.”

  “You look damn familiar to me. Do you play racquet-ball?”

  “Piano. Jazz piano.”

  “A club! Am I right?”

  “The Big Joke.”

  “Exactly. I knew I’d seen you before.” To Lucille Guillard he said, “He’s good.” To Boldt he said, “You’re very good. Happy hour. Right?”

  Boldt thanked him and pointed out that he had to drop the piano when a case like this came along.

  “A case like what? You’re not Fraud, are you, Sergeant? Not unless you just transferred. I know the guys from Fraud, believe me.”

  “Homicide,” Boldt said.

  It was a word that hit most people sideways, and Ted Perch was no exception. He actually jerked his head back as if he’d been struck. “The big leagues,” he said.

  “Just another division.”

  “What is this thing? Blackmail? No, extortion-right?”

  “Right.”

  “Bet someone’s dead,” Perch guessed, “or what would you be doing here?”

  “Someone’s dead,” Boldt confirmed. “Maybe others if we don’t hurry.”

  “If people’s lives are at stake, that’s different.”

  “We need your help,” Lucille Guillard said earnestly. “The problem is that by the time a real-time system identifies a hit, Sergeant Boldt has about ten seconds-or less-to apprehend this person.”

  Boldt added, “And that’s not enough. Not even close.”

  “Slow down the entire system?” Perch queried. “(A) It’s not possible-not that I know of, and (B) I would be hanged. If the system goes down for five minutes, it makes the news these days. People have gotten used to ATMs. They expect them to work. Twenty-million a day, don’t forget.”

  “Does it have to be the whole system? Couldn’t we isolate just these requests?” Boldt asked.

  “It doesn’t work like that. Sometimes there are two, three, even four ATMs installed right alongside one another. What’s this person going to think when his transaction takes forever and the guy next to him receives service as usual? Let me tell you something: People have built-in clocks when it comes to ATMs. They know how long a transaction is supposed to take. The average transaction takes twelve seconds. You stretch it to forty and a guy like this, someone jerking the system around, is going to notice. Plain and simple. He’s gone.”

  Boldt was glad that Perch had the gender wrong.

  Guillard said, “But if the whole network were to slow down. Or at least every request in the city. What then, Ted? So it makes the papers for a couple of days?”

  Boldt agreed. “Oddly enough, that kind of publicity might help us. Might convince him it’s a regional problem.”

  “Help you, maybe. It’d get me fired. I can tell you that. But it’s all moot anyway. I’ve never heard of such a thing. You can’t just slow down the network by flipping some switch.”

  “That is what I told the sergeant. But I was hoping you might know more than I do.” She hit Perch right where he lived. He wanted to know more than she did, and he didn’t see the trap she had laid for him.

  “We have some software techs. I could ask them.”

  “Our people are looking into it, too,” she said, adding a sense of competition.

  “I’ll need permission from the nationals,” Perch said, already a step ahead. “There would be some serious explaining to do.”

  “We’re long on people capable of serious explanations. That shouldn’t be a problem,” Boldt offered.

  Perch suggested, “Let me circle the wagons. How soon you need this?”

  Lucille Guillard recrossed her legs and Perch didn’t even notice.

  That was when Boldt knew he had him.

  NINETEEN

  Someone was watching her.

  Daphne had studied enough paranoids, had worked with some, and knew the symptoms well. Symptoms she now displayed: a heightened nervousness, the constant checking over her shoulder, insomnia, loss of appetite, the suspicious pauses to stop and listen. But it was an energy and she understood energy. An energy focused on her, and if she were imagining this, then she intended to compliment her imagination, because this was like nothing she had ever experienced.

  Back there somewhere? Over there? she wasn’t sure. It seemed at times to be all around her. At others to be in a specific place-yet when she checked: no one. It made her skin crawl, this feeling. And it wasn’t just while out on a run, which was where she was at the moment. It was in the bedroom, in the car-she felt it when undressing even in the bathroom, which is where she changed clothes. The rest of her houseboat made her feel naked before she took off a thing. This filled her with a nauseating fear, a sense of violation she had not known.

  Was that the same car? she wondered. It looked awfully familiar. Had it been parked across from the dock entrance to the houseboats? What was it, Japanese? Detroit/Japanese? She wished she were better with cars. It was the same color, she thought. Same size. Dark blue. Small. Nondescript. Just the kind of car one would use for surveillance! Just the kind of paranoid thinking that could get you in big trouble. “Conspiracy vision”-there were all sorts of slang terms for it. “Oliver Stone disease,” she had once heard it called; and that one had made her laugh. No longer.

  She broke with her regular Tuesday evening running route and turned right up Galer and right again onto Eastlake, a procedure similar to the consecutive four right-hand turns used to spot moving surveillance when in a vehicle. She glanced over her shoulder. Watch it! a voice cried out inside of her. That was symptom number one.

  She ran another quarter mile, and literally leapt into the air when a blue car overtook her from behind. A different blue car, she realized quickly enough. Upset with herself, she turned around, cutting short the run. It was dusk. It would be dark by the time she got back, and whereas normally her run would take place after work and therefore under the streetlights, tonight the idea bothered her. It cut her run nearly in half, but she could make up the difference tomorrow.

  Daphne ran hard, working up a good sweat, pushing herself to go a little harder today since she had cut it short. Her gymnasium-gray tank top was soaked dark below her breasts and down her back. Her hair stuck to her neck, and her white wristband was damp from sponging her brow.

  Typically, she used her runs as meditations-a quiet break devoted to nothingness, to thinking as little as possible. She waved to a walker, thankful for a familiar face, and the woman waved back at her with a broad smile. Although they had never formally met, she knew all about this woman-the houseboat community was like that. The woman was an M.D. who volunteered her time at a local clinic for the poor; her husband was a former minister turned author. They lived in a small houseboat, though it was one of the more charming ones-with very few pretensions. And they waved at you when out for a walk.

  A scruffy dog crossed the road lazily, either not seeing or not caring about a sleek black cat that sat atop a shingled mailbox house at the end of pier 11.

  She walked the last hundred yards, peeked into her mailbox for the second time today, and headed down the dock.

  Halfway down the long dock her skin crawled, and she blamed it on a light breeze off the lake and the slight chill it induced.

  Whether attributable to caution or paranoia, she took inventory of her houseboat as she approached. It was tiny, less than eight hundred square feet, but with the proportions that created an illusion of a house twice its size. From behind her came the constant drone of traffic from the interstate, distant but intrusive-it seemed so much closer at this moment. Edges and corners seemed sharper. Her motion seemed to slow, despite the quickness of her heartbeat. This increased awareness had come all of its own, and yet Daphne Matthews the psychol
ogist knew better: Something had triggered this-nothing came all of its own. The cop she worked with in a survivors clinic described similar sensations moments before a firefight. But Boldt would talk instinct, Daphne would talk reflex. She had caught something out of place perhaps: a sound, a smell, an image; she fell victim to this stimulus, misinterpreted or not.

  The air smelled of charcoal. She heard a seaplane taking off in the distance, and, much closer, the nauseating laugh track of a television show.

  Her face felt hot from the run, her skin itched. Her mind worked furiously trying to sort things out.

  At the same time, she began an internal dialogue, chastising herself for being such a paranoid. What a baby! She also wrestled with the internal voices of several friends, Lou Boldt among them, who had once attempted to talk her out of buying a houseboat. The investment had silenced her critics-the place was worth a fortune now, and her timing couldn’t have been better. But it was an isolated location, and tonight in particular it felt just a little too removed.

  Get in the house! she told herself. She bent to retrieve the key that she had tied to her shoelace. Get in the house, her mind repeated more loudly.

  She unlocked the door, leaving it slightly ajar until she got the light on, and hurried to the nearest lamp, on the entrance table along with her purse. Inside the purse was her gun. This thought did not escape her. The light flashed brightly and died-the bulb had blown.

  She felt a gust of wind at her back. The front door thumped shut of its own accord. Startled, she leapt over to it, and swiveled the dead bolt, locking it. Issuing darkness. Nothing-not even the pitch black-was going to convince her to open that door again. Safe! She inched carefully forward, the picture of the downstairs emblazoned in her mind: directly ahead, the living room, a center post in the middle of the room, a small sofa and end table, a rocker, the wood stove; to her right, the narrow ladder ascending to the tiny bedroom and its balcony; to her left, the small galley, demarcated by a blue tile countertop with two ash stools looking across the Jenn-Air range; around the galley, the head to the left-and opposite this, a small hall flanked by two closets and the back door directly ahead.

  Her eyes beginning to adjust, she reached out and found the arm of the rocking chair. Good, she knew exactly where she was. Some light off the lake found its way through the window behind the sofa, though not enough to help: the room oozed with a gray, ghostly paste. She inched ahead and slightly to her left and brushed up against the rough wood of the room’s central support post. Small waves lapped against the pier, sounding like an animal licking the floats. The refrigerator hummed loudly. The lamp she sought remained a few feet to her right and then directly ahead: its fuzzy image loomed before her.

  She crossed the room. Just as she reached the lamp, she heard a board squeak. It came from the back of the house, past the galley by the head. She reminded herself that the houseboat was always making such noises. On any other night, she might not have noticed a squeak. But that particular sound was as individual, as distinct, as the voice of a friend. A year or so ago rain had leaked in under the back door and had warped the floorboards. When stepped on, one of the wide pine planks, and only one, chirped like a bird-the sound she had just heard.

  With her thumb on the lamp switch and her voice caught somewhere between “Hello?” and a scream, she froze. It must have been something else, a voice inside her reasoned.

  It’s nothing! Right?

  But the voice warned: A person has to step on that board for it to make that sound.

  Her heart hurt in the center of her chest. Her ears burned. I’m overtrained, she thought, as a dozen instructions from her police training flooded her head noisily. Paranoid is all. Each idea separate and individual, she processed them differently, sorting out contradictions as best she could.

  Get out of the building. Call someone! Seek help.

  Turn on the light and see … It’s nothing.

  Go for the gun, then turn on the light.

  Her gun was in her purse, and her purse was on the table by the front door.

  Indecision plagued her. She despised herself for just sitting there-a policewoman frozen in fear.

  She crouched, held her breath, and switched on the lamp. She didn’t look toward the source of that noise first, she looked toward her purse.

  She processed more information: A few steps to get there: A few added milliseconds to flick the safety off and load one into the chamber. From the moment she made her move, to having a functional weapon in hand, perhaps five seconds. An eternity if someone is inside this house.

  A lifetime?

  A good cop could not afford indecision. And if that was the only measure of a good cop, then she was not a good cop. Indecision had provided her with a four-inch scar across her throat. She hated that scar, not only for its appearance, but because she wore it like a flag. Indecision.

  At this point, all she wanted was to prove herself wrong: That squeak had been nothing. She wanted a hot shower, a warmed-up dinner, and a glass of Pine Ridge on the deck. After that, a good book, with every door and window locked tight. Tomorrow, a security system, courtesy of Kenny Fowler. Her feet felt nailed to the pine planks.

  The light, which had been on perhaps two seconds, went out. She grabbed for it and threw the switch. Nothing!

  Silence! she thought. Not even the refrigerator was running. The power was out!

  The board squeaked again.

  She moved fast: two quick, bounding steps. She planted her forehead smack into the center post and went down hard and fast. Head swimming. Nauseated and dizzy. She imagined dinosaurs in a tar pit struggling to get out, sinking deeper. Black and gooey. She didn’t know how much time had passed, if any. She struggled to her feet and clawed her way over to the gun.

  She announced in a slurred voice, “I’m armed. I have a weapon! Go away now!” Training. Arms sagging with the weight of the gun, her head swimming. “Go away now,” she mumbled. She fell to one knee and struggled back up to standing, feeling a thousand pounds heavier. Her head complained with the slightest movement. She inched her way forward, her right toe feeling in front of her. “Go away now,” she repeated in an unconvincing voice that sounded to her like someone else talking.

  Her left hand searched out the flashlight that she kept in the kitchen drawer with the knives. She plunged her hand inside the drawer. “Shit!” she said as she caught a knife blade on the tip of her finger and yanked her hand out quickly, instinctively delivering the cut to her lips and sucking on it.

  She switched on the flashlight, its beam a white tunnel splashing a large circle on the walls. But her vision was all wrong.

  Sweating heavily, heart beating furiously, she staggered uncertainly out of the galley and pivoted left, bracing for a shot. No one.

  Slowly, she lowered the intense beam of light until it illuminated the warped plank responsible for the bird chirps. She gasped as she saw beads of water catching the light like jewels. This was not her imagination. Someone was inside.

  Assess the situation! She had a 50 percent chance. The intruder could be to her left, hiding in the head, or to her right, down the small hall, about to go out the back door. She hadn’t heard the back door open or close, and although it wasn’t a terribly noisy door-might have been opened and closed without her knowledge, the intruder gone-she didn’t believe this.

  Think! But she could not.

  “I’m armed,” she repeated, this time more strongly, her strength returning.

  She leapt ahead, spun completely around, and slapped her back into the corner-the head now to her right, the back door nearly straight in front of her. No silhouette. She shined the flashlight there. No one.

  Hiding in one of the closets? Or is he gone? Did he get out without me hearing?

  She summoned her courage, maintaining a firm but awkward grip jointly on both the gun and flashlight. She spun to her right, first aiming into the head-nothing! — and then, in self-defense, spinning fully around and covering the c
losets. The quick motions drove her to the edge of vomiting.

  The intruder made contact from behind-pushed her hard. She screamed loudly as she lost her balance.

  Her furtive glance into the head had been too quick. He must have been standing in the tub, she realized, as she struck the opposing wall face-first. She heard two heavy steps, the back door come open, and then two more footsteps. In her mind’s eye she could see the intruder leaping to the next platform, the adjacent house, then, no doubt, the next after that, and the next. Too fast to be stopped. In the shadows, too dark to be seen.

  She clambered back to her feet and surged forward and out the back door, handling the gun with great care. She knew she had lost him, but her training and her nerves required her to determine the area was clear. She made no attempt to try to follow or catch up. Her intention was self-defense. The area was clear: There was enough ambient light here to see. She reentered the house, shut and locked the back door, and hurried to the front door, which was still locked.