No Witnesses lbadm-3

by Ridley Pearson

  She moved quietly, her ears alert, telling herself that a deer, a dog, even a squirrel might cause such sounds. She stopped again, and there it was: but this time above her and to her right, nearly the opposite direction as before.

  Struggling against the idea, she convinced herself that someone, not something, was out there, and he or she knew that she was on this trail.

  The psychologist in her realized that fear could be dissipated only by acceptance, not challenge. To challenge fear was to succumb to paranoia and terror, both of which she had experienced in the last several weeks. She focused on turning off all thought and allowing the fear to rise in her chest. There was no choice but to take this back route. Tempted to cry out, she channeled this release into her legs and bounded up the trail at an all-out sprint. On the run, she reached into her purse, removed the handgun, and with the touch of a finger ensured that the safety was engaged. She welcomed the weapon defensively-a scare tactic if needed.

  Finding her pace, she moved fluidly, following the steep switchbacks. Her eyes now fully adjusted, she kept watch for a place to duck off the trail and hide, deciding it would be foolish to lead a possible pursuer to Owen’s guest cottage. She had three strong candidates for who was back there: first-and the most likely, it seemed-a reporter; second, whoever had been following her; third, Harry Caulfield. But it was a possible combination that charged her with energy: Had it been Harry Caulfield following her and watching her?

  Her foot punched through rotten timber and she fell hard, looking out at a short, level stretch of trail connecting to another set of steps. Hearing her pursuer even closer, she ducked into the woods. She was quite near the top, as little as forty yards to go, the surrounding terrain quite steep, the trail wedged between a V of rock and offering the only clear way up.

  She hid herself against a cedar tree and muted her keys as she sought them from her pocket, interested solely in the penlight attached to them.

  Below and to her right, her pursuer approached up the trail, not twenty yards back. She visualized the area through which she had just passed, settling her nerves with deep breaths and planning her actions like a hunter in a blind.

  The next thing she heard was ragged breathing and the rapid approach of footsteps. And then complete and total silence-the drumming of blood in her ears. Her hands shook, belying her self-confidence. Again, she trained her fear into the center of her chest, allowing it a physical presence in her like some kind of demon, and her hands steadied.

  How close was he?

  No sooner had this thought entered her mind than the looming shape of a man appeared within a few feet of her, stealthily moving up the trail. He, too, appeared on edge-he had lost track of her.

  She sprang with incredible force and speed, driving her heel into the side of his knee, her right shoulder into his left, and propelled him to the trail’s dirt floor. In this same steady motion she delivered her words loudly and with great authority: “Police! I am armed. Do not move!” The flashlight came on brightly under her direction and found him facedown. His hands were empty of any weapon, instead clutching that painful knee. He moved his arms slowly for her, like the wings of an awakening bird.

  “Easy,” he announced. “I’m on your side.”

  She knew the voice, though she could not place it. The light followed his motions. “Mackensie?” Formerly Detective Mackensie of Major Crimes. Recruited by-“Mac?” she asked again, though it was clearly he. She staggered back a step and made her weapon ready and returned it to her purse. “Why are you following me?”

  “Following you?” Mackensie inquired, adding his own emphasis, working his knee carefully and sitting up. “Don’t compliment yourself.” Trying his knee again, he said, “Jesus, Matthews, you coulda broke it.”

  “What are you-”

  “What am I? What are you doing here? I’m perimeter patrol. Kenny’s got one of us on all four sides of the estate. You’re lucky it wasn’t Dumbo you tried that on-he’da broke your collarbone and then some.”

  “Patrol?”

  “He is the boss, Matthews. The CEO. Hell, he doesn’t even know we’re out here. But here we are.” He stood up and brushed himself off. “What’s left of us,” he said sarcastically. “In case you haven’t been paying attention, there’s a wacko out there drilling holes in his soup cans. It’s our job to make sure he doesn’t try to drill a hole in the boss. Comprendo?”

  “Kill Owen?”

  “It’s one of his stated aims, right? Or are you going to try and throw some psychobabble shit at me that says this boy is going to play by the rules? Don’t do that, okay? Not with me. Play Dr. Ruth with someone else.”

  Mac Mackensie was so much the opposite of what she had expected that she felt momentarily speechless. Fowler had stolen him away from the department less than a year before for a huge salary, a company car, and six weeks’ paid vacation. Mackensie was a good cop-or had been. He was a prime example of the brain drain being effected on SPD by the private firms.

  “What exactly are you doing here?” he asked in a lower voice, touching her hand and convincing her to extinguish the flashlight. “I mean I know you two … you know … but I thought … I was under the impression that …”

  “It’s not that,” she fired back at him, realizing that sex was the only possibility in Mackensie’s perverted mind. “It’s an emergency,” she explained. “He wouldn’t say what. And if you make a crack about that, I’ll snap your other knee.”

  “If you tell anyone about this,” he warned, defending his manhood, testing his knee and finding it sound, “I’ll make some serious trouble for you, Matthews. And that’s no shit.”

  “Go lift your leg on a tree, Mackensie. I’m terrified.” She added, “Do not follow me any farther!” and broke off at a run.

  As she approached the summit, she wondered why she had failed to consider the possibility of an attack on Owen, why this had not come up in her discussions with Clements. Had it been kept from her because of her personal connection to Adler? She moved faster, her imagination explaining the reason for Owen’s call. Had there been an attack? She ran now. Was that why Mackensie was patrolling the woods? The thought of losing Owen terrified her. And this fear of losing him seemed to further define her feelings, to illustrate to her just how committed to him she was. Since the start of their relationship, she had taken on more work, hiding. Afraid to get too close. Her volunteer work at the Shelter, her contact with her girlfriends had suffered as well. She thought about him all the time, and she ran from those thoughts. But now she ran toward him, terrified by the thought of a world without him.

  She swung open the cottage door and spotted his distinctive silhouette against the blank pane of a darkened window, hurried across the room, and threw herself into his arms. “Thank God,” she said.

  He held to her tightly and said how nothing was worth their separation, how worried he was about losing her-and she laughed that they could be thinking the same thoughts. Perhaps, she thought, she finally knew love.

  After several minutes of holding each other, they settled into a comforting stillness and a satisfying warmth. Later they untangled themselves, and she said selfconsciously, “You didn’t call me for this.”

  “It’s nice,” he admitted.

  “Then what?”

  “He called me.” He stated this so matter-of-factly that Daphne nearly missed the content. She studied his face in the ambient light from the main house that penetrated the large window. “I wasn’t sure what to do.”

  “Called you?” Although she had clearly heard his words, the professional in her vied for time, attempting to fit this behavior into something she understood.

  “I answered the phone and there was this silence on the other end. It’s funny, because I normally would have hung right up-wrong number, prank call, one of Corky’s friends too bashful to speak, a phone solicitation. But I didn’t hang up. Somehow, I knew. Don’t ask me how.”

  She studied his face to measure his state of
mind. How far could she dig? He seemed rattled, but okay. This was her chance to hear the truth. His mind would betray him; his memory less clear. Embellishments, omissions. She faced these with all witnesses.

  Adler said, “‘It’s me,’ he said, ‘the one you’re after. The faxes.’ And I couldn’t speak. I froze. I’ve been in dozens, maybe hundreds, of complex negotiations and I’ve never frozen like that.” His next words came out with difficulty. “He said that I took everything he loved away from him, that I had ruined everything, that I had lied and cheated long enough. He told me that I could stop it. And that if I failed to, he would take everything away from me. He said something like, ‘How simple it is for you to stop it. And yet you won’t, will you? And you know why, don’t you? We both know why-’” Adler’s voice caught and he looked away. In doing so, his face was blanketed in shadow and she could not make out his features, only the top of his head, which he hung in shame.

  “Owen?”

  “He called me a coward-which I am, of course-”

  “That’s absurd and you know it.”

  “He asked if I had heard the late news. He said, ‘It can get much worse. It will get much worse. Time is running out-you know that, don’t you? Tic, tic, tic, tic, tic.’ He made noises like a clock. He said, ‘It will be too late to stop it.’ And he hung up. Strange thing is-I never said one word. He might have been talking to a baby-sitter, for all he knew.”

  A cold, penetrating chill started at the back of her scalp. “Are you sure?” she asked.

  “Never a word.”

  She grabbed on to his shirt, slid off the couch, and pulled him to the floor with her. “Daffy!” he protested, but she quieted him with a “Shh!” and led him crawling across the floor and into the windowless bathroom. She pushed the door shut, locked it, and turned on a pale night-light that colored the white walls cream. Her clothes were damp from the exhausting climb up the trail.

  “What are you doing?” he asked tenderly, grinning, amused with her, fingering a lock of her hair that hung in her eyes.

  She glanced at him hotly, afraid, fumbled through her small purse, and pulled up the antenna on the cellular phone. She questioned, “How did he know it was you on the phone, Owen?” She keyed in the phone number too hastily and made a mistake, forcing her to cancel several digits and reenter them. Angrily she asked, “How did he know?”

  Adler’s mouth slacked open.

  “Did you come by the tunnel?” she asked. Again, he failed to answer.

  Adler had purchased two water-view estates on Loyal and had connected them into one. The former landowner, a product of the paranoia of the early sixties, had installed a bomb shelter in his backyard, at great expense, with an underground tunnel connecting it to the main house. Owen now used the bomb shelter as a wine cellar, and had also connected the guest house to it via a tunnel so that guests could share access to the fine wines and, more important, avoid the miserable rains when going back and forth between the two houses. It was a gimmick, and used rarely, because Owen Adler rarely entertained overnight guests with his busy schedule. Still he loved showing off both the tunnel and his extensive wine collection, and he used the tunnel whenever possible-even in nice weather. “Did you-”

  “Yes, the tunnel,” he managed to say.

  Boldt was not home. She apologized to Liz for calling late, hung up, and called Boldt’s pager number, keying in her cellular phone number when the recording asked for it. For two minutes she and Owen Adler sat shoulder to shoulder in an awkward silence on the bathroom’s tile floor.

  Her cellular phone chirped, and she answered it instantly. “It’s me,” she told Boldt. “I’m at Owen’s. He was here, Lou-Caulfield-he may still be here.”

  “What?” Adler exclaimed.

  “Right!” she said into the phone. “We’re in the guest house. We’ll wait.”

  “Corky!” Adler said, thinking of his daughter. He came to his feet, but Daphne caught hold of his shirt.

  She disconnected the call. Still holding him back, she told her lover, “I’ll go.”

  Adler’s face contorted. “Here?”

  She spoke rapidly. “He knew it was you on the phone, Owen. You said so yourself.” She waited briefly for this to register, but Adler was a mass of confusion. She said impatiently, “He knew because he was looking-he was watching you.”

  Adler sprang for the door, but Daphne blocked him with a straight arm and ordered him to lock the doors behind her. “It’s you he wants. I’m going for Corky.”

  “To hell with that,” he said, shoving her aside abruptly. He threw open the door and ran for the tunnel.

  Daphne followed, but failed to catch him. The concrete tunnel consisted of two long subterranean passages that met outside the wine cellar’s vaultlike steel door. The passage to the main house was noticeably older, its lights more widely spaced and therefore darker.

  When she did catch up to him, he was in Corky’s room, his arms wrapped around his eleven-year-old, who was caught halfway between waking and dreaming.

  Corky wrestled loose of her father’s constraints, jumped out of bed, and assaulted Daphne, leaping into her arms, “Daffy!” she exclaimed, using Boldt’s nickname for her that followed her everywhere.

  Carrying the heavy child, who hung from her neck awkwardly, Daphne edged to the windows and pulled the drapes. Seeing this, Adler helped her, and the darkened room became darker still.

  “What now?” he asked her, helping Corky off her.

  “You stay right here,” Daphne said defiantly. “I’ll get the lights and lock up.”

  This time Adler nodded.

  “Are you cooking breakfast?” Corky asked her. This was the euphemism they used when Daphne spent the night.

  “No, not tonight,” Daphne answered. She met eyes with Owen. His eyes were filled with tears.

  Boldt understood immediately the difficulty he faced. If he descended on Adler’s estate with ten patrol cars and the entire late-shift ID unit, and if the estate were being watched, the involvement of the police would be rather obvious. On the other hand, if the Tin Man were somewhere on the property and Boldt passed up an opportunity to contain him and apprehend him, then he was throwing away innocent lives.

  He checked his watch: His squad’s shift had ended at midnight, forty-five minutes ago.

  He reached LaMoia at home, and ten minutes later, Bobbie Gaynes at her apartment. He tried Danielson’s apartment, failed to reach the man, and had the dispatcher page the detective, hoping for a call back on the cellular. He called in five patrol cars, each with two uniforms, and deployed them roughly around the perimeter of Adler’s estate-not an easy task given the terrain and layout of the Loyal area. One officer from each team was to stay with the car, the other to make ready to work his or her way toward the main house, if requested.

  He roused Shoswitz and prosecuting attorney Michael Striker and informed them of the developments. It was during his conversation with Shoswitz that he learned that two different ATMs had been hit that night and yet another three thousand dollars withdrawn.

  Boldt arrived at Adler’s nine-thousand-square-foot home ahead of either of his detectives. He pulled Daphne aside and the two talked over Boldt’s plan for several minutes. “It’s pretty low-profile at the moment,” Boldt explained. “In case things change and we need it, Shoswitz is arranging for KOMO’s traffic chopper for air surveillance.” The news radio chopper-its services often lent to SPD-would also carry a SWAT sharpshooter, but Boldt left that part out. Daphne abhorred the entire approach of SWAT-shoot first, talk later.

  He was shown to Adler’s sumptuous office, which was hidden behind a moving bookshelf. The decor reminded Boldt of an English manor home. The office window faced out to the water and the precipitous terrain leading down to Daphne’s unseen car parked far below in Golden Gardens Park. “The only point of view into this office,” Boldt observed, “would be from the lawn or one of those trees.”

  They looked out at the broken teeth of the jagge
d horizon. In private, Daphne told Boldt about her encounter with Mackensie in those very woods, and Boldt weighed what to do about it. As Gaynes and LaMoia arrived separately, but nearly at the same moment, Boldt was on the phone to Fowler. The security man dodged any direct answer about the estate’s surveillance and said he would look into it. Boldt, furious, advised that he look into it quickly. “We’re going into those woods with our safeties off,” Boldt explained. “You had better get your people out of there.”

  By the time a nervous and perspiring Boldt had quickly briefed his two detectives, Kenny Fowler called back. “There’s no one currently deployed,” Fowler told him. “But we have a slight problem on this end-might be technical. Might not be. We can’t seem to raise Mackensie.”

  With Daphne’s help, they searched the house thoroughly, checking every possible hiding place, and then locked it up tightly and armed the security system. Outside, LaMoia took the high ground, assigned to check the gardens and shrubs and landscape. The three of them used secured police-frequency radios that connected them to one another and with the perimeter patrol personnel, who were put on an armed-and-dangerous alert. Boldt and Bobbie Gaynes took the hillside, while Daphne patrolled the home’s interior.

  They started down the steep hillside trail together, but quickly separated, because it became obvious that the only trees offering a view of Adler’s office were perched near the very top of the incline. Boldt went left, Gaynes right.

  He checked behind him frequently, watching for the beam of her flashlight as it swept the trees and ground cover. From training, he mentally divided the area into a number of grids and approached his search as he would a homicide crime scene. Methodically, he moved from grid to grid, patiently alert for some sign of recent activity.

  He found just such a sign about twenty yards into the thicket-deep enough that when he turned, he could no longer see the light from the efforts of Bobbie Gaynes. The stems of a large plant were crushed, and a few feet farther along he noticed a skid mark where a boot or shoe had recently kicked a rut into the fallen brown pine needles. Beyond this, he encountered yet another swath of broken twigs through a thicket. It smelled moldy deep in the woods; it smelled of decomposition and too much moisture and not enough sunlight. Boldt used the radio to softly announce that he had picked up signs to follow. He advised Gaynes to return to the main trail and descend slowly, alert for indications of where the man may have departed from it. LaMoia was to stand guard at the top of the trail in case they flushed the suspect.