No Witnesses lbadm-3

by Ridley Pearson

  “I’ve got nothing to say.”

  Daphne glanced once, hotly, at Boldt, turned to face the suspect, and said, “Lean against the table.”

  “I will not,” Uli protested.

  Daphne slapped the table hard, jarring the woman. “Lean against the table.”

  “Go ahead,” Boldt said.

  Reluctantly, Uli leaned onto her hands.

  “Your forearms,” Daphne said. “Good. Now open your legs. More. Move ’em. Good!”

  “What do you think?” Daphne asked, stepping back to view the profile as she might a painting.

  Having no idea what he was agreeing to, Boldt said, “I think you’re right.”

  Daphne stepped up behind a nervous Cornelia Uli and reached around her, careful not to make contact, and leaned over her in a provocative position impossible to mistake. She rocked her hips unmistakably. In an intimate whisper she asked the suspect, “Remind you of anyone?”

  “Get off me.”

  “I’m not on you. Neither was he. He was in you.”

  Boldt felt like an idiot for taking so long to see it: The woman in Kenny Fowler’s apartment. The night Daphne had taken the hotel room and sat in the dark.

  In that same intimate whisper Daphne said, “I saw you two up there.”

  Uli’s head jerked. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “It didn’t look like you enjoyed it very much,” Daphne said. She added quietly, “Whatever he has on you is gone. We tear it up, burn it, whatever. We’re not interested.”

  “All I do is squeal, right? Forget it.”

  The first crack.

  Boldt said, “We’re talking about extortion, accessory to murder. The rest of your natural life spent behind bars.” he added, “We know it was you.”

  The door swung open and an angry male voice demanded, “Out of here now!”

  It was Uli’s public defender, and he left the door for them to close as he rushed to his client’s side.

  On the other side of the Box’s one-way glass, Uli, her attorney, and Penny Smyth were waiting impatiently for Daphne and Boldt, who had been talking it through for the last several minutes.

  Wrapping it up, Boldt speculated, “Being one of the few insiders, Fowler knew how to word the extortion threat so that we would attribute it to Caulfield.”

  “But he blew it-the extortion demand neglected to blame Adler, something that bothered both Dr. Clements and me.”

  “We expected extortion demands. He simply gave us what we wanted.”

  Looking at Uli through the glass, Daphne explained proudly, “It was her body language that caught my eye. When she started prancing around the room like that, I knew I recognized her. I sat in that hotel room watching them for hours. It just took a second for it all to click.”

  Boldt said cynically, “Both of them in that apartment-right there across from us …”

  “He was angry with her about something. Maybe she wasn’t supposed to show up there. He took a quickie at the dining room table for payment and sent her packing.”

  “He’s such a prince,” Boldt said, swinging open the door as they joined the others.

  Uli’s public defender was a young Jewish kid fresh from the law boards named Carsman. He looked like an unmade bed. He had a high, squeaky voice and he protested Boldt’s every breath. Penny Smyth, looking the most dignified of any of them, dragged Carsman into the hallway for a conference, and when they returned to the Box, Cars-man did not utter a single objection. He took notes furiously, and occasionally passed one to his sagging client.

  Boldt passed Uli her arrest record. “Badge number eight-one-six-five. That badge number belonged to Detective Kenneth Fowler when he was a police officer. He arrested you in a gang situation, and you were charged with a second-degree homicide. The charges were later dropped for lack of evidence.”

  Daphne stated, “We saw you in his apartment that night.”

  “Shit,” the suspect said, and she hung her head and shook her hair in defeat.

  Boldt felt triumphant. His face revealed nothing. Impassive. Exhausted.

  Daphne said, “What does he have on you, Cornelia?”

  She mumbled. “A videotape. A surveillance tape. I was seventeen.”

  “Sex?” Daphne asked.

  “A homicide,” Boldt stated knowingly.

  “Don’t answer!” Carsman interrupted.

  Boldt said, “Lester Gammon. Age eighteen. Stabbed seven times.”

  Cornelia Uli obeyed her attorney, though she locked eyes with Boldt. “He asks me to do stuff now and then. I do it.”

  “Like the other night?” Daphne asked.

  “Go stuff it,” Uli said vehemently. “What do any of you know about the streets? Let me tell you something-out there you do favors and people leave you alone. It’s simple in the streets. It’s basic survival. You and your perfect hair and your strawberry douche,” she said spitefully to Daphne. “You make me sick.”

  Daphne blushed and held herself back in a formidable show of internal strength.

  “You did Fowler favors,” Boldt repeated.

  “Like this ATM thing. Yeah.”

  “Do not say anything more!” her attorney advised.

  “Shut up,” Uli told him.

  “I can’t represent you if-”

  “Shut up!” To Boldt she said, “I went where he told me to. I did what he said to do.” To Daphne she said, “And yeah, he jumps my bones now and then. And no, I don’t particularly like it. But it’s not like it’s something new, okay? He’s been doing it since back when he was a cop. He had a lot of the girls doing it back then. If Kenny busted you, you went down on him. No charges. It was that simple. That’s what I’m saying. You get why I’m afraid of cops? It started when I was fifteen and running with a gang. Kenny liked me. Too bad for me.” She seemed to be apologizing to Daphne. “You get kinda used to the ones like Kenny Fowler. But it’s better than the alternative, and that’s the way it works out there. Doing favors for people beats the hell out of living under bridges in cardboard boxes. Getting gang-banged. Getting bad needles. You don’t know until you’ve been there.”

  “You’re right,” Daphne said, overcoming her personal agenda and striving to establish rapport with the suspect. Daphne’s friend Sharon had been there. Daphne knew all about it, but was not going to say so, was not going to defend herself. Boldt admired her for that.

  “He gave you the ATM card,” Boldt began for her.

  “And the number. And he told me which machines to hit. Big deal. He gave me a hundred a night.”

  “Generous,” Boldt said.

  “It’s a living,” Uli replied dully.

  “Sergeant?” It was Penny Smyth. She asked for a conference in the hall. Daphne stayed with the suspect.

  Smyth said, “What I’m seeing here is that it’s going to come down to her word against Fowler’s. Is there any other evidence tying them together other than this? Because I’ve got to tell you, a judge is not going to like her. Will Fowler have the money on him? No way. It’s long gone-the minute you picked this girl up, it was gone. He was a cop, right? He knows the game. He’ll have something planned; he used her for a reason. Am I right, or am I right? I’ll run with this if you want. I can take it up the ladder and see what they think, but it stinks, if you ask me. She’s young-she has reasons, serious reasons in her past to hate Fowler and want to do him harm, and that’s going to come out in any testimony. It stinks, Sergeant. Matthews cannot say for sure it was this girl in Fowler’s apartment that night.”

  Boldt countered, “We have the PIN number. We have the former arrest.”

  “The bank account was opened by her. She uses Fowler’s badge number as a way of getting back at him, just in case she’s caught, which she was. I’m showing you the spin that can be put on this. As a witness she stinks, I’m telling you. Your call. You tell me what you want me to do.” She met and held eyes with him.

  “I hate attorneys,” Boldt told her.

&nb
sp; “Me too.” She smiled. “All my friends are cops.”

  He smiled back. “So what do you suggest, Counselor?”

  “I suggest she wears a wire for us. We plea her down to six months in medium with good behavior. Carsman will do back flips to get that. We send Fowler to the Big House until he’s gray.”

  Boldt asked incredulously, “Do you actually think that Kenny Fowler will get within a six-state region of this woman? No way in hell. Maybe to kill her, but not to-” He caught himself.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “Maybe we let Fowler do our work for us. I think he owes us that.”

  Boldt had his car swept for listening devices before driving Daphne out to Alki Point, where he parked with a view of the water and a volleyball game being played out at sunset. Thankfully, no devices had been found.

  A body had washed ashore here once, and had changed a case and their lives along with it. He had not chosen this place to park at random.

  “I don’t want to ask this of you, Daffy.”

  “Then don’t.” She knew already. But she had agreed to the drive, so perhaps he stood a chance of convincing her. She looked away from him, out her window. “Please don’t,” she repeated.

  “You have to be living back there if this is going to work. We’ll have to script some things for you and Adler to say. We have to chum the water, or he’ll spot the hook.”

  “Do you understand what you’re asking?”

  “I know what I’m asking-I don’t know what it would be like. I don’t know that I could do it.”

  “And Watson and Moulder-they would see me, too, if all this works the way you have planned. On the toilet, in the shower … My God, Lou!”

  “We gave him the mug shot, Daffy. We know he showed it around the processing plants, the warehouses. At some point someone must have recognized it. Caulfield delivered there on a regular basis. Fowler kept that information from us, all so that he could continue the extortion. He’s as guilty as Caulfield is. If we’re to put him away for that, we need a huge case against him. We need to build it from the ground up and show that Kenny Fowler, because of greed, allowed these poisonings to continue. But to do that, we have to have him dead-to-rights on the extortion. Honestly?” he asked. “I don’t care much about the extortion. I care about these lives. I care about being lied to and strung out because of Fowler’s greed. He deserves more than a slap on the wrist. And yes, it means that you have to take your clothes off. Yes, you have to do all the private things we all do every day of our lives. And yes, you have to do them as if there is no camera watching you, no microphone listening. And no, I don’t know how a person does that. But I know you want him as badly as I do-otherwise, I couldn’t have asked.”

  She sighed, and she scratched the dashboard with a fingernail. “Thank you for not saying that he’s seen it all already-that he may have hours of me on tape-so what does it matter? And thank you for not saying that I’m strong enough to pull this off. That is a sentiment that would not be appreciated, I can tell you that. We won’t know about any such strength until I try-if I try. And so that would only be manipulative garbage.” She smirked and added, “More my territory than yours. I could blow this, Lou. And thanks also for downplaying the report on that witness from the loading dock. We know Fowler received confirmation of Caulfield’s identity and did not act on it. I read that report. That makes him guilty of these crimes by omission.”

  Boldt did not realize that she had read it. “Whatever,” he said. But his heart was pounding strongly, for it sounded to him as if perhaps she had made up her mind.

  “They ask too much of us,” she said, her lips tight as if fighting off her emotions. “We give too much, and we get so little back. The media tears us to pieces. The sixth floor rains hell on us. And all for what?”

  “Cold pizza and Maalox,” Boldt answered.

  She sputtered a laugh. “Yeah. Job benefits.”

  “Right.”

  The wind blew across the water like a shadow, and sand swirled in the air, and the people playing volleyball shielded their eyes from it.

  “As a teenager, like all teenage girls, I wanted to be a movie star. I thought it looked so easy. ‘Be careful what you wish for. Someday it may be yours,’ or however that goes.”

  “You have to do this willingly; it’s not something that will work if you feel pressured into doing it. You have to sell him on the idea that everything you say, everything that goes on at that houseboat is for real.”

  “Business as usual,” she said spitefully.

  He was not going to touch that comment.

  “I’m in,” she announced. Facing him with hard eyes she said, “But for my own reasons, Lou. For my own damn reasons.”

  Everyone called the man Watson, and he ran Tech Services as if it were his own department, which it was not. He had been called Watson for so many years that Boldt did not remember his real name. He was a bald man with glasses and thick red lips, and was commonly mistaken for Bernie Lofgrin’s younger brother. If it ran on electricity, then Watson could build it, modify it, copy it, or compromise it.

  Watson and his prize technician, a man named Moulder, spent two consecutive days in a cabin cruiser anchored off of the Lake Union houseboats, alternating between running the gear and fishing off the stern-this “to keep up appearances.” They were the envy of the entire department that week.

  The two most difficult performances were turned in by Daphne Matthews and Owen Adler, who did everything short of making love for the cameras. According to script, they discussed the Uli case on occasion, with Daphne implying that the suspect was getting closer and closer to cooperating with the authorities. Daphne showered, shaved her legs, and brushed her teeth as usual, and Watson followed procedure to the letter, never connecting monitors to the cameras in the bedroom and bath.

  The technology behind the ruse was explained to Boldt in layman’s terms. Fowler’s surveillance system worked off of infrared and radio-frequency transmission as opposed to hard wiring, which necessitated cables. The signals from the microphones and fiber optic cameras were transmitted via the airwaves to a remote location that Watson estimated was within a quarter-mile of the houseboat. Another houseboat or a nearby condominium seemed the most likely location for this remote, but a vehicle or boat was a possibility. It was suspected that the incoming signals were recorded and videotaped at the remote site, although it was also possible that the signals were relayed over telephone lines from the remote to either the security room at Adler Foods or Fowler’s apartment-they would not be able confirm this until they conducted a physical search of the various premises. It was no different from the surveillance techniques the police themselves used, except that Fowler was more thorough in his coverage of the houseboat, and he incorporated a state-of-the-art digital technology that required Watson to borrow some equipment from the FBI.

  Watson and his people spent twenty-some hours identifying the various frequencies being used, and stealing onto the signals. Now, what Fowler was listening to and watching was also being recorded on the anchored cabin cruiser that housed two of the world’s worst fishermen. More important, when directed to do so, Watson was prepared to jam Fowler’s outgoing signals from the houseboat and transmit his own from videotape, leaving Fowler with false images of an empty houseboat, when in fact it would be bustling with activity. This deception had been the key element for Boldt’s plan to work, and it took nearly seventy-two hours before Watson believed he was ready. No one could guarantee it would work.

  On day four of the ruse, the morning headlines and broadcasts led with the story that Cornelia Uli had agreed to turn state’s witness and to reveal to a grand jury the identity of the man who had run the ATM extortion of Adler Foods. Deputy prosecuting attorney Penelope Smyth was quoted as saying that with Uli’s testimony, the state believed it had an airtight case, and that for “security reasons” the witness was being placed into hiding so that nothing could jeopardize her testimony-or the state�
�s case.

  At one-thirty in the morning the night before-well before the story hit the press-an unmarked dark-blue sedan pulled up in front of the dock that led to Daphne’s houseboat, and two plainclothes policemen climbed out and walked the area for five minutes before returning to the car and giving the all-clear. The car’s back door opened, and a figure small in stature, accompanied by a big bear of a man, walked quickly toward Daphne’s home. The front door swung open and admitted these two without a knock or introduction. Moments later, the blue car sped away.

  Daphne closed the door and locked it. “Everything go okay?”

  “Fine,” Boldt answered.

  Cornelia Uli pulled back the hood to the sweatshirt and shook her hair free. “I thought we were going to a hotel,” she complained.

  “So will everyone else,” Boldt said. “The press will be searching every hotel, motel, and inn within an hour’s drive of the courthouse. A houseboat on Lake Union, five minutes from downtown? You’re safer here than in any hotel. It has a brand-new security system, and-”

  “A policewoman to look after you and take care of you.”

  “What about television?”

  “There’s a television in the bedroom, and the bedroom is yours until this is over.”

  “Okay, fine.” Cornelia Uli strolled the houseboat looking it over, touching some of the furniture, inspecting the view. “It’s killer,” she said.

  “Let’s hope not,” Daphne answered. “And let’s get one thing straight: I am not your housemaid. We share dish duty, cooking, and cleaning.”

  “Forget it.”

  “This is nonnegotiable. You can go back to county lockup and take your chances, if you’d prefer.”