The Art of Deception (20 page)

“Gary Hollie. West Seattle. An accountant with something called Cross Ship LLC.” LaMoia held himself back a moment before saying, “I hate accountants.”

A young patrolwoman approached at a brisk walk and delivered a coy grin to LaMoia as well as the awaited computer printout. Matthews tried to ignore the woman’s open flirting.

“Never met her.” LaMoia defended himself without looking up from the printout. It was his prescience that disturbed her the most. She didn’t want him reading her thoughts.

LaMoia said, “Seems our Mr. Hollie went down for illegal trespass in Maryland less than two years ago.”

“That could be anything,” Matthews said.

“Including a peeping charge dealt down,” LaMoia said.

“He’s yours,” Boldt told LaMoia, strategizing a game plan. “I’m a presence, that’s all. You take the chair. I want to pace.”

“Got it,” LaMoia said. Already at the interrogation room door, he looked back at Matthews. “You see something you don’t like, give us a knock or a buzz.” A gracious offer, but also a little patronizing.

“What if I don’t like
any
of it?” she called out.

LaMoia motioned Boldt through first. “Age before beauty,’ he said.

Gary Hollie’s oversized head was reminiscent of a jack-o’– lantern, and had nearly as much hair. He wore a neatly trimmed black mustache above pursed lips that struggled to contain a simmering anger. Forest green chinos, a white button-down shirt, and the thick-soled office shoes completed the look. If they ended up pressing charges they would have a good look at the waffle pattern of those shoes.

LaMoia introduced Boldt as “the guy who runs the show around here.” He then took a seat in an uncomfortable chair across the war-pocked table from the suspect. Everything about the Box was austere and drab, from the vinyl flooring to the acoustic-tiled ceiling punctuated with randomly lanced pencil holes. Boldt wandered the perimeter, studying the familiar walls like a building inspector. A mirror of one-way glass occupied most of the west wall, a window through which Daphne Matthews would observe the interview.

Hollie complained in a tight nasal whine of a man held hostage by stress and tension. “This is what I get for trying to help the lady? Who are you people?”

LaMoia played the game, allowing a drawn-out silence to settle into the room beneath the steady presence of forced air. “We appreciate your taking a few minutes to help us sort this out.”

“I have a right to an attorney.”

“Yes, you do, and you may exercise that right at any time. No one here has denied you that right. You’ll recall that I offered you the chance to place that call if you so desired.”

“You also threatened to charge me.”

“I
informed
you that the involvement of attorneys would necessitate I book you. Those are the facts, Mr. Hollie. Currently, I can still change my mind. Right now, we’re just two guys talking about an incident that’s as likely to go away as it is to stick. If you want to walk out of here, then I’ve got to make your arrest go away. That’s what we’re doing here, me and you: We’re making like magicians. We’re working out the disappearing act.”

“So what’s
he
doing?” Hollie indicated Boldt.

Distracting you. Worrying you. “The boss is here to make sure I don’t knock you sideways and use you to mop the floor, because I’m known to have a little bit of a temper when it comes to defending my family. The woman you threatened is a police officer I work with—we work with. Highly respected and loved by all. You picked a hell of a target, Hollie.”

“I did not target her.”

“She asked you to back off, several times. Her phone was on. I heard it.”

“Her car was blocking two lanes.”

“She told you to go away. You chose to ignore her request.”

“She was being unreasonable.”

“Whereas banging on a window, wrestling with a door handle, and shouting at a driver is the epitome of reasonable behavior.”

“The … car … was … blocking … the road,” Hollie said, his attention alternating between Boldt and LaMoia. “I was trying to help. The car was stalled in traffic. Would you have just driven by? The headlights were on. It was raining. A woman inside. Alone.”

“You see? Now we’re getting somewhere,” LaMoia said. “Like, for instance, how did you know there was a woman inside that car? How did you know she was alone?”

He stammered, looked a little dazed, and then recovered. “Because I went up to the window and looked inside.”

“You get off on looking in windows, do you?” LaMoia asked, turning to make eye contact with Boldt.

“What the hell does that mean?”

“Maryland, two years ago. You want to tell us about the trespass charge?”

Hollie blanched, chewing nervously on his lower lip like something was stuck in his teeth. His fingers drummed rapidly on the edge of the table as a sheen appeared below his eyes and above his thin eyebrows. A criminal record was like a pole marker on a racetrack—no matter how fast you ran, it kept reappearing in front of you.

“We’re calling Maryland right now,” LaMoia informed him. “You don’t want to work a story on me because I do not like stories. I respect a man who owns up to what he did. The past is the past, eh, Mr. Hollie?”

“You’re single, or you wouldn’t say that,” Hollie said with authority. “There’s no such thing as the past when you’re divorced. It stays right there with you every day: the alimony, the anger, the memories. You never get past it. Not completely.”

“So enlighten me about these charges.”

“My ex got it in her head I was going to steal our son from her. I’m talking kidnap. She made up a bunch of crap about me harassing her—
none
of it true—and got a restraining order in place. The woman is psycho. And of course they believe the woman, not the guy, right? You show me one time they believe the guy. The restraining order wouldn’t let me within a hundred feet of a house that I was paying the mortgage on. Try that out.”

“So you ignored the order.” LaMoia realized he sounded less confident, and regretted the letdown.

“I entered the house—
my
house, and when no one was home I might add—and got a bunch of my clothes, a couple CDs, and
a picture of my son. For
that
I got arrested, and charged, and convicted.” He huffed and shook his head. “I’ll tell you something: I drew a line on a map as far away from Maryland as I could get—excluding southern California, because that place makes me sick—and I ended up here in Seattle. Away from her and, I might add, away from my son, which is killing me. If you were a father, you’d understand that.” Gesturing to take in Boldt and the room, he said, “But take a look around. I’m still not far enough away from her.”

Boldt spoke for the first time, asking calmly, “Mr. Hollie, would you have any objection to our lab guys making a quick impression of your shoe soles, maybe looking over your car?”

“What are you talking about?” Hollie seemed caught between a laugh and a cry.

“Agreeing to the search will expedite the process,” Boldt advised, “however you’re under no obligation to cooperate, and there are no guarantees of the outcome.”

Hollie squinted his eyes shut like a man kneeling before the altar asking for forgiveness. “All I wanted to do was help the woman out.”

“Out of the car, or out of the road?” LaMoia questioned, turning his words.

“The opportunity still exists to help,” Boldt advised. “By clearing you, our lab guys can move on.” It was a bit of a stretch, but sounded convincing enough.

LaMoia and Boldt awaited his answer expectantly, a pair of gamblers waiting for the roulette ball to drop.

“I’ve got to call a lawyer first.”

LaMoia’s head bounced in defeat. “We brought you in for answers. Now we get lawyers?”

“If the lawyer says it’s okay, I’ve got no problem with you looking at
anything
of mine. Shoes, car, what do I care?”

Hollie made it sound as if he were cooperating, or intended
to cooperate, but it was all a ruse: Not even the stupidest PD would advise him to submit to such a search without evidence and charges in place.

The suspect reminded them, “I’m starting all over out here. Though I’ve got to tell you I’m reconsidering that decision as well.” He met eyes with Boldt, who wore his disappointment openly. “Is there any place left in this world where anyone—and I mean anyone at all—is still sane?”

Boldt signaled LaMoia. He wanted a chat in the hallway. They had the wrong guy, and both cops knew it.

“Thank you for meeting me.”

“You didn’t say anything about him being here.” Deputy Sheriff Nathan Prair pointed to LaMoia like a man ready to pick a fight. Prair lived coiled like a snake, ready to strike.

“I’m the translator,” LaMoia explained. “You feed her the bullshit, and I’ll sort it out later.”

“Real cute.”

Prair’s round face and surfer-blond hair normally took ten years off his forty, but on this day fatigue painted his eyes a sickly gray. It wasn’t his workouts holding his shoulders square and high, but a steely determination not to appear intimidated in the company of a police sergeant and lieutenant bent on questioning him. He fought off that fatigue like a driver too long behind the wheel, blinking continually and overexposing his eyes so they looked, at times, wide with fear.

The three stood outside the Nordstrom’s Rack store on Pine, an unattractive street corner only yards from a bus tunnel station entrance. Matthews had let Prair name the spot, and it intrigued her that he’d chosen this place. He was on duty, but taking a few minutes of lost time to meet with her. A warm wind ripped off Puget Sound and carried a seagull at blazing speeds overhead. LaMoia tracked it like a hunter. His eyes fell onto Prair, and the deputy stiffened.

Against LaMoia’s wishes, Matthews handed Prair a photocopy
of the moving violation that Prair had written up on MaryAnn Walker. She said, “We could probably give you a dozen false reasons why we’re here, Nathan. But the thing is, we’re all cops. We all know better. We could put you in the Box and talk around the edges of this and see if we couldn’t get something to spill out of you. But you’ve been through enough of that to know better. Don’t you think? I do. So I’m just going to put it to you straight: We’ve got the ticket that you wrote up for Mary-Ann Walker a week prior to her going off that bridge. We’re asking ourselves why in the world you would withhold that information from the investigating officer, seeing as how it could come back to bite you, as now it has.”

Cars and trucks rumbled by. Some yahoo across the street had a blaster playing rap music at the decibel level of a jet taking off.

“And here I was thinking you were going to thank me for getting you out of a jam yesterday.”

“I guess I’m just lucky you showed up,” she said.

“Life is just chock-full of happy coincidences.”

“Like you knowing Mary-Ann,” LaMoia said.

“Just like that,” Prair agreed. He radiated a smile. “What? You two think I actually had any way of knowing, standing up on that bridge, that the woman below was one of probably sixty or more violations I’d written up that week? Are you kidding me?” He addressed LaMoia, “You ever work traffic? You know what I’m talking about.”

Three kids in clothes too big for them went by on skateboards timed perfectly to catch the pedestrian crossing light.

“Never had the pleasure,” LaMoia said. “I came up gumming sidewalks.”

“The night Mary-Ann was killed you took forty minutes of personal time—”

“Killed? She was a jumper last I heard.”

“No way,” LaMoia said. “You were on that bridge. You
knew we’d found the blood trail, knew what we were thinking. You were there, Prair. We were all there together. Skip the theatrics. You’re ripping yourself a new one.”

“McD’s,” he said. “I went off the clock—eleven, eleven-thirty—for a quarter-pounder and fries.” Right or wrong, she read his face as truthful.

Whether Prair knew it or not, he’d just supplied the window of time suggested by the university’s oceanography department. Neal’s claim of seeing 2:22
A.M.
on the clock had proved far too late to account for the physical sciences of the ocean. MaryAnn Walker had gone off that bridge before midnight. Matthews caught LaMoia’s eye and knew he was thinking the same thing.

LaMoia had his detective’s notebook out and in hand. “Which McDonald’s?”

Prair buried his face in a large hand. “Shit.” He cleared his expression and supplied LaMoia with the address: Marginal Way at the turn for SEATAC.

Matthews asked, “Are we going to find you had a history with Mary-Ann Walker beyond this moving violation?”

“Excuse us a moment, would you?” Prair seized Matthews by the arm and led her out of earshot from LaMoia, who craned toward them as if hoping to hear. Seeing this, Prair moved her a little farther.

A couple of big, hefty women came out of The Rack carrying too many bulging plastic bags—they looked like elephants with saddlebags. Both talked at once, going on about the deals they’d just made and all the money they’d saved. Matthews thought: You’ve got to spend it to save it, does anyone see the irony?