The Art of Deception (24 page)

The psychologist pushed aside the frightened woman in what she considered a moment of personal triumph. “The arrest and conviction of Lanny Neal isn’t about you, Mr. Walker. It’s about us doing our jobs. As for your contributing to our ongoing investigation into the disappearances—”

“Then do your job,” he complained.

“We are. We’re doing just that.”

“By letting him go? By buying a bottle of red wine and taking the night off?”

Oh God: He’d followed her, watched her. He knew her
cell number.
She fought to hold herself together, to place the psychologist ahead of the victim.

“How’d you get this phone number?” She blurted it out without thinking, her internal wiring a mess from the unwanted cocktail of wine and adrenaline. She realized that the phone would reveal to her the caller-ID information once she disconnected. She had to know where he was calling from, and she had to hang up on him to get the information. But with Walker dangling information about Hebringer and Randolf, she knew she couldn’t hang up. Not yet.

“Why cover the windows like that? It spoils the view.”

Her entire body twitched as her nerves seized. She never let these guys win, yet the temptation was to hang up. She could stare across any interrogation table faking self-confidence and
leveling intimidating looks that made even the most heartless think twice about going up against her. So why couldn’t she face Ferrell Walker over the airwaves?

She disconnected the call.

Her fingers fumbled through the phone’s menu choices in search of caller-ID.

She lunged for her home phone and dialed 911 as her mobile began chirping again. The caller-ID blinked on the screen:

Walker, calling back.

“Emergency operator,” a controlled voice answered.

Matthews introduced herself, recited her shield number, and requested the street address for pay phone number 945.

She was placed on hold as her mobile continued to ring. Then the mobile went silent as the voice mail engaged. Two transfers later, she reached a supervisor. Nearly five minutes after that, minutes consumed by the supervisor establishing her legitimacy, she was finally supplied the address of pay phone 945. An address just two blocks south of her.

Hanging up the phone, she sensed the walls of the room closing in on her—physically moving—and though she’d heard such anxiety attacks described in sessions from the other side of the couch, only now did she experience the terror associated with the physical environment shrinking. Suddenly the houseboat was but a cage from which to be plucked. Walker was two blocks away and watching her.

Already on the run, she snatched up car keys, purse, and cell phone, giving little thought to stepping outside the safety of her home. Clomping down the dock in a pair of rubber Wellingtons,
her robe slipping open to expose her flannel pajamas, Matthews fished her handgun from her purse and chambered a round.

She lumbered past a well-dressed couple, neighbors returning from dinner. They made way for her, the woman calling out and offering help.

A blur of white terry cloth, Matthews clomped her way up a set of wooden steps that led from the dock to street level beneath an overhang of limbs, maple trees and a sycamore reaching down with their long bony fingers, an area where even she had to duck and maneuver in order to avoid having an eye poked out. Her head averted, she ran smack into a person. The unexpected contact took her breath away—part solid physical contact, part shock. In such close quarters, amid the jumble of lacelike mottled light from a streetlamp, she saw only the brown uniform at first, the resulting wave of terror filling her head like a rush of blood from standing up too quickly. She’d struck a man’s chest. A tall man. She looked up into the eyes of Nathan Prair.

“Daphne?” His surprise sounded genuine, though hers won the moment. He took her by the shoulders. “I…,” he stuttered, “was just coming to see you … I wanted to apologize for—”

There was no rational thought or logic guiding her at that moment, only a primal instinct to flee. No calculation, no clever excuse for the bathrobe and Wellingtons. What came out of her mouth was half scream, half alarm, like a martial arts grunt while delivering a blow. She shoved Prair, connecting in the center of his chest, and to her great surprise, sent him backward and off-balance.

She crossed the street to the parking lot and stood a fraction of a second too long looking for the Honda that wasn’t there, only to realize it was in the SPD repair shop. Behind her, Prair had regained himself and had turned toward her.

“Daphne! Wait up!”

A moment later she had the departmental pool car unlocked and started.

Prair ran across the street toward her.

Gravel and mud flew as the car skidded out onto pavement in a lazy fishtail that nearly decapitated a row of mailboxes. She raced past a standing pay phone that she assumed to be number 945, craning her neck to take it in. It stood empty, forcing her to wonder where Walker had gone. To her houseboat? The Chevy blew through a red light into traffic. Car horns sang protest behind her as she fishtailed yet again, careening into the opposing lane before jerking the wheel to correct and recrossing the double yellow line. The car’s speedometer needle twitched as she rattled over potholes, doubling the speed limit. In a perfect world she would have had the time and presence of mind to make a call and ask dispatch to electronically clear traffic lights, affording her a straight shot into Public Safety. She would have, at the very least, announced herself to Traffic Patrol.

The wet roads shone like polished stone. As she took a sharp left, she lost the back half of the Chevy and, like crack the whip on ice skates, found herself floating at unbearable speeds. The Chevy connected solidly with the front grill of a Mazda coupe, the sounds of shattering glass bigger and bolder yet somehow less significant than her shattering wineglass of only minutes earlier.

She realized that Walker had won the game, and the resulting anger caused her to lay on the accelerator and drive the car on a steady course. In her mind there was no stopping for an insurance swap; she was three blocks north of safety. Two more red lights slipped behind her before it registered that she had just hit-and-run a motor vehicle. There would be hell to pay if anyone had caught her plate.

She skidded the tires to a stop in the police garage, threw
the shift into
PARK,
and ran from the car like it was on fire. Two grease monkeys on night duty looked up in unison. The building’s heavy steel door came open awkwardly, Matthews struggling to find the strength that normally required little effort. With her back pressed up against the concrete block wall, she fought to catch her breath, the first sensation of security melting through her. The red glare of the
EXIT
sign caught her eye, the color suiting her for some reason. This hallway smelled of old tires, gasoline, and human sweat.

From inside the building, a pair of uniformed officers, young kids assigned night duty, approached her while clearly trying not to stare. The woman officer turned and asked, “May I help you?”

“Lieutenant Matthews,” she identified herself.

Fighting off a grin, the young woman asked, “You’re kinda in the wrong place, ma’am. Do you have an appointment?”

“I
am
Lieutenant Matthews, Officer.” She badged her.

“My mistake, Lieutenant.” The woman officer sobered and straightened, a poster girl for good posture.

“There’s a situation,” Matthews said, attempting to explain the robe and rubber boots that had clearly won their attention.

Saved, as the door to the garage jerked open and one of the grease monkeys, a civilian named Roy who’d worked the garage for years, said, “Hey, listen, Lieutenant—a Chevy or not, this here’s a pool vehicle, and it went outta here looking good, and you brung it back with half the rear quarter panel tore off. We got us some paperwork that’s got to get done.”

“Send the paperwork up to my office, Roy,” Matthews said, striving for dignity. Realizing the futility of that effort, she turned her back on all three and stomped her green rubber boots toward the waiting elevator.

Safety had come at the price of humiliation.

When the phone rang at 10:15
P.M.,
there was no doubt in the Boldt home who should answer. He received fewer of these calls since the promotion to lieutenant—paper pushers weren’t in demand as much as squad sergeants—but he still kept his finger in the pot. Boldt’s team rarely made major decisions without his input. He’d been hoping for word from Sandra Babcock, hoping to gain access to the Underground given that the city had refused him entrance through the sinkhole due to safety concerns.

He answered the living room phone, listened to LaMoia on the other end, and agreeing with everything his sergeant suggested, grunted out “Yes,” five or six times in a row. As he hung up, it suddenly felt more like 7
A.M.
inside his head—wide awake.

By this time Liz had appeared in their bedroom door wearing a sky blue pajama top of a synthetic that had all the qualities of satin, hanging on her like a coat of paint down to mid-thigh. He knew she wore only that top and nothing else, for that particular choice was her signal for what she had in mind, and he felt sorry to disappoint them both. As he cradled the receiver, he also hung his head.

“Too bad,” she said. “You would have liked it.”

“Yes.”

“Me, too, for that matter.”

“Nice to hear.”

“Can you be twenty minutes late?”

“Wish I could.”

“Yes, you do,” she said, offering an understanding face and sympathetic eyes. Being a policeman’s wife couldn’t be easy. He knew this and tried to cushion the blows whenever possible. They’d made it through the most dangerous years, the most stressful years, both of them straying from the marriage, but only once as far as he knew, though Liz for a much longer period. He’d never learned the identity of her lover and wondered if he ever would. As a lieutenant, the demands were on his time, the pressures more political in nature, the internal problems of his people leaving him feeling like a camp counselor. This call proved a little bit of all three. She wouldn’t want to hear about it. They both worked hard to leave their jobs at the office—an unattainable ideal, but one worth striving for.

“How long?” she asked.

“An hour if I’m lucky,” he said. “All night, if I’m really lucky.”

He won a grin from her, a small but important concession. “Good for you.” Had they not been personally tied to the disappearances, it would have been out of bounds for her to ask if it involved Susan Hebringer, and Boldt might have felt uncomfortable about including her. But the rules had changed since the mother of their daughter’s classmate had gone missing, and Boldt thought maybe it was for the better—Liz deserved to know more about what took him away at 10:15 at night.

He told her that LaMoia had called, that Daphne Matthews had jammed herself up, and that it needed untangling, but that yes, there seemed to be an unexpected connection to Hebringer and Randolf.

“Then go,” she said, knowing this made no difference to his decision, and yet it did. “I’ll stay up and do some prayer work.”

They came at life’s solutions from two different angles, but Boldt had finally settled into feeling right and good about it,
believing that maybe one couldn’t exist without the other, that the material and spiritual were far more interconnected and yet entirely separate at the same time. He was still learning about her world; she’d given up on his the day she walked out of medical treatment for the lymphoma. And yet there was a meeting of the minds more often than not. “I could use that,” he said, wanting to support her efforts.

She had something to say to him but kept it to herself, a coy grin taking the place of the words. He wanted to hear it but knew better than to ask. The secret to the success of their marriage these days was as much about knowing what not to say as it was knowing what to say. He admired her for her restraint. They shared a kiss. She smelled softly of the lotion that he knew her to spread all over her body prior to bed.

This was a night of great sacrifice indeed.

“Where is she now?”

“Back at her place,” LaMoia answered, the two of them at a near run as they approached Homicide’s situation room. When Boldt shot him a disapproving look, LaMoia explained that they had a patrol guarding her dock.

“Everyone else is here?”

“Heiman, Gaynes, DeLuca, and Morse. Brandon’s home sick, Marsha’s still on pregnancy leave.”

“Listen up!” Boldt shouted, addressing the gathering, as he and LaMoia entered the bland conference room that served as a staging area for major investigations. The four detectives were strewn around the room, Heiman in a chair, Gaynes propped against a file cabinet, DeLuca towering over a stack of equipment trying to get the room’s video projector switched off before Boldt realized they’d been watching a movie on TBS. The room
smelled of coffee and old socks. The video went to a solid blue panel, though the sound of the action flick lingered for another few seconds until DeLuca found the right switch.