The Art of Deception (29 page)

“I wanted to ask if you saw any flooding in your basement when that water main broke,” Boldt said, as Vanderhorst led the way.

“Not a drop.” He forced his reply dryly from his throat, sounding like someone was choking him.

Vanderhorst used one of about twenty keys on a ring to open a door marked
PRIVATE,
then led Boldt down an unattractive corridor past an
EXIT
sign on the right and another
PRIVATE
door to the left. At the end of this hall they entered one marked
AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY
and descended two short flights of concrete-and-steel stairs, at the bottom of which Vanderhorst hit a second light switch and motioned into a sterile, immaculately kept basement area that provided storage.

“My daughter has a friend Vanderhurst,” Boldt leaned on the “u” in the name. He wanted to get Vanderhorst talking, open him up about the water main break, rumors of the Underground’s existence, anything he could get from the man, but he’d been given a guy who could hardly breathe, much less make conversation.

“I heard it was the Underground that flooded in this block,” Boldt tried.

Vanderhorst wheezed. “This is dry storage mostly.” It was stone and concrete walls, steel beams supporting the low ceiling,
tube lighting bouncing off white and gray paint. Rows of industrial shelving aligned north to south stretched like library stacks floor to ceiling. Cardboard boxes bearing codes in thick black marker occupied every available inch of space.

“How about below this floor?” Boldt asked. “Anything?”

“Not that I’m aware of.” The thin man stood there like a statue. Boldt asked if he’d ever found people down here who didn’t belong.

“I’m not going to say it has never happened, because I haven’t been here all that long. But this is a
bank.
They don’t like the idea of strangers cruising around.” They moved on. “Couple more rooms down here you might want to see.”

He showed Boldt three other rooms, one jammed with heating/ventilation ducts and equipment; another tangled with electric, phone, and communication wires; a third, larger and much older, that housed plumbing and steam heaters no longer in use. The walls of this third room were brick covered in thick layers of paint. Generations earlier, some window openings had been bricked closed and painted over. Those window holes suggested an outside wall. Boldt rubbed his hand on the cool brick. “I’m looking to get on the other side of this.”

Vanderhorst remained disinterested, a maintenance guy going through the motions. “Wouldn’t that be dirt?”

Boldt repeated his earlier question about flooding, somewhat astonished that the quantity of water so close wouldn’t have resulted in any flooding.

“Listen, what do I know? You could check with my boss.” He asked irritably, “You seen enough?”

Still touching the wall, Boldt asked, “Have you ever come across any doors, holes in the wall, the floor … anything that might lead somewhere outside this basement?”

“The bus tunnel… they had problems with that water main thing, I think.”

This comment stirred Boldt’s interest—a light went off inside him. “Which wall is that?”

Vanderhorst pointed to the nearest wall of the rectangular room. With some checking, Boldt determined it was the same wall as the one in the utility room with the bricked-up windows.

“We’re done here,” an excited Boldt announced.

Vanderhorst led the way back upstairs, letting Boldt go ahead as he lagged behind to shut off the lights.

Boldt reached the
EXIT
door down the hall, which was alarmed with a red panic bar.

“You’ll get me fired, you push that.” Vanderhorst stood a few yards behind Boldt, watching him. He’d crept up on Boldt, and that bothered him.

“Where’s it lead?”

“Onto Columbia. It’s a fire exit. You want to see the security people, they’re the first door to the right, upstairs, in Admin.”

Boldt thanked Vanderhorst and walked through the lobby back out onto the street, debating his next move. He had other businesses yet to explore within this city block, all with potential access to the Underground, according to Babcock.

Frustrated by his lack of discovery at the bank, Boldt called into the office and assigned two of his detectives to do that door-to-door footwork for him.

To his right, he saw the entrance to the bus tunnel station that fronted Public Safety. He made up his mind, choosing the tunnel for himself.

When Washington State builds a transportation project, 1 percent of the contracted cost is budgeted to the arts, for aesthetics. The result is an eclectic mix of sculpture, writing, music, and painting, little gems that catch the public unaware. In the case
of the pedestrian entrances to the bus tunnel, it included poetry engraved into the kick plates of the stairs, as well as colorful sculpture attached to the walls.

At the Pioneer Square station, escalators, stairs, and elevators lead down first to a vast tier, an open plaza that spans the tunnel traffic below, providing passengers access to any of several additional stairs and escalators for northbound or southbound bus routes. The incandescent lighting is bright; sounds echo off the concrete and tile, and because the buses run electrically once into the tunnel, there are virtually no odors other than a faint trace of burning rubber, a condition that put Boldt ill at ease. The underground bus tunnel stations had not proven popular enough to account for the enormity of such a facility. It swallowed up the two dozen passengers down on the platforms awaiting the arrival of a bus, and Boldt along with them.

The director of bus tunnel maintenance, a man named Chuck Iberson, was a big man with florid cheeks and thinning white hair. Iberson’s military background showed in his attentiveness and respect for Boldt. He had treated Boldt’s summons with the utmost seriousness, arriving to meet him in less than fifteen minutes. By nature Boldt couldn’t help looking at people as possible suspects. Iberson’s overzealous willingness to respond so quickly, like Per Vanderhorst’s mealy and vaguely sleazy sniveling persona, made the detective think twice about the personalities that lurked beneath. A bank janitor might have a shot at an unsuspecting woman, as might a man in a position of authority like Iberson. Boldt knew from his years of experience that suspects often surfaced in the most unlikely places.

“I’m interested in the water main break, back on the twentieth and twenty-first of March.” He felt impatient. He’d come down here on nothing but a hunch. Nine out of ten times, such spontaneity proved a mistake.

“What a mess.” Iberson appeared suddenly uneasy, and Boldt wondered why.

“The possibility, if any, that a person could gain access to the Underground from inside the tunnels,” Boldt continued.

Iberson look confused by that suggestion. For impact, Boldt returned to his original question. “I’m investigating the drowning of a city worker. Pinpointing the source of the flooding may help us out some.”

Iberson appeared somewhat relieved.

Boldt explained, “The EMTs and Fire Rescue who hauled him out reported being inside an area that sounds to us like a part of the old Underground. Access to that area might solve some of the questions surrounding the worker’s death.”

“I got no problem with that whatsoever. You want to look at my tunnel, it’s yours. But I don’t know nothing about no underground city, and if you want to see where we flooded, we’ll have to walk it, and it’s tight in those tunnels.” He pointed to where the station’s expanse condensed to the mouths of two concrete tunnels that each carried one-way bus traffic.

“So we’ll walk it,” Boldt answered.

“Okay, but I gotta put you in an orange vest and hard hat.”

“I can live with that.”

Ten minutes later, Iberson led Boldt up the left tunnel, walking against the direction of bus traffic. They both wore Day-Glo orange vests and yellow hard hats. The transportation department used a good number of double buses joined in the center by an accordion. Nicknamed dragons—because the second of the two sections was “dragging” behind the first—they stretched some fifty feet stem to stern and were hated by all motorists.

“If I tell you it’s a dragon coming,” Iberson warned, “you put your back against the wall and keep your toes behind the
white line. Them tail sections tend to wander a little, so don’t trust what you see.”

Passing a gray door marked
EMERGENCY EXIT—ALARM WILL SOUND,
Boldt asked about the exits.

Iberson explained, “EERs,” pronouncing it “Ears.” “Emergency Evacuation Routes. Two per block, in both tunnels.”

“Where do they come out up top?” Boldt asked.

“Most are spiral staircases leading up to trapdoors in the sidewalks.”

Boldt had walked Third Avenue for years and never paid attention to the existence of the trapdoors. “What trapdoors?”

“They look like metal plates up there. Granted, a couple of the EERs connect through to adjacent buildings, but most head straight to the surface, swear to God.”

“Talk to me about the ones that connect through buildings.” It occurred to Boldt these buildings might be candidates on Babcock’s list.

“Listen, with all due respect, I keep the tunnels lit and drained and the ventilation system working. I don’t know all that much about the EERs.”

There wasn’t much of anything to see. A bus approached, and Boldt pressed his back to the curved concrete. It swept past, sucking his tie from under the vest. Iberson never broke stride.

“I’d like a complete copy of the original construction plans,” Boldt said, “including the ventilation and drainage systems.”

Iberson stopped walking and waited for Boldt to catch up. “I didn’t build them, Detective, but I can see what I can do for you.” It was lieutenant, not detective, but Boldt didn’t correct the man. Iberson pointed out two drains in the roadbed. “This is where we first saw problems. Normal drainage is no problem, and we have pumps that kick in at a certain volume, but once that water main broke, we couldn’t keep up. We had two feet down here before we knew it. Enough for the buses to hydroplane,
so we closed down. It was a bitch. The overflow had breached the ventilation ducting. It wasn’t the drains backing up, which is what we first thought—that our pumps had failed.” He pointed to a massive grill installed high on the cement wall. “Don’t ask me how, because we still haven’t figured it out, but this baby was basically a waterfall.”

Boldt said, “That other emergency door we passed. That would be more like the middle of the block?”

“A little north of center.”

“I’d like a look at it.” Boldt clarified, “Inside it.”

Iberson motioned Boldt back well before a dragon rushed past, wind and dust kicking up behind it. He said, “Sure thing.”

They walked a distance in silence. By this time Boldt’s thoughts were sparking as he assembled a possible explanation for both the missing women and what Iberson had been telling him. He explained as if he absolutely knew this to be fact, “Your ventilation duct penetrates the original retaining wall, constructed to enclose what once were street-level storefronts. When the water main broke, it flooded that area deep enough that your vent went underwater, creating your waterfall and flooding your tunnel.”

They reached the door. It was marked 19.

Boldt asked, “This is which kind, spiral stairs and trapdoor, or building access?”

Iberson shrugged. He didn’t have a clue. “You want a look?”

“Yes.”

Iberson disarmed the door with a key and led Boldt through, saying immediately, “It’s
not
the trapdoor variety.”

Boldt hadn’t thought so, but he said nothing, preoccupied with trying to put himself in Chen’s shoes or even those of Hebringer and Randolf.

The floor was textured steel plate, the walls a gray metal paneling. The lights flickered on with the opening of the door.
It was a man-made hallway leading twenty feet straight ahead to another door.

“Detective?”

“Lead on.”

They walked twenty or thirty feet before climbing a short flight of steel “fire escape” steps, at the top of which yet another sign on a steel door warned of alarms. Iberson keyed this door as well and pushed it open. It accessed a basement room bearing large
EXIT
signs directing pedestrians up a flight of stairs to reach the surface. The room itself felt eerily similar to the bank basement Vanderhorst had shown Boldt. If Iberson had his directions correct, then it even seemed possible this room shared a wall with the bank. The basement smelled of fresh paint and mildew. Boldt could hear the rumble of the overhead street traffic for the first time, a sound absent in the bus tunnel.

Iberson said, “Most all of the basement accesses I’ve seen look about like this. Basically nothing in them but a few signs directing traffic.”

Boldt turned and studied the wall the door had led through. It, too, showed evidence of former windows having been bricked up. The hallway they had passed through connected this wall to the bus tunnel.

Boldt stood there for a few seconds, all else tuned out. He put Hebringer and Randolf into this space—a transcendental moment when he experienced an actual image of a man dragging an unconscious woman by the arms. It was a dreamy, jagged image, not born of anything that had happened here, but his own creation. He knew this perfectly well, and yet he went with it, allowing himself the luxury of a vivid imagination. The man had the woman by both wrists. Her hair cascaded to the floor. Her blouse ripped, her bra pulled down exposing her right breast, her head hung to the side, lifeless. The killer pulled the gray door open, only to have Boldt find his own left hand on
the cool steel metal. The killer looked back at him, but before Boldt could see the face, it melted, along with the man himself. Susan Hebringer lay on the floor of the man-made hallway connecting the basement to the tunnel. Her eyes popped open, and she looked directly at Boldt. Her face and body changed to that of Chen, the city street worker. Chen had been clubbed on the back of the head and was bleeding. Then he, too, was gone.