The Art of Deception (31 page)

“Right here, Lieu. Center of the building, I think. A big room. A bar, or drugstore maybe.”

“Anything?”

“Nothing.”

He waited, straining his ears to hear, well aware the person who had fled could easily still be down here, crouching, hiding, waiting for a chance to slip away.

“I’m going to work west and then north, circling back toward you,” he told the radio. “You hold, all eyes.”

“Copy.”

“Lights on,” he said, ensuring they could discern one another from the person they pursued.

“Copy.”

Boldt carefully negotiated his way around the perimeter of the enormous underground city block, backtracking and retracing his steps where necessary. He crawled under fallen timbers, stepped through vacant window holes, and eased his way through doorways, alert for rotten beams or other debris raining down onto him unannounced, alert for his suspect to spring up from behind, unexpectedly, and take a swing at him. He found himself in a full sweat, damp and burning up from head to toe, the toxin of fear escaping.

All at once there was more mud, Boldt wondering if he’d gone full circle. He stepped through the goop, reaching a doorway, and scrambled over a hill of metal that had once been a fire escape. His flashlight found Gaynes looking back at him bewildered.

“Gone,” she said. “He vanished.”

“But who? A homeless person? Susan Hebringer’s abductor? Chen’s killer?” He tried the walkie-talkie again, to nothing but static. He said, “Maybe they got him up top.”

“You can’t see five feet with these things.” She tore off the flashlight’s colored gel. Boldt did the same. They made their way back, Gaynes in the lead.

“That hissing we heard,” Boldt said, announcing what they were after.

“Yes,” she agreed.

It took them twenty more minutes of false turns and opening doors, of hallways and storage closets and more discarded junk and litter than seemed possible, before Boldt carefully pushed open a door, revealing a cluttered, lived-in room, twelve by fifteen feet. The former storage room had red brick walls and no
windows, a mattress with blankets, plastic milk crates containing cardboard boxes of food. Boldt’s gloved fingers triggered a battery-powered fluorescent and the room came to life. This hideaway was an investigator’s treasure chest.

Its conversion into a living space included a door on cinder blocks that held a camper stove, several white plastic tubs filled with water, and a box of books. Boldt picked up immediately on the cleanliness to the air, the musky stink of the basement barely discernible. Only then did it dawn on him that the light in this room was battery-powered, not Coleman gas, and his eyes drifted slowly behind him as he spun around to see a half dozen four-foot-tall pressurized tanks. Green tanks. Oxygen tanks. One of them with its valve cracked open and hissing.

“Lieu?” Gaynes asked. She knew that perplexed look of his meant he had thought of something she had not.

Boldt said, “Suddenly, the elevated oxygen level in the late Mr. Chen’s blood gas makes a hell of a lot more sense.” Boldt reached down into one of the milk crates and came up with a New Year’s Eve party favor, the kind that uncurls when you blow into it. “I think our Mr. Chen might have spoiled someone’s party.”

With little or nothing to do without her suspension first being lifted, Matthews made Margaret her top priority once again, unable and unwilling to take the downtime for herself. She knew this obsession with filling her time went beyond accepted limits, knew she had real problems when it came to allowing herself to relax, knew that at some point such obsessions came to a head and stung you, usually when you could least afford it. Most of all she secretly knew that downtime would allow her the opportunity to take stock of herself, to examine her goals and aspirations, to come to grips with the fact that she had none beyond getting through the day. She had no idea what she wanted for herself—a man, a family, a career, time off, independence, a hobby, a cause? If she took time to stop and think of it, she feared the emptiness of her current existence might prove too overwhelming. Currently, she lived to solve other people’s problems, whether at Public Safety or the Shelter. Facing her own was nowhere on her radar, and this, in turn, led her back to finding Margaret and doing something to help her.

A call to the Shelter confirmed what she already knew, because even if Margaret had been thinking of staying there, by mid-morning the place was virtually deserted, the girls back on the street. There were any number of haunts where she could look for her: Pioneer Square, the Market, the area in front of the Westlake Center, several of the malls. Sometimes these girls just
rode the bus routes, back and forth, sitting in the last row, talking, hours at a time. As pregnant as she was, Margaret wasn’t stripping, wasn’t hooking, but she might be drugging, and this Matthews wanted to prevent at all costs. The girl had mentioned eating pizza crusts—“I’m eating Italian”—but Matthews couldn’t remember a particular pizzeria. She walked a few more blocks until locating a pay phone that actually had the phone book intact. She was flipping through the Yellow Pages under Italian restaurants, hoping to jog her memory, when her cell phone rang. She turned the face of the phone so that she could read it:
BLOCKED CALL.
A sharp shudder passed through her.

“Matthews,” she answered.

“I thought we had a deal.” Walker.

“We do,” Matthews said, gripped briefly in a moment of panic, the result of surprise. She tried not to be too obvious about her looking around for him, but felt her senses winning out as she rotated a little too quickly, inspecting every corner, every shop window, every vehicle.
Where the hell are you?
The temperature felt like it had dropped about thirty degrees. Then, a calm overcame her as she reminded herself that she need not allow him any authority over her.
The eye of the beholder,
she thought. She warmed. She had a job to do—Boldt wanted her to bring him in by accepting his earlier offer. This, while allowing him to believe he still maintained the upper hand.

Walker said, “Sure doesn’t seem like it to me. Let’s see … I offer to help you, and you agree … then all of a sudden you take off from your place, half dressed, like some ghost is chasing you … then you hook up with Dirty Harry. What is
wrong
with you?”

“I think we should get together and talk about it,” she said calmly, her experience and training finally able to separate out her personal stake in this. Their discovery of the peepholes at the Shelter had profoundly affected her, forcing her concern
away from herself and onto the girls. Her determination now was to bring Walker in for questioning, as Boldt wanted.

“I’m disappointed in you, Daphne.”

“I need your help, Ferrell. I want your help.”

“Believe me, you don’t want to disappoint me. Life’s little lessons come so hard sometimes.” Like something his mother might have said to him.

“No.” It was all she managed to say.

“You lied to me … about helping each other.”

“No. We can work this out, Ferrell. It’s not what you think. Let’s get together and discuss it.” She racked her mind for some carrot to hold out as an offering to him. “There’s a possible witness to Mary-Ann’s murder.” She let that sit there a moment. “A truck driver passing over the bridge at the time. We may be able to put Neal in a lineup. Let’s talk about that—you and I.” She continued to search every crack and cranny for sign of him. She didn’t believe he had a cell phone—to her knowledge he’d never used one in calling her—so where was the land line he was using? She heard the unmistakable sound of spitting steam, and she immediately spun in a circle. Through a window of a coffee shop on the next corner of the same block, she spotted a figure on a pay phone.

“Hello,” he said. He’d seen her turn around.

She lost her breath for a moment. “Hello,” she answered. One-handed, she worked her purse open, and her fingers frantically searched its contents for her wallet, wanting the thirty-five cents necessary to operate the pay phone. If she could call through to LaMoia, if she could allow him to overhear this conversation, he might make the connection and send a surveillance unit. She hoped in the next few minutes to trick Walker into sitting down with her to discuss Hebringer and Randolf. If successful, she wanted backup.

She said, “My colleagues don’t think you could possibly have information about the two missing women.”

“They’re wrong,” he said, his voice a hoarse whisper.

She allowed that change in tone to get to her, and again reminded herself not to yield to him. She said, “You need to know that we’re still determined to build a case against Neal that will stick.”

“Just because he lied about the time doesn’t mean he didn’t do it.”

“I understand that,” she said, “but our legal case was fashioned around that lie, and we lost ground in the hearing because of that. We haven’t given up, believe me.” In fact, she didn’t think anyone had done anything on the Mary-Ann Walker case since the probable cause hearing—although the lab work continued. “The forensics will be convincing. It takes awhile.”

“You’re bullshitting me,” he said. “You’re waiting for me to give you what I’ve got before you actually do anything.”

“That’s not how it works.” She placed a quarter onto the small stainless-steel shelf. She dug for a dime.

“If you start lying to me, Daphne, then what’s left?”

“We have a witness,” she repeated. “A truck driver who saw him on the bridge.”

She heard only his excited breathing, and realized the seductive role that hope played in his small existence.

Walker said, “You would have used him already.”

“No … It was night, don’t forget. That bridge is dark.” Her mind reeled with how to make this sound convincing. Her fingers pinched a dime. She adjusted her position so he couldn’t see her lift the receiver and let it hang. She placed her thumb over the cell phone’s tiny microphone hole and slipped the two coins into the guts of the pay phone. They rolled noisily inside. She punched out LaMoia’s direct line, brought the receiver to
her ear, and heard him answer. “Don’t talk! Listen!” she said into the pay phone. She awkwardly joined the two phones, inverting the pay phone’s receiver, wondering if LaMoia could hear any of this.

She said, “Eyewitnesses are notoriously unreliable,
Ferrell.
We always thought of this guy as a last resort, but we’re ready to play that hand now—we could arrange a lineup—and we just might do that if you agree to share what you know about these missing women.” God how she hoped LaMoia was getting this.

“You’re going to suggest we meet, no doubt.”

“Yes, I was.”

“Are you lying to me again, Daphne? Would you risk something as
stupid
as that? Playing your little games. Teasing me, like walking around that houseboat in that tight T-shirt and underwear, but never getting naked? What’s with that, anyway?”

Her throat went dry.
He could be making that up,
she said, unable to recall walking around her place dressed like that. How could she turn this around back on to him? Why wouldn’t her mind get off that image of him looking in on her half-naked?

“Is that how it was with Mary-Ann, Ferrell? You’ve got us confused, don’t you? Was it out on the boat? Did you watch her? You’ve got us confused, don’t you? Did you watch
your own sister?
By herself? With Lanny Neal? What?”

“Shut… up.”

His tone told her she had scored a hit, and this actually surprised her, for she’d brought it up only as a distraction, something to fill his head with a different image. But that tone of his …

Children saw, or overheard, their parents making love and were never quite the same for the experience. With no parents left, had Ferrell Walker spied on his own sister, peeped his own sister? Even with someone else killing her, the guilt over having done that would torment him.

“Where was it, Ferrell?”

“You—”

“At Lanny’s apartment? You saw her, didn’t you? Saw them, however that happened. Accident or not. Saw what he was doing to her.”

He spoke, barely above a whisper, but just enough to be heard. “How could you know that?”

Her arms prickled in gooseflesh. She had him going now—her dentist’s pick probing the cavity and striking the nerve. She thought of LaMoia and how he unexpectedly put the accelerator down in the turns in order to avoid skidding. She, too, put down the accelerator. “He was getting things you never got from her and she liked him in a way that she didn’t like you, and that hurt, didn’t it?”

“You don’t know as much as you think.” Again, barely discernible, indicating she’d thrown him deep into thought or recollection. These were the moments she lived for—she’d cracked open his conscience and was climbing inside.

The process allowed her to intentionally refocus Walker onto Neal and off of her—also a deliberate act on her part. They had Neal under surveillance as it was. At the very least, this effort of hers might provide them the opportunity to apprehend Walker as he made another attempt on Neal. She asked, “Is that where that anger at the medical examiner’s came from? It wasn’t just her death, was it, Ferrell? It was more than that. It was that she liked him, loved him, even. And you were left out in the cold in the process. Isn’t that right?” She thought of LaMoia listening in. “Here I am on one corner of Marion, and there you are in that coffee shop—how much sense does this make, Ferrell? We can sit down—the two of us, together—and discuss this, our case against Neal, what you know about the two missing women. Mary-Ann’s gone, but I’m here for you, Ferrell.”

“Here for me? I don’t think so. Tell that to Dirty Harry. He’s
bad for you, Daphne. I warned Anna, and she ignored me. Look where it got her.”

Her brain froze, and she saw the events of the past few days in a whole different light, immediately regretting where she’d just now, so carefully, led him. Walker, or Prair, or whoever had driven her out of her houseboat in a state of panic, had also pushed her into LaMoia’s care. Walker somehow knew this, resented it, and drew parallels to the loss of his own sister. The massive psychological knot this would cause—first the transference on his part, then her own mimicking of Mary-Ann’s shacking up with Neal—might never come untangled, even in the most cooperative patient. Walker found himself watching instant replay, and she now began to see the complications of events that had changed his tone with her, had pushed him across the fine line between adoration and hate.