The Art of Deception (32 page)

“It’s complicated,” she said, suddenly bone-tired, twinges of fear creeping back up her spine.

“I’ll show you mine, if you show me yours,” he said, suddenly childish again.

His 180-degree reverse was both too quick and too convincing. He was suffering the psychological equivalent of the bends. He’d surfaced too quickly.

“I won’t lie to you, Ferrell. I want whatever help you can give me with the missing women.” She imagined that by now at least one car was rolling toward their location. Perhaps, even, LaMoia had gotten the switchboard to forward the call to his cell phone, and he was currently listening in while on the way himself.

“Why don’t you get us a table?” she said. “I’ll come over to the Seattle’s Best with you and we’ll sit down and discuss this.” How many more crumbs did she need to leave LaMoia? She’d both given him the address and named the establishment. At this
point, she felt certain it was safe to leave the pay phone and approach Walker. “Ferrell?”

“Ten o’clock tonight. You be at the door to the Shelter. If I see you’re alone, we’ll talk. If not…” Again, she heard his shallow, rapid breathing. She could picture him sweating yet cold, excited yet scared. “Don’t be stupid, Daphne.”

She heard the steamer again, but a large truck rounded the corner and double-parked, and the sunshine bouncing off it blinded the coffee shop’s window.

“Ferrell?” she said, already dropping the pay phone and moving up the sidewalk toward the coffee shop. At first she walked, but then, as the hum of the room grew louder in her cell phone, she began to jog, and finally to run. The blind spot on the window shrank with her angle as she approached, from a blinding silver, to black, and finally to transparent again.

The pay phone’s receiver dangled on the end of its cord.

LaMoia’s Jetta turned and rounded the corner, swerving out of the way of the double-parked truck. He’d been careful not to show himself on foot—was trying to let her know that he was nearby and available as backup.

But it was too late. Ferrell Walker was gone.

At 9:48
P.M.,
a matter of hours after Matthews had spoken to Ferrell Walker, she calmly drove her repaired Honda south on First Avenue, the black leather wallet containing her lieutenant’s police shield sticking out of the top of her Coach purse. Boldt had obviously pressured Captain Sheila Hill into reinstating her, because there had been no review board or formal review. She’d gotten the call that the meet with Walker had been approved, and that meant reinstatement.

The last few hours at SPD and Public Safety had been the mobilization of a surveillance team that included several plain-clothes detectives from Narco and CAP as well as a three-man, black-clad ERT unit from Special Ops and even a rooftop sharpshooter. Boldt had suspended the search of the Third Avenue Underground while SID combed the lair, and the surveillance of construction sites continued, meaning his manpower was stretched.

As she’d prepared for the meet, Matthews had asked LaMoia to wire her up, an invitation usually assigned a fellow member of the same sex. The idea was for him to clip and tape the transmitter to her pants to avoid ripping hairs off her skin. Although not exactly an intimate moment, it felt that way to both of them, what with him running his fingers inside the waistband of her pants, brushing the elastic of her underwear. True, she wore less clothing, showed far more skin, at a pool or
the gym, but men didn’t run their hands down your pants at either. He couldn’t manage to get the tape to stick very well, so he ran his fingers even deeper. He stepped back suddenly, as if she’d bitten him.

“Listen, I’m not doing such a great job. Maybe we should get a skirt in here.”

“Finish it,” she said, unbuttoning her blouse at the navel. She fished for the wire he was attempting to pass her.

She asked, “Would it help if I unbuttoned my pants?”

“Not unless you have twenty minutes to spare,” he teased.

“Ha, ha,” she said, trying to sound like that hadn’t fazed her.

He tested the tape, and it held. “I’m fine.”

“You don’t sound fine,” she said.

“Mind your own business.”

“When a man has his hand down my pants, it most certainly
is
my business.”

“You’re playing with me.”

“Oh, yes,” she said. “Absolutely. I love to see you squirm.”

“I’m not squirming.”

“Of course you are.”

He grunted.

Again she teased him. “Finish the job and get your hands out of my underwear.”

“You’re nervous. That’s what this is about, right? Your nerves?”

“You really know how to woo a girl.”

“Woo?”

The tape finally held. Her fingers caught the wire he passed and she drew the small mike up inside her blouse. She unbuttoned yet another button of her blouse and clipped the lavaliere to the elastic bridge connecting the cups, turning to face him as she buttoned herself. For a moment she allowed herself to believe he blushed with the sight of her.

“You have a real way with the women,” she said.

“That’s what they say.”

She brushed herself off, smoothing the blouse.

He looked a little too closely and pursed his lips, bunching his mustache. She’d never liked mustaches much.

“A cry for help,” he said, repeating a possible explanation of Walker’s behavior that she had raised at an earlier meeting.

“If I have it right—and remember, I may not—then there’s a psychological progression Walker’s going through, a decline that has everything to do with what is more than likely confusion over his relationship with his sister; Neal’s stealing Mary-Ann from him; Neal’s abuse of Mary-Ann; the subsequent murder; and then Walker’s transference of his need to protect Mary-Ann over to me. Transference comes in all flavors, John, from lite to extra-strength. He latches on to me. He follows me. For reasons known only to him, he has chosen me to represent Mary-Ann in his life. Maybe he’s just trying to gather the courage to tell me something. I don’t know. Maybe he saw more of the murder than he’s shared with us. That wouldn’t surprise me—his guilt over watching them in the first place preventing him from telling us exactly what went down. It would also explain his conviction to see Neal put away for this crime.”

“But Hebringer and Randolf?”

“I’m not pretending I have the answers,” she said, unbuttoning her pants and tucking in her shirt, the act itself implying an immodesty that clearly surprised him. “I could be way off base with any of this. My original thinking was that he didn’t know anything more about Hebringer and Randolf than what he’d read in the papers, but that he recognized a way to bait me into meeting him.”

“I’m still camping on that side of the river,” LaMoia said.

“But the way he made this meet—preempting what was to be an attempt on my part to arrange something inside, something
contained, something that worked better for us … and the fact that Lou likes Walker being positively IDed for having been in the Underground, and then this guy getting away from Lou and Bobbie down there … and Lou never liking coincidences and suddenly thinking Walker could either have something on Hebringer and Randolf, or might even be a part of it himself… and here we are.”

“Here we are,” LaMoia echoed.

She felt his objection to her playing this role and appreciated his restraint in not verbalizing it. Doing her damnedest to appear collected and composed, she said calmly, “Listen, John … I think we pushed him over the edge with Neal walking away from the probable cause hearing and with my subsequent attempt to distance myself from him. It was a bad judgment call on my part. If he misses Mary-Ann as much as I think he does, then at some point he will come after me. This level of obsession leads to abduction. It’s my turf. I know what I’m talking about,” she said, answering his head shaking no. “It could be for something as innocent as a confession—confiding his guilt about knowing more than he’s told us—or something … more serious. And if he should get me—”

“He will
not
get you.”

“—you need to think unconventionally, something you’re good at. Neal’s apartment is a possibility. The family home—this place he lost when the business went bad. A trawler is entirely possible.” She met eyes with LaMoia and lowered her voice. “These places hold significance for him. He’ll take me to someplace that holds significance.”

“He will not—”

“If you guys lose me,” she interrupted, “I’d check those places I just mentioned first. The Aurora Bridge after that.”

“Jesus … you’re as sick as he is.”

She continued in her businesslike tone, “If I go missing,
John, don’t do it by the book. Promise me that. Time’s the enemy, okay? He’s an organized personality. He knows what he’s doing. He lives to control the situation. When he senses he’s lost control, as he did earlier, he takes action. That alone separates him from what you guys think of as ‘loonies.’ Trust me, if he should get me and then lose control of the situation …” She couldn’t complete that thought, even in her own head. “Just find me, John. And fast. However you have to do it, just find me.”

“Cross my heart,” said the all-time rule breaker.

LaMoia opened his arms, an improbable invitation from a guy like him. She stepped forward cautiously, afraid he might make a joke of it. But he didn’t, and so she held herself close to his chest, the thumping of his heart like timpani. She tried to think of something amusing to say, to cushion the moment for them both, but the feeling of his arms around her, of that absolute sense of safety, lodged a walnut in her throat and she couldn’t get a word out. She squeezed, and he squeezed her back, and for a fleeting moment there was absolute peace in her world.

Driving now past the
ALL NUDE
storefronts, a wino walking unsteadily behind a grocery cart filled to overflowing, the tourists intermingled with the city’s subculture, neither acknowledging the other, she marveled at the tolerance, at the coexistence of two such diverse cultural strata. She felt herself being injected into this, like a vaccine into tainted blood, down through Pioneer Square where groups clustered around street musicians, where gray-haired hippies sold trinket jewelry from the tops of cardboard boxes and college kids waited in lines outside the music clubs.

“Test, one, two,” she said into the empty car.

Her dash-mounted Motorola squawked and called back, “Copy that, Decoy.”

She hadn’t liked the moniker assigned her for this operation, but it wasn’t her place to comment on it.

A few turns later, she pulled into the church lot marked
PRIVATE PARKING STRICTLY ENFORCED—VEHICLES WILL BE TOWED,
and slipped the cardboard permit onto her dash before locking up. She wore her hair over her ears in order to cover the tiny ear bud that carried the network of radio traffic surrounding her surveillance. She tested the gear once more as she dumped her keys into her purse. “Okay, boys, I’m all yours.”

“Copy that, Decoy,” the calm voice returned softly in her ear. No jokes from dispatch. No humor. These radio operators were the grumpy librarians of police work.

She reached the overhang and the door in the side of the church that led down to the Shelter at five minutes before ten, five minutes ahead of schedule. The sky opened up with a drizzle that felt like the misters over vegetable stands in supermarkets. She thought sarcastically how perfect it was to further complicate things with the added hassle of the rain—traffic would slow, long-distance surveillance would be more obscured, and any right-thinking person would seek some kind of shelter from it, making the undercover roles harder to play effectively without standing out.

She listened in her one ear to the radio reports from the observation points outside her houseboat, for Boldt didn’t put it past Walker to use the meet to buy himself a chance to get inside her houseboat, either souvenir-seeking or in order to await her return there. The rain was apparently stronger over Lake Union, and one of those keeping surveillance reported a red-and-black umbrella on the dock, unable to identify the person holding it. “That’s a neighbor,” Matthews said, barely moving her mouth
in case she was being watched by Walker. The red-and-black umbrella belonged to Robert, a man who could have played stunt double to Ernest Hemingway. If they hassled Robert, she’d hear about it for months to come.

Location by location, the four undercover detectives and the leader of the ERT squad reported into dispatch, confirming their positions, reporting sightings considered “possibles” for Walker, filling the radio with activity where no such activity existed in the real world. She knew that LaMoia had parked the Jetta on the second floor of the car park, engine out, and was sitting in the car’s backseat (making it more difficult for others to spot him), keeping an eye on her through the car’s back window. She felt the attention of all those eyes and ears, both onstage and exposed for all to see. If and when her moment came with Walker, it would be recorded, videoed, and analyzed, as would any subsequent interrogation. She felt uncomfortable in the spotlight, even a little sick to her stomach, as it didn’t feel much different to her than walking around her houseboat certain someone was watching. Someone
was
watching—many someones—and for a person accustomed to doing the watching, she found the reversal of roles unpleasant, going on vulgar. Walker himself was no doubt watching as well, and she could only hope he couldn’t see or sense the swarm of protection that had been created around her, for she felt certain it would put him off and prevent him from approaching her.