The Art of Deception (40 page)

“No.” The man cowered slightly, swinging the door open for Boldt. It led to the hallway, as expected.

“Maintenance?”
Boldt asked. Another logic jump struck him that should have come earlier: the oxygen tanks, the maintenance man’s horrible wheezing. Boldt remembered the name because Sarah had a friend with a similar last name: Vander-horst. His own internal alarm was going now. He saw a listless Hebringer being dragged through this same door. Leaning over her, Vanderhorst wore a set of coveralls, soon to be bloodied.

“Yes, maintenance too,” the man confirmed.

Boldt entered the hallway and looked right, recalling the stairs that led down into the bank’s basement. The maintenance man, Vanderhorst, had told him the exit door went out to the street; he had failed to mention the ATM machines on the way out. Vanderhorst had played dumb about the existence of access to the Underground.

Dyed hair? A doxycycline prescription for his clogged lungs.

“I’m declaring this a crime scene,” Boldt informed a surprised bank officer. “Stand back, and keep your hands in your pockets.”

“Lieu, shouldn’t we be watching the Greyhound station or something?” Bobbie Gaynes occupied the Crown Vic’s passenger seat.

Boldt said, “We
are
watching the bus,
and
the ferries,
and
the trains,
and
the northern border crossing with Canada. Rental car agencies clear down to Tacoma have a fax of his bank ID.” The last few hours had been his busiest in recent memory. He felt incredibly good. “What’s the problem, Bobbie?”

“But why
here?”
she asked, still frustrated with him. “Vanderhorst
called in sick today. That should tell us something, right? He split. We’re wasting time here.”

The Crown Vic pointed downhill and away from the corner office building occupied by the SeaTel Bank. Boldt had both the rearview and driver door mirrors aimed with a view of the corner—one set for his sitting height, the other for slouching.

Boldt’s silence bothered her. “So explain to me what good it is watching the bank?”

“It closes for the weekend in ten minutes.”

“And by my figuring that means he’s another ten minutes farther away.”

“Why do people kill, Bobbie?”

She sighed, letting him know she wasn’t up to his quizzes, his schooling her. It grew old after awhile. “For love and money.” She made her voice sound like a schoolkid reciting her math tables. “For country and revenge,” she added into the mix. Outright annoyed now, she added, “For the smell of blood, or the scent of a perfume, or because God or their dog told them to and they forgot to take their pill that day.”

“We got lucky is all,” Boldt said. “Sometimes you get lucky.”

“Lucky?” she asked, exasperated. “He’s halfway to Miami, or Vegas, or Tijuana by now. How is that lucky?”

A crackle came over both Boldt’s dash-mounted police radio and the handheld resting in his lap. A male voice said calmly, “We have joy. Wildhorse is headed out the north stairs of the bus station.”

“No fucking way,” Gaynes mumbled. “Wildhorse is …?”

“I only had a minute to come up with a handle.”

“Vanderhorst is Wildhorse,” she said.

“Too obvious?” he asked, peering intently out the windshield now.

She said, “You’re telling me you put six cruisers and, including us, ten plainclothes dicks out on the streets, and you were counting on luck?”

“The first part of that luck is that we discovered that lair yesterday, on a Thursday. The second, and much more important half, is that today, Friday, happens to be SeaTel’s biweekly payday.”

“Payday,” she whispered, almost worshiping him now.

“Who’s going to pass up a two-week paycheck? He wasn’t about to quit. I knew he’d be back when they told me he’d called in sick this morning. I mean, why bother otherwise?”

“His four-one-one?”

“All invented. No such address. No such phone. The security firm is going to fry: If they ran a background check, it was pitiful.”

“Typical,” she said. “Big Mac’s inside?”

“Mackenzie’s posing as a customer. We had to play it that way. Vanderhorst knows the layout, knows the normal personnel, including security and the tellers. We add someone to that mix and he’ll sniff it out.”

“So—”

But Boldt interrupted. “Heads up!”

Boldt had his own image of Per Vanderhorst, both from the tour of the bank basement and from the man’s security ID photo. Neither matched up perfectly well with the lean, lanky, unhealthy silhouette of the man reflected in the mirror.

Gaynes asked, “Do we have the confirm yet on the cash cards?”

Never taking his eyes off the approaching suspect, Boldt said, “We now know that neither Hebringer nor Randolf received any cash from those machines. What we’re trying to determine is whether or not either of their cards ever logged on for the two days in question.”

“They can do that?” she asked.

“Supposedly any attempt, even a canceled session, registers with the system.”

“He nabbed them before they ever got their money,” she suggested.

“Who’s going to think anything of some guy in blue coveralls wearing a security tag on his chest pocket? He’s sweeping up the room. So what? They use their card to enter, turn toward one of the machines, and take his broomstick to the back of the head. He’s got them through that emergency exit door before they’re even half conscious.”

“But it’s a glass room, Lieu. It’s a well-lit glass room.”

“Guys like Vanderhorst, they thrive on that moment. Just ask Matthews. For those few seconds he’s dragging the body toward the door, he’s as high as he’s ever been.”

“You creep me out sometimes, Lieu.”

“No, not me, Bobbie. It’s them.” Boldt motioned her down, and slouched himself.

She scootched down and reached for her door handle. “We grab him on the way out, or back up Big Mac, or what?”

Vanderhorst paused ever so briefly in front of the bank and gave the block a once-over. He failed to make anything of the steam cleaning panel van across the street, the homeless guy with his guitar case open playing a horrible rendition of “This Land Is Your Land,” or the tall black woman walking the German shepherd, who was himself a member of the K-9 unit.

“What the hell?” Gaynes asked, eyeing the mirror.

“He just convinced himself it’s safe.”

“That motherfucker’s got some loose screws, Lieutenant.”

Boldt hoisted the radio’s handset. “All units: We play this
exactly
as I laid it out in Situation.”

“Affirm,” came the voice of Dennis Schaefer from the steam cleaning van. Schaefer, a Special Ops dispatcher on the force,
had the combined role of play-by-play sports broadcaster and team captain. It still left Boldt the coach.

He plugged an earpiece jack into the radio and filled his right ear with its ear bud.

The moment Vanderhorst entered the bank, Boldt and Gaynes headed directly to the ATM room, where Boldt swiped a borrowed card admitting them. He felt unusually warm as they passed through what was typically the alarmed exit door without a sound.

He’d been advised that it would take Vanderhorst between three and ten minutes to both retrieve and cash his paycheck at the teller window. Boldt was told he could count on the maintenance man standing at the counter for that length of time. Mackenzie, at a stand-up check writing desk, would alert dispatch if actual events inside the bank varied from this.

Boldt had assigned one uniformed officer to stand guard on the other side of the loose panel discovered in the bus tunnel’s emergency exit. He had another four uniforms at possible street-level exits suggested by Professor Babcock. He had radio cars forming a perimeter. The safe money said to pick up Vander-horst the moment they had him confined. It was not like Boldt to play chances, but that’s what he had in mind, and Gaynes had clearly sensed this. If it went south on him, the review board would rule that he’d allowed personal pressures to influence his decision making, to dictate actions taken, to cloud his judgment. They would be right, of course, though he’d vehemently deny it. Susan Hebringer ran this operation by proxy. Once Vander-horst was officially under arrest, statistics said that their chances of ever finding his victims were greatly reduced. Sometimes perps rolled over in interrogation. But with nothing but circumstantial evidence—an ATM receipt and some compromised blood evidence, with no clear way yet to connect the ATM room to the Underground, and, more important, to show Vanderhorst’s
knowledge of that connection, Boldt could foresee Vanderhorst walking out of Public Safety a free man.

He and Gaynes reached the bank’s second-floor offices winded. He knocked on a door marked
PRIVATE
and was welcomed a moment later by an attractive young woman in a smart gray suit and, beyond her, two men in private security garb manning a bank of five black-and-white television monitors, all of which were hardwired to hidden cameras.

Each screen offered a variety of looks at various parts of the bank, including the main lobby, the ATM anteroom, and the downstairs hallway through which they had just passed.

Gaynes asked Boldt, “Are you telling me we already have him on camera abducting these women?”

“Twenty-four-hour loops are reused after seventy-two hours,” Boldt explained in whispered disappointment. “Long since erased.”

“Yeah?” she said, gesturing toward the bank of monitors, “Well, we’ve got him now.”

Vanderhorst stood at a teller window to the right of the large room, his back to the camera. Detective Frank Mackenzie maintained his position at the check writing counter, close to the main doors and the only exit to the streets.

Boldt’s plan revolved around Mackenzie’s ability to deliberately slip up while attempting to act the part of undercover cop. Mackenzie, a big tree trunk of a man with seventeen years on the force, had been selected for this role in part because of his legendary reputation as a thespian. In the summers, he took time off to join the Ashland, Oregon, theater troupe responsible for that city’s Shakespeare festival. As a lieutenant and team leader, Boldt’s responsibility was to make the most of his assets.

The screens lacked any sound, and so the commotion that followed on the bank’s main floor played out on the one television screen silently, making the action all the more eerie and
disconnected. Boldt listened to SPD dispatch in his right ear, mentally dialing it into the background.

“Can we hold on number four, please?” Boldt asked as he and Gaynes stepped closer.

She whispered, “I’d rather be
in
the movie, than watching it.”

“Stay tuned, we may be yet,” Boldt informed her. “First, we see how smart Vanderhorst is.” He lifted the handheld, tripped the
TALK
button, and issued the order he knew he’d be held responsible for: “Okay, let’s do it.”

“Affirm.” Dispatcher Dennis Schaefer’s reply passed thinly through Boldt’s earpiece. Mackenzie was ordered to “lay the bait.” The rest of the team was put on high alert. Like most operations, after several hours of waiting, the real-time event was likely to play out in a matter of seconds or, at the most, a few minutes. For those few precious moments, disparate players, several city blocks away from each other, had to move, think, coordinate, and act in harmony. Anything less, and Vanderhorst was likely to escape. Denny Schaefer was the stage manager, but Lou Boldt was the playwright, and as such, he listened and watched carefully.

On the small screen Frank Mackenzie unplugged his earpiece from his radio and then fiddled with a knob, turning up the volume.

The message from dispatch: “Suspect is in the building,” played over Boldt’s radio at the same time it did Big Mac’s—as planned. The message spilled into the bank lobby, turning heads.

This was it. Boldt leaned in and watched. Vanderhorst, along with everyone else in the lobby, overheard Mackenzie’s radio. The suspect cocked his head slightly in that direction, but he did not overreact. His left hand pocketed the cash from his paycheck. Mackenzie did a convincing job of playing the buffoon. He dropped the radio, turned the volume back down, and tried
to look like nothing had happened. He then took a couple obvious steps toward the entrance, clearly planting himself to block the main doors. A colorful sign there advertised the benefits of home equity loans.

Vanderhorst abandoned the teller window and walked
incredibly calmly,
Boldt noted, toward the
EMPLOYEES ONLY
door that led into the back hallway. But Vanderhorst stopped at that door, studying Mackenzie, who had his back turned.

Boldt spoke loudly into the crowded security room, “Open the door, Vanderhorst.” On the screen, Vanderhorst continued to look like he was weighing his options. “Through that door! Now!”

Vanderhorst disobeyed, taking several steps toward Mackenzie and the bank’s main entrance.

“We’re losing him!” Boldt shouted into his handheld.

Denny Schaefer calmly instructed Mackenzie, “Phase two, Big Mac.”

On the screen, Mackenzie spun on his heels, looked in the direction of Vanderhorst, and reached inside his sport jacket, revealing his holster and weapon.