The Art of Deception (44 page)

Boldt said, “You’re about to be traded back and forth like a
pro ball player, Vanderhorst. Texas uses lethal injection. You know that, right? Capital murder equals capital punishment in that state, and you killed a woman in Fort Worth, and you need to think about that. The U.S. Attorney’s office has the authority to move your trial to Texas, and they’ll argue for that because they’re going to want you on death row. This attorney general is tough on crime—you understand that, right? But they’re basically good guys, better guys than you’d think. They won’t take you away from us if we have a better case to make against you here. You see how this works?” He added, “Or maybe it doesn’t work—the system. Not all that well. But it’s what we’ve got at the moment, and you’re square in the middle of it.”

Worry crept into the man’s eyes.

“What’s it going to take?” Boldt asked Matthews in a familiar game to them.

“I think he knows,” Matthews replied.

“You see where this leaves you?” Boldt asked him.

Matthews said to Vanderhorst, “You and I both know you’re of sound mind, fit to stand trial. That’s not an out for you, Per. We’ll run the usual tests, of course, but you’re going to
pass
them. The decision you need to make now, before you lose the chance, is who is going to control your destiny. If you want it in the hands of the feds, that’s up to you.”

Boldt said, “You’re curious about those last two photographs, aren’t you?”

Vanderhorst eyed him suspiciously.

“Go ahead, take a look,” Boldt said.

Vanderhorst didn’t move a muscle.

“Curious about how we got the key, I’ll bet.”

Vanderhorst narrowed his eyes, both angry and unnerved, and Matthews saw the opening Boldt had given her.

She said, “We thought you’d worked them alone, Per. The ATM machines. The basement of the bank. That was one of our
mistakes—one of the things that took us so long to catch you—this idea you were smart enough to plan this on your own.” She leaned across the table—Vanderhorst reared backward, overreacting, and nearly went over—and rolled the second to last sheet, revealing Ferrell Walker’s head shot from central booking. “This is the man who gave us the key to that room. He says that he planned it all—that it was his brains—but that you did the actual killing.”

“I don’t even know this guy,” Vanderhorst said.

“He says you do.”

“He gave us the key to that room,” Boldt repeated.

“He stole it.”

“The key?” Matthews asked.

“That’s right,” Vanderhorst said, dipping his toes into the confessional waters.

“Stole it from where?” Boldt asked.

Vanderhorst continued to sweat profusely. He viewed Boldt with suspicion but didn’t recoil into himself as Matthews feared.

She repeated, “He’s claiming he’s the brain behind this.”

A confused Vanderhorst pointed to the first three images on the table. “Then who did these? I suppose this guy did these as well? Millicent Etheredge. Tanya Wallace. Anita Baylock. He’s lying to you.”

Their suspect had just stated the names of the other three victims, names that had not been mentioned in this room. There were explanations a good defense attorney could use, including the absurd amount of press most such cases received. But the context of his answer combined with the determination in his voice would go a long way toward convicting Per Vanderhorst.

“You’re saying he wasn’t part of this,” Matthews suggested.

“It’s bullshit,” Vanderhorst said.

“He described them as strung up like fish. He’d been inside that room.”

“He stole the key.
My
key.”

She wanted so badly to look over at Lou and celebrate their victory with him, but she dared not send such a signal. They needed as much out of him as possible.

Boldt said, “That key has been missing how long?”

“A while now. I’m not all that great with time.”

“How’d you get in there after that?”

“I didn’t,” Vanderhorst said and coughed. “Not after I lost that key. Most of the locks down there … any skeleton key will work. But not that room. That’s why I used it.” He answered their puzzled expressions. “Listen, I hid the key so it couldn’t be found on me.”

“Is that right?” Boldt said.

“That was your idea,” Matthews said.

“Hid it on a nail down the hall… this storage room. And then one day it vanishes—and that’s the last I gone down there.” He said to Boldt, “I’d been planning on leaving way before you ever showed up, believe me.”

“But they owed you money,” he said.

“Nearly six hundred bucks,” Vanderhorst said, as if a king’s ransom, as if it had been worth getting caught with that kind of money on the line. His desperate eyes tracked between his two interrogators. “Why are you both looking at me like that? What’d I say? Six hundred bucks is six hundred bucks. Who’s going to walk away from six hundred bucks?”

“Makes sense to me,” Boldt said.

Vanderhorst rolled the last photo over for himself. It was an ME’s head shot of Billy Chen. He stared at the photo for a long time in complete silence. “Wrong place, wrong time.”

“Is that right?” Boldt said skeptically.

“Ask him.”

“You had him in that room. We can prove it.”

Vanderhorst looked dazed to hear that. He shrugged his
shoulders. “Some guy shows up uninvited, you show him the welcome mat.”

“You knocked him out and then made it look like a drowning.”

“So says you.”

“Convince me I’m wrong.”

Vanderhorst looked up at Boldt with bored, droopy eyes.

A sharp knock on the door caused Matthews to jump. For a moment she’d been in the Underground with Vanderhorst. The knock was followed by a woman in police uniform. “Lieutenant,” she said, addressing Boldt. “They’re here.”

Anthony Shapiro pushed past her, all five foot three of him. He wore a dark blue silk suit worth a month of Boldt’s salary. He said to Vanderhorst, “We’re all done here, Mr. Vanderhorst. Don’t say another word.” He glanced at Boldt with fiery eyes. “Shame on you, Lieutenant. And on the weekend, no less!” He noticed the tape recorder then, the hubs still moving. He vaguely acknowledged Matthews. Two lieutenants in the same interrogation room—this particular team of Boldt and Matthews—seemed to finally register with him.

“Tell me you kept your mouth shut, sir,” he said to his client.

“Who the hell are you?” Vanderhorst said.

Shapiro hung his head and sighed. “Okay,” he said to Boldt, “tell me how bad it is.”

Boldt smiled his first smile in many long weeks. It was as much as he needed to say.

As Boldt and Matthews had sat down with Vanderhorst, LaMoia hung up the phone, his hand trembling noticeably. A housefly landed on the fabric wall of his office cubicle, and he watched it lovingly clean itself, rubbing its arms together like a card dealer warming his hands before the big game. As a detective he chased facts, one to the next, the clichéd analogy of following crumbs so appropriate to him at a time like this.

Nathan Prair’s long-awaited written report lay on his desk, a poorly crafted summary of the deputy sheriff having given Mary-Ann Walker a speeding ticket a week prior to her death, as well as his written alibi for the night Mary-Ann Walker had been killed—a night tour during which, by his own admission, he’d taken what cops called “lost time,” a break, during the critical hour of 11
P.M.
to 12
A.M.

LaMoia called upstairs to Matthews to share the vital information he’d just gotten from the manager of the airport McDonald’s. Hoping she might either make the interview with him or at least monitor his progress, he felt disappointment when her voice mail picked up. With time of the essence—Prair rotated off-duty soon—LaMoia made his journey without her.

On his way across town, he called Janise Meyer, of SPD’s I.T. unit, and asked the impossible of her. Janise didn’t know the word. He was counting on that.

•  •  •

He had GPS technology to thank for his ability to locate Prair. The King County Sheriff’s Office tracked every vehicle out on patrol. LaMoia requested the man’s physical location or assignment rather than asking KCSO dispatch to radio the deputy or send a text message over the patrol car’s Mobile Data Terminal. As an SPD officer, LaMoia lacked any authority whatsoever to order Prair in for review, but he saw nothing wrong with paying the deputy a visit with a tape recorder in his pocket. With the blessing of the PA’s office, and the knowledge that car 89 was currently between Madison and Marion, moving south on Broadway—doing bus route duty that was easy to predict—LaMoia parked the Jetta outside a frame shop on Broadway, walked over to the bus stop, and kept watch for the patrol car. He spotted it a few minutes later, started the tape recording, and stepped out into the street, sticking his thumb out like a hitchhiker. He wanted this encounter as casual and light as possible.

Prair pulled the cruiser to the side of the road, unlocked the master lock, and LaMoia climbed in.

“What the fuck?” the deputy said, rolling the car with a green light. LaMoia heard the master lock engage and experienced the first twinges of unease.

“I don’t owe you this,” LaMoia began. “I’m not even sure why I’m bothering with it.”

Prair glanced hotly at his passenger, straightened his head, and said nothing for several more blocks. “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” LaMoia answered.

“So I’ll say it again: What the fuck?”

“The fuck is this: The Mickey D’s you used as your alibi the night Mary-Ann Walker went off the Aurora Bridge had a fire in the deep-fat fryer that night.” He watched the horror register
on Prair’s face. “SFD logged the call as nine fifty-four
P.M.
Had responded by ten-oh-seven
P.M.
They closed the joint down for the rest of that night and part of the next morning. Meaning that when you went off the clock, the place wasn’t open.” The
whish
of wet tires on roadway. Broadway stayed pretty busy at all hours. “Shit, we’ve got to follow up anything like this: an alibi, a witness, whatever—and
you know that,
Prair—you dumb shit. The least you could have done is check out your own alibi.”

“Fuck off.”

Another five blocks ticked off, slipping by the windows in a blur of wet colors. College kids peopled this section of Broadway. LaMoia was amazed at how much younger they looked each year.

Prair finally said softly, “There was no way I could make this thing right with any of you. And you know why? Because you come to the table prejudiced against me.”

“Oh, give it a rest.”

“If I’d told you the way it was I could have lost my badge.”

“A distinct possibility.”

“You’re making jokes out of this?”

“Me and Popeye: ‘I y’am what I y’am.’”

“Fuck you.”

“Why do you think I’m here, Nate? If I wanted to arrest you, I’d have turned it over to II, or the brass, or the PA’s office. Should I be wanting to arrest you for this murder, Nathan? Or should I be hearing your side of this first?” Never mind that he’d already spoken to Hill, that Hill would have already called the prosecuting attorney by now; never mind that if they’d hauled him into the Box, Prair would have invoked his right to a guild attorney and clammed up. LaMoia hoped like hell that by doing this in the comfort and safety of Prair’s
patrol car, by offering him a preemptive second chance, the man might overlook the condition of the quicksand where they now treaded.

So far, so good.

Prair turned off his route, down the hill toward the city, and pulled over in front of the Egyptian’s marquee, engine running.

He looked over at LaMoia, who could see the tension behind the man’s eyes belying his attempt at a cool demeanor. LaMoia found himself eyeing the passenger door handle. Prair said, “She and me … we got into it a little.”

LaMoia felt restless all of a sudden. Who was the one cornered, and who was the one planning to surprise? Prair was a burly fuck. LaMoia didn’t want to find himself tangling with him.

Prair continued, “She and me … well… let’s just say we’d had a cup of coffee together … and she was a pretty messed-up kid.”

“Are you telling me you were jumping Mary-Ann Walker?” LaMoia asked, still trying to make it sound like a locker-room shower discussion.

“No, no,” Prair said, his confidence allowing a smarmy grin to occupy his face. “A fucking cup of joe is all.”

“You sure?”

“I’m sure,” Prair answered. “But I was
interested,
okay? And she was
interested,
I’m telling you. You, of all people, know what I’m talking about.”

“Sure I do.” LaMoia felt a little sick of himself.

“It happens to all of us on the job.”

“It does,” LaMoia said, trying to force a fraternal grin onto a face that felt slightly frozen.

“And all I’m saying … maybe I got a little carried away with this one. So sue me! She was a looker, sexy as all hell, and as
vulnerable as they come, all this sobbing over this wife-beating bastard she was shacking up with. And me, I’m thinking I’ll come swinging on the vine through the window and catch her Dangerous Dan backhanding her, and I’m good for getting laid anytime I want it—am I right?”

“Right as rain,” LaMoia said, feeling the acid in his stomach.

“Exactly,” Prair said, finding a rhythm in the patter. “So what was I supposed to tell you guys—that I was using my lost time to loiter outside that turdball’s apartment that night, debating how to rescue a damsel in distress? How fucking sick does that make me look? But you see what I was thinking?”

“Sure I do.”

“My line of thought.”

“Clear as a bell.”

“She’s having problems with the guy; I take care of the guy.”

“Simple as pie,” LaMoia said. “Might have thought of it myself.”

“You pull these peaches over, and they spill their guts to you. I’m telling you. I mean, the honey pot is yours. One look in their eyes and you know the ones that are so high-strung they’re about to rip, the ones that like the uniform regardless who’s inside, the ones that are going to blow you off. You can tell, right?”

“Absolutely.”