Shorts - Thriller 2: Stories You Just Can't Put Down (37 page)

“Nearly a thirty percent pay cut.”

“That hurts. That’s supposed to keep you from accepting it.”

“Shorter vacation. Back to a pool car.”

“Ditto and ditto.” She stepped even closer to him. It felt dangerous and warmer at the same time. “Did Phil give any opinion? Did he steer you one way or the other?”

“He said he wished they’d let him take my desk. That the only real police work is on the streets. Always has been. Says it’s more like a corporation upstairs every day.”

“That’s a nice compliment, don’t you think?”

“LaMoia and I the same rank,” he said. A loaded statement because she’d been living with LaMoia for nearly a year now. The world’s oddest couple, and yet they were still together. A rocky year, he thought, looking on from a distance. They’d struggled with Social Services to maintain guardianship of a young girl. There was no way it was going to happen. They weren’t married. They weren’t in the system for adoption. But LaMoia knew enough judges and had enough friends to keep pushing back the decision a week here, a month there. It was all thumbs and toes in the dike at this point. They were about go get washed downstream and he had a feeling the whole thing would go if the child led the way.

“He won’t treat it that way. You know that. You walk on water for him.”

“Anything but.”

“It’ll be your squad. Both teams. I pity the lieu who comes in above you.”

“You make it sound as if my decision’s been made.”

“Hasn’t it?”

There were times, like right now, that he wanted to take her by the hips and pull her close to him. He wanted to experience her. Not so much sexual as just a physical contact to bridge all the words that flowed between them. Liz, his wife, would never understand. LaMoia would never understand. But he felt they would—he and Daphne. They would get it. They wouldn’t abuse it, or misuse it or push it. But it wasn’t to be. Not today. He’d learned to contain it, like locking up the neighborhood dog. He muzzled its bark. He tried not to feed it, hoping it would just roll over and die. But it never did.

Not ever.

“Yeah,” he said. “I suppose it has.”

“Can I help you move your things across the room?”

“I’d like that,” he said.

“Do you need to call Liz?”

“Do you need to call John?”

They were maybe a foot apart. Her chest rose and fell more quickly than only a minute earlier. There was mirth in her eyes—he could swear there was—and invitation on her lips, and God, he didn’t dare look below her waist. He’d been there once, a long, long time ago, but he remembered it like they were still tasting the other’s skin. How could time stand still like that, while the world rushed by?

The phone at the sergeant’s desk rang.

His desk.

It rang and rang, and Lou Boldt marched toward it with both
reluctance and hunger, the same way he would have marched toward her—just this once—if she had dared to ask.

“Get used to it,” Boldt said. He was standing outside an office high-rise at the northern end of Third Avenue where no local had ever foreseen a high-rise taking root. He addressed John LaMoia, who wore his trademark deer-skin jacket, so soft and supple it looked like a chamois, and the pressed jeans above the exotic cowboy boots. He couldn’t see Daphne pressing the jeans as other girlfriends had done for him over the years; it meant he had to send them out, had to actually
pay
to have them that way, and the thought of that amused Boldt to no end.

“I’m good,” LaMoia said. “Welcome back, Sarge.”

Technically, the graveyard was Boldt’s shift—another disincentive Shoswitz had thrown at him. LaMoia would be the day sergeant for CAP for the next month. But apparently Daphne had said something, and a phone call had followed, and just as Boldt had been about to tap one of his team to join him, LaMoia had volunteered “for old time’s sake.”

“So?” LaMoia said.

“Call’s been on the books over two days,” Boldt said. “How that happened has to be looked into, but the fact is, a woman’s gone missing and we’re now officially past the first forty-eight—”

“So we’re screwed.”

“We’re challenged,” Boldt said.

“And we’re here because this is where she was last seen?”

“We don’t know if she was seen. We’re here to check the surveillance cameras because work was all the boyfriend gave me.”

“You brought him in?”

“Phone call.” Boldt answered LaMoia’s questioning look. “I wanted to expedite things. The extra day and all.”

“All that time behind a desk,” LaMoia said, “can’t help a person’s game.”

“One phone call,” Boldt said. “It saved us something like two, three hours.”

“I’m not arguing,” LaMoia said. But he clearly disapproved of Boldt’s cutting a corner, and Boldt marveled how quickly his world had turned upside down: LaMoia—the rogue of all time—questioning
his
practices!

“I’d like to find her alive.”

“Would the boyfriend?” LaMoia asked, knowing that statistics put the crime squarely on the man.

“Who knows? He sounded genuine enough, but maybe he’s taking Internet acting classes.”

Boldt called into the high-rise over his mobile and they were approached moments later by a uniformed guard. As the man worked to open the doors, LaMoia spoke.

“How can we gain access to security tape at this hour?”

“Frankie Malone’s the top guy.”

“No way.”

“I called him at home. He gave us the keys to the store.”

“When it works, it works,” LaMoia said.

They were ushered in and taken to the security department and shown an hour of tapes. They had the missing woman arriving two days earlier. Had her going out to lunch with friends. Back in the hallways and elevators upon her return. Couldn’t find her leaving the building. Boldt asked the tapes be set aside and that half-inch copies be sent over to Public Safety by noon the same day.

Boldt and LaMoia walked the hallways. Rode the elevator. Repeated what they’d seen.

“I doubt it was here,” Boldt said.

“I’m with you.”

“But then how’d she disappear?”

“That’s quite a crush at the end of the day.”

“True enough.”

“We might have missed her.”

“You think?”

“No.”

“Me, neither.”

“So it was here?” LaMoia ventured.

“Don’t see how. But, yeah, maybe.”

“Locked in a closet somewhere? Down in parking in a trunk?”

“Dogs?” Boldt asked.

“Expensive.”

“We’re past the forty-eight,” Boldt said. “We’ve cut the probability of finding her alive by—”

“Fi’ty, sixty percent. I know the stats, Sarge.”

“If we did miss her in the crowd, then it was between here and home.”

“And the boyfriend gets a much closer look either way,” LaMoia said. “Did you search for similars?”

“With the number of missing persons reports we get? I didn’t have all night.”

“We do now,” LaMoia said.

“Don’t you have to get home to the baby?”

“Let’s not go there, okay?”

The men were outside the building now, the background whine of rubber on I-5. A jet just behind the Space Needle, on final approach to SEATAC. A motorboat was cutting across Lake Union. Some rowdy voices echoed from a half block away. The city stayed up later and later. It was in its adolescence. Boldt felt as if he’d known it from birth.

“Two-thirds…hell, more like ninety-five percent, are going to be underage, or just overage girls,” LaMoia said. “We toss them, the database is manageable.”

“You know me and computers.”

“I got it, Sarge,” LaMoia said. “We can crunch this data in minutes. Trust me.”

He would never fully trust LaMoia again. With Daphne he’d
made his peace, but LaMoia’s going after her would never sit right. He let it pass. For now.

An hour later they were sitting alongside one another, staring at a flat-screen display. It was nearing midnight.

“Should we run it again?” Boldt asked.

“That’s the third time, Sarge. It ain’t lying to us.”

“How could this have slipped through? They put me on leave and no one mans the shop?”

“It was DeFalgo. You know how he is. He’s waiting out his twenty-two. It’s all done with mirrors with him anyway. Always has been.”

“Buddy DeFalgo couldn’t figure out a scratch-and-win lotto card,” Boldt said. “What are they doing putting him in my chair?”

“It’s more like a corporation upstairs,” LaMoia said. “That’s what I hear.”

Boldt wanted to smack him. Had Daphne told him that as she’d gotten home?

On the screen was a woman’s face. Attractive. Early to middle thirties. A driver’s-license photo, but one that Boldt assumed would be on every morning news show in town by 6:00 a.m.

It was on.

They weren’t trying to find a missing woman.

They were trying to find two.

The facts of the reports were far too similar to put it off to chance: last seen at work. Never made it home.

“Maybe not the boyfriend,” Boldt whispered, his throat dry, his chest painful.

“Yeah, “LaMoia said. “I was just thinking the same thing.”

Rastus Malster applied the finishing touches. This was no dab-on-some-blush exercise. The fact that he had to accomplish it inside a restroom stall only added to the thrill. He heard the
unique, whistling stream of a female peeing from the adjacent stall and looked low to see a wide, black leather toe-end of a shoe pointing toward him to where he swore if he’d bent over he could have seen his face in its polish. But he kept his eyes, if not his mind, on the work before him—the small mirror hanging from a wire thrown over the coat hook on the back of the door. Every line was carefully applied. If he didn’t like his work, he used a moist towelette to clear the slate, and tried again. A great deal of admiration went into his work; he took time to study and appreciate his expertise. Transformation took time; Rome wasn’t built in a day. The soiled, white leather work shoes helped him—in case Miss Hissy Thighs next door was looking at his footwear the way he was looking at hers. But no: she was in and done, up and gone before the automatic flusher had a chance to catch up with her. Besides, even if she had glanced his way, he’d Naired both legs the night before to baby-bottom-smooth; he might look a little thick at the ankle, but not everyone fit into a size two.

The trick now was to time his exit well. He’d entered when there was no one in here; he hoped to leave the same. Long on patience—for he would never have taken on any of this without his mother’s patience—he found himself in no hurry. He waited for the last click of a heel, the last spray of a toilet flushing or the electronic peal of the automatic paper dispenser. Then he gave it an extra thirty seconds.
Twenty-eight…twenty-nine…

And, having collected his small mirror and his bag of goodies, he swung open the stall door to behold true artistry at work.

He slipped out the printout of the
Intelligencer’
s Web page from his pocket, took one last look at it, memorizing both the face and the name, and crumpled it up. He disposed of it immediately in front of him. She had a royal, almost equestrian look about her—a high princess, a lady-in-waiting. He looked like a corn-fed Midwesterner with a graying buzz cut.

If they wanted to make comments about him to the press, then they deserved the opportunity to meet him. They’d earned it.

When a uniformed woman entered the restroom, Rastus startled, his heart racing.

“Hello,” she said.

Reconsidering his location, he heaved a sigh of relief as the woman slipped into a stall and immediately was heard unzipping her pants—all without waiting for any kind of reply from him.

Rastus moved along the sinks, pleased as punch she’d never given him a second glance.

The piece of paper he’d tossed into the trash uncurled slightly, like the dancers at the beginning of Swan Lake. Not enough to catch the face again. Only part of the two names:

The first body surfaced at sunrise, bobbing up out of murky depths of Bowman’s Bay like a decomposing mermaid. Phen Shiffman was who spotted her as he motored out for his morning work of checking the hatchery. He’d been enjoying a smoke and a fresh cup of strong coffee when her breasts arched out of the water, followed by the dark trim between her legs. It was like one of those synchronized swimming moves he’d seen on the Olympics—“only she was naked as a jaybird, not wearing any kind of bathing suit or undies or nothing,” as he would later tell Mike Rickert, the prosecuting attorney whose desk the case landed on. Though he hadn’t seen it, he supposed her head had surfaced first, led by her arms, maybe. Whatever the case, she’d continued in a graceful, back arch, like a dancer: head, shoulders, chest, groin, knees, feet, and she was under again. If he’d been drinking the night before, or he’d been smoking some rope on the way out, as he sometimes did, he might have considered
saying nothing about her because once she was gone she was gone. But on the other hand, he knew this was serious—she was as dead as a salmon, bruised and fed-on some, as pale as the silver flash of a trout. This, he had to call in.

Boldt read about it on a briefing page that arrived on one’s computer screen at the start of every shift. The victim’s toenails had been elaborately painted in a way that suggested city life, not Skagit County. Rickert, for his part, had done his homework; he knew of the missing Seattle women. He posted the information and made a few calls suggesting SPD might want to visit the county morgue, or might want some dental records sent down—the crabs had gotten half her face. By midafternoon, Boldt and Daphne had made the ninety-minute drive north together, arriving at the county hospital. Dental records had confirmed the deceased’s identity: the second of the two women who’d gone missing.

Dressed in surgical kits, and wearing paper masks over their faces, having smeared Mentholatum liberally beneath their noses—because
floaters
were the worst of the worst—they studied the rotting corpse. At one point Boldt looked over at Daphne and wondered if the stains on the mask beneath her eyes were tears of emotion or from the Mentholatum vapors getting in her eyes.