“And is that number published?”
Striker nodded. “I see what you’re getting at, Lou, but it’s no good. I didn’t recognize the voice. I’m being straight with you on that.”
“You were set up, Razor,” Boldt informed the man. “Someone wanted you or Danielson or both of you out of the way.”
“Yeah?” Striker said angrily. “Well, I couldn’t care less about that. If I got that phone call again, I would go right back there and finish up what I started. I swear I would. My one and only one regret is that I missed. I wasn’t aiming to kill him. A PA knows the difference between assault and murder one. But I missed, goddamn it. Four shots and I couldn’t hit the damn thing. Four damn tries. Not that it was very big anyway. So much for the myth—I’m here to tell you.”
At first the laughter seemed all right, though Daphne looked concerned. And then Boldt realized that the laughter would not quit, and after a minute it frightened him, because Striker had lost all control. He was crying and laughing and looking at them desperately as though he did not understand where it came from and that they should pull the plug and shut off the machine. He was laughing ten minutes later, when the male nurse kicked them out and delivered a shot of something that Daphne said would take care of it. But it did not. When they reached the car, Boldt imagined he could still hear the man’s laughter, as if it had penetrated the electronic window, reverberating down to the parking lot below. Even the car door closing did not shut it out for Boldt. And he told Daphne this.
“You know what those two words are together?” she asked, placing the car in reverse. “Man’s laughter? Combined?” she asked. “What we witnessed up there is how most of them pay for it.”
Boldt combined the words in his head and spoke softly: “Manslaughter.”
She said, “Michael Striker has a long road ahead of him.”
He placed his hand on hers and stopped her from backing up the car. “How good is your memory?” he asked, taking his hand away.
“You know damn well that I pride myself on it.”
“I forget who it was,” Boldt said, “but someone told me that the bump on your forehead was from a box coming down off a shelf.”
“That was Lofgrin or LaMoia or Bobbie. They were the only ones who asked.” She said, “It’s after seven, aren’t you supposed to be over at NetLinQ? You want me to drop you?”
Boldt asked, “Why? Why did you invent the box coming down?”
“Because we agreed to keep my break-in at the houseboat between us, and trying to explain running into a post in the dark was a little much. It was a white lie, Lou. So what?” Again she asked, “You want me to drop you or not?”
“And what about Fowler? If you told the others one thing, why tell Fowler something different?”
“I’ve never told Fowler anything about it. I’ve hardly seen the man since then.”
“But he’s seen you,” Boldt said. And her face froze. “I made him nervous with a question, and in trying to get out of it, he made reference to your hitting that post.” He hesitated. “So how did he know?”
“Exactly what are you saying?” Her lips quivered and she crossed her arms tightly. She knew.
“When they put in your security system, they swept your house for bugs, right?”
She gasped. “Fowler’s people.”
Bear Berenson had told him that some people could feel the camera’s presence. Boldt said, “But that feeling never went away, did it?”
She threw her head back as if to keep her tears from running. “Why?” She choked out.
“Longview Farms,” Boldt answered.
She looked over and met eyes with Boldt and tried to speak, but nothing came out.
“I’ve got an idea,” Boldt said.
The device looked like a small squash racquet, or an electric charcoal starter, though it worked more like one of those hand-held metal detectors used at airports. The people in Technical Services referred to it simply as Clark, for Clark Kent, he of the X-ray vision. There was said to be a flyswatter variety, and another in the form of a feather duster that came with a four-foot extension, both of which could be used without telegraphing that the room was being swept for electronic bugs. Detective Laura Battles carried Clark in her briefcase; a wire ran to her ear and would emit a beep if a bug were encountered.
Once activated, a microprocessor inside the device continuously checked for magnetic fields caused by hidden microphones, and was said to be 95 percent effective in detecting them. It was less dependable in the detection of fiber-optic cameras, the latest generation of which were smaller than a shirt button and emitted no magnetic field whatsoever. But Clark, through some advanced technology that no one had ever bothered to attempt to explain to Boldt, scored in the 67 percentile in this department as well.
Daphne, accompanied by Battles, entered through the houseboat’s front door—and by agreement, already in the midst of a real estate discussion. Daphne the seller, Laura Battles the agent. They toured the houseboat room to room. Battles took detailed notes on a clipboard—the studious type.
Back in the parking lot where he had waited, she told them both, “The place is a floating sound studio. Sorry, Daphne,” she apologized. Checking her notes, she informed them, “Audio in the galley, sitting area, head, bedroom, back deck, top deck, and telephone line.” She hesitated, uncomfortable with this. “Fiber-optic in the bathroom, sitting room, and bedroom.” Daphne sank to the gravel. Boldt tried to catch her, but she fought him off. Battles said, “Most of them these days are infrared, night-vision, sensitive.”
“Everything,” Daphne stated. She looked up at Boldt with eyes he had never witnessed in her. He said, “We’ll want to keep them in place, I think.” She sprang to her feet and began hitting Boldt ferociously. He tried to hold her off, but she was hurting him, and as Laura Battles climbed out of the car, Daphne threw her knee into the car door, turned, and threw her knee into Boldt’s crotch and sent him down to the gravel. He heard her say, “Oh my God!” and then her feet took off at a run.
Laura Battles helped him up and seemed more bothered by the dent in her car door than Boldt’s condition. They drove around the neighborhood for the better part of an hour and checked the houseboat twice. “I’ll keep looking,” Battles offered.
Boldt was due for yet another night at NetLinQ. And this time, he had an army at his disposal.
Another night spent at NetLinQ passed without success, the main problems being logistical. With so many people added to the surveillance team, and virtually overnight, tracking them and deploying them proved a technical nightmare. It left Boldt watching technicians switch wires and install sophisticated radio receivers while the extortionist walked away with another $2,400 in cash.
Depressed, he left for home at two in the morning. But on the way he made a detour, after a sleep-interrupting call to Laura Battles confirmed that Daphne Matthews had not been found.
He stopped at the houseboat first.
She was not home. He pounded on both the front and back doors, and was beginning to worry, when it occurred to him to check his voice mail. No message there, either.
He finally thought to call her cellular, and she answered on the first ring.
“Where are you?” he asked.
“Room six-fourteen.”
“A hotel?”
“Inn At The Market. Interesting view.”
She sounded terrible. “Daffy? You okay?”
“Peachy.”
“Are you with someone?”
“In a roundabout way. No one in the room with me, if that’s what you mean.”
“Did I wake you?” She sounded that way to him—dazed.
“Not a chance.”
“Can you stand some company?”
“If you can possibly forgive me for what I did to you.”
“Make yourself decent. I’m coming over there.”
Room 614 was a suite with a water view. It had to cost three hundred dollars a night. It smelled of Earl
Grey tea. She did not allow him to turn on the light, though he tried twice. “No!” she insisted angrily, holding his arm the second time. He caught sight of her in the dimly lighted room, and her eyes looked cried out.
Holding his arm, she led him over to a sitting couch that fronted the huge plate-glass window. A moment later she delivered a tea to him and kept one for herself. She sat down beside him. Two people in a dark room, looking out a window.
“Nice view, huh?”
Boldt looked out across the bay, its surface in a constant shifting motion catching the moonlight, broken only by container ships awaiting a morning dock. “She arrived about an hour and a half ago. They talked awhile—actually he talked at her. He was angry, I think. Then he took her from behind. Right there. She leaned against that table. See that table? I don’t think she liked it much,” she said. “But she put up with it, which tells you something about the way he negotiates a deal. I wonder how much she goes for.”
It was Fowler’s apartment. She was watching Fowler’s apartment, not the water. Not the boats or the moon. A set of gauze drapes was pulled, but Boldt could make out the shapes of two people, clearly a man—Fowler—and a woman. No telling her age or what she looked like.
“This is what he does in his free time when he’s not watching other people.” Her angry tone of voice worried him. “Buy a little piece of ass for a midnight snack. A Hostess Twinkie.” In a Betty Boop voice, she said, “What? Can’t sleep tonight? Dial: One-eight hundred-I-DO-FUCK.”
“I’m right here,” he offered.
Staring out the window, she asked, “Have you ever watched other people screw? Not movies—I mean for real. It was disgusting. It was my first time. It’s really a disgusting dirty little act in many ways—especially like that, at the table like that. All the bumping and grabbing. A couple minutes is all, like alley cats. They never even kissed. Can you imagine? He just took her like a piece of meat. Like he had ordered a pizza or something. I don’t think she liked it,” she repeated.
“Let’s get out of here,” Boldt suggested.
“I’ll bet you anything he watched me and Owen.” She snapped her head toward him then, but looked away immediately. She said, “He didn’t learn anything, judging by his own performance.”
“We could get some eggs,” Boldt suggested, wanting her out of here.
“She’s leaving now. She’s smart.” Boldt saw that the woman was in fact leaving. “Two hours on the nose. Well, not exactly the nose. No matter what he paid her, it wasn’t enough. Not with a man like that. I wonder what two hours cost. Is it by the hour, or what?”
“What does this accomplish, Daffy?”
“If I’m watching him, then I know he’s not watching me. You want to fault that logic?” She added, “I want to bring charges, Lou.”
“Daffy, do whatever you have to do.”
“If you’re going to say something, just say it.”
“We were cutting him out, Daffy. He knew it. He even said as much. You were nosing around some old skeletons, and he wanted to know what you had.”
“No pun intended,” she sniped sarcastically. “I’m quite certain that by now he knows what I have.”
“You want to blame someone, try Taplin. You think Fowler dreamed this up? He takes orders, Daffy. He’s Taplin’s go-and-fetch-it.”
“They probably had pizza parties and watched me take showers.”
“They’re in business. They’re not running peep shows. If you really want to hurt them, then forget filing charges. We wait and we use this against them somehow.”
“How?”
“I don’t know.”
“You think I can go back there and pretend I don’t know?”
He waited her out.
“You’re saying they’ve already seen all there is to see, so why not?” she questioned.
“I’m not really suggesting that. No. We make an excuse. A friend needs you. Adler asks you to move in with him.”
“We had to stop that because of my badge.”
“We’ll think of something. I’d just rather not blow the whistle yet.”
Fowler’s light went off. It was over.
“You’re staying here tonight?” he asked.
She nodded.
“Are you going to be all right?”
Another nod. “I’m a big girl.” She smirked. “Just ask him.”
“I can stay.”
“Go home to your family.” She glanced over at him. “I’m sorry for the way I behaved. I lost it, that’s all.”
“Yeah. You lost it,” Boldt said. And she grinned for the first time.
He kissed her. She flinched. And he left.
THIRTY-THREE
“Where were you until four in the morning?”
“You’re not supposed to ask that at six-thirty.”
“The question stands.”
“If I told you I was in an ocean-view suite in a fancy hotel with a beautiful woman, what would you think?”
“That you’re full of you-know-what.”
“Good. The answer stands.”
“You’re hopeless.” She walked around the room, and in and out of the bathroom, naked, getting herself ready. Boldt thought back to someone watching Daphne, and how she had reacted, and he thought he understood her better now that he saw his own wife being so casual with herself. And he, too, was angry, and perhaps more determined to do something about this anger.
“Wake up.”
He had drifted back to sleep. “You said I shouldn’t let you sleep.” Adding, “It’s not fair to ask of me such things.” She was dressed now, but not for work.
“What day is it?”
“Suzie and I are going over to Elaine’s. Michael is still locked up in that room with rubber walls.”
Boldt realized that losing the prosecuting attorney would set back the investigation, but he pushed this thought aside. “You should be sainted.”
“Taken to dinner would do.”
“I haven’t forgotten.”
“Yes you had,” she told him.
“I had,” he admitted. “But now I remember. I owe you a champagne dinner.”
“And you owe your son about two weeks off.”
“So noted.”
“He’s spending too much time at day care. I’ll drop him,” she frowned. “But I’ll pick him up early. So forget it, in case you were thinking about it.” She looked at him. “You weren’t thinking about it.”
“I can hardly think at all.”
“Sleep deprivation has that effect.” She hesitated in the doorway, reluctant to leave.
“What?” he asked.
She asked tentatively, “How beautiful? And which hotel?”
He smirked.
The phone rang, and they both hesitated. “Do we have to?” she asked. Boldt answered it.
Shoswitz’s voice named an address on Lakewood.
Boldt hung up.
“Honey?” she asked.
“It has happened again,” Boldt mumbled.
By the time Boldt arrived at quarter to eight, the crime scene had turned into a circus. Scores of the morbidly curious, plus television and radio vans including the three nationals with satellite links, every variety of police and—never explained—two fire trucks, crowded the area so badly that Boldt was forced to park on Sierra and cut through someone’s backyard. Much to his chagrin, the crime scene had been held for one man: Lou Boldt, and his arrival sparked a kind of instant celebrity that proved one of the most distasteful experiences of his career. Reporters shoved microphones at him, but he shielded his face and avoided both cameras and questions. When he finally made it inside the home, he discovered a video-cam crew from a tabloid television news show in the process of recording every aspect of the deceased—three bodies, total. The crew had set up in the living room and were waiting for him, complete with a portable light that was blindingly bright. The crime scene was contaminated, yes, but the violation of this family’s privacy was what triggered Lou Boldt’s
explosive rage. He had the entire crew arrested for trespassing and breaking and entering.
By the time the area was finally cleared, both Dixie and his crew, and Bernie Lofgrin and his, were on hand. The three men closed the kitchen door, shutting out the chaos outside, and studied the dead.
The husband had made it to the phone, though he had apparently never dialed. Dixie attributed these extra few seconds to his body weight “and a great deal of courage.” The middle-aged suburban woman appeared to have lunged for her eight-year-old girl, perhaps knocking over her chair in the process. Mother and daughter were curled tightly in each other’s arms, now dead beneath the kitchen table, the mother’s face locked in an expression of pure horror.
The source of the poison—Dixie guessed the cause of death as such within minutes of his preliminary examination—appeared to be a watermelon. Lividity, the settling of blood in the body, indicated a time of death of between eight and sixteen hours earlier; additional tests would further narrow this. There were three slices of the melon on three plates, the seeds carefully removed, the slices cut up into cubes. No one had ingested more than six cubes of melon. Dixie declared, “We’ve both attended a lot of deaths, Lou, but I’ve never witnessed anything quite like this.”
It was true. The father’s final effort was frozen, mocking his attempt; he was lying on the floor, arm outstretched, the phone’s receiver still in his hand. The dishes were neatly stacked alongside the sink. They had eaten barbecued pork chops, corn, and a green salad.
Lofgrin said, “The news crew has already destroyed any chance of clean evidence, but we’ll go through the motions.”
The similarity to the tree-house killings had reporters asking about a serial killer. Fishing still, but closer to the real story.
He needed to be alone. He passed through the kitchen and into a small sitting room where a color television aimed at a couch and a bookshelf was crowded with hardcovers and paperbacks. The name of the family was Crowley, and the neighborhood, the house, the furnishings, the appointments, put them firmly in the combined six-figure income. This was another house that Liz would have wanted, and he could not help but think of mother and daughter beneath the kitchen table, huddled against the fears and pain of death. And how glad he was that this was not Liz and Miles.
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