“Hasn’t been home, either,” the blind woman said in a troubled voice.
Boldt asked, “Why is it you think something happened to Sharon?”
“Oh, something happened all right. Why else would that man have lied to me?”
“Which man?”
“You can hear it in a person’s voice when they’re lying. Did you know that? He was a very tense man. What a voice he had—like fingernails on a blackboard. Nervous. Not just because I surprised him—which I did, mind you—but out of fear. Strange as it may seem, he was afraid of me. Me!”
Daphne suggested calmly. “Why don’t you start at the beginning, Agnes.”
“I heard voices through the wall. Two men talking to Sharon. And Sharon was scared. Plenty scared. I couldn’t hear the words, you understand, but I didn’t have to. She was good and scared.”
“Voices …” Daphne repeated.
“Yes, so I came in through the kitchen. We share the kitchen. My rooms are just off the back side there. Came in to make sure she was all right. That’s why I say the man lied—he told me Sharon had gone out for a minute and that he and his associate were also leaving. But the other one—the one with the halitosis—I think he dragged Sharon out. I heard something dragging on the carpet. She had been sitting in that chair, right over there. That chair squeaks. I heard it. I heard her voice, too, though not her words, not what she said. Not exactly.”
“Do you remember what was said?” Boldt asked.
Agnes Rutherford nodded. “Thereabouts. As I rounded the corner the one with the hard voice asked the other. ‘Who the hell is that?’ ”
“Those exact words?”
“Yes. He didn’t expect me. And then there was a long silence. Then the other dragged her out, I think. At the time, of course, I didn’t know what was happening, but that’s what I think was going on.”
“And you didn’t call the police?” Boldt asked, dumbfounded.
“I was—I am—afraid of you. I spent a good many years of my life avoiding you. Hiding. On the streets, you understand. Would anyone have believed an old, blind, bag lady, Mr. Boldt? Would they have? You don’t believe me now. I can hear it in your voice. You can’t believe an old blind lady can survive the streets, but I did! Daphne believes me, I bet, but only because she knows me.” She added, “I didn’t call the police, I called The Shelter. I called Daphne.”
Daphne glared at Boldt then. He was trying to see this through the eyes of the law—Phil Shoswitz, or prosecuting attorney Bob Proctor—and he didn’t like what he saw: There was no proof of a crime. No matter what Agnes Rutherford believed she witnessed, she had not seen it. Police work was as much practicality as it was instinct. Sharon Shaffer’s history was that of a runaway. This would not be an easy sell, despite the cooperative relationship between the police and The Shelter. The prosecuting attorney’s office was another realm entirely.
Boldt examined the room. He remembered the Stevie Wonder line: Her clothes are old, but never are they dirty. That was how this room looked: pieced together from yard sales but clean to the corners. Vacuumed recently. He asked Agnes Rutherford, “Is this room still pretty much as it was?”
The woman answered, “Oh, yes. Exactly. I haven’t touched a thing. My rooms are back there. I don’t fool with Sharon’s things.”
Boldt walked slowly and carefully over to the table and chairs. The cop in him understood the significance of what, to untrained eyes, might have looked like nothing more than dust on the table. It wasn’t dust. Tiny particles of shredded paper perhaps. He studied the table top and then, using his handkerchief so he wouldn’t leave fingerprints, applied pressure to the back of the chair. It squeaked.
“That’s the one,” Agnes said.
Boldt told her, “The house had just been cleaned.” He made it a statement. “She had vacuumed the carpet that morning.”
“Now just exactly how did you know that?” Agnes Rutherford asked.
Daphne asked Boldt, “Lou?”
Boldt didn’t need any more convincing, he was standing amid a pile of evidence. There were drops of blood on the arm of the chair. “Call the lab,” he said. “And tell them to bring a lot of lights.”
“Lights?” Daphne asked.
“For the carpet,” Boldt explained. Variations in the nap of the carpet allowed him to see a pair of scuff lines and the perfectly formed impressions of shoe prints.
18
Boldt enjoyed watching the ID Unit—the Scientific Identification Department—at work. Educated as scientists, they didn’t think like other cops. They worked as a team, speaking in half-sentences, using techie jargon unintelligible to the layman. With their nerd packs and a language all their own, these men and women remained on the social fringe of the police fraternity but played an increasingly important role in any investigation. The star witnesses in an investigation were no longer the boyfriend or the observant neighbor but these ID Unit technicians. Convictions relied on a foundation of incriminating scientific evidence. A jury, even a judge, preferred to believe a computer-generated enlargement of work from an electron microscope rather than a woman like Agnes who had heard voices through a wall. You didn’t bother Bob Proctor and his band of PA’s unless you had a file full of stats to support your case.
The only thing about ID that really irritated Boldt was how slowly they went about their jobs. If Sharon Shaffer had been abducted, which he now believed, he could only imagine how terrified she must be at this moment—providing she was still alive. No ransom call, no notification whatsoever. Impatience nagged at him.
The ID Unit continued its meticulous examination of the crime scene. The first round involved the detailed photographing, in varying degrees of enlargement and detail, of all angles and aspects relevant to the possible crime. Several general shots were taken, followed by increasingly specific studies of the carpet, the chair Sharon had apparently sat in, the table top, and the fixtures.
The area was vacuumed next—excluding the carpet—for fibers, using small, hand-held, filter-specific vacuum cleaners. Each filter was removed and labeled and then bagged in a white paper bag. Plastic bags were rarely used by Hairs And Fibers because of their static charge.
While several of the team continued to measure and photograph the “impressions” in the carpet, others began carefully dusting surfaces with dark and light powders using soft animal-hair brushes. Any developed prints were first photographed and then “lifted” using wide strips of transparent packing tape. The powder, print and all, came up with the lift, which was then mounted on card stock, labeled, and set aside.
All this while Boldt, consulting Daphne, wrote up a detailed first officer’s report, describing the scene exactly as he had found it, his suspicions, and his findings. The report came to two single-spaced legal pages written longhand. They both signed and dated it for the specific hour.
Bernie Lofgrin ate too much and exercised too little. He had the coloring of an Irishman and the temper of a Scot. He wore glasses as thick as ashtrays and suspenders with full-frontal nudes hand painted onto them. When Bernie tugged them this way and that, the nudes did a belly dance. Everyone called him the Professor. He ran his squad like a Scout leader and put away more beer at The Big Joke than an alumnus on homecoming weekend. Over the past year he had become a regular during Boldt’s piano sets. He had joined the Boldt-Dixon jazz record exchange—taping each other’s albums. Bernie’s collection leaned toward drummers and trombone players.
Boldt knew that with this being a Sunday it should have been only a skeleton-crew ID unit. But Lofgrin had come himself and had brought additional overtime help as a personal favor.
As he approached, his thick glasses were aimed at Boldt like unfocused binoculars. He seemed to have eyes the size of fried eggs. “One of the two suspects wears a shoe size eight-and-a-half wide. Maybe D, maybe E. The other suspect, some kind of running shoe. The way the nap in the carpet stood up for us, these guys might as well have left us plaster impressions. We might even hav
e a make on the manufacturer of those running shoes by sometime tomorrow. We’e got a distinctive, triangular tread pattern in a couple of takes. Size thirteen, by the way. Big Foot. Fibers on the table vacuumed up just fine. Crisp paper by the look of it. We got another small piece under the table. Light blue ink on it reads ‘USA,’ as in ‘printed in.’ ”
“Was that what the guy was waving a microphone over?” Boldt asked.
“You jazz guys think anything with a wire running into it is a microphone. That device measures low-level radioactivity.”
“A Geiger counter?”
“Like that, yeah. The reason being that I suspected it was the paper covering to a Band-Aid or gauze, something like that. That paper has a distinctive look. That Geiger counter—as you call it—picked up a charge consistent with my suspicions.”
“Radioactivity?”
“It’s how they sterilize them. Band-Aids, gauze, nearly every self-contained disposable item in a hospital—they zap ’em with low-level radioactivity after they’re packaged—that way they can guarantee sterility.”
“Live and learn.”
“Stick with me, kid. Evidence points to two possibilities: real careful junkies—doubtful; or a doctor—more likely.”
“A doctor?”
“We’ve got some real obvious residual fluids—dried up you understand—discovered both on the arm of the chair and beneath the table. We got a good photo of the drip pattern. My guess is it was squirted. Size of the droplets suggest—”
“A syringe.” Boldt interrupted.
“Either that or this guy is the original needle-dick and he came all over that chair.” He smiled. “We’ll get all this shit off to the state lab. Might have that blood you found typed sometime tomorrow,” he said, answering Boldt’s thoughts before he could voice them. “Mr. Eight-and-a-half-wide was carrying some kind of flat-bottomed case, fourteen by eighteen inches.”
“Like a doctor’s bag?”
“That’s my guess, yes.” Bernie went on. “Big Foot, the guy with the running shoes, was carrying a laptop computer. He set it down next to the chair and gave us enough of an impression for an educated guess that that’s what it was, although you can’t take that one to the bank. If you bring in these two in the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours, I may be able to lift some of these carpet fibers from the edges of their shoes. It’s a cheap synthetic, loose weave, real prone to shedding. The static should hold the fibers on the shoes for a while. As to your idea that maybe the person in that chair was dragged out of the room, it’s possible but we’re not likely to prove it. Something was dragged—I can testify to that—and it had two legs or feet or posts, but that’s as close as we’ll get. Our other vacuum samples could give us a hell of a lot more to work with. Stay tuned.” He slapped Boldt on the arm and returned to his crew.
Boldt looked around at an anxious Daphne, who had just returned from interviewing the neighbors in the apartment houses. He waved her over. “Nothing,” she said. “Fourteen families of people and no one saw a thing!” He asked her to call the city’s 911 dispatch, Sharon’s doctor, ambulance services, and the two closest area hospitals, inquiring whether on the previous day Sharon had sought medical attention.
“What’s up?”
“The Professor has uncovered some evidence that points to either a drug deal or a doctor.”
“Not drugs, Lou. Not Sharon. I know her past says otherwise, but I know the woman.”
“Would I have you calling hospitals if I suspected a drug deal?”
She eased noticeably.
“But if she didn’t call an ambulance, then a drug deal is easier to believe.”
“Not for me it isn’t.”
“Daffy, somehow two people convinced a streetwise woman to open her door for them. How? It also now appears that somehow she was further convinced to roll up her sleeve for them. You know Bob Proctor’s reputation. It’s going to be our job to disprove any street-drug connection. The state lab will have a lot to say about that. But if we found her admitted to an area hospital, we’d all feel a hell of a lot better.”
“That’s not the way Agnes reports it. She says she was kidnapped.”
“I know that, Daffy.”
“Lou?” The Professor, Bernie Lofgrin, called out, kneeling by one of the chairs. Boldt joined him there. “You’re the quintessential king of no coincidences,” Lofgrin said. “Am I right?”
“So?”
“So we did the lab work-up on the Cynthia Chapman clothing—Matthews’ runaway. ‘Kay?”
“Okay.” Boldt felt his pulse quicken. Why would the Professor bring up Cindy Chapman now?
Lofgrin, who was wearing a pair of jeweler’s loupes clipped to his already thick glasses, found a magnifying glass in a bag and handed it to Boldt. “Get a load of this,” he said.
He pointed. Boldt focused the glass onto the spot indicated. A clump of animal hairs clung to the fabric of the chair. Under the glass they looked like pick-up-sticks.
“What do you see?” Lofgrin asked confidently.
“Animal hairs,” Boldt replied. “A pile of them.”
“Notice the extremely long white ones? See how much longer they are than the others? They’re unusually long. We lifted similar hairs off Chapman’s clothes.” He made a face at Boldt. A lab guy like Lofgrin would never use the word identical. In the scientific world, identical rarely existed. “What we’ve got here is a visual cross-match.”
Lofgrin’s magnified eyes looked like two vein-mapped beach balls.
Boldt studied the hairs once again, blood thumping in his ears. Cindy Chapman and Sharon Shaffer connected? Abducted by the same man? Both runaways, one present, one past. Overlaps. Mounting coincidences he couldn’t buy. He asked, “Any way to prove such a connection?” Evidence as ubiquitous as animal hairs was unlikely to hold up in court, but Boldt temporarily ignored this.
Lofgrin smiled; the Professor loved a challenge. “We’ll sure as hell try.”
Daphne kept a close eye on Boldt as he hurried her off the telphone, took it from her, and started dialing.
She protested, “Hey, it was you who wanted me to make these calls.”
“Priorities,” he replied.
He avoided looking at her because she was the kind of person to sense something was wrong. He didn’t know the number, so he called information. “Seattle,” he said. Coincidences, he was thinking. “BloodLines,” hoping he had spoken quietly enough not to be overheard, but as he turned around, there she was, only inches from him, wearing a puzzled, frightened expression.
The woman who answered connected him to a man named Henderson, because Verna Dundee, the managing supervisor, didn’t come in on Sundays. Boldt reintroduced himself and presented his case, Daphne listening in. He cupped the receiver and protested to Daphne, “Can’t a guy get some privacy around here?”
“No,” she replied, fear and irritation flashing from her eyes.
Boldt spelled Sharon Shaffer’s name for the man. “I doubt it’s a recent file. I’ll wait,” he said in anticipation. As he assumed, he was placed on hold. He would have to check central processing using another line.
“Lou?” Daphne asked, eyes squinting, lips pale.
Boldt felt impossibly hot. The seconds grew into minutes. He thought: I should hang up right now. I should leave this for others. I should stick to my family and my piano playing, because if it turns out …
It was Henderson telling him what he didn’t want to hear. He wouldn’t need the results of the Professor’s tests. Not now that he had this. He felt sick to his stomach.
Daphne had desperate eyes. She had already guessed. “Lou?”
How did you put something like this to Daphne? Why, as a cop, were you always the bearer of bad news?
“Sharon Shaffer is in the BloodLines database. Three years ago she was a regular donor.”
Daphne gasped.
“I think the harvester’s struck again.” He looked over at Agnes Rutherford, her blind eyes steady a
nd untracking. “And she’s our only witness.”
MONDAY
February 6
19
Sharon Shaffer looked on as the black man in the kennel next to hers came awake for the first time. She remembered the terror of that moment and could do nothing to warn him of the horror he was about to experience, nothing to lessen its effect. The dogs started barking; she knew he would awaken—it had been the same for her. She couldn’t remember exactly when. Had it been just yesterday? It seemed more like forever.
He looked around. Surprise. Astonishment. Terror. He clearly noticed then the chain-link cages; and a moment later, his own nakedness. She knew that his head ached miserably from the drugs just as hers had.
He spotted her then. She tried her best to communicate with her eyes, for her jaw was now held in a modified dog muzzle made of nylon webbing, one strap of which ran across her mouth, keeping a gauze rag stuffed into place to prevent her from crying out, as she had to this man. She felt responsible for his being here. She was responsible. His jaw was secured in a similar muzzle, although the gag had been omitted, probably because the doctor feared he might vomit on coming awake, which he did, repeatedly. She had to wonder: Was it the effects of the sedation or from looking at her? She could only guess at what she must look like. A bandage glowing a lurid pink at the edges. She had pale skin the color of cigarette ash. Her hair was matted flat. Or perhaps that expression of his arose from the dogs and their horrid smell. The deafening barking at the slightest instigation. It would take him a while to adjust to their situation, but she needed him to adjust—to settle down.
To help her escape. She was going to get out of here, with or without him.
She thought that if only she could stop him from what he would do next, she could spare him some pain. But the muzzle and gag prevented her from speaking; she could only grunt and gesticulate. And that, only quite weakly. She had little strength, drugged as she was by whatever was in the I.V. It felt like a combination Valium-Demerol to her. She was experienced enough to know. When she thought about it, it brought on resentment and anger, rage and indignation. She had spent the last three years of her life learning to live sober. Now, forced on her, she found herself drugged up again—enjoying the feeling, wanting more. She looked up at the precious drip, drip, drip of the I.V. Worst of all, she couldn’t bring herself to disconnect the tube. If anything, she wished it would flow faster. She could take more. She had always been able to take more …
The Angel Maker Page 13