The Body of David Hayes

by Ridley Pearson

  “And if someone got into these servers,” Boldt said, leading Hartsmith on.

  “That’s my point. You look at it that way, it’s a pretty fallible system.”

  Boldt could see Hayes having entered the building, and then the processing suites, but convincing the computer-controlled security system otherwise. Boldt suddenly wondered if that had already happened, if Hayes had come, gotten his money, and gone.

  “Can you put a guard, a human being, one of your security guys, on the doors to these processing rooms? Can we not rely on the technology so much?”

  “It would cost. I’d have to check.”

  “Check,” Boldt said. “And if you’re refused, let me know right away.”

  He looked for cracks in his reasoning, absolutely certain that Hayes used the money drop as a diversion, but stumped to prove it. Witte pulled himself out of a chair and left the small conference room. Hartsmith’s intelligent eyes stared off into space, deep in thought.

  “It’s problematic,” Hartsmith said. “A computer controlling its own security. But then again, it’s integrated. A closed system. You can’t get into the system to mess with it, because it guards its own door.”

  “But if you do get through that door… ” Boldt could see Liz being forced to gain Hayes access to the servers, could feel her terror. Increasingly, it seemed to Boldt that if Hayes could not get her to cooperate, his only choice would be to kidnap her or someone else at the bank with the proper security clearance.

  “Then we’re toast. Yes. You erase any record of your visit, and you dump any video that captured you. It’s brilliant, really, except that it’s putting the cart before the horse.”

  “But how do we know absolutely?”

  “There is no absolute way. But if you’re asking if I think someone raided the AS/400s today, I’d put a good piece of change on that not having happened.”

  Boldt understood then that both Foreman and Liz were right: Hayes needed Liz for her palm print to gain access. Once inside the server suites, with access to the mainframes, he could not only steal his money back but erase any record he’d ever been in the building, clear himself of any charges, and he could do it using the very same computers that were supposed to catch him. Perhaps today, using Liz to make the money drop, to distract bank security and the police, was nothing more than a dry run, a chance for him to inspect the place, to get a lay of the land and refine his plan. If so, they’d pick him up on the security video.

  Boldt caught up to Liz still being held in a small room off the bank’s branch offices located on the ground floor. He asked her to assemble a list of all WestCorp employees and executives with security clearance to the server suites. He intended to interview them all. He then called in the best eyes on his squad, unwilling to wait for video dubs from the bank surveillance cameras. Within the hour, he had six officers in front of televisions, carefully screening the jerky imagery-still images shot every four seconds and stored to video. At shortly after 11 P.M., one of the officers spotted David Hayes.

  “Elvis is in the building,” the woman announced to her colleagues, a little punch-drunk from the hours of tedious viewing.

  Boldt was telephoned and awakened at home.

  Thirty minutes later, Boldt found himself waiting for Danny Foreman outside the First Hill brownstone belonging to one Thedona Rembrandt Wilson. He’d left two messages for Foreman, as well as sending a page, and felt confident that rain or shine, Danny Foreman would meet him there, given the gravity of the find. He tried Foreman’s cell phone one last time and finally elected to make the interview alone. He’d left Liz at home, with the kids, but not before placing a team of uniformed patrol officers, one on foot, one in the cruiser, to watch his own house. Boldt remained convinced Hayes intended to abduct her. He wasn’t about to leave her unwatched and unguarded.

  Thedona Wilson, an African American woman with good bone structure and large hands, required Boldt not only to show his identification but to pass his credentials through her chained front door, allowing her to make a call downtown. By the time she admitted Boldt and showed him into the living room, she was dressed in a white satin robe tied tightly around the waist and was sipping herbal tea. She offered nothing to Boldt, viewing him with skepticism, until Boldt placed some photocopied images in front of her and happened to mention that Elizabeth Boldt was his wife. At that point she did, in fact, offer Boldt tea or coffee, but he declined, too edgy and high-strung, interested only in making some progress on the case.

  “These images, captured on security video, show this man, the one in the hat, at your desk, do they not?”

  “Yes, sir, they do.”

  “Do you remember this man?”

  “I’m a customer service representative, Mr. Boldt. I’m supposed to remember faces, make conversation, and cross-sell. This man here was in his late twenties, early thirties. Polite. Handsome. Soft-spoken.”

  Boldt shifted uncomfortably, not wanting to hear Hayes described in any of these ways. “You leave your desk at one point. Then he leaves with you… ” Boldt shuffled the freeze-frame images.

  “To his safe-deposit box.”

  “Safe deposit,” Boldt echoed, yanking his notebook from his blazer’s inside pocket.

  “That’s all I know. Don’t remember the box number. In the two hundreds I think-two-oh-six? Two-oh-eight? Or is that an area code?” She tugged her robe to ensure it stayed tightly closed at her chest. “It’ll be in the log.”

  “A name?”

  “Brindle? Binder?” She searched her memory.

  Boldt felt all the blood settle out of him, like someone had pulled a cork. “Brimmer,” Boldt said.

  She snapped her long fingers, cracking the air. “Brimmer! First initial, E. A funny name, Everest? Everett?”

  “E. Brimmer,” Boldt said, this time dryly. “Not Hayes? You’re sure it was Brimmer?”

  “He doesn’t gain access without signing in, without me comparing that signature card, and I’m telling you, it was Brimmer for sure.”

  The signature card would allow an expert to compare handwriting. If it came back Hayes, as he was certain it would, then it would serve as probable cause for them to obtain a warrant and to drill the safe-deposit box. Boldt assumed this effort would prove fruitless: He suspected Hayes had kept the “cloaking” software-which he’d used to keep the seventeen million hidden in WestCorp’s system-in the safe-deposit box. He had it now, and with it, the ability to recover the money. Given use of the pseudonym, Brimmer, bank officers had failed to identify the box as registered to Hayes.

  Boldt told Ms. Wilson he’d meet her at the bank at 8 A.M., Monday, and that together they would examine the safe-deposit logbook. An exercise in futility, he knew.

  “That name, Brimmer,” she said. “Why the long face, Lieutenant?”

  “It’s nothing,” Boldt answered, lying well. In fact, it was Liz’s maiden name: Elizabeth Brimmer. E. Brimmer, a false identity Hayes had established, no doubt, years ago while still a bank employee. While still infatuated. In love? Boldt wondered. That name, that safe-deposit box, connected Hayes to Liz, and Liz to the past, and Boldt’s memory to that shared past as well.

  Suddenly, he felt sick to his stomach.

  SEVEN

  “THE STRUGGLE IS NOT IN solving this case,” Boldt told Liz, who was still half asleep. “Because to tell the truth, I don’t care about the embezzlement, this seventeen million dollars. The struggle is to protect you and to save our marriage, it’s retaining or maintaining respect for each other, making it out the other side in one piece.”

  “I didn’t know he’d used my maiden name.”

  “It borders on worship, that kind of thing. I’m thinking he probably had a shrine to you in his jail cell.”

  “Stop it.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “What if he did? So what? You don’t see any shrine on this end, do you?”

  “I’m telling you, the battle I face right now is forgiveness. Finding forgiveness
. That and protecting you. This money? I could care less!”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, pulling up the bedcovers, experiencing a chill.

  “I woke you up. It was stupid of me.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous!” she called out, as he crossed the bedroom to the bathroom door. “And don’t walk away from me.”

  He turned, one foot, half of him, into the sanctuary of excusable privacy.

  “You have every right to be upset,” she said.

  “Don’t do that,” he said. “Don’t manipulate me like that.”

  “I am not manipulating you. I mean every word of that.”

  “It doesn’t help things.”

  “It’s honesty. It’s what I’m thinking. It has to help.”

  “I’m just telling you: I don’t care about the money.”

  “Neither do I.”

  “I care about you.”

  “That’s important to me. To us.”

  “I hate the images I have in my head. The two of you together. I’m resentful I even have them.”

  “Understandable.”

  “Don’t patronize,” he cautioned.

  “Is there a script I’m supposed to follow?” she asked. “I’m saying what comes to my head, Lou. What comes to my heart. Don’t condition that. Let me speak.”

  “So speak.”

  “You’re mad at me,” she said. “I accept that.”

  “There you go again.”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” she fired back bitterly. “Are you? Is that what this is about? You’re the only one who’s walked out on this marriage, Lou. I didn’t.”

  “This again?”

  “Yes, I suppose so: this again. And again, and again. And I hate it as much as you do-for the record. I’d like nothing more than to rewind and erase the tape, forget it ever happened. But we can’t, right? We’re stuck with it. We’re both going to have to live with it, maybe forever. I appreciate your efforts at forgiveness, but you don’t just jump there all at once. It’s a process, not a destination.”

  His mouth opened twice, and he even raised his hand as if about to speak. But then he pounded a fist against the doorjamb, his jaw muscles knotted. He choked out, “I don’t want this.”

  “Well, I’ve got news for you: Neither do I.”

  “I’m going to go sleep with Miles.”

  “All I’m going to say is that if you start that kind of thing, it’s hard to undo it.”

  “So what do you want from me?” he asked, frustrated.

  She considered this deeply and finally waited for eye contact before delivering her response. “Time,” she said.

  Boldt slept in their shared bed that night, and through the weekend, though fitfully, if at all. Mercifully, work saved him from his insomnia in the wee hours of Monday morning.

  The alert came from his pager at a few minutes before four. The code was for an assault, the address not one he recognized. But he knew damn well that even the dumbest dispatcher would not page a lieutenant unless the reported crime was of incredible importance to either the department as a whole or the lieutenant personally. Sergeants and their squads kept on-call hours, but not lieutenants.

  He hung up the bedside phone.

  Liz spoke through a dry throat. “Sweetheart?”

  “It’s Danny Foreman,” Boldt said.

  “What’s he want at this hour?”

  “Not the call,” Boldt answered, correcting her. “The victim. Robbery/assault. Someone beat him up pretty badly and robbed him. I gotta go.”

  “Is he going to be okay?”

  “I think so. Get back to sleep if you can.”

  “I’m up,” she said. “You call me when you can.”

  “Maybe I just had to get that off my chest Friday night,” he said.

  “Meaning?”

  “I feel better for having said what I said. I feel more like a team all of a sudden. Us, I mean.”

  “Music to my ears,” she said.

  “Speaking of which… ”

  “I’ll pick up Miles, yes,” she said. “I’ll get them both and be home around six.”

  “I’ll get the team back here to watch the house as soon as I can.”

  “Okay.”

  He was dressed now, standing at the closet safe, fetching his gun. He slipped the blazer on, tugged on his shirtsleeves. She called him over and scratched out a stain.

  “Can’t take me anywhere,” he said.

  “Oh, I don’t know about that.”

  He hesitated a moment, but he leaned over then and kissed her on the lips, a little peck, but a kiss nonetheless, and she felt like a high school girl who didn’t want to wash her face for a week.

  A mile down Martin Luther King Boulevard, Boldt turned right and worked his way into the middle-class, mostly black, neighborhood. Foreman’s house was a modest one-and-a-half-story clapboard.

  Inside the front door, Boldt met with the familiar smell of a crime scene: male sweat. He walked through the house and descended steep stairs into the dank cellar.

  It was dark and bitter down here, a tomb with stale air that carried on it the rusty tang of fresh blood. Clusters of halogen lights on aluminum tripods, stenciled “SPD,” blinded the man who remained in the wooden chair at their center.

  Foreman sat slumped forward, doing his best to hide the pain.

  The smell of solvent stung Boldt’s sinuses. Acetone. It didn’t make sense that SID, the department’s Scientific Identification Division, would “fume” for prints down here with rescue crews still in attendance. “Glue?”

  “Duct tape and Superglue,” answered the female half of the two personnel working on Foreman. “Wrists and ankles to each other, and the chair to the floor.”

  Foreman’s left hand was missing two fingernails, accounting for the pool of blood on that side of the floor.

  “Twice in a week,” Boldt said.

  Foreman didn’t react.

  The rescue woman informed him that Foreman had been given a sedative to help with the pain.

  The basement space was small, with little room for more than a heating system, a hot-water tank, and a beat-up washing machine. Add to that two light stands, the chair and the man at their center, the two Search and Rescue personnel attempting to free Foreman, and a pair of EMTs standing by half tucked under the wooden staircase, and it was approaching claustrophobic.

  Foreman’s lip was split, and his right eye swollen. Boldt pulled out a handkerchief and gently wiped the man’s face clean. Foreman lifted his head and the two met eyes, and Boldt felt pain tingle clear through him.

  “Bastards,” Foreman managed to mutter.

  “Who?”

  “No fucking clue.”

  One of the EMTs piped up that the small spot on the right side of Foreman’s neck “was consistent” with an injection.

  “They got you again.” Rohypnol, the “date rape” paralysis drug. Truth serum, Boldt thought.

  Foreman merely rolled his eyes. He appeared ready to pass out.

  Boldt made a quick study of the basement, disappointed to see so many people and so much equipment. The scene was now contaminated beyond recovery.

  The young woman said he could try his wrists now, but it might hurt. Danny Foreman tore a four-inch strip of his own flesh away, he pulled so hard. His face grimaced and his eyes shone, but he did not cry out. An EMT shot forward and went to work bandaging the wounds. Boldt saw more blood now. It was everywhere. Sprayed around like a kid with a garden hose.

  Boldt took in some of the odds and ends piled on a dusty shelf. A faded Frisbee. Well-worn work gloves. A pair of hiking boots. A waffle iron with a cracked black cord. Two or three cardboard boxes that Boldt knew without looking contained Darlene’s things: clothes and accessories and maybe some photo albums; a hospital bracelet cut off a limp wrist three years earlier.

  Seeing the damage to the skin, the rescue woman told Foreman they were going to give the solvent a few minutes longer on the ankles.

  Foreman gushe
d through a string of expletives, still under the influence.

  The rescue worker called for Boldt’s attention and pointed out what appeared to be the carcass of a dead bug, a housefly or larva, to the left of Foreman’s chair. When that bug rolled lightly a few inches across the floor, Boldt identified it as cigar or cigarette ash.

  “Any of you smoke down here?” Boldt stepped carefully toward the evidence. No answers. “I’m going to ask all of you but this woman to leave now.” He instructed them on how to leave in single file, being careful to set their feet down slowly and gently and only in a clear area of the floor.

  Boldt knelt down and eased the small worm of gray ash into a three-by-five manila envelope that he kept on his person for evidence collection. Foreman tried to speak, but ended up drooling and spitting instead. “Fuck!” he finally managed to moan, throwing his head around like a blind man at the piano.

  Other than the pulled nails, Foreman’s hands showed no signs of struggle, no indication he’d fought back. A moment later, the rescue worker had Foreman’s ankles free and asked Boldt’s permission to summon her partner and the EMTs in order to get Foreman into the waiting ambulance. Boldt acquiesced, again trying to minimize the crime scene contamination.

  Once Foreman was gone, Boldt searched the house, now joined by the timely arrival of his own department’s Scientific Identification Division.

  “Better late than never,” Boldt told the anemic thirty-year-old wearing the blue windbreaker marked with his department’s acronym. The guy had thin, bluish lips and the pale skin of a cadaver. Boldt had never seen him before.

  “The only espresso was a twenty-four-hour drive-thru on the other side of Broadway. And believe me, you do not want to see me before my first espresso.”

  “I believe you,” Boldt said, leading the man into the bedroom, guarded by a uniformed patrol officer.

  The bedroom was undisturbed, except for the closet. There Boldt saw a number of shoes swept aside, a hinged shoe rack swung out of the way, and an empty wall safe hanging open with no sign of tampering.