“Reece has a good plan,” Boldt reminded.
“Doesn’t include this,” Foreman complained.
“We adapt, right, Danny?”
“I’m just saying: I don’t like it.”
“So noted.” Boldt disconnected the call. So far, so good. Riz had not thrown up any roadblocks.
“Miles6, Sarah4,” Boldt reminded her as he approached. He didn’t want her using these passwords under any circumstances but had to appear otherwise.
He stepped forward to hug her and she whispered into his ear. “Is this going to work?”
“Stay with the plan,” Boldt said into her ear.
She kissed him on the cheek. It felt strangely foreign to him. He felt like kissing her back or hugging her, but inexplicably did neither. Instead, he opened the door for her and watched as she walked toward the waiting taxi.
He had calls to make. Arrangements. His complex plan to beat his own people without breaking laws and without being discovered suddenly seemed so fragile, so easily broken. Seeing the taxi drive off, he wished he’d said something more to her, longed for a second chance before sending her off without so much as a dress rehearsal. If Svengrad or Foreman had a plan to abduct Liz, Boldt had just beaten them to it. He’d abducted his own wife by arranging the costume, by buying the ticket to The Sound of Music ahead of time. By having it delivered by taxi. However tenuous, he controlled the strings now, though for how long was anyone’s guess.
LaMoia felt awkward dressed in his black funeral suit, a white shirt, dark vest, Stewart plaid bow tie, and gray felt hat. With his hair pulled into a small ponytail and tucked down his collar, even his colleagues were unlikely to recognize him-which was, of course, the point.
Fifth Avenue, Seattle’s most posh shopping street, was crammed with traffic, the sidewalks overflowing with both the dinner crowd and theatergoers. The 5th Avenue Theatre stood directly across the street from the WestCorp Bank Center. The Four Seasons Olympic Hotel occupied the opposite corner.
He stood in a line of several hundred people, families, kids, full-bodied coeds in tight, colorful shorts, all dressed from various scenes in the movie. Women in full skirts and high heels-Maria. Men dressed as boys in lederhosen with its latzbund and schlitzfleck. More nuns than in a convent. But the real shocker was the uniformed Nazis-enough to run a concentration camp. It was as if the film had given an excuse to the white supremacists to play dress-up.
LaMoia was one of only a handful of Max Detweilers, giving him the feeling that he’d chosen the least inspired costume in the bunch. For her part, Matthews, as always, looked astonishingly perfect as a rosy-cheeked Maria, turning more than a few heads as she and LaMoia had found their places in the long line that awaited a slow box office.
The earpiece from his cell phone alerted him to the arrival of Liz Boldt’s taxi just west of the theater. Pahwan Riz’s team had followed her but were scrambling to get people costumed and on the ground in order to stay with her.
“The Sarge is a genius,” LaMoia told Daphne. He pressed his hand to his ear to isolate the voice in the ear bud. “The flying nun just entered the ticket holders’ line behind us. Reece is about to blow a valve.”
Daphne said, “Get seats near the back. I’ll tell her to look for your hat.”
“You be careful.”
“It’s not me they want,” Daphne said.
“That’s what worries me,” he said. “Nothing stupid.”
“Agreed.”
LaMoia couldn’t see over a couple of Nazis ahead of them. So when they made it inside and Daphne split off toward the women’s room, he lost sight of her. Liz Boldt pushed past in her nun’s outfit, close enough for him to reach out and touch her.
LaMoia kept his hands to himself.
Liz loitered by a trash bin in front of the women’s room where a line had formed. The theater’s lobby teemed with costumed moviegoers hungry for popcorn and to be seen by friends. The din made it hard to think. Bumped from behind, she turned to face Daphne Matthews, who looked strikingly beautiful in her Maria outfit. She felt her face flare behind the emotions of looking at her husband’s former lover, an identity kept secret all these years. The sickening combination of disinfectant, perfume, and hairspray overcame her as they moved into the rest room. A strong waft of marijuana overcame the other odors. She hadn’t seen a bathroom so crowded since her high school prom, and all the women dressed as one of three or four characters. She rubbed up against the Baroness, only to see the stubble of beard through the cosmetics. Somewhere in heaven the Von Trapps were as nauseated as she.
Wall-to-wall costumed freaks, Liz realized. Some were on drugs, or boozed up, anything to lower their inhibitions and allow them to croon through the three-hour film, thinking they were Pavarotti or Sills. The volume of talk in the tiled room proved deafening, the air thick with too many conflicting odors.
Again Daphne bumped her from behind. Adrenalized, and mildly claustrophobic, she felt tempted to scream out at the woman. Instead the two pushed into a toilet stall together, and Daphne turned quickly to lock the metal door.
“You,” Liz said, not sure why it came out this way.
“He briefed you, didn’t he?” Daphne asked.
“Oh, he briefed me all right,” Liz said, finding the opportunity impossible to pass up.
Reaching behind for her own zipper, Daphne looked back at Liz curiously. “We should get started.”
Liz made no effort to undress, embarrassed beyond belief to have to show her body to “the other woman.” She said, “He told me it was you. The affair. The one-night stand.”
Daphne looked as if she’d been punched, as if she needed to lean past Liz into the toilet bowl. She said, “Yes… well… this isn’t the time.”
“All these years,” she said. “Your coming to our house. Always playing so sweet and considerate. How did I miss it?”
“Liz, whatever you two are working through, I’m not part of that. We’ve got enough going on here without this. Okay? This is designed to buy you time. We’re wasting that time.”
“It’s more insidious than what I went through with David,” she said. “You see him every day. Interact with him every single day. How can you do that without thinking about it? I don’t think you can. You don’t, do you? So you think about it, and you both share it, even though it’s years behind you. That’s kind of sick for a psychologist, don’t you think?” She didn’t understand why she clung to this, except that the last thing she wanted to do was disrobe in front of this woman, and engaging her seemed a way to stall. Daphne pulled the dress off her shoulders, revealing first her substantial cleavage and then a white bra and finally the smooth tummy of a woman who had not given birth. Flawless, like something from a magazine, and only then did Liz glimpse the depth of what Lou had gone through to suffer her own affair with David Hayes.
Liz felt herself an awful combination of humiliation, regret, and anger. Her emotions bubbled to the surface. The stall was so small that Daphne switched places with her, passing closely enough that their chests touched. Daphne sat down on the toilet in order to keep the dress from touching the floor, pulled down past her underwear to her knees. A waxed bikini line.
Liz asked that she be allowed to undress in private. Daphne looked at her as if she were crazy and said, “There are fifty women out there, all waiting for a stall. Liz, please… now.”
“I can’t do this.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
She wanted to say: You slept with him. You were naked with him. I’ve had cancer. I’ve had two children. But she understood how petty and trite that would sound-especially aimed at a woman offering to take her place in a dangerous situation and one in which Daphne was to go unmonitored; Daphne was preparing to trick her own colleagues, risking all kinds of future discipline. She said nothing, but stood paralyzed by the situation.
“Undress. Now!” Daphne said sharply.
“That’a girl!” a stranger’s voice shouted from an adjacent stall.
Daphne sat down on the toilet in bra, tights, and shoes, working to get the tights off.
Liz turned around and asked Daphne to help with the Velcro to the various pieces that made up the nun’s habit, which Daphne did.
Daphne said, “You can bunch the top of your dress at the waist. The skirt is longer than yours, so you can wear the LBD under it.” Little Black Dress.
Liz got the habit off. She felt cold fingers as Daphne unzipped the cocktail dress for her, and helped her half out of it. She would need the dress for the reception. Lou had chosen it in part because it would hide underneath the Maria dress.
“Bras,” Daphne reminded.
Liz felt nauseated. She was being asked to bare her chest in front of Daphne as they switched bras in order to move the concealed tracking device. There was nothing left to her chest, wizened by nursing two children, flattened by gravity, corrupted by the starvation of cancer treatment. She turned her back on Daphne and then passed the bra back, wiggling her arm until Daphne claimed it. The one that was handed her was a bigger cup size. She swam in it, and she found this humiliating. Liz reached for some toilet paper mumbling, “This is embarrassing.”
Daphne struggled to adjust Liz’s bra straps. The undergarment barely contained her breasts, fitting uncomfortably. “Hand me the rest of the habit,” she requested.
“I get two dresses. You get none,” Liz said, turning now as she stepped into the Maria dress.
“That’s about right.”
“That thing-a couple Velcros is all to close it. You’re going to fall out left and right.”
“Luckily, it’s dark,” Daphne said.
“How can this possibly work?” Liz asked, having trouble with the zipper and once again needing Daphne’s help.
“We switch purses-the one thing that identifies you-and I find a seat and watch the movie. The hook is baited. Everyone, our own people included, are watching for a nun leaving the bathroom with your purse. I hide the purse and they’ll never confuse me with you. You’ll fail to show.” Daphne pulled a red-headed wig from her own bag. “We get you into this. You join John near the back. The two of you leave together at intermission. Two people leaving together, not a single. A Maria, not a nun. He walks you out, by which point you’re headed for the reception-better late than never. You’re in the bank while Special Ops continues sorting through nuns trying to find you. Lou looked at this thing from every way possible. It’s not perfect, but it’s as close as we’re going to get.”
“How do I get in the bank? We’re assuming the bank is being watched, aren’t we?”
“One thing at a time,” Daphne said. “John’s got that covered.”
“That’s all you’re going to tell me,” Liz said, sounding disappointed.
They exchanged purses. Liz placed all kinds of symbolism into this act and thought that as a psychologist Daphne could probably sort through it all, but had no desire to discuss it.
“And if my cell phone rings? If they give me instructions that go against this plan of Lou’s?”
“He worked this out with you, didn’t he?”
Liz felt deflated. He had, in fact, walked her through this a half dozen times, but she’d wanted to hear it again. She now realized the absurdity of this desire, given their current location.
Daphne instructed, “Go out there and find John. That’s all you focus on right now. It’s a zoo out there. Find John and follow whatever he says. He’s at the back of the theater.” She repeated, “The back of the theater.”
Liz felt inadequate, ashamed of her behavior over the past few minutes, responsible for people putting themselves at risk-all because of her past. But she could not find it within her heart to thank the woman. She helped Velcro Daphne into the habit. Skin showed, and flashes of underwear.
They transferred the contents of the purses, Liz making sure she retained the two bank IDs she carried-one supplied by Lou-her wallet, lipstick, and mobile phone.
“All set?” Daphne asked. Daphne looked good even with just the oval of her face showing. Jealousy brewed inside her once more.
She nodded.
Daphne added, “For what it’s worth: John and I are happy together.”
“It’s not worth much,” Liz said quickly and uncharitably. “But I’m working on it.”
“Good.” Daphne indicated the stall door, and the two women spilled out into the din and clamor of the rest room, among a dozen competing odors. Women’s voices crooned off-key, “The hills are alive… ”
Daphne joined in at the top of her lungs as if having the time of her life. The back of the habit hung open slightly, exposing her bottom. She never missed a step.
A clear, perfectly pitched voice on top of everything else. Liz thought she might be sick.
She stepped into a world where people lay in wait for her, and this thought terrified her. She wanted to be home. With him. She wanted another chance at whatever it was they now called their relationship. Marriage? Companionship? Parenting? She pushed away the thought that an organized band of criminals, perfectly willing and capable of submitting to violence, needed her services first and her lack of memory second. She held off the thought that Boldt believed Danny Foreman had turned against them all and represented an uncontrolled, unchecked piece of the equation, seemingly willing to take matters into his own hands. Her feet moved forward steadily as she trained her face to look to the floor, exposing as little of herself as possible, containing her new red-headed identity. But she knew even the most well-trained man would have a hard time keeping his eyes on her given the busty nun in the loosely attached habit who split off and headed down an aisle and took a single seat in the middle of the theater. Daphne Matthews and her flashing backside had every eye in the lobby. No doubt, all part of Lou’s plan.
Liz pushed her way through the thick crowd, tolerating the close contact. Her claustrophobia began to work against her. She hated crowds.
She took up a rhythmic chant in her head, scanning the seats for sight of John LaMoia: “Only a few more minutes… a few more minutes… ”
There he was, waving a box of Milk Duds at her, his arm around the empty chair she would soon occupy, a gorgeous babe to his right spilling out of her dress while openly flirting with him: John LaMoia, in heaven. Liz felt a sense of dread sweep through her, as if a thousand eyes followed her down the row. She felt those eyes boring into her, studying her, looking to identify the face beneath the wig, and she regretted not having used the toilet while she’d had the chance.
Liz never sang a note. For an hour and a half LaMoia seemed to enjoy himself, an ear bud planted in his left ear as he monitored the surveillance team’s radio traffic. He crooned through the songs as if he’d rehearsed the parts, but she saw his eyes tracking the room like a Secret Service agent’s. Nothing got past him. He faked a few smiles for her, and she appreciated that, but he felt as nervous as she did. Lou was the only one who knew fully what was going on, and she found her trust in him the only comfort.
Within moments of the intermission announcement, just as the room erupted into applause and people jumped from their seats, throwing the auditorium into chaos, her phone buzzed and tickled her right hand, and she touched LaMoia’s shoulder to get his attention.
He nodded, and she answered it, plugging a finger in her left ear.
A low, mechanical, sterile voice said, “It’s time.” The line disconnected.
She felt all the color drain from her, all warmth. She existed in another realm where all motion slowed around her, and all sound stretched and distorted. LaMoia asked, “What’s up?” but her brain barely processed the inquiry.
“It’s time,” she managed to say.
“What about the phone call?” LaMoia asked, misunderstanding.
“It’s time,” she repeated, explaining that this had been the message delivered. The room spun. She locked on to the armrests in order to slow the carousel. She wanted the movie back. She didn’t want to go anywhere, do anything. As childish as she
knew it to be, she wanted nothing more than to stay right where she was.
LaMoia leaned into her ear. “I’m going to tell the Sarge, but not until we’re out of here. This is our chance-this craziness. You gotta get up. We gotta get moving.”
“I don’t think I can.”
“I’ll carry you if I have to, but we’re outta here.”
That got her moving. She stood and followed him out into the throng. LaMoia motioned toward a side exit where a number of people were already lighting cigarettes as they stepped outside. She and LaMoia cut through a row of seats toward these open doors, and as they did she felt the eyes on her once more and the seeds of distrust and fear fought to take root yet again. Up the street the WestCorp Bank Center loomed.
“I don’t know that I can do this,” she said to LaMoia.
“I don’t think you got a choice,” he returned. “Hang with me. We’re almost there.”
But in her heart of hearts she knew this too was just another lie.
They had barely begun.
TWENTY-THREE
BOLDT WORKED THE CASE LIKE a fire juggler with too many torches in the air. He had recused himself from direct participation in Liz’s surveillance, surprising no one by declining an offer to take a seat in the Special Ops steam-cleaning van, electing instead to drive himself around and listen in on the radio. Riz warned him politely but directly that he didn’t need “any rogue operatives” during his effort to keep Liz safe, and Boldt lied, assuring Riz that he would keep his distance.
He took up a position, parking across the street from the bank building’s north entrance, a place that included a view of one of the two entrance/exits to the high-rise’s private underground parking facility. His biggest concern remained Svengrad and men like Alekseevich. Into the mix he threw Foreman, whom he knew to be operating solo but whose motives remained unclear, and therefore his danger to Liz difficult to assess. Somewhere out there, Boldt believed Olson and Organized Crime were keeping watch now that Alekseevich’s status remained so closely tied to this case and Boldt’s decision making.
The Body of David Hayes Page 24