The Body of David Hayes

by Ridley Pearson

  His job was to trick Special Ops into sitting on a decoy-Daphne Matthews or one of the several dozen other nuns in attendance at the movie-while LaMoia smuggled Liz out of the theater and put her in play. Svengrad had made it perfectly clear that no substitutions were to take place, and as yet, Boldt felt unwilling to challenge the man. The second part of his job was to allow Liz to transfer the money without Danny Foreman messing things up or getting selfish. Ultimately, he had plans beyond this, but early into the chicanery, his focus remained his wife’s safe transfer, slipping her past the watchful eyes of Special Ops’ “B”-as in “bank”-post, a group of three technicians who currently occupied a Seattle Post-Intelligencer panel truck conveniently parked over an open manhole with unseen video trunk lines running into the bank through the floor of the truck. From that truck the three could monitor every surveillance camera in the building, could directly communicate with bank security, and could even listen in over the public address system’s microphone during tonight’s reception. He knew his one advantage was that unbeknownst to anyone but him and a trusted few, he was working directly with his nemesis, David Hayes. Hayes was the wild card he intended to play to its fullest. As much as Boldt was loath to admit it, Hayes could run circles around all of them.

  “Yo!” Boldt heard in his ear after answering his mobile phone. LaMoia informed him that Liz had received a call just after the start of intermission. A synthesized voice again, short and to the point. Foreman, Boldt thought, finally beginning to sort out the various roles being played. Assuring Boldt that he and Liz had slipped away successfully, LaMoia concluded by saying, “We’re happening.” Translation: They were about to cross the street to the WestCorp Bank Center.

  Call-waiting chirped in the phone and Boldt signed off with LaMoia, accepting a call that turned out to be from Heiman at the On-Sat navigation offices. Foreman’s Escalade was on the move, heading downtown.

  “Interesting timing,” Boldt muttered. This too fit into an expected pattern.

  He called Gaynes into action. Posing as a waitress, she would now join the reception, a stopgap and final line of defense known only to him. Hayes was to be guarded by Milner, one of LaMoia’s trustworthy soldiers. Boldt ended the call, expecting to see his wife at any moment, wondering if his plan could get her into the bank without her being seen or detected and identified by the elaborate electronic surveillance already in place.

  He counted on David Hayes to help him, if indirectly. In fact, Liz’s survival now depended on him.

  In the midst of a light drizzle and traces of ground fog that swirled between the high-rises like smoke from a fire, a darkened figure stalked through the rain toward the west pedestrian entrance to the WestCorp Bank Center shopping complex, a lower-level mall that sat below the bank.

  Police radios, quiet for the past several minutes, drew attention to this visitor. The mall stores had all closed at 6 P.M., though access to parking and the tower elevators remained open. Not one pedestrian had entered the shopping complex in the past half hour, raising suspicions as this figure approached.

  The “B” unit commander, Dennis Cretchkie, jockeyed his team, directing an undercover wheelchaired officer to enter the facility behind this visitor. Cretchkie called for reports. Off Fifth on University, the Town Car set jammed the Olympic Hotel’s U-shaped driveway, the hotel doorman blowing his whistle for taxis stacked along the curb. A small group of white seagulls flashed in the black sky and shrieked noisily overhead. A homeless woman pushed a supermarket cart laden with soggy blankets and aluminum cans uphill, leaning into her effort. A street-cleaning machine lumbered slowly up University, brushes spinning, eliciting the complaint of car horns as it hindered traffic.

  The undercover officer in the wheelchair reported that the unidentified pedestrian was a woman carrying an umbrella that obscured her face. As this unidentified subject-“unsub”-approached the west entrance of the underground mall, the cop in the wheelchair worked furiously to intercept her, hoping she might hold the door for him and thereby give him a good look at her face. His effort failed.

  Monitoring surveillance activities over the police radio, Boldt sat forward in the front seat of the Crown Vic, the steering wheel pressing into his chest. Every action, every move by Special Ops was crucial to the success or failure of his plan. Boldt was parked with a view of the north side of the block-square complex, with no view of the unidentified woman who had just entered WestCorp Center. With the announcement of her entering the mall, Pahwan Riz, one block east, with a view of the 5th Avenue Theatre, pressured his detectives and operatives in the audience for the exact location of “the mark.” Liz.

  “I want a positive ID,” Riz said, “and I want it now.”

  Damn him, Boldt thought. Riz had always been one of the smarter ones. Boldt phoned Daphne Matthews to warn her that Riz’s team was inspecting the patrons more closely in order to obtain a positive ID.

  A moment later Matthews said, “I see them. It’s Brandy and Klinderhoff, each coming down an aisle.” Judging by her suddenly muffled voice, he pictured that she’d bent forward, head to the theater floor. “But it’s crazy in here.”

  “I need at least ten to twenty minutes, Daffy.”

  He heard a loud cheer and music in the background.

  “The purse!” Boldt shouted. “Make sure they see the purse.” He knew how a cop’s mind worked. The purse would convince either Brandy Schaeffer or Howie Klinderhoff as easily as if either saw Liz’s face.

  Daphne disconnected the call, and Boldt was left with indelible melodies swimming in his head. He saw a WSDOT Metro bus pull to its stop on Fifth Avenue. The arrival of the bus won the attention of Cretchkie and his “B” unit because it briefly and effectively blocked Cretchkie’s view of the complex. An undercover officer was dispatched, though too late. Cretchkie shouted across the radio, “Get the fucking buses off Fourth and Fifth Avenues. All eyes on anyone and everyone coming off that bus!”

  Riz cut in, demanding once again that Liz be identified in the film audience.

  The umbrella woman entered an elevator and rode it one floor to ground level, where she had to switch elevators in order to continue into the office tower. The wheelchair officer followed on the next elevator car, reporting every few minutes.

  The bus pulled away, scattering pedestrians, most of whom stayed on the WestCorp block, requiring Cretchkie to account for them.

  In all of the commotion, little if any attention was paid to the homeless woman’s abandoned supermarket shopping cart, now canted into the wall just outside the entrance to the bank’s underground parking garage.

  Boldt fixed upon that shopping cart. A smile crept slowly across his face.

  Liz was inside.

  Liz struggled to clear her head. During the walk with LaMoia at intermission he directed her across the street and down into a sunken courtyard plaza that fronted a Japanese restaurant. There, she jettisoned Maria’s frock, covering her little black dress with a street urchin’s Salvation Army wardrobe.

  LaMoia indicated a street person’s shopping cart packed with aluminum cans and some other junk. It had been secreted into some bushes in the courtyard.

  He then smeared her face with some brown base, making her look street dirty. “There’s a damp towel in the cart. Use it to clean this off.” Lou had planned all this carefully in advance. She found it difficult to hold up under the pressure.

  David Hayes had put her here, and the level of her resentment briefly stole all thought and clarity. Despite her usual Christian thinking, she vowed to have some kind of revenge against him. Ultimately, recovering the money would be the revenge, and she steeled herself to make it through the next hour of her life and to put things straight.

  When the bus pulled up, at the very minute LaMoia had told her it would, she pushed the junk-laden supermarket cart against the concrete wall and slipped into the shadows of the underground garage, already planning her metamorphosis. She kept only the damp rag. Fatigue took a physical toll on
her, leaving her feeling spent-despite the clamor of her heart in her chest.

  She headed directly to the glassed-in area that contained the elevators and stairs. It was from this garage that she had first sneaked away to a rendezvous with David Hayes, from this garage that she had left on maternity leave.

  As she heard the distant hiss of the bus brakes releasing, she reached into the waiting elevator and tripped the button for the ground floor, then jumped back out of the car. As she pulled open the heavy door to the fire stairs, immediately adjacent to the elevators, she heard the elevator doors slide shut behind her. She stepped inside the stairs and began to undress immediately. She cleaned her face in the reflection of a fire extinguisher box.

  Lou believed her sending the elevator up might distract the minimum-wage security team, whose job it was to monitor television screens in a darkened room somewhere in the building. Dressed now in her black cocktail dress, Liz climbed the stairs. The garage stairs deposited her into the main lobby. She still had to pass through security in order to reach the main bank of elevators.

  Liz said hello to Dilly, the portly security man with whom she was friends. As she did so, she used Tony LaRossa’s ID card on the turnstile in front of the metal detector through which she would pass. Lou had no doubt that Pahwan Riz had cued security’s computers to watch for Liz’s entrance to the office building. It was even possible the security computer had been set for a special notification when Liz’s ID card entered the system. Lou’s gamble that Riz would not have given the same consideration to Tony LaRossa’s card paid off. The light turned green, the turnstile moved, and Liz passed her purse to Dilly while she stepped through the metal detector.

  Dilly looked shell-shocked to see her. She stepped up to him, physically closer to the man than she’d ever been, and whispered clearly into his ear. “I know you’re supposed to report my arrival, Dilly. Believe me, I know all about it. And that’s a decision you will have to make. But if you do, what happened to Tony LaRossa will happen to me.” She kissed him on the cheek, took her purse, and walked away, not looking back.

  The elevator typically required the use of an ID card to reach the restricted floors, including the twenty-fifth floor and I.T.’s data processing. For the sake of the reception, that requirement had been overcome by stationing a security guard as an elevator operator to shuttle guests. This came as an unexpected complication. Liz’s way around being seen by this security guard was to use the stairs once again, for one reached the stairs before the bank of elevators. She climbed twenty-five floors in less than ten minutes, her heart and lungs burning, her calves aching. Using Tony’s security card, she entered the floor at the end of a hall that had been taken over by the caterers. The roar of conversation and the smell of chicken satay greeted her. A moment later she was just another little black dress in a reception with dozens of invited guests.

  Lou had taken it on faith that Hayes’s software would reach her. She felt less inclined to believe this, knowing David was under watch and believing that without his direct participation the transfer would not happen. But it was Lou’s show, and she played her role as directed. In her head an imaginary clock continued counting down the minutes to the corporate switchover.

  Boldt called Gaynes on her cell phone and asked her location.

  “Heading into the lobby from the shopping area.”

  “They saw you enter. They put guys on it.”

  “The mark?” Gaynes asked, meaning Liz.

  “She’s in.”

  “Oops,” Gaynes said. “Gotta go. Looks like I’m about to be caught.”

  She disconnected the call before Boldt could remind her that if her cover as a staff waitress for the caterer failed, she should use her police credentials against the bank’s rent-a-cops, and that if confronted by Cretchkie or Riz she should pass blame back onto him, Boldt, who in turn would argue that it was his wife, and if he wanted to slip his detective inside the bank then it was his prerogative. It was in fact not his prerogative, but he could live with a brief dressing-down from Riz if it came to that.

  He encouraged his cell phone to ring, awaiting confirmation that Liz had reached the twenty-fifth floor. Even if the empty-elevator ploy got security’s attention, Boldt expected no drastic action to be taken by the bank. No one in his right mind was going to shut down this merger reception as the couple approached their wedding bed.

  Boldt put his head back against the headrest, understanding but not quite accepting that he had to wait it out like a director in the wings watching a play.

  Then, when the phone did ring, it was only Heiman, reporting from On-Sat. “The Escalade’s moving south,” the voice said. “Heading through Fremont at the moment. If I had to guess,” Heiman said, “I’d say he’s still heading downtown.”

  Having tended once again to her hair and lipstick, centering the strand of pearls she wore around her neck, Liz rounded the corner into the open area of the twenty-fifth floor and immediately spotted Phillip Crenshaw’s gray-white mane across the crowded room. She elected to steer clear for the time being. Phillip had been carefully briefed on all aspects of the embezzlement case, by Liz, the police, BCI, and the prosecuting attorney’s office. Liz didn’t want him seeing her and then making phone calls to check up on her. If they crossed paths, fine; she would tell him in private that she’d been run through what now appeared to be a ruse, but still had not taken possession of the software, nor had she been given the account number-all true.

  It surprised her how well the data center transformed for the event. Her staff had done a terrific job. Several transit posters announcing the merger had been placed strategically to hide unsightly workstations. Helium balloons grouped in threes livened up the place. Champagne flowed as waiters and waitresses circulated. It appeared that most if not all of the forty to fifty invitees had shown up. Finger-food-sized crab cakes and cheesy hors d’oeuvres laced the air and enticed Liz’s empty stomach. She recognized any number of faces and said short hellos to various groups as she passed, making her way to the registration table manned by several of her staff. The overall mood was festive: canned jazz playing and champagne lifting voices into peals of laughter. A lot of money was being made off this merger, not the least of which went to the attorneys, a cabal of suits who hovered near the wine bar like a school of barracuda.

  “Charlotte.” Liz smiled at the attractive young woman behind the welcome desk.

  “There you are!” Charlotte bent over and reached below the table. She handed Liz a name tag that bore a small blue ribbon, a touch that Liz didn’t care for but something Phillip had insisted upon. The ribbon identified Liz as “co-hostess” and made her feel cheap, as if she were throwing a Pampered Chef party instead of a reception for a multibillion-dollar merger. “This came for you.”

  Charlotte gave her a plain manila envelope. A plain white label bore her name and nothing more. It was the right size and shape and thickness for a computer disk.

  “How’d you get this?”

  “It was messengered to the lobby desk. Dilly sent it up.”

  “When was this?”

  Charlotte heard the concern in Liz’s voice and reflected it. “Just before we got going. A few minutes before eight. Why?”

  Liz backpedaled, sorry she’d suggested there was any problem. “Oh, no reason.” She forced her face to soften. “It’s just in time. Thanks.” She glanced to her right, where the end of the room was sectioned off by polished steel beams and thick, unbreakable glass, and looked right at one of the twin AS/400s, a black, solid block of computer the size of a washing machine. Behind the server and out of view was a small desk holding a large flat-panel screen and a keyboard. The placement of this workstation intentionally screened the operator in order to prevent any eavesdropping or spying from without. The machine’s twin sister sat to the right in a small office of its own. This more private room was where most of the heavy lifting was done by programmers and maintenance. This was Liz’s destination. To reach it, she would h
ave to pass through a palm-scanner, as well as an ID reader. She would be under the glare of the overhead lighting, visible to all. She would stick out, given that there was no activity at that far end of the large room. Her entrance to the space would alert security and, in turn, the surveillance team.

  The cake had been Lou’s idea, his solution to part of this dilemma, and only then did she think to follow up with it, asking Charlotte about its readiness.

  “It’s here,” Charlotte replied. “But we’re saving it for after the switchover, right?”

  That had been Liz’s original instruction, but now that had to change for the sake of timing. She could feel Special Ops close on her heels. “The switchover is actually just ceremonial. Phillip… Mr. Crenshaw, will throw a switch, yes. But the final exchange of data won’t occur until after midnight. Then our servers are off-line for good.”

  “Right… ” Charlotte clearly wondered why Liz would explain what she already knew.

  “So what can it possibly matter when we serve the cake? The point being that once the switch is thrown, the party peaks, and maybe folks don’t stick around for the cake.”

  “Just admit it, Mrs. Boldt,” Charlotte said, nearly stopping Liz’s heart. “I know your real reason for changing plans.”

  Liz felt the color drain out of her face and her hands go cold.

  “Choc-o-holic, anyone?” Charlotte cracked up. “Confess your sins, Mrs. Boldt!”

  Liz felt nervous laughter escape from her throat. “Caught!” she said, her knees weak and actually trembling. “Me and chocolate! You got me. Let them eat cake.”

  “How soon?”

  “Let’s give the hors d’oeuvres another few minutes, and then surprise everyone.” Liz kept one eye on the end of the room, and the brightly lit secure office. “And don’t forget the candles and the room lights. Phillip wants this to be dramatic.”