The First Victim

by Ridley Pearson

  ‘‘So why not use me as bait?’’ she suggested.

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  ‘‘It isn’t done. You’re a civilian. We don’t put civilians at risk. Not ever.’’

  ‘‘Do you think she’s dead?’’ she asked bluntly. ‘‘If it was you running things, for instance . . . Would you have killed her by now? What would you do with her?’’

  ‘‘Me?’’ he blurted out.

  ‘‘Hypothetically,’’ she acknowledged unflinchingly. He stared back at her, trying to read in her face what she knew. She said, ‘‘If anything has kept her alive, it’s that they haven’t found the second digital tape. Without it firmly in hand, they’d be stupid to kill her. She’s the only one who knows where it is.’’

  ‘‘If there’s anything they want from her, they’ll simply torture her and get it,’’ he said flatly. ‘‘These people do not play fairly.’’

  Not taking her eyes off him, ‘‘But they don’t know her, do they?’’

  ‘‘Don’t they?’’

  ‘‘Her parents were great heroes in China. They survived seven months of torture by the Mao regime. Seven months of it! They’re legends. Melissa’s family honor is at stake. Do you understand? To the Chinese, family honor is everything. She won’t talk. And then they’ll have to make a decision. Kill her, and risk never finding that tape, or wait her out. What do you think?’’

  ‘‘Iknow all about the Chinese and their families,’’ he said a little too defensively.

  ‘‘So if she doesn’t talk?’’ Stevie asked.

  ‘‘You should take a vacation, a leave of absence. The only thing they would want from you is silence. I’d think about that if I were you.’’

  Coughlie dragged himself forward to the edge of the couch. ‘‘If you stay, you’re making a mistake,’’ he warned.

  ‘‘If they let her go, then that’s the end of it,’’ she repeated.

  ‘‘You need to tell them, not me,’’ he said.

  ‘‘You have sources,’’ she pressed. ‘‘Connections. You said so. You told me you did.’’

  He stood and paused at the door. ‘‘It doesn’t work like that,’’ he told her.

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  She spun back around to catch his reflection in the mirror. ‘‘Help me,’’ she pleaded. ‘‘I’ll keep my word on this.’’

  ‘‘If that break-in taught you anything, it should have been that it’s too late to negotiate. Just ask Klein.’’ He paused there at the door.

  ‘‘You take care of yourself,’’ he advised, turning his back on her and walking away.

  t

  When the receptionist rang almost immediately, Stevie was convinced that Coughlie wanted another chance at her. The announcement that Boldt was in the lobby surprised her. She asked that he be shown back to the set because she wanted to meet him on her turf for a change. A minute later, her head still spinning, he entered the enormous studio, taking in every detail as if a student.

  ‘‘Did you cross paths with him?’’ Stevie asked Boldt.

  ‘‘Who?’’ Boldt asked.

  ‘‘Brian Coughlie. He came to tell me Ishould leave town.’’

  ‘‘Did he?’’ Boldt pondered this. ‘‘Not the worst advice. We can hardly arrest him for that.’’

  ‘‘Ioffered my silence for Melissa’s safe return.’’ She kept Boldt standing because she didn’t want him to stay long. They talked between two of the large robotic cameras facing the backdrop of the Seattle sunrise that needed a few thousand watts to look realistic. He said, ‘‘When a victim lives through what you went through, we call her a material witness.’’

  ‘‘Is Melissa dead, Lieutenant?’’ The only question that mattered. The one that haunted her.

  ‘‘We need to work together. To trust each other. You need it for the sake of your safety. Ineed it if we’re to find Melissa. Ihave reason to believe that they may not have found her yet.’’

  ‘‘But you found her van,’’ she said flatly, surprising him with her knowledge. ‘‘Why the hell didn’t Ihear about that?’’

  ‘‘Coughlie?’’ he asked, wondering about her source. She fumed. ‘‘Ishould have been told.’’

  Boldt shook his head. ‘‘Not without ground rules laid. He’s playing

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  us against each other. You see that? Ineed to know everything you two have shared. We could be way off base with him.’’

  She studied him. ‘‘Ican go along with that.’’ She added, ‘‘So what is it you want from me, Lieutenant? Why the visit?’’

  He met eyes with her. ‘‘Police pressure isn’t always the most effective. The press has powers that we don’t.’’

  ‘‘You see? You hate us until you need us.’’

  ‘‘Are you so different?’’ he asked.

  ‘‘You ask around about Lou Boldt,’’ she said, ‘‘and you get back this guy larger than life. As a reporter you don’t trust those myths. Those guys don’t exist anymore. They lived in another era. White walls and wide lapels.’’

  ‘‘And if you ask around about Stevie McNeal,’’ he said, ‘‘you hear that she’s much more than a pretty face, that she’s one of the few anchors in this town who’s capable of reporting a story, not just reading into a camera.’’

  ‘‘What is it Ihave to do?’’ she asked.

  ‘‘You have to use that anchor chair to force someone’s hand.’’

  She debated this long and hard. She looked at him curiously, cocking her head as if getting a better view. ‘‘I’ll do whatever it takes.’’

  Boldt reached into his pocket and pulled out the digital tape confiscated in the sting. ‘‘Let’s get to work,’’ he said.

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  ‘‘This is out of order.’’ Boldt pointed to the screen. They had reviewed all the tapes together. They were taking their second look at the digital tape. McNeal’s expression was grave, her reaction time delayed like a person working off a translator. From his experience when his own Sarah had been abducted, Boldt knew this horror firsthand: the hollow resonance of people’s voices as they spoke to you; the way the clock hand refused to creep forward; the insomnia.

  ‘‘Ibeg your pardon?’’ Stevie said, finally responding to him.

  ‘‘You’re the reporter here—don’t get me wrong. But the outside of the bus on the VHS looks dirty to me, like it has been raining, whereas the bus on the digital tape, the one she boards, is clean. We get just a glimpse of it, but it’s not the same bus, believe me. And if that’s right, then there may be as much as a day or two between the VHS and this digital tape being shot. If that’s true, as thorough as she is in her reporting, then maybe there’s another tape. Maybe there’s one still missing. And if there is, who knows what’s on it? Maybe that’s the tape that establishes the location of the sweatshop—or even the people responsible.’’

  She studied the two screens—one showing the back of the dirty bus as it descended into the bus tunnel; the other, the opening shot on the digital tape. She said, ‘‘Itold Brian Coughlie there was a tape missing, but at the time Iwas just making it up—trying to buy Melissa some time. Ijust assumed the remaining tape Igave her was blank, but you’re right about the dirt.’’

  ‘‘So she may have shot yet another tape.’’

  ‘‘It’s possible.’’ Her voice was fragile and did not carry. ‘‘She may 261

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  have simply had nothing to shoot for a day. It happens. You know surveillance work.’’

  He proposed, ‘‘Let’s assume that when the camera was confiscated it contained the second of the two digital tapes, not the first. Let’s say the first had already been shot and put aside, and whoever got the camera only got the second tape.’’

  She said hoarsely, ‘‘So maybe there is a second tape.’’

  ‘‘We have to explain that camera showing up. If whoever’s behind this found it, would they hock it? Not likely! Destroy it, yes, but hock it? We have Riley’s statement—the man you met at the water shower fountain—that it was a gang kid who brought the camera to him in the first place. So maybe this kid simply found the camera, or stole it, or maybe she hid it. That would make it a random discovery. He doesn’t tell anyone about it—he simply hocks it to cash in on his discovery. But conversely, maybe she used it to buy this kid’s silence, or to help her to escape—’’

  ‘‘And if that was all she had to trade, what happens next time they come looking?’’

  ‘‘Or maybe someone in the sweatshop—one of the leaders—took it, traded it, used it. It doesn’t mean they’ve found her, ’’ he reminded.

  ‘‘Iaired her photo,’’ Stevie whispered. ‘‘They’ve identified her.’’

  ‘‘We can’t confirm that.’’

  ‘‘The papers ran it . . . the other stations. You’d have to live in a vacuum to have missed that photo.’’ Equally softly she said, ‘‘Iscrewed this up.’’ She added, ‘‘All because you bastards were moving too slowly.’’

  He’d been waiting for that. Blame followed on anger’s coattails. Boldt allowed a moment for the air to clear and held to the high ground. ‘‘We’ll pull a picture of the car wash and distribute it to every radio car on patrol. Someone will recognize it. You . . . you have two assignments. One is to go back over this digital tape and translate. I don’t mean the spoken language—what the women are saying—we’ve already had that done. She gets their histories, the conditions aboard ship—’’

  ‘‘Ispeak Mandarin,’’ she reminded. ‘‘We’ve seen the tape twice.’’

  ‘‘What Ineed— we need—is to be inside Melissa’s head. Her

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  thoughts. Emotions. Why is it she dwells so much on the ship’s conditions, when we’re assuming all they saw was the inside of that container? She mentions the ship over and over. We need all that subtext.’’

  ‘‘The second?’’

  ‘‘Ineed you to craft a smear piece. Ineed you make someone look pretty damn bad.’’

  ‘‘Idon’t know how Ican get by putting something on the air that’s pure fantasy.’’

  He hesitated, needing her, and said, ‘‘Nothing libelous, but bad enough that she’ll squirm.’’ He asked, ‘‘How long does something like that take?’’

  She considered all this, her face a mixture of curiosity and concern. She answered reluctantly, ‘‘Anywhere from a couple of hours to a couple of days. Depends on who the subject is, what kind of existing footage we have.’’

  ‘‘It doesn’t have to be long, just powerful.’’

  ‘‘You’re sounding more like a producer than a cop.’’ She tried to smile, but her face only found a grimace.

  ‘‘You know a woman called Mama Lu?’’ Boldt asked. She arched her back, opened her eyes and said sarcastically,

  ‘‘The crime lord? You really do want me killed.’’

  ‘‘Former crime lord,’’ he corrected. ‘‘More of a politician these days. She’s the one. She has the answers.’’

  ‘‘She’s behind the disappearance?’’ Stevie asked. ‘‘She’s who Coughlie’s protecting?’’

  ‘‘We don’t know anything for certain. My gut says Mama Lu has the answers. Some of the answers? All of the answers? Idon’t know. But I’ll never get any of them without some way to open her up. She’s getting older. She wants acceptance in the community. That’s her pressure point.’’

  ‘‘Let me check the clip files,’’ Stevie said, committing to helping him. ‘‘How soon do you need it?’’

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  T U E S D AY , S E P T E M B E R 1

  1 5 D AY S M I S S I N G

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  C H A P T E R 5 0

  MamaLu’sempireincludedthelargestAsianfooddistributorship in King County and partial ownership in Asian restaurants in the city, one of which was the unmarked noodle shop where Boldt found her engaged with a bowl of brown broth, shrimp, green onion and ginger, the smell of which encouraged him to accept her offer of a bowl for himself, though he made it clear he was required to pay for this out of pocket, a condition she tolerated. Dressed in a blue cavalcade of cotton, her flesh inflated from joint to joint, wrist to elbow, so that if he reached out and touched her, the skin would feel taut and ready to burst. When she smiled, her eyes fell into shadow, elongating to thin black slivers like chips of coal in the face of a snowman; her lips, too, grew long and thin, stretched like a rubber band across her false teeth.

  The soup was delicious.

  ‘‘How is your wife’s health, Mr. Both?’’

  Boldt considered the number of times he’d been asked this question over the past eighteen months and the hundreds of variations and forms it took, from sympathetic expressions to probing curiosity. But from the mouth of this woman, the inquiry sent a chill through him.

  ‘‘Do the Chinese have any sayings about coincidence?’’ Boldt asked, attempting to change the subject.

  ‘‘Inot Confucius, Mr. Both. Humble businesswoman. You no want talk of wife? How about the children?’’

  ‘‘It’s not a social visit, I’m afraid,’’ he answered, his skin prickling. He would not put his family at risk; he had been through that, had learned the hard way. But he thought back to her day-care center and his children as something they had in common. ‘‘My children are 267

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  the light of my life. There is so much wonder through their eyes, so much is new. Ilearn something from them every day.’’

  ‘‘Children are windows to past and future. Much to learn.’’

  ‘‘And your children?’’ he asked. ‘‘The ones Imet?’’

  ‘‘Yes . . .’’ she said, sipping grotesquely from the Chinese spoon and spreading her smile onto the table.

  They ate in silence then, for Boldt could not salvage any more common ground between them; they ate like lovers, talking only with their eyes. By the end of the brief meal Boldt felt oddly confident. She pushed the bowl aside with her forearm, dabbed her large mouth with a paper napkin and burped softly. ‘‘Good enough to savor twice,’’ she said.

  Boldt finished and placed his bowl aside as well, perceiving correctly that so placed the bowls could no longer capture the words spoken between them and thus business could now be discussed. She supported this notion with her inquiry.

  ‘‘Now, what accounts for your visit?’’ she asked. Collecting his thoughts, he bowed his head. ‘‘We—the police, that is—investigate the ship’s captain and he drowns; we inquire after the manager of the equipment rental, and his forklift explodes; we hear of a government worker selling
counterfeit driver’s licenses and she sucks oven gas—all convenient coincidences to whoever is profiting from the transportation of illegals.’’

  She said only, ‘‘Trouble comes in threes.’’

  ‘‘It doesn’t require a great leap of faith to suspect that someone with inside knowledge is remaining one step ahead of us.’’

  ‘‘Change begins in our own house,’’ she said. She touched her enormous chest. ‘‘Inside ourselves.’’

  ‘‘We, the police, that is, have shared each step of our investigation with Immigration and Naturalization.’’

  Her eyes became darker, if that were possible.

  ‘‘And only them,’’ he continued.

  ‘‘You have shared much with me as well,’’ she offered, testing to see where his suspicions lay.

  ‘‘The government does not pay its workers well,’’ he said. ‘‘One

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  can easily imagine a dissatisfaction with the system, an openness to the persuasion of corrupting influences.’’ He continued cautiously.

  ‘‘You, Great Lady, might have heard of such a government employee, and whereas Iwould understand, even respect your reluctance to mention any names, Ithought perhaps were Ito speak the names, you might be able to show some indication, make some sign to me that might prevent me from wasting my time.’’

  ‘‘You overestimate me, Mr. Both. Ihumble businesswoman. A few investments here and there.’’

  With the carrot failing, he decided to try the stick. ‘‘A certain television station intends to run a series on power and influence within the International District and the Asian community and its relationship to the flow of illegal immigrants into the city.’’ Boldt pulled the VCR cassette from his coat pocket and set it on the table. ‘‘You may want to see some of the footage they intend to use. Arrests that didn’t need to happen. Courtroom trials that ended in hung juries.’’ He met eyes with her and said, ‘‘It’s so unfair the way the press can air our dirty laundry, trials that have long since been forgotten by most.’’