“You did the right thing. It does complicate things, but we’ll put you under surveillance at your own apartment.”
“What’s next on the Judith Fuller investigation?”
Boldt looked at her curiously. “I hope you understood fully what this volunteer work entails.”
“You weren’t serious about me going home and sitting around all day, were you?”
“We’ll keep you under surveillance.”
“You have to be kidding! You guys were serious? I checked for any tails. All the procedures. It took me nearly two hours to make sure I wasn’t being followed. Put me to work. I’m clean.”
“No can do. This is your last briefing here. And since my mug has been in the papers so much lately,” Boldt added, “we’ve assigned John LaMoia to be your contact and go-between. If we have anything to pass to you, John will do it. He’s your new boyfriend. The apartments we’ve rented are set up to handle that. You’ll have to improvise now.”
“Meaning?”
“You know how we’re running this, Bobbie. We have to act the whole thing out to the T. We talked about this. LaMoia’s going to take you out to dinner a few times. Show up at the apart—at your place after work. He’ll have to spend the night a few times.”
“Oh, Christ. What have I gotten myself into? I have a one-bedroom efficiency apartment over on Eighth Avenue in the U section. The bathroom is the size of a postage stamp. If two people are in the kitchen at the same time, they brush fannies. This is not going to work.”
“You’re going to have to make it work. I assume you’ve had visitors before—”
“And that’s another thing… What do I say to my friends, one of whom is not going to take kindly to John LaMoia coming over to watch X-rated videos with me. I’m assuming we’ll have to do that as well….”
“You know the routine. You have to act it out all the way. We don’t know to what extremes the killer goes. He may try and peep on you while you’re watching the show. Who knows? At the apartment building we chose, we had three units close together. It was much more easily controlled. Up until the lights go out at your place, you’ll want to act it out as best you can. We’ll be right there of course. We should know if he has you under surveillance.”
She shivered. “I don’t like the thought of that.”
“Having LaMoia around may not be so bad after all.”
“I’d rather it were you. I trust you.”
You shouldn’t, he thought. You’re young, sweet, and quite beautiful, just the kind of temptation a recently separated man in his late, late thirties doesn’t need.
“LaMoia’s an animal,” she continued.
“Enough,” he said somewhat harshly.
She nodded, and then had an idea. “Listen, since what we’re after is covering as many shifts as possible at these places, why don’t I return later tonight and tell them my machine broke down and I’ve sent it off to be repaired and I’d like to rent one? It would definitely speed things up. Since LaMoia’s my partner and he’s on stakeout up there, I could just wait until he told me the shift changed, and then go back in. That’s really how we’re doing it anyway, right?”
Boldt nodded. “Sure. That’s fine by me. Just remember, we don’t know what this guy looks like. We think he wears sneakers and jeans. It doesn’t give us much. You’ll have to do all your communication with LaMoia by phone through the radio dispatcher. You don’t want to direct attention to the stakeout.”
“I understand,” she said.
“Now get out of here. And don’t come back. You need me, give me a call. From here on out you’re Bobbie Gaynes, duly unemployed, attractive young woman with a thing for porno flicks.”
“I’ve got a tight leather skirt that will fit that image perfectly.”
“Don’t overdo it.”
“And black fishnet panty hose,” she said, standing, smiling, and touching Boldt lasciviously on the hard line of his cheek. “That ought to get a rise.”
“Bobbie…” he chided.
She stopped at the door and shoved out her hip, playfully. It was a nice hip, and it fit inside her black slacks very well. “Later,” she said, running her fingers down the molding and closing the door.
***
LaMoia was gabbing by the smoking room. Boldt pulled him aside and reviewed how he would team up with Gaynes. LaMoia complained about the overtime but shut up when he saw the look in Boldt’s eyes. Boldt asked, “What about the employee lists at the Market Videos?”
“Hey, Sarge, I put in the request as soon as I could. The owner wouldn’t take my call until an hour ago. I told him we needed it ASAP, but you didn’t want me tipping our hand so I couldn’t rag on the guy. He says he’ll have a complete list sometime late afternoon. That’s the best I could do.”
Boldt nodded. Sometimes the pace of an investigation was stifling. “Keep on him, John. Don’t let him stall us too long. He probably thinks it’s IRS-related or something. We’ll have to wait him out, but we don’t want to wait forever.”
“Okay, Sarge.”
The officer of the day, a uniformed sergeant in his mid-fifties, spotted Boldt and came over. “This just in for you, Lou.” He handed Boldt an interdepartmental memo. Boldt read it. “Keep me filled in, John. Got to run.”
An airport security patrol had found Judith Fuller’s Mercury parked in a long-term lot at SeaTac International Airport. The long-term lot was a favorite dumping ground for both stolen and abandoned cars, and a routine patrol crosschecked registration numbers against police lists. That afternoon, the sky smoky with ashen clouds and heavy with the noxious odor of diesel fuel, Lou Boldt slipped on a pair of gloves and used a police “speed key” to unlock and open the driver’s door. The device, a favorite tool of car thieves, gained him access to the car in a matter of seconds. He left the door open and was careful not to touch anything as he leaned his head inside.
Abrams joined him twenty minutes later and said he had only agreed to dust the car because Lou was a friend and he had heard that Lou had offered Doc Dixon a chance to tape his record collection. Abrams wanted to tape three Charlie Parker albums. A deal was cut, right then and there, and Lou Boldt realized he had opened Pandora’s box. The piranhas were on him now. So as part of the contingency plan he let Abrams know that all taping had to be done on his equipment, under his watchful eye. He didn’t bother to explain that his albums and recording equipment were still with Elizabeth.
It only took Abrams a matter of minutes to determine the car had either been driven by a person wearing cotton gloves, or had been wiped down. The door and the steering wheel were clean, as was the interior rearview mirror. He was dusting the exterior mirror mounted to the driver’s door when he suggested that Boldt might want to check what size person had driven the car last, as they had done with the Norvak minivan. He pointed out that there were cotton fibers on this mirror as well, indicating that it may have been adjusted. As Boldt climbed in and pulled the door shut, Abrams moved on to dust the gas cap and flap door on the side of the car.
Boldt came out of the car with a puzzled look on his face. “I could see in the mirror without any problem,” Boldt confirmed. “Fuller isn’t that tall. I’m a little over six feet.”
“Look here,” Abrams said, pointing to the gas cap, “I’ve got a beauty.” Abrams had dusted the gas cap, yielding a large and perfectly formed print. “By the size of it, that’s a man’s thumbprint. Right thumb. That’s what we’ve been waiting for.”
“May I search the car?”
“Go ahead. And while you’re in there, pop the hood for me.” He saw Boldt’s expression and explained, “If he got gas, chances are he might have checked the oil.”
“It could be nothing more than a gas attendant’s print, Chuck,” Boldt reminded.
“True. My job’s not to find out who the prints belong to, just to find the prints. Pop the hood.”
Boldt climbed back inside the car and popped the hood for Abrams. As the hood came up, the inside of th
e car darkened. Boldt slid open the ashtray. It was littered with butts lying in a bed of dark gray ashes. He used his pen to stir the contents. Some of the ashes lifted out and floated down to the interior carpeting, and a moment later the car smelled more bitter. He tried the glove box next. Her papers were all in order: a current registration listing Fuller’s Los Angeles address and an insurance voucher. Gleaning her home address from a credit card, Boldt had already tried Fuller’s home phone number and had found it disconnected. He assumed the address no longer valid, the apartment or home sublet or rented out again. They had put in a request to the LAPD to check the apartment out for them, but Boldt knew it would take several weeks for the unimportant request to be handled, and it was not worth the taxpayers’ money to fly down and have a look himself, though he was tempted to do so anyway. He opened the front page of the owner’s manual and six parking tickets dropped into his lap—two from Denver, four from SPD’s traffic division. Returning the manual to the glove box, he studied each of the tickets in detail, knowing full well they would tell him where Fuller had been and when she had been there. He ignored the two from Denver. The other four had been issued earlier in the month, within a time span of ten days. From what he could tell, all the addresses were in the general downtown area. He pocketed all four, like a miner pockets a land claim, and dug back into the box with the same enthusiasm a miner might use to force a pick into the hard earth. He pulled out a white envelope, another nugget worth weighing. Inside the envelope were a dozen receipts. He leafed through them briefly—more recent dates than those found in the apartment—aware they would require additional scrutiny back at his office. He would line them up by date and organize them according to category. The parking tickets and receipts both from the car and the apartment offered just the kind of puzzle he lived for. With any luck at all he would soon know exactly where Fuller had been, what she had been buying, and therefore quite possibly what she had been doing in Seattle.
“Nothing worthwhile,” Abrams said, leaning his bald black head into the car. “How about you?”
“Hit a gold mine,” Boldt said, waving the envelope in the air. “Receipts spanning nearly a two-week period, by the look of it. They should help.”
“I’ll take the gas cap back to the office. Need me for anything else?”
“Radio in to have this thing towed, would you please? I’ll hang around until they arrive.”
Abrams said he would, and a minute later, after packing up his gear, was gone.
Boldt began a thorough inspection of the car. He noted the rented roof rack for the windsurfer as well as sandy mud on the fenders that he also found evidence of on the accelerator and the driver’s floor mat. He scraped some of it into the receipt envelope as a sample. Methodically, he searched every square inch of the car’s interior, not knowing what he was looking for. This was nothing new to him. He wondered how many dozens of cars he had searched in this exact way—cars belonging to victims or suspects. A few of the boys from Vice ran a lecture once a year on new-model cars, pointing out easily accessed hiding places. Boldt hadn’t bothered to attend for a few years, and realized now it was one of those things worth the time.
It took him several minutes to search the front-seat area thoroughly. In the process he discovered the radio’s on-off knob had been left on. He used the speed key to engage the car’s battery. Static-cluttered classical music filled the car. Boldt noted the FM station’s call number and then pushed the radio’s first preset button. The reception jumped and he was listening to an AM news station. The next button brought a similar news station, also AM. The third button switched the radio to the FM band—soft rock. The fourth and fifth gave two more rock stations. None of the presets—all tuned for Seattle stations, he noted—had produced classical music. It suggested that someone other than the car’s owner had last used the radio—someone who liked classical music, not rock. It was an inconsistency that intrigued Lou Boldt.
“You gonna go for a ride, or what, buddy?” The man’s face was acne-scarred and he had a devious delight in his eyes, proud of his comment.
Boldt had not heard the tow truck arrive.
39
Daphne Matthews knocked on Boldt’s front door at just after seven that night. He answered it, surprised to see her, and asked her in. She carried a bag of groceries in her arms. She wore a white pleated blouse and black skirt. Jade earrings danced from her lobes. “Relief supplies,” she announced. “I’m counting on the fact you haven’t eaten dinner.”
“Good guess.”
“Show me to the kitchen and then stay out of my way.” She whisked past him, well aware of where the kitchen was. She called out, “I know you’re not a drinker, but I brought some wine along and I’m hoping you’ll help me out. You can begin by opening it so it can breathe.”
He was going to object to the wine, but didn’t. He found himself watching her as she unpacked the groceries. Corkscrew in hand, he liberated the cork and set the bottle aside to breathe. It was a California Cabernet, Robert Mondavi. She kicked him out of the kitchen a minute later and told him she had heard wonderful things about his jazz collection, and how about a sample? He explained he didn’t have his collection here, but turned on the radio in the living room in time to hear that tonight’s Spotlight featured Ornette Coleman. He returned to the kitchen. “I have homesteading rights,” he told her. “You can’t kick me out of my own kitchen.”
“No comment,” she said, going about her work studiously. She brought some water to boil and placed fifteen good-sized shrimp into it, leaving them only a matter of seconds. She then peeled them, deveined them, and placed them to one side. She instructed him to empty the pot, clean it, and bring about a quart of water to boil. He obeyed without comment. She was prepping some onions and green pepper when she said, “You like pasta?”
“Love it.”
“Blackened fish?”
“Never had it.”
“Never had blackened fish? Do you like spicy food—hot, spicy food?”
He worried about his stomach and said anyway, “Sure.”
“Good, because that’s what you’re getting.”
“Why the meal? Why the special treatment?” he asked.
She turned and faced him. She had brought along an apron she was now wearing. It read: Kiss the Cook. She stepped up to him and kissed him on the lips. It was a long gentle kiss. She kept her eyes open and stared right back at him. “That’s why,” she told him nervously. “Because I liked that this morning, and I thought you did too.”
“Guilty,” he said.
“Is that how it feels to you?”
“Kind of.” He thought of Elizabeth. He liked Daphne, appreciated her presence, but she was not Elizabeth.
“It shouldn’t.”
“I know.”
“You’ll get over it.”
“Glad to hear it.”
She heard his cynical tone of voice and asked, “Would you prefer I leave?”
“No.”
“Sure?”
“Sure.”
“Pour me some wine.”
“Yes, dear.”
She produced four metal skewers and went about threading shrimp, onion, cherry tomato, and green pepper onto them. He marveled at how she turned a pile of food into a work of art. He found the color combinations and the shapes extremely attractive and appetizing.
He poured them each a glass of wine. It tasted great to him. “A toast to the chef,” he said.
“No fair,” she protested, “I can’t drink to that.”
“In this house you can.”
“Splendid.” She beamed and sipped the red wine, humming her approval. “I should have brought white—with fish, that is—but white wine and I don’t often agree.”
“I wouldn’t know the difference. I drink wine about twice a year: Christmas and Easter. Not a real connoisseur.”
They remained silent as she melted some unsalted butter and brushed the skewered shrimp. She then sprinkled a red powder fl
ecked with black spices onto the shrimp. The stove was electric. She moved the oven rack close to the top element, produced a small cast-iron skillet, and placed it beneath the broiler element. “This is an attempt to contain the smoke,” she said. “It works at home.” He had gone through his first glass of wine quickly, and he poured himself another, noticing she had barely touched hers. He encouraged her to keep up.
The pasta and the Cajun shrimp-kebob were ready simultaneously. Boldt set the table quickly and suddenly they were both facing each other at the dinner table. She retrieved a candle from her shopping bag, melted it to a saucer, and lit it, turning off the lights.
“Thanks,” he said, preparing to eat.
She topped off their wines and sat down, staring through the flickering candle and returning his fond gaze. She blew lightly on the flame and it bent toward him briefly before standing strongly again. He returned the gesture. The flame pointed toward Daphne.
“We humans bend like that, don’t we,” she mused.
“How’s that?”
“To the whim of the other.”
“Sometimes,” he said, thinking that lately he had been independent, not bending toward anyone; lonely, he thought they called it.
“It has been a strange couple of weeks.”
“Yes, it has.”
“For a while there I wasn’t sure you would be able to handle it. A lot of pressure was heaped on your shoulders, not the least of which was Jergensen. How do you think that leak happened, anyway? I know some of the department blames me, but I swear—”
“I know it wasn’t you, Daffy. Everyone who knows Daphne Matthews, knows it’s not her style. Whoever leaked that information—first that we had apprehended a guy in that neighborhood, and then that he fit the BSU profile—is directly responsible for Jergensen’s murder. He or she should be thrown off the force. I doubt we’ll ever know who did it.”
“That’s the ugly side of being a cop: there are so many unanswered questions, unsolved cases. As a psychologist I understand the need for completion. Too many incompletes in one’s life and the stress and tension become too much to bear.”
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