The Art of Deception b-8

by Ridley Pearson

  Matthews dug around in her jeans pocket and came up with the folded memo. Thank God, she thought, glad she’d saved it.

  There wasn’t any address to speak of, only the notation, “above Mario’s.” She pulled out the phone book and started thumbing through the yellow pages. She’d never felt right about Margaret’s mention of a place to stay. A roof overhead was one thing, but the baby needed prenatal care, square meals, doctor visits. A flophouse above a pizza parlor? Was it a crack house, a cum shop, a shooting gallery? She found it finally in the white pages: Mario’s Pizza. Time to move. She felt awful for having been out of touch with the girl, and especially for being unavailable for the past sixty minutes. With these girls, every minute counted. On the street, a life could change in a matter of seconds.

  “Lost time,” she informed the civilian administrative assistant who managed the seventh-floor secretary pool-and whereas the expression meant the time clock stopped for lower-rank personnel, for lieutenants and above it meant their offices would be vacant, their phones picked up by voice mail. The assistant slid a thumb-worn in/out marker on a wall poster that tracked such things, and returned to her typing.

  Matthews’s hand hovered over the phone on this assistant’s desk as she debated calling Boldt, two floors down. The Vanderhorst interrogation had gone well-better than expected-the two of them finding a mutually inclusive rhythm that to Boldt must have felt like a pair of musicians trading riffs. She owed him a report and knew he wouldn’t fancy her ducking out of the house until that homework was turned in. There was a series of psych tests to schedule; outside experts would have to be consulted to either support or challenge her professional evaluation. Each of these efforts required reports be written as well.

  The complications of multijurisdictional warrants caused by a four-state killing spree would consume over half the detectives on CAP, a good deal of SID’s resources, and virtually all of her own time for the next several weeks. One man and his crimes would put a piece of SPD at a virtual standstill.

  She tried LaMoia instead, the phone switching through to voice mail on the first ring, meaning he was either on the line or out of the office. She hadn’t seen him since breakfast-his showing up at the loft with Blue on his heels and a bag of hot sesame bagels under his arm.

  She left him a message that she was running an errand to help Margaret. She left the name of the pizza shop in SoDo.

  Her final attempt on the phone found Bobbie Gaynes at her desk.

  “Would you mind taking an hour of lost time as a favor?” she asked.

  “Name it, Lieutenant.”

  “Take a ride with me? I could use some backup. A young girl from the Shelter-pregnant out to here-just left me a message that she and the baby are in trouble. She’s shacked up above this pizza joint, and I’m thinking if she’s got a room, then there’s a pimp or a dealer involved-you know what these girls get into.” She added, “Two of us, that’s better odds.” She smiled, trying to win Gaynes over. If this grew into anything more than a quick favor, Lou would turn it into a surveillance ops.

  “Give me five minutes. I’ll meet you in the garage.”

  Driving south of the Safe a few minutes later, Gaynes asked, “Anything more I should know, Lieutenant?”

  Matthews briefly explained her relationship with Margaret.

  She said, “I promised Lou I’d stay on the wire, but honestly, I don’t want dispatch monitoring this conversation, because I also made a promise to the girl, weeks ago, that I’d respond as a woman, not as a cop.”

  “Those things only throw a signal about a hundred yards, Lieutenant. No way dispatch will monitor.”

  “Yes,” Matthews said.

  “So, I’ll listen in from the car and provide backup as necessary.”

  “Yes, exactly.”

  “No problem,” Gaynes said.

  Traffic thinned past the two sports stadiums, the neighborhoods slowly deteriorating into a docklands, warehouse district.

  As directed, Gaynes parked two blocks away from the pizza joint. She would drop Matthews off here and then move into position, closer to the shop, a minute later.

  “So I lie low unless there’s trouble,” Gaynes asked. “If you need me, you want a code word?”

  Matthews had considered something like this, but thought better of it. “No. I’ll just scream for help.”

  Gaynes grinned. “Got it.”

  Her academy training and past experience caused Matthews to take a few extra minutes to scout the immediate area, fully circling the block that included Mario’s Pizza.

  On the last leg of this patrol, she spotted the chrome bumper and black trunk of a car parked down a narrow alley, less than a block from Mario’s. She held closely to a wall of an abandoned building, edging near enough to read the black decal numbering on the left of the bumper: KCSO-89.

  She gasped aloud, then for the sake of the lavaliere microphone clipped beneath her shirt, she said, “Bobbie, I’ve got Nathan Prair’s patrol car in sight. One block south, on the west side of the street, down an alley. I’m going to take a closer look.

  Stand by.”

  She crossed the street, able to see through the car’s back windshield as she approached. The car stood empty. Her heart pounding, she slipped into the shadows of the alley alongside the car and peered into both the front and back seats, ready for Prair to jump out and surprise her.

  “Officer?” she called out, to no answer.

  Had Margaret been involved with Prair all along? Had she notified Prair, asking for help, after failing to reach Matthews?

  Had some contact of Prair’s at SPD leaked the teen’s cry for help, inspiring attempted heroics on Prair’s part aimed once again at impressing Matthews? A dozen thoughts circled inside her, and Matthews nearly swooned, briefly off-balance, reaching out to steady herself.

  “Bobbie,” she said, again speaking aloud into the cold air, for the sake of the small microphone clipped to her bra, “call KCSO and request … no, you had better make that insist …

  that you speak with Prair. When you reach him, find out what the hell his patrol car is doing a block from Mario’s Pizza. Then call me back on the cell. I’ll leave the cell on until I hear from you.”

  She crossed the street with a forced, stiff-legged stride, a renewed enthusiasm to get to the bottom of this. She resented the idea of Margaret being used as bait to get to her-if that’s what was going on. Nathan Prair had stepped way out of bounds.

  Then again, she didn’t know what was going on-and that confusion made her all the more determined to find out.

  A Good Shooting

  LaMoia spotted Janise Meyer from a concrete bench within a few yards of the plaza fountain across from Westlake Center, his heart pounding with the possibility of what she carried. She wore an ankle-length khaki trench coat, the waist belt not fas-tened, but tied like a robe. Brown flats with bare brown ankles.

  Hair the color of midnight with matching eyebrows and lashes.

  Green eyes that screamed improbably of an Irishman somewhere in her African American heritage. Thick lips that curled into a provocative smile that he’d liked from the first time he’d met her. She adopted that same smirk now as she sat down on the bench next to him, a leather briefcase on her lap.

  “So why the cloak and dagger, Cowboy?”

  “You’re smuggling out confidential paperwork there, Janise.”

  “Printouts of confidential paperwork,” she reminded, passing the half ream of paper to him. “I could have e-mailed them to you, for Christ’s sake. It would have saved me walking the six blocks over here.”

  “True story.” LaMoia leafed through them. It had been a while since he’d ridden patrol. It took him a moment to orient himself to the small forms-citations for everything from speeding to parking violations. “Our e-mails are watched, right?” he asked the pro. “Listen, if I get in trouble for this, I wanted it on my head, not yours.”

  She accepted the closest coffee, lifting it out of his lap
. She sipped through the small hole in the lid, savoring it. He remembered that about her-she treated a cup of coffee like it was an elixir. Treated a lot of things that way, come to think about it.

  A pair of teenaged boys raced by on skateboards, testing new moves.

  She said, “I don’t know why you want this-him going over to Sheriff’s and all, but that’s what you got.” She informed him, “Metro used to archive the traffic ‘cites’ on microfiche. Now it’s all digitized.”

  LaMoia flipped pages while Janise enjoyed the coffee.

  She said out of the side of her mouth, “Double-check stub number thirty-five MN seven thirty-two.”

  In trying to convert LaMoia to a love of jazz, Boldt had once told him that good music was as much about what was left out-what wasn’t there-as the notes one heard. A true connoisseur of music learned to listen for what was missing. To LaMoia, that advice had been an oxymoron until the moment he turned to the citation Janise had mentioned. Prair’s citation records from two years earlier were missing an entry for 35MN-732.

  “You’re shitting me,” he let slip. The copy of 35MN-733, the next in sequence, carried ghostly images familiar to any cop who’d ever used a “carbonless” ticket book-the ballpoint pen impression from the missing carbon of 732 had carried through to 733, the result of forgetting to insert a divider ahead of the next record. The same thing happened to LaMoia with his check-book. It took a moment for his eyes to decipher one entry from the next. The fainter impressions slowly began to stand out in his mind’s eye.

  A minute later an excited LaMoia was on his cell phone to the Department of Licensing, reciting a tag number to a bored bureaucrat on the other end. “I need it A-SAP,” he said.

  Janise Meyer pulled the coffee away from her lips and said, “Damn, Cowboy, you get any more worked up, you gonna blow a valve or something.”

  LaMoia made eyes at her, not wanting to speak with the open line.

  She said, “What’s so special about a missing citation, other than it’s against regs to tear one from a book?”

  The woman on the phone calmly read the name of the owner of the vehicle back to him. LaMoia thanked her and disconnected the call.

  “Dana Eaton,” he said, his brain locked on the name.

  On hearing the name, Janise spilled the coffee down her front and wiped it away quickly, cursing him. “The Dana Eaton?”

  There wasn’t a cop on SPD that didn’t know that name-a name beaten into the entire population by a media feeding frenzy.

  Janise yanked the pages out of LaMoia’s lap and flipped back and forth, checking the dates of the traffic citations immediately before and after the one that was missing. “Can’t be right,” she said. “This is like two months before the shooting.” It took a moment to sink in. “Are you telling me he knew that woman?”

  LaMoia couldn’t get a word out. He’d sensed it all along; only now could he actually prove it hadn’t been a “good shooting” after all.

  Nathan Prair was going to jail.

  Five Minutesfrom Prosperity

  Mario-if there even was a Mario-had found some cheap real estate that still remained in striking distance for delivery downtown. The building looked older than God. The neighborhood, no stranger to police patrols, was a favorite for gang activity, a warehouse and light industrial region in decay over a decade, since software had overcome hardware in the bid for the local economy. Brick and broken asphalt played host to the rusted carcasses of stripped cars. Five minutes from prosperity.

  Mario’s had a takeout counter, two cooks, four runners, a pair of enormous ovens, and alternative rock playing at dangerous decibels over shredded speakers. The Rastafarian currently engaged with a phone order lifted a finger indicating he’d be right with her. Hanging up, he barked across the small room to a skinny woman in her late teens. The girl wore too many earrings to count. The wanna-be-a-gangsta white boy next to her, his arms covered in the purple lace of spiderwebs and barbed-wire tattoos, his hands in disposable gloves-thank God! — seeded a pie with sliced mushrooms.

  She let her shield wallet fall open, displaying her creds. “Is there a pregnant girl upstairs?”

  “Could be,” the Rastafarian answered. He hadn’t had time to study her shield, so he impressed her when he said, “What’s a lieutenant doing on the street?”

  “You the landlord?”

  “Not hardly. Manager is all. You the Apartment Police?”

  This was a game to him.

  “Margaret.” Matthews said. “Her name is Margaret.”

  “Is that right?”

  “I’m here to give her a leg up.”

  “I just bet you are.”

  “When was the last time City Health stopped by for an inspection?”

  “Room two,” he said. “It’s on the left.”

  “What about the deputy sheriff?”

  “Who?”

  “His car’s around the block.”

  “So he’s getting a hummer from one of the charmers in the hood. What’s new?”

  She studied his face and found herself believing him. In her mind, Prair had to be hooked up with Margaret’s situation-either as a friend or the enemy. She wasn’t eager to run into him. He was good at staying hidden and out of the way, and she kept that in mind as well.

  “Who’s in the other rooms up there?” she asked.

  He eyed her suspiciously.

  She said, “Who am I going to run into in the hall?”

  “There’s no one going to throw shots at you, if that’s what you mean.”

  “That’s what I mean.”

  She produced a twenty from her purse and placed it on the counter. She said, “Hold the anchovies,” and made the guy smile. Lousy teeth. She made it forty, total. “Anyone up there with Margaret?”

  “I don’t even know that she’s up there, lady.”

  “Within the realm of possibility,” she suggested.

  “Listen, they think I don’t know, but there’re three of them sharing what’s barely big enough for one. Young girls.”

  Matthews withdrew her gun from the purse and chambered a round. It all came down to a show of power on the streets.

  You were either a player or not. She understood the psychology, though lacked some of the courage. She said, “I don’t need anyone crashing my party. Should I give you a minute to let anyone know, or what?”

  “People are in and out of there all the time, Lieutenant.” The way he emphasized her rank, she knew he’d made her for the desk jockey she was. He said, “You do what you gotta do.”

  The stairway entrance to the apartments was outside the takeout door and to the left. She glanced across the street to where Gaynes had parked the car. In theory, Gaynes was making every attempt to raise Prair. Matthews bootlegged her weapon on the way up the dingy and dirty stairwell, choking on the smell of urine. In situations like this-tenement busts-it was surprise that cost cops their lives. Reaction time proved longer than the thought process. Twelve-year-olds with water pistols took a bullet.

  The upstairs hallway was empty and dimly lit. Either her man downstairs had cleared the area, or she’d gotten lucky. The gun felt an inappropriate way to greet Margaret, but it wouldn’t feel right in the handbag, either. She let it fall to her side and knocked. “Margaret, it’s me,” she announced. Either that registered or not, she wasn’t calling out any more details.

  She heard footsteps approaching the door and found herself relieved that Margaret could walk, was not prone on the bed delivering the baby prematurely. For this had been her most recent thought: contractions. Margaret about to give birth.

  “Just a minute.” The sound of the girl’s voice filled Matthews with gratitude. She resolved not to abandon her, to stay with her until whatever was the problem was fully resolved.

  She heard a pair of locks come off the door. She felt herself grip the handgun more tightly and braced herself for bloodshot eyes, jaundiced skin, the girl’s water having broken-whatever terror she next confronted. T
he apartment door came open.

  She’d been crying, her face blotchy, her nose running, her cheeks silver with tears. She wore torn leggings, a loose dress from Goodwill. She trembled head to toe with fever, her forehead beaded with perspiration. Or maybe it was toxic shock or a reaction to some drug she’d taken. The girl could not bring herself to look at Matthews, eyes downcast. Embarrassed, Matthews thought.

  A combination of horror, sympathy, and righteous indigna-tion charged her system, and again she promised to see this through. Hebringer and Randolf were dead-they could wait awhile. This girl still had a chance.

  “It’s okay,” Matthews said. The door fell fully open. She peeked through the crack before stepping inside. The room was empty. “You did the right thing in calling me.”

  “I don’t know about that.”

  The sad, cheerless room was barely bigger than a bathroom stall. Soiled sheets covered a thin mattress on a steel-framed bed.

  If three women lived here, they shared that bed, nearly on top of each other. A corner sink housed a faucet that dripped, a teardrop of green patina below. The toilet had to be down the hall. A wooden closet bar sat across the corner diagonally holding a handful of empty wire hangers. The room’s only window looked barely big enough for egress. The room smelled of girls, of mildew, and of sweat, all overpowered by the nauseating aroma of tomato sauce and something burning.

  Margaret sat down, paralyzed on the edge of the bed. She began crying again. “I’m so sorry,” she moaned, repeating it over and over.

  Matthews secured the weapon and stored it in her purse. She eased down alongside of the girl. Matthews said, “Well … it’s good to see you’ve got a roof over your head.”

  Matthews heard footsteps out in the hall draw closer. She experienced a jolt of heat like hormones gone bad. Margaret looked up, struggled to sober up, her eyes clearly fixing onto Matthews as she whispered hoarsely, “He said he’d kill the baby.”