The Art of Deception

by Ridley Pearson

  “So what’s he doing?” Hollie indicated Boldt.

  Distracting you. Worrying you. “The boss is here to make sure I don’t knock you sideways and use you to mop the floor, because I’m known to have a little bit of a temper when it comes to defending my family. The woman you threatened is a police officer I work with—we work with. Highly respected and loved by all. You picked a hell of a target, Hollie.”

  “I did not target her.”

  “She asked you to back off, several times. Her phone was on. I heard it.”

  “Her car was blocking two lanes.”

  “She told you to go away. You chose to ignore her request.”

  “She was being unreasonable.”

  “Whereas banging on a window, wrestling with a door handle, and shouting at a driver is the epitome of reasonable behavior.”

  “The . . . car . . . was . . . blocking . . . the road,” Hollie said, his attention alternating between Boldt and LaMoia. “I was trying to help. The car was stalled in traffic. Would you have just driven by? The headlights were on. It was raining. A woman inside. Alone.”

  “You see? Now we’re getting somewhere,” LaMoia said. “Like, for instance, how did you know there was a woman inside that car? How did you know she was alone?”

  He stammered, looked a little dazed, and then recovered. “Because I went up to the window and looked inside.”

  “You get off on looking in windows, do you?” LaMoia asked, turning to make eye contact with Boldt.

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “Maryland, two years ago. You want to tell us about the trespass charge?”

  Hollie blanched, chewing nervously on his lower lip like something was stuck in his teeth. His fingers drummed rapidly on the edge of the table as a sheen appeared below his eyes and above his thin eyebrows. A criminal record was like a pole marker on a racetrack—no matter how fast you ran, it kept reappearing in front of you.

  “We’re calling Maryland right now,” LaMoia informed him. “You don’t want to work a story on me because I do not like stories. I respect a man who owns up to what he did. The past is the past, eh, Mr. Hollie?”

  “You’re single, or you wouldn’t say that,” Hollie said with authority. “There’s no such thing as the past when you’re divorced. It stays right there with you every day: the alimony, the anger, the memories. You never get past it. Not completely.”

  “So enlighten me about these charges.”

  “My ex got it in her head I was going to steal our son from her. I’m talking kidnap. She made up a bunch of crap about me harassing her—none of it true—and got a restraining order in place. The woman is psycho. And of course they believe the woman, not the guy, right? You show me one time they believe the guy. The restraining order wouldn’t let me within a hundred feet of a house that I was paying the mortgage on. Try that out.”

  “So you ignored the order.” LaMoia realized he sounded less confident, and regretted the letdown.

  “I entered the house—my house, and when no one was home I might add—and got a bunch of my clothes, a couple CDs, and a picture of my son. For that I got arrested, and charged, and convicted.” He huffed and shook his head. “I’ll tell you something: I drew a line on a map as far away from Maryland as I could get—excluding southern California, because that place makes me sick—and I ended up here in Seattle. Away from her and, I might add, away from my son, which is killing me. If you were a father, you’d understand that.” Gesturing to take in Boldt and the room, he said, “But take a look around. I’m still not far enough away from her.”

  Boldt spoke for the first time, asking calmly, “Mr. Hollie, would you have any objection to our lab guys making a quick impression of your shoe soles, maybe looking over your car?”

  “What are you talking about?” Hollie seemed caught between a laugh and a cry.

  “Agreeing to the search will expedite the process,” Boldt advised, “however you’re under no obligation to cooperate, and there are no guarantees of the outcome.”

  Hollie squinted his eyes shut like a man kneeling before the altar asking for forgiveness. “All I wanted to do was help the woman out.”

  “Out of the car, or out of the road?” LaMoia questioned, turning his words.

  “The opportunity still exists to help,” Boldt advised. “By clearing you, our lab guys can move on.” It was a bit of a stretch, but sounded convincing enough.

  LaMoia and Boldt awaited his answer expectantly, a pair of gamblers waiting for the roulette ball to drop.

  “I’ve got to call a lawyer first.”

  LaMoia’s head bounced in defeat. “We brought you in for answers. Now we get lawyers?”

  “If the lawyer says it’s okay, I’ve got no problem with you looking at anything of mine. Shoes, car, what do I care?”

  Hollie made it sound as if he were cooperating, or intended to cooperate, but it was all a ruse: Not even the stupidest PD would advise him to submit to such a search without evidence and charges in place.

  The suspect reminded them, “I’m starting all over out here. Though I’ve got to tell you I’m reconsidering that decision as well.” He met eyes with Boldt, who wore his disappointment openly. “Is there any place left in this world where anyone— and I mean anyone at all—is still sane?”

  Boldt signaled LaMoia. He wanted a chat in the hallway. They had the wrong guy, and both cops knew it.

  24 Of Bridges and Badges

  “Thank you for meeting me.”

  “You didn’t say anything about him being here.” Deputy Sheriff Nathan Prair pointed to LaMoia like a man ready to pick a fight. Prair lived coiled like a snake, ready to strike.

  “I’m the translator,” LaMoia explained. “You feed her the bullshit, and I’ll sort it out later.”

  “Real cute.”

  Prair’s round face and surfer-blond hair normally took ten years off his forty, but on this day fatigue painted his eyes a sickly gray. It wasn’t his workouts holding his shoulders square and high, but a steely determination not to appear intimidated in the company of a police sergeant and lieutenant bent on questioning him. He fought off that fatigue like a driver too long behind the wheel, blinking continually and overexposing his eyes so they looked, at times, wide with fear.

  The three stood outside the Nordstrom’s Rack store on Pine, an unattractive street corner only yards from a bus tunnel station entrance. Matthews had let Prair name the spot, and it intrigued her that he’d chosen this place. He was on duty, but taking a few minutes of lost time to meet with her. A warm wind ripped off Puget Sound and carried a seagull at blazing speeds overhead. LaMoia tracked it like a hunter. His eyes fell onto Prair, and the deputy stiffened.

  Against LaMoia’s wishes, Matthews handed Prair a photocopy of the moving violation that Prair had written up on Mary-Ann Walker. She said, “We could probably give you a dozen false reasons why we’re here, Nathan. But the thing is, we’re all cops. We all know better. We could put you in the Box and talk around the edges of this and see if we couldn’t get something to spill out of you. But you’ve been through enough of that to know better. Don’t you think? I do. So I’m just going to put it to you straight: We’ve got the ticket that you wrote up for Mary-Ann Walker a week prior to her going off that bridge. We’re asking ourselves why in the world you would withhold that information from the investigating officer, seeing as how it could come back to bite you, as now it has.”

  Cars and trucks rumbled by. Some yahoo across the street had a blaster playing rap music at the decibel level of a jet taking off.

  “And here I was thinking you were going to thank me for getting you out of a jam yesterday.”

  “I guess I’m just lucky you showed up,” she said.

  “Life is just chock-full of happy coincidences.”

  “Like you knowing Mary-Ann,” LaMoia said.

  “Just like that,” Prair agreed. He radiated a smile. “What? You two think I actually had any way of knowing, standing up on tha
t bridge, that the woman below was one of probably sixty or more violations I’d written up that week? Are you kidding me?” He addressed LaMoia, “You ever work traffic? You know what I’m talking about.”

  Three kids in clothes too big for them went by on skateboards timed perfectly to catch the pedestrian crossing light.

  “Never had the pleasure,” LaMoia said. “I came up gumming sidewalks.”

  “The night Mary-Ann was killed you took forty minutes of personal time—”

  “Killed? She was a jumper last I heard.”

  “No way,” LaMoia said. “You were on that bridge. You knew we’d found the blood trail, knew what we were thinking. You were there, Prair. We were all there together. Skip the theatrics. You’re ripping yourself a new one.”

  “McD’s,” he said. “I went off the clock—eleven, eleven-thirty—for a quarter-pounder and fries.” Right or wrong, she read his face as truthful.

  Whether Prair knew it or not, he’d just supplied the window of time suggested by the university’s oceanography department. Neal’s claim of seeing 2:22 A.M. on the clock had proved far too late to account for the physical sciences of the ocean. Mary-Ann Walker had gone off that bridge before midnight. Matthews caught LaMoia’s eye and knew he was thinking the same thing.

  LaMoia had his detective’s notebook out and in hand. “Which McDonald’s?”

  Prair buried his face in a large hand. “Shit.” He cleared his expression and supplied LaMoia with the address: Marginal Way at the turn for SEATAC.

  Matthews asked, “Are we going to find you had a history with Mary-Ann Walker beyond this moving violation?”

  “Excuse us a moment, would you?” Prair seized Matthews by the arm and led her out of earshot from LaMoia, who craned toward them as if hoping to hear. Seeing this, Prair moved her a little farther.

  A couple of big, hefty women came out of The Rack carrying too many bulging plastic bags—they looked like elephants with saddlebags. Both talked at once, going on about the deals they’d just made and all the money they’d saved. Matthews thought: You’ve got to spend it to save it, does anyone see the irony?

  He said, “Lieutenant, forgive me for saying so, but whatever was said in sessions with you was privileged and said in confidence, and is supposed to stay that way.”

  “You have fantasies about having sexual relations with the women you pull over, Deputy. On several occasions those fantasies have had a direct influence on your behavior. Was that the case with Mary-Ann Walker?” Is that the case with me?

  “That’s got nothing to do with this.”

  “Prove it.” She was wondering if that was the case with her as well. Had Prair crimped her gas line in order to play the hero and save her? Had he hoped to win a roll in bed as her thank-you?

  “I don’t have to. There’s nothing to prove. You’re coloring your opinion based on privileged information, Lieutenant. Never mind that there’s nothing to it—it wouldn’t hold up if there was.”

  She broke his grip and stepped back. LaMoia moved in, ever the protector.

  She said to Prair, “You should have come forward when the body was identified last week.”

  “Would’a . . . should’a . . . could’a . . . let me ask you this: Would you have come forward if you’d been me? My history?”

  She probably wouldn’t have, but she didn’t say so.

  “That shooting colors every impression there ever is of me, never mind that it was ruled a good shooting. No one remembers that part. If I’d have come forward on Walker I’d have distracted the investigation—exactly what’s happening now—and that helps no one.”

  “Especially you,” LaMoia said.

  Matthews glanced over at the patrol car Prair was driving. Registration plate: KCSO-89. She’d looked down at the rooftop of that same patrol car from the parking garage across from the Shelter. There was no room for coincidence in such matters. She felt the blood drain from her face.

  “You just happened across me, broken down like that yesterday,” she said.

  “What if I did?”

  “I’m asking: Do you make a habit out of following women around in their cars?”

  “It’s not like that.”

  “Then write it up the way it is, the way it was,” LaMoia ordered. “Do it voluntarily, do it by tonight, or we’ll pass an official request through channels that’ll have you hoisted up a flagpole by your short hairs. Every meeting with Mary-Ann— chance encounter or not—every phone call, the four-one-one on your whereabouts every waking second the night she died. If so much as one comma is out of place, this thing is going to rain down on you, Nathan. We’re going to want your time sheets for the past month, we want copies of every moving violation you issued. If there are holes in your time sheet, we’re going to want detailed explanations of every missing minute. Witnesses to your whereabouts, you name it. You carried the gold shield once— you fill in the blanks.”

  Prair’s eyes went icy. Knots formed like hard nuts at his jaw. “That’ll be it for me. You two know that. My record? Time sheets? Ticket carbons? Are you shitting me? That puts me square in the crosshairs.”

  “That’s where you are,” LaMoia informed the man. “Deal with it. Ten tonight, on my desk, or the shit starts raining down on you.”

  With that, the skies opened up, as if on command, and dumped buckets. LaMoia and Matthews ran for the bus tunnel entrance. Prair headed for his patrol car. The seagull reappeared overhead, caught in the rain, barely able to fly. Matthews saw it struggling, and then it was gone, lost in the gray, along with hundreds of pedestrians scurrying for shelter from the storm.

  25 Buried History

  Boldt awoke to the sounds of Liz showering and the fish-eye distortion of his son’s peaceful sleeping face, nose to nose with him. He didn’t remember Miles having snuck into bed with them. For one blissful moment, he lay there staring at the little man, realizing this would likely be the best part of his day— then, like tiny sprouts ripping open the seed husk, thought began to penetrate that peace.

  He had an appointment later in the day that might supply answers about both Chen’s death and possibly—he allowed himself to believe—the disappearance of Susan Hebringer. He had at least two administrative budget meetings on the schedule that he dreaded. Liz’s minivan needed to find its way from the bank’s underground parking to a body shop on Broadway. Sarah had after-school ballet, and if Liz’s car wasn’t out of the shop by then Boldt would need to arrange pickup by five.

  “What’s your day look like?” Liz stood naked in the doorway, toweling off. She’d added back some of the weight the lymphoma had claimed, finally covering her skeleton again in delicious womanly flesh.

  “Not too bad,” he said. “Looking up at the moment.”

  “You want to lock the door a minute?” she asked.

  “Yes, I do.” Along with her weight, some appetites had returned as well. Boldt slipped out of the covers so as not to wake Miles, crossed the room, and pulled the bathroom door shut behind himself. As he brushed his teeth, she undressed him, pulling down his pajama pants and helping his feet out the same way she did with the kids. He considered teasing her about this, but didn’t want to ruin the moment. He left the sink water running to cover their sounds.

  Liz dropped the towel, pulled herself up onto the countertop, and turned to face him. “This okay with you?” she asked.

  He stepped up to her, gently eased her legs apart, and they embraced. “Do you hear me complaining?”

  Responding to his kissing, she eased her head back against the mirror. Drops of water raced down its smooth surface. Her fingers wormed into what remained of Boldt’s hair as he dropped to one knee. “Good morning,” she said in a husky, appreciative voice.

  Starting out that way, Boldt was thinking.

  Dr. Sandra Babcock could have modeled in a blue jean ad, and proved to be much younger than what Boldt had expected of a tenured professor of archaeology. Mid-thirties at best, she had a clear complexion, soft green ey
es, and a slurry, southern way of speaking. She had a playful sparkle to her eyes and the distracting habit of rolling a mechanical pencil between the fingers of her right hand like a majorette with a baton.

  If her office reflected her thought patterns, then they’d get along fine. Neat and tidy, not a paper clip out of place. Two discarded yogurt containers in the trash—nonfat strawberry. He noted that she’d saved the plastic spoon, as it stood out amid a group of pens and pencils in a Weekend Edition coffee mug. But for all the organization, the pretension that accompanied the director of any university department, Dr. Sandra Babcock churned inside, as her fingernails were gnawed to the quick. He appreciated knowing that in advance. Birds of a feather, he thought.

  They killed a few minutes in social discourse. Boldt lectured regularly for the criminology courses at the U and Babcock had done her homework. They got through the do-you-knows and have-you-mets without too many overlaps. After a few tentative silences between them, Boldt saw clear to open up the conversation to the purpose of his visit.

  He said, “Day before last I interviewed a pair of EMTs. Either they lied to me, or there’s an explanation for events that I’m missing. As I explained over the phone, Dr. Babcock, I need the Cliffs Notes on this city’s Underground and, if possible, access—I need to get under that section of Third Avenue, and the city won’t let me down in.”

  “EMTs?”

  “They claimed they had not attempted resuscitation on a man who I believe died later than what they put down in their report. It’s not them I’m after. I just want the right answers.”

  “Where exactly on Third?”

  “Between Cherry and Columbia.”

  She glanced up to a large wall map of downtown Seattle that was nothing like what he’d ever seen—instead of city blocks, a good deal of downtown was represented as excavated walls and floor plans.