Middle Of Nowhere b-7

by Ridley Pearson

  Boldt caught sight of himself in the window's glass, and was troubled by the growing exhaustion that hung beneath his eyes. The extra caseload brought on by the sickout meant fourteen- hour work days. Investigators in any department accepted whatever case was handed them. Vice, narcotics, burglary, it didn't matter.

  He glanced up again. The window, fogged by steam, offered only a blurred image, but he could still see his face. He could still pass for late thirties. Mid-thirties in low light. In truth, forty had come and gone a few years ago.

  These days he was making an effort. No more neckties bearing catsup stains, no more permanent wrinkles in his khakis. A single comment from Liz about how "the run-down-professor look adds ten years" had cleaned up his act. Since then, he'd looked like a new man.

  The burn came out of the bottom of the pan, but his elbow ached.

  "You know I'll be supportive," Liz said, now tossing the wet wash rag into the sink. "But, Lou, please, try to see that it stays outside the family. I'm afraid for you, for us-" She didn't need to complete the sentence. Those threatening phone calls of the past few nights were on both their minds.

  As if on cue, the phone rang. Liz looked over at her husband. They had talked about just letting it ring, to allow the machine to pick up, but Liz instinctively lifted the receiver from its cradle and held it out to him.

  Boldt dried his hands and accepted the phone. Liz pushed through the swinging door and into the family room.

  "Hello?" Boldt said into the phone.

  For a moment he believed whoever had called might have hung up. But life these days just wasn't ever that simple. "Hello?" he repeated.

  He heard music, not a voice. His stomach turned: another threat? Pop music-a woman's plaintive voice. "Hello?" he repeated a third time. At first, he took it as wallpaper-background music-and waited for a voice. But then he listened more clearly. It was Shawn Colvin, a recording artist he admired, whose lyrics now gripped his chest. "Get on out of this house," the anguished voice cried out in song.

  Boldt understood, though too late: it wasn't a threat, but a warning.

  The best explanation for why he ripped the phone from the kitchen wall was that he'd forgotten to let go of the receiver as he ran into the family room to alert Liz, failed to let go until he heard the explosion of breaking glass from the other side of the swinging door. At that instant, both the cop and the husband and the father in him warred over his having locked up his handgun in a closet safe in the bedroom-family policy whenever he crossed the threshold into their home.

  He burst through the swinging door, his wife's screams ringing in his ears. He heard a car racing away at high speed. Liz lay on the floor in a sea of broken glass. She wasn't moving.

  "No!" he hollered, lunging across the room toward his fallen wife. He heard one of the kids wake up crying. Liz had a strange mixture of fear and confusion in her eyes. He would not soon forget that look… it seemed to contain an element of blame.

  He reached out to her and rolled her onto her back. Her forearms bled. Her face was scratched, though not cut badly. She mumbled incoherently at first.

  "Shhh," he whispered back at her.

  "I thought it was a bomb," she mumbled.

  Underneath her lay a brick. It had been painted policeman's blue.

  CHAPTER 4

  " Feeling a touch of the Flu coming on, I hope?" Mac Krishevski asked. Boldt shoved the man back into the living room, kicked the Krishevski front door closed and removed his gun from his own holster, setting the piece down by a bowling trophy alongside a faux-marble lamp made out of formed plastic. The gesture made it clear to Krishevski that no weapons were to be involved. Beyond that, there were no promises made.

  "Lieutenant?" a cocky but concerned Krishevski queried.

  Harold "Mac" Krishevski reminded Boldt more of the man's Irish mother than his Polish father, though he'd never met either. The capillaries in his cheeks had exploded into a frenzied maze of red spider webs. His nose, with its sticky, moonlike surface, fixed to his face like a dried autumnal gourd. His rusty hair, awkwardly combed forward to hide the acreage of baldness, failed miserably in this purpose, so that in strong overhead light, the shadows that were cast down onto his scalp looked like cat scratches. His teeth belonged to a heavy smoker, his plentiful chins to an overeater or beer drinker. A man in his early fifties, he wore his Perma nent Press shirt unbuttoned at the collar, a threadbare undershirt attempting to contain escaping chest hair.

  "You want an appointment," Krishevski suggested, attempting to sound in control but clearly under the effect of Boldt's fixed stare, "you gotta call ahead."

  "My wife dove onto this, thinking it was a bomb." Boldt tossed the blue brick into the center of the room. "She cut her arms on the broken glass. We just got back from having her sewn up."

  Boldt believed that, as president of the Police Officers Guild, Krishevski bore the responsibility not only for the walkout but also for the blue brick.

  "Teenage vandalism," Krishevski said. "It's amazing how the kids go wild when there are fewer officers on the beat."

  Boldt took issue with Krishevski's confident grin and steely-eyed glint. The man looked like a trained watchdog. The room smelled of stale tobacco, garlic, and booze, and the combination turned Boldt's stomach. Krishevski had taken unwarranted pot shots at Boldt and his department's handling of evidence in the runup to guild elections two years earlier, all in a blatant attempt to portray Homicide as an ivory-tower department in need of an overhaul, an attempt to keep Boldt from receiving the lateral transfer back to his old squad. Krishevski's complaints had fallen short of outright accusation, but had crossed acceptable lines. In point of fact, their troubled history went back twenty years, to a time when Boldt had been selected for advancement and Krishevski had not. The sores from those wounds remained. Boldt had little doubt that the blue brick had been ordered by this man, little doubt that his own selection as target had been as much personal vendetta as union strategy.

  The Police Officers Guild had been organized in the late fifties to represent officers in contract negotiation, and to provide legal representation for any officer who required it. The guild represented all personnel below the rank of lieutenant, accounting for the majority of SPD's twelve hundred officers. The administrative ranks of lieutenant, captain, and above- less than one hundred in number-were represented by a separate management team, effectively separating uniforms from the white-collar jobs. Membership in the guild was theoretically voluntary, but nearly every uniformed officer belonged, as well as most of the detectives. Its elected officials came out of its own ranks of active officers.

  As the elected president of the guild, Mac Krishevski, senior sergeant in SPD's Property room, was guild spokesman-its public voice and point man. Boldt, among others, not only blamed Krishevski for allowing, if not encouraging, the first illegal strike in the department's history-despite the man's claims otherwise- but also for permanently tarnishing the badge and the public's view of law enforcement.

  "You being president of the Chapter," Boldt said, "I'm holding you responsible for what happened to my wife tonight."

  "Now wait a second!" Krishevski complained.

  Boldt boiled. "If you don't control your fellow striking officers, if you don't bring those responsible forward for discipline-to set a proper example-then in effect you're condoning what happened tonight. If that's the case, then I'd prepare myself for certain consequences."

  "Are you threatening me, Lieutenant?"

  Boldt calmed outwardly, though internally he continued to churn. He said clinically, "I'm asking for your assistance in querying guild members for any knowledge of my wife's assault. I'm asking you to make this right, no matter what the history between us."

  "I'm not responsible for this… absenteeism, Lieutenant. I'm simply a dog on a runner: back and forth between the blue and the brass."

  "Right," Boldt said sarcastically. He'd heard it all before.

  "The move to restrict overtime and
prohibit off-duty employment opportunities for our officers was viewed by certain individuals within the department as intrusive and destructive and is apparently the driving force behind this current situation."

  "This absenteeism," Boldt said, "that the papers and courts are calling a strike."

  "I'm in constant contact with both the chief's and the mayor's office, as I'm sure you're aware. As Chapter president, I'm forced to put my own personal feelings aside and to represent the majority opinion of my constituency. I do not condone tossing a brick through a window, and I'm sorry for your wife's injuries and any upset this may have caused you and your family. But the brick could just have easily been from an angry neighbor. Am I right? Someone pissed off over the Flu- improperly associating you with the sickout. The public understands so little of our inner workings."

  It was true, though Boldt was loath to admit it. His neighbor's acquisition of an attack dog was proof enough of the public's current perception of safety. "All I'm saying is-if you start a war, you had better be prepared to fight it."

  Krishevski's eyes hardened. "I seriously doubt that the current absenteeism had anything to do with your wife's incident."

  "A blue brick? The reports of slashed tires? Coincidence?" Boldt asked.

  "An angry public," Krishevski repeated.

  Boldt did not appreciate the man's slight grin. "You brought my family into this. For that, you'll be sorry."

  "Another threat!"

  "You know what I think, Krishevski? I think you enjoy all the attention, the cameras, the headlines. Seeing your name in print. But the sad truth is you're misusing the trust of your fellow officers-this entire city-for your own personal gain." Boldt picked up the brick off the carpet and placed it on a small end table. He retrieved his gun and returned it to its holster. "Sticks and stones, Mr. Krishevski." He intentionally left out the man's rank. "Be careful what you ask for."

  Krishevski's tension and anger surfaced in his now menacing voice. "Dangerous ground, Lieutenant."

  "A threat?" Boldt fired back, mimicking the man. "Control the troops, Krishevski. Bring in whoever was responsible. Or you and anyone else connected to this will be facing charges."

  "I'm trembling all over."

  Boldt pulled the front door shut with a bang that carried throughout the peaceful neighborhood. He hurried toward the car, anxious to return home and be with his family. Krishevski was a wild card. Boldt knew there was no telling if the threats would stop with blue bricks.

  CHAPTER 5

  Cathy Kawamoto ignored the deep, low rumble that had become such a commonplace sound, it could be anything from a passing truck to the garage door opening or closing. She wasn't alarmed. Kawamoto's basement home office felt unusually warm, and she was uncomfortable. She'd heard the phone ring just a minute earlier, but as was her habit, she allowed the machine upstairs to pick up rather than interrupt her work. Her thin fingers danced across the computer keyboard, the translation coming effortlessly now. When the screen briefly went dark she saw herself reflected in its "nonreflective" glass: jet black hair, almond eyes with tight folds of skin that instantly labeled her Japanese. Then another page of text appeared and Cathy Kawamoto returned to her work. Sometimes the translations were of textbooks or technical documents, but her favorites were the American and Canadian romance novels that within a few months would populate the Tokyo subways, read intently by commuting women. At times the torrid love stories became so compelling that she found herself carried away.

  The low rumble stopped and then started again. Cathy paused in her work this time. The sound seemed suddenly close. Perhaps it wasn't simply that the basement was warm, perhaps it was nerves. But then again the rental house was always full of strange noises, especially when her sister was home.

  A flight attendant for Alaska Air, Kira came and went at all hours, for days at a time on an unpredictable schedule that Cathy could neither understand nor attempt to track.

  Footsteps overhead…

  At first Cathy simply glanced up toward the floor joists wondering what Kira had forgotten this time-she had left the house only a few minutes earlier, rushing off somewhere, yelling down into the basement that she was borrowing the car if that was all right. She hadn't waited for an answer. Late again.

  Cathy translated another sentence- Her unbridled passion sought escape- before another squeak in the overhead floorboards once again attracted her attention.

  This time it didn't sound like her sister. Her sister didn't move that slowly. Not ever, especially not when she was late, and she was always late.

  A third careful step overheard. A mixture of curiosity and fear unsettled her. The telephone's in-use light indicated the phone was busy. Cathy felt relief wash over her. It was her sister, after all. Clearly, she had returned home to make a phone call. Cathy sat back down at the computer. But she couldn't concentrate. Something just didn't feel right.

  She felt restless with it, a fire smoldering inside her.

  Her fingers hesitated above the keys, her eyes drift ing over to the telephone's in-use light. It continued to flash. When the footsteps started up again, left to right, directly overhead, the pit in her stomach became a stone. The kitchen phone was a wall phone, not a wireless walk-around. How could it be in use at the same time someone was walking around?

  The stairs signaled both the direction of movement and the fact that the person up there was heavier than either she or her sister. They normally didn't make noise.

  She thought about calling out, just shouting, "Who's up there?" but she was afraid of giving herself away, letting the intruder know she was at home. She was now allowing herself to think there could be an intruder. The previous night's late news report began to cloud her thoughts. A policewoman had been attacked in her own home. A policewoman!

  She lifted the phone's receiver to eavesdrop. She heard no one-only the hissing silence of an open line, ominous and frightful. "Hello?" she tested in a whisper. No one answered. Cathy Kawamoto fought back panic. She quietly climbed the basement stairs. She could hear her unannounced visitor ascend the stairs directly overhead. The footfalls were strangely tentative, cautious, and she could only conclude that someone was trying hard not to be heard.

  She climbed and reached the kitchen, first looking to the phone to see if by some chance it was off the hook. It was in place, and her alarm heightened. She could see now that her sister's purse was not hanging by its strap over the ladder-back kitchen chair, in its usual place. Kira was not at home.

  She felt a tightness in her chest. She desperately wanted to announce herself, but this was tempered by her recollection of the policewoman news: She wasn't going to volunteer herself. On the other hand, she had trouble thinking of herself as a victim. Other people ended up on the evening news, not her. Other people's lives went to hell in a handbasket. This couldn't be happening to her.

  "Hello?" she finally called out softly, unable to bear it any longer. "Kira?" With her inquiry, the noises upstairs stopped. Cathy moved involuntarily toward the staircase, a decision she would find so difficult to explain later on.

  She reached the top of the stairs, adrenaline surging through her system. She glanced down the hall. Back down the stairs. She felt cornered and yet exposed. The stairs suddenly seemed so incredibly long.

  No sounds whatsoever. Panic seeped in and took hold. She attempted to run, but instead she froze with fear. The assault on the news had been of a single woman living in a relatively affluent community. What if this was a pattern?

  Her mouth fell open to scream. No sound came out. Her chest now fully paralyzed by fright.

  Where the intruder came from, she wasn't sure. He seemed to materialize in front of her-a blur of dark color and tremendous speed. She felt an aching blow in the center of her chest, right where that knot had been. She flew through the air, limbs flailing, down to the open stairs. Landing on her back, she slid and tumbled head over heels, her skull catching the wooden treads and feeling like someone was clubbing her. P
ain owned her. A thick haze consumed her and drew her down toward unconsciousness. She hit hard on the landing. That same dark shape flew over her. He grazed the wall. Her crotch ran warm with pee.

  The shooting pain would not release her. Her fear was unforgiving. A cold, impenetrable darkness, devoid of light and sound.

  Please, God, no! was Cathy Kawamoto's last conscious thought.

  CHAPTER 6

  " Who's this?" said the sorry-looking, trash-talking white kid with the shaved head and a dragon tattoo under his left ear.

  Boldt wasn't used to anyone else's interrogation rooms. The North Precinct had a brick-and-mortar quality that reminded Boldt of a converted ice house, when in fact it had formerly been an elementary school. Daphne had joined him not only because she was vital to any interrogation, but because some of the answers, if forthcoming, pertained directly to her case: Maria Sanchez.

  Boldt stared at the kid's handcuffs, knowing these were just the first domino in a long chain of lost freedoms. He saw no need to explain himself to the suspect, to dignify the questions of a confessed rapist. But Daphne's assessment was clearly different, for she answered the kid immediately.

  "This is the detective who discovered Leanne Carmichael in the basement where you left her. Alone. Malnourished. A hole cut into the crotch of her pants through which you repeatedly raped her. The man who untied the shoelaces from her wrists and ankles. The man who dealt with the urine and defecation before the ambulance arrived. Who dealt with the frozen-eyed terror of a little girl who went out to pick up the barbecued chicken, and never came home."

  "Ruby slippers went out a long time ago, honey," the kid said, eyes and lips shiny wet. He wore a small silver ring pierced through his left eyebrow. Daphne wondered if Leanne Carmichael might recall that ring.