She cast him a disapproving look and continued, saying, "In and out of youth detention facilities, corrections. Six months for this, eighteen for that-minimum or medium facilities, never the big house. Fast forward: He's thirty-three years old, he has two recent felonies on his dismal sheet, one aggravated assault, one grand larceny."
"File that for a moment," she said, motioning for Boldt to set Bryce Abbott aside. "Rewind. David Ansel Flek. Little brother. Same trailer park, same parents, same schools. But no truancy. No arrests until he's seventeen, and that one's for loitering and curfew violation following a winter flood that takes out the family trailer and Mom along with it. It's sketchy at best, but a Denver Post article I pulled from the Net mentions her by name-Adrian Abbott Flek-electrocuted when the flood hit. Got to be the mother. Father blew off the sons and headed to the Alaska fields. David drifts south, although he never leaves Colorado-his brother's influence can hardly be said to be positive. David enlists in the Army, makes it two years, goes AWOL. Is arrested on one of his brother's robberies. Turned back over to the Army. Serves a couple months in the brig, serves out his stint and is dishonorably discharged at twentythree. State tax records show him employed briefly with a computer software firm. Mail room or programmer, we have no idea, but he's basically on the straight-andnarrow. It's during this period that brother Bryce is making his mark with the local blues, one arrest after another, increasingly violent. Make note of this: David's next job is with a discount electronics retailer, a Best Buy type. He moves up to manager in a two-year period-he's twenty-five, twenty-six now. There's a breakin at David's store right after a major delivery-two dozen TVs, VCRs, twice that many computers. David is busted and eventually confesses. His first felony, he goes down for two to seven."
"In Etheredge," Boldt said.
"Correct."
"He's out in two with good behavior," Boldt said.
"Correct. Which means we have all sorts of leverage. If we convince younger brother David that with both the Sanchez and LaMoia assaults, Bryce faces bullets from the first uniform to make him, maybe he gives us a lead. Or maybe we simply hold the threat of an added ten years over him, although that sure didn't work the first time."
"I like playing him for the brother's safety. The only thing is, we don't have either brother for Sanchez-no phone solicitation records, remember? — and we don't have Bryce for LaMoia. He never saw his attacker's face. So we're looking at burglary at best, unless Kawamoto can make him."
"Someone walked away from that blue van and never came back. How difficult is it for a judge or jury to see that?"
"It's circumstantial. When and if we catch up with Bryce, he'll tell us the van was stolen an hour before. We can't disprove that."
"What about the convenience store's security camera? Did it pick up his face?"
"The system's VCR was lifted a month ago and never replaced by management. There is no tape. We can't put Bryce Flek at that gas station."
She said, "What exactly are you saying?"
"David is our way to find Bryce. We find Bryce, maybe we wrap this thing up."
"Maybe," she said. "But Bryce would have to confess to Sanchez to get any decent charges to stick."
Boldt answered, "Maybe not." He hoisted a blackand-white mug shot of Bryce Abbott Flek and turned it to face Daphne. "What if Sanchez can ID him?"
Boldt's private line rang, and he took a call. Hanging up a moment later, a satisfied grin playing across his lips, he informed her, "We found the apartment where Flek has been staying."
CHAPTER 33
Bryce Abbott Flek's photo was recognized by a guitar maker. The rented room, one of five that occupied the two floors above Fletcher Brock's custom instrument shop, consumed three SID field technicians who combed it floor to ceiling. LaMoia's assault could be felt here too-normally Boldt would have been lucky to get even one tech to a potential suspect's abode in under an hour.
"What have we got?" Boldt asked a SID tech from just inside the doorway. He wore latex gloves and a snarl. The place was a pig sty.
"Stroke mags, beer drinker, junk food, dirty laundry. Three cellular phones, all apparently working. Could be a college dorm room, if I didn't know better."
"The phones? Clones?" Boldt said.
"Three of 'em? Probably."
"Weapons?"
"Negative."
"Prints?"
"A lot of lifts-mostly the same guy. Maybe a woman, by the size of the others. Box of Tampax on the floor by the toilet. Blond pubic hairs mixed in with the more abundant darker ones, collected from the sheets, toilet rim, and shower drain-platinum blond."
"Shoes?"
"Pair of high-top sneakers, is all."
"Nike?" Boldt asked, recalling the shoe at his own assault. Had that been brother Flek?
"Converse. We've already bagged and tagged the clothes. We'll go over them for hairs and fibers. If there's anything that links this place to Sanchez or your other sites, you'll hear about it."
"Drugs? Alcohol?"
"Valium and amphetamines in the bath. Street grade. No prescription bottles. The beer. Some Cuervo Gold. That's about it. Purely recreational stuff."
"Not in combination," Daphne said softly into Boldt's left ear. "Two bennies, one Valium, and a shot of Gold. That's a street cocktail they call a glow plug. A couple glow plugs and a guy'll think he's bulletproof."
"As in beating up a cop from behind?" Boldt suggested to her.
"That would certainly fit."
He turned to the tech and asked, "Electronics? Parts? Computers? Anything in that category?"
"Just the three cell phones."
"Any of these?" he said, pulling from his pocket one of the plastic ties he'd recovered from the Kawamoto crime scene.
"Not here, but in the van," the man answered.
"You did the van?"
"The blue van. Colorado plates? All three of us," the tech replied, indicating the woman and man still busy behind him. He stepped forward and picked the white plastic tie from between Boldt's fingers. "Must be a couple hundred of these lying around loose in that van."
Boldt looked over his shoulder at Daphne and said, "That's a start."
Revisiting the hospital wasn't easy for Boldt. This time he was there to see Officer Maria Sanchez.
He perked up the moment he and Daphne entered the room, as the woman lying there was able to somewhat jokingly wave hello to them with her toes. Movement had returned to the digits of both feet, and with a great deal of concentration, her left ankle could be flexed. Though she remained paralyzed from the knees up, the woman's hopefulness and enthusiasm now filled the room like warm sunlight, replacing the fear and terror that had so recently been in evidence.
"We have a suspect," Daphne announced.
The woman looked right, signaling "yes."
"Not yet in custody," Boldt added. "We would like to show you a photo array. You know the drill, Officer."
Another "yes."
Daphne explained, "There are six faces in the array, all numbered. If you recognize one of the individuals as your assailant, we would like you to blink the number to us. Number two-two blinks, et cetera. Is that okay with you?"
"Are you up to this?" Boldt asked.
"Yes," came the indicated reply.
"If you have doubts," Boldt continued, "we'll get to that. For the moment, we simply need to know if any of these faces looks familiar to you."
The woman looked right with her dark eyes. "Yes."
"Good," Daphne said, checking with Boldt who nodded to go ahead. Daphne pulled the array from her shoulder case. Sandwiched layers of heavy stock, the six head shots sat behind equally sized cutout windows, a number below each. Four were black-and-white, two color. She held it an arm's length from Sanchez's pillowed head, and knew within seconds that the victim did not recognize any of the men in the photos. Then she reminded herself that Sanchez was incapable of facial expression, and because of this, she held out hope.
Sanchez closed her eye
s.
Boldt held his breath in anticipation, ready to count the number of blinks. He wanted desperately for the number to be four: Flek's position in the array-though doubted she could identify the man who had done this to her. If she identified Bryce Abbott Flek then they had linkage between all the robberies. Either way, they still needed Flek in custody if Boldt hoped to pry the lid off the I.I. investigation.
When she opened her eyes, Sanchez looked left.
"No?" Boldt questioned.
"You don't recognize any of them?" Daphne clarified.
"No," came the woman's answer.
"You're sure?" Daphne asked.
"She's sure," Boldt answered. An assault at night. Boldt had been through that. He knew. "The victim doesn't recognize any of the faces in our array," Boldt pointed out. "We take it from there."
"We take it where?" Daphne asked, "Without Flek in custody-"
"So we get him in custody," Boldt fired back. "And when we do we'll sit him down, and we'll question him. And then maybe we get some answers." He added in a hoarse whisper, "If we're really lucky, then whoever brings him in has a hard time of it, and makes him pay for what he did to LaMoia." His eyes sparkled. "Which is why I hope I'm the one to bring him in."
CHAPTER 34
Meeting in the fifth-floor conference room with a deputy prosecuting attorney named Lacey Delgato, a woman with whom he'd worked a dozen other cases, some successfully, some not, Boldt struggled to find a way to bring David Ansel Flek to the table as a witness. The Prosecuting Attorney's office was crucial to his effort.
Delgato's unflattering nickname, "The Beak," was a result of her oversized nose. With a low center of gravity, and a voice that could etch glass, Lacey Delgato surprised anyone who made the mistake of judging her by her appearance. To Boldt, she represented the best and the brightest of the up-and-coming trial attorneys in the PA's office. Her loud mouth, and the fact that she wasn't afraid to jump in with locker room vocabulary, turned off some people, but not Boldt; for anyone who worked with LaMoia and Gaynes, all else was tame.
Into their second hour of discussion of the brothers Flek, Delgato and Boldt had yet to solidify a legal strategy that might force the incarcerated David Ansel Flek to open up and provide leads to help police locate his older brother. With this the most obvious and direct way to end the case, Boldt pressed on relentlessly.
"Maybe we should be looking at the girlfriend," Delgato suggested.
"We've got some pubic hairs and a box of Tampax," Boldt reminded. "That's a pretty wide-open field."
"And some lifts," Delgato reminded, indicating SID's record of the fingerprints developed inside Flek's boarding room.
Boldt explained, "Lofgrin ran them through ALPS"- the state's automated latent print system used to analyze and identify latent fingerprints-"and struck out. We've posted them on the Bureau's database."
"And if he brought her from Colorado with him?" Delgato asked.
The missed opportunity stabbed Boldt in the center of his chest. Such a simple idea, and he had overlooked it for the better part of the last eighteen hours. "Damn," he mumbled.
"Just an idea," Delgato said in a doubtful tone of voice that implied he had screwed up.
Boldt placed a call down to the lab. The unidentified fingerprints lifted from Flek's apartment would be posted over the Internet to Colorado's Bureau of Criminal Identification-CBCI-in the next few minutes.
"That's why they pay me the big bucks," Delgato said once Boldt was off the phone.
"You might be the better cop of the two of us," a somewhat defeated Boldt suggested.
"A woman looks at the relationship between the principals. A guy looks at the evidence. That's the only difference. It's what makes you and Matthews such a good team. You're lucky to have her." Boldt didn't touch that. He thought of her too often. That kiss had still not left his lips, and he knew that wasn't right.
Delgato continued, "The whole time we're sitting here, I'm looking over this SID report-the pubic hair the lab ID'd as being bleached blond-and I'm thinking, what kind of babe dyes her privates? You know? And I'm thinking stripper. Sure it could be an older woman who's trying to dye a few years off the truth by taking the gray out of anywhere it shows. But someone hanging with a burglar? More likely young and obedient-black leather pants and a halter top. A real gum chewer. Flek says, 'I want you a blond all over,' and little Miss Junior Mint is off to the pharmacy for some Nice 'n Easy. Which just about describes her perfectly. And if she is who I think she is, then she's not so different from Flek. Some drug charges, some soliciting. Maybe some fraud. Maybe even armed robbery, who knows? Maybe she drives for him. A lookout? Maybe she's giving him a hum job before the hit for good luck. Maybe she knows nothing about his game. But I like her for a juvie sheet. She has that feel about her. She's the kind that smiles for the mug shots. You know the type."
"All that from dyed pubic hair? I'm glad you're on our side," Boldt said. "If you were a PD, I'd retire."
"You'll never retire," she fired back. "And I'll never be a public defender. We both hate the bad guys too much, you know?"
"Yeah, I know," Boldt agreed.
A sharp knock on the door drew their attention. A woman civilian from the secretary pool whom Boldt had only met that same morning. "Lieutenant," she said, "call for you, line one. They said it's urgent, or I wouldn't have-"
Boldt interrupted, thanking her, and scooted his rolling chair over to a phone. "Boldt," he announced, into the receiver. As he listened to the man's voice on the other end of the call, his shoulders slumped, his head fell forward and his right hand clenched so tightly into a fist that his fingers turned white and ghostly. He hung up the phone.
"Lieutenant?" a concerned Delgato asked in her strident voice.
Boldt's voice caught. He cleared his throat and tried again. "We're going to need another game plan," he warned her. "Another angle. Something-" He finally looked up at her, stealing her breath away.
"Lieutenant?" she repeated, a little more desperately.
"Seems the inmates didn't like having the private commerce program shut down. Probably enjoyed the extra income, not to mention the access to information. Can you imagine how many games were being run out of that facility?"
"Lieutenant, what the hell's going on?" she demanded.
"The call was from Jefferson County Corrections. David Flek was found beaten to death in the showers. They would have called us sooner, but it took them a while to identify the body."
Delgato frowned. "Luck of the draw."
"We're screwed," Boldt said.
CHAPTER 35
The woman believed to be connected to Bryce Abbott Flek was identified through her fingerprints by Colorado's BCI as Courtney Samway. The mug shot came back as a cream-skinned sixteen-year-old with a pretty face and a home haircut that made her into a tomboy vixen with a curiously rebellious expression.
Samway's Colorado parole officer had required her to register in Seattle upon her fulfillment of obligations and her departure from the Colorado corrections system. Samway had, in fact, contacted the Washington State Parole Board upon her arrival, as required, meaning that a tiny, insignificant computer file in the vastness of the endless mainframes that constituted law enforcement's efforts to track thousands of offending juvenile felons provided an address of residence for the recently released teen.
"She kicked from Colorado two months ago," Boldt told Bobbie Gaynes, who rode shotgun in Boldt's brandnew Crown Vic. Nearing midnight, the city still teemed with activity. Ten years earlier it would have been dead this late at night. The car replaced his Chevy Cavalier. He'd earned the Crown Vic apparently for his loyalty throughout the Flu. The Chief was handing out perks. Boldt wasn't complaining. The Crown Vic was twice the car and even came with a remote device that locked and unlocked the door or popped the trunk from thirty yards. "Mug shot is two years old."
Gaynes said, "She's a punk slut. You can see it in her eyes. Age doesn't matter."
Boldt said
, "She registered with a parole officer here, claiming the move was to support a job offer."
"She turned eighteen last month," Gaynes said, reading from the woman's jacket-her record having been forwarded by Colorado's BCI. "The alleged job is with a fish processor-probably someone Flek bought off to write her a letter of employment. The address is not the same as the one her P.O. provided. Not that it matters. I'm betting this address is smoke. You want five on that?"
"Have I ever taken one of your bets?" Boldt asked, checking the rearview mirror to ensure that the radio car was following as planned. "The address is good," he guessed. "She registered with the parole board. That tells me she didn't like serving time-she doesn't want to go back there. She played by the rules laid out for her in Colorado. The address will be good. Maybe I should take that five," he contemplated.
"Yeah, right." Gaynes laughed. "The day you take a bet, L.T., I'm having your head examined."
The brick structure had been built fifty years earlier at a time when this south part of the city had prospered from timber and fishing. Time had not been kind to it. The street was paved in wet, matted trash. The carcasses of vehicles resting on rusted rims lay alongside broken glass and spent syringes littering the alleys like discarded cigarette butts. It was not somewhere to take a stroll.
They had waited impatiently to conduct a midnight raid. A daytime operation in this neighborhood was worthless: Rats only returned to the nest at night. Boldt used only secure frequencies-believing Flek might be monitoring the normal channels. If this was in fact Samway's apartment, with Flek's roost already raided, it seemed possible, even likely, he might be inside.
On command, the cruiser behind him turned up the side alley. He would allow his team a minute or two to take positions. According to city fire records for the once commercial building, three possible exits offered egress. At each of the three, a uniform would be waiting for anyone beating a hasty retreat-anyone who managed to get past Boldt and Gaynes. With Gaynes at his side, Boldt knew not many would slip past.
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