Boldt - 04 - Beyond Recognition

by Ridley Pearson

  “My parents too,” she lied. “It trashed me at the time. Tough stuff.”

  “My dad was driving pigs, Des Moines to Lincoln. Can you imagine? They say he caught a wheel on the shoulder. The pigs all swung at the same time and carried the trailer over. Trailer took the cab. Rolled down into that middle part. I was fourteen.”

  She nodded sympathetically. She reached up and scratched the back of her neck, giving Boldt the signal.

  The sergeant came charging into the interrogation room, red faced and angry. “It’s my turn,” he announced. “You’re out of here.”

  “No way,” Daphne complained. “He doesn’t want to talk to you.”

  “What the hell do I care what he wants?” Boldt asked. “He killed a woman and left her in a crawl space—”

  Sitting forward, his handcuffs dragging on the table, Hall said, “That’s bullshit.”

  “You’re interrupting me, Sergeant.” She glanced at her watch. “Nick and I aren’t through,” she said, using his abbreviated name. Until that moment she had only called him Nicholas. The idea was for her to develop a rapport and isolate Boldt as far as possible. “You mind if I call you Nick?” she added, checking with the suspect, who looked confused and afraid. To Boldt she said, “If Nick wants to speak with you instead—” She left it hanging there.

  “No!” objected the suspect.

  “There you have it,” she informed Boldt. “You’ll have to wait your turn.”

  “You’re not going to get anything out of him,” Boldt complained. “Let me have him. I sense Nick and I are on the verge of some real progress here.”

  “I don’t think so,” she countered. “The door is that way.” She added, “If your head isn’t too big to fit through it.” She glanced at Hall. The suspect grinned. Just right, she thought. He’s all mine. “Out!” she told Boldt.

  The sergeant glared at them and left the tiny room.

  “These charges are bullshit,” Hall stated. “I didn’t kill no woman.”

  “You know, it’s better if you don’t play dumb,” she informed him. Quietly, she said, “If they think you’re cooperating with me, we can keep you up here. Otherwise it’s down to lockup. And once they arraign you, you can spend weeks there—months in County. The backlog in the courts is awful right now.”

  “I am not playing dumb,” he protested. “I don’t know nothing about no dead woman.”

  “Listen, the thing is, they can place you in the house. What were you doing there, if not trying to cover up your knowing her?”

  “I don’t know her.”

  “Didn’t,” she corrected. “I’m telling you, these guys are not real long on brains.” Raising her voice, she said, “They’re just about as dumb as they look.”

  “Are they watching us?” he asked.

  She nodded.

  “Listening?”

  She nodded again.

  “Can we talk—I mean, just you and me? None of that?”

  “I can check.”

  “Check it out,” he said. “I’ll talk to you, but in private. You know? Off the record.”

  “Right,” she said. None of what was said in that room was ever off the record. It was written down in a notebook, or tape-recorded, or videoed. But the rule of the Box was to please the customer. “Let me check,” she said.

  “I didn’t kill no woman!” he repeated, shouting at her. “Never been in that house before! You gotta believe me.”

  She left the room, immediately greeted in the office area by Boldt and Lieutenant Shoswitz. “You’re a genius,” Boldt said.

  “He’s coming around, I think.”

  “You think? You’ve got him by the stones,” Boldt encouraged.

  “I think he’ll give us that airport meet,” she said, “if we use the homicide charge to deal.”

  “We’re holding Santori on that charge,” Shoswitz reminded her.

  “He doesn’t know that,” Daphne countered, then asked Boldt, “What about the truck, the mobile home?”

  “The lab has been through the truck. The dogs didn’t turn up anything.”

  “Is that possible?”

  “No hydrocarbons,” Boldt answered bluntly. “That’s all they’re trained for. That’s all it means.” Boldt left them a moment and stepped over to his desk, returning with photocopies of several lab reports. He handed them to Daphne and said, “Here’s your ammunition. You can hang him with these.”

  She looked them over, switching back and forth between the top report and the memo, which was indicated to have been written only twenty minutes before. “Are we wrong about this?” she asked Boldt, bewildered.

  “Some answers wouldn’t hurt any.”

  “You mind if I work this?” she asked. “Or do you want it?”

  Shoswitz advised, “Be careful about the way you two do this. We want all the ducks—”

  “In a row. Message received,” she said.

  Boldt told her, “They’re yours if you want them.”

  She beamed. The lieutenant shook his head in disgust and walked away.

  “He’s not thrilled about you having the boy at your place. He’s worried it’ll come back to haunt us.”

  She felt her face heat up. “We’ve sequestered witnesses before. He’s Shoswitz; he worries about everything.” She indicated the interrogation room door. “Okay?”

  Boldt answered encouragingly, “Go get him.”

  “They’ll let us talk,” she told the suspect. The small room was hot and she felt uncomfortable. “They won’t eavesdrop without me knowing about it,” she said. It wasn’t a lie, though she used it to trick him. She did know about it, and they were listening in. Foremost in her mind was that she wanted Ben out of this as soon as possible. That required nothing short of a full signed confession. No matter how she worked and reworked it, she didn’t see that happening. She felt discouraged but not defeated. In the right hands, an interrogation was something fluid and changeable.

  Failure was at the base of most of the personal problems that as a professional she attempted to treat. Failure to beat a legal system that seemed stacked against law enforcement. Failure to take the slime off the street. Failure to make a promotion or convince a superior of the importance of a case. Failure at home: to communicate, in bed, as a parent, as a partner. It worked its decay slowly, at first, and unnoticed. By the time the pain struck it was virtually too late to stop the damage. The only recourse was to attempt to plug the hole, fill the void left behind. It took various forms: tobacco, alcohol, cocaine and amphetamines, sex addiction, physical abuse. Early warning signs were reckless behavior, vehement disagreements over trivial matters, absenteeism.

  Over the years she had come to learn that suspects were no different: plugging the pain with crime. Nor was she any different. The idea of failure hurt.

  “I didn’t kill nobody,” Hall mumbled. “Never. You gotta know that. Believe that. Nobody. Not ever.”

  “The hand,” she said, knowing this was the source of the pain. “Tell me about that hand.”

  “No!”

  “They stare at it, and they look away. They talk about it behind your back. They make you think about it at times when you’d forgotten all about it. But you can’t get away from it. It follows you around, stuck to the end of your arm like another person—someone you don’t understand.”

  “We’re not talking about my hand.”

  “I am.”

  “We’re talking about these murder charges. I ain’t never—”

  “I’m talking about your hand,” she interrupted. “What, you think I’m working against you here? Maybe we find out she was strangled with bare hands. That’s all you need, you know.”

  “Is that true?” he asked.

  “I said maybe. Now tell me about that hand. How long ago?”

  “Three years, seven months,” he answered. His eyes grew glassy and distant.

  “How?”

  “An accident. I was in the service.”

  She replied, “Air For
ce.”

  “Yeah, so what?”

  “How?”

  “An explosive device. Phosphorus. It misfired. Detonator problem. Fired early.”

  She stared at his bad hand a moment, long enough to know that he too was engrossed in it. Then she asked, “Why were you in that house?”

  He looked away.

  “Why not tell me?” she encouraged. “If it had nothing to do with the victim—”

  His nostrils flared and his eyes grew wide. He said softly, “A kid stole some money from me.” Daphne felt ebullient. More, she pushed silently. “I got a tip it was in the house. I swear. You found it on me; that’s my money.”

  She asked, “You know what they found when they found the body—the lab guys? Down in the crawl space, I’m talking about.” She toyed with the papers Boldt had handed her, shifting them around on the table.

  “I’m telling you, I have no idea about no body.”

  She toughened her demeanor and prepared herself for a more military attitude, one that Hall might understand. She took a deep breath of the room’s sour air and said, “Listen, mister, when I ask you a question I expect more than an answer, I expect the truth. If the truth is too much for you, then we have no business here, you and I. Do you hear me, Mr. Hall?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Good. Now I will tell you what they found down in that crawl space other than a pile of bones. And in return for this favor you will tell me the truth—for a change—and maybe, just maybe, I can save your sorry ass from Sergeant Boldt, who would just as soon send you down to lockup and never see you again. You think that Sergeant Boldt cares about your side of the story?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “That’s correct. He does not. His desk is covered in open murder investigations, and as far as he’s concerned this one is cleared. You’re just a number to him. As far as he’s concerned, the next stop for you is a court, a jury, and death row.” She tapped the papers violently, summoning an anger that she expressed as an unrelenting and penetrating stare. “Do we understand each other?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “I’m getting a better feeling about this, Nick. I believe we’re beginning to understand one another. Is that your assessment as well?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Look me in the eye, Nick. That’s better. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “They found your fingerprints in that crawl space, Nick. Where they found the dead woman.”

  He wore a paralyzed expression, part shock, part realization.

  She explained, “There is absolutely no question about this. Do you understand? That is what we call evidence. Proof. The stuff that puts you away for life.” He couldn’t get a word out. She watched as he relived some incident, his eyes suddenly blank.

  He said hurriedly, “No, listen. You don’t understand.”

  She told him, “No, I don’t. But Boldt thinks he does.”

  “You got this wrong.”

  “What I got,” she said, “is you, on tape, telling me that you had never been to that residence prior to tonight. Never been in that house before. You gotta believe me,” she said, reading her interrogation notes. “So I believed you. Now I don’t believe you, and neither does Sergeant Boldt.”

  “No, I had been there.” He attempted to correct himself.

  “I think we’re pretty clear on that, Nick.”

  “Last week,” he said.

  “You’re saying you just happened to be in the crawl space last week? Oh, well,” she said sarcastically, “that explains it! Certainly fills in all the blanks for me.” She straightened her posture and ran her fingers through her hair. She felt bone tired and yet almost high at the same time. This was the stuff she lived for. “There’s no accurate way to date latent fingerprints. Did you know that? Last week, last year…. It’s all the same to the lab guys. All the same to a jury.” She fixed her eyes on to him and said, “Help me here. What the hell were you doing there, Nick? How do we explain this to Boldt? Did you kill that woman?”

  “No, no, no,” the suspect said, shaking his head violently and gently slapping the table with that paw and its ungainly three fingernails.

  “Talk to me.”

  “I was at the airport,” he stated, breaking out of the dark and into the open ground of truth for the first time.

  Confessions came piece by piece, by disassembling the fabricated truth and allowing the real truth to take its place. To her it felt like digging in wet sand as the waves came in—remove the sand, allow the water to fill the hole.

  “You weren’t alone there,” she said.

  He shook his head, the handcuff chains rattling on the tabletop.

  “Help me out here, Nick.”

  She stood, leaned onto her outstretched arms. “A person can’t dance alone. Boldt’s way of doing this?” she asked. “He’ll misplace you for a couple days. Place you ‘accidentally’ in the wrong lockup, in with the guys the screws call the soapies—the soap droppers. For you it’s a few days of sitting on the toilet and screaming, a few months of wondering if you’re carrying the disease or not.

  “Who cares about capital punishment,” she continued, “when there’s the disease? It’s free. No one pushes a button. That’s Boldt’s way for justice,” she lied. “He’s of the old school. He’ll tell you he cares, but he doesn’t. He wants a good, solid clearance rate. That’s how his success is measured. You’re a number to him. They made the arrest, now they want to clear the case. Take a good long look, Nick. This is your life walking out the door.”

  She stood and walked slowly toward the door, each step a lifetime: Dorothy Enwright, Melissa Heifitz, Connie Branslonovich. She reached for the doorknob deliberately, took her time in turning it. Pulled open the door. The air smelled better, felt cooler.

  “It wasn’t drugs,” Hall admitted in a hushed voice.

  Daphne turned, reentered the room, and pulled the door shut behind herself. Suddenly that dreary, claustrophobic room smelled a lot sweeter.

  “I was doing some business, you know? Some punk kid ripped me for five bills. Stupid asshole drops his wallet in my truck. First time I went there, he hid from me in the crawl space.”

  “You roughed up the stepfather.”

  “We tangled. I wanted my fucking money! Second time—tonight—I took the money. And that’s the God’s truth.”

  Daphne’s pulse quickened, she felt warm in the small of her back. She focused on his body language and his facial expressions, searching for the signs. She measured his eye movement, waited for him to begin licking his lips—a dry mouth tipped off lying—watched keenly for how much eye contact he sought—eye avoidance often indicated insincerity.

  After a long silence she asked, “What kind of business?”

  “A phone call now and then. The guy knew more about my base than I did. I swear that’s the truth.” He checked her again. He was made nervous by her silence, which was exactly what she wanted, so she didn’t change a thing. “I never met him.”

  Her skin crawled. A second person. No one would want to hear this, she realized. He looked over at her with the vacant eyes of a man on death row. “I don’t know nothing about him.”

  She caught herself gnawing at the inside of her right cheek. She was full of questions but as yet unwilling to voice them, hoping instead to pressure him with silence, the most effective of all interrogation tools.

  “I don’t know his name,” he declared solemnly. “I don’t know what he looks like.” He squinted and placed his pink paddle onto the table instead of hiding it below the lip as he had been. “A buck twenty a month. That’s the disability pay our fine country sees fit to give me for this: a hundred and twenty a month. And what kind of job am I supposed to get? Tell me that. A typist?” He twisted his wet lips into a grin that caused her to shiver and made him feel dangerous. Was he looking to vent his rage? she wondered. She sat straight up and met his eyes, and silently told him not to try anything with her.

 
“It wasn’t drugs,” he repeated.

  “Something available on the base,” she replied.

  He nodded. His mandible muscle locked up as big and firm as a chestnut. His eyes went wide. He was terrified. Of the military or the man with whom he had dealt? she wondered.

  “What was it you sold, secrets?”

  “Hell, no, I ain’t no traitor!”

  “What then?”

  He answered, “I had access that he didn’t have. Let’s just leave it at that.”

  Her voice rose to a shout. “Leave it? I don’t think so. Have you been listening, Nick? We’re trying to build a credible story here. I don’t know what you were selling, but it’s not going to bring you death row. The murder charge will!”

  His eyes hardened. His mandible muscle knotted again. “I want me a lawyer.”

  “We’ll arrange one, of course, if you insist, but I should warn you that you’ll regret it. You like me,” she said. “We understand each other, you and I. But Boldt and the prosecutor? You think they care?”

  “I’m not answering any more questions.”

  “Then I won’t ask any more questions,” she informed him. “Just tell me what was going on in that parking garage at Sea-Tac. Try the truth, in a way I can believe, and you may walk out that door with the charges dropped.”

  “Bullshit.”

  She stood. “You don’t want the murder charges dropped? What am I doing trying to help you? You think I have time for this?” she complained. “You think I have nothing better to do than sit in this stinky little room listening to you bitch and whine? You want Boldt, you got him. You want the soapies, you got ’em. You want death row, it’s all yours.”

  Her second false exit was less successful. She was mad at herself for trying it too soon. His chains rattled, but he did not speak up. No matter how many times she heard that sound, it gave her chills.

  She could not be seen to give in. The temptation was to turn around and give him another chance, rather than let Boldt have him for a while, but there were no second chances to be given. The finality of his position was all-important. And besides, she thought, it was embarrassing to have the mark settle on a request for an attorney during her turn at bat. Hall had the look of terror. Better to give him a few minutes and let Boldt go at him for a while. But she gave him up reluctantly, like a pitcher coming off the mound in the early innings.