No Witnesses lbadm-3

by Ridley Pearson

  Boldt moved slowly now, painfully aware of the easy target he offered by carrying a lit flashlight. Within a few yards his trail ended at the trunk of an extremely climbable tree. The bark was scarred pale where a clambering shoe had scraped it clean. Boldt shined the light up the tightly spaced branches. Considering himself too big and too clumsy for such acrobatics, Boldt nonetheless snapped his weapon in tightly, stuffed the light into his coat pocket so that it aimed up, illuminating his ascent route, and began to climb.

  He did not have to climb far. Fifteen feet up, he got his first look at the house. He could see LaMoia pacing impatiently at the top of the trail steps near the guest house. He climbed up higher and discovered a large, heavy branch that ran nearly level and probably offered a fairly comfortable perch. The flashlight revealed that here the dark tree bark was excessively shredded yellow. Someone had spent some time here. He did not climb up onto the branch, for he wanted to leave it for ID, who were waiting for a call while parked only a few blocks away. But there seemed to him little question as to the quality of the unobstructed view this offered of Adler’s home office.

  He aimed the light back down to the ground, with a little voice calling to him never to look down, and experienced a brief sensation of vertigo. But it was as he was planning his descent through the branches that his eye caught the flash of something bright. Suddenly his planned route meant nothing to him. He descended out of the tree as effortlessly as would a chimpanzee.

  From above they had looked like yellow pine needles, and yet unnatural and misplaced. Boldt counted three of them-not pine needles at all. Each chewed to a pulp on both ends-discarded as the Tin Man had sat patiently up in this tree biding his time, waiting to place his call. Toothpicks. Three of them. Freshly chewed-damp to the touch at one end, dry on the other.

  The radio spit static and the urgent voice of Bobbie Gaynes said, “Sergeant, I need you down here. I’m about thirty yards lower than where we split up. I’m waving my light.”

  Boldt covered his own flashlight and saw the beam from hers reflected in limbs of the trees. “I’ve got you.” He took note of his surroundings so he could find this same spot again. He contacted Bernie Lofgrin’s ID crew and told them to come onto the property and to wait with LaMoia at the top of the trail. LaMoia copied.

  Boldt contacted Daphne and asked her to relay to prosecuting attorney Michael Striker that they needed an immediate access to the calling logs of all the area cellular phone companies. If it had been Caulfield in that tree, and if he had made the phone call from up there, then it had to be from a cellular phone. If Caulfield had a cell phone, then he had an account; if he had an account, he had a mailing address. Striker was to contact Boldt the moment he located a record of any such call.

  The park trail was rough going at a run. Boldt punched through a railroad tie, crashed, and recovered himself, but not without winning some bruises to show for it.

  Gaynes was fifteen yards off the trail into the woods, in an area that seemed to Boldt nearly directly beneath the observation tree. As Boldt approached, she asked, “Did you have dinner?”

  “No.”

  “Well, you’re lucky. I just left mine in a bush over there.”

  Boldt did not think of Gaynes as having a tender stomach. He reached her. He could smell the metallic bite of fresh blood in the air well before he saw the body. She lowered her light onto Mackensie’s corpse. The branch that had been used to cave in his face was lying a few yards from the twisted wreck of a body, and Boldt thought that the man might have survived that blow had his hands not been cleaved from his arms at the wrist with something incredibly sharp. But there they lay-at the ends of his arms looking like a pair of deerskin gloves. Mac Mackensie, knocked unconscious by that branch, had bled to death, his face now the color of a bedsheet.

  A few minutes later when LaMoia arrived, he said to Gaynes, “Come on, help me. I think we should give him a hand.”

  At three in the morning, Boldt drove Daphne down to where she had parked her car in the picnic area.

  “You’re awfully quiet,” he said.

  Daphne nodded.

  “You’re just tired,” he tried. “It’s late.”

  “I’m wide awake,” she answered. She could not think how to explain what she felt to another person; she barely understood it herself. As a psychologist, she wanted to be strong and able to quickly overcome such pain-to adapt. But as a woman, a human being, she ached not for Mac Mackensie, but selfishly, for herself. Then she thought that Lou Boldt, of all people, would understand. “Five minutes either way,” she whispered hoarsely, her voice giving her away.

  Boldt pulled the car next to her Honda and left it running. “And it would have been you,” he said.

  She nodded, and she felt the choking sensation in her throat, she felt the tears, and she hated herself for this reaction. She leaned forward and Boldt put his big hand on her back and rubbed her there, and it comforted her. “That was too damn close for me,” she said, sobbing now. “And it’s me I care about, not Mac Mackensie-can you believe that? And you know how he went out? He went out being a jerk. A real goddamn prick. And that’s the last thing he ever was-a jerk. A real jerk. Listen to me!”

  He continued to rub her back, and when his hand reached her neck, she felt the tension spill out of her and she found her self-control again. “Sorry,” she said.

  “Whenever a cop-someone I know-goes down, my first sensation is gratitude. Glad it wasn’t me. My turn. I always felt guilty about that-until now. I’ve never talked about it with anyone, never shared that part of me. Not even with Liz. My second thought is for the deceased-it’s not that I don’t care; but my first reaction is a huge sense of relief. I dodged another one-something along those lines.”

  “I was there,” she said softly. “I heard someone in the woods. First to my left, then below me, then later to my right. I heard two people, not one. He was there. For all I know he was coming for me when Mackensie caught up to me. For all I know he was right there.” She looked over at him then with surprise in her eyes. “For all I know it’s been him following me all along.”

  “Or Mackensie for that matter,” Boldt suggested.

  “No,” she said, “Mackensie was just doing a job. After he left me, he didn’t make it far.”

  “He probably heard something. Wandered into the woods. Caulfield jumps up and hits a home run into the side of his face. The hands were an afterthought, I think. Maybe Mackensie tried for his piece. Maybe he grabbed for a radio or something. I think Harry used the hands to buy himself time-no time to tie him up, so he cuts them off. Something that simple. The question I have to ask is what the hell kind of knife is he carrying around?”

  “You’re trying to say there was nothing I could have done. You’re trying to make it right.”

  “It wasn’t you who disobeyed the signs.” Boldt pointed through the windshield to where the headlights caught the parks department sign. It read: FOR YOUR OWN SAFETY, PLEASE STAY ON THE TRAIL.

  Daphne parked her car down the street and across from the houseboats in a space for which she paid seventy-five dollars a month. It was a well-lighted lot, which lately made her appreciate it all the more. She turned off the car, locked it, and made the trip to the houseboat at a brisk pace. It was after three-thirty in the morning and all of her neighbors were locked up and dark.

  She reached the door, unlocked and opened it, and headed directly to the home security box that she found flashing its violation, indicating her entry. She rekeyed the device, locked the front door, and turned on more lights than necessary, keeping her purse at her side while she made a full trip around every room, checking coat closets, even under the bed, and confirming to herself that she now qualified fully as a paranoid.

  She convinced herself that at this hour any sane person would head straight to bed, but on this night it was not for her. She considered a bath, but not tonight. Sleep would not come for another hour or so, and to try to force it would only delay it more.r />
  She unbuttoned and unzipped her pants, slipped off her bra without taking off her shirt, washed her hands twice in a row, and poured herself a glass of Pine Ridge.

  She set down the wine, pulled out the stool, climbed up onto it, and let out a long and meaningful sigh. She was in the middle of a second sip when her heart fluttered. She felt her eyes go wide, and acting on instinct, she was suddenly off the stool, pants still unfastened, over to her purse … her shoes … the alarm … out the door … lock it! Feet not fully in the shoes … running … shoes flapping … refusing to look behind her … running … up the gangway … past the mailboxes … down the street toward her car … A dog lunged from a shadow, and Daphne screamed at the top of her lungs and ran faster … faster. Into the parking lot … straight for the car … unlock it! Inside! Relock it! Start the engine … She pulled out of the lot, spinning gravel behind her tires, and fastened her seat belt on the fly. Ran a red light, horn sounding … Ran another …

  She would take a hotel room. Charge it to the department, for that matter. She would not return to her own home until it was light again. She would not tell anyone if she did not find some other piece of evidence. And perhaps-she allowed herself to believe, now that she found herself in the safety of the vehicle-perhaps she remembered wrong.

  But the image in her mind stung her with certainty: She had left the mechanical pencil pointing at a word. What was the word? What was it?

  Intractable-she remembered!

  And now that same pencil was sitting alongside her papers. Pointing nowhere. Which was not how she had left it.

  And that was wrong.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Boldt stood before the bathroom mirror shaving when he heard Liz climb out of bed. Miles was still asleep. As he shaved, she slipped off her nightgown and pressed her warm, sleepy body against him.

  “Honey?” he said cautiously.

  “I have something for you.” She reached around him, grabbed a hair band, and put her hair back. She meant business. Elizabeth did not let her hair down before sex, but put it up instead. Reaching around him, she unfastened his pants.

  “I’m going to cut myself,” he warned.

  “Be careful,” she said, teasing his chest in a way she knew he liked.

  “I have something for you,” she repeated. He dropped the plastic razor into the water and it splashed into the islands of shaving cream. She led him over to the counter, sat up on it, and wrapped her legs around him. “Come and get it,” she said.

  Later, she leaned her head back against the wall, but refused to let him go. She was sweating and her eyes looked dreamy.

  She allowed them to separate then, and her legs sank down, but she did not move until Boldt finished shaving-and then only once she had talked him into running the shower for her.

  Drying her hair in the living room, a white terry-cloth robe cinched tightly around her waist, and watching her son, who was now awake, she said to Boldt, “They had a similar case in London,” which won his attention.

  “Who did?”

  “The London authorities. A kidnapping. Ransom by ATM machine. I told you I had something for you.”

  “I thought you meant-”

  “No,” she corrected. “That was for me.”

  “Liz?”

  “They paid out one hundred and eighty-five thousand pounds over a ten-month period. If your case goes on for ten months, I figured we would end up divorced, so it was in my best interest to get to the bottom of this.” He moved closer to her. She smelled good. “From what I can tell, it was incredibly similar to what you’re facing. The guy moved from one ATM to another, one town to another, making withdrawals, and no matter how fast the police responded, he was always long gone.”

  “That’s us exactly,” Boldt replied, anxiously awaiting whatever else she had to tell him. Elizabeth could not be rushed. She had her own timing-in everything.

  “At one point, if I’m right about this, they had over two thousand police watching ATMs. They still couldn’t catch him. But there was a reason, of course: the average ATM transaction is only a matter of seconds. It’s what makes it such a clever way to collect a ransom demand.”

  “And they found a way around that obstacle,” Boldt speculated, seeing that sparkle in her eye.

  “Yes, they did. A couple of brilliant computer hackers were called in. They devised something they called ‘time traps’-software that slowed down the entire system.”

  “We talked to the switching station here about doing just that, slowing down the network, but starting from scratch they claimed it could take months.”

  “They’re right. It did take months. But it has already been done. All these networks, all these systems speak the same computer language-they have to in order to interface, in order for you to make a withdrawal from an ATM in Paris on your Seattle account. So it seems to me that whatever time-trap software they came up with should be easily adapted for use here. If not, right up in Redmond we have some of the brainiest software wizards in the world; they should be able to port it for you.”

  “Time traps,” Boldt repeated.

  “You slow down the system and buy yourself time to catch this guy. Another thing that occurred to me?” she asked rhetorically. “Are you aware that some ATMs can be instructed to ‘eat’ ATM cards? They use it to pull the counterfeit cards and bad accounts off the market.”

  “We thought about that, too. But we want him to have the card. That card is how we catch him. But these time traps.”

  “Go,” she said, anticipating his apology before he ever spoke it.

  “You sure?”

  “It’s my idea. Go.”

  He grabbed his weapon and his badge wallet and literally ran to the back door. The last thing he heard from her was, “And catch the bastard! We could use a little peace around here.”

  Boldt exchanged a dozen phone calls with his wife, each bringing him more encouragement. At twelve noon Pacific time-evening in London-in an amazing show of technology, the time-trap software was beamed by telephone company satellites via computer modem and downloaded by technicians at Ted Perch’s NetLinQ ATM switching station. The entire transfer took twenty-two minutes.

  With an open phone line to London, NetLinQ technicians worked furiously to install the software, which crashed the first time on-line, freezing twelve hundred cash machines for over fifteen minutes. At 2:18 P.M., July 17, Perch authorized the activation of the software network-wide for a second time. And for seventeen minutes, it held.

  The second crash involved a cluster of 120 First Interstate machines, which was later deemed something of a success. By five o’clock sharp, with 17 percent of NetLinQ’s directly controlled ATMs time-trap operational, the first effort was made to place a six-second drag in the transaction time. These intervals of delay were quickly tagged WOTs-for “window of time.” The six-second WOTs were placed between the customer entry of the PIN number and the appearance of the first transaction menu. Remarkably, the system held. For 279 cash machine customers, a brief but effective test pause had been created in their transaction, virtually unnoticed by any of them, but sending up a cheer at NetLinQ that was heard all the way to London.

  Through a series of conversations, Boldt encouraged Perch to increase the number of machines that were time-trapped, but Perch was reluctant to risk a third crash in a single evening. “I would like to be working here tomorrow,” he teased Boldt. But Boldt hounded him. By 7:22, another commercial bank’s network had been added to the core group, leaving 27 percent of all ATMs in Washington State and western Oregon under the direct control of time-trap software.

  Boldt spent the early evening at NetLinQ monitoring the effectiveness of the new software, and congratulating the crew for their efforts. The ransom account had never been hit before eight o’clock in the evening, leading Boldt and others to suspect Caulfield might be holding down a day job-although Ted Perch pointed out that late evening made sense for such hits. Many banks restocked their cash machines
at the close of business; if an extortionist wished to avoid being seen by bank employees, then at the very least he or she would wait until after the close of business-as late as 6 P.M. at some branches.

  The NetLinQ operations room was an impressive collection of high technology and reminded Boldt of what he had seen of telephone command centers. It was nearly pitch-black, the focus of the room being three enormous flat-screen color monitors that visually mapped all ATM traffic in the NetLinQ region. The floor descended toward these screens in three tiers, each housing rows of computers, some of which were attended. The far right-hand screen showed all those ATM locations under time-trap control. After pestering from Boldt, Perch reluctantly added another six-second WOT, this time between account authorization and delivery of cash.

  NetLinQ’s public information office had earlier distributed a press release, announcing that due to system maintenance some “inconveniences” were to be expected. The eleven o’clock news had promised to run it.

  For the sixth consecutive night, an ATM hit occurred shortly after 8 P.M. “It’s getting like clockwork,” Perch said, pointing out the flashing dot on the overhead screen. Clockwork was what Boldt hoped for-the more predictable and repetitious the withdrawals were, the increased chance of apprehending a suspect.

  Perch announced, “Five seconds and counting.”

  Boldt relayed news of the hit directly to SPD dispatch. “Location is N-sixteen. Repeat: En-one-six.”