Ridley Pearson - The Art of Deception

“Daphne?” His surprise sounded genuine, though hers won the moment. He took her by the shoulders. “I …,” he stuttered, “was just coming to see you … I wanted to apologize for-”

There was no rational thought or logic guiding her at that moment, only a primal instinct to flee. No calculation, no clever excuse for the bathrobe and Wellingtons. What came out of her mouth was half scream, half alarm, like a martial arts grunt while delivering a blow. She shoved Prair, connecting in the center of his chest, and to her great surprise, sent him backward and off-balance.

She crossed the street to the parking lot and stood a fraction of a second too long looking for the Honda that wasn’t there, only to realize it was in the SPD repair shop. Behind her, Prair had regained himself and had turned toward her.

“Daphne! Wait up!”

A moment later she had the departmental pool car unlocked and started.

Prair ran across the street toward her.

Gravel and mud flew as the car skidded out onto pavement in a lazy fishtail that nearly decapitated a row of mailboxes.

She raced past a standing pay phone that she assumed to be number 945, craning her neck to take it in. It stood empty, forcing her to wonder where Walker had gone. To her houseboat?

The Chevy blew through a red light into traffic. Car horns sang protest behind her as she fishtailed yet again, careening into the opposing lane before jerking the wheel to correct and recrossing the double yellow line. The car’s speedometer needle twitched as she rattled over potholes, doubling the speed limit.

In a perfect world she would have had the time and presence of mind to make a call and ask dispatch to electronically clear traffic lights, affording her a straight shot into Public Safety.

She would have, at the very least, announced herself to Traffic Patrol.

The wet roads shone like polished stone. As she took a sharp left, she lost the back half of the Chevy and, like crack the whip on ice skates, found herself floating at unbearable speeds. The Chevy connected solidly with the front grill of a Mazda coupe, the sounds of shattering glass bigger and bolder yet somehow less significant than her shattering wineglass of only minutes earlier.

She realized that Walker had won the game, and the resulting anger caused her to lay on the accelerator and drive the car on a steady course. In her mind there was no stopping for an insurance swap; she was three blocks north of safety. Two more red lights slipped behind her before it registered that she had just hit-and-run a motor vehicle. There would be hell to pay if anyone had caught her plate.

She skidded the tires to a stop in the police garage, threw the shift into PARK, and ran from the car like it was on fire. Two grease monkeys on night duty looked up in unison. The building’s heavy steel door came open awkwardly, Matthews struggling to find the strength that normally required little effort. With her back pressed up against the concrete block wall, she fought to catch her breath, the first sensation of security melting through her. The red glare of the EXIT sign caught her eye, the color suiting her for some reason. This hallway smelled of old tires, gasoline, and human sweat.

From inside the building, a pair of uniformed officers, young kids assigned night duty, approached her while clearly trying not to stare. The woman officer turned and asked, “May I help you?”

“Lieutenant Matthews,” she identified herself.

Fighting off a grin, the young woman asked, “You’re kinda in the wrong place, ma’am. Do you have an appointment?”

“I am Lieutenant Matthews, Officer.” She badged her.

“My mistake, Lieutenant.” The woman officer sobered and straightened, a poster girl for good posture.

“There’s a situation,” Matthews said, attempting to explain the robe and rubber boots that had clearly won their attention.

Saved, as the door to the garage jerked open and one of the grease monkeys, a civilian named Roy who’d worked the garage for years, said, “Hey, listen, Lieutenant-a Chevy or not, this here’s a pool vehicle, and it went outta here looking good, and you brung it back with half the rear quarter panel tore off. We got us some paperwork that’s got to get done.”

“Send the paperwork up to my office, Roy,” Matthews said, striving for dignity. Realizing the futility of that effort, she turned her back on all three and stomped her green rubber boots toward the waiting elevator.

Safety had come at the price of humiliation.

When the phone rang at 10:15 P.M., there was no doubt in the Boldt home who should answer. He received fewer of these calls since the promotion to lieutenant-paper pushers weren’t in demand as much as squad sergeants-but he still kept his finger in the pot. Boldt’s team rarely made major decisions without his input. He’d been hoping for word from Sandra Babcock, hoping to gain access to the Underground given that the city had refused him entrance through the sinkhole due to safety concerns.

He answered the living room phone, listened to LaMoia on the other end, and agreeing with everything his sergeant suggested, grunted out “Yes,” five or six times in a row. As he hung up, it suddenly felt more like 7 A.M. inside his head-wide awake.

By this time Liz had appeared in their bedroom door wearing a sky blue pajama top of a synthetic that had all the qualities of satin, hanging on her like a coat of paint down to mid-thigh. He knew she wore only that top and nothing else, for that particular choice was her signal for what she had in mind, and he felt sorry to disappoint them both. As he cradled the receiver, he also hung his head.

“Too bad,” she said. “You would have liked it.”

“Yes.”

“Me, too, for that matter.”

“Nice to hear.”

“Can you be twenty minutes late?”

“Wish I could.”

“Yes, you do,” she said, offering an understanding face and sympathetic eyes. Being a policeman’s wife couldn’t be easy.

He knew this and tried to cushion the blows whenever possible.

They’d made it through the most dangerous years, the most stressful years, both of them straying from the marriage, but only once as far as he knew, though Liz for a much longer period.

He’d never learned the identity of her lover and wondered if he ever would. As a lieutenant, the demands were on his time, the pressures more political in nature, the internal problems of his people leaving him feeling like a camp counselor. This call proved a little bit of all three. She wouldn’t want to hear about it. They both worked hard to leave their jobs at the office-an unattainable ideal, but one worth striving for.

“How long?” she asked.

“An hour if I’m lucky,” he said. “All night, if I’m really lucky.”

He won a grin from her, a small but important concession.

“Good for you.” Had they not been personally tied to the disappearances, it would have been out of bounds for her to ask if it involved Susan Hebringer, and Boldt might have felt uncomfortable about including her. But the rules had changed since the mother of their daughter’s classmate had gone missing, and Boldt thought maybe it was for the better-Liz deserved to know more about what took him away at 10:15 at night.

He told her that LaMoia had called, that Daphne Matthews had jammed herself up, and that it needed untangling, but that yes, there seemed to be an unexpected connection to Hebringer and Randolf.

“Then go,” she said, knowing this made no difference to his decision, and yet it did. “I’ll stay up and do some prayer work.”

They came at life’s solutions from two different angles, but Boldt had finally settled into feeling right and good about it, believing that maybe one couldn’t exist without the other, that the material and spiritual were far more interconnected and yet entirely separate at the same time. He was still learning about her world; she’d given up on his the day she walked out of medical treatment for the lymphoma. And yet there was a meeting of the minds more often than not. “I could use that,” he said, wanting to support her efforts.