Ridley Pearson - The Art of Deception

“But Hebringer and Randolf?”

“I’m not pretending I have the answers,” she said, unbuttoning her pants and tucking in her shirt, the act itself implying an immodesty that clearly surprised him. “I could be way off base with any of this. My original thinking was that he didn’t know anything more about Hebringer and Randolf than what he’d read in the papers, but that he recognized a way to bait me into meeting him.”

“I’m still camping on that side of the river,” LaMoia said.

“But the way he made this meet-preempting what was to be an attempt on my part to arrange something inside, something contained, something that worked better for us … and the fact that Lou likes Walker being positively IDed for having been in the Underground, and then this guy getting away from Lou and Bobbie down there … and Lou never liking coincidences and suddenly thinking Walker could either have something on Hebringer and Randolf, or might even be a part of it himself …

and here we are.”

“Here we are,” LaMoia echoed.

She felt his objection to her playing this role and appreciated his restraint in not verbalizing it. Doing her damnedest to appear collected and composed, she said calmly, “Listen, John … I think we pushed him over the edge with Neal walking away from the probable cause hearing and with my subsequent attempt to distance myself from him. It was a bad judgment call on my part. If he misses Mary-Ann as much as I think he does, then at some point he will come after me. This level of obsession leads to abduction. It’s my turf. I know what I’m talking about,”

she said, answering his head shaking no. “It could be for something as innocent as a confession-confiding his guilt about knowing more than he’s told us-or something … more serious.

And if he should get me-”

“He will not get you.”

“-you need to think unconventionally, something you’re good at. Neal’s apartment is a possibility. The family home-this place he lost when the business went bad. A trawler is entirely possible.” She met eyes with LaMoia and lowered her voice. “These places hold significance for him. He’ll take me to someplace that holds significance.”

“He will not-”

“If you guys lose me,” she interrupted, “I’d check those places I just mentioned first. The Aurora Bridge after that.”

“Jesus … you’re as sick as he is.”

She continued in her businesslike tone, “If I go missing, John, don’t do it by the book. Promise me that. Time’s the enemy, okay? He’s an organized personality. He knows what he’s doing. He lives to control the situation. When he senses he’s lost control, as he did earlier, he takes action. That alone separates him from what you guys think of as ‘loonies.’ Trust me, if he should get me and then lose control of the situation …” She couldn’t complete that thought, even in her own head. “Just find me, John. And fast. However you have to do it, just find me.”

“Cross my heart,” said the all-time rule breaker.

LaMoia opened his arms, an improbable invitation from a guy like him. She stepped forward cautiously, afraid he might make a joke of it. But he didn’t, and so she held herself close to his chest, the thumping of his heart like timpani. She tried to think of something amusing to say, to cushion the moment for them both, but the feeling of his arms around her, of that absolute sense of safety, lodged a walnut in her throat and she couldn’t get a word out. She squeezed, and he squeezed her back, and for a fleeting moment there was absolute peace in her world.

Driving now past the ALL NUDE storefronts, a wino walking unsteadily behind a grocery cart filled to overflowing, the tourists intermingled with the city’s subculture, neither acknowledging the other, she marveled at the tolerance, at the coexistence of two such diverse cultural strata. She felt herself being injected into this, like a vaccine into tainted blood, down through Pioneer Square where groups clustered around street musicians, where gray-haired hippies sold trinket jewelry from the tops of cardboard boxes and college kids waited in lines outside the music clubs.

“Test, one, two,” she said into the empty car.

Her dash-mounted Motorola squawked and called back, “Copy that, Decoy.”

She hadn’t liked the moniker assigned her for this operation, but it wasn’t her place to comment on it.

A few turns later, she pulled into the church lot marked PRIVATE PARKING STRICTLY ENFORCED-VEHICLES WILL BE TOWED, and slipped the cardboard permit onto her dash before locking up. She wore her hair over her ears in order to cover the tiny ear bud that carried the network of radio traffic surrounding her surveillance. She tested the gear once more as she dumped her keys into her purse. “Okay, boys, I’m all yours.”

“Copy that, Decoy,” the calm voice returned softly in her ear. No jokes from dispatch. No humor. These radio operators were the grumpy librarians of police work.

She reached the overhang and the door in the side of the church that led down to the Shelter at five minutes before ten, five minutes ahead of schedule. The sky opened up with a drizzle that felt like the misters over vegetable stands in supermar-kets. She thought sarcastically how perfect it was to further complicate things with the added hassle of the rain-traffic would slow, long-distance surveillance would be more obscured, and any right-thinking person would seek some kind of shelter from it, making the undercover roles harder to play effectively without standing out.

She listened in her one ear to the radio reports from the observation points outside her houseboat, for Boldt didn’t put it past Walker to use the meet to buy himself a chance to get inside her houseboat, either souvenir-seeking or in order to await her return there. The rain was apparently stronger over Lake Union, and one of those keeping surveillance reported a red-and-black umbrella on the dock, unable to identify the person holding it.

“That’s a neighbor,” Matthews said, barely moving her mouth in case she was being watched by Walker. The red-and-black umbrella belonged to Robert, a man who could have played stunt double to Ernest Hemingway. If they hassled Robert, she’d hear about it for months to come.

Location by location, the four undercover detectives and the leader of the ERT squad reported into dispatch, confirming their positions, reporting sightings considered “possibles” for Walker, filling the radio with activity where no such activity existed in the real world. She knew that LaMoia had parked the Jetta on the second floor of the car park, engine out, and was sitting in the car’s backseat (making it more difficult for others to spot him), keeping an eye on her through the car’s back window. She felt the attention of all those eyes and ears, both onstage and exposed for all to see. If and when her moment came with Walker, it would be recorded, videoed, and analyzed, as would any subsequent interrogation. She felt uncomfortable in the spotlight, even a little sick to her stomach, as it didn’t feel much different to her than walking around her houseboat certain someone was watching.

Someone was watching-many someones-and for a person accustomed to doing the watching, she found the reversal of roles unpleasant, going on vulgar. Walker himself was no doubt watching as well, and she could only hope he couldn’t see or sense the swarm of protection that had been created around her, for she felt certain it would put him off and prevent him from approaching her.

When she needed to speak to dispatch, she would fake a small cough, fist to mouth, and quickly talk. “Nothing so far,”

she reported, immediately identifying it as an amateurish comment, tagging herself a desk jockey for all in the communications truck to laugh at and make fun of her. She felt tempted to just stomp off and forget about this whole thing-let them find some other way to collar Walker. But a bigger part of her wanted this resolved, both for her own sake-to get Walker off her case-and for Boldt’s, because she thought he was putting too much faith in Walker’s connection to Hebringer and Randolf.