Ridley Pearson - The Art of Deception

Her phone’s caller-ID displayed: PAY PHONE #122.

“Hello?” she answered, pressing the phone to her ear.

“I wouldn’t have let anything happen to you. You know that, don’t you?” Her throat constricted. The voice was too breathy to identify. Purposefully difficult to identify, she thought.

She stopped abruptly and Boldt clearly sensed the dread that washed through her.

“P-a-y p-h-o-n-e … WALKER?” she mouthed, looking in all directions at once. She mouthed the word “pay phone” again and held up her fingers: one, two, two.

Boldt grabbed for his own phone, speed-dialed a number, and turned away from Matthews so he wouldn’t be overheard.

“Boldt. I need the location of pay phone one twenty-two, one-two-two. I’ll hold.”

The breathless voice continued in her ear, “Tell your friend they don’t need to worry about you. You’re in good hands.”

“Who is this?” she asked calmly.

“I won’t let anything happen to you.” The phone went dead.

She spotted a pair of pay phones down on Third.

But Boldt pointed in the opposite direction, up to the corner of Fourth Avenue. “There!” he said, still waiting for identification from dispatch.

Matthews followed his outstretched arm to where a man hung up a pay phone receiver and stepped away from the open booth.

“Oh my God,” Boldt gasped, as the man’s face could be seen.

It was Lanny Neal. He turned his back on them and disappeared at a leisurely pace around Fourth Avenue.

Boldt took a step in that direction, but Matthews snagged him by the arm. “What, Lou?”

“It’s Neal!”

She agreed: It had looked like him.

“He had my cell phone number? Do we really think so? Are we sure? Where’s the foul?” she added, slipping into LaMoia’s vernacular. Little pieces of him rubbing off on her-she’d have to watch that.

Boldt broke loose of her grip.

“There’s no crime, Lou! It’s a phone call is all. Besides, that guy-if it was Neal-hung up too late. My guy had already disconnected.”

“We don’t know that,” Boldt argued. He stopped, two paces into the street, his ear pressed to the phone. His head spun around sharply, and she thought he was looking at her, but more likely he was receiving confusing directions. He then turned back and crossed the hill toward that empty pay phone at a near run. “Which corner?” she heard him say into the phone. “Give me the compass point! North … south … what?”

“I think it was Walker,” she said, blurting it out, keeping up as they crossed through traffic. “Psychologically, it fits perfectly for Walker.” Was he even listening to her? she wondered.

He called over his shoulder. “You’re telling me that Neal being at a pay phone is coincidence?” The word, so distasteful to him, barely came off his lips. He kept the phone pressed to his ear.

“It was Walker,” she repeated, this time more convincingly.

“The protective role fits him perfectly. It’s the last logical step, Lou, before-” but she cut herself off, slipped through two parked cars, and joined him on the opposite sidewalk. She didn’t want him hearing what she was thinking.

“Before what?” Boldt climbed the hill, leaning toward the far street corner like Blue straining at his leash.

She didn’t answer. He glared at her.

Traffic noise and a ferry’s horn filled the resulting silence.

“What?” Boldt barked angrily into the phone. He caught Matthews’s attention and shook a pointed finger at the street corner diagonally across from them. Based on the Neal look-alike-or had it been Lanny Neal? she wondered-they’d crossed to the wrong set of phones.

Boldt snagged the com-radio and rattled off the coordinates of the pay phone: “Suspect spotted on southeast corner of Fourth and Columbia! Pursue and detain!” With the streetlight green and the resulting traffic, which included a tall delivery truck, they hadn’t spotted Walker, but that was Boldt, she thought-he trusted the system more than any other cop.

A pair of patrol cars and three plainclothed officers converged on the street corner, seemingly out of thin air. Over the rooftops of vehicles, Ferrell Walker was seen running three steps before throwing his hands over his head and leaning up to the chain-link fence of a construction site. Pedestrians collected like bluebottle flies on a corpse.

“Abduction,” Boldt said, supplying the word Matthews had avoided.

They met eyes. Matthews found it impossible to speak.

“She betrayed me,” Walker said to LaMoia across the interrogation table in the Box.

“Where have you been?” LaMoia asked flippantly. “She’s a woman, Walker. Get used to it.”

The edge of the table carried the regimented brown larvae of cigarette burns despite the NO SMOKING sign on the wall. A cassette machine ran two tapes recording simultaneously. Two yellow pads. Two pencils.

Dressed in an orange county jail jumpsuit, Walker looked older and in a bad way. She and Boldt observed this initial exchange from the other side of the one-way glass in the narrow, dark closet that served as the observation booth. Boldt explained apologetically how he had to take the meeting with Lofgrin.

“That skeleton key came back clean,” he told her, “but he’s got the prelim on the Underground for me-I was due down there a half hour ago-and he’s got this set of high-level meetings later on that he can’t beg out of.”

“John can handle it, Lou. He’s one of the best. We’re fine.”

She didn’t take her eyes off Walker.

“We’re the best-you and I,” he said. But it sounded to her more like he was testing her, even fishing for a compliment.

“Interrogations, I’m talking about.”

She knew perfectly well what he was talking about. Jealousy belied his intentions. She broke her attention off the Box for the first time, met eyes with Boldt, and said again, “We’re fine here.”

Boldt nodded, though in such a reserved fashion he might as well have shook his head no instead.

“We’re running both audio and video, Lou. You won’t miss a thing.” He would miss it, of course, but she couldn’t bring herself to care.

“We’re holding him overnight,” Boldt said.

“I think it could be a mistake,” she said.

“He threatened you.”

“Yes, but listen, a teakettle is one kind of threat, Lou. All that boiling water inside … but you spill it out, and that’s a different kind of hot. We tip this guy over … we don’t know what’s going to happen.” Again, she wondered who was doing the talking. Her eyes left Walker and settled on the other guy across from him. It was time she took a hotel room. She felt discouraged, even sad. Walker consumed by grief, Boldt by jealousy, she with her fear-and LaMoia with his resolute calm.

She envied him that, and hoped her face didn’t reveal her thoughts.

“It’s harassment. We can make that stick for twenty-four hours, which gives us time to pursue a court order to get his clothes down to SID.”

“You don’t really think he’s the one living in the lair, do you? You honestly think the hairs and fibers on his clothes are going to come back for that? For Chen?”

They entered into a staring contest, neither about to back down.

She said softly, “I know you think you’re helping, Lou, and I love you for it. But not this guy. Not this way.”

He never broke the eye contact. “Well,” he said hesitantly, “I guess I’m out of here, then.”

“Bye,” she said, lifting her hand in a half wave, her full attention back on that room. She heard him leave and felt relief and wondered what was going on between them. Was she using him, thriving on his confusion over her and LaMoia? If so, to what end?