Ridley Pearson - The Art of Deception

“You’re saying he wasn’t part of this,” Matthews suggested.

“It’s bullshit,” Vanderhorst said.

“He described them as strung up like fish. He’d been inside that room.”

“He stole the key. My key.”

She wanted so badly to look over at Lou and celebrate their victory with him, but she dared not send such a signal. They needed as much out of him as possible. Boldt said, “That key has been missing how long?”

“A while now. I’m not all that great with time.”

“How’d you get in there after that?”

“I didn’t,” Vanderhorst said and coughed. “Not after I lost that key. Most of the locks down there … any skeleton key will work. But not that room. That’s why I used it.” He answered their puzzled expressions. “Listen, I hid the key so it couldn’t be found on me.”

“Is that right?” Boldt said.

“That was your idea,” Matthews said.

“Hid it on a nail down the hall … this storage room. And then one day it vanishes-and that’s the last I gone down there.”

He said to Boldt, “I’d been planning on leaving way before you ever showed up, believe me.”

“But they owed you money,” he said.

“Nearly six hundred bucks,” Vanderhorst said, as if a king’s ransom, as if it had been worth getting caught with that kind of money on the line. His desperate eyes tracked between his two interrogators. “Why are you both looking at me like that?

What’d I say? Six hundred bucks is six hundred bucks. Who’s going to walk away from six hundred bucks?”

“Makes sense to me,” Boldt said.

Vanderhorst rolled the last photo over for himself. It was an ME’s head shot of Billy Chen. He stared at the photo for a long time in complete silence. “Wrong place, wrong time.”

“Is that right?” Boldt said skeptically.

“Ask him.”

“You had him in that room. We can prove it.”

Vanderhorst looked dazed to hear that. He shrugged his shoulders. “Some guy shows up uninvited, you show him the welcome mat.”

“You knocked him out and then made it look like a drowning.”

“So says you.”

“Convince me I’m wrong.”

Vanderhorst looked up at Boldt with bored, droopy eyes.

A sharp knock on the door caused Matthews to jump. For a moment she’d been in the Underground with Vanderhorst. The knock was followed by a woman in police uniform. “Lieutenant,” she said, addressing Boldt. “They’re here.”

Anthony Shapiro pushed past her, all five foot three of him.

He wore a dark blue silk suit worth a month of Boldt’s salary.

He said to Vanderhorst, “We’re all done here, Mr. Vanderhorst.

Don’t say another word.” He glanced at Boldt with fiery eyes.

“Shame on you, Lieutenant. And on the weekend, no less!” He noticed the tape recorder then, the hubs still moving. He vaguely acknowledged Matthews. Two lieutenants in the same interrogation room-this particular team of Boldt and Matthews-seemed to finally register with him.

“Tell me you kept your mouth shut, sir,” he said to his client.

“Who the hell are you?” Vanderhorst said.

Shapiro hung his head and sighed. “Okay,” he said to Boldt, “tell me how bad it is.”

Boldt smiled his first smile in many long weeks. It was as much as he needed to say.

As Boldt and Matthews had sat down with Vanderhorst, LaMoia hung up the phone, his hand trembling noticeably. A housefly landed on the fabric wall of his office cubicle, and he watched it lovingly clean itself, rubbing its arms together like a card dealer warming his hands before the big game. As a detective he chased facts, one to the next, the cliche?d analogy of following crumbs so appropriate to him at a time like this.

Nathan Prair’s long-awaited written report lay on his desk, a poorly crafted summary of the deputy sheriff having given Mary-Ann Walker a speeding ticket a week prior to her death, as well as his written alibi for the night Mary-Ann Walker had been killed-a night tour during which, by his own admission, he’d taken what cops called “lost time,” a break, during the critical hour of 11 P.M. to 12 A.M.

LaMoia called upstairs to Matthews to share the vital information he’d just gotten from the manager of the airport McDonald’s. Hoping she might either make the interview with him or at least monitor his progress, he felt disappointment when her voice mail picked up. With time of the essence-Prair rotated off-duty soon-LaMoia made his journey without her.

On his way across town, he called Janise Meyer, of SPD’s I.T. unit, and asked the impossible of her. Janise didn’t know the word. He was counting on that.

He had GPS technology to thank for his ability to locate Prair.

The King County Sheriff’s Office tracked every vehicle out on patrol. LaMoia requested the man’s physical location or assignment rather than asking KCSO dispatch to radio the deputy or send a text message over the patrol car’s Mobile Data Terminal. As an SPD officer, LaMoia lacked any authority whatsoever to order Prair in for review, but he saw nothing wrong with paying the deputy a visit with a tape recorder in his pocket. With the blessing of the PA’s office, and the knowledge that car 89 was currently between Madison and Marion, moving south on Broadway-doing bus route duty that was easy to predict-LaMoia parked the Jetta outside a frame shop on Broadway, walked over to the bus stop, and kept watch for the patrol car. He spotted it a few minutes later, started the tape recording, and stepped out into the street, sticking his thumb out like a hitchhiker. He wanted this encounter as casual and light as possible.

Prair pulled the cruiser to the side of the road, unlocked the master lock, and LaMoia climbed in.

“What the fuck?” the deputy said, rolling the car with a green light. LaMoia heard the master lock engage and experienced the first twinges of unease.

“I don’t owe you this,” LaMoia began. “I’m not even sure why I’m bothering with it.”

Prair glanced hotly at his passenger, straightened his head, and said nothing for several more blocks. “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” LaMoia answered.

“So I’ll say it again: What the fuck?”

“The fuck is this: The Mickey D’s you used as your alibi the night Mary-Ann Walker went off the Aurora Bridge had a fire in the deep-fat fryer that night.” He watched the horror register on Prair’s face. “SFD logged the call as nine fifty-four P.M. Had responded by ten-oh-seven P.M. They closed the joint down for the rest of that night and part of the next morning.

Meaning that when you went off the clock, the place wasn’t open.” The whish of wet tires on roadway. Broadway stayed pretty busy at all hours. “Shit, we’ve got to follow up anything like this: an alibi, a witness, whatever-and you know that, Prair-you dumb shit. The least you could have done is check out your own alibi.”

“Fuck off.”

Another five blocks ticked off, slipping by the windows in a blur of wet colors. College kids peopled this section of Broadway. LaMoia was amazed at how much younger they looked each year.

Prair finally said softly, “There was no way I could make this thing right with any of you. And you know why? Because you come to the table prejudiced against me.”

“Oh, give it a rest.”

“If I’d told you the way it was I could have lost my badge.”

“A distinct possibility.”

“You’re making jokes out of this?”

“Me and Popeye: ‘I y’am what I y’am.’ ”

“Fuck you.”

“Why do you think I’m here, Nate? If I wanted to arrest you, I’d have turned it over to II, or the brass, or the PA’s office. Should I be wanting to arrest you for this murder, Nathan? Or should I be hearing your side of this first?” Never mind that he’d already spoken to Hill, that Hill would have already called the prosecuting attorney by now; never mind that if they’d hauled him into the Box, Prair would have invoked his right to a guild attorney and clammed up. LaMoia hoped like hell that by doing this in the comfort and safety of Prair’s patrol car, by offering him a preemptive second chance, the man might overlook the condition of the quicksand where they now treaded.