Ridley Pearson - The Art of Deception

“Would you mind taking an hour of lost time as a favor?” she asked.

“Name it, Lieutenant.”

“Take a ride with me? I could use some backup. A young girl from the Shelter-pregnant out to here-just left me a message that she and the baby are in trouble. She’s shacked up above this pizza joint, and I’m thinking if she’s got a room, then there’s a pimp or a dealer involved-you know what these girls get into.” She added, “Two of us, that’s better odds.” She smiled, trying to win Gaynes over. If this grew into anything more than a quick favor, Lou would turn it into a surveillance ops.

“Give me five minutes. I’ll meet you in the garage.”

Driving south of the Safe a few minutes later, Gaynes asked, “Anything more I should know, Lieutenant?”

Matthews briefly explained her relationship with Margaret.

She said, “I promised Lou I’d stay on the wire, but honestly, I don’t want dispatch monitoring this conversation, because I also made a promise to the girl, weeks ago, that I’d respond as a woman, not as a cop.”

“Those things only throw a signal about a hundred yards, Lieutenant. No way dispatch will monitor.”

“Yes,” Matthews said.

“So, I’ll listen in from the car and provide backup as necessary.”

“Yes, exactly.”

“No problem,” Gaynes said.

Traffic thinned past the two sports stadiums, the neighborhoods slowly deteriorating into a docklands, warehouse district.

As directed, Gaynes parked two blocks away from the pizza joint. She would drop Matthews off here and then move into position, closer to the shop, a minute later.

“So I lie low unless there’s trouble,” Gaynes asked. “If you need me, you want a code word?”

Matthews had considered something like this, but thought better of it. “No. I’ll just scream for help.”

Gaynes grinned. “Got it.”

Her academy training and past experience caused Matthews to take a few extra minutes to scout the immediate area, fully circling the block that included Mario’s Pizza.

On the last leg of this patrol, she spotted the chrome bumper and black trunk of a car parked down a narrow alley, less than a block from Mario’s. She held closely to a wall of an abandoned building, edging near enough to read the black decal numbering on the left of the bumper: KCSO-89.

She gasped aloud, then for the sake of the lavaliere microphone clipped beneath her shirt, she said, “Bobbie, I’ve got Nathan Prair’s patrol car in sight. One block south, on the west side of the street, down an alley. I’m going to take a closer look.

Stand by.”

She crossed the street, able to see through the car’s back windshield as she approached. The car stood empty. Her heart pounding, she slipped into the shadows of the alley alongside the car and peered into both the front and back seats, ready for Prair to jump out and surprise her.

“Officer?” she called out, to no answer.

Had Margaret been involved with Prair all along? Had she notified Prair, asking for help, after failing to reach Matthews?

Had some contact of Prair’s at SPD leaked the teen’s cry for help, inspiring attempted heroics on Prair’s part aimed once again at impressing Matthews? A dozen thoughts circled inside her, and Matthews nearly swooned, briefly off-balance, reaching out to steady herself.

“Bobbie,” she said, again speaking aloud into the cold air, for the sake of the small microphone clipped to her bra, “call KCSO and request … no, you had better make that insist …

that you speak with Prair. When you reach him, find out what the hell his patrol car is doing a block from Mario’s Pizza. Then call me back on the cell. I’ll leave the cell on until I hear from you.”

She crossed the street with a forced, stiff-legged stride, a renewed enthusiasm to get to the bottom of this. She resented the idea of Margaret being used as bait to get to her-if that’s what was going on. Nathan Prair had stepped way out of bounds.

Then again, she didn’t know what was going on-and that confusion made her all the more determined to find out.

LaMoia spotted Janise Meyer from a concrete bench within a few yards of the plaza fountain across from Westlake Center, his heart pounding with the possibility of what she carried. She wore an ankle-length khaki trench coat, the waist belt not fas-tened, but tied like a robe. Brown flats with bare brown ankles.

Hair the color of midnight with matching eyebrows and lashes.

Green eyes that screamed improbably of an Irishman somewhere in her African American heritage. Thick lips that curled into a provocative smile that he’d liked from the first time he’d met her. She adopted that same smirk now as she sat down on the bench next to him, a leather briefcase on her lap.

“So why the cloak and dagger, Cowboy?”

“You’re smuggling out confidential paperwork there, Janise.”

“Printouts of confidential paperwork,” she reminded, passing the half ream of paper to him. “I could have e-mailed them to you, for Christ’s sake. It would have saved me walking the six blocks over here.”

“True story.” LaMoia leafed through them. It had been a while since he’d ridden patrol. It took him a moment to orient himself to the small forms-citations for everything from speeding to parking violations. “Our e-mails are watched, right?” he asked the pro. “Listen, if I get in trouble for this, I wanted it on my head, not yours.”

She accepted the closest coffee, lifting it out of his lap. She sipped through the small hole in the lid, savoring it. He remembered that about her-she treated a cup of coffee like it was an elixir. Treated a lot of things that way, come to think about it.

A pair of teenaged boys raced by on skateboards, testing new moves.

She said, “I don’t know why you want this-him going over to Sheriff’s and all, but that’s what you got.” She informed him, “Metro used to archive the traffic ‘cites’ on microfiche. Now it’s all digitized.”

LaMoia flipped pages while Janise enjoyed the coffee.

She said out of the side of her mouth, “Double-check stub number thirty-five MN seven thirty-two.”

In trying to convert LaMoia to a love of jazz, Boldt had once told him that good music was as much about what was left out-what wasn’t there-as the notes one heard. A true connoisseur of music learned to listen for what was missing. To LaMoia, that advice had been an oxymoron until the moment he turned to the citation Janise had mentioned. Prair’s citation records from two years earlier were missing an entry for 35MN-732.

“You’re shitting me,” he let slip. The copy of 35MN-733, the next in sequence, carried ghostly images familiar to any cop who’d ever used a “carbonless” ticket book-the ballpoint pen impression from the missing carbon of 732 had carried through to 733, the result of forgetting to insert a divider ahead of the next record. The same thing happened to LaMoia with his check-book. It took a moment for his eyes to decipher one entry from the next. The fainter impressions slowly began to stand out in his mind’s eye.

A minute later an excited LaMoia was on his cell phone to the Department of Licensing, reciting a tag number to a bored bureaucrat on the other end. “I need it A-SAP,” he said.

Janise Meyer pulled the coffee away from her lips and said, “Damn, Cowboy, you get any more worked up, you gonna blow a valve or something.”

LaMoia made eyes at her, not wanting to speak with the open line.

She said, “What’s so special about a missing citation, other than it’s against regs to tear one from a book?”

The woman on the phone calmly read the name of the owner of the vehicle back to him. LaMoia thanked her and disconnected the call.