Ridley Pearson - The Art of Deception

LaMoia left the alley, returning into the street, and carefully searched the block back toward Mario’s Pizza and the tenement that housed it, now off to his left. LaMoia knew Special Ops CO Chatwin to be a Neanderthal incapable of thinking outside the box. Matthews, in all her prescience, had nailed this on the head. Chatwin had his ERT troops and a traffic helicopter searching the surface streets-an urban commando exercise he was both familiar with and comfortable in exercising. LaMoia’s brief plea to designate a unit to search for an access to the Underground had left him snubbed. “What, you think this is fucking Disneyland, Sergeant?”

“The kidnapper has an established history of subterranean access.” LaMoia tried his best to make this sound official. But he couldn’t maintain his composure once Chatwin dismissed the suggestion. LaMoia said, “With all due respect, he’s a fucking troglodyte, sir. We’ve got him directly linked to at least two different areas of the Underground beneath the city.”

“What, the tourist place?” Chatwin asked, and LaMoia realized that any attempt at an explanation was not worth the wind.

“You’re looking in the wrong place,” he tried, one final time.

“Process of elimination, Sergeant. I’ll entertain your suggestion, but we work this my way first.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’m CO,” he reminded, a little miffed by LaMoia’s tone.

“Yes, sir.”

“If you want to be of help, get in your car and log in with dispatch. We could use you.”

“I don’t want to be of help, sir.”

Checking the street carefully now, LaMoia wanted to avoid another encounter with Chatwin at all costs. He held to his own.

Another alley up ahead caught his attention. The ERT guys had rushed through this area like a tornado. They’d been looking for an abductor and hostage. LaMoia was looking for something else entirely: access to an escape route Walker might have used.

Matthews had labeled the man an organized personality, and that was good enough for him. She’d foreseen her own abduction.

Who was he going to trust? He intended to work the scene methodically, as he’d been trained to do by Boldt, one of the best in the business.

He rounded the corner into that next alley, wondering all of a sudden where the hell Boldt was. Matthews as a hostage and the Sarge nowhere to be seen? The guy would have to be either locked up or dead to be kept from this crime scene.

His eyes lighted on that white fabric tab from fifteen yards away, the glare of his penlight illuminating the improbable color in a world of mud brown and ash gray. Perfect, pure, white. It called out as if it had yelled at him. He headed to it like a bloodhound-the thought of which made him wonder if the K-9

unit had been called up. He bent and retrieved it.

Victoria’s Secret, size medium.

There was no sound, no night air, no sirens, no radio squawks, no movement in his universe, only his trembling fingers and that white fabric tag clasped so tightly.

Debating whether or not to call for backup, he looked quickly around for something with which to lift that manhole cover. She had made it plain to him that if she went missing, she trusted him to do what was right. Chatwin seemed certain to bungle this, putting Matthews at risk. Backup could wait until he knew the full situation.

Victoria’s Secret. He would tease her about that when he found her. And he would find her, he told himself. He had to.

It was the only way he knew. John LaMoia always got the girl.

“Where’d all the water go?” Boldt asked Iberson and Babcock.

She wore blue jeans, a brown sweater, and rubber boots. Iberson was dressed for the ball game in tennis shoes, khakis, and a red thin shell that zipped down the front. The two looked back at him blankly. A double dragon swept past them, lifting dust and sand and grit in its wake. The bus tunnel’s oddly sterile mercury vapor lighting turned everyone’s skin a bluish green.

Boldt said, “The water main. All that water … enough to drown a man. So where’d it go? Where’d it end up?” He said to Babcock, “It was damp but not flooded in that lower level.”

Iberson answered, “I told you, it came out our wall vents.”

“Some of it, sure. But all of it?” Boldt asked.

“Enough to shut us down,” Iberson reminded.

Babcock understood him. “What prompted this?” she asked.

He wasn’t interested in such chitchat. “We have an officer wounded. Another’s missing. A girl, a young woman, is in critical condition and probably won’t make it. I’m up against a clock here. The guy I’m after got hold of that key on that lower level. That suggests access that we don’t know about. The water from that broken main, it went somewhere. And not just here, into this tunnel. Most of it had to have gone down to that lower level-that’s just physics. So what happened to it? It should have been a swimming pool down there.”

Babcock lost a shade. She nodded. “You’re right. Of course, you’re right.”

“Is anybody going to fill me in?” an irritated Iberson asked.

Boldt had left Iberson behind, focusing now only on the ac-ademic. “But where? Another level? A sewer system? An aqui-fer?” He had trouble getting the words out, the bubble in his chest from Matthews missing too big to swallow away.

He picked up a flicker in her eyes. “What?” he asked. She shook her head. “Anything,” he stressed. “He’s got our officer underground somewhere. I’d guarantee you that.”

“Rumors is all,” she said, her throat dry, her words raspy.

Boldt nodded furiously. “I’ll take rumors.”

“There are old references to a smugglers’ tunnel. Supposedly, it connected speakeasies and the hotels to the waterfront during Prohibition. Dug by the Chinese. Controlled by the Chinese mafia in those days,” said the historian.

“The International District?” He thought of Mama Lu, the very woman who had set him on this quest in the first place.

Matthews had gone missing within a stone’s throw of the I.D.

“Connecting this place to the I.D.?”

“I’m just saying it’s possible. Not probable. Not even likely.”

Boldt yanked out his cell phone and then shouted at Iberson.

“I’ve got to get topside. I’ve got to make a phone call.”

Iberson flagged down the next bus that approached. Boldt and Babcock hit the surface streets less than two minutes later.

58 The Offering

The low tunnel bent around a turn, a good deal of the wooden posts and beams-old railroad ties in all probability-badly rotted. Matthews struggled to fight off the fear that wanted to own her.

Walker stopped her, instructing her to stand out of his way.

They hadn’t traveled terribly far, the going slow. She watched as his fading flashlight caught the edge of a large hole in the earthen wall. Walker stepped up to it and peered inside, and she came away with the sense that it was familiar to him.

She couldn’t see into that hole, but she prayed silently that he wasn’t going to make her go through it. It looked like one of those places a person never came out of. It failed to give her any sense of hope that it might lead to an escape route.

Walker turned and faced her, shining the light first onto her, then directing it onto himself, enabling her to see him. In a childish tone that sent shivers through her, he said, “It’s important to me you know how much I care.”

“Ferrell-”

He shushed her and said, “To understand the extent to which I’m prepared to go to help you. You found the room. It’s why …” His voice tapered off.

She worried he couldn’t hold a thought, that the synapses might be misfiring in his brain, either as a result of stress or some organic malfunction that she’d failed to identify in the course of her contact with him. That face-to-face contact had, in fact, been precious little. “Why what?” she asked.