Ridley Pearson - Middle Of Nowhere

"You're unsure. Is that right?"

"Yes." Her efforts were labored.

He scribbled a question mark in his notebook alongside the question.

"You were working a burglary before the assault. Brooks-Gilman over in Queen Anne. It was assigned after the sickout. Do you remember the case?"

"Yes."

"Do you think your assault had anything to do with that burglary investigation?"

"Yes. No." Maybe.

"So let me ask you: Do you think your assault had anything to do with your work?"

She closed her eyes and held them shut.

"Maria?" Boldt's heart beat faster. He repeated her name. He said, "Is it possible that your assault had something-anything-to do with, or was a result of, your police work?"

"Yes." Then, "No." Maybe.

"You're doing well, Maria," Boldt said. "Can we keep going?"

"Yes."

"Okay then." He glanced through the pages of his notebook and moved a question forward onto his list. A part of him didn't want to keep going. A part of him just wanted to leave this poor woman alone, to deal with, what for her, were more urgent problems. Why, he wondered, did he feel so pressed to squeeze something out of her right now?

"Is it safe to say that you believe your assault may have been at the hands of a fellow officer?"

Her eyelids fluttered shut. When they reopened, her eyes were locked onto Boldt's, and he began to feel all watery and weak inside. She wasn't going to commit to that, not yet. She was still as terrified of the idea as he was. Cop on cop. Strike or not, it seemed inconceivable.

She wasn't looking directly at him anymore. Now her eyes were fixed below the horizon of his gaze. Something else. Lower. He looked around the room for what held her attention. Seeing nothing that made sense, he wondered about her stare. Did she just want him to stop? Had he and his questions pushed her further toward frustration? Was he just giving her another problem to handle?

"Listen," he began. "I probably shouldn't be press ing you so hard." He continued to try to figure out what it was-if it was anything-that had caught and held her attention, but he could see that her eyes had become more frantic, jumping to make contact with him and then dropping back down, locked onto whatever it was. She's telling me something, he realized, feeling a tension in the air, still searching. The floor… The wall behind him… His own right hand… His keys…

Liz had pointed out that he had a nervous habit of constantly fiddling with his keys. He barely even realized he was doing it. It was just something to do. Motion. Like a smoker rolling the ash of a burning cigarette.

He drew the keys out of the pocket and Maria's eyelids fluttered shut and opened, eyes-right. "Yes!" those eyes shouted, now focused onto him with a burning intensity.

"What about the keys?" he asked with growing excitement.

She didn't answer, her gaze still fixed on the keys and key chain.

"My keys?" he asked.

"No."

Now her eyes seared him. His own eyes stung.

"Your keys?"

"Yes."

The mechanical efforts of the respirator moved in time with her chest as it rose and fell with ungainly symmetry, its exhale a long, peaceful, artificial sigh.

"What about your keys?" he wondered aloud, trying to make sense of it. He held his up, until they rang like tiny chimes and sparkled in the glare of the tube lights. Again, her eyes lit up with anticipation and even fright. She didn't need to tell him anything more-keys were somehow significant in what she was trying to communicate.

He asked her directly, "Are the keys important?"

"Yes."

"You left your garage. You were headed to the back door, and you had your keys."

She closed her eyes-he thought in frustration- and held them shut. When she reopened them, they bore into him.

"I'm off track," he whispered.

"Yes," she answered, the effort draining her. He sensed her fatigue, which she was fighting desperately. They both knew he was losing her. She closed her eyes to rest, this time for longer.

"Your keys," he repeated, feeling he was working her too hard.

She struggled to open her eyes. "Yes."

"The robberies? The burglar made copies of the keys? Something like that?" And then he thought he knew where she was headed. "Whoever did this was in side your house. He'd gotten your keys somehow-and he was inside waiting for you?"

"No." Her frustration seethed from her eyes.

"I'm sorry," he mumbled. The great detective can't string three useful questions together. He felt impotent. "Damn it all!" he muttered.

Her eyes fluttered, sagged shut, and failed to reopen.

"Maria? Maria?" he gently tested. It took him a moment to realize the interview was over. Maria had fallen asleep.

" I 'm not sure I see the point of this," Daphne said, hurrying down the hallway toward Property. Boldt had rousted her out of her office.

"The point is," Boldt said, pain ringing through him, "her keys are important. How, I'm not sure. You're lead on her case, which means I don't get her keys out of Property without your signature."

She held a door for him. He said, "I'm beginning to believe my assault and hers are linked: that's what led me back to her hospital room. Now this-these keys, I've got to face facts: People don't get mugged in my neighborhood, Daffy."

"I know that. So if they weren't muggers, who were they?"

"Maybe we don't want to find out."

"The cop in me doesn't want to believe any cop would do this to another cop. Not ever."

"You think I like it?" Boldt asked.

"The psychologist-she's a different story," she went on. "There's resentment here. Frustration on the part of the Fluers. Venting those pent-up emotions is a natural progression, a natural expression."

"But the sickout is working."

She agreed. "To us it is, because we're worn out by it. But to those cops now on the outside?" she questioned. "To them-and to the public too-we're wounded, we're down on one knee, but we're not on the mat. We're not raising white flags. That could be the source of a lot of anger."

"Violence?" he asked her.

She shrugged and reluctantly nodded. "I'd rate it as a possibility," she confirmed. "But for the record: I'd put Maria's assault down as a burglary gone bad; your little skirmish, I'm not so sure."

"So we listen to the victim and we chase the evidence," he reminded her. Boldt's law of investigation. In the Sanchez case, chasing the evidence now meant a certain set of keys.

As its senior sergeant, Krishevski ran the evidence storage facility's daily operations, claiming the day shift for himself and his three-man squad. As guild president, Krishevski had caught a bad case of the Blue Flu, as had his squad, leaving what remained of the night duty and graveyard shifts to handle things.

Ron Chapman, a uniformed sergeant with two years less seniority than Krishevski, looked haggard. Barrelchested, potbellied and pale, he looked as much like an Irish potato farmer as a cop in pressed blues. Boldt knew Chapman casually though not socially, having spent years passing the man in the hallways and seeing him working behind the Property room's wire-mesh screens in the process of cataloging case evidence. Any field detective worth his salt knew any and all of the officers who manned Property-the repository of all physical evidence from active and uncleared investigations and arraignments that had yet to reach trial.

As lead on the case, Daphne signed off for the Sanchez evidence at the cage, and Chapman retrieved it for her. A few minutes later, Chapman delivered the items in a sealed cardboard box that in turn contained a large plastic garbage bag kept shut by a wire twist that carried a tag bearing the case particulars. That tag had to be torn in order to open the twist and get to the contents. Daphne did so in front of Chapman, who held a computerized inventory of the bag's contents. She removed the woman's black leather jacket, now stained with chemicals used by the lab in an attempt to develop fingerprints. She held it up for both to see.