Ridley Pearson - Middle Of Nowhere

Daphne stepped closer to Chapman. Boldt admired her technique. "He's Property, Lou. There have to be people who owe him favors." To the subject she said, "Is covering for someone the right way to play this?" "It's not like that!" Chapman shouted. "Now leave!"

Twenty minutes later Boldt pulled the Chevy to a stop at the end of the dock that led to Daphne's Lake Union houseboat. He escorted Daphne to her front door. He wasn't going to add her to the list of assaults.

"So we know Chapman's caught up in something," the psychologist said.

"Yes, we do."

"But not what, nor to what degree."

"No."

"So what's next?"

"I go back to John for an update. You start working the phone tree. We save as many people as we can before the axe falls."

"And if John has something, you'll call?"

"Your line'll be busy," he said, "from all that calling you'll be doing."

"Lou…"

For a moment, the connection between them was everything, and he had to remind himself of Icarus's perilous journey too close to the sun, or that even the most loyal husband remained subject to the laws of gravity. They paused at the front door to her houseboat, and for one awkward moment it felt to him as if they might kiss; then he turned and left.

John LaMoia lived on the third floor of a waterfront loft that thirteen years earlier had been a drug lab in the heart of a gang-controlled neighborhood. The lab had been busted by police, including a wet-behind-theears patrolman who, when the raid was concluded, noted the spectacular view on the other side of the painted-over windows. LaMoia had never forgotten that view, nor the neighborhood, because of the repeated radio calls taking him there: disruptions, street wars, stabbings. He bought low, well ahead of the gentrification that followed, restored the interior, installed security, and scraped the paint off the windows, so that now he commanded views of the waterfront-the piers and tourist restaurants on Alaskan Way-as well as Elliott Bay's sublime gray-green waters and the whitecapped peaks of the Olympics beyond.

It wasn't often that a blue-collar policeman like LaMoia celebrated a capital gains cut, but when Congress voted a lowering of the surcharge to twenty percent, John LaMoia threw a beer bash for fifty of his closest friends-mostly women.

Boldt stepped inside, and LaMoia threw a lock behind him. It clicked into place with authority.

He caught him up on the Chapman visit. "I wanted to go back over what you saw at the bar before you went to bed and lost the immediacy of the moment."

"Worried my memory will slip? That sounds like something Matthews would say," LaMoia countered.

"Does it?" Boldt questioned, distracted-even disturbed-by the comment. "The Flu," Boldt said apologetically, "has thrown us together round the clock. You know how it is."

LaMoia said, "Hey… I was just teasing, Sarge."

"Let's go back over who was there tonight at the Cock and Bull," Boldt said.

"Sarge, it's a pub. Probably a hundred of us in there. All unemployed cops. You expect me to recite the roll call?"

Boldt interrupted. "Anyone from Property at the bar?"

"Property?"

"Chapman clammed up, but he grew all nervous when I pointed out he didn't belong in that pub. Daphne and I are thinking we've got this one wrong. What if Schock and Phillipp were into something Ron Chapman found out about?"

"Something inside Property," LaMoia said, connecting the dots. He nodded, "I suppose it could fall that way, couldn't it? What about Maria and the possible I.I. connection?"

"Tomorrow morning," Boldt said. "Tonight we deal with the assaults while the blood's still fresh."

LaMoia squinted his eyes shut. When Boldt had first started working with him, LaMoia had been a smoothfaced young loudmouth, smart but a little too sure of himself. Now the face showed ten years of rough road, and though the mouth still broadcast his unparalleled self-confidence, the eyes revealed a more practical, sea soned man. "What I remember," he said, squinting ever more tightly, "in terms of Property, is that Pendegrass and some of them guys were whooping it up over the race-a NASCAR qualifying heat-on account I was trying to hear about this unscheduled pit stop, and I couldn't hear nothing because of their racket. And I'm trying to think now, but I gotta put Chapman's arrival right about then. Maybe I looked up and caught sight of him or something, you know? Maybe I had this little brain fart on account Chapman's still active and I'm thinking it was gonna be him getting the shit beat out of him, and how I'm not gonna let something like that happen, and what a pain in the ass it was going to be for all concerned. And then I'm thinking how stupid it is for Chapman to show his face at the Bull. You know? And then I'm wondering if maybe he took a brick the way you did, because there's been more of that, you know, and so maybe he's showing up pissed off and ready to settle the score or something, and that kinda leans me away from wanting to help him out too much. I mean, if a guy is stupid enough to walk into a room like that, maybe it's Darwin's law that he get the living shit beat out of him. But the point is, the pit stop was something to do with communications. Radio problems between the crew and the driver, and they didn't want to get into the final third of the race without communication-"

"John…"

"Which means I heard the explanation, Sarge. Get it? I heard the guy explaining the pit stop. Which means that Chuck Pendegrass and his riot squad had either shut up, cut out, or all gone to take a piss at the same time, which is technically impossible on account the men's room is only one urinal and a crapper, and there must have been three or four of them over there hooting it up." He repeated, "I got a hunch Pendegrass split the minute Chapman walked through that door. And let me just say that he and his buddies did not impress me as being ready to leave a few minutes before that."

"When Chapman arrived, or Schock and Phillipp?" Boldt pressed.

"You got me there. Maybe it was a minute later."

"But Chapman didn't speak to Pendegrass?"

"I can't say one way or another. Maybe Pendegrass shut up when he saw Chapman, same way Chapman caught my eye." He added, "Chapman caught a lot of people by surprise, Sarge."

"So Pendegrass left when?"

"No clue."

"They could have talked," Boldt theorized. "For that matter, they could have simply made eye contact. Some kind of visual."

"We don't even know that Chapman came looking for Pendegrass," LaMoia reminded him.

"No," Boldt agreed. "But we could ask him."

"Yes, we could at that," LaMoia replied, collecting his coat off the back of a chair.

"Doesn't Chuck Pendegrass have a boy about ten?"

"Tanner," LaMoia answered knowingly. "But what's that about?"

"Nothing," Boldt said, but inside he was thinking that ten was a good age for Little League and aluminum baseball bats.

Before LaMoia knocked on the front door of the gray house, he said to Boldt, "I hate this shit. Cop on cop. I don't even want to think it, much less confirm it."

"We don't know that that's what we've got," Boldt said. "Sanchez could have been a burglary gone wrong. She could have nothing to do with Schock and Phillipp. Probably totally unrelated."

"Then what the hell are we doing here, Sarge?"

"I'll tell you what… Boredom does weird things to people."

LaMoia tugged at the sleeve of his deerskin jacket. "This rain's a bitch."

"That's the wrong coat for Seattle. I've been telling you that for a couple years now."

"They make chamois out of deerskin, Sarge. Doesn't hurt the jacket."

"Jacket doesn't stop the rain," Boldt said.

"Can't have everything."

Pendegrass met the front door himself, his face enmeshed in a three-day beard, already in a snarl. His hair was wet, his eyes rheumy. "Don't want any." He stepped back, intending to shut the door on them.