Ridley Pearson - Middle Of Nowhere

"Our pay phones here are owned and operated by an Etheredge subsidiary," he began.

"Never leave a dime unturned," Daphne said.

"The home office is still working with the database of calls placed from those pay phones. The attorneys will eventually have to sort out the first amendment issues. Many, if not most, of the calls made from our pay phones are placed using calling cards owned by relatives or friends on the outside. We can get these numbers from the various carriers, I'm told, but it will take some time. In the meantime, I have this." He handed Boldt a stack of twenty faxed sheets. "They are not sorted by area code," he apologized.

"We'll live," Boldt said.

"But I did have my secretary highlight any directdial calls made to the two-oh-six area code." He added somewhat proudly, "And she put a check by four of the calls that could have been made by inmate number forty-two."

"Determined how?" Daphne inquired, pulling her chair next to Boldt's and looking over his shoulder.

Boldt pointed to the top sheet. "By time."

"Schedule," the warden said. "It's not open access. Pay telephone time is closely controlled."

Boldt said, "So how many others had access to the phones at the same time Flek did?"

"There are five pay phones," the warden explained. "We give each inmate fifteen minutes a day."

"So four other guys," Boldt suggested. It was a nice, narrow field, something he could work with. He recognized the prefix of the highlighted 206 number as a cellular prefix. He would call LaMoia and have the owner of the cell phone identified. He would make sure David Flek made no more calls. If they got lucky, they'd have their burglar. He wasn't holding his breath; it was rarely that easy.

Daphne tested him. "So our chances are one out of five that Flek called Seattle and passed along the names and addresses of possible burglary targets?"

"He doesn't know that," Boldt answered. To the warden he said, "I think it's time we meet Mr. Flek."

"We can arrange that. But first, you mind explaining how all this works? My people are going to ask me, and I'm going to look a hell of a lot smarter if I know what I'm talking about."

Boldt thought it sounded fair enough. "Flek is supplying names to someone on the outside. Through the phone solicitation, this survey conducted by Consolidated through Newmann, he identifies homes that have a couple computers, a high-end stereo or a couple TVs. A nice bottom line."

Daphne had returned her attention to the original fax of phone numbers called by the phone solicitation team.

Boldt continued, "He calls out on the pay phones- probably to this cell phone number-and supplies the names and addresses of potential high-end targets. At that point it's in our part of the world. We get a burglary call."

Daphne, her nose still in the fax, said, "Lou! Granted, three of the burglary victims are not anywhere on this list from last night. Maybe they were placed a week earlier than the records we've been provided. Maria's not on the list either."

In his excitement over the connection to inmate 42, Boldt had neglected to search out Sanchez's number in the database. It was such a simple oversight, but suddenly the absence of her number from the phone solicitation's master call sheet loomed largely over their efforts.

"She could have been called earlier as well," he suggested.

The closer they came to the interrogation of a possible suspect-even an accessory to the fact like David Ansel Flek-the more Boldt dreaded the possibility of discovering that Maria Sanchez had never been one of the burglary targets. The implication would then be that Maria's assault had been cop on cop, the same way he feared his own assault had been. Now that he approached whatever truth existed, he did so cautiously, well aware that on rare occasions, some truths were better left undisturbed.

"No," she said, shaking her head. "In every case the burglaries come within ten days of the initial phone solicitation. That being the case, she'd be on here."

"Erased?" Boldt inquired of a confused warden. He and Daphne exchanged glances, and he could see her concern as well.

"To my knowledge," the man said, "the system does not allow it. You can't erase any information from the private commerce database. That's one of the stipulations. Just in case something like this ever happened."

To Daphne, Boldt stressed, "We need Flek to implicate whoever was doing these burglaries. If that guy was not at Sanchez's… if he never hit Sanchez's place… if we can confirm it… prove it

… then maybe we have the ammo we need to go knocking on I.I.'s door and get a look at whatever they know."

She nodded, though her concern, like his, was palpable.

To the warden, Boldt said, "We need to speak to Flek right now!"

The prison's interrogation room still smelled of the glue used to fasten down the vinyl flooring. It ranked as the cleanest interrogation room Boldt had ever seen. Better than even the FBI or BATF. A video camera looked down on the occupants. Built into the wall was a twin cassette tape recorder that kept track of every spoken word, every sound. The twin cassette concept, borrowed from the Brits, ensured that no one could later edit the content of the interrogation to fit his needs; one tape went with the officer in charge, the other was filed in a vault accessed only by the warden- a failsafe against corruption.

David Ansel Flek wore the demeaning zebra suit, his number EJC-42 on a patch sewn onto the right breast pocket and on another that ran shoulder to shoulder across his back. "Forty-two," the guards called him, never using names, never personalizing or humanizing the process. A team of privately contracted criminal psychiatrists had advised Etheredge Corporation on how to treat the prisoners in order to maintain discipline and keep peace, so it came as something of a shock to the man in the jumpsuit when Boldt and Matthews addressed him by his Christian name. It also served to mark the two as outsiders-exactly as Matthews had advised Boldt.

"Who are you?" the man inquired. Flek's boyish face and blond surfer-dude hairstyle, his blue eyes and white teeth reminded Boldt of one of the Beach Boys, or Tab Hunter in a Fort Lauderdale movie. His smallish frame had been beefed up in the gym. Boldt knew the ordeal such looks suffered in any prison. They called them babes, wives, soapies-the young men forced to lie on their stomachs for the rulers of the pen. But to his surprise, Boldt did not see the steely-eyed resentment he associated with the abused. The more he studied Flek, the more he believed the man had somehow escaped the role of girlfriend, either a credit to Etheredge's management of the facility, or testimony to the ruthlessness of Flek himself.

"We're your only hope," Daphne said.

Boldt clarified, "Your only hope, unless you like it here."

"Unless you're thinking of turning fifty in here," Daphne said. Dates or age had a way of shaking up any inmate-the passage of time was the only god in such places, the only redeemer. According to his file, the man was twenty-nine years old, and Boldt's comment seemed to hit home.

"What's it about?" he asked.

"The harder you make us work for it," Boldt informed him, "the fewer years we trim off what's going to be added to your sentence. You want to get out of here by forty? Thirty-five? Then don't play dumb."

His ice blue eyes searched them both. They favored Daphne, and for a little too long.

Boldt cautioned, "There are no second chances, Flek. We leave, and we take twenty years of your life out the door with us."

"I requested my public defender," the man reminded.

"And she's on her way, as I understand it," Boldt said. "You know how busy they are."

"So we wait," Flek said confidently.

Boldt and Matthews exchanged glances. Daphne spoke to the inmate. "I'm not advising you one way or the other, David-"