Ridley Pearson - The First Victim

Coughlie dragged himself forward to the edge of the couch. ‘‘If you stay, you’re making a mistake,’’ he warned.

‘‘If they let her go, then that’s the end of it,’’ she repeated.

‘‘You need to tell them, not me,’’ he said.

‘‘You have sources,’’ she pressed. ‘‘Connections. You said so. You told me you did.’’

He stood and paused at the door. ‘‘It doesn’t work like that,’’ he told her.

She spun back around to catch his reflection in the mirror. ‘‘Help me,’’ she pleaded. ‘‘I’ll keep my word on this.’’

‘‘If that break-in taught you anything, it should have been that it’s too late to negotiate. Just ask Klein.’’ He paused there at the door. ‘‘You take care of yourself,’’ he advised, turning his back on her and walking away.

When the receptionist rang almost immediately, Stevie was convinced that Coughlie wanted another chance at her. The announcement that Boldt was in the lobby surprised her. She asked that he be shown back to the set because she wanted to meet him on her turf for a change. A minute later, her head still spinning, he entered the enormous studio, taking in every detail as if a student.

‘‘Did you cross paths with him?’’ Stevie asked Boldt.

‘‘Who?’’ Boldt asked.

‘‘Brian Coughlie. He came to tell me I should leave town.’’

‘‘Did he?’’ Boldt pondered this. ‘‘Not the worst advice. We can hardly arrest him for that.’’

‘‘I offered my silence for Melissa’s safe return.’’ She kept Boldt standing because she didn’t want him to stay long. They talked between two of the large robotic cameras facing the backdrop of the Seattle sunrise that needed a few thousand watts to look realistic.

He said, ‘‘When a victim lives through what you went through, we call her a material witness.’’

‘‘Is Melissa dead, Lieutenant?’’ The only question that mattered. The one that haunted her.

‘‘We need to work together. To trust each other. You need it for the sake of your safety. I need it if we’re to find Melissa. I have reason to believe that they may not have found her yet.’’

‘‘But you found her van,’’ she said flatly, surprising him with her knowledge. ‘‘Why the hell didn’t I hear about that?’’

‘‘Coughlie?’’ he asked, wondering about her source.

She fumed. ‘‘I should have been told.’’

Boldt shook his head. ‘‘Not without ground rules laid. He’s playing us against each other. You see that? I need to know everything you two have shared. We could be way off base with him.’’

She studied him. ‘‘I can go along with that.’’ She added, ‘‘So what is it you want from me, Lieutenant? Why the visit?’’

He met eyes with her. ‘‘Police pressure isn’t always the most effective. The press has powers that we don’t.’’

‘‘You see? You hate us until you need us.’’

‘‘Are you so different?’’ he asked.

‘‘You ask around about Lou Boldt,’’ she said, ‘‘and you get back this guy larger than life. As a reporter you don’t trust those myths. Those guys don’t exist anymore. They lived in another era. White walls and wide lapels.’’

‘‘And if you ask around about Stevie McNeal,’’ he said, ‘‘you hear that she’s much more than a pretty face, that she’s one of the few anchors in this town who’s capable of reporting a story, not just reading into a camera.’’

‘‘What is it I have to do?’’ she asked.

‘‘You have to use that anchor chair to force someone’s hand.’’

She debated this long and hard. She looked at him curiously, cocking her head as if getting a better view. ‘‘I’ll do whatever it takes.’’

Boldt reached into his pocket and pulled out the digital tape confiscated in the sting. ‘‘Let’s get to work,’’ he said.

"This is out of order.’’ Boldt pointed to the screen.

They had reviewed all the tapes together. They were taking their second look at the digital tape.

McNeal’s expression was grave, her reaction time delayed like a person working off a translator. From his experience when his own Sarah had been abducted, Boldt knew this horror firsthand: the hollow resonance of people’s voices as they spoke to you; the way the clock hand refused to creep forward; the insomnia.

‘‘I beg your pardon?’’ Stevie said, finally responding to him.

‘‘You’re the reporter here-don’t get me wrong. But the outside of the bus on the VHS looks dirty to me, like it has been raining, whereas the bus on the digital tape, the one she boards, is clean. We get just a glimpse of it, but it’s not the same bus, believe me. And if that’s right, then there may be as much as a day or two between the VHS and this digital tape being shot. If that’s true, as thorough as she is in her reporting, then maybe there’s another tape. Maybe there’s one still missing. And if there is, who knows what’s on it? Maybe that’s the tape that establishes the location of the sweatshop-or even the people responsible.’’

She studied the two screens-one showing the back of the dirty bus as it descended into the bus tunnel; the other, the opening shot on the digital tape. She said, ‘‘I told Brian Coughlie there was a tape missing, but at the time I was just making it up-trying to buy Melissa some time. I just assumed the remaining tape I gave her was blank, but you’re right about the dirt.’’

‘‘So she may have shot yet another tape.’’

‘‘It’s possible.’’ Her voice was fragile and did not carry. ‘‘She may have simply had nothing to shoot for a day. It happens. You know surveillance work.’’

He proposed, ‘‘Let’s assume that when the camera was confiscated it contained the second of the two digital tapes, not the first. Let’s say the first had already been shot and put aside, and whoever got the camera only got the second tape.’’

She said hoarsely, ‘‘So maybe there is a second tape.’’

‘‘We have to explain that camera showing up. If whoever’s behind this found it, would they hock it? Not likely! Destroy it, yes, but hock it? We have Riley’s statement-the man you met at the water shower fountain-that it was a gang kid who brought the camera to him in the first place. So maybe this kid simply found the camera, or stole it, or maybe she hid it. That would make it a random discovery. He doesn’t tell anyone about it-he simply hocks it to cash in on his discovery. But conversely, maybe she used it to buy this kid’s silence, or to help her to escape-’’

‘‘And if that was all she had to trade, what happens next time they come looking?’’

‘‘Or maybe someone in the sweatshop-one of the leaders-took it, traded it, used it. It doesn’t mean they’ve found her ,’’ he reminded.

‘‘I aired her photo,’’ Stevie whispered. ‘‘They’ve identified her.’’

‘‘We can’t confirm that.’’

‘‘Thepapersran it. .the other stations. You’d have to live in a vacuum to have missed that photo.’’ Equally softly she said, ‘‘I screwed this up.’’ She added, ‘‘All because you bastards were moving too slowly.’’ He’d been waiting for that. Blame followed on anger’s coattails.

Boldt allowed a moment for the air to clear and held to the high ground. ‘‘We’ll pull a picture of the car wash and distribute it to every radio car on patrol. Someone will recognize it. You. . you have two assignments. One is to go back over this digital tape and translate. I don’t mean the spoken language-what the women are saying-we’ve already had that done. She gets their histories, the conditions aboard ship-’’