Ridley Pearson - The Body of David Hayes

“Danny Foreman received a similar call. Are you aware of that?”

“I am. You look puzzled.”

“Hayes makes pleas to both you and Foreman and within hours is bludgeoned or tortured, perhaps to death. Is there, was there, wire surveillance in place on that cabin?”

“I’m unaware of any. But Foreman is certainly in a position to have bypassed me and gone directly to an Assistant U.S. Attorney. My federal colleagues are far more facile when it comes to granting surveillance.”

“If not a wiretap… ” Boldt said, intentionally not completing his thought.

“Yes, I see,” Geiser said. “Then either Foreman or I would have been the source of such information to whoever did the punishing. One of us leaks that Hayes wants to cut a deal, and someone-let’s say Svengrad-steps in and teaches him a lesson in loyalty.”

“Or kills him,” Boldt said.

“Or that.”

“Which makes that person party to capital murder.” Nothing had gone as Boldt had foreseen or hoped. He wasn’t any closer to lifting the injunction against Svengrad, and instead of pinning down Geiser he felt as if he were coming away partially trusting the man. His detective’s sense told him it was time to check both Foreman’s and Geiser’s alibis for the night Hayes had been assaulted.

“So if you passed on the offer to meet Hayes, that left you where two nights ago?”

“Are you accusing me of something, Lieutenant?” Geiser seemed genuinely amused. “I’m offering to protect you, and you’re accusing me? Of what? Bludgeoning David Hayes? I’m a black belt, Lieutenant. If I wanted to hurt or kill David Hayes-or anyone else for that matter-I would never make such a mess of it. You just bit the hand that was feeding you. I’m going to ask you to leave now. I will keep what we discussed, in terms of you and your wife, in confidence, but I warn you again: Do not take on Yasmani Svengrad by yourself. In all likelihood, that’s what David Hayes seemed to have tried, does it not? And just look what it got him.”

“We don’t know what it got him.”

“Not yet we don’t. And if Svengrad doesn’t want us to, then we never will.”

Boldt and Liz were just sitting down to reheated gourmet dinners from the Whole Foods in the U District when the home phone rang. Neither knew when or even if the call to Liz was coming, so each ringing of the phone brought its own sense of dread. Boldt answered.

“Lieutenant? Sergeant Szumowski. Front desk.”

“Yes.”

“Sorry to bother you with this, but I just got me a caller asking for your mobile or home number. When I refused to give them out, this individual made me write down a message for you, word for word. You want the message?”

“Read it to me, please.”

“Okay. Here goes.” Szumowski cleared his throat as if auditioning for a part. “‘Has your wife watched any good movies lately? If so, you might want to let me have your numbers when I call back.’” He waited through a good deal of silence. “Lieutenant?”

“Did you get a caller-ID, Sergeant?” By agreement with the phone company, every call that came into SPD showed its caller-ID, even if the line owner subscribed to call-blocking. But not every caller-ID number was written down.

“I did, yes.”

“Run that number and get back to me the moment you have a location.”

“Yes, sir.” Szumowski paused. “As to that other thing, sir. How should I handle that? Giving out your numbers and all.”

“If he calls back before you get back to me, then yes, give him my mobile.” Boldt recited it for the man, sparing him the need to look it up in the SPD directory.

“Right back at you, Lieutenant.” Szumowski hung up.

“Lou?”

“Looks like I’m going out,” Boldt told Liz. “I’ll ask Gaynes to come inside with you. That’ll still leave the cruiser and Heiman’s unmarked out front.”

“I don’t need babysitting.”

“Not up for discussion,” Boldt said, and the air froze between them.

A moment later the wall phone rang, and Boldt answered. He scribbled down the physical address for the phone that had made the strange call. A bar in Fremont, only a few minutes by car from the Boldt home. He now knew where the call had come from; the caller didn’t know he knew. He felt a flutter in his chest.

“They may have made their first mistake,” Boldt told Liz, who appeared frightened. But then he saw it not as fright, but doubt-a keen and penetrating doubt-and as he replayed this statement in his own head, even he found the sound of it foolish.

Fire codes required all commercial businesses to provide a minimum of two points of egress. No cop in his right mind walked through the front door of a establishment like Tanker’s Tavern when looking for a possible suspect. Even in blue jeans and a dark windbreaker, as he was currently dressed, Boldt knew he stuck out, indelibly marked cop . Not to mention that whoever had called for him had the advantage of knowing what he looked like. Boldt entered the bar’s back door off an alley marked by dented Dumpsters and stacks of beer bottles awaiting recycling. The door opened onto a narrow hallway offering a men’s room and women’s room, marked TANKED and TANK TOPS, a battered pay phone, and an empty cigarette vending machine missing a front leg. Someone had key-scratched the words BLACK LUNG across the glass of the vending machine.

Boldt moved furtively down this narrow hall, alert for someone to spring out from the men’s room unexpectedly, attempting to grab him up. The miles he wore as lines around his eyes accounted for years of experience, qualities that could never be taught at the police academy or in college classrooms. They eventually instilled themselves as instinct, a kind of sixth sense of knowing when danger loomed. Boldt was not big on belief in a sixth sense, and yet he possessed the unusual ability to “see” crime scenes through the eyes of the victim, a faculty that he kept to himself, knowing others would not understand. He moved ahead with heightened senses, smelling the stale beer, disinfectant, and cigarette smoke, hearing the background grind of rock and roll behind loud conversation, seeing the spinning overhead fans in a kind of slow motion, the flickering television screen playing a football game, the bartender patrolling his narrow aisle between the regimented bottles and the cronies on stools, bent on elbows glued to the wooden bar that separated them from their spirits.

Mixed into this clamor, the faint but distinguishable ring of a telephone, a sound that Boldt’s brain elected to single out and bring to the forefront of his consciousness. Why, he wasn’t sure.

He stood with his back to a corner, the barroom now open before him. Pinball and a video game in a small room to his left, circular tables, mostly full, in front of him. Glassy-eyed men drinking beer. Women of every type, from fully available and advertising, to withdrawn and hurt, relationships forming and disintegrating before him.

From the din a word so incongruous in this setting that at first he fully ignored it, believing his brain was playing tricks on him, or perhaps not hearing at all. Not feeling. The events of late had numbed him, like a limb falling asleep and tingling without the ability to feel or stand. “Boldt?” a male voice called. Still his brain refused to process the information correctly. “Boldt?” Again.

He turned toward that voice. The bartender, his mustache and curly hair reflected in the mirror behind the bottles. He held a phone’s receiver, standing at the end of the bar, by a waitress with more cleavage showing than necessary, a tray filled with empties in her hand.

Boldt wondered if by identifying himself, he marked himself for abduction and a “manicure,” or if the call were actually a call meant for him. Then it slammed home: He’d been led here like a dog in heat, the caller to the police department knowledgeable enough to know how Boldt would proceed, that he would request the caller-ID information and investigate. And if not, what then? he wondered, believing a second or third call would have been placed, and eventually contact would have been made. But the caller had wanted this on neutral ground, someplace Boldt could not easily or quickly trace, and that implied either a substantial conversation or a threat that one wouldn’t want recorded. The first name to pop into his head was Svengrad’s, the Sturgeon General. When he accepted the phone and heard the metallic, distorted sound of voice synthesis, he felt caught off-guard. The caller was using a voice-altering device, readily available from Radio Shack, that made his voice sound inhuman, like a robot.