Ridley Pearson - The Body of David Hayes

He found himself believing Geiser, and it bothered him. He said, “I need to know if something like that is in play.”

“I imagine you do.”

“Do you believe Danny Foreman was stuck in traffic at the time he called you?”

“Well, now we’re getting to the heart of it, aren’t we, Lieutenant? The hell of it is, there’s no way I can know that, is there?”

“Would you know if Hayes had cut a deal for protection?”

“I should. It should go through my office. Absolutely.”

“But it wouldn’t have to.”

“It could just as easily go through the U.S. Attorney. Maybe more likely, you think about it. The USAO can negotiate with Treasury for witness protection. I can’t offer that.”

“Danny Foreman told my wife that you and he had Hayes under protection and that you’d deny it ’til hell freezes over.”

“Well, he’s right on one account, isn’t he?” Geiser said. He scooted his chair up to the desk again and met eyes with Boldt. “You’d better move before your glue dries, gentlemen. You can find your way out.”

Paul Geiser was in the middle of a tricky bit of business on his model when his kitchen doorbell rang only minutes after Boldt’s departure. Angry that Boldt would play the “oh, I forgot something” technique on a seasoned attorney, Geiser hurried through the house to the kitchen’s back door, ready to give Boldt a mouthful. His glue was indeed drying. He yanked open the door, already mid-sentence. “This is the oldest game in the book-” but cut himself off, not recognizing the two men in the suits who faced him. FBI, by the look of them. Treasury , he thought, reminded again of the discussion of witness protection. Boldt had been followed, or the house had been watched. Fucking feds were full of such tricks.

Seeing two strangers at his back door was jarring; he had expected Boldt and LaMoia. In those few seconds it took his facile mind to clear the slate and begin again, one of the two stepped through the door and hit him with two open palms squarely in the center of his chest. Not federal agents after all . The impact not only threw him across the kitchen like a puppet, it froze his lungs and vocal cords in a nerve-deadening spasm.

One of them spoke to the other, his words clouded by an unfamiliar accent. Only then did he fully register what was going on. Only then did his thought finally catch up to real time, the specter of Boldt and LaMoia fading like the orb left behind by a camera’s flash.

Thugs, goons , a dozen different names. Geiser called them “apes” around the office. One was dropping the blinds while the other was shoving a damp and smelly kitchen rag down Geiser’s throat, pulling him by the hair and standing him up while wrestling his arms behind him. If his feeling had returned sooner, he might have fought them both, given his training.

The interrogation was conducted by mobile phone so that Geiser never saw his questioner-a walkie-talkie feature that allowed use of a speakerphone so that it didn’t need to be held to Geiser’s ear, and so the two men could follow instructions where necessary as well. The advantages of modern technology. His back ached from the way they’d bound his torso to the chair, sitting up so perfectly straight, hands out in front of him, also taped to the arms of the chair. They’d moved him into the basement by simply throwing him down the stairs, part intimidation, partly a way to keep him physically stunned. They knew their work well.

When he answered questions incorrectly, the big one shoved the musty kitchen rag back into his mouth as the smaller guy pulled a Leatherman out of a belt case and worked the polished metal multi-tool device into a pair of pliers.

“Please… no,” Geiser gagged, tape wrapped around his head holding the rag in his mouth. His words came out as only deep grunts, nearly indistinguishable, except in volume, from the cries of pain that followed.

“Where is he?” the voice asked over the phone’s thin speaker.

Geiser shook his head. He had no idea.

“ Nyet ,” the ape said for the sake of the interrogator, which caused Geiser to loosen his bowels.

The voice on the other end of the phone wanted answers he didn’t have. He understood the frustration of such a position from his years of working as a trial attorney. There were times he’d wanted to use these same methods on some of his unforthcoming witnesses. Wild with desperation-that ape stepping closer, the pliers extended like a prosthesis designed with only one purpose in mind-Paul Geiser understood that it promised to be a long night.

WHEN BOLDT DROPPED LAMOIA OFFat his building, John offered his round-the-clock services, an expression of fraternity that implied there would be no overtime filed for, nothing on the books if Boldt wanted it that way. This reaching out by his former partner, a man Boldt had personally trained to follow in his path, meant the world to him.

“I may take you up on that.”

“Do it. And I can safely volunteer Matthews as well.” Boldt found it amusing that John still referred to Daphne by her last name.

He was about to pull away from the curb when a woman’s figure stepped out of a doorway and headed directly for his car. Boldt couldn’t imagine prostitutes working this neighborhood, but he prepared his shield to display and drive her off to another corner.

The woman opened Boldt’s passenger door, and he had dropped his credentials wallet onto the seat and had his gun in hand by the time he recognized her.

“Maddie Olson,” she reminded him. “We met in the men’s room.”

“If I were the paranoid type,” Boldt said, “I’d say you were lying in wait for me.”

“Word gets around,” she said. “Drive please.”

Boldt pulled the Crown Vic into traffic and started taking random turns through an old part of town where traffic was moderate. “You’re not serious,” he said, when she failed to instigate conversation, “about knowing I’d show up.”

“Sure I am. I knew you had snatched up LaMoia. I’m telling you, there’re no secrets.”

“Geiser,” he guessed.

“… is in the Emergency Room at Swedish Med Center, Central district.”

“I was with him an hour ago.”

“Our guy, the same guy you’re never going to speak to-”

“Alekseevich,” Boldt supplied.

“-got word to us that the shit was flying. Geiser had been scheduled for a manicure. Foreman’s up next, if they can find him.”

“Damn.” Boldt was not surprised to hear Foreman’s name. He’d just fed it to Geiser himself.

“You don’t sound surprised,” she said.

“Two nights ago Danny Foreman led me to a crime scene.” He went on to explain the blood in the cabin. “It made me suspicious of him.”

“Because?”

“Danny had missed an important meet. Claimed he was stuck in traffic. Gave me the same excuse that he gave Geiser. I made some calls. Followed up on those calls just now. We look for patterns, right? I had one I thought worth pursuing, and come to find out, the highway where Danny was stuck in construction traffic while watching a car get towed turns out to be an area watched by a traffic cam. We live and die by the details. Danny tried too hard, said he’d seen a broken-down car to both me and Geiser. Too much information. When Geiser gave me that, my antenna went up.”

“Reporting what he saw on the traffic cam allowed him to pretend to be somewhere he was not?”

“By the look of it, yes.”

“And where was he, in fact?”

“This is all just speculation,” he cautioned, “but my guess is he was doing a damn good job of imitating your Mr. Alekseevich so we’d take the bait. Meanwhile, I thought he was sequestering our primary suspect for the U.S. Attorney’s Office. That is… that’s the direction I was going until what you just told me.”