Ridley Pearson - The Body of David Hayes

A full ten minutes passed before she returned solemnly to the table, her face and neck glowing red as they did after a hard cry. Boldt had paid. She stood there by the table, never making any move toward the chair. “Ready?” she asked. She turned toward the door before he answered, and he followed, resisting her effort to make him feel bad for telling the truth. In his mind there was a time and a place for everything, and this had been both. He felt he needed to explain Daphne’s willingness to go along with this, to put herself and her job at risk; he felt obligated to be as honest with her as she had been with him, and there was just no good time for such revelations. They came when they came, and his had come in a sandwich shop after church and the call for redemption in the beautiful hymns. The other thought on his mind, the one he dared not share with her, was that he might be in jail by the end of the night, and that if he were arrested, the one person he could count on to fight for him was Daphne Matthews, and that Liz should understand the connection they all three shared. The truth could hurt no one. Our strength is not lessened by giving utterance to truth . One of the readers had read that line during the service and it had stuck in Boldt’s craw as he had realized all the pain she carried for bearing the burden of her truth, while his own truth remained guarded. No more. He had not said this to wound her, despite what she might think. He told her because he had a bad feeling about the events to come, and he needed to bare all before their arrival.

She kept to their bedroom for the first few hours of their return to the house, and he left her there to deal with it.

She ventured out only once, stopped in the doorway, and said to him, “It’s all right. What you did. Telling me, I mean. It’s my problem, not yours.”

“If you believe that, we’re in trouble.”

“If you believe we’re not in trouble already, you’re fooling yourself,” she fired back. “Danny Foreman said I’d get a call Sunday evening. Tonight. That the call would arrange for me to pick up David’s software, that I’d make the transfer and the money would go to a government account.”

Boldt had expected the conversation to remain on his brief affair with Daphne Matthews-that Liz would make him pay for that. But now he realized she was looking for a way out of that morass while at the same time attempting to remain clear about what was expected of her. He picked up her lead and explained, “Danny is the one who’ll be making the call. Danny must be the one with the software. I’m guessing he was the one who ran me on my goose chase. The Palm Pilot-when he was talking to you-wireless Internet access. He was following my every move in the car that night. According to Geiser, there is no deal between him and Danny Foreman, which means either Geiser is lying as Danny said he would, or Danny is pulling a Lone Ranger in order to make these arrests and recover the money. The third possibility is that Danny’s planning an early retirement by keeping the money for himself. I don’t want to believe that. The one who got burned by Hayes’s disappearance is Svengrad-and he’s also the one with the long reach, the one to watch, which is why he directed that you would be using his account for the transfer and no one else’s.”

“But what account? Where’s the number? He should have given it to me by now.”

“He can’t. He knows Pahwan would stick some electronic glue onto that account number and that he, Svengrad, would never be free of us. He’s too smart for that.” Boldt asked, “So the question is: How and when will he get the account number to you?”

“And why has he waited until now?”

Boldt felt a flash of heat pulse through him, as if he’d accidentally grabbed a live wire. Past conversations percolated through him like groundwater rising during a flood. He answered, “Because he knows you aren’t in the bank… that you aren’t anywhere near that server.” It hit him so clearly-it explained so much.

“He’s watching me? Having me watched?” she said, suddenly looking left to right as if expecting to catch someone staring.

The tumblers fell into place and the truth unlocked for him. He felt an immense sense of relief, wondering at the role of random chance and whether he or Liz would have reached this same place, made this discovery, had he not confessed to her.

He continued by saying, “Listen carefully to what I’m about to tell you.”

SUNDAY AT 5 P.M. BOLDT’Scell phone rang as if he’d set an alarm clock. He and Liz were sitting in the living room, the shades drawn, she on the couch, he in a chair, she pretending to thumb through a catalog, he monitoring the surveillance radio channel via an ear bud. For the past thirty minutes no words had been exchanged, as the clock moved toward the bank reception.

A thirty-year-old female officer, whose name Boldt had already forgotten, remained within earshot at the kitchen table. Liz continued scanning gift items as he answered the call, didn’t succumb to the gravity of the moment. Boldt terminated the call and said to her, “There’s a taxi out front. The driver’s on his way up to the door with a box.”

Liz checked her own phone, then glanced up at Boldt before he turned his attention to the kitchen where the officer was already receiving orders over the secure walkie-talkie.

Boldt jumped up and waved Liz into the bedroom and the backup officer out of sight, cradling his handgun behind his back and moving toward the front door. All for show. Liz knew this taxi’s arrival was Lou’s doing. He waited for the doorbell to chime, gave it an appropriate pause, and opened the door. The cab driver sounded half Indian, half Arab. “Happy birthday to the Missus,” he said. The box was wrapped in a flower-print paper, torn and untaped on one side. The driver explained, “I don’t deliver nothing without seeing what’s inside. But it’s okay. Only clothes. Forty bucks for a five-dollar fare, what the hell?” He added, “There’s a note,” pointing out the unaddressed white envelope taped to the top.

Boldt stepped back, leaving the door ajar, and told the driver to open the box. “Empty the contents.”

“Listen, Mister.”

Boldt displayed his shield and repeated himself.

The driver tore off the paper and nervously upended the box. A pile of black and white clothing spilled out. Boldt instructed him to shake out the clothing, which the driver then did. Boldt returned the gun to its holster, tipped the man ten dollars, and attempted to send him away, at which point the driver said he’d been instructed to wait for the fare.

“To take her where?” Boldt inquired.

The man shrugged. “I wasn’t told. Listen, you want me to take off-”

“No.” Boldt put on his best face of confusion for the sake of the backup officer. He sent the driver to wait in the cab and then pushed the door shut. He held up the first of what turned out to be several oddly shaped pieces of clothing. A nun’s habit.

Boldt locked the door, called the Command van and suggested they double-check the cab number to verify it was legitimate. He quickly filled in Riz on the little he knew of the situation, and promised “more to come.”

Boldt carried the box and the note into the living room, summoned Liz and the officer, and placed everything on the coffee table. Boldt handed Liz the note that he himself had printed out.

The envelope was not sealed. She slipped out what turned out to be a movie ticket.

“This is them,” she said, again for the sake of the plainclothes officer.

“Yeah. We can still call this off,” he offered, as she sized the clothing.

“They don’t gain anything from hurting me as I leave the house. They need me inside the bank. Willing to cooperate.”