Clive Cussler - Thriller 2 - Stories You Just Can’t Put Down

“She said she would pull the Command Center together for me,” Boldt said.

“Little girls room, I think,” Gaynes said. “I saw her in the hallway heading that direction.”

“Go check, would you? We need her, you, and everyone we’ve got in the building who’s a detective. Command Center. Five minutes.”

“Yes, sir.”

Boldt raised his voice and made an announcement. Bodies started moving immediately.

The coach was back. The game was on. And everyone in the room knew it.

The players assembled in the Command Center briefing room. Designed like a college lecture hall, it could seat fifty, all with Internet access, all facing a lectern and PowerPoint projection screen, five 42-inch LCD HD monitors suspended from the ceiling and two large white boards. There were eleven detectives facing Boldt and LaMoia, who quickly brought the others up to speed. Most had read their daily briefings, as charged, and needed nothing more than to be caught up on the discovery of the bridge and the connection to the killer’s use of disguise as a women’s restroom attendant.

Teams were created to chase down specifics: other area bridges to consider; the traffic cams that might reveal a vehicle going out to Deception Pass bridge; area retail stores that sold Asian wigs; costume shops or tailors that might have provided the coveralls specific to the office buildings where he/she had preyed on his victims. They were smart cops and barely needed instruction to get started. Within minutes, the Command Center hummed with conversation. Some teams stayed. Some broke off to other parts of the building. But a machine had been started with Boldt and LaMoia sharing the driver’s seat, and that machine was intent to narrow down various aspects of the case and begin to focus on suspects.

When Bobbie Gaynes stepped into the center and shrugged across the room at Boldt, Boldt felt his hackles raise. He pulled out his cell phone and speed-dialed Daphne. It went immediately to voice mail, indicating the phone was turned off.

“Why would Daffy have her phone off?” he asked LaMoia, her lover.

“She wouldn’t.”

“She does.”

LaMoia pulled out his mobile and gave it a try. “No,” he said, disconnecting. “Must have forgotten to charge it or something. Her office?” He raised his voice across to Gaynes. “Her office?”

“Not there.” Gaynes looked worried. “And her car’s downstairs. I checked.”

LaMoia dialed another number, presumably his loft apartment where Daphne now lived with him. He disconnected, his skin a shade grayer.

“I’d like to say that there’s a reason for this, but we both know her too well,” he said.

“This is not like her,” Boldt said.

“No.”

“So?”

LaMoia stepped to a landline. “Let me check my office voice mail.” He did so. No message.

Gaynes had joined them. “I’m sure she was headed to the bathroom. Earlier. When I last saw her.”

Photographs of the two women victims: one deceased, one still missing, played on the center LCD TV overhead. It was here that LaMoia looked. “Oh, shit,” he said.

Boldt looked up, as well.

“Hair color. Eyes. You and Daphne said-”

“She said. Not me. Yes,” Boldt interrupted. “A similarity between his victims.”

“You see the resemblance?”

“I do. It’s unmistakable.”

“But it’s just not possible,” LaMoia said. “Not with our level of security.”

“If I may?” Gaynes asked somewhat timidly.

“Go ahead,” Boldt said.

“You’re suggesting that Lieutenant Matthews shares a certain look with the two prior victims?”

“We are. Yes.”

“And that…well…” She stepped up to the computer that ran the various overhead displays. She called up the daily alerts that opened with one filed by Cynthia Storm of HHS.

Boldt and LaMoia spun around to read the alerts on the overhead screen.

“My eyes suck,” Boldt said anxiously. “What the hell does it say?”

LaMoia’s voice broke as he read aloud, summarizing. “One of our staff…a housecleaner…Jasmina Something-avich…was found tied up in her apartment. This is like, three hours ago. She’d been there, left that way for nearly…forty-eight hours. Thirty-nine hours,” he corrected himself. “She said the doer…it wasn’t burglary or sexual assault. He wanted…he confiscated her photo ID. Her Public Safety ID.”

The three moved as a unit, a team, as they first walked and then ran from the Command Center, down the hall with such intensity that everyone moved out of their way; others jumped up from their desks and peered into the hallway to see what was going on. Gaynes knocked, but LaMoia didn’t wait for an answer. He pushed through the door.

“Men inside,” he announced.

A woman cursed and complained from inside a stall. A toilet flushed.

Boldt went to the janitor’s closet. “It’s locked! I want this unlocked!”

Gaynes hurried from the bathroom, shouting for a key.

LaMoia dropped to a knee, stood and started opening stalls. He banged on the locked stall from where the woman had cursed. “Open it! Now.”

“I’m a little busy here.”

“Open the fucking door!” LaMoia ordered.

The woman leaned forward and threw open the lock and covered her legs as LaMoia swung the door open.

He stared at the tile floor.

His voice rasped as he said, “Finish with your business. Stick to this panel as you stand. You go out to my right. You understand?”

“You have no right-”

“Shut up and do as I say.”

The woman came off the toilet, pulled up her underwear and pants and was holding them as she nudged by LaMoia and then Boldt, who was by now looking over LaMoia’s shoulder.

The toilet flushed automatically.

“It’s just not possible,” Boldt whispered gravely.

“You and Matthews,” said her lover, “your photos were in the paper two days ago. She brought it home to show me. Her photo. He saw her photo. He knew she was looking for him. He’s a sick fuck. That much we know already.”

“Are you sure it’s hers?”

The two men had not stopped staring at the tile floor where a wire hoop earring lay.

“I bought it for her,” LaMoia said. “The six-month anniversary of her moving in. It was the last really good night we had,” he said.

Boldt didn’t want to hear such things.

Gaynes returned with the closet key in hand, out of breath.

“S.I.D.,” Boldt said to her. Scientific Identification Division. “Get them up here.”

“What is it?” Gaynes said desperately.

“Get them up here,” Boldt repeated, his head beginning to spin.

Boldt had been through this once before, back when the fires had been hotter between them, back when he’d been younger and less experienced with the overlap of personal and professional. He had that behind him now, had that to build upon, but still felt his knees weak with terror and his mind a runaway train careening down memory and emotion toward an unknown abyss.

He couldn’t think about her. That was the point. He had to make the disconnect to give her the best chance of being found alive. Regulations called for LaMoia to step aside. Boldt wouldn’t force the issue, but John knew enough to keep his mouth shut and his ideas to himself. He could share them with Boldt in private, but to actively push his own agenda would only drive himself out of the wheelhouse. He was an observer now, not even that if he misstepped.

There was no time to pull the threads together. Boldt had done the best he could: he turned up the heat on the team trying to identify area bridges; he doubled the man power reviewing traffic cams and assigned two other detectives to review Public Safety surveillance video to locate the imposter housecleaner and follow him to wherever he’d gone. He worked Shoswitz to provide the department’s helicopter, either to race him and a small team to possible sites, or for use as air surveillance if they got a bead on what vehicle the man was driving.