The Art of Deception Page 4

  “Lucky you. Not so lucky for second cousin.”

  Here it came—the reason for his soup. Her cousin. A euphemism for anyone of Asian descent for whom the Great Lady felt morally or physically responsible. Over the years, Boldt had learned some of the code. Not all, not by any stretch. “Do you mind if I take notes?”

  She gestured for him to do so. Boldt pulled out the worn notebook, taller than it was wide. It fit into his hand like a cross to the devout.

  She said, “Billy Chen. His mother sister to my cousin’s husband.” She smiled. All an invention on her part. “Work road crew, here in city. Good boy, Billy Chen.”

  “And how was Billy unlucky?” Boldt said.

  “Billy dead,” she said.

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” he said. “How did it happen?” And then it registered, though too late. The sinkhole on Third Avenue. Interpreting “yesterday night” had left him on the wrong date, and it took him a moment to back up the calendar, to relocate himself. The sinkhole raised a red flag only because of its location. The only two reliable witnesses in the Susan Hebringer disappearance had put her last-seen nearby on Columbia Street, once on First Avenue, and a few minutes later crossing Second heading east, uphill. Randolf was believed to have been in this same area at the time of her disappearance. Shop owners had been questioned, bus drivers, pamphlets distributed—and to date, not a single other lead had come. Then that immense sinkhole. And now a dead body. He sat up, his pulse quicker, pen ready.

  “Billy working broken water main. Your people say he drown fixing it—that he no good at job. Medical examiner office. Mama Lu, not think so, Mr. Both. Billy Chen no good worker? Want better job done. Much grief, Billy brings us all. Mama Lu have no answer. Turn to good friend for answer.”

  “Where exactly was the body found?” Boldt said.

  “Do I ask you to do my cooking for me? Run grocery?”

  Boldt grinned. She intended for him to start from the start. This woman didn’t run a grocery, she ran Seattle’s Asian economy. Who was she kidding?

  He said, “The medical examiner, Doc Dixon, is a close friend. He can be trusted. He’s very good at his job. If he says Billy Chen drowned, then I’m sure that’s right. I don’t know the particulars, but if Doc Dixon—”

  “You will know particulars, yes, Mr. Both? If not accident, you investigate. Yes? As favor to good friend.”

  “We—my department—are only authorized to investigate deaths ruled suspicious causes, Great Lady. I can certainly look into this . . . accident, or whatever it was . . . no problem. But unless there is a determination of suspicious causes, my hands are tied.”

  “But you untie as favor to friend.”

  “I can work after hours. Maybe take some lost time. I just wanted you to understand it may go a little slowly.”

  “I no understand.”

  “I’m very busy right now. The family might prefer a private investigator, someone who can tackle this full-time.” He couldn’t believe he was recommending they use a PI. He hoped he’d worded this carefully enough. He didn’t want to offend the likes of Mama Lu. Not now. Not ever.

  “Chen family prefers you, Mr. Both.” She set her spoon down and gently pushed at the small table before her. She meant she preferred him. As she dabbed her chin with the generous linen napkin, the wisp of silk swept through the room and the bowl of soup disappeared. A magician at work.

  As close to a direct order as he was going to get. The choice was now his. “Let me see what Dixie, the ME, has to say about it.” Boldt nudged his table. Same reaction: bowl gone; table dry; table removed from in front of him.

  “You like fortune cookie?” she said.

  “No, thank you.”

  “You no like fortune cookie?”

  “We make or break our own fortunes. I don’t need a cookie interfering.”

  “But taste so good,” she said, crunching down on hers and raining crumbs into folds. She smiled. Thankfully she had her teeth in.

  “Billy Chen,” Boldt said, making sure he had the name right. “C-h-e-n.”

  But he was thinking about both Hebringer and Randolf having last been seen in the same general area when Mama Lu said, “Little birdie tell me Cherry and Third part of old underground city. How you know what kill Billy until you look?”

  “The Underground extends up there?” Boldt asked, adrenaline warming him. In the late 1800s, Seattle had been rebuilt following a colossal fire. The reconstruction, made in large part because of tidal flooding, developed a city on top of a city— enormous retaining walls built around each of twenty city blocks and streets between them built up with soil and rock sometimes as high as thirty feet. A good deal of the original city now lay underground. He’d done the tour once—it was a world unto itself down there: antique storefronts, stuff wreathed in darkness for more than a century, some of it frozen in time, some intruded upon by shop owners desperate for storage.

  Boldt couldn’t have been less interested in Billy Chen. It was all Hebringer and Randolf for him at that moment. A paved-over section of the city left undisturbed for a hundred years. The Phantom of the Opera, Boldt was thinking.

  “Maybe so,” she said, but with a twinkle in her eye that told him she knew more.

  “Who is this ‘little birdie,’ Great Lady?”

  The wide shoulders shrugged.

  Boldt suddenly possessed enough energy to jog back to headquarters. The Underground? She’d handed him a hell of a lead. “I can look into this,” he told her, trying to hide his enthusiasm.

  “You good man, Mr. Both,” she said, reading whatever was on that fortune and finding it extremely amusing. Her body shook like a mountain of jelly.

  7 Hide and Peep

  Nordstrom and the tourist thing had worn Melissa Dunkin’s legs down to a pair of aching calves that would be shinsplints by the following morning. At 7 P.M., practically stumbling into her suite in the Inn, she headed straight for the bath. With dinner scheduled for 8:30, she had no time to waste. A few minutes for a “lie-down” in front of CNBC if she hurried.

  Melissa used the brass security hook-and-latch lock to ensure her privacy against a random minibar inspection or turndown service. She started the bathwater and began undressing immediately, the water steaming piping hot and making her think, for no reason at all, of home and her husband and kids, whom she missed. On reconsideration, more honestly, she was happy to have the time alone. Nothing wrong with some self-indulgence once or twice a year.

  Her blouse off and hung up, she drew the living room sheers across a large window with a panoramic view of Puget Sound. Slate-green water, densely forested islands, and the Olympic mountain range served as a backdrop. She drew the curtains in the bedroom as well, mildly annoyed that they wouldn’t close completely, but as they faced a darkened construction site, a skeleton against the slowly fading evening sky, she didn’t worry about it. She undressed fully, off to one side. Nothing mattered much at this point but that bath.

  She slipped into the complimentary terry cloth robe, angled the TV to face the bathroom, angled the bathroom door’s full-length mirror, and readjusted her efforts twice so that she could see a reversed image of Market Wrap from the tub. Turned the volume way up. Toe in the water. Heaven.

  She shed the robe, slipped into the foaming tub, and nearly squealed with delight it felt so damned good. A moment later, she climbed back out, ignored the robe, and sneaked into and across the suite’s living room where she snatched a beer from the minibar. She returned to the tub a conquering hero.

  Twenty hedonistic minutes later, Melissa Dunkin dried herself off with a towel the size of a rug, slipped back into the robe, and headed straight for bed. Do not pass Go. The covers drawn, she shed the robe and lay back into the crisp sheets, naked, glowing, the bath’s heat slowly seeping out of her flushed skin. She zapped the TV’s sound and dozed, as relaxed as she’d been in ages. If that dinner hadn’t been on her Palm Pilot, she’d have let herself sleep until morning.

  She
would never have accused herself of woman’s intuition. She left that for the touchy-feelies, the Birkenstock set who frequented the whole-food stores and took Chinese supplements they couldn’t pronounce. Melissa Dunkin considered herself pedantic but effective and efficient as a businesswoman, adequate as a mother, accomplished as a lover. She pulled the sheet up over her chest as she cooled, luxuriating in the serenity of a self-induced stupor.

  It was at that moment she saw the man’s reflection in the bathroom mirror, which, at its present angle was trained with a view out the bedroom window. He glowed red, then suddenly green as a traffic light changed. He held something to his face.

  Binoculars.

  Aimed into her window.

  At her.

  Naked, until only seconds before.

  Oh, my God!

  She coiled into a fetal ball, stretching for the phone while clinging to the sheet that hid her from him. She snagged the handset and ended up dragging the phone by its cord across her oversized pillow. She was dreadfully cold all of a sudden, her skin coursed with gooseflesh, her teeth actually chattering. The talking head on the TV looked out at her, so calm and collected. The collision of fear and dread inside her left her nauseated.

  She wasn’t about to call some minimum-wage hotel receptionist. Not Melissa Dunkin. She dialed 9 for an outside line and punched in 9-1-1.

  8 Catch, As Catch Can

  The ringing phone demanded to be answered, but John LaMoia hesitated. In Crimes Against Persons the telephone was its own kind of crapshoot, its own lottery. The detective that answered a call automatically accepted whatever case presented itself, sometimes a murder worthy of his time, but mostly domestics. Beatings with baseball bats, stabbings with kitchen knives, gunshot wounds of every variety—it was enough to keep a man like LaMoia single. Enough for him to give it time to let someone else catch this one.

  He’d had one bit of good news, and he felt reluctant to spoil it with some worthless case that would demand his time: A truck driver had read a story about Mary-Ann Walker and had called in that he’d seen a car parked on the bridge right before midnight. He hadn’t gotten a good look at the driver, but LaMoia had put a detective on a telephone follow-up (the trucker was currently on a run to Boise) to try to get a decent description of events. When the trucker returned to town, they would follow up yet again.

  His office cubicle was personalized with a Sports Illustrated swimsuit calendar, an audaciously pink rabbit’s foot hanging from a thumbtack, a collection of classified newspaper ads, each offering a Chevy Camaro, and a Life in Hell comic-strip frame. His home, eight to twelve hours a day, or night, or holiday. Never mind the razzing he took for the pressed blue jeans, the ostrich cowboy boots, the deerskin jacket. He, and only one other CAP detective, carried a sergeant’s shield. If he didn’t want to answer a cold call, then he wouldn’t.

  Finally he picked up the phone—duty overcoming reason.

  “LaMoia.”

  “Is this a detective? Am I speaking with a detective? I’d like to report a Peeping Tom.”

  He immediately had her in his mind as white, thirties, well educated. The caller-ID helped. The Market Inn catered to a certain set, a set that could make trouble for a detective.

  He sat up in his chair and grabbed for a pen. Any homicide detective worth his salt would have paid attention to this call. Susan Hebringer, one of the two women missing from downtown, had reported a peeper twenty-four hours prior to her going missing. An alarm sounded in LaMoia’s brain—he’d caught a good call.

  “Sergeant, ma’am. Crimes Against Persons. It’s my squad.”

  She whispered into the receiver. “He’s . . . right . . . across . . . the . . . street. Right now. I can see him over there.”

  “Let’s stay calm, okay?” He checked the clock and wrote down the time: 7:38 P.M. “I’m assuming you’re in the Market Inn. What floor?”

  “Five.”

  “Do you happen to know what direction you’re facing?”

  “No.”

  “The water? Do you have a water view?” LaMoia spun around to face the map of the city and the clearance board above it that tracked which cases remained active. Hebringer and Randolf were up there in red marker with Boldt’s name in the Lead column. They’d both been up there way too long.

  “The living room. If I’m facing the water, this guy’s to my right.”

  “North. Okay. Fifth floor. And you are currently where?”

  “In bed.”

  “Alone?”

  “Yes, alone.” Indignant. Afraid.

  “Clothed, or unclothed?”

  “Not clothed, no. There’s a robe on the floor.”

  “I’d rather you not move, if he’s still there.”

  “He has binoculars, I think.”

  LaMoia’s pulse pounded at his ears. A peeper with binoculars. Susan Hebringer.

  “I’m going to ask you to sit tight. I’m going to take your room number and call you back on my cell phone. I’m maybe five minutes away, max. I’ll have patrol cars in the area in less than that. The key here is not to give this guy reason to bail. If he thinks you’ve made him, he’s out of there.”

  “I want him out of there.”

  “I understand that, Ms. . . . Your name please?”

  He wrote down the particulars and practically begged her to remain in bed and to act calm. He made the calls on the run for the elevator. For a lousy peeper report, this would be the biggest show of manpower SPD had ever mobilized.

  Susan Hebringer. If he had time, he’d get a call to Boldt. If not Boldt, then Matthews: top of the lineup; he needed the heavy hitters.

  Assuming his role as commanding officer, LaMoia directed dispatch to put out an 041 for the Bay Tower construction site. Officers in two patrol cars responded within seconds and were advised to enter the area “cloaked,” with a BOL (Be On Lookout) issued for an adult male possibly fleeing the area, possibly in possession of a pair of binoculars or a telescope. Another three foot soldiers called in, all in the general vicinity, and once advised of this fact, LaMoia used them to bracket the area in case the guy slipped the two teams from the patrol cars.

  With just five minutes to act, he felt he’d done as much as humanly possible to throw a net around this peeper. The phone call to Boldt’s residence put him onto voice mail, and he left a cryptic message to return the call. He asked dispatch to send Boldt a page. A call to Matthews paid off—she was on her way over.

  He juggled all this while keeping an open channel and something of a running dialogue with Melissa Dunkin, still curled up under a cotton sheet in suite 514. When Dunkin reported the peeper gone, LaMoia dialed up the urgency to his people on the ground. Ten minutes later, fifteen minutes after receiving the call from Dunkin, a search was on in the construction site with LaMoia fearing they’d lost him. Thirty minutes later, that search included fifteen patrolmen, the foreman of the construction site, and a vice president of the company putting up the building.

  By the time the construction site was crawling with law enforcement, LaMoia found himself sipping coffee in the company of a visibly shaken Melissa Dunkin, who had eschewed the go-juice in favor of vodka on the rocks from little minibar bottles with tiny aluminum caps.

  Dunkin wore a dark wool suit that she’d thrown on hastily, judging by the wrinkled and incorrectly buttoned blouse. Matthews arrived in blue jeans and a T-shirt, looking great. Introductions were followed by the explanation that the prosecuting attorney’s office no longer permitted a male detective to interview a woman without a female officer present. The truth, it was hardly why Matthews was there. A patrol officer would have satisfied regs. LaMoia wanted Matthews “to look under the hood,” and she was present to willingly oblige.

  “A dot-com in Redmond?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “But you did tourist stuff around town here today.”

  “After lunch. Yes,” Dunkin said.

  “Shopping mostly?” Matthews asked.

  “Not
only shopping, but it included shopping. Yes. The aquarium. Pioneer Square. The monorail.”

  “A busy day,” LaMoia said.

  “Very.”

  Matthews asked, “And did you then, at any time, sense that you might be being followed or watched?”

  “Not at all. Not in the least. My God, you think this guy was following me?”

  LaMoia recapped. “You came back to the hotel, locked the door to your room, pulled the drapes—as far as they’d go—and undressed for a bath.”

  “That’s correct.”

  “You were in a state of undress only twice when outside the bathroom,” he repeated from his notes. “The beer, and in bed after the bath.”

  “I was in the tub,” she reminded, going on to describe her arrangement of using the door’s full-length mirror to afford her a view of the television.

  This was a new one for LaMoia, and so he had her show him. He placed a hotel towel into the damp tub, stepped in, and sat down. She aimed the door until he could see the bedroom’s armoire. She asked for him to verify the angle.

  “Yeah, there,” he said, stopping her. “I got the television, but I’m also looking right out that window at my men over there on the construction site.”

  “He had a view of me,” she mumbled. He didn’t know if her slurred tone was a product of the booze or shock. “I think he had binoculars. He was holding something in his hands.”

  LaMoia believed with certainty that a perv peeping a naked woman would most certainly be holding something in his hand, but he didn’t comment. Instead, he asked, “A camera?”

  “Oh .. . God! You think? What, I’m going to find myself circulating the Internet?”

  LaMoia doubted there was a lot of demand for pictures of naked middle-aged execs, even on the “Internet-ional House of Porncake,” as he called the Web, but he bit his tongue. “Let me ask you this, Ms. Dunkin, and I apologize in advance for the way this may sound, but is your business with the Redmond dot-com of such a nature that advantage might be gained by . . . influencing you in any way?”