The First Victim lbadm-6 Read online

  Stevie said sarcastically, ‘‘That’s just a little unusual for a couple with a reported combined income of sixty-seven thousand a year.’’

  ‘‘A little unusual?’’ Melissa exploded. ‘‘That’s damn near impossible. That’s a thirty-thousand-dollar truck.’’

  ‘‘There’s more. The Kleins’ credit cards, which for seven years had maintained balances in the mid-four thousands, were all paid off over the last eighteen months.’’

  ‘‘So, if nothing else shapes up we threaten to turn the Kleins over to the IRS.’’

  ‘‘There you go again,’’ Stevie said.

  ‘‘Just trying to think ahead.’’

  ‘‘Don’t. Stay where we are.’’

  ‘‘You’re not the one chasing the All-American mom from the grocery store to the-’’

  When Melissa failed to complete her thought, Stevie checked that they still had a connection.

  ‘‘I’m here,’’ Melissa acknowledged. ‘‘Okay, so I missed the obvious.’’

  ‘‘Little Sister?’’

  ‘‘You know those trick posters that are all color and pattern, and you stare at them long enough and suddenly this three-D image appears?’’

  ‘‘You missed what?’’ Stevie asked.

  ‘‘She washed her car two days ago. I mean, what was I thinking? I sat right in this same spot! Talk about lame!’’

  ‘‘You missed what?’’ Stevie repeated.

  ‘‘She’s rolling. I gotta go,’’ Melissa said. The phone went dead.

  CHAPTER 6

  Boldt sat on the back porch on a warm Friday night, the kids in bed, waiting for Liz, the slide projector at the ready, aimed at the only smooth white surface available, a door that had once led into what was now the kitchen pantry. Painted shut. Lately, he had felt pretty much the same way as that door: closed off, stuck.

  He might have set up the projector in the living room; there was a wall there, pretty much of it white if the framed watercolors were removed, but the noise of the carousel’s clicking was certain to wake Sarah, who was as light a sleeper as her father, and if she awakened it might be an hour or two before she could be coaxed toward slumber again. So the carousel sat out there on a wicker table, the yellow Kodak box alongside. Boldt blinked in an attempt to decipher the firefly mystery: He couldn’t figure out whether he was actually seeing fireflies or if those spots of white light before his eyes were simply another sign of his total exhaustion.

  ‘‘I think we have fireflies,’’ he told Liz when she finally joined him.

  ‘‘We’ll need to cover Miles before we go to sleep. Remind me, would you?’’

  The wicker creaked as she sat into it. Boldt wanted her twenty pounds heavier. He wanted that wicker chair to cry when she took to it, not simply moan.

  ‘‘I didn’t think we had fireflies. Six years in this house, I can’t remember ever seeing a firefly.’’

  ‘‘I don’t see any fireflies,’’ she informed him.

  ‘‘Give it a minute,’’ he said. ‘‘Over toward the back fence.’’

  She eyed the projector. ‘‘If we’d bought more carousels we wouldn’t have to load it each time.’’

  ‘‘Don’t use it enough to justify two carousels.’’

  ‘‘We should have the slides put onto video.’’

  ‘‘Then what would we use the projector for?’’ he asked.

  She stared out into the lawn. ‘‘I don’t see them.’’

  ‘‘That’s what I was afraid of.’’

  ‘‘What are we looking at?’’

  ‘‘On her seventy-fifth birthday my mother gave each of us slides of old family photos.’’

  ‘‘I remember these.’’

  ‘‘Right.’’

  ‘‘Old, old family photographs.’’

  ‘‘Right. That’s what I said.’’ He got the projector up and running and focused the image of a gray-haired lady onto the overpainted door.

  ‘‘I love summer evenings,’’ she said. ‘‘The charcoal in the air, the fresh-cut grass. Shouldn’t ever take any of it for granted.’’

  ‘‘My mother’s mother,’’ he said. ‘‘She died in her sleep. I remember her clothes smelled like mothballs. Hair like cotton candy. But what sticks in my mind is that she died in her sleep.’’

  ‘‘That’s the cop in you. You’re always more concerned with how a person dies than how he lived.’’

  He didn’t like the comment. He sensed she might apologize for it, and he didn’t want her doing that, and he wasn’t sure why. ‘‘I think it’s strange I’d remember that about her.’’

  ‘‘How’d your grandfather die?’’

  ‘‘No idea. They never told me, I guess. He came over first. He was the one who brought us here.’’ He fast-forwarded through a dozen slides. Liz wanted him to stop at a few, but he plowed through them with the determination of a man who knew where he was going.

  He landed on a photograph, a sepia print, of a young boy of eighteen standing by the butt end of a huge fallen timber. He said, ‘‘We were Polish. My father called us Europeans.’’

  ‘‘This is about the container,’’ Liz stated. ‘‘This is about the women who died.’’

  Boldt worked the projector through two more slides of his grandfather. ‘‘We all crossed an ocean at some point,’’ he observed. ‘‘Your people came in the early 1800s. Mine, during the Great War. You think our people would make it in now? All the qualifications and requirements?’’

  ‘‘Don’t do this to yourself.’’

  ‘‘Technically they died of malnutrition, but Dixie says that some kind of flu was a contributing factor. If they had lived longer, the flu might have killed them. How’s that for irony?’’

  She pointed. ‘‘I think I saw one!’’ She craned forward. ‘‘I didn’t think we had fireflies!’’

  ‘‘Not over there. Those are those Christmas lights that they never take down.’’ He pulled off the carousel, leaving a blinding white box on the old painted door. Liz jumped out of her chair with the enthusiasm of a little girl and made hand shadows of birds flying. She wore shorts. Her legs were tan but too thin. She made a duck’s head and her voice changed to Donald Duck. Donald told him he worried too much. She wouldn’t have jumped up like that two years ago before the illness. She’d become unpredictable that way. He didn’t know what was coming next. She wouldn’t deprive herself of a single moment of joy. She seized each and every one unabashedly. He envied her that freedom, that allowance of youth. She was no longer painted shut.

  ‘‘Can you imagine leaving Christmas lights up all year?’’ she asked.

  ‘‘There ought to be an ordinance.’’

  ‘‘Always the cop.’’

  He loaded the carousel with shots of a vacation they had taken years before.

  ‘‘If your grandfather had never made the crossing, we wouldn’t be here,’’ she said.

  ‘‘That’s what’s bugging me, I think. If those women had lived. . At least for a while they would have had a legitimate chance at freedom.’’

  ‘‘They found a different kind of freedom,’’ she said.

  He wasn’t going to go there. He wasn’t going to touch that one for anything.

  CHAPTER 7

  "What do we know?’’ Boldt asked LaMoia before the man ever sat down. Boldt’s office had been transformed into an art gallery, the present exhibition finger painting and crayon coloring by daughter Sarah and son Miles. He treasured each and every drawing, had invented titles for most; the scientists were wrong about the world spinning on an axis-it revolved around his two kids.

  ‘‘I been following up on that fabric. Spent the weekend with dockhands, Customs and my face in the Yellow Pages. That’s the part of this job you forget, Sarge. When you went up to Lieutenant you got your weekends back.’’

  ‘‘The polarfleece,’’ Boldt said.

  ‘‘Yeah, the bales we hauled out of that container along with the body bags,’’ LaMoia answered.

&nb
sp; Boldt spoke with great but unfounded confidence, for he was only guessing. ‘‘There’s no bill of lading that can be connected to it. No record of the container number. No import company on record.’’

  ‘‘Two out of three ain’t bad, Sarge.’’

  ‘‘Where’d I miss?’’

  ‘‘Officially there’s no import company that we can tie to that container,’’ LaMoia corrected. ‘‘No paperwork-true enough. But unofficially?’’ When LaMoia got something right, which was more often than not, he enjoyed dragging out the success like a kid retelling an old joke he’s just heard for the first time. Bernie Lofgrin in the crime lab had the same bad habit of turning what could be a one-line answer into a ten-minute lecture. Boldt felt no obligation to egg him on by responding, so he waited him out. ‘‘After I struck out IDing that container, I decided to put the word out on the street. Nice and gentle like. . nothing too severe. There’s an art to working the street, you

  know?’’ he said, fishing for a compliment.

  ‘‘Uh-huh,’’ Boldt agreed.

  ‘‘It’s like lovemaking: You start slow and easy and let things develop of themselves.’’

  ‘‘Try to get around to your point sometime today, if possible.’’

  LaMoia didn’t so much as flinch. He was on stage; he was performing. Nothing could rattle him. ‘‘So rather than make an issue out of this, I just let it be known that we would be interested in whosoever might be ordering polarfleece by the container load. Okay? I know it’s not Eddie Bauer or REI’cause I’ve already checked with them. Can’t be a mom-and-pop with that kind of quantity. So what the fuck, chuck?’’

  ‘‘John!’’ Boldt raised his voice enough to send the two-minute warning.

  ‘‘It wasn’t a snitch, Sarge-wasn’t no squirrel. The right snitch, and I coulda worked some Monopoly magic on him, you know? ‘Get out of jail for free,’ or something along those lines. Okay? Coulda come up with a name, a contact, something firm enough to squeeze by the neck and start choking. Okay?’’ He stopped talking. Stopped, and stood there, waiting to elicit some kind of response from his lieutenant, who sat impassively enough to allow another unsuspecting person to believe he had died there in the chair. Boldt would not, did not, move. He waited. LaMoia took this all in and finally understood that he was to blink first. ‘‘Part of me thinks we should contact I.I. before they contact us. Save ’em the trouble.’’

  I.I.-Internal Investigation-a pair of initials that drove a heat rash to the back of the neck of even the most honest and upright soldier-in-blue. I.I. could stall careers, stop paychecks and cause months of consultation with overworked attorneys on retainer to the Police Officers’ Benevolent Association-the union. LaMoia’s suggestion meant that whatever he’d turned up could put one or both of them directly in harm’s way. The implication was obvious-organized crime was involved.

  Corruption swept through police departments and other government agencies like the flu, passed one person to the next, indiscriminate of rank, race or gender. Like any contagious disease, when its proportions became epidemic within the given population, measures were taken to eradicate or at least reduce its influence; a few scapegoats were found and hung out to dry while the others went more deeply underground.

  Throughout the course of his twenty-odd years on the force, Lou Boldt had carefully avoided and had never succumbed to even a hint of impropriety, which occasionally amounted to a full-time job. He stood sentry at the gate, alert and watchful. He would not willingly rat out his fellow officer to Internal Investigations; likewise, he would not tolerate compromised police work. He purposely avoided any social contact with individuals known, or even suspected, to have ties to organized crime including certain politicians and even a few of his own superiors at SPD. If even a whiff of a rumor surfaced, Boldt mentally added the name to his list.

  Professionally, he could not afford such luxury. Crimes Against Persons-CAPers-implicitly required fundamental knowledge of, and contact with, elements of organized crime, whether the Chinese Triad, the Russian Mafia, or any of a number of gangs that in recent years had begun to pick up the crumbs-the street level crimes-left behind by their larger counterparts: drugs, prostitution, auto theft and small-time gaming. While the Russian mob controlled the brothels, the gangs ran the street hookers; while the Chinese Triad imported the coke and heroin by the boatload, the gangs distributed them. Each group had cut out its own niche, and for the most part, left the other alone. Only at the street level, the gang level, was this not the case- where hotheaded loyalties and romantic notions gave way to the occasional street war leaving teenagers and twenty-five-year-olds dead in the streets.

  To receive a request for a meeting with any person known to have association with such organizations could mean the kiss of death-an either/or offer that might include a threat to one’s family or, to one’s life, profession or aspirations. There were few police officers who could not be reached given the appropriate pressure point. Boldt knew that of all his possible vulnerabilities, his children presented the biggest target for such people. He would never accept money, nor improved station, but if the health and welfare of Miles and Sarah were brought into play, he knew he would be faced with one of two choices-strike back, or roll over. Each cop knew his own vulnerabilities; Boldt, whose daughter had once been threatened, guarded his carefully.

  A cop’s home number was never given out, never published in the phone books. Some lied to neighbors about their profession both to protect their families and to avoid being called into petty disagreements. The game of dodging compromise, of avoiding corruption, was never-ending and required great vigilance on the part of any police officer, Boldt included. When the call came from Mama Lu, he briefly gave pause. It was the day he had feared most of his professional career.

  LaMoia was the messenger. They had moved to the fifth floor’s coffee lounge. Boldt shut the doors and prepared himself a cup of tea.

  ‘‘So there’s this girl I went out with for a while name of Peggy Wan.’’

  ‘‘Woman,’’ Boldt corrected. ‘‘Let’s hope so anyway.’’

  ‘‘We hit if off pretty great. Not that it lasted.’’

  ‘‘Not that that’s news,’’ Boldt said.

  ‘‘But we stayed friends. Are you interested in this?’’ LaMoia asked.

  ‘‘If it’s going somewhere. If it’s the Further Adventures of. . I can do without it this morning. Your trail is littered with Peggy Wans, John. For your sake I hope someone comes along who actually means something to you.’’

  ‘‘Just ’cause I’m altar-shy. . Gosh, Sarge, I didn’t know you cared.’’

  Boldt hesitated a moment too long to keep things on a joking level. ‘‘Yes,’’ he said, ‘‘I do care.’’

  LaMoia stiffened while his smile softened and his eyes found a lint ball in the far corner of the room. His bottom lip twitched beneath

  his mustache.

  Boldt said, ‘‘So tell me about Peggy Wan.’’

  LaMoia took a second longer to recover, to regain the boyish enthusiasm and cocky independence that were his trademarks. ‘‘So Peggy is evidently the niece of Mama Lu-although Asians throw around this aunt and uncle business a little too often, if you know what I mean. And so maybe that explains why Peggy-God bless her silky smooth tush-went the way of other LaMoia conquests. A little too tight around the collar, you know what I mean. I hang with that piece of work and pretty soon I’m going to be doing the dance with Mama Lu herself-am I right? And then I’m jammed but good.’’

  ‘‘So Peggy’s name gets a line through it in Seattle’s most famous black book.’’

  ‘‘But evidently she does reciprocate the favor-’’

  ‘‘The legend lives on,’’ Boldt said.

  ‘‘-on account I hear from Peggy last night. She calls my crib, right? Which means she lifted my number off the home phone because I never gave it to her.’’

  ‘‘Bedside phone, no doubt.’’

  ‘‘And what does she
want but to arrange a meet between you and her aunt?’’

  ‘‘Me?’’

  ‘‘That’s what I said to her.’’

  ‘‘Mama Lu?’’

  ‘‘Exactly.’’

  ‘‘Oh, shit,’’ the man cursed uncharacteristically. ‘‘Why me?’’ Boldt protested.

  ‘‘I can’t answer that. I imagine she can, and will.’’

  ‘‘You’re coming with me.’’

  ‘‘I wasn’t invited.’’

  ‘‘Doesn’t matter. Two of us in the room, it changes the approach.’’ Boldt reconsidered. ‘‘Only if you’re all right with it. No arm twisting here, John. I don’t want to put you into something. . you know.’’

  ‘‘Yeah, I do know. But I’m cool with it. You want me to hang with you, I’ll hang.’’

  ‘‘We may both hang,’’ Boldt warned ominously.

  Two sinewy, lithe men stood outside the Korean grocery smoking non-filters that smelled like burning tires. Two men going nowhere. They both wore nylon gym pants that whistled as they moved to follow LaMoia and Boldt through the store’s screen door. A seagull complained loudly, flying overhead, trapped by the buildings. The International District occupied a forty-block area south of the downtown core and just north of the industrial wastelands that gave way to Boeing Field. Of unremarkable architecture and few tax dollars, the District’s only color was its energetic people.

  ‘‘I’m LaMoia,’’ the sergeant said, turning to greet the welcoming committee. ‘‘This is Boldt. She’s expecting us.’’

  The men’s faces were placid and unresponsive until one of them nodded, his neck so stiff that the gesture ended up more of a bow.

  Boldt bowed back to the man.

  LaMoia mumbled, ‘‘That’s only for the Japanese, Sarge. These two are Chinese.’’

  The grocery smelled of ginger and hot oil. Its floor plan violated the fire code with not a spare inch of unused space: diapers and paper products kissing the century-old tin ceiling where a dust-encrusted paddle fan spun slowly, trailing broken lengths of spider web like bunting.