Middle Of Nowhere

C H A P T E R

35

The woman believed to be connected to Bryce Abbott Flek was identified through her fingerprints by Colorado's BCI as Courtney Samway. The mug shot came back as a cream-skinned sixteen-year-old with a pretty face and a home haircut that made her into a tomboy vixen with a curiously rebellious expression.

Samway's Colorado parole officer had required her to register in Seattle upon her fulfillment of obligations and her departure from the Colorado corrections system. Samway had, in fact, contacted the Washington State Parole Board upon her arrival, as required, meaning that a tiny, insignificant computer file in the vastness of the endless mainframes that constituted law enforcement's efforts to track thousands of offending juvenile felons provided an address of residence for the recently released teen.

"She kicked from Colorado two months ago," Boldt told Bobbie Gaynes, who rode shotgun in Boldt's brandnew Crown Vic. Nearing midnight, the city still teemed with activity. Ten years earlier it would have been dead this late at night. The car replaced his Chevy Cavalier. He'd earned the Crown Vic apparently for his loyalty throughout the Flu. The Chief was handing out perks. Boldt wasn't complaining. The Crown Vic was twice the car and even came with a remote device that locked and unlocked the door or popped the trunk from thirty yards. "Mug shot is two years old."

Gaynes said, "She's a punk slut. You can see it in her eyes. Age doesn't matter."

Boldt said, "She registered with a parole officer here, claiming the move was to support a job offer."

"She turned eighteen last month," Gaynes said, reading from the woman's jacket—her record having been forwarded by Colorado's BCI. "The alleged job is with a fish processor—probably someone Flek bought off to write her a letter of employment. The address is not the same as the one her P.O. provided. Not that it matters. I'm betting this address is smoke. You want five on that?"

"Have I ever taken one of your bets?" Boldt asked, checking the rearview mirror to ensure that the radio car was following as planned. "The address is good," he guessed. "She registered with the parole board. That tells me she didn't like serving time—she doesn't want to go back there. She played by the rules laid out for her in Colorado. The address will be good. Maybe I should take that five," he contemplated.

"Yeah, right." Gaynes laughed. "The day you take a bet, L.T., I'm having your head examined."

* * *

The brick structure had been built fifty years earlier at a time when this south part of the city had prospered from timber and fishing. Time had not been kind to it. The street was paved in wet, matted trash. The carcasses of vehicles resting on rusted rims lay alongside broken glass and spent syringes littering the alleys like discarded cigarette butts. It was not somewhere to take a stroll.

They had waited impatiently to conduct a midnight raid. A daytime operation in this neighborhood was worthless: Rats only returned to the nest at night. Boldt used only secure frequencies—believing Flek might be monitoring the normal channels. If this was in fact Samway's apartment, with Flek's roost already raided, it seemed possible, even likely, he might be inside.

On command, the cruiser behind him turned up the side alley. He would allow his team a minute or two to take positions. According to city fire records for the once commercial building, three possible exits offered egress. At each of the three, a uniform would be waiting for anyone beating a hasty retreat—anyone who managed to get past Boldt and Gaynes. With Gaynes at his side, Boldt knew not many would slip past.

Once inside the wet and cold building, loud rock and roll from a downstairs apartment obscured Boldt's hearing. He relied on his sensitive ears the way a bloodhound depended on its nose, and he found the overpowering music frustrating and troublesome.

Gaynes gestured through a series of hand signals indicating that she would take lead on the climb up the stairs. Boldt's chest knotted and his skin prickled with sweat. A month earlier he would have had Special Ops as his advance team, but the Flu had taken its toll. In the company of one other detective—albeit a bulldog in the form of a poodle—he prepared to take on some animal who had cracked one officer's neck and rabbitpunched another into the hospital.

Weapons drawn, he and Gaynes worked up the staircase as if an adversary had already spotted them, Gaynes in the lead, Boldt trying to cover her both top and bottom, nerves rattled.

A sudden movement behind and below. Boldt swiveled silently to see a rail-thin junkie cross the hall in a T-shirt and bare feet, moving between neighboring rooms. Boldt signaled Gaynes to continue.

The staircase smelled strongly of cats. Crushed candy wrappers, spent Lotto tickets, and cigarette butts littered the edges of each step. They reached the first landing. It smelled of pizza. The thumping of the downstairs music faded behind them. Boldt heard at least two televisions and a considerable amount of muted talking.

They turned right at the top of the stairs, Bobbie Gaynes looking stressed and tension ridden, her movements sharp and angular. They passed three closed doors before Gaynes raised her hand to stop them. She pointed across the hall to their target. Boldt signaled back an acknowledgment, and moved Gaynes to the side, her back to the wall immediately alongside the door.

His gun aimed to the side and down to the floor, Boldt tried the doorknob and found the door locked. He rapped his knuckles loudly against the wood, stepped back and waited. When nothing happened, Gaynes reached around and pounded on the door.

"Police!" she announced. "Open this door!"

Shock waves reverberated down the hall: police! Through the closed doors behind them, they heard much shuffling, but the door before them remained quiet.

Boldt reared back onto one leg and hammered on the door, kicking it hard, most of his weight behind the blow. His second attempt broke the door loose from the jamb. The door crashed loudly into the wall as it swung open.

"Police!" he repeated, eyes darting to Gaynes, who confirmed she was ready. Boldt stepped inside and snugged his back against the near wall. Gaynes flowed in behind him, moving to the center of the small room. Boldt took the galley kitchen to her right.

"Clear!" he announced.

Gaynes rushed the tiny bedroom to the left. "Clear," she echoed.

They lowered their guns, though kept them at the ready. Boldt shut the door as best as possible. "Need a pair?" he asked, indicating the latex gloves in his hand.

"All set." She retrieved a pair from her pocket.

They moved through the small area fluidly, two investigators accustomed to their work. The warrant called for a plain-sight search for any materials relating to the thefts, but Gaynes conveniently found drawers and cabinets surprisingly left open to where she could search them. Boldt made sure his back was turned.

"Milk is dated next week," he announced. "So she's been living here recently." He wondered if kicking the apartment had been the right thing the do. They could have placed it under long-term surveillance, but Boldt's guess was that if Samway was hooked up to the Flek brothers, then she'd already been advised to avoid her own digs.

"Couple of roaches left in the ashtray," Gaynes announced. "We could get her on that if we had to. She's on a year's probation following her parole."

"We want her," Boldt reminded. He would worry about the technicalities later.

"Here we go," Gaynes announced from the bedroom.

Boldt approached her voice, but with his back to it, his attention mostly on the apartment's broken door. He glanced to his right—an unmade bed; cigarette butts piled high in an ashtray. Facing the bed was a 37inch Trinitron with a cable box on top. He said, "We should have checked the cable company. Maybe we'd have found her or Flek's name there."

"Not that. This," Gaynes said, swinging the bathroom door open further. Bathing suit thongs and bikini tops the size of corn chips.

"I guess she likes the pool?" Boldt said, the image not fitting with his vision of Courtney Samway.

"This here is her work uniform," Gaynes corrected. "She's stripping, L.T. We're looking for matchbooks, coasters—"

"Check stubs, T-shirts—" he interrupted. "Something with the name of the club on it," he said.

Boldt walked through the small bedroom, carefully studying the place. He reached the side of the bed and a mound of cigarette butts in a plastic ashtray. He dumped the butts onto the floor without a second thought. His gloved fingers wiped away the ash and tobacco smudges, cleaning the bottom of the ashtray. He held it up then for Gaynes to read from across the small room.

"Mike's Pleasure Palace," he said.

"Table for two," Gaynes replied. "I shouldn't admit it, but I love strip joints."

* * *

"I like the female body," Gaynes told him from the Crown Vic's shotgun seat. "You guys fantasize about jumping their bones, but I fantasize about looking like that. They're gorgeous, these girls. On top of it they can really move. And they choose to be there, so don't give me that shit about it being exploitive. They rock their hips and some asshole stuffs a twenty into their Gstring, thinking he's some kind of big shot, when she's gonna take that thing off regardless. He's gonna pay her another twenty. And then she goes backstage and drinks for free and awaits her next performance."

"And the lap dancing?" Boldt asked.

"Hey, most of that is voluntary. Extra credit work. Sometimes not, sure. Sometimes management demands it. But it's a power trip for the girls—it's gotta be. Drag your crotch down some guy's thigh and cream him in his pants. Fifty bucks for five minutes' work? There's no kissing, no fluids exchanged. No harm, no foul."

"I'm hearing this from a woman."

"A woman who likes to watch other women," she reminded him. "Not touch, despite what they say about me. Not woman on woman—nothing like that. But I appreciate the SI swimsuit edition as much as any of you. The boys can't understand a woman appreciating the female body—but they can watch one guy pound another guy on the scrimmage line every Sunday—so that's their problem, not mine. I'd never been to strip joints until the guys from our squad dragged me in one time. And them thinking they would gross me out. You should have seen them! Have I ever gone down on a woman? No. Do I want to? No. Disgusting! Do I like marble nudes? You bet. Nude dancers? Why not?"

"I think I have more information than I need," Boldt said.

"If I had a body like that, I might show it off for a few bucks. I'm built like a truck. So what can I do about it?"

"You are not!" Boldt objected. "You're a good-looking woman."

"That's horse shit, L.T."

"Lacey Delgato is one thing." He hesitated, "I'm not having this conversation," he said vehemently.

After a long silence, Gaynes said under her breath, "Thank you for saying that, L.T. You're a peach."

"So I'll make you a deal," he said.

"Shoot."

"I'll handle the bouncer and the bartender if you'll do the talking with the ladies." He checked to make sure a cruiser was following, as ordered. "If she's here, it's straight into the radio car for a ride downtown. I want her scared."

"They're girls, L.T." Correcting him. "Bodies as hard as that; they just don't last all that long."

Upon entering Mike's Pleasure Palace, Boldt shouted to be heard above Don Henley's grinding rock and roll.

"These girls don't often use their real names, even with the help," Gaynes said, pulling him down to hear. "Use the mug shot from BCI."

"Unnecessary," Boldt said, pointing to the stage where pulsing blue light welcomed the next dancer to the platform. Wearing a translucent wet T-shirt and an equally showy, wet white cotton thong, the relatively small-chested Courtney Samway strutted out onto stage, her platinum blond hair showing slightly from beneath a black wig. There was no mistaking her. She didn't have the meaty frame of a stripper, and the crowd of men seemed to be assessing her until she began to move to the music, at which point all eyes took to the stage.

Boldt scanned the crowd for Flek. "You see him?"

"No," Gaynes replied. "But I'm thinking we might want to hang for a while in case he shows. We approach her too soon we could scare him off."

"I'm not hanging around, if that's what you're sug gesting," Boldt said. "I want her downtown. I want some answers."

She slithered like a snake, wrapping herself around her own frame suggestively. The T-shirt came off somewhere in the process, followed a moment later by the thong. Boldt told himself he wouldn't have watched if he hadn't been required to, but in truth there wasn't a male not watching. She didn't have a centerfold body, but she was shapely enough.

"Hair coloring's a match," Boldt said, still looking.

"Thing looks like a sheepskin rug," Gaynes said. " 'Bout as natural-looking as one of those car seat covers."

"You take the dressing room," Boldt advised Gaynes. "I'll stay out here." He reminded her: "Radio car's out front." Probably hadn't been helping win Mike any customers.

Gaynes never met Samway face to face that night. Following her dance, the woman slipped into a robe and stepped off out front, summoned for a lap dance. Boldt cut the private performance short. Two minutes later Samway was escorted to the backseat of the police cruiser and was headed downtown to Public Safety.

* * *

Samway occupied the chair inside the interrogation room in her satin robe. Chewing gum kept her jaw pumping. Deputy Prosecuting Attorney Delgato could see this all for herself, since Boldt had summoned her to the 1 A.M. interrogation. The witness had requested a public defender despite the fact she was only in for questioning. Where a public defender appeared, prosecuting attorneys followed; hence Delgato. Daphne too had been rousted. Gaynes watched from the other side of the room's one-way glass with Delgato. Boldt's ATeam. All but LaMoia. It hurt Boldt to think about him laid up in the hospital.

"You talk to us now before your court-appointed attorney arrives," Daphne told the young woman, "and the lieutenant here forgets about the probation violation of associating with known felons and we forego the urine test to see if you've been smoking pot."

"I'm sure," she said.

"You want to hear it from a deputy prosecuting attorney?" Daphne asked. "I give the signal and she's in here laying it out for you."

"Trust me," Boldt intervened from the chair next to Daphne. "All we want is a little frank discussion about your roommate."

"He saw you on the news at that Denver hotel," she said ominously while staring at Boldt.

"Meaning?" Daphne asked.

Samway said, "Listen, who's talking to you? I've never seen you before. But him?" She eyed Boldt.

Boldt wanted Courtney Samway the focus of the discussion, not the other way around. He tried to signal Daphne, but failed.

Speaking directly to Boldt, Samway said venomously, "You're the one shut down the program. The one got Davie killed. Abby said you're a dead man. I heard him say it. I don't need to talk to you—I'm talking to a dead man."

Daphne grew several inches as her spine stiffened. Boldt reached out and gently touched her forearm.

He said, "Let's start there, then. Abby was. . . . You and Abby were watching the news on television. You saw me. Here in Seattle?"

She shied, smelling the trap he laid for her. "I'm not saying nothing."

"You see the problem?" Boldt asked her, trying to keep her mind engaged and slightly off her game. "If it isn't us who catches up to Abby to speak with him . . . let's say it's Denver, or Reno or Portland, for that matter. All that the police there see is the sheet, the warrant, the Be On Lookout, the All Points—a guy wanted for questioning in regard to the assault of police officers. You see how that looks to a cop? Like trouble. Big trouble. Serious trouble. The kind of trouble where you shoot first and ask questions later, because this guy is on the sheet for doing cops. Forget about me. Do I look dead to you? It's Abby—Bryce Abbott Flek—you need to be concerned with here. He's the one in danger. And honestly? You're his only hope right now."

"Bullshit."

"It's not either. It's the God-given truth. Matthews and I want him alive. We need him alive because we're not so convinced what his role is in any of this. We know David called him from Etheredge. So what? Where's the crime? We need to talk to him, no matter what he believes my role was in his brother's murder. I wasn't the one who beat David to death, Courtney. I'm not going to be the next guy lying on a slab. You and Abby watched the news," he said, "so you know we have a hell of a lot of young officers on the job. Maybe not the best trained at the moment. One of those guys sees Abby out on the street. What do you think's going to happen? And how are you going to feel when you look back and see you could have prevented it?"

"Bullshit," she said, a little more tentatively this time.

"Where's he gone, Courtney?" Boldt asked.

Daphne said, "You want to be the one who could have helped him, but didn't?"

The witness glanced back and forth between her two interrogators, both of whom saw opportunity. Courtney Samway would talk, if pressured correctly.

Boldt said, "We've confiscated his van, so what's he driving?"

Daphne added, "We've seen the apartment. Did you know that? Not your apartment—we got it too—I'm talking the rented room in Ballard. So where does Abby have left to go? And how does he get there? He had better go somewhere, because if he's out on the streets . . . the buses . . . the ferries . . . well, these young officers are out on the street as well. You see where that leaves him, Courtney?"

Boldt took a wild stab. "Where's it leave you, Courtney? Where's it leave you once he knows you've been brought in for questioning? No matter what you tell him, the first time he stumbles upon a cop, Abby's go ing to think you set him up. You tell me: Where does it leave you?"

Daphne flashed a look at Boldt that suggested he might be stepping on her psychologist toes. She didn't need him playing psychologist any more than he needed her playing detective.

"I want a lawyer," Courtney said now, her lips wet and trembling.

"One has been appointed," Boldt said, "and is on the way over here. Count on it."

"I want my lawyer now!" Courtney repeated, this time with more of an edge.

"You don't have to talk to us, if you don't want to," Daphne reminded, "but it might be in your best interest. Either way, we can't leave you alone right now, so you're stuck with us."

"You don't know him," she mumbled, the cracks widening.

"Why don't you tell us," Daphne suggested.

"There's like a switch in him, you know? I've never seen anything like it. When Davie died—"

Just then, her young attorney burst into the interrogation room, a blur of briefcase and words. "Violation of rights! Protecting my client!"

Boldt had heard it all too many times before. "We'll give you five minutes," he announced.

Courtney Samway looked over at Daphne, and with a frightened-sounding voice she whispered, "Snookers, the bar. He hangs there."