Middle Of Nowhere

CHAPTER 34

Meeting in the fifth-floor conference room with a deputy prosecuting attorney named Lacey Delgato, a woman with whom he'd worked a dozen other cases, some successfully, some not, Boldt struggled to find a way to bring David Ansel Flek to the table as a witness. The Prosecuting Attorney's office was crucial to his effort.

Delgato's unflattering nickname, "The Beak," was a result of her oversized nose. With a low center of gravity, and a voice that could etch glass, Lacey Delgato surprised anyone who made the mistake of judging her by her appearance. To Boldt, she represented the best and the brightest of the up-and-coming trial attorneys in the PA's office. Her loud mouth, and the fact that she wasn't afraid to jump in with locker room vocabulary, turned off some people, but not Boldt; for anyone who worked with LaMoia and Gaynes, all else was tame.

Into their second hour of discussion of the brothers Flek, Delgato and Boldt had yet to solidify a legal strategy that might force the incarcerated David Ansel Flek to open up and provide leads to help police locate his older brother. With this the most obvious and direct way to end the case, Boldt pressed on relentlessly.

"Maybe we should be looking at the girlfriend," Delgato suggested.

"We've got some pubic hairs and a box of Tampax," Boldt reminded. "That's a pretty wide-open field."

"And some lifts," Delgato reminded, indicating SID's record of the fingerprints developed inside Flek's boarding room.

Boldt explained, "Lofgrin ran them through ALPS"- the state's automated latent print system used to analyze and identify latent fingerprints-"and struck out. We've posted them on the Bureau's database."

"And if he brought her from Colorado with him?" Delgato asked.

The missed opportunity stabbed Boldt in the center of his chest. Such a simple idea, and he had overlooked it for the better part of the last eighteen hours. "Damn," he mumbled.

"Just an idea," Delgato said in a doubtful tone of voice that implied he had screwed up.

Boldt placed a call down to the lab. The unidentified fingerprints lifted from Flek's apartment would be posted over the Internet to Colorado's Bureau of Criminal Identification-CBCI-in the next few minutes.

"That's why they pay me the big bucks," Delgato said once Boldt was off the phone.

"You might be the better cop of the two of us," a somewhat defeated Boldt suggested.

"A woman looks at the relationship between the principals. A guy looks at the evidence. That's the only difference. It's what makes you and Matthews such a good team. You're lucky to have her." Boldt didn't touch that. He thought of her too often. That kiss had still not left his lips, and he knew that wasn't right.

Delgato continued, "The whole time we're sitting here, I'm looking over this SID report-the pubic hair the lab ID'd as being bleached blond-and I'm thinking, what kind of babe dyes her privates? You know? And I'm thinking stripper. Sure it could be an older woman who's trying to dye a few years off the truth by taking the gray out of anywhere it shows. But someone hanging with a burglar? More likely young and obedient-black leather pants and a halter top. A real gum chewer. Flek says, 'I want you a blond all over,' and little Miss Junior Mint is off to the pharmacy for some Nice 'n Easy. Which just about describes her perfectly. And if she is who I think she is, then she's not so different from Flek. Some drug charges, some soliciting. Maybe some fraud. Maybe even armed robbery, who knows? Maybe she drives for him. A lookout? Maybe she's giving him a hum job before the hit for good luck. Maybe she knows nothing about his game. But I like her for a juvie sheet. She has that feel about her. She's the kind that smiles for the mug shots. You know the type."

"All that from dyed pubic hair? I'm glad you're on our side," Boldt said. "If you were a PD, I'd retire."

"You'll never retire," she fired back. "And I'll never be a public defender. We both hate the bad guys too much, you know?"

"Yeah, I know," Boldt agreed.

A sharp knock on the door drew their attention. A woman civilian from the secretary pool whom Boldt had only met that same morning. "Lieutenant," she said, "call for you, line one. They said it's urgent, or I wouldn't have-"

Boldt interrupted, thanking her, and scooted his rolling chair over to a phone. "Boldt," he announced, into the receiver. As he listened to the man's voice on the other end of the call, his shoulders slumped, his head fell forward and his right hand clenched so tightly into a fist that his fingers turned white and ghostly. He hung up the phone.

"Lieutenant?" a concerned Delgato asked in her strident voice.

Boldt's voice caught. He cleared his throat and tried again. "We're going to need another game plan," he warned her. "Another angle. Something-" He finally looked up at her, stealing her breath away.

"Lieutenant?" she repeated, a little more desperately.

"Seems the inmates didn't like having the private commerce program shut down. Probably enjoyed the extra income, not to mention the access to information. Can you imagine how many games were being run out of that facility?"

"Lieutenant, what the hell's going on?" she demanded.

"The call was from Jefferson County Corrections. David Flek was found beaten to death in the showers. They would have called us sooner, but it took them a while to identify the body."

Delgato frowned. "Luck of the draw."

"We're screwed," Boldt said.