The Art of Deception

"Yes. Exactly. Jackson Pollock this isn't." Before Boldt could ask, Lofgrin answered. "This was also washed, but in a heavy detergent. No way to type it, no chance for DNA. Could be the guy butchered an elk."

"Or a couple missing women," Boldt said.

Lofgrin said, "He wears size ten-and-a-half shoes. About six feet tall. Hair color brown, but it's dyed-from a sandy blond. He's on a strong dose of doxycycline."

Lofgrin was probably not describing Ferrell Walker, Boldt realized. Dyed hair? Nathan Prair, perhaps-although that also felt like a stretch.

"Are you telling me we found a 'script bottle down there? Are you holding out on me, Bernie? Do you happen to have a name from that prescription?"

"No prescription, no bottle, either. His hair, the dyed hair, the predominant hair sample found down there in that room," Lofgrin answered, "revealed the doxycycline. You are what you ingest. Most of it goes into your hair."

"He's fighting an infection," Boldt said. The use of hair coloring bothered the detective in him. Women, sure. But a man using hair coloring suggested more than vanity to a cop-if the occupant of that room had changed his looks, the possibility existed that he'd done so in an effort to outrun a criminal record. Boldt's pen wrote down: Ex-con? Escapee?

"Are we done here?" Boldt asked, anxious to work the evidence.

"What do you think?" It was Lofgrin's way to hold some cherry for the end of such prelims. The hair coloring and doxycycline had seemed the punctuation mark to Boldt-the exclamation point-but the lack of Lofgrin's proud-as-a-peacock, I'm-smarter-than-you superior attitude had left him thinking there might be more.

"Out in the hallways as we were looking for his escape route we came across some recent bus ticket stubs."

"I entered through the bus tunnel emergency route, Bernie. We already know he had access." Boldt added, "And you knew that, too, because it's how your guys got in there, so what's going on?" Lofgrin appreciated being challenged, or Boldt wouldn't have been so aggressive. Friendships within the department were both a curse and a blessing.

Lofgrin dug around on the lab bench and produced an evidence bag that contained a rectangular piece of paper-a receipt, or stub. "ATM receipt. SeaT el Boldt knew that SeaT el was the bank on the corner, the basement of which he'd toured with the maintenance man. "You're interested in the date."

Boldt snatched the bag from Lofgrin, his chest tight. He pressed the plastic of the bag against the receipt, trying to read the date. He fumbled and dropped the bag. Lofgrin spoke as Boldt collected the bag off the floor. "One of my guys-Michael Yei-his sister's a teller at SeaT el over in Capitol Hill. The account comes back a sixty-year-old woman named Veronica Shepherd. I doubt seriously Ms. Shepherd is living below Third Avenue."

Boldt had the bag in hand again. He pressed, and the date printed on the receipt came into focus. It was a date emblazoned in Boldt's memory, the date Susan Hebringer had gone missing. Boldt experienced both a pang of hurt and one of exhilaration simultaneously.

"Cash machines," Boldt said hoarsely, his voice choked with emotion. He'd found the connection between the tourists who'd been peeped and the two missing women. "The common denominator is cash machines."

He was out the door before he had a chance to witness Lofgrin's self-satisfied grin.

Boldt double-parked the department-issue Crown Vie, its emergency flashers going, on the steep incline outside SeaT el He approached the corner entrance to the bank at a run, but stopped abruptly at sight of the small lighted sign: ATM. Any investigator worth his salt questioned himself when the facts became known. You wondered why and how something so obvious now had seemed so insignificant then, how the brain could overlook something so important, so glaring.

It was a small glassed-in room-a glorified booth-that fronted Columbia Street and contained two ATM machines side by side, a wall clock, and a small blue shelf with pens attached to chains. Mounted to the doorjamb, an electronic credit card reader provided restricted access for the sake of security, admitting only legitimate cardholders.

Boldt pressed his face to the glass, cupping his eyes. Littered across the floor at the foot of both machines he saw several paper receipts, their size and shape now familiar to him.

Of all things, he didn't own an ATM card-he still cashed checks at the teller window-and therefore couldn't gain access.

He caused a brief moment of alarm inside the bank as he pushed to the front of a small line, polite but determined to gain admittance to that room. Now that he'd seen the room, he could also picture Susan Hebringer inside it, her purse slung over her arm, her bank card slipping into a slot on one of the two machines.

Already planning his next move, Boldt intended to pull whatever favors necessary to gain immediate access to Hebringer's and Randolf s bank records. It seemed inconceivable to him that both women might have used their ATM cards on the dates they disappeared without him knowing about it. He felt like a burst dam, unable to contain himself, spilling out a flood of anger and confusion. His people had run the financials on both victim she knew this absolutely. So where had the mistake been? How could they have missed this?

A nervous bank officer swiped a card through the outdoor reader. Boldt entered a warm room that smelled bitter. Initially he dismissed the bank officer but then quickly changed his mind and asked him to stand outside and prevent anyone from coming in and disturbing him.

Boldt then studied the room, including the two wall-mounted cash machines, their small screens glowing with a welcome message.

He noted the alarmed exit door in the corner, leading into the building-a fire code requirement. He collected himself, slowing his breathing, trying to get beyond the emotion of the moment. He focused on those two machines and tried to put Susan Hebringer into this room. The imagined scene then played before his eyes, black-and-white and jittery. He saw her from the back, dressed in the clothes that she'd been described wearing by both her husband and coworkers on the day of her disappearance.

He saw her remove her ATM card from her purse, look up as she heard a man come through that door through which she herself had just entered. Would she have said hello? He thought not. She'd gone about her business.

But who? A street punk wanting the cash? A well-dressed man in a suit-someone she'd never suspect of the foul play that was to come? A bank officer? A deputy sheriff?

He took a step closer to the machines but stopped as he felt something stuck to the bottom of his shoe. He picked the receipt off his shoe sole, knowing then how one could find its way into the Underground, and immediately lifted his eyes to the alarmed exit door.

He recalled the steel exit door in the hallway on his earlier tour. "It sounds an alarm," the maintenance man had warned. He got the bank officer to open it for him.

"Let me guess," Boldt said as the man searched a cluttered key ring for the proper key, "you-bank officers, that is-and your security guards both have keys to these alarmed doors. Who else? Housecleaning?"

"No." The man cowered slightly, swinging the door open for Boldt. It led to the hallway, as expected.

"Maintenance?" Boldt asked. Another logic jump struck him that should have come earlier: the oxygen tanks, the maintenance man's horrible wheezing. Boldt remembered the name because Sarah had a friend with a similar last name: Vanderhorst.

His own internal alarm was going now. He saw a listless Hebringer being dragged through this same door. Leaning over her, Vanderhorst wore a set of coveralls, soon to be bloodied.

"Yes, maintenance too," the man confirmed.

Boldt entered the hallway and looked right, recalling the stairs that led down into the bank's basement. The maintenance man, Vanderhorst, had told him the exit door went out to the street; he had failed to mention the ATM machines on the way out. Vanderhorst had played dumb about the existence of access to the Underground.

Dyed hair? A doxycycline prescription for his clogged lungs.

"I'm declaring this a crime scene," Boldt informed a surprised bank officer. "Stand back, and keep your hands in your pockets."

"Lieu, shouldn't we be watching the Greyhound station or something?"

Bobbie Gaynes occupied the Crown Vie's passenger seat.

Boldt said, "We are watching the bus, and the ferries, and the trains, and the northern border crossing with Canada. Rental car agencies clear down to Tacoma have a fax of his bank ID." The last few hours had been his busiest in recent memory. He felt incredibly good. "What's the problem, Bobbie?"

"But why here!" she asked, still frustrated with him. "Van derhorst called in sick today. That should tell us something, right? He split. We're wasting time here."

The Crown Vie pointed downhill and away from the corner office building occupied by the SeaT el Bank. Boldt had both the rearview and driver door mirrors aimed with a view of the corner-one set for his sitting height, the other for slouching.

Boldt's silence bothered her. "So explain to me what good it is watching the bank?"

"It closes for the weekend in ten minutes."

"And by my figuring that means he's another ten minutes farther away."

"Why do people kill, Bobbie?"

She sighed, letting him know she wasn't up to his quizzes, his schooling her. It grew old after awhile. "For love and money." She made her voice sound like a school kid reciting her math tables. "For country and revenge," she added into the mix. Outright annoyed now, she added, "For the smell of blood, or the scent of a perfume, or because God or their dog told them to and they forgot to take their pill that day."

"We got lucky is all," Boldt said. "Sometimes you get lucky."

"Lucky?" she asked, exasperated. "He's halfway to Miami, or Vegas, or Tijuana by now. How is that lucky?"

A crackle came over both Boldt's dash-mounted police radio and the handheld resting in his lap. A male voice said calmly, "We have joy. Wildhorse is headed out the north stairs of the bus station."

"No fucking way," Gaynes mumbled. "Wildhorse is ... ?"

"I only had a minute to come up with a handle."

"Vanderhorst is Wildhorse," she said.

"Too obvious?" he asked, peering intently out the windshield now.

She said, "You're telling me you put six cruisers and, including us, ten plainclothes dicks out on the streets, and you were counting on luck?"

"The first part of that luck is that we discovered that lair yesterday, on a Thursday. The second, and much more important half, is that today, Friday, happens to be SeaT el biweekly payday."

"Payday," she whispered, almost worshiping him now.

"Who's going to pass up a two-week paycheck? He wasn't about to quit. I knew he'd be back when they told me he'd called in sick this morning. I mean, why bother otherwise?"

"His four-one-one?"

"All invented. No such address. No such phone. The security firm is going to fry: If they ran a background check, it was pitiful."

"Typical," she said. "Big Mac's inside?"

"Mackenzie's posing as a customer. We had to play it that way. Vanderhorst knows the layout, knows the normal personnel, including security and the tellers. We add someone to that mix and he'll sniff it out."

"So-"

But Boldt interrupted. "Heads up!"

Boldt had his own image of Per Vanderhorst, both from the tour of the bank basement and from the man's security ID photo. Neither matched up perfectly well with the lean, lanky, unhealthy silhouette of the man reflected in the mirror.

Gaynes asked, "Do we have the confirm yet on the cash cards?"

Never taking his eyes off the approaching suspect, Boldt said, "We now know that neither Hebringer nor Randolf received any cash from those machines. What we're trying to determine is whether or not either of their cards ever logged on for the two days in question."

"They can do that?" she asked.

"Supposedly any attempt, even a canceled session, registers with the system."

"He nabbed them before they ever got their money," she suggested.

"Who's going to think anything of some guy in blue coveralls wearing a security tag on his chest pocket? He's sweeping up the room. So what? They use their card to enter, turn toward one of the machines, and take his broomstick to the back of the head. He's got them through that emergency exit door before they're even half conscious."

"But it's a glass room, Lieu. It's a well-lit glass room."

"Guys like Vanderhorst, they thrive on that moment. Just ask Matthews. For those few seconds he's dragging the body toward the door, he's as high as he's ever been."

"You creep me out sometimes, Lieu."

"No, not me, Bobbie. It's them." Boldt motioned her down, and slouched himself.

She scootched down and reached for her door handle. "We grab him on the way out, or back up Big Mac, or what?"

Vanderhorst paused ever so briefly in front of the bank and gave the block a once-over. He failed to make anything of the steam cleaning panel van across the street, the homeless guy with his guitar case open playing a horrible rendition of "This Land Is Your Land," or the tall black woman walking the German shepherd, who was himself a member of the K-9 unit.

"What the hell?" Gaynes asked, eyeing the mirror.

"He just convinced himself it's safe."

"That motherfucker's got some loose screws, Lieutenant."

Boldt hoisted the radio's handset. "All units: We play this exactly as I laid it out in Situation."

"Affirm," came the voice of Dennis Schaefer from the steam cleaning van. Schaefer, a Special Ops dispatcher on the force,

had the combined role of play-by-play sports broadcaster and team captain. It still left Boldt the coach.

He plugged an earpiece jack into the radio and filled his right ear with its ear bud.

The moment Vanderhorst entered the bank, Boldt and Gaynes headed directly to the ATM room, where Boldt swiped a borrowed card admitting them. He felt unusually warm as they passed through what was typically the alarmed exit door without a sound.

He'd been advised that it would take Vanderhorst between three and ten minutes to both retrieve and cash his paycheck at the teller window. Boldt was told he could count on the maintenance man standing at the counter for that length of time. Mackenzie, at a stand-up check writing desk, would alert dispatch if actual events inside the bank varied from this.

Boldt had assigned one uniformed officer to stand guard on the other side of the loose panel discovered in the bus tunnel's emergency exit. He had another four uniforms at possible street level exits suggested by Professor Babcock. He had radio cars forming a perimeter. The safe money said to pick up Vanderhorst the moment they had him confined. It was not like Boldt to play chances, but that's what he had in mind, and Gaynes had clearly sensed this. If it went south on him, the review board would rule that he'd allowed personal pressures to influence his decision making, to dictate actions taken, to cloud his judgment. They would be right, of course, though he'd vehemently deny it. Susan Hebringer ran this operation by proxy. Once Vanderhorst was officially under arrest, statistics said that their chances of ever finding his victims were greatly reduced. Sometimes perps rolled over in interrogation. But with nothing but circumstantial evidence-an ATM receipt and some compromised blood evidence, with no clear way yet to connect the ATM room to the Underground, and, more important, to show Vanderhorst's knowledge of that connection, Boldt could foresee Vanderhorst walking out of Public Safety a free man.

He and Gaynes reached the bank's second-floor offices winded. He knocked on a door marked PRIVATE and was welcomed a moment later by an attractive young woman in a smart gray suit and, beyond her, two men in private security garb manning a bank of five black-and-white television monitors, all of which were hardwired to hidden cameras.

Each screen offered a variety of looks at various parts of the bank, including the main lobby, the ATM anteroom, and the downstairs hallway through which they had just passed.

Gaynes asked Boldt, "Are you telling me we already have him on camera abducting these women?"

"Twenty-four-hour loops are reused after seventy-two hours," Boldt explained in whispered disappointment. "Long since erased."

"Yeah?" she said, gesturing toward the bank of monitors, "Well, we've got him now."

Vanderhorst stood at a teller window to the right of the large room, his back to the camera. Detective Frank Mackenzie maintained his position at the check writing counter, close to the main doors and the only exit to the streets.

Boldt's plan revolved around Mackenzie's ability to deliberately slip up while attempting to act the part of undercover cop. Mackenzie, a big tree trunk of a man with seventeen years on the force, had been selected for this role in part because of his legendary reputation as a thespian. In the summers, he took time off to join the Ashland, Oregon, theater troupe responsible for that city's Shakespeare festival. As a lieutenant and team leader, Boldt's responsibility was to make the most of his assets.

The screens lacked any sound, and so the commotion that followed on the bank's main floor played out on the one television screen silently, making the action all the more eerie and disconnected. Boldt listened to SPD dispatch in his right ear, mentally dialing it into the background.

"Can we hold on number four, please?" Boldt asked as he and Gaynes stepped closer.

She whispered, "I'd rather be in the movie, than watching it."

"Stay tuned, we may be yet," Boldt informed her. "First, we see how smart Vanderhorst is." He lifted the handheld, tripped the TALK button, and issued the order he knew he'd be held responsible for: "Okay, let's do it."

"Affirm." Dispatcher Dennis Schaefer's reply passed thinly through Boldt's earpiece. Mackenzie was ordered to "lay the bait." The rest of the team was put on high alert. Like most operations, after several hours of waiting, the real-time event was likely to play out in a matter of seconds or, at the most, a few minutes. For those few precious moments, disparate players, several city blocks away from each other, had to move, think, coordinate, and act in harmony. Anything less, and Vanderhorst was likely to escape. Denny Schaefer was the stage manager, but Lou Boldt was the playwright, and as such, he listened and watched carefully.

On the small screen Frank Mackenzie unplugged his earpiece from his radio and then fiddled with a knob, turning up the volume.

The message from dispatch: "Suspect is in the building," played over Boldt's radio at the same time it did Big Mac'sas planned. The message spilled into the bank lobby, turning heads.

This was it. Boldt leaned in and watched. Vanderhorst, along with everyone else in the lobby, overheard Mackenzie's radio. The suspect cocked his head slightly in that direction, but he did not overreact. His left hand pocketed the cash from his paycheck.

Mackenzie did a convincing job of playing the buffoon. He dropped the radio, turned the volume back down, and tried to look like nothing had happened. He then took a couple obvious steps toward the entrance, clearly planting himself to block the main doors. A colorful sign there advertised the benefits of home equity loans.

Vanderhorst abandoned the teller window and walked incredibly calmly, Boldt noted, toward the EMPLOYEES ONLY door that led into, the back hallway. But Vanderhorst stopped at that door, studying Mackenzie, who had his back turned.

Boldt spoke loudly into the crowded security room, "Open the door, Vanderhorst." On the screen, Vanderhorst continued to look like he was weighing his options. "Through that door! Now!"

Vanderhorst disobeyed, taking several steps toward Mackenzie and the bank's main entrance.

"We're losing him!" Boldt shouted into his handheld.

Denny Schaefer calmly instructed Mackenzie, "Phase two, Big Mac."

On the screen, Mackenzie spun on his heels, looked in the direction of Vanderhorst, and reached inside his sport jacket, revealing his holster and weapon.

Crack the whip. Vanderhorst turned, shoved a key into the side door, and hurried through.

"Okay!" an elated Boldt shouted much too loudly for the small room, "let's do it like we talked about."

The guards busied themselves throwing switches, and the monitors displayed new views: the back hall, the ATM room, the stairs to the basement, and several angles of the basement itself.

"Go ... go ... go!" Boldt shouted at the screen like an armchair quarterback. Into the radio's microphone he shouted, "More pressure, more pressure!" as Vanderhorst paused in the hallway outside the door that led into the ATM room. Boldt didn't want that door an option.

Dispatch barked another order, and although the monitors had no sound, Boldt knew that Mackenzie was now pounding on that hallway door. Vanderhorst reacted in a mechanical, nervous way, looking first in that direction and then taking off down the hall and into the stairs leading to the basement.

"Yes!" Boldt shouted excitedly. He grabbed Gaynes by the arm. "Get ready to run. You first. The basement."

"Copy," she said, moving toward the security room's door.

Behind them, the image of Vanderhorst moved one monitor to the next, as if he were jumping from screen to screen. As he reached the last, with the flip of a switch, the monitors displayed several different views of the basement.

Special Ops had added these cameras at Boldt's request.

Gaynes understood Boldt's plan then for the first time. "You're stinging him into showing us the way into the Underground," she said.

"We hope," he answered.

With that, as if instructed, Vanderhorst moved quickly across three of the screens and used a master switch to lower the elevator.

Boldt mumbled, "Not possible. I checked that elevator myself and-" But he interrupted himself as Vanderhorst boarded the elevator, stepped inside, and-after a brief but unexpected monitor glitch that left Vanderhorst off-camera momentarily keyed open a back panel on the elevator car intended for emergency evacuation.

"Oh, shit," Boldt barked, a police lieutenant who took pride in rarely swearing. Vanderhorst stepped through and pulled the elevator's panel closed behind him.

"Keys!" Boldt shouted at the security men, as if rehearsed, which it was not.

One of the guards tossed him an enormous ring of keys,

saying, "The small, silver one does the panel. The green dot does the elevator override."

Susan Hebringer had been pulled through that panel. Patricia Randolf before her. Boldt could see it play out, as if watching one of the monitors.

Boldt and Gaynes took off at run, Boldt shouting instructions into a handheld that he knew would lose contact once he was underground. "Contact lost. Repeat, Wildhorse contact lost!" Dispatch copied. Boldt shouted, "We want him alive, people! For God's sake, let's take him alive."

Into the Dark

Boldt and Gaynes descended the stairs two at a time, reaching the basement only seconds after they'd left the security room. At the most, Vanderhorst had a half minute lead on them.

Boldt keyed the elevator open, then tossed the keys to Gaynes, who was first into the car. She keyed open the back panel as Boldt stepped through. "Sixty seconds," Boldt said, checking his watch.

They climbed through the open hole, descending a ladder of re bar that protruded from the chamber's concrete wall. The space between the shaft's wall and the car was narrow. Gaynes descended effortlessly, while Boldt had to flatten himself, his jacket hanging up on the car's mechanics. The thick air smelled heavily of grease and electricity. Gaynes switched on a Maglite well before she reached the bottom rung, making the short leap to the shaft's dirt floor. Boldt followed immediately behind her.

"Lieu!" The Maglite's beam revealed the inside of a castiron coal chute door about two feet square. A false wall of bricks had been stacked to create an illusion, from the Underground side, of an enclosed coal chute. Gaynes kicked down the dry stack, pushed the iron door open further, and squeezed through. Boldt followed, again straining to get his girth through the small space.

Boldt heard a crackle in his earpiece, and the broken voice of Denny Schaefer as a few radio waves managed to briefly penetrate the depths. He couldn't understand a word that was said: They were on their own.

They stood in one of the dark underground hallways, vaguely familiar from the previous foray into the underground city block. Boldt used sign language to direct Gaynes, indicating that they would split up. She would take this hallway, Boldt would move south and search for another. Gaynes acknowledged. Boldt's fists came together: They could reunite at the far end of the underground space.

Boldt got his flashlight lit. Ninety seconds had elapsed since they'd lost Vanderhorst.

They heard a crash in the distance-wood and then glass. Too far away to discern someone running.

Boldt took off into the dark, through a huge, empty room. He found a second hallway and turned left, his mind searching for explanations for that noise. Certainly Vanderhorst, if their man, would know this city block of the Underground intimately, an area the size of several football fields. So what, or who, had made that noise-and was it worth following? Boldt slopped through mud and debris, believing that by then Gaynes would be passing close to the lair. She would take a few seconds to inspect it. In that time, Boldt found himself at the end of the hall.

He took the door to the right, into and through a former barbershop, the beam of light catching his own reflection in the dusty mirrors, still intact. He jumped back from his own reflected image, stumbled over a barber chair, and fell down, the chair noisily spinning on rusted joints. Boldt clambered to his feet, dodged debris on his way out yet another door, and found himself in a section of Underground sidewalk he hadn't seen on his earlier exploration. The sidewalk was caved in ahead, choked with earth and stone, reminding him how fragile an environment this was. He took the first doorway to his left that he encountered, working his way judiciously through a room filled with discarded washing machines and tooling equipment that had to go back forty years.

Through this door he reached another short hallway, and up ahead a tangle of yellow police tape. He paused here, aware this had been what he'd heard only moments before-Vanderhorst had been tripped up by one of their yellow tapes. Blood beat loudly in his ears, his mouth dry, his body damp with sweat. He thought of his promises to Liz to stay behind the desk, of his kids and their bright faces. But then in his mind's eye he saw Susan Hebringer's unconscious body being dragged down this hallway, a face now attached to the man dragging her, and he inched forward, following the unmistakable sound, an uneven scraping-something dragging-through a door to his right.

He followed that sound, careful of his own footfalls. He's limping. Vanderhorst had hurt himself in the fall caused by the crime scene tape. Boldt moved more quickly, seizing the opportunity, aware all of a sudden of footfalls approaching rapidly from his left. Gaynes. He cupped the flashlight. This was the horror house in the amusement park, where goblins and witches and skeletons jumped out at you. Boldt braced himself for surprise, his nerves electric with anticipation.

He crossed through to a smaller room, fully covering the flashlight's lens with his fingers and issuing darkness. He could smell the man now-the sour human fear. He's close.

He heard the whoosh to his left, and credited his sensitive hearing with sparing him the blow. As he ducked, a piece of lumber cut just above his head, and that promise to Liz loomed all the more clearly. He slipped his fingers off the flashlight, and the beam swiped the side of Vanderhorst's face like the slice of a sword. Boldt saw fear and determination. He saw what Susan Hebringer would have seen as she'd come awake in captivity. The timber caught Boldt in the gut on its return.

Boldt bent over and fell back, but kicked out mightily as he went down, connecting with the side of the man's knee and causing Vanderhorst to cry out as he careened into a shelf of rusted paint cans and spilled them in a waterfall of tin to the floor. Vanderhorst clawed and picked his way through the debris to the far end of the room, delivered a chair through what remained of a window, and was following through himself when Boldt got a hand on him. He pulled the man back, so that Vanderhorst's head and shoulders struck the floor. Boldt swung a paint can and struck the man in the head. The lid popped off, a thick red sludge melting down the side of Vanderhorst's face and shoulder, looking like fresh blood.

His right foot on the man's throat, Boldt sighted down the barrel of his handgun, the flashlight catching the whites of complacent eyes. The sudden calm in those eyes went straight to Boldt's stomach. Vanderhorst held the wire handle of a paint can gripped firmly in his left hand, ready to strike.

Boldt said, "Do it," his breath shallow and quick. "Do us all a favor."

Gaynes caught up to them, breathless. "Easy, Lieu."

Boldt backed off, removing his foot from the man's throat. Vanderhorst released the can's wire handle, slowly closed his eyes, and said, "I want a lawyer."

A Slippery Slope

Matthews heard the key in the lock, saw Blue run to paw the door, and set down the glass of wine. Her heart fluttered in her chest, and she thought herself a teenager as she crossed the room.

Blue started licking his hand the moment it showed.

LaMoia, looking exhausted, shut and locked the heavy door. "Hi, honey, I'm home."

His making light of it like that caught Matthews short and stopped her just prior to offering herself for a hug. What the hell had she been thinking?

"What's with the radio car?" he asked, shedding the deerskin jacket and playing with Blue.

"Lou's idea."

"We've got Walker an overnight room in the Grand Hotel."

"Good riddance."

"We should make the reservation permanent, you ask me."

"He's working through this."

She didn't want to even think about business. She wanted to enjoy his company, order some takeout, get as far away from police business as possible.

It wasn't to be. LaMoia said, "Bobbie Socks and the Sarge arrested a bank maintenance guy for Hebringer and Randolf."

"Yes, he called," she said. "He wants me in on the first round of interrogation, but the lawyers are into it pretty thick and it isn't going to happen until tomorrow."

"Same thing I heard," he said. "Kind of shoots my theory on Walker."

"It kind of does."

"What?" he asked. "No "I told you so'?"

"Lou was hoping for a court order to process Walker's clothing."

"He got it. They lifted some blood. They're testing whether it's fish or human. Some fibers they want to run against a pile of shit they collected in the hideaway."

"It wasn't Walker's," she said. "Lou knows that. He wants to jam Walker up just to keep him off the streets. Fine with me."

LaMoia noticed the open bottle of wine.

"Self-medicating," she said, thinking it funny until her brain caught up with her mouth. "Sorry about that."

"Do I look like I have a problem with it?"

They spent a half hour on the couch, LaMoia nursing a beer, Matthews working on the bottle of merlot she'd already promised to repay him. Blue settled in at their feet, looking like a rug that breathed.

"I think I should go at him," she said.

"Walker? Are you kidding?"

"We need his help with the key."

"We're trying the Underground. The Sarge messengered a Polaroid over to an archaeologist at the U. Something'll break."

She said, "Somebody's got to bring him up to speed on email attachments."

"He's got his own ways of doing things." He sounded mad at her, and she wondered how she deserved this.

The dog jumped to his feet and began to whine.

"Rehab needs a walk," he said, toeing the dog's fur with his right foot.

"It's weird you call him that," she said.

LaMoia took it wrong. "So, I'm weird. What of it?"

"Is something wrong, John?"

"Yeah, something's wrong."

"Me being here? Have I overstayed my welcome?" Why had she said that? She felt herself blush.

"What? No! It's me ... my stuff," he said. He stood and the dog rallied. "Come on, you idiot." He petted Blue's head.

"Would I be in the way?" she asked.

"You still don't have it figured out, do you, Matthews?"

"Probably not."

"You're not in the way."

"Okay." She fought back a flicker of anger. At herself? At him? She wasn't sure.

He turned toward the couch, looking away momentarily. "What you said just now ... self-medicating ..."

"Was stupid," she interrupted.

He had sadder eyes than Blue. "Listen, Matthews ... I stole two caps from your bathroom on my last visit. I tucked them away in my pocket and I walked around with them there for days, and I never said a thing to you, to Boldt. At the meetings. Nothing."

Somehow this scared her more than Walker had. Her words caught in her throat. "Did you ... take them?"

"No, I tossed them, but I was this close to taking them," he said. "I stole from you, and I didn't tell you. I lied to myself that tossing them made it fine, but it didn't make it fine. It sucks. What an asshole I am. The worst of it is that I haven't stopped thinking about them. I keep thinking how stupid it was to toss them."

"You tossed them, John. That's the point."

"Listen, Matthews, this is as much about you as it is about those caps."

"I understand that," she said.

"Do you? I don't think so. You don't know the half of it."

Indicating Blue, she said, "I think he'd rather we continue this outside."

LaMoia found a slight grin. She thought: That's better.

They moved toward the front door, the three of them. He hooked her arm and said, "The guys in the cruiser out front. They'll see us. You know they're gonna talk if we walk armin-arm."

"So they talk. They're already going to talk."

"It's not like we've done anything," he said.

"No, it's not," she agreed.

His words hung in the air on the way out.

They passed the cruiser and LaMoia waved.

"Well," he said to Matthews, "I guess it's all downhill from here."

Downhill, but a slippery slope, she thought.

Blue found a hydrant and watered it down.

Matthews knew she would sleep alone that night, but catching herself even thinking about this had her wondering what she was getting herself into.

The Door

She loved it like this: She, LaMoia, and Boldt as a team, descending the Public Safety fire stairs so fast she could hardly keep up.

"What's going on?" she asked, rounding a landing and continuing down with them. Boldt had nearly everyone on CAPs in the offices on a Saturday. SID was on its way in. Special Ops had been placed on call. Everyone awaited orders, knowing this was the moment for the Hebringer/Randolf case. She'd been told to leave her office and rendezvous with them on the stairs. She was to have a coat with her, which she did.

Boldt had this amazing charisma that instilled energy in everyone around him, an uncanny leadership quality that accounted for the uncompromising devotion of his squads, to where even a wise-ass like LaMoia stayed reined in under his command.

"We're holding Vanderhorst under the state terrorism act, based on his having oxygen tanks in his possession, any one of which could cause a massive explosion. Together, they're more like a small nuke." For a big man, he moved fluidly, the railing slipping through his left hand used more as a guide than a support.

"But we released Walker?" LaMoia asked, clearly voicing a complaint. "What's with that?"

"The bloodstains on his clothing are corrupted-some fish, some human, but none of it's going to tell us anything specific, no matter what tests we run. The fiber workup failed to connect him to the lair, which is understandable since it's clearly Vanderhorst's lair."

"But can't we hold him on something?" LaMoia said, trying to keep Boldt focused on his own complaint about Walker. "What if he still has it in for our friend here?"

At the next landing, Boldt looked back at him. "You tell me what we hold him on, and I'll be the first to consider it."

"Obstruction!"

"We can't prove it," Boldt returned.

LaMoia pressed, "Then let's at least keep Matthews on a wire."

"No way!" she said.

Two floors to go. It seemed impossible, but Boldt was moving even faster now-taking three stairs at a time. She didn't have that reach. Both men moved ahead of her, but only briefly. She took two stairs, but outran them, and quickly caught up. Boldt said, "Consider it done. Daffy, you'll wear the wire whenever you're out of this building."

"Lou," she protested.

It wasn't up for discussion. Boldt changed subjects, "I got Babcock a photo of that skeleton key, which she subsequently determined was late nineteenth, early twentieth century-at least twenty years past the construction of the section of the city that's currently beneath the church."

"Twenty years?" she asked, not following what this determined.

"Construction spread uphill after the great fire."

"As in Columbia and Third?" LaMoia asked.

"Granted," Boldt said, finally reaching the building's garage level, "any lock could have been put in any door at any time. But if we're playing percentages, then that lock is more likely from this area of town-right where we're standing, for that matter, than down the hill toward Pio Square."

"And that's where we're headed?" she asked. "Across the street?"

"Each level of the Underground is over a hundred thousand square feet. That's three football fields or so. At this point, SID has been through ninety percent or more of that level where we found Vanderhorst's lair, and so far no sign of Hebringer or Randolf."

He held the door for them.

"We put a pair of K-9s into that space about an hour ago, each scented for one of the missing. They led us straight back to the elevator shaft. A drain. Vanderhorst had sealed it with black plastic so the smell couldn't escape."

"He put them down a drain?" LaMoia asked. "In one piece?"

Boldt held up the skeleton key, still in the evidence bag. "The drain leads down to yet another level of Underground," he said. "That's why the jackets. We're going to be the first inside, and I'm betting it's chilly down there."

It felt damn near freezing to her. She wasn't sure if that was the actual temperature or her own heightened anxiety over what they expected to find, but the coat didn't help, and that was her first big clue. Preparing to lower themselves through the open storm drain at the bottom of the elevator shaft, itself now lit by halogen lights running off extension cords lowered from the bank's basement,

Boldt passed out latex gloves and shared a tube of Mentholatum to smear above the lip to help mask the smell. The rituals of homicide came painfully. All three knew that odor, and "it ain't dead rats," as LaMoia had put it.

Squeezing through the open drain into a dark, damp space in which the stench was far more concentrated felt to Matthews like willfully entering a portal into hell.

She interviewed them, she counseled them, she analyzed them, she predicted them, and she evaluated them, but she would still never fully understand why human beings treated their own species with such willful disdain, disrespect, and distemper.

The going was relatively dry underfoot. For all of Boldt's rapid descent in Public Safety, he moved down this hallway at a snail's pace-mindful of every footfall, stepping this way and that and indicating for the two others to follow in his exact footsteps, the protector and keeper of evidence in all its possible forms. Ancient gaslight fixtures held to the crumbling red brick walls. This subterranean area had either been stables or cold storage back in the days of the Yukon gold rush, when Seattle rose from a tiny fishing village to a commercial metropolis nearly overnight. In those days, when a nickel or dime would buy a man a dinner, each and every prospector was dropping nearly two thousand dollars to be supplied for a year in the northern province, as twelve months of provisions were mandated by the government before anyone would be allowed aboard a ship heading north. Basements like this ran full of beef jerky, oats, sugar, and salt. Cattle and swine, horses and mules. Now it was empty space behind locked doors, and it was in front of one of those doors that Boldt stopped, having nearly walked past it, his nose turning him around, as well as a keen eye that picked up the drizzle of key oil staining the wood beneath the wrought iron of a keyhole.

Three flashlights found that keyhole at once. It was a heavy wooden door that hung on hinges pounded flat by the muscle of a blacksmith.

"No one enters until we get a good look," Boldt told them. He broke open the evidence baggie that contained the key left by the tooth fairy beneath Matthews's pillow.

Boldt inserted the large skeleton key into the lock. He met eyes with Matthews in the dim light. She thought she saw his lips barely moving and she wondered if he was praying-beyond reason, it seemed to her-that Susan Hebringer had been spared. The key turned with a loud click of the tumblers. For Matthews, his turning that key was to expose a part of the human condition that would kill off yet another fraction of the optimism she maintained that mankind could and would someday work through its problems.

Not likely, she thought, finding herself only able to moan as she witnessed the scene before them.

The sterile light from the flashlight revealed the corpses of two women. They were still partially clothed, but their breasts and pubic symphyses were exposed. They both hung by their wrists from nylon strapping, secured to large iron rings mounted to the rock wall. Massive yellow and brown bruises cried out from their chests, rib cages, and swollen faces. Their legs had been bent back at the knees, ribbons of silver duct tape binding their ankles to their thighs so they could neither kick nor fight their attacker's intentions to repeatedly rape them.

Evidence suggested he had kept them alive: There was packaged food discarded on the floor, some of which had spilled down their clothes or adhered to their skin. He had revisited them, a fact that would contribute to the profile Matthews would later build. He had kept them awake, used them up, one at a time until replacing them became necessary. He had kept them on the wall like trophies.

" "Strung up like marlins," " Matthews quoted. "I remember Walker saying that. Walker, not Vanderhorst." This revelation clearly stole Boldt's attention briefly from the bodies. Walker had supplied the key as well, but this was Vanderhorst's sceneBoldt said so in a whisper.

He added, "The ATM connection was Vanderhorst's not Walker's."

"Oh ... God ... no ..." They heard a gurgle and splat behind them. Babcock, the university professor, had somehow talked her way down here. Heads would roll. But in the meantime they had her vomit to deal with.

"Help her out," Boldt instructed Matthews, refusing to move himself, refusing to break his train of concentration. She understood the importance of everything Boldt took in now, before he steeled himself to the sight and smell, before the SID techies stuck little paper flags around the room making it into a parade route, now, before any other living person, except one (the killer), experienced this horror for what it truly was. The crime scene offered insight into the events that had taken place here, insights that could prove invaluable to the prosecution of Per Vanderhorst. Boldt's latex gloved fingers slipped out his notepad and she watched as he began to sketch. "John?" he said. "The camera?"

LaMoia had brought along the department's pocket-sized digital camera as well as a handful of evidence bags.

"What the hell's going on here?" Babcock moaned.

"Shhh." Matthews attempted to console the woman. "He's working the scene."

Double Team

For several hours Boldt and his team managed to keep their discovery confidential, avoiding the inevitable media stampede that promised both to steal their focus and to give Vanderhorst's defense attorney information the PA's office didn't want him having. Knowing that even on a Saturday such a news blackout wouldn't last forever, Boldt had asked Lofgrin to pick his two most trusted SID technicians to work the site. Boldt had also tasked his information technology squad to work the National Crime Information Center's database for like crimes, and they had already produced results. Three of the seven pages he now carried were crime scene photographs gleaned from an advanced search on the NCIC database. Filling out a detailed database query that included such information as the use of duct tape, the sustaining of the victim's life, the blood type of the secretor (semen had been collected from both Hebringer and Randolf, and was currently being DNA-typed), the age and specifics of the two victims, SID-IT had matched the Hebringer/Randolf murders to three other similar unsolved cases. These results, once the product of weeks, months, or even years of interstate detective work, had been accomplished in less than forty minutes.

"So far, so good," Boldt put to Matthews when asked how things were going. "Though that may be about to change."

She indicated the door to the interrogation room, on the other side of which sat Per Vanderhorst, waiting. "You can't honestly think that Walker was any part of these murders." Following the trip into the Underground, she'd changed into a pair of blue jeans that she normally reserved for weekends and, tucked in at the waist, a white, oversized, tailored shirt belonging to LaMoia. She had the shirt's starched sleeves and cuffs rolled up on her forearms nearly to her elbows.

"Walker delivered the key. That puts him in this, like it or not."

"There's an explanation for that," she said.

"Not that I've heard, there isn't."

"So Vanderhorst will explain it to us now," she said.

"He'd better. No matter what, Walker faces obstruction charges. At the very least, he knew about that death chamber. If Vanderhorst doesn't sort it out for us, I'm going to tie them both up in this."

"Lou, that's preposterous, and you know it! Walker stumbled onto this in the Underground, nothing more."

"The various sections of Underground don't connect, Daffy. You'll need a better explanation than that."

"Maybe they do somehow and we just haven't found it yet."

Reading his wristwatch, Boldt signaled the end of the discussion, telling her, "In twenty-five minutes Tim Peterson from the U.S. Attorney's office is going to be arriving here to meet with Mahoney and Tony Shapiro."

"Shapiro?"

"There's a report he took the case pro bono as of about an hour ago. That's why I said I think things may change. If Shapiro has taken the case, then it's going to be a media circus. The guy lives for it. Worse, he'll sew Vanderhorst's lips shut and feed him through a straw."

She understood then that this hurried effort to interrogate Vanderhorst resulted from Boldt's hand being forced-they were about to lose their suspect to the wheels of television justice.

The time frame of twenty-five minutes seemed laughable typically barely enough time to get a couple cups of coffee into the Box. Win a confession in that amount of time?

"Lou?" she said.

"Listen, the PD must not like Shapiro's grandstanding any more than we do, or he wouldn't have advised his client to sit down with us. I'm not sure who to fear more, Shapiro or the feds. Peterson's a good guy, and I know he thinks he's helping us by putting out the possibility of extradition to a death penalty state, but all it really means is we'll lose Vanderhorst, and I just don't like that idea."

"So it's a full-court press," she said. Another LaMoiaism. Boldt's expression registered complaint.

"Something like that," he said. About to throw the door open, he said in a whisper, "In any case, it's show time."

With the out-of-state crime scene photos in hand, Boldt stepped into Homicide's conference room A-the largest of three such rooms-Matthews close on his heels. She gently shut the door. Initially, neither of them acknowledged Vanderhorst's presence on the far side of the small table. Instead, they moved chairs around, Boldt took off his sport coat and hung it on the back of a chair like a man ready to spend the rest of the day here, and Matthews switched off her cell phone and took a seat alongside Boldt-the combined impression that of two people digging in.

Vanderhorst, transferred from lock up, wore the humiliating orange jumpsuit issued by county jail, manacles on his ankles and a waist harness that secured the chain of his handcuffs to where his hands were free to move but their motion limited.

Boldt started the double-cassette tape recorder, introduced himself and Matthews, and naming the suspect, stated that Vanderhorst had requested counsel, had met with counsel several times over the past twenty-four hours, and that counsel had been notified of this interview and was "expected any minute."

Boldt carefully placed the seven pages facedown in front of Vanderhorst and, like a Vegas card dealer, then rolled three of them over, as deliberately and dramatically as possible. With no time to waste, he had to forgo the usual "warm-up" of introducing the suspect to the roles that would be played, of the small talk that often began such an interrogation in an effort to establish a rapport. There was no time for a rapport. This was to be the emotional equivalent of slapping the man around.

Stabbing each in succession with a determined index finger, Boldt said, "Fort Worth, Little Rock, Santa Fe." The victims hung from walls, their ankles taped to their thighs with duct tape, their garments torn, their chests and crotches exposed.

Boldt had hoped for the power of shock value. He saw no response. He yielded to Matthews, who said, "You remember each of these as if it happened yesterday, don't you, Per? Is it all right that I call you Per?" she asked rhetorically, not allowing him to respond. "The way the air smelled just before you abducted them... that incredible rush as you overpowered them..."

Vanderhorst looked up from the photos, met eyes with Matthews.

She felt nothing from him. Disappointed, she pressed on.

"Oh, yes," she said, "I know how it felt for you."

The suspect lowered his head, but more out of boredom, she thought. No remorse, no excitement, no fear or trepidation. This, in turn, filled her with curiosity, for she had expected, at the very least, a sense of surprise from him. She felt the clock running, ticking off the minutes, and wished Boldt hadn't told her about the arrival of the attorneys.

Boldt figured the photos had to have surprised the man, regardless of his outward appearance. He followed this with what he hoped would be another surprise, sliding the evidence bag containing the skeleton key across the table.

Vanderhorst looked up, the first seams of terror breaking his cool facade.

"Been looking for that?" Boldt asked.

The man's eyes tightened. "Never seen it before."

They had him talking. Matthews leaned back in the steel chair.

Boldt said, "We found them."

The suspect cocked his head like Blue when he heard an errant noise. Matthews experienced a shudder of cold. She glanced up at the room's air vent, then back to the suspect.

Boldt leaned across the table and rolled over the next photographs-first

Randolf, then Hebringer. "Five women in four states in the last eighteen months. The best chance you have is to get ahead of this, Vanderhorst. Once it breaks, there isn't a juror you can draw who hasn't heard something about it judges too, for that matter. No matter what jurors and judges claim about their remaining objective, it just isn't possible. The smart money says you preempt all that by getting in front of it."

"I've never seen any of them," Vanderhorst claimed. "Never seen that key, either."

"Is that right?" Boldt said. "Then you wouldn't have any interest in seeing the videotape of you entering that elevator car, of you keying the back panel and disappearing into that shaft. That video confirms you had both the necessary knowledge and access to move the bodies once you'd abducted them in front of the ATMs." His intention was to keep stacking evidence on him, one surprise after another. "You think we won't find physical evidence that those two women made that trip? You were in a hurry, Vanderhorst. Of course there's evidence, and the more we collect the less agreeable we are to listening to your side of this." He'd leave Matthews to sort out or to exploit the man's guilt and what she believed would prove to be his relief at having been caught and stopped.

Vanderhorst studied the final two blank pages in the line of seven but made no attempt to turn them over.

Feeling the time pressure, Matthews saw no choice but to go for the jugular. She said, "This is the last time you'll see any of these. You understand that, don't you ... that it's over?"

His brow furrowed. She considered any and all responses victories. She caught a flicker from Boldt's sideways glance he saw it, too.

"What do you feel with it being over?" she asked. "Relief? Anger?"

Vanderhorst's attention remained on the final two sheets of paper that remained facedown.

She thought she saw him shrug his shoulders, but it might have been nothing more than him trying to get comfortable, an impossibility in these chairs.

"Does it feel good that it's over?"

She thought for sure he'd nodded.

"You tried, but you couldn't stop yourself." She made it a statement, quickly adapting to the asocial personality she believed in front of her. "You left each city, not because you were afraid of being caught, but because you thought the change of scenery might allow you to stop."

Boldt signaled her to notice the tape recorder: He wanted Vanderhorst's answers spoken onto tape.

"You can talk to us," she said calmly. A part of her disliked playing so deceptively sweet to killers like Vanderhorst; she owed it to the victims to show more disgust and abhorrence with the nature of the crimes. A part of her enjoyed the game, the challenge of tricking the criminal mind into unraveling, exploiting the guilt, when present, the sense of remorse, if any. The art of deception here was feigning empathy and understanding in the pursuit of truth and discovery. She, too, had victims: the perpetrators of these crimes who allowed themselves to open up to her and admit those things they had protected so carefully.

"It's not like what you think," he said.

She felt a wave of relaxation just hearing him speak. "Help us out here."

"I don't know anything about any of this."

"We might surprise you," she said. "Maybe we know more about it than you think."

"I don't think so," he said.

Matthews knew there were no voices in Vanderhorst's head, no whispered "messages from God" to kill. She wasn't dealing with a display of a so-called psychopath, but with a man suffering from antisocial personality disorder-APD-a person so distanced from his fellow human beings and a sense of right and wrong that he committed these acts with little understanding of the consequences. The time had come to prove herself, to convince

Vanderhorst she knew more about him than he knew about himself. And, she thought, just maybe she did.

"You watched women in their hotel rooms," she said, knowing him much better already. "In their apartments and condominiums.

Undressing. Bathing. You imagined yourself in there with them, leading a normal life, a part of their lives."

Vanderhorst cringed, shifting in the chair nervously. He studied her intently and she stood up to it, not to be undermined.

Boldt regarded her with a pale face and nervous expression.

A knock on the door gave them all a moment's pause. A uniformed woman officer entered and handed Matthews a pink telephone memo. She said, "I wouldn't have bothered you, but the girl apparently sounded pretty bad and said it was urgent." The message read: "Problems with the baby. Please come. I'm above Mario's." It was signed Margaret. Matthews thanked the officer, folded up the message, and tucked it away in her jeans pocket, disappointed in herself for briefly abandoning the teen but knowing the time line of the interrogation had to take precedence.

With the door shut again, she confidently told Vanderhorst, "You followed them-some of them-hoping they might notice you, might speak to you. So much of your life you've spent just wanting to be noticed. And yet it terrifies you when a woman actually notices you, doesn't it?" She knew by his squirming that she had him pegged. He looked both shell-shocked and curious. Just right. "Susan Hebringer ... you peeped her, and then, surprise, she showed up at the ATM. And you had to have her. Randolf? That was what: a look she gave you? The way she said hello to you? Tell me." Knowing that at some point he would attempt to tune her out, she quickly continued, "You were caught between those two worlds, weren't you, Per-wanting the attention, yet not wanting it?" His eyes held on to hers all the more tightly. Stay with me, she silently encouraged. "What were their crimes, Per? For what did you punish them? Did they say hello to you? Ask you the time of day? Or was it simply a look they gave you-a look you took as an invitation? It's only women that confuse you, isn't it? The men you can handle. Lieutenant Boldt comes by the bank and you have no problem talking to him, do you? But a woman? Am I confusing you now? You're feeling anger toward me, aren't you? I can sense that, Per. It's all around me, that anger. Because you know what I'm going to say next, you know who I'm going to mention, don't you?" His eyes went increasingly wider, increasingly whiter. "And you don't want her mentioned, do you? You want her left out of this. Her dark hair, her sending you mixed signals. What was it she did to you to deserve this?" she asked, touching the second of the crime scene photographs. "Criticize you, no matter what you did? Dress you up like a little girl and show you off to her friends and laugh at you? Take baths with you? Showers? When you were old enough to respond to that-to her-in ways you didn't want to respond but couldn't help responding, she laughed at you-at it-didn't she? She thought it was funny, cute. Didn't she? But it wasn't funny, not at all. It was humiliating.

It was awful for you, her laughing like that. Or maybe it was her walking around in panties and underwear, showing way too much to a boy your age. Maybe that's why you like looking through windows now. Or was it her slipping in beside you on those cold nights, or the ones with thunder and lightning, or was it that she'd had a little too much to drink and wanted the company?

The same way you want company now."

Vanderhorst didn't answer with words, but she had his face in a sweat. Boldt looked as if he wanted to stop her, or wanted to leave the room himself, but he sat calmly beside her, his pencil taking down notes on a legal pad as if writing a grocery list.

She addressed Vanderhorst and said, "You never wanted any of it, did you, Per? Never volunteered for any of it. She teased you in front of her friends, in front of your friends; she cut you off from everyone around you. You brought a friend home, she made a fool of you. And you, you loved her all the more for it. Loved her like nothing else in this world. And this proved the most confusing of all." His rheumy eyes seemed ready to spill tears. He was no criminal animal but a poor, pathetic creature who'd lost sight of the out-of-bounds markers. She felt Boldt's precious minutes slipping past. "Later," she said, "when you were older what fourteen, fifteen?-she was still coming into your room at night, only now for things unimaginable to you a year or two before.

Now you ran, didn't you? You hid. First the closet. But she found you. Then the bathroom ... but she found you." With each statement she looked for any unintended response on his part-a shortening of breath, a twitch to his eyes, a dilation of his pupils, using these as her signposts. "And finally ... the basement," she said, knowing in advance she would score a direct hit. Indeed, he looked away and to the floor, wearing his shame. "The one place she never did find you. Tell me I'm wrong, Per. Tell me you didn't unscrew the lights down there and hide in the dark, because you knew she was afraid of the dark and that she'd never find you." She based this on the discovery of the underground lair. The location of that hideout was no accident. "That's where you feel the safest, isn't it? In the dark. Alone. Your back pushed up against a cold wall." She worked from her own experience in the Shelter. "The musty smell-it's almost like perfume to you. You brought them down there, and you did those things to them-those things she did to you-and then you felt bad about it, didn't you? Then you wanted to keep them alive, if you could. In the dark. Locked in the room. There when you needed them."

It hadn't been about torturing his victims but trying to save them. His mistake had been hanging them from the wall-he'd unintentionally crucified them. She suspected that if she could travel back in time to his mother's apartment she would find Jesus on the cross in nearly every room. She'd read about extreme cases of APD, the Per Vanderhorsts of this world; she'd just never interviewed one.

She wondered how any of this could bring a sense of excitement, of fulfillment for her, and yet it did.

She said, "It's easier now that it's over, isn't it? There's nothing to hide any longer." In point of fact they knew almost nothing. It was far from clear if they had enough evidence to convict Vanderhorst. The DNA blood evidence and the semen collected from the corpses might put him away, but without that evidence firmly in hand (and it was still a day or two away), she knew that Boldt needed a confession.

Boldt said, "You're about to be traded back and forth like a

pro ball player, Vanderhorst. Texas uses lethal injection. You know that, right? Capital murder equals capital punishment in that state, and you killed a woman in Fort Worth, and you need to think about that. The U.S. Attorney's office has the authority to move your trial to Texas, and they'll argue for that because they're going to want you on death row. This attorney general is tough on crime-you understand that, right? But they're basically good guys, better guys than you'd think. They won't take you away from us if we have a better case to make against you here. You see how this works?" He added, "Or maybe it doesn't work-the system. Not all that well. But it's what we've got at the moment, and you're square in the middle of it."

Worry crept into the man's eyes.

"What's it going to take?" Boldt asked Matthews in a familiar game to them.

"I think he knows," Matthews replied.

"You see where this leaves you?" Boldt asked him.

Matthews said to Vanderhorst, "You and I both know you're of sound mind, fit to stand trial. That's not an out for you, Per. We'll run the usual tests, of course, but you're going to pass them. The decision you need to make now, before you lose the chance, is who is going to control your destiny. If you want it in the hands of the feds, that's up to you."

Boldt said, "You're curious about those last two photographs, aren't you?"

Vanderhorst eyed him suspiciously.

"Go ahead, take a look," Boldt said.

Vanderhorst didn't move a muscle.

"Curious about how we got the key, I'll bet."

Vanderhorst narrowed his eyes, both angry and unnerved, and Matthews saw the opening Boldt had given her.

She said, "We thought you'd worked them alone, Per. The ATM machines. The basement of the bank. That was one of our mistakes-one of the things that took us so long to catch you this idea you were smart enough to plan this on your own." She leaned across the table-Vanderhorst reared backward, overreacting, and nearly went over-and rolled the second to last sheet, revealing Ferrell Walker's head shot from central booking. "This is the man who gave us the key to that room. He says that he planned it all-that it was his brains-but that you did the actual killing."

"I don't even know this guy," Vanderhorst said.

"He says you do."

"He gave us the key to that room," Boldt repeated.

"He stole it."

"The key?" Matthews asked.

"That's right," Vanderhorst said, dipping his toes into the confessional waters.

"Stole it from where?" Boldt asked.

Vanderhorst continued to sweat profusely. He viewed Boldt with suspicion but didn't recoil into himself as Matthews feared.

She repeated, "He's claiming he's the brain behind this."

A confused Vanderhorst pointed to the first three images on the table. "Then who did these? I suppose this guy did these as well? Millicent Etheredge. Tanya Wallace. Anita Baylock. He's lying to you."

Their suspect had just stated the names of the other three victims, names that had not been mentioned in this room. There were explanations a good defense attorney could use, including the absurd amount of press most such cases received. But the context of his answer combined with the determination in his voice would go a long way toward convicting Per Vanderhorst.

"You're saying he wasn't part of this," Matthews suggested.

"It's bullshit," Vanderhorst said.

"He described them as strung up like fish. He'd been inside that room."

"He stole the key. My key."

She wanted so badly to look over at Lou and celebrate their victory with him, but she dared not send such a signal. They needed as much out of him as possible.

Boldt said, "That key has been missing how long?"

"A while now. I'm not all that great with time."

"How'd you get in there after that?"

"I didn't," Vanderhorst said and coughed. "Not after I lost that key. Most of the locks down there ... any skeleton key will work. But not that room. That's why I used it." He answered their puzzled expressions. "Listen, I hid the key so it couldn't be found on me."

"Is that right?" Boldt said.

"That was your idea," Matthews said.

"Hid it on a nail down the hall... this storage room. And then one day it vanishes-and that's the last I gone down there." He said to Boldt, "I'd been planning on leaving way before you ever showed up, believe me."

"But they owed you money," he said.

"Nearly six hundred bucks," Vanderhorst said, as if a king's ransom, as if it had been worth getting caught with that kind of money on the line. His desperate eyes tracked between his two interrogators. "Why are you both looking at me like that? What'd I say? Six hundred bucks is six hundred bucks. Who's going to walk away from six hundred bucks?"

"Makes sense to me," Boldt said.

Vanderhorst rolled the last photo over for himself. It was an ME's head shot of Billy Chen. He stared at the photo for a long time in complete silence. "Wrong place, wrong time."

"Is that right?" Boldt said skeptically.

"Ask him."

"You had him in that room. We can prove it."

Vanderhorst looked dazed to hear that. He shrugged his shoulders. "Some guy shows up uninvited, you show him the welcome mat."

"You knocked him out and then made it look like a drowning."

"So says you."

"Convince me I'm wrong."

Vanderhorst looked up at Boldt with bored, droopy eyes.

A sharp knock on the door caused Matthews to jump. For a moment she'd been in the Underground with Vanderhorst. The knock was followed by a woman in police uniform. "Lieutenant," she said, addressing Boldt. "They're here."

Anthony Shapiro pushed past her, all five foot three of him. He wore a dark blue silk suit worth a month of Boldt's salary. He said to Vanderhorst, "We're all done here, Mr. Vanderhorst. Don't say another word." He glanced at Boldt with fiery eyes. "Shame on you, Lieutenant. And on the weekend, no less!" He noticed the tape recorder then, the hubs still moving. He vaguely acknowledged Matthews. Two lieutenants in the same interrogation room-this particular team of Boldt and Matthewsseemed to finally register with him.

"Tell me you kept your mouth shut, sir," he said to his client.

"Who the hell are you?" Vanderhorst said.

Shapiro hung his head and sighed. "Okay," he said to Boldt, "tell me how bad it is."

Boldt smiled his first smile in many long weeks. It was as much as he needed to say.

Without a Prair

As Boldt and Matthews had sat down with Vanderhorst, LaMoia hung up the phone, his hand trembling noticeably. A housefly landed on the fabric wall of his office cubicle, and he watched it lovingly clean itself, rubbing its arms together like a card dealer warming his hands before the big game. As a detective he chased facts, one to the next, the cliched analogy of following crumbs so appropriate to him at a time like this.

Nathan Prair's long-awaited written report lay on his desk, a poorly crafted summary of the deputy sheriff having given Mary-Ann Walker a speeding ticket a week prior to her death, as well as his written alibi for the night Mary-Ann Walker had been killed-a night tour during which, by his own admission, he'd taken what cops called "lost time," a break, during the critical hour of 11 P.M. to 12 A.M.

LaMoia called upstairs to Matthews to share the vital information he'd just gotten from the manager of the airport McDonald's.

Hoping she might either make the interview with him or at least monitor his progress, he felt disappointment when her voice mail picked up. With time of the essence-Prair rotated off-duty soon-LaMoia made his journey without her.

On his way across town, he called Janise Meyer, of SPD's IT. unit, and asked the impossible of her. Janise didn't know the word. He was counting on that.

He had GPS technology to thank for his ability to locate Prair. The King County Sheriffs Office tracked every vehicle out on patrol. LaMoia requested the man's physical location or assignment rather than asking KCSO dispatch to radio the deputy or send a text message over the patrol car's Mobile Data Terminal.

As an SPD officer, LaMoia lacked any authority whatsoever to order Prair in for review, but he saw nothing wrong with paying the deputy a visit with a tape recorder in his pocket. With the blessing of the PA's office, and the knowledge that car 89 was currently between Madison and Marion, moving south on Broadway-doing bus route duty that was easy to predict-LaMoia parked the Jetta outside a frame shop on Broadway, walked over to the bus stop, and kept watch for the patrol car. He spotted it a few minutes later, started the tape recording, and stepped out into the street, sticking his thumb out like a hitchhiker. He wanted this encounter as casual and light as possible.

Prair pulled the cruiser to the side of the road, unlocked the master lock, and LaMoia climbed in.

"What the fuck?" the deputy said, rolling the car with a green light. LaMoia heard the master lock engage and experienced the first twinges of unease.

"I don't owe you this," LaMoia began. "I'm not even sure why I'm bothering with it."

Prair glanced hotly at his passenger, straightened his head, and said nothing for several more blocks. "Yeah?"

"Yeah," LaMoia answered.

"So I'll say it again: What the fuck?"

"The fuck is this: The Mickey D's you used as your alibi the night Mary-Ann Walker went off the Aurora Bridge had a fire in the deep-fat fryer that night." He watched the horror register on Prair's face. "SFD logged the call as nine fifty-four P.M. Had responded by ten-oh-seven P.M. They closed the joint down for the rest of that night and part of the next morning. Meaning that when you went off the clock, the place wasn't open." The whish of wet tires on roadway. Broadway stayed pretty busy at all hours. "Shit, we've got to follow up anything like this: an alibi, a witness, whatever-and you know that, Prair-you dumb shit. The least you could have done is check out your own alibi."

"Fuck off."

Another five blocks ticked off, slipping by the windows in a blur of wet colors. College kids peopled this section of Broadway.

LaMoia was amazed at how much younger they looked each year.

Prair finally said softly, "There was no way I could make this thing right with any of you. And you know why? Because you come to the table prejudiced against me."

"Oh, give it a rest."

"If I'd told you the way it was I could have lost my badge."

"A distinct possibility."

"You're making jokes out of this?"

"Me and Popeye: "I yarn what I yarn." "

"Fuck you."

"Why do you think I'm here, Nate? If I wanted to arrest you, I'd have turned it over to II, or the brass, or the PA's office.

Should I be wanting to arrest you for this murder, Nathan?

Or should I be hearing your side of this first?" Never mind that he'd already spoken to Hill, that Hill would have already called the prosecuting attorney by now; never mind that if they'd hauled him into the Box, Prair would have invoked his right to a guild attorney and clammed up. LaMoia hoped like hell that by doing this in the comfort and safety of Prair's patrol car, by offering him a preemptive second chance, the man might overlook the condition of the quicksand where they now treaded.

So far, so good.

Prair turned off his route, down the hill toward the city, and pulled over in front of the Egyptian's marquee, engine running.

He looked over at LaMoia, who could see the tension behind the man's eyes belying his attempt at a cool demeanor. LaMoia found himself eyeing the passenger door handle. Prair said, "She and me ... we got into it a little."

LaMoia felt restless all of a sudden. Who was the one cornered, and who was the one planning to surprise? Prair was a burly fuck. LaMoia didn't want to find himself tangling with him.

Prair continued, "She and me ... well... let's just say we'd had a cup of coffee together ... and she was a pretty messed up kid."

"Are you telling me you were jumping Mary-Ann Walker?" LaMoia asked, still trying to make it sound like a locker-room shower discussion.

"No, no," Prair said, his confidence allowing a smarmy grin to occupy his face. "A fucking cup of joe is all."

"You sure?"

"I'm sure," Prair answered. "But I was interested, okay? And she was interested, I'm telling you. You, of all people, know what I'm talking about."

"Sure I do." LaMoia felt a little sick of himself.

"It happens to all of us on the job."

"It does," LaMoia said, trying to force a fraternal grin onto a face that felt slightly frozen.

"And all I'm saying ... maybe I got a little carried away with this one. So sue me! She was a looker, sexy as all hell, and as vulnerable as they come, all this sobbing over this wife-beating bastard she was shacking up with. And me, I'm thinking I'll come swinging on the vine through the window and catch her Dangerous Dan backhanding her, and I'm good for getting laid anytime I want it-am I right?"

"Right as rain," LaMoia said, feeling the acid in his stomach.

"Exactly," Prair said, finding a rhythm in the patter. "So what was I supposed to tell you guys-that I was using my lost time to loiter outside that turd ball apartment that night, debating how to rescue a damsel in distress? How fucking sick does that make me look? But you see what I was thinking?"

"Sure I do."

"My line of thought."

"Clear as a bell."

"She's having problems with the guy; I take care of the guy."

"Simple as pie," LaMoia said. "Might have thought of it myself."

"You pull these peaches over, and they spill their guts to you. I'm telling you. I mean, the honey pot is yours. One look in their eyes and you know the ones that are so high-strung they're about to rip, the ones that like the uniform regardless who's inside, the ones that are going to blow you off. You can tell, right?"

"Absolutely."

"It's like a fucking dating service."

"So you were there that night," LaMoia pressed, wondering how far he could push this. The thought occurred to him to escape from the car while he still had both legs, both arms. Then he saw that bloated body floating facedown in the black water, and he stayed put.

"I hung around out back, yeah. Fifteen, twenty minutes."

"This is gospel?"

"Okay ... truth told, I'd been there a couple nights before looking for an opening. I got a little hung up on this one." Prair gripped the wheel tightly. The power steering mechanism under the hood cried out loudly if he moved the wheel even an inch. Prair didn't seem to hear this.

"If we're gonna sort this out," LaMoia said, "we gotta have all the cards."

Prair nodded. He'd started the process-he knew there was a logical conclusion to it. "Okay, so that particular night, that Saturday night, I'm doing a drive-by as they're coming back to his place."

"What time is this?"

"Little after ten. I'm thinking, I'll let her see the cruiser, catch up alongside them at a light. Surprised the shit out of her, I want to tell you. But at least she knew I was there now. She knew there was help available if she needed it. I hang out in the cruiser, the back of his place. Ten forty-five, maybe eleven o'clock, she climbs out onto the fire escape and lights up a cancer stick. I'm thinking she's signaling me, right? So I get out of the car. I got my juices going-I'm thinking it's show time. But as I'm coming around the cruiser, all of a sudden she turns around up there, and I see she's on the phone, the fucking phone! Then, like seconds later, I see this guy climbing the fire escape toward her, and now I got my piece out. Who the fuck is this? He's got to have been hanging around just like I have. Fuck if the creep doesn't wave to her on his way up, and she waves back. He sits down a couple steps below her-like at crotch level, right?-and the two of them start chatting it up, and I'm out of there."

"You saw this guy?"

"Saw how? Not like that. No fucking way. He's a phantom is all. But me, I'm gone. The rendezvous she's having ain't with me, so I'm the fuck out of there. Just wanna make sure they don't make the cruiser on the way out. And they don't, so I'm good." He paused. "Good until she's found fucking bobbing for apples Tuesday night, and me, I'm right in the middle of it." He faced LaMoia. "Can I pick 'em or what?"

LaMoia let some skepticism show. "That's the way you want to call this?"

"That's the way it went down, LaMoia. Swear to God. But think about it. What was I supposed to do? There was no way ... I mean, no way, I was going to detail any of this to you guys up there on that bridge. You fucking kidding me?" He mimicked himself. " "Hey, by the way, LaMoia, I was scouting this peach the other night. Watching her smoke a cancer in her fucking panties on the fire escape." What the fuck is that about? Then, later, what was I supposed to say, "By the way, I may have forgotten to mention..."?"

"Wouldn't have been too cool."

"No shit. And these girls. I'm already down in the books on that. You know that. Something like this gets out..." He looked over at LaMoia, the pall of realization taking hold. "You understand,

John," use of the first name did not come easy for Prair, "this cannot get out."

As the extent of his confession began to sink in, for Prair, LaMoia calculated the time needed to escape the front seat-the doors were power locked, necessitating several steps.

"I mean ... in terms of helping you out... that's been bugging me, sure it has. I've got a duty to help out, and I know my duty." Prair was talking to himself now, and that bothered LaMoia all the more. "I should have said something early on, okay? I'm good with that. But you can see my side of it."

"Of course I can." It didn't sound convincing, even to him.

"Something like this, and I'm done. I'm running a cash booth in a mall parking garage. Give me a fucking break."

"There's definitely room to work this right," LaMoia said.

"You give anyone your source on this, and I'm fucked. You can see that, right?"

"Oh, yeah," LaMoia said, "we're good on that."

"How good?"

"Let me get something straight," LaMoia said. "You saw this other guy, the one on the fire escape, but not any kind of good look."

"I got the hell out of there. I told you." Prair paused, considering this. "You're thinking it was the brother, this creep bothering Daphne."

LaMoia said nothing. He didn't like hearing Prair calling Matthews by her first name. He felt incredibly protective at that moment.

Prair said, "I'm good with saying I saw him, if that's what you need, if that would help your present situation. If maybe you and I could do a little business here. Maybe you see clear to get around directly involving me in this."

Did this clown hear himself? LaMoia wondered. He was dealing with a pathological liar, a man who'd say anything to a woman to get himself laid, anything to a fellow cop to keep his record clean. LaMoia said, "My opinion, Nate: You've got some issues here need working out."

"Issues," Prair agreed, nodding slightly. "That's what I'm trying to tell you."

"We're gonna want to go over this again," LaMoia said.

"Not officially, we're not. No fucking way. You can forget about it. You call me in, and I'm making like Sergeant Shultz. You're gonna see my guild rep's ugly ass. Me? I'll be swigging tall boys over at the Cock and Bull."

LaMoia's right hand found the door lock button-he kept the move as subtle as possible. For him the air heated up a few hundred degrees. He popped the button, the loud click like a muted gunshot. "You know, Nate, shit like this works out for the best."

"You bring me in, and I've got me a bad case of laryngitis."

"SPD and KCSO, we're talking apples and oranges here," LaMoia reminded. "One hand doesn't always wash the other. We put you down as an informer, and we can block your identity."

It didn't work like that, but a guy like Prair thought he knew more about detective work than he actually did.

A cell phone rang. LaMoia reached for his, only to realize it was Prair's ringing. The cop answered the phone. "The fuck you say!" His eyes tracked to LaMoia, and for a moment the detective believed he might be the topic of discussion. Had Sheila Hill jumped the gun with her phone calls? Had Prair just been alerted he was under investigation for something that showed in one of his ticket books nearly two years earlier? "Maybe you will, maybe you won't," he said. He ended the call, studied LaMoia out of the side of his eyes as if about to say something. He then looked out the windshield at the appealing skyline. LaMoia wished he could have enjoyed the moment. Prair said, "We're all done here, Cool. I gotta roll."

LaMoia felt the relief loosen his muscles and allow him to move. For a moment, he'd been frozen in the seat. "We'll work this through, Nate. No sweat."

"Just remember what I told you: I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine. But if you turn Dick Tracy on me, my memory's gone to shit."

"Got it," LaMoia said, managing to open the car door and connect with the security of the sidewalk. He fingered the lump of the tape recorder in his coat pocket.

"You want me to drop you, it's on the way."

"I'm good," LaMoia said.

"Whatever."

LaMoia slammed the door shut. His left thumb turned off the tape recorder as Prair pulled into traffic. It was raining. But like everyone else in this city, LaMoia didn't feel it.

A little over twenty minutes later, having headed directly back to Public Safety and winded from hurrying down the hall, LaMoia knocked on the office's open door, expecting to see Matthews behind her desk. Ironically, Matthews understood Prair better than anyone-she'd freak when she heard what he had on tape. His shoulders slouched in disappointment and he turned to the secretary pool. "Matthews have a meeting or something?

Where can I find her?"

"Lost time," the closest of the secretaries answered, glancing up to the grid on the wall.

"What are you talking about?" he said, his voice noticeably louder.

"Lost time, Sergeant."

"She's on a wire. She's under surveillance," he said, though he wasn't sure. He didn't want her out there unprotected.

The snotty secretary answered, "So how hard can it be to find her?" She mumbled under her breath something about his being a detective after all, and the woman next to her grinned with the comment.

LaMoia said sternly, "Make some calls and find her. I'm on my cell phone." He started off at a walk and broke into a run as he avoided the elevator and took to the stairs. He had her mobile number ringing in his ear by the time he reached the fifth floor. Her voice mail answered. What was with that?

He called Special Ops dispatch from his office cubicle. They'd heard nothing about Matthews leaving the building. "You check the ladies' room?" the dispatcher asked.

LaMoia mumbled back at the man, incoherent. She wasn't in the bathroom-he knew this in his gut. Something, someone, had drawn her out of the building, and LaMoia was bound and determined to find out what was going on. He'd find Boldt, he'd page the day-shift squad detectives to call him back. He'd check with the lab, theMEs Anyone else he could think of.

He'd broken into a clammy sweat. His eyes stung; his palms were damp.

What the hell was happening to him?

Lost Time

In addition to the pink telephone memo that had inappropriately interrupted the interrogation of Vanderhorst, Matthews found a voice mail on her cell phone as well. "Miss Matthews?" Margaret's warbling voice was itself enough to make Matthews feel sick. "I'm ... I've screwed up, pretty bad. Real bad. You said to call. So... so I'm calling." No address, no phone number. Matthews dug around in her jeans pocket and came up with the folded memo. Thank God, she thought, glad she'd saved it.

There wasn't any address to speak of, only the notation, "above Mario's." She pulled out the phone book and started thumbing through the yellow pages. She'd never felt right about Margaret's mention of a place to stay. A roof overhead was one thing, but the baby needed prenatal care, square meals, doctor visits. A flophouse above a pizza parlor? Was it a crack house, a cum shop, a shooting gallery? She found it finally in the white pages: Mario's Pizza. Time to move. She felt awful for having been out of touch with the girl, and especially for being unavailable for the past sixty minutes. With these girls, every minute counted. On the street, a life could change in a matter of seconds.

"Lost time," she informed the civilian administrative assistant who managed the seventh-floor secretary pool-and whereas the expression meant the time clock stopped for lower rank personnel, for lieutenants and above it meant their offices would be vacant, their phones picked up by voice mail. The assistant slid a thumb-worn in out marker on a wall poster that tracked such things, and returned to her typing.

Matthews's hand hovered over the phone on this assistant's desk as she debated calling Boldt, two floors down. The Vanderhorst interrogation had gone well-better than expected-the two of them finding a mutually inclusive rhythm that to Boldt must have felt like a pair of musicians trading riffs. She owed him a report and knew he wouldn't fancy her ducking out of the house until that homework was turned in. There was a series of psych tests to schedule; outside experts would have to be consulted to either support or challenge her professional evaluation.

Each of these efforts required reports be written as well. The complications of multi jurisdictional warrants caused by a four-state killing spree would consume over half the detectives on CAP, a good deal of SID's resources, and virtually all of her own time for the next several weeks. One man and his crimes would put a piece of SPD at a virtual standstill.

She tried LaMoia instead, the phone switching through to voice mail on the first ring, meaning he was either on the line or out of the office. She hadn't seen him since breakfast-his showing up at the loft with Blue on his heels and a bag of hot sesame bagels under his arm.

She left him a message that she was running an errand to help Margaret. She left the name of the pizza shop in SoDo. Her final attempt on the phone found Bobbie Gaynes at her desk.

"Would you mind taking an hour of lost time as a favor?" she asked.

"Name it, Lieutenant."

"Take a ride with me? I could use some backup. A young girl from the Shelter-pregnant out to here-just left me a message that she and the baby are in trouble. She's shacked up above this pizza joint, and I'm thinking if she's got a room, then there's a pimp or a dealer involved-you know what these girls get into." She added, "Two of us, that's better odds." She smiled, trying to win Gaynes over. If this grew into anything more than a quick favor, Lou would turn it into a surveillance ops.

"Give me five minutes. I'll meet you in the garage."

Driving south of the Safe a few minutes later, Gaynes asked, "Anything more I should know, Lieutenant?"

Matthews briefly explained her relationship with Margaret. She said, "I promised Lou I'd stay on the wire, but honestly, I don't want dispatch monitoring this conversation, because I also made a promise to the girl, weeks ago, that I'd respond as a woman, not as a cop."

"Those things only throw a signal about a hundred yards, Lieutenant. No way dispatch will monitor."

"Yes," Matthews said.

"So, I'll listen in from the car and provide backup as necessary."

"Yes, exactly."

"No problem," Gaynes said.

Traffic thinned past the two sports stadiums, the neighborhoods slowly deteriorating into a dock lands warehouse district.

As directed, Gaynes parked two blocks away from the pizza joint. She would drop Matthews off here and then move into position, closer to the shop, a minute later.

"So I lie low unless there's trouble," Gaynes asked. "If you need me, you want a code word?"

Matthews had considered something like this, but thought better of it. "No. I'll just scream for help."

Gaynes grinned. "Got it."

Her academy training and past experience caused Matthews to take a few extra minutes to scout the immediate area, fully circling the block that included Mario's Pizza.

On the last leg of this patrol, she spotted the chrome bumper and black trunk of a car parked down a narrow alley, less than a block from Mario's. She held closely to a wall of an abandoned building, edging near enough to read the black decal numbering on the left of the bumper: KCSO-89.

She gasped aloud, then for the sake of the lavaliere microphone clipped beneath her shirt, she said, "Bobbie, I've got Nathan

Prair's patrol car in sight. One block south, on the west side of the street, down an alley. I'm going to take a closer look. Stand by."

She crossed the street, able to see through the car's back windshield as she approached. The car stood empty. Her heart pounding, she slipped into the shadows of the alley alongside the car and peered into both the front and back seats, ready for Prair to jump out and surprise her.

"Officer?" she called out, to no answer.

Had Margaret been involved with Prair all along? Had she notified Prair, asking for help, after failing to reach Matthews? Had some contact of Prair's at SPD leaked the teen's cry for help, inspiring attempted heroics on Prair's part aimed once again at impressing Matthews? A dozen thoughts circled inside her, and Matthews nearly swooned, briefly off-balance, reaching out to steady herself.

"Bobbie," she said, again speaking aloud into the cold air, for the sake of the small microphone clipped to her bra, "call KCSO and request... no, you had better make that insist... that you speak with Prair. When you reach him, find out what the hell his patrol car is doing a block from Mario's Pizza. Then call me back on the cell. I'll leave the cell on until I hear from you."

She crossed the street with a forced, stiff-legged stride, a renewed enthusiasm to get to the bottom of this. She resented the idea of Margaret being used as bait to get to her-if that's what was going on. Nathan Prair had stepped way out of bounds.

Then again, she didn't know what was going on-and that confusion made her all the more determined to find out.

A Good Shooting

LaMoia spotted Janise Meyer from a concrete bench within a few yards of the plaza fountain across from Westlake Center, his heart pounding with the possibility of what she carried. She wore an ankle-length khaki trench coat, the waist belt not fastened, but tied like a robe. Brown flats with bare brown ankles. Hair the color of midnight with matching eyebrows and lashes. Green eyes that screamed improbably of an Irishman somewhere in her African American heritage. Thick lips that curled into a provocative smile that he'd liked from the first time he'd met her. She adopted that same smirk now as she sat down on the bench next to him, a leather briefcase on her lap.

"So why the cloak and dagger, Cowboy?"

"You're smuggling out confidential paperwork there, Janise."

"Printouts of confidential paperwork," she reminded, passing the half ream of paper to him. "I could have e-mailed them to you, for Christ's sake. It would have saved me walking the six blocks over here."

"True story." LaMoia leafed through them. It had been a while since he'd ridden patrol. It took him a moment to orient himself to the small forms-citations for everything from speeding to parking violations. "Our e-mails are watched, right?" he asked the pro. "Listen, if I get in trouble for this, I wanted it on my head, not yours."

She accepted the closest coffee, lifting it out of his lap. She sipped through the small hole in the lid, savoring it. He remembered that about her-she treated a cup of coffee like it was an elixir. Treated a lot of things that way, come to think about it.

A pair of teenaged boys raced by on skateboards, testing new moves.

She said, "I don't know why you want this-him going over to Sheriffs and all, but that's what you got." She informed him, "Metro used to archive the traffic 'cites' on microfiche. Now it's all digitized."

LaMoia flipped pages while Janise enjoyed the coffee.

She said out of the side of her mouth, "Double-check stub number thirty-five MN seven thirty-two."

In trying to convert LaMoia to a love of jazz, Boldt had once told him that good music was as much about what was left out what wasn't there-as the notes one heard. A true connoisseur of music learned to listen for what was missing. To LaMoia, that advice had been an oxymoron until the moment he turned to the citation Janise had mentioned. Prair's citation records from two years earlier were missing an entry for 35MN-732.

"You're shitting me," he let slip. The copy of 35MN-733, the next in sequence, carried ghostly images familiar to any cop who'd ever used a "carbonless" ticket book-the ballpoint pen impression from the missing carbon of 732 had carried through to 733, the result of forgetting to insert a divider ahead of the next record. The same thing happened to LaMoia with his checkbook.

It took a moment for his eyes to decipher one entry from the next. The fainter impressions slowly began to stand out in his mind's eye.

A minute later an excited LaMoia was on his cell phone to the Department of Licensing, reciting a tag number to a bored bureaucrat on the other end. "I need it A-SAP," he said.

Janise Meyer pulled the coffee away from her lips and said,

"Damn, Cowboy, you get any more worked up, you gonna blow a valve or something."

LaMoia made eyes at her, not wanting to speak with the open line.

She said, "What's so special about a missing citation, other than it's against regs to tear one from a book?"

The woman on the phone calmly read the name of the owner of the vehicle back to him. LaMoia thanked her and disconnected the call.

"Dana Eaton," he said, his brain locked on the name.

On hearing the name, Janise spilled the coffee down her front and wiped it away quickly, cursing him. "The Dana Eaton?" There wasn't a cop on SPD that didn't know that name-a name beaten into the entire population by a media feeding frenzy.

Janise yanked the pages out of LaMoia's lap and flipped back and forth, checking the dates of the traffic citations immediately before and after the one that was missing. "Can't be right," she said. "This is like two months before the shooting." It took a moment to sink in. "Are you telling me he knew that woman?"

LaMoia couldn't get a word out. He'd sensed it all along; only now could he actually prove it hadn't been a "good shooting" after all.

Nathan Prair was going to jail.

Five Minutes from Prosperity

Mario-if there even was a Mario-had found some cheap real estate that still remained in striking distance for delivery downtown.

The building looked older than God. The neighborhood, no stranger to police patrols, was a favorite for gang activity, a warehouse and light industrial region in decay over a decade, since software had overcome hardware in the bid for the local economy. Brick and broken asphalt played host to the rusted carcasses of stripped cars. Five minutes from prosperity.

Mario's had a take-out counter, two cooks, four runners, a pair of enormous ovens, and alternative rock playing at dangerous decibels over shredded speakers. The Rastafarian currently engaged with a phone order lifted a finger indicating he'd be right with her. Hanging up, he barked across the small room to a skinny woman in her late teens. The girl wore too many earrings to count. The wanna-be-a-gansta white boy next to her, his arms covered in the purple lace of spiderwebs and barbed wire tattoos, his hands in disposable gloves-thank God!seeded a pie with sliced mushrooms.

She let her shield wallet fall open, displaying her creds. "Is there a pregnant girl upstairs?"

"Could be," the Rastafarian answered. He hadn't had time to study her shield, so he impressed her when he said, "What's a lieutenant doing on the street?"

"You the landlord?"

"Not hardly. Manager is all. You the Apartment Police?" This was a game to him.

"Margaret." Matthews said. "Her name is Margaret."

"Is that right?"

"I'm here to give her a leg up."

"I just bet you are."

"When was the last time City Health stopped by for an inspection?"

"Room two," he said. "It's on the left."

"What about the deputy sheriff?"

"Who?"

"His car's around the block."

"So he's getting a hummer from one of the charmers in the hood. What's new?"

She studied his face and found herself believing him. In her mind, Prair had to be hooked up with Margaret's situation-either as a friend or the enemy. She wasn't eager to run into him. He was good at staying hidden and out of the way, and she kept that in mind as well.

"Who's in the other rooms up there?" she asked.

He eyed her suspiciously.

She said, "Who am I going to run into in the hall?"

"There's no one going to throw shots at you, if that's what you mean."

"That's what I mean."

She produced a twenty from her purse and placed it on the counter. She said, "Hold the anchovies," and made the guy smile. Lousy teeth. She made it forty, total. "Anyone up there with Margaret?"

"I don't even know that she's up there, lady."

"Within the realm of possibility," she suggested.

"Listen, they think I don't know, but there're three of them sharing what's barely big enough for one. Young girls."

Matthews withdrew her gun from the purse and chambered a round. It all came down to a show of power on the streets. You were either a player or not. She understood the psychology, though lacked some of the courage. She said, "I don't need anyone crashing my party. Should I give you a minute to let anyone know, or what?"

"People are in and out of there all the time, Lieutenant." The way he emphasized her rank, she knew he'd made her for the desk jockey she was. He said, "You do what you gotta do."

The stairway entrance to the apartments was outside the take-out door and to the left. She glanced across the street to where Gaynes had parked the car. In theory, Gaynes was making every attempt to raise Prair. Matthews bootlegged her weapon on the way up the dingy and dirty stairwell, choking on the smell of urine. In situations like this-tenement busts-it was surprise that cost cops their lives. Reaction time proved longer than the thought process. Twelve-year-olds with water pistols took a bullet.

The upstairs hallway was empty and dimly lit. Either her man downstairs had cleared the area, or she'd gotten lucky. The gun felt an inappropriate way to greet Margaret, but it wouldn't feel right in the handbag, either. She let it fall to her side and knocked. "Margaret, it's me," she announced. Either that registered or not, she wasn't calling out any more details.

She heard footsteps approaching the door and found herself relieved that Margaret could walk, was not prone on the bed delivering the baby prematurely. For this had been her most recent thought: contractions. Margaret about to give birth.

"Just a minute." The sound of the girl's voice filled Matthews with gratitude. She resolved not to abandon her, to stay with her until whatever was the problem was fully resolved.

She heard a pair of locks come off the door. She felt herself grip the handgun more tightly and braced herself for bloodshot eyes, jaundiced skin, the girl's water having broken-whatever terror she next confronted. The apartment door came open. She'd been crying, her face blotchy, her nose running, her cheeks silver with tears. She wore torn leggings, a loose dress from Goodwill. She trembled head to toe with fever, her forehead beaded with perspiration. Or maybe it was toxic shock or a reaction to some drug she'd taken. The girl could not bring herself to look at Matthews, eyes downcast. Embarrassed, Matthews thought.

A combination of horror, sympathy, and righteous indignation charged her system, and again she promised to see this through. Hebringer and Randolf were dead-they could wait awhile. This girl still had a chance.

"It's okay," Matthews said. The door fell fully open. She peeked through the crack before stepping inside. The room was empty. "You did the right thing in calling me."

"I don't know about that."

The sad, cheerless room was barely bigger than a bathroom stall. Soiled sheets covered a thin mattress on a steel-framed bed. If three women lived here, they shared that bed, nearly on top of each other. A corner sink housed a faucet that dripped, a teardrop of green patina below. The toilet had to be down the hall. A wooden closet bar sat across the corner diagonally holding a handful of empty wire hangers. The room's only window looked barely big enough for egress. The room smelled of girls, of mildew, and of sweat, all overpowered by the nauseating aroma of tomato sauce and something burning.

Margaret sat down, paralyzed on the edge of the bed. She began crying again. "I'm so sorry," she moaned, repeating it over and over.

Matthews secured the weapon and stored it in her purse. She eased down alongside of the girl. Matthews said, "Well... it's good to see you've got a roof over your head."

Matthews heard footsteps out in the hall draw closer. She experienced a jolt of heat like hormones gone bad. Margaret looked up, struggled to sober up, her eyes clearly fixing onto Matthews as she whispered hoarsely, "He said he'd kill the baby."

"Who-?" But in that instance, Matthews felt her eyes refocus on a tiny hole freshly drilled through the room's side wall. The plaster's white dust had settled on the floor like a tiny pile of snow. She rotated her head toward the door. Unlocked! She realized the oversight too late. She'd answered her own question: a fisherman. The department had hung her out as bait for Walker, but he'd baited her instead. Despite her earlier planning for this possibility, the minute or two with Margaret had pushed all that aside.

Ferrell Walker came through the door, catching Matthews flat-footed and a beat behind. She grabbed for her purse, but his knife severed the leather strap and it fell to the floor, where he kicked it away. The knife was familiar. The curved blade a deceptive dull gray from hours of hand sharpening.

Suddenly the door was shut and Margaret in his grip, the knife held below her bulging belly.

"Who's the friend in the Ford?" he asked, the first words out of his mouth. He leaned forward, cheek to cheek with Margaret. "She betrayed you," he said. "Just like she betrayed me." He met eyes with Matthews as he took Margaret in a choke hold, the knife suddenly at her belly. If he used it, she'd come open like a piece of ripe fruit.

"They have me under surveillance," she said. Rule number one: Never lie in a hostage situation. For the sake of Bobbie Gaynes, monitoring her every word, she added hastily, "Put the knife down, Ferrell.""

He backed up to the window and glanced furtively outside.

"Shit! Call her off." Below him, no doubt, Gaynes was already on the move.

"How do I do that, Ferrell?" Matthews asked, stalling. She pointed to the door. "Should I go out-"

"YOU CALL HER OFF!" He tightened his grip on Margaret, pulling the knife lower.

"My purse. My cell phone," Matthews said.

Walker eyed the purse on the floor ... back to Matthews ... the door to the room ... out the window.

She was thinking that peepers don't kill and that Walker was clearly a peeper from the Underground, a person satisfied with phone harassment, a grief-stricken lost soul who'd lost his way. Only then did she notice what looked like fresh blood on the man's sneakers and the bottoms of his pants. Only then did she realize she'd played this wrong.

He said, "So we give them something to keep them busy." With that, he dragged the knife across Margaret's belly, muffling her cry with his left hand, and let her sag to the floor in a pool of the impossible.

Matthews screamed out and charged, but took the butt end of the knife in the forehead and her lights dimmed. As she struggled up to consciousness, she felt him pulling on her arms, dragging her across the floor. Margaret's crimson cry huddled beneath the window, the fingers of her right hand dancing like a typist's in an erratic, bloodless twitch.

"You son of a bitch," she groaned as she threw up just outside the door. Walker pulled her to her feet and pushed her. She stumbled forward down the hall, leading the way. "She'll bleed out," she said, trusting Gaynes to hear. "Where's this hallway lead?" Again, for the sake of the microphones.

He pressed the point of the knife into her back, and she felt it cut through her skin. "What's that blood on your clothes?", she asked. "Did you harm Lanny Neal?" She hoped to hell Gaynes was getting this. Her vision blurred, but she tried to keep watch for the detective, tried to prepare to make a move that would allow a shot. With his next shove, Walker encountered the bulge of metal hardware taped to her back. His arm suddenly came around her throat as he tore the device loose, wires and all, and smashed it under his right heel. The shirt of LaMoia's that she wore ripped from her armpit to her waist.

This was not the Ferrell Walker she had ever expected. The psychologist in her looked for the telltales she'd missed, the source of the violence he displayed. Twice now he'd mentioned her betrayal of him. He'd made that connection between Mary Ann and her-both "leaving him" for someone else. LaMoia, in her case. A spark of dread filled her as she realized she'd warned LaMoia and Boldt of this very event-her abduction. So here it was, nothing like she'd imagined it.

He pushed her again, and she wobbled forward on unsteady legs.

They were two steps down the slanting staircase when a winded Gaynes rounded the landing. Without hesitation, as if he'd practiced this a hundred times, he let go of Matthews, shoving her off balance so that she tumbled down the stairs, knocking into Gaynes like a bowling ball chasing a pin. Gaynes, two handing her weapon during her ascent, aimed the gun low and swiveled to avoid Matthews, but went down hard. Walker, showing no interest in the gun, kicked it away and then smashed his foot down on the detective's wrists, first the right, then the left. He dropped a knee squarely onto her chest, seized her by the hair, and smashed her skull down onto the flooring, rendering her unconscious. This was a man who could pin a squirming four-hundred-pound halibut.

He dragged Matthews by the arms until she scrambled to walk under her own power, her legs riddled with splinters. He led her to and through a door that opened up on the back side of the building, where a kid in a white apron smeared with tomato sauce leaned against the brick smoking a joint. That apron reminded Matthews of the first time she'd met Ferrell Walker. It seemed like a year ago now. Hopefully, she thought, not a lifetime ago.

"Get the fuck out of here," Walker said, making no attempt to disguise his holding Matthews captive.

The kid mumbled "Fuck off" as he snubbed the joint and rolled to his right, turning his back on them. A street assault was nothing new to him.

Walker stopped her at the corner, peering out into the mostly deserted street. A pair of delivery trucks lumbered past. He slipped the bloodied knife away with the expertise of a swordsman, held her firmly by the arm, and said, "You stay close, or I feed you to the crabs." He fought with her as he led her across the street. In regaining her feet, in being set into motion, she awoke from the stupor brought on by Margaret's evisceration. It was one thing to respond to crime, quite another to witness it, this act of his catching her squarely in the crosshairs. She understood in those few hurried moments of crossing the street, of heading down yet another litter-strewn alley, that her very survival depended on her ability to quickly and accurately pinpoint

Walker's mind-set, the motivations and factors that had turned him from a benign mourner into an unpredictable, homicidal killer. Some trigger had been thrown, and she believed her continued existence turned on her ability to identify it, expose it, and manipulate it to her advantage.

As if hearing her internal thoughts, he turned to her halfway down the alley and said with wild eyes, "Don't worry, you're going to like this."

That made her worry all the more.

They stopped in front of a steel-plate manhole marked

SWD-Seattle Water Department. Walker retrieved a crude tool fashioned from bent re bar that he'd hidden behind a pile of soggy cardboard boxes. The reinforcing rod was bent like a giant meat hook. He instructed Matthews to sit down on the pavement, and she obeyed, ill prepared to try to outrun the man. He slipped the hook end of the bent rod through a ventilation hole in the manhole cover and hoisted the heavy lid. It came off the exposed hole with a rattle of metal. As he did so, she used the cover of the noise to reach behind her, grope down her backside, and tear loose the small tag inside her panties. She let it fall onto the pavement. Leave them crumbs, she thought, her cop's mind beginning to separate from her personal emotions.

A flicker of light swept through the looming darkness that seemed to overwhelm her at that moment. She was letting him win without intending it. She said to him, "Weybw'J the room, Ferrell. The bodies. We know all about it." She saw disappointment crease his face-she'd guessed the contents of the gift before allowing him to unwrap it for her.

He told her to get to her feet. He pointed down the black hole in the pavement. "Ladies first," he said.

Circling the Drain

The early reports of the situation were sketchy at best, and Boldt tried not to overreact. His tendency, when hearing one officer was down and another missing, was to assume the best while preparing for the worst. The job rarely involved much good news, and he'd developed a fairly thick skin, but one learned not to creatively interpret a simple radio code.

That this call involved members of his own unit-one a protege and friend, the other his friend and former lover-proved the exception to the rule. He fell to pieces with the news. Monitoring the tense radio traffic, he determined that ambulances were headed to the scene. Reports included a woman-quite possibly a civilian-badly cut and bleeding out. The pit in his stomach grew to nausea as he caught himself hoping that the vie was a civilian, a line he had no right to cross.

He rushed down the hall to the men's room, the nausea escalating to where he felt his stomach preparing to void. In all his years on the job he'd never vomited over an earful of radio traffic.

He put out the fire with a dose of cold water to the face, and it worked. The nausea receded into a world of anger and frustration.

What the hell had Daphne been thinking? She'd skipped out of Public Safety without notifying Special Ops. In a gust of ill temper, he slammed his palms down onto the sink with such force that he knocked the entire fixture off the wall. Water sprayed from broken pipes. Boldt jumped back, as the ceramic sink broke into several chunks that echoed as a small explosion.

Detective Gerald Millhouse rushed into the room fearing he'd be calling the bomb squad. "Shit, Boss. I'd thought we'd lost you."

Boldt moved back and away from the encroaching flood of water on the tile floor. He heard Millhouse and knew well enough he should respond, but instead he found himself locked into a trance as he watched that floor water coil in waves as it formed an ever-tightening spiral and slipped down the floor drain.

Inevitably, you overlook the obvious, he thought, recalling the cliched line lectured to all rookie detectives. It was a Boldt version of Murphy's Law that he'd seen in action more times than he liked.

"Lieutenant?" It was Millhouse again, trying to win his attention.

Boldt flushed crimson with embarrassment, not over his having broken a sink, but for having overlooked the simple law of gravity.

His instruction to Millhouse was oblique, for his mind was working too quickly to form a perfect sentence. "Dr. Sandra Babcock, Archaeology Department at the U." He racked his brain for the name of the bus tunnel maintenance man. Couldn't find it. Then, there it was. "And a Chuck Iberson over at WSDOT Third Avenue bus tunnel maintenance. Find them both and get them over here to the Pioneer Square station, A-SAP. No tears."

Millhouse lowered his voice and said tentatively, "But Boss, you heard about Matthews and Gaynes, right?"

"You'll be chalking tires if those two aren't in that bus tunnel in ten minutes," Boldt replied matter-of-factly.

Millhouse fled the men's room in a panic.

Boldt fought to keep emotion out of the decision-making process, fought the urge to fly down the fire stairs, climb into the Crown Vie, and race to the crime scene. He put the victims first, and one of them was missing. An extremely important one.

The water, collected on the floor, kept "circling the drain," police-speak for all hope being lost. But Boldt knew he wasn't lost at all-he'd just found the missing piece to the puzzle.

Darkness, My Old Friend... The space-an old tunnel of some sort-was wet, dark, and cramped. They had reached it fairly quickly by following a city storm sewer north a good several blocks. Walker had removed a large grate mounted in the side of the storm sewer and pushed her through. Matthews now walked hunched over, stepping sometimes through gooey mud, sometimes ankle-deep in extremely cold water. It smelled of earth and loam and vaguely of the sea. She paid little or no attention at all to the slimy objects in her path, which to her spoke volumes of the more pressing need to find a way out of this situation, for normally she would have reeled at the tangled contact with cobwebs and the awful sensation of the disgusting, unseen objects sucking past her bare ankles.

Walker remained behind her, egging her on with sharp jabs of his fingers in the small of her back, the first few of which she had thought were the knife. She had long since lost all sense of direction. His small flashlight provided the only light-it amounted to her shifting shadow stretching long and thin on the tunnel's earthen walls.

Somewhere behind and above them lay Margaret with her abdomen sliced open and Gaynes, unconscious. A by-the-book detective, Gaynes would have called in a "510" requesting backup before she moved on the building. By now, Matthews could assume that backup was already on the scene. Lou would have been consulted. John would have been informed. A controlled but professional panic was sweeping through Public Safety, and she was the focus of it all. She had to stall Walker in order to buy herself time. She had to get to the surface. She possessed the facilities to accomplish both goals, as long as she kept herself collected and focused. The mind tended to jump almost randomly from one thought to another in such situations-the professional in her was very much aware of this. She needed focus. She needed clear, linear thought.

The floor of the tunnel dried to packed earth-they were on dirt now. At first she thought the crunching beneath her feet was gravel or rock. She encountered areas like this every twenty yards or so; there was no predicting when, or how much. Then she realized it was crushing under her footfalls, not merely shifting as gravel might. The dirt floor suddenly sparkled to life, a thousand jewels, and she realized they were walking atop broken glass-broken bottles, to be more accurate-the smugglers' tunnel.

With no idea where she was headed, she nonetheless knew where she was, and this tiny seed of knowledge strengthened her, emboldened her to begin the task of breaking him down, piece by piece.

"This is kind of fun," she said strongly, gathering in her strength and forcing it out her lungs. When the flashlight flickered away from her, she dropped a gold stud earring onto the dirt floor. Another crumb, she hoped.

Walker stumbled behind her, and she mentally marked one down in her column. The first of such marks. Hopefully, not the last.

The Tag

LaMoia stared at the rear bumper of KCSO patrol car #89, the phalanx of police and emergency vehicles only a block behind him. The pregnant girl was critical. Gaynes was conscious but in extreme pain, and was being carted off to Emergency. At that moment, he might have believed Nathan Prair had abducted Matthews, except for Gaynes having told him it was Walker. Now he came to believe the obvious: that Prair had either responded to the same cry for help from the girl that Matthews had received, or that he'd intercepted the 510, the SPD radio call for backup, and had responded in hopes of rescuing Matthews himself.

"Over my dead body," LaMoia heard himself say aloud.

He searched the car and found it locked. He searched the alley and found nothing but trash, a few needles, and the rotting carcass of a dead cat. The buildings off this alley were secure as well. The more he studied the situation, the more he believed Prair had simply stashed the car here so it might avoid being seen. He had wanted to buy himself a head start, and that pissed off LaMoia all the more. It would be just like Prair to observe something like this going down, only to realize too late that he'd better do something.

LaMoia left the alley, returning into the street, and carefully searched the block back toward Mario's Pizza and the tenement that housed it, now off to his left. LaMoia knew Special Ops

CO Chatwin to be a Neanderthal incapable of thinking outside the box. Matthews, in all her prescience, had nailed this on the head. Chatwin had his ERT troops and a traffic helicopter searching the surface streets-an urban commando exercise he was both familiar with and comfortable in exercising. LaMoia's brief plea to designate a unit to search for an access to the Underground had left him snubbed. "What, you think this is fucking

Disneyland, Sergeant?"

"The kidnapper has an established history of subterranean access." LaMoia tried his best to make this sound official. But he couldn't maintain his composure once Chatwin dismissed the suggestion. LaMoia said, "With all due respect, he's a fucking troglodyte, sir. We've got him directly linked to at least two different areas of the Underground beneath the city."

"What, the tourist place?" Chatwin asked, and LaMoia realized that any attempt at an explanation was not worth the wind.

"You're looking in the wrong place," he tried, one final time.

"Process of elimination, Sergeant. I'll entertain your suggestion, but we work this my way first."

"Yes, sir."

"I'm CO," he reminded, a little miffed by LaMoia's tone.

"Yes, sir."

"If you want to be of help, get in your car and log in with dispatch. We could use you."

"I don't want to be of help, sir."

Checking the street carefully now, LaMoia wanted to avoid another encounter with Chatwin at all costs. He held to his own. Another alley up ahead caught his attention. The ERT guys had rushed through this area like a tornado. They'd been looking for an abductor and hostage. LaMoia was looking for something else entirely: access to an escape route Walker might have used. Matthews had labeled the man an organized personality, and that was good enough for him. She'd foreseen her own abduction.

Who was he going to trust? He intended to work the scene methodically, as he'd been trained to do by Boldt, one of the best in the business.

He rounded the corner into that next alley, wondering all of a sudden where the hell Boldt was. Matthews as a hostage and the Sarge nowhere to be seen? The guy would have to be either locked up or dead to be kept from this crime scene.

His eyes lighted on that white fabric tab from fifteen yards away, the glare of his penlight illuminating the improbable color in a world of mud brown and ash gray. Perfect, pure, white. It called out as if it had yelled at him. He headed to it like a bloodhound-the thought of which made him wonder if the K-9 unit had been called up. He bent and retrieved it.

Victoria's Secret, size medium.

There was no sound, no night air, no sirens, no radio squawks, no movement in his universe, only his trembling fingers and that white fabric tag clasped so tightly.

Debating whether or not to call for backup, he looked quickly around for something with which to lift that manhole cover. She had made it plain to him that if she went missing, she trusted him to do what was right. Chatwin seemed certain to bungle this, putting Matthews at risk. Backup could wait until he knew the full situation.

Victoria's Secret. He would tease her about that when he found her. And he would find her, he told himself. He had to. It was the only way he knew. John LaMoia always got the girl.

Another Level

"Where'd all the water go?" Boldt asked Iberson and Babcock. She wore blue jeans, a brown sweater, and rubber boots. Iberson was dressed for the ball game in tennis shoes, khakis, and a red thin shell that zipped down the front. The two looked back at him blankly. A double dragon swept past them, lifting dust and sand and grit in its wake. The bus tunnel's oddly sterile mercury vapor lighting turned everyone's skin a bluish green.

Boldt said, "The water main. All that water... enough to drown a man. So where'd it go? Where'd it end up?" He said to Babcock, "It was damp but not flooded in that lower level."

Iberson answered, "I told you, it came out our wall vents."

"Some of it, sure. But all of it?" Boldt asked.

"Enough to shut us down," Iberson reminded.

Babcock understood him. "What prompted this?" she asked.

He wasn't interested in such chitchat. "We have an officer wounded. Another's missing. A girl, a young woman, is in critical condition and probably won't make it. I'm up against a clock here. The guy I'm after got hold of that key on that lower level. That suggests access that we don't know about. The water from that broken main, it went somewhere. And not just here, into this runnel. Most of it had to have gone down to that lower level-that's just physics. So what happened to it? It should have been a swimming pool down there."

Babcock lost a shade. She nodded. "You're right. Of course, you're right."

"Is anybody going to fill me in?" an irritated Iberson asked.

Boldt had left Iberson behind, focusing now only on the academic.

"But where? Another level? A sewer system? An aquifer?"

He had trouble getting the words out, the bubble in his chest from Matthews missing too big to swallow away.

He picked up a flicker in her eyes. "What?" he asked. She shook her head. "Anything," he stressed. "He's got our officer underground somewhere. I'd guarantee you that."

"Rumors is all," she said, her throat dry, her words raspy.

Boldt nodded furiously. "I'll take rumors."

"There are old references to a smugglers' tunnel. Supposedly, it connected speakeasies and the hotels to the waterfront during Prohibition. Dug by the Chinese. Controlled by the Chinese mafia in those days," said the historian.

"The International District?" He thought of Mama Lu, the very woman who had set him on this quest in the first place. Matthews had gone missing within a stone's throw of the I.D. "Connecting this place to the I.D.?"

"I'm just saying it's possible. Not probable. Not even likely."

Boldt yanked out his cell phone and then shouted at Iberson. "I've got to get topside. I've got to make a phone call."

Iberson flagged down the next bus that approached. Boldt and Babcock hit the surface streets less than two minutes later.

The Offering

The low tunnel bent around a turn, a good deal of the wooden posts and beams-old railroad ties in all probability-badly rotted. Matthews struggled to fight off the fear that wanted to own her.

Walker stopped her, instructing her to stand out of his way. They hadn't traveled terribly far, the going slow. She watched as his fading flashlight caught the edge of a large hole in the earthen wall. Walker stepped up to it and peered inside, and she came away with the sense that it was familiar to him.

She couldn't see into that hole, but she prayed silently that he wasn't going to make her go through it. It looked like one of those places a person never came out of. It failed to give her any sense of hope that it might lead to an escape route.

Walker turned and faced her, shining the light first onto her, then directing it onto himself, enabling her to see him. In a childish tone that sent shivers through her, he said, "It's important to me you know how much I care."

"Terrell-"

He shushed her and said, "To understand the extent to which I'm prepared to go to help you. You found the room. It's why ..." His voice tapered off.

She worried he couldn't hold a thought, that the synapses might be misfiring in his brain, either as a result of stress or some organic malfunction that she'd failed to identify in the course of her contact with him. That face-to-face contact had, in fact, been precious little. "Why what?" she asked.

"Well... it's the purpose of all this," he explained.

"So if we've already accomplished that purpose, Ferrell... maybe we should head up topside together."

"It's way beyond that now, isn't it?" He tried to smile, but his unwilling face would only pinch further, into a snarl. "Come look. It's for you."

"No, thank you."

"Come. Look." His hand went to the butt of the knife, and Matthews felt herself moving, as if on the ends of marionette strings.

"I'd like to go back up to the street now," she said, pressing for his cooperation in a period where he acted at least somewhat conciliatory toward her.

He positioned her in front of that dark hole in the wall. It looked as if a course of water had ripped loose this rent some years before. The sickening smile he managed should have forewarned her. He turned slowly, training that yellow light with him.

Sitting on a natural throne carved out of the mud like some kind of shrine was a decapitated corpse of a man in a brown uniform. Matthews cried out loudly and jumped back, as the flashlight caught up to the head of Nathan Prair that sat in his own lap, his big hands coddling it.

"For you," Walker said. "He was bothering you, right? I saw you two outside the Shelter that night we were supposed to meet. I saw you push him. Him grab you ..." His voice trailed off as he realized she was upset with this, not pleased as he'd intended. "You were ... upset... with him."

Walker had been watching her outside the Shelter on the night they'd agreed to meet-the night Nathan Prair had arrived unexpectedly, a result, no doubt, of a phone call or message from Walker himself. She realized he must have followed her back to LaMoia's-probably knowing about the loft already must have gone through that window to leave the key as she'd taken Blue for a walk. He'd been playing her all along like a fisherman with a prize catch.

Her vision zoomed in on the faint edge of that light in a staccato way that brought everything closer to her in a series of jerky movements: Prair's service pistol was still snapped into the holster on his work belt, now, just to the right of his ear. Next to it, an unmarked black can of pepper spray. Next to that, a Maglite. Walker, who had shown no interest in Gaynes's weapon, had clearly ignored Prair's as well. It took every ounce of strength and composure she could summon, but she stepped forward, toward the shrine. "I was upset with him," she said. "You're right about that." She made a point of making contact with Walker and allowing a smile to grace her lips. "You did this for me?"

Walker nodded, but his eyes ticked back and forth distrustfully as he sought out hers, and she wondered which Walker had come out to play, the one with the boyish crush on her or the knife-wielding woman killer?

She edged yet another step closer to both Walker and that hole, wondering if she could bring herself to dive in there with that severed head, reach the gun, and still have enough time to present it as a threat. The air tasted metallic and smelled putrid.

"I wanted to help," Walker said.

"It's not what I expected."

"I love surprises," he said.

Gooseflesh chased up her arms and down her spine.

She said, "Do you? Oh, good." With that, she recoiled, wound up, and then leaned forward, driving her weight into the shove that lifted Walker off his feet and sent him flying. She dived to her left, into that hole, slipped and scrambled up the muddy slope, facedown next to Prair's severed head as she fumbled with the holster's snap, grabbed hold of the weapon, racked the slide to chamber a round, thumbed the safety off, and rolled. Walker was on his feet, at the mouth of the hole, as she squeezed the trigger. Click. The trigger then stuck. She frantically tried to clear the jammed round as Walker took hold of her ankles and pulled, dropping her flat onto her back. Prair's head rolled off of his lap and up onto her chest, and she threw it aside, screaming. She felt the weight of the gun then, and she knew: Its magazine was missing. Walker had emptied the gun. Walker had baited her, yet again.

He clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth, shaming her. "Someone's been a bad girl," he said.

She lunged for the can of pepper spray in Prair's belt.

"Empty," Walker called out.

She threw the weapon at him, but he deflected it.

"I've never liked guns," he said. "I feel much safer with this." He held the curved gray blade between them.

Bloodstained and mud-covered, Matthews took a moment to regain her breath. She had disassociated from him, a conscious effort on her part that now would not come without consequences.

He had tested her, and she had been suckered into it. And she had failed.

"It changes everything," he said sadly. "You know that, don't you?"

There were no words for her, only a pounding heart, a dry tongue, and the chills that came with the knowledge of what she had done. She chastised herself for that decision-she'd allowed the emotion of fear to overcome any hope of rationally negotiating her way out. Had she been outside of this, observing it, she could have identified the victim's bad decision making at every turn. But from inside her own cloistered fear, she felt only punishment for her will to survive and the internal strength to act upon it.

"On your feet, Anna," he said, not hearing his own slip.

Metaphorically, she saw light at the end of the tunnel. Then she realized it was for real: There was light up ahead.

"We're going to go join your friends," he said.

Hebringer and Randolf, the only two "friends" she could think of.

"We're going to get to know each other."

She needed some way to attempt to rekindle rapport, even if she played into his fantasy that she was none other than his sister. She searched wildly for a nickname a sister might have used for a younger brother at some point in their long relationship.

She settled on the first nickname to pop into her head, literally a stab in the dark. "I already know you... Ferris Wheel."

Walker snapped his head toward her. He stared at her until she felt him looking through her, not at her. Her head ached, but she kept it up. "You think Anna didn't know that you watched her and Lanny Neal? Of course she did, Ferris Wheel."

He shoved her. She staggered back but did not fall. Nathan Prair's head, sideways in the mud now, watched them.

Matthews said, "Is that what caused the split between you? Your watching?"

He shoved her again, and this time she went down hard in the mud, face first, on all fours. Her right hand hit a piece of glass and cut. The smell that kicked up was putrid and sickening. He trained the light down onto her, but by the time he did she'd picked the sizeable piece of curved glass out of her palm, and had transferred it to her left hand, now curled around it. She rubbed her bleeding hand on her pants, and Walker noticed the wound.

"Shit," he said, the child that didn't mean to hurt the family pet. "Up ahead there's this wall. We'll rest there. Clean that up."

She gained a few yards on him. She wasn't going to run away, but she wanted some physical space in which to clear her mind, regain herself. She recalled all that LaMoia had told her about the interview with the barmaid, Walker's former girlfriend.

"The trouble began after your father died, didn't it?" The pain in her hand lessened. She decided she had to keep talking, free association, whatever came out of her mouth. Just keep talking. "It was just the two of you on the boat after that."

"So what?"

"Pretty close quarters for a man and a woman."

"It wasn't like that."

"No?" Her mind worked furiously through several sets of possibilities. She'd try them all if she had to. "You think you're the first guy to ever watch his sister? Give me a break." Condescending.

Mary-Ann would have dominated their relationship. She sorted out several planes of thought on which to operate, areas of possible vulnerability for him. She had him talking that was the important step. She didn't want to lose that for anything. Until now the mud had disgusted her, but as it came to cover her, to own her, she felt in a primitive state, capable of almost anything. Prepared to strike.

"Shut up about her," he said.

"No, I don't think so," she fired back. He moved her down the tunnel. The mud walls weeped in places. If she sneezed hard, the ceiling was coming down. "Why do you think you picked me, Ferrell? I'll tell you why: Because I listen, because I made sense from the very first time we spoke. It was at the docks. Do you remember?"

"Of course I remember."

"You liked the way I looked, sure. They all do, Ferrell." She wanted to make him as small as she could, for both their sakes. "But more important, you liked what I said." She didn't remember what she'd said, not exactly, but she knew something had initiated the transference, and she felt determined to unlock that key. "You knew I could help you, didn't you?" she asked. "It's why you haven't given up on me."

"Oh, but I have," he said, chilling her.

"No, you haven't."

He raised the knife blade in the dim light and spun it back and forth so that it threw light across her face. Margaret's blood had dried onto that knife. "Got me all figured out, do you?" It flashed again. "Maybe not," he said. "Maybe the fuck not."

She stood her ground. Plan two. "You picked me for a reason,

Ferrell."

"Because you told me to."

"I told you to what?"

"At the morgue," he said. "You told me there was no one else in the room. You said to put Mary-Ann where you were ... and I did that... and when you spoke, I heard her voice, just like you said I would. You were right."

"I'm not Anna, Ferrell, am I? Look at me. Listen to me closely. Your sister is dead."

"Going for that gun just now?" he said. "That was impressive.

That was something Anna would have done." She felt his eyes encompassing her. "It was a mistake, but it was ballsy."

"How do you think seeing that knife makes me feel? How would Anna feel? You think I want to get to know you when you're holding that knife, threatening me with that knife?"

"You said you already know me," he reminded.

She didn't want to think of him as smart, didn't want him focusing on her attempt to escape, deciding to challenge him yet again in an attempt to keep him off-balance. "You didn't find that sweatshirt, did you, Ferrell? I missed that, didn't I?"

"Don't know what you're talking about." But he most certainly did.

"Mary-Ann's sweatshirt," she said. "You didn't find that sweatshirt. You already knew where it was."

"What?" His voice betrayed him. He sheathed the knife, taking time to draw its blade clean on his jeans. This victory instilled her with a sense of courage.

"You knew where Neal hid his car key."

"Enough of this."

"You'd been with them that night he'd misplaced the other key. A birthday, wasn't it?"

"I said, enoughl"

"How did you get her to just sit there while you backed over her, Ferrell?"

He screamed, "Shut... your... mouth!" and she knew she'd scored a direct hit.

"Up ahead, we'll rest a minute," she said, wanting it to sound like it was her idea, to take control away from him. She was starting to understand that Walker's transference had gone beyond what she'd previously imagined. He'd not only transferred his feelings for Mary-Ann onto her, but he'd transferred his own guilt onto Lanny Neal in the form of blame.

She heard his breathing-quick, shallow intakes-and realized they'd switched roles. She had him back on his heels now, and didn't want to stop.

"You can't replace her, Ferrell. Not with me, not with anybody.

You can't change what has happened, as much as you'd like to, and repeating what you've done-it's what you have in mind, isn't it?-that won't help anything. It'll just make it worse. The pain, I'm talking about. I know all about the pain. It'll be much, much worse." She defiantly and purposely turned her back on him before he had a chance to recover from that. She marched forward toward the resting place he'd told her about.

"You betrayed me," she heard from behind her, and she knew this was about Mary-Ann, not herself.

She worked with something Neal had told them, saying over her shoulder, "You begged her for money ... to go back out on the boat with you. It's not what she wanted. She wanted a life. What did you expect, Ferrell?"

"I... saved... her," Walker said. "She ... owed ... me." She stopped, turned. "Saved her from Lanny Neal, from herself," she purposely hesitated, wanting this next thought to sink in, "or from youl That part of you that thought about her in ways that brothers aren't supposed to think about their sisters." Walker stepped close enough that she could smell his familiar stench. "From him\" he said, as agitated as she'd ever seen him. "I saved her from him." His eyes darted to the left, and she knew he regretted having revealed whatever it was he'd just revealed.

Without meaning to, Matthews gasped aloud. She'd missed the catalyst all along. It had been right there in front of her practically handed to her by LaMoia-and she'd moved right past it. Now the pieces fell into place for her like a row of dominoes tumbling over in perfect succession. Now, it finally all made sense, the discovery charging her with a renewed strength and sense of purpose. She had him; he was all hers. She said, "The drowning ... It wasn't an accident." Walker's face tightened, a mass of pain, and she expected tears from his eyes. But he proved far stronger, far more resilient, than she'd expected. He'd already processed some of this, and that brought Matthews back to his confrontation with Mary Ann

Raising the knife between them, he said, "Accidents happen."

Chasing a Cry

The first scream turned LaMoia in the right direction. Prior to that, he'd been following the city storm sewer out toward Elliott Bay. But that cry, a woman's cry, spun him on his heels and he rapidly retraced his steps, his cell phone immediately in hand. When the phone proved useless, its signal blocked by his depth underground, he debated climbing back up the chimney of concrete to the manhole through which he'd come-he was passing by this exact same spot again-debated enlisting the support of Special Ops, but recalling her request to avoid tying up her rescue in department-dictated procedures, something she had somehow foreseen, he passed beneath the manhole entrance, ignoring it, determined to follow the sound of her voice before he lost it, and her with it.

Heading in this direction, his flashlight picked up two pairs of muddy shoe prints that, a few minutes later, led to a woven metal grate in the wall of the storm sewer's concrete tube. He pulled on the grate, and it came free in his hand. He stuffed the small flashlight into his mouth like a cigar and used both arms to set the grate aside so he could climb through. The muddy tracks continued on the other side-a low horizontal shaft that reminded him of a mining tunnel. The thing looked ancient... and then his mind seized upon what he was looking at. He knew next to nothing about storm sewers and tunnels, and yet the detective in him believed that in all probability this was the smugglers' tunnel the minister had mentioned.

A voice shouting came from far away down the tunnel barely audible. This voice was male.

Ferrell Walker.

LaMoia's chest tightened painfully. He trained the Maglite into the dark. He ducked through the hole and stepped inside that tunnel. It smelled familiar-like death, he thought.

"I'm coming," he whispered under his breath, already moving quickly into the dark.

A Matter of Trust

In all his visits to Mama Lu, Boldt could remember seeing her out of that rattan throne only twice, surprised once again by how short she was. Not small, he thought, but short.

"I appreciate this, Great Lady," he said. He and Babcock, Mama Lu and her two trained polar bears in the black garb stood behind the butcher's meat counter where a crippled stairway led down into the glare of overhead bare bulbs. The Korean grocery smelled of fresh ginger and exotic spices. Korean talk radio played from a nasal-sounding AM radio behind the cash register at the other end of the room.

"This been family secret many generations, Mr. Both."

"We understand."

"You, I know, I trust. Yes. But woman? Mama Lu no know."

"You've nothing to worry about," Babcock said.

"I give you my word," Boldt said, knowing the commitment that statement represented.

"Police no know this. Nobody know."

Boldt said, "Understood."

"Only because this friend of yours."

"Matthews," Boldt said.

"I do this only for you. For her. You good man, Mr. Both. You clear Billy Chen's good name."

He didn't want to have a twenty-minute discussion about it,

but he knew her ways. "We'll eat a meal together," he said. "We'll celebrate."

She grinned across lipstick-smeared teeth. "But later."

She knew him better than he thought.

"Yes, later."

"Show them," she said to the larger of her bodyguards. To Boldt she said, "Saved my life three times, this secret. Maybe save your friend, too."

Boldt nodded, a frog caught in his throat. "Thank you," he said. He ducked his head, and the three descended the cramped stairs to the storage room below.

"This is old," Babcock informed him excitedly, well before the bodyguard pulled on the gray boards of built-in pantry shelves, opening and revealing a narrow passageway into darkness.

"This is it."

Boldt nodded to the big man and led the way through to the damp smells and pitch-dark. "Let's hope so," he heard himself say.

Seeing Double

Sitting on a damp ledge in total darkness, Walker having turned off the flashlight to save batteries, Matthews adjusted the broken piece of bottle glass in her left hand. To make the laceration count she would need a good deal of pressure, and this made her realize she needed her own hand protected or she might let " go of the glass as it also cut into her.

Walker turned the light back on, surprising her, and took her right hand in his, examining her cut. "It's not so bad," he said. He pulled a soiled rag out of a back pocket-she didn't want to think where it might have been-and he stuffed it into the hand to stem the bleeding. Without knowing it, he'd just passed her a shield for her piece of glass.

She tried to understand his patience. Why wasn't he in a hurry? Did he fail to realize that half the city's police department was by now out looking for her? Or was it simply that he trusted these tunnels-virtually untraveled by all but the homeless for the past hundred years-to protect him from discovery? Or was it something much worse, that he wanted to put off what he had in mind for her for as long as possible?

Hostage negotiators never pushed the abductor into making hasty decisions. Walker's obvious patience came to her as a blessing. He might know the tunnels beneath the city, but she knew the tunnels of the human mind.

Consumed in total darkness once again, she prepared to move the chunk of glass to her right hand. "How did it start... the idea of him having an accident?"

"Leave it."

"That's not something that comes out of nowhere. That builds over time. What was it: He criticized you? Thought he'd taught you to be a better fisherman than you were? Something like that?"

"You don't know anything."

"But isn't that why we're here?"

"We're here because I wanted you here," he said. "We're here because I helped you and I wanted to show you-"

She cut him off. "No, you wanted to test me."

"And you failed the test."

"I'm here because I understand you, Ferrell." She got the glass set in her right palm. "Take a good long look at your reasons, because that's why I'm here. It was your decision, not mine, and you need to face this."

She allowed the resulting silence to settle around them, like listening for animals in the woods.

"Was it Mary-Ann?" she asked in a whisper. "Something he did to Mary-Ann?"

The flashlight popped back to life. He scooted away from her, and she resented not having taken a swipe at him while she'd had the chance.

"Something you saw him doing to her. Something you heard him doing to her. What? Out on the boat, where you couldn't escape it? Where she couldn't escape it?"

No indignant rage, no shouting protestations. Ferrell Walker looked over sadly in the dull yellow of the weak light and she knew she'd scored a hit.

"Let's go," he said, waving her up.

"Where to?" She would need that flashlight of his after she cut him. If she lost it to the mud ... Without the flashlight she'd be lost down here, forever banging into the mud walls and rotting timbers.

"What you're feeling, Ferrell... it isn't something you can escape through a few tunnels. Hurting me is only going to make it worse."

"You betrayed me," he said far too calmly, too sadly. "You both betrayed me."

"You want to talk about both of us1? Answer me this: How would Mary-Ann have felt if you'd put her in this same situation?

Dragging her through the mud. And for what? To play some game of yours that's supposed to justify what you did to your father? Would she have played along, Ferrell?"

They moved in the same direction, heads ducked beneath the sagging timbers. She guessed north, back toward the heart of downtown. The Shelter? That room where Vanderhorst had hung the bodies? Where?

"You saved her, didn't you?"

"Shut up."

"Saved her from him, and I don't mean Lanny Neal."

"You don't know anything about it."

"Don't I? He would drink himself blind, wouldn't he? Criticize your handling of the boat, of the fish, when all along it was his incompetence that hurt the catch. His, not yours. And then Mary-Ann grew up, developed into a beautiful young woman, and the three of you out on the boat. He took advantage of that, didn't he? Advantage of her. Drunk as he was. And you on the other side of a bulkhead were made to listen to the whole demeaning thing. And the next morning, that dead look in her eyes, and you with a rage you've never felt. But he's a big, ornery man, and you aren't about to cross him. You even suggest something and he hits you upside the head. You both carried bruises, you and Mary-Ann, didn't you? Badges of honor, those bruises. How long did it go on, Ferrell? Months? Years?"

She paused, realizing he'd stopped several paces behind her, his small light aimed down at his feet, head hung in defeat. She'd scored another direct hit. She capitalized on it, taking a step back toward him, careful to conceal her weapon. "Someone had to do something to stop it. You only did what was necessary."

She hesitated, this the most dangerous ground of all. "The only reason it tore you up inside, Ferrell, the reason it wouldn't go away, kept coming back to haunt you, is because you're a good person. The bad people don't feel anything. But you felt bad for what you'd done, despite the fact it helped her, despite the fact you saved her." Amid the silence, a steady drip of water somewhere off in the dark. "And of all the ungrateful things, the minute you save her, she leaves you."

"She wanted me to tell them," came the man's voice faintly.

Matthews felt both victory and dread. She had assumed Mary-Ann's act of betrayal had been moving in with Lanny Neal. Now she knew she'd had the catalyst wrong.

"Keep moving."

"You can't outrun this. You can run me over, you can throw me from a bridge, it's still going to be inside your head."

"It just happened," he said. "Accidents happen."

"You backed over her, Ferrell. That doesn't just happen. That's going to stay in your head until we get rid of it."

"There is no 'we." Not anymore there isn't."

"There's two of us here, Ferrell. Look at me. Touch me if you want. I'm still here." She wanted to lure him closer.

The piece of glass begged. This was the moment-when she'd filled his head with enough images to slow his reaction time. But her knees wouldn't obey.

"No more talking," he said. "We're all done talking."

"She wanted to help you, too," she said. That was the connection between Mary-Ann and her. Not looks, not tone of voice or sexual fantasies. Mary-Ann had wanted to help him and accidents happen-he'd killed her for it. She, Matthews, had been his chance to try again, and once she understood he'd killed his father and sister, she'd demand what Mary-Ann did: Turn yourself in, Ferrell. Let us help you.

"Keep moving."

"No." She stood her ground defiantly. She would not be willingly marched off to her death. Mary-Ann had clearly run this boy's life, either directly or indirectly, until he'd killed her. She had to succeed where Mary-Ann had finally failed. "I can help you, Ferrell. I can make it go away. But we both have to see it for what it was. Tell me about the accidents. Share it with me. Please," she added, no longer feeling the same blood lust. She didn't want to kill him. Wound him. Escape. Yes. But she felt him as much a victim as herself.

"You don't need the knife," she said. "I'm not going anywhere, am I?" she indicated the tunnel's tight confines. The truth was, she wanted him confined-an easier target. This cramped tunnel was perfect for her needs.

A thought occurred to her and she found herself with no desire to analyze it, to pre consider its every possible angle, its every possible argument. In that fraction of a second where she elected to speak her mind rather than preprocess the thought, she spoke it the moment it came to her: "You could have had me any number of times. If you intended to abduct me, why now?"

Walker waved the knife. "Walk."

"No. Do it here. Right here. Right now." She threw her arms open, the chunk of glass still gripped in his handkerchief.

"It's not about betrayal," she answered, knowing perfectly well it was, but wanting to steer him away from this. "Don't kid yourself. It's about power. Control. And I'll tell you something:

You won that game with me for a while. I gave into that. Sure, I did. I played along."

"You're wasting yourself on this, Anna," he said. "Everything's decided. Save your breath."

Her teeth chattered. The son repeats the father's sins. He wanted her on a boat with him. He wanted the past back. He wanted what his father had had. The present, the future, were no good to him any longer. "I'm Daphne, Ferrell. I am not Mary Ann

Mary-Ann is dead."

"We're going to spend time together again. That's all that matters."

"I can help you out of this," she pleaded. "I can make your father ... whatever happened out on the boat... go away. You don't believe that now because you think you've tried everything, but it's true. I'm your passport out of those nightmares. You don't sleep, do you, Ferrell? You can't. You don't eat much-I can see that just by looking at you. He still owns you, Ferrell. I can make him go away. I can make it right again."

"That'll never happen." He stepped even closer. "Now walk."

The batteries were dying, and her chance of escape along with them. If she was going to use that piece of glass on him, it had to be soon.

"Then tell me about the other accident-Mary-Ann's accident."

He said, "You like everything neat and tidy. Shipshape. But it doesn't always work out that way. We're going to have plenty of time to talk, Daphne." He actually smiled. "There's light at the end of the tunnel. You'll see."

More likely a boat at the end of the tunnel. Something he'd scouted already. Steal the boat, make for the open sea. Fishermen could stay weeks, even months, at sea. The thought paralyzed her. They'll never find me.

Closing the Distance

I'II never find her, LaMoia thought to himself as he faced a bend in the tunnel, its floor covered in a sloppy mud that made tracking difficult if not impossible. For all he knew the prints he was following were sixty years old. But then, the moment he had this thought, he spotted a cluster of prints up ahead, like a group of pigs had stirred the mud.

He caught his foot at the very last second, his heel connecting with the packed dirt, toe about to rock forward-a sense of dread, like a soldier about to step on a land mine. He moved his foot cautiously and trained his light into the chips of broken glass where a tiny piece of gold sparkled back at him. A second later, he stood holding her earring. I'm right behind you, he caught himself thinking. Hang tough.

As he closed the distance toward that disturbed area of tunnel floor he picked up the enormous wash to his left, a hole cut out of the wall. Another tunnel? he wondered. An exit back up to the surface, or into another storm sewer?

He slipped his pistol out of its holster beneath the deerskin and quickly chambered a round. "I'm armed," he called out, but only loud enough to carry a few yards. He contained the flashlight beneath the pistol, took three long strides, and extending both the weapon and the light, lit up the hole.

"Jesus Christ." His stomach turned in shock at the sight of the headless deputy. It took him a moment to even locate the head lying on its side and identify it as Prair's.

He caught himself thinking as both a cop and a psychologist. This, too, surprised him. Escalation. Walker had sacrificed Prair for her-this he knew with all certainty. Killing the man would have been one thing; decapitation signaled a quantum shift, a different paradigm. He checked the cell phone reception yet another time-still nothing. He tried the phone's "radio" function. Dead as well.

Standing perfectly still as he was, he picked up the faint sound of voices. Like an insect in a dark room. He couldn't clearly identify its direction. He took a step forward, then back. He turned around, trying a different ear.

He left Prair behind him, back in that hole. Good riddance.

North! He had it now. Then it faded again and he couldn't be sure if he'd had it at all. But yes. There. A woman's voice, no question about it. Closer than he thought. He moved quickly toward that sound, staying to the edge of the narrow tunnel and out of the slop in its center, moving as quietly as possible.

It was all he could do to contain himself, to keep from shouting out her name.

Unzipping the Truth

The consumptive darkness played tricks on her equilibrium, making her dizzy. Walker directed her down to her hands and knees and they crawled under a pair of pipes that bisected the tunnel. As she stood, he pushed her forward and held her to the muddy floor. He shined the yellow light into her eyes.

"She fell," he said. "That's all it was: an accident."

"An accident?" she asked. "You ran her over, Ferrell. Help me through that."

Still straddling her, his eyes went distant and he shook his head violently. In doing so, he gave her the opening she needed, but she didn't take it-couldn't take it. She needed the answers. He spoke so fast, so softly that she could hardly keep up. "She pushed me ... shouldn't have done that... went off the fire escape ... thought she was dead down there ... had to move her ... the car. That key ... the back axle."

"You had to move her," she repeated, directing his focus for her own gain. "That makes sense."

"I backed it up to get her. She was dead. And there she was ... sitting up like that all of a sudden." His voice trailed off, and she knew he was completely consumed in the memory. "She'd say I pushed her. But it wasn't like that. I told her to get away from me, but she wouldn't. She smelled ... of him ... of if."

"Like the boat," Matthews allowed.

Walker lowered his head and looked out the top of his eyes at her. He nodded.

"When I saw her sitting up like that... I knew what I had to do."

"All this," she said softly, "everything you've told me, it's all understandable." She left out any discussion of Nathan Prair. "Let me help you-not like Mary-Ann had planned. Not like that at all."

The flashlight dimmed. It had only minutes left. To attempt an escape in the dark was unthinkable. Instinctively, she shifted the grip of her right hand, exposing the glass and its razor-sharp edge.

She pushed up to one elbow. It had to be now! She wanted tears in his eyes, his vision blurred. She needed to work him like a lump of clay. "She loved you very much, Ferrell. No matter what happened between her and Neal it never came close to what you gave her. She wanted to help you because she loved you. Why else would she have kept trying the way she did?"

His face tightened.

"And you loved her too, didn't you?"

Walker's shoulders shook. "No one knows how much," he said hoarsely.

The jaundice of the flashlight painted him in a milky light as he flexed his legs to stand. That was the distraction she'd waited for.

Her left hand stole the flashlight from his right, a look of astonishment overcoming him. With her right hand she pulled the curving piece of glass from collarbone to navel, like trying to open a stuck zipper.

Locked in disbelief as much as physical shock, Walker looked down at the wound as if it belonged to someone else. In doing so, he unintentionally protected his throat as her second effort failed. The glass cut his neck below his ear, but only superficially. Walker reared back, stumbled, fell to one arm, and then lifted himself to standing. He screamed like a wild animal.

Matthews struggled to her feet and ran, the light blinking on and off in her hand.

To her astonishment, she heard him clomping along, right behind her.

Echo

When Boldt heard the scream, it came so faintly that he might have mistaken it for something from the street far overhead had it not been for his musical ears. Had it not been for his heightened senses caused by being confined in a damp earthen grave.

"You hear that?" he asked Babcock.

"No ... what?"

"Behind us," Boldt said, turning and aiming his flashlight past her.

She turned to look back as well, as if they might see something more than earth and rotten timbers.

"We're going in the wrong the direction."

"But the city ... the Underground ... it has to be this way."

"We're going the wrong way," he said, pushing past her and starting off in the opposite direction.

Babcock stood her ground, allowing him to pass. "You're making a mistake."

Boldt called back to her, "It's mine to make."

With that, she hurried to catch up to him.

Running Below Graves

LaMoia had a cop's eye, a cop's nose, and a cop's instincts, but he had the heart of a man, and when the faint voices he'd been following stopped abruptly-one now clearly a woman's-he feared he'd lost her.

He abandoned his effort at stealth, charging up the tunnel at a reckless speed given his hunched posture. No witticism filled his head longing to escape his lips, no wisecrack; he was briefly all muscle, adrenaline, and determination.

Feelings for others often reveal themselves in strange ways. It took a tunnel, the stench of death, and dying voices to illuminate his heart's unwilling truth: Her life was precious. She was to be saved at all costs.

The tunnel looked ready to come down in places, the century old railroad ties bulging under the weight and pressure of a city built atop them. He passed through sections of warmth and then cold, of foul odors followed by none at all. Graves were dug shallower than this. He was running below graves.

A wall of pipes up ahead briefly appeared to seal off passage, and he thought, to have come all this way only to find it blocked. But as he approached, the light revealed the illusion-there was plenty of room to duck beneath the lowest.

Tucking himself through this space, LaMoia heard a scream-a man's scream-a scream that was the result of physical pain, not anger.

And then, the wet slop of running. Not one person, but two, the detective ascertained. Not toward him, but away. From himself? he wondered. Had Walker seen the beam of his flashlight, heard his approach?

Or was it, more likely, Matthews running away from Walker, as that scream he'd just heard might suggest? He broke into a sprint, tempted to call out but afraid of giving himself away.

When his halogen bulb caught the blood-red rag and the jagged piece of glass it contained, he didn't cringe but warmed with hope. Was Walker clever enough for that? He thought not. Had Walker severed a head with a piece of glass? He thought not.

She'd tricked him. Goddamn it-she'd tricked him!

Rotten Luck

A fantail of the faint yellow light indicated either a sharp turn up ahead or the tunnel's dead end. Her mind stuck on that thought: dead end. Had Walker ever intended to kill her, or only to present her with the body of Nathan Prair as his "peace offering"?

Had she brought all this upon herself by going for Prair's gun?

Her next thought was that Walker, cut badly and desperate, had purposefully allowed her to charge ahead because he knew she was boxing herself in. At once, the flashlight failed. Shaking it did nothing to revive it. She worked off the last image she'd seen, now fading off her retina like a projector's bulb going dim. A pile of debris a few yards ahead and to her right. Walker, too, had slowed, the moment the light died, probably suspecting a trap. She eased ahead, hands stretched in front of her. Slowly the absolute black lost a tiny amount of its edge. A faint amount of light was coming from somewhere up ahead-not yet enough to see by, but enough to give her hope.

She knelt and felt around and formed her fingers around a brick. Holding it tightly, she turned and pressed her back against the cold mud wall alongside what she felt to be the post of a rotting, crumbling, vertical railroad tie.

No means of death frightened her more than the idea of being buried alive. She tried to slow her breath to hear better, but the blood pounding in her ears blotted out all sound.

She could imagine him approaching but could not see him or sense him. Her eyes adjusted further and she could make out the silhouette of the post she hid against. Light meant air. Air meant the surface.

Accidentally leaning some weight against the post caused a chunk to break loose. It fell to the floor, and with it, some dirt rained down from the tunnel roof.

Walker lunged out of the total darkness, misled by the faint light, and stabbed his fishing knife into the soft post. Dirt and debris cascaded down on both of them as Matthews cried out and jumped back, her feet catching on another pile of debris. She went down hard, falling backward, her hands groping to cushion the fall, her head striking yet another post. A large chunk of mud fell into her lap, followed by a volley of rocks. Walker staggered toward her, seen only as a looming shape-a dark mass. She swung the brick at his head with the force of a tennis serve, but it impacted his shoulder as he, too, tripped over that pile of debris. She swung again and clipped him squarely in the ear, and separated a piece of his scalp.

"Fuck!" he shouted, his reaction time much faster than seemed possible as the knife flashed in the darkness and she felt her left forearm burn. He cut her again, higher on the arm.

He staggered forward, and she delivered the brick again, but his eyes had adjusted, and he careened out of the way, falling against the wall, smashing into another post with enough force to dislodge it. An overhead beam cracked loudly, spraying splinters and chunks of wood. It swung down toward the wall as if hinged and slammed into Walker, knocking him back and pinning him half standing. He fought to get it off him as Matthews heard it-a sound she understood before its effects were felt.

She took two steps backward but was stopped by sight of a flashlight beam. It appeared out of the darkness, well beyond Walker, who broke the fallen beam and shoved it to the side.

"Matthews!"

John! She burst into tears at the sound of his voice. She yelled a warning only seconds before the ceiling caved in, earth and wood and rock, like water from a burst dam. She dived back, rolled, came to her feet, and scrambled away, the ceiling disintegrating. Looking back, she lost sight of LaMoia and his light as the earthen roof rained down.

She screamed again for him, but the world came down as if a dump truck had dropped its load from above. The fantail of light she'd seen ahead was suddenly a beam, and then a spotlight, and then the sky, as the collapsing tunnel ripped open a section of street or alley. As fast as she could scramble, the debris filled in around her and under her. It briefly overcame her, winning the race, covering her, burying her. She dug out frantically, gasping for air, struggling for purchase, then suddenly lifted by a giant wave of moving earth. She climbed, slipped, and ripped her way toward the crest of the wave. As it broke and settled, reversing its direction, sucking her back down, Matthews clawed out and grabbed hold, a moment later finding herself dangling, clinging to a buried pipe and a lattice of tangled wires.

Air. Lights.

Behind her, below her, was nothing but dirt, and mud, and asphalt, and wires and broken pipe, all formed in a giant V pointing down from where she'd come.

No other voices. No other sign of life.

A Dog in Sand

Boldt and Babcock reached the back end of the cave-in only minutes after it had happened, his radio miraculously sparking back to life seconds before a plume of dust billowed down the runnel and briefly overcame them. Dispatch called a general alarm over the radio that an officer was down, buried in a cavein.

An address was called out. Babcock, reading a GPS in hand, said to Boldt, "That's us."

Then, from somewhere ahead, they heard the sound of rock against rock. Someone was digging!

Believing Matthews buried, Boldt dived into the pile and started tossing anything large enough to grab. Babcock called him off, condemned him for nearly burying them as well, and instructed him to carefully remove the larger debris and only from the tunnel's very edge-to stay below the cover of an overhead beam whenever possible. By directing him in a controlled and determined manner, she saved John LaMoia's life.

When they reached him, LaMoia was frantically digging in the wrong direction-into the collapse. Boldt seized his legs and pulled. LaMoia gasped for air, retched, and coughed. Dazed and disoriented, he would not stop digging-as frantic as a dog on a beach.

Again Boldt pulled at the man's legs, finally stopping him. "John! Daffy!" he shouted.

"I saw her," LaMoia said, returning to his chaotic digging.

"Saw her!" He turned his mud-caked face toward Boldt and shouted manic ally "Help me!" as he once again clawed into the pile, pathetic in his determination.

Over the radio, a male voice: "Shield nine-twenty is ten forty-five-A, enroute to Harbor view." Boldt heard it: 10-45ACondition of Patient Is Good.

LaMoia heard this too, and finally stopped digging. Boldt held the man by the ankles, in an attempt to drag him out of there. They met eyes in the light of Babcock's flashlight. Something communicated between them, as it can only communicate between two men who love the same woman.

"Nine-twenty," LaMoia breathed, the white of his teeth showing behind a smile. Her.

"Yeah," Boldt said. "I heard."

Faint Hope

As two male nurses rushed Matthews through Emergency into a curtained stall where blue-clad physicians awaited her, Matthews asked, "Was there a girl... a pregnant girl... ?

One of them aimed a small light into her eyes and pulled at her forehead, stretching and lifting her eyelids. She blinked furiously.

"You're in Harbor view Medical Center's emergency room," a man's voice reported calmly.

She took the doc by his surgical scrubs and pulled his face down to hers. "A girl... a knife wound ... pregnant."

The doctor separated himself, barked a few orders for injections, and then checked with his nurse, a gentle-eyed black woman. This nurse shook her head gravely at the doctor while eyeing Matthews. "She didn't make it. I'm sorry."

"The baby?" Matthews asked. Someone pricked her skin with a needle. She winced. The clear plastic tubing of an IV rig was quickly untangled. A fluid dripped, followed by a warm wave of relaxation and peace. A sedative. The feeling threatened to consume her.

"We're going to stitch you up," she heard the doctor say. "We've given you something to help with pain."

"The baby?" she whispered at the nurse.

The nurse leaned into her, her face suddenly much more gentle.

"They were going to try to deliver the baby postmortem."

She could barely keep her eyes open. Sleep pulled her down. But she managed to reach out and find the nurse's hand. The woman leaned in closely. Matthews said, "LaMoia ... police officer is he okay?"

The woman looked at her with soft eyes. "Rest," she said peacefully.

"No drugs," Matthews said.

"It's just something to relax you."

"Not me," she complained hoarsely, trying to sit up, but failing.

The nurse eased her back down. "Cowboy ... no drugs. He can't have drugs. He ..." She couldn't get another word out, her tongue an uncooperative slug. A deep purple light fanned in at the edges of her eyes, stealing away the nurse and finally the overly bright light above the bed. Just before the goo dragged her down for good, she thought she heard the nurse say something, but it blended into a dream, and she lost all track of it.

Winning the Yes

"I owe you," LaMoia called out from behind the roar of his kitchen blender and a batch of LaMoia's original-recipe margaritas.

Blue patrolled the kitchen floor licking up spills. LaMoia drizzled tequila through an open hole in the lid. A plate of raw salt awaited to his left.

"Damn right you do." She wore a sling on her left arm, some bandages he couldn't see. She sat on a padded stool at his kitchen counter. Even her bottom was sore.

He wore a series of serious bruises on his face and arms like medals of honor. He caught her looking. "You could kiss them to make them better."

"Are we flirting?" she asked. Not wanting to be in the houseboat where Walker had watched her so closely, she'd been living as LaMoia's houseguest for the past week. As friends. But on this night romance simmered beneath the surface, and both felt it.

He delivered the drinks. "Get over it."

"Delicious," she said, sampling the concoction.

"More where that came from."

"Indeed."

He raised his glass. "To forgetting."

She knew he meant well by such a toast, but it only served to remind her of all the forgetting she had yet to do. Ferrell Walker wouldn't be forgotten-at least not by a legal system hungry to prosecute him. The man had months, years, of waiting to do-first in the hospital, then a prison in the eastern part of the state. His rescue from the debris of the cave-in had come nearly twenty minutes after LaMoia's. His oxygen-starved brain had failed to recover following resuscitation. The guards called him "a drooler." LaMoia called him pitiful. Matthews called him a casualty. She wouldn't soon forget Margaret either, or the little baby girl the doctors had saved postmortem. Inquiries had been made: Margaret's mother and stepfather, her only living family, had refused the child.

An honors memorial service had been held that same afternoon for Deputy Sheriff Nathan Prair. Neither Matthews nor LaMoia had attended.

She sloshed the tangy ice around her mouth, taking a big gulp. "I could have about five of these."

"Now that's more like it," LaMoia said.

"You want to get me drunk, John?"

"It was your idea, not mine. Besides, you're not exactly drinking alone here, in case you hadn't noticed." He considered this. "Have I ever seen you drunk, Matthews? I don't think so. You see? That's another thing about you: You're always in such total control-of you, and everyone around you."

She drank too fast and froze her throat. LaMoia brought the mixer's pitcher over and refilled her glass halfway. He fully topped off his own.

"More, please." When he failed to accommodate her, she reached for the pitcher with her good hand, but LaMoia caught her gently by her wrist.

LaMoia said, "No more for you. You don't get any excuses."

"Excuses for what?" she asked, bewildered by his refusal. For a moment, the room held perfectly still-the ferries out on the bay stopped moving; the rivulets of margarita froze on the side of the mixer-the only sound in the room the steady thumping of Blue's tail against one of the stools and the high octane drumming in her ears.

He reached over, took hold of her shirt, and carefully drew her to him. She reached out for balance with her good hand as he planted his lips onto hers and drew the wind out of her, drew her eyelids down, her head spinning, her toes dancing in her shoes. She felt everything inside tense like she'd grabbed hold of a live wire, and then her muscles melted into a steadily increasing warmth that rose into her chest and flooded her thighs. Her free hand laced into his curly hair and she kissed him back.

His bar stool nearly went over.

She wanted to get naked. She wanted him inside her, right here on the kitchen counter.

He whispered, "No excuses for that."

"You make a mean margarita."

"Practice makes perfect."

"In all sorts of things." Where had that come from? She added, "I may be a little rusty."

"You don't feel rusty." His hand was inside the back of her shirt. Her head tingled.

"No excuses," she said.

"None."

She whispered, "Listen, John, either we stop right now, or... we don't." It sounded stupid, once she heard it replay in her head.

"Whatever happens, happens," he said, still kissing her. "And we give it the best chance it has. No excuses, no fear."

She said, "Who'da thought?"

"There's a lot you don't know about me, Matthews."

"I imagine so." She added, "What are the chances you might call me by my first name, Romeo?"

"None." He opened his arms and embraced her. Peace and excitement washed through her.

"Take me to bed," she whispered into his ear. "Mind reader."

She sputtered a nervous laugh. He grabbed her hand.

Easing off the stool and into his arms, she said softly, "What are we doing?"

"Living. What's so wrong with that?"

Old Friends

The Great Lady inhabited the same wicker throne, a twinkle to her dark eyes that nearly hid behind the mass of flesh as she smiled at Boldt. Dumpling soup. Crispy beef with pea pods. Egg-fried rice with gulf shrimp.

"You like, Mr. Both?"

"Tasty. Better than ever," he said.

"Why eyes so sad? You clear up Billy Chen. He make no mistake on job. Prove again what great friend you are to an old lady."

"Friendships are complicated. You helped me out, too."

"You got woman problem." Mama Lu made it a statement with no room for argument.

"I've got a wonderful wife I love and terrific kids, Great Lady."

"You still got woman problem," she said.

He laughed aloud. He thought it might have been the first time he'd ever laughed in her company, and he wondered if it was bad form. He apologized, excusing himself, just in case.

"You apologizing for laughing? You got it bad. Who is she?"

"It's a he and she," he admitted.

Again she clucked her tongue. "Only a fool suffers another man's pleasure."

He considered this, nodded, and said, "And sometimes a fool has to hear things from a friend to get it right."

She smacked her lips and picked at her teeth, and for a moment he feared she might take out her teeth. This monster of flesh trained her dark, beady eyes onto him and he withered beneath her gaze. He wasn't sure how it had happened, but he had a relationship with this woman.

"People change, Mr. Both. Maybe laws don't change, but people do. Not good confuse the two."

He heard himself admit to her, "I love them both separately, it's together I'm having a hard time."

"There you go again, face like a dog," she said, studying him from the far side of a loaded pair of chopsticks. She waited a long time before speaking. Not a grain of rice fell from her grip. She said, "Hearts of gold never break. Bend, sure. Gold soft. But never break." She ate the rice and spoke through the food. "You have good heart, Mr. Both. Heart of gold."

When he left, a half hour later, Boldt kissed her hand. It was the first time he'd touched the woman, and she clearly appreciated the gesture.

Back in the Crown Vie, he put on a Chieftains tape and cranked the volume. A plaintive Irish ballad sung by Van Morrison.

"Have I told you lately that I love you?" Van the Man crooned, and Boldt hummed along, swept up by his emotions. He had memories of Liz in his head, not Daphne, and this felt absolutely right to him.

He burped and thought Mama Lu would have appreciated that more than a kiss on the hand.

He drove home, his thumb keeping the song's slow rhythm on the steering wheel. The melody rose from his throat to his lips as he formed the lyrics and began singing loudly. He couldn't wait to get home.

Life's No Picnic

The houseboat stood empty, its hardwood floor gleaming clean because Daphne Matthews was not the kind of person to sell a house and leave it dirty. John had known this moment would hurt, and he'd offered to join her, but she'd made this pilgrimage alone.

She couldn't leave without tears, and she'd wanted to be alone to suffer them in private. So much of her adult life had passed through these doors, even if limited in terms of years. She'd both found herself here and lost herself here-several times, if she were being honest-and parting came hard. The lump in her throat practically stopped her from breathing. It had been more than a house, a home-this place had been a friend that had suffered her complaints, her joys, and two failed engagements.

They knew each other. Yet she didn't want to live the next chapter here.

Her cell phone rang-a new number-and she fished it from her purse, checking the caller-ID before she answered it. Seeing the number on the screen filled her with purpose and joy. She felt especially glad that it wasn't John calling. He'd kept his word about giving her this time here. She hardly recognized the guy anymore. What on earth was she getting herself into?

She answered, the caller-ID having alerted her that it was her attorney. Quick hellos, a brief amount of small talk. Bursting with curiosity, Matthews asked, "Did you speak with the judge?"

"I did."

"Has he made a determination?"

"There are waiting periods."

"But the relatives declined custody." They'd been through this so many times. It seemed so simple to Matthews. Why did the courts get involved and make it so complicated? She had butterflies. She wanted an answer. She knew she might lose John if this came to pass, and that worried her. A part of her questioned the wisdom in losing the one thing currently working in her life. She was happy for the first time in a long, long time.

"Yes, but a further search for blood relations must be made. We'll have to petition the court again on your behalf, and I'd be remiss if I encouraged you about the outcome."

"And in the meantime?"

"State custody."

"Which means exactly what, after the hospital stay, the incubators?"

"An institution for the waiting period. A foster home if she's lucky after that while the paperwork makes her available."

"Can I visit her?"

"In all likelihood."

"And if I'm first in line for adoption?" She felt like reminding her attorney she'd handled an illegal adoption case a few years back. She knew a lot more about providing a good home than anybody would ever know.

"The watchword right now is patience, Daphne."

"Patience," Matthews repeated into the phone. She pulled the front door of the houseboat shut angrily, and it locked her out.

"None of this is bad news," the attorney said. "But you have to stop thinking about this in terms of being first in line. The court looks at qualifications."

"And I'm a single mother," she said. "You're saying that hurts us."

"Not at all. Plenty of single mothers adopt. I'm saying you need patience. That's all."

"I can handle that," she said, knowing it was the truth. She told herself repeatedly that she could handle it. She felt a wreck. "But I don't think it's best for her."

The attorney chuckled on the other end of the call. "I'll call you as her situation changes. And you call me if you change your mind."

"I'm not changing my mind on this," Matthews said.

"No," the attorney said, "I don't believe you are."

Matthews said good-bye and tripped the call to disconnect, returned the phone to her purse, and started down the dock. She stopped and grinned as she saw him.

Up under the shadow of a tree, staying out of the heat, John LaMoia was smiling that shit-eating grin of his. John LaMoiashe still couldn't get over it. He held a picnic basket in his right hand. An incongruous combination if ever there were one.

But then again, John LaMoia had proved himself, if anything, unpredictable.

Please visit Ridley Pearson's website: www.ridleypearson.com