The Art of Deception

Voice Male

A blinking message light was no great surprise to Matthews as she returned to her office that evening. In what had become an automatic gesture, she dialed in to retrieve her voice mail, which announced that she had six messages. She cringed as she intu-itively anticipated that at least one of these could be from Deputy Sheriff Nathan Prair. He’d attached himself to her once before, and now, with their renewed acquaintance, with the description of the brown uniform in the parking garage, she felt nearly certain she would need to deal with him again.

The first message on the system was an earlier one from LaMoia asking for her company when he went to interview a possible peeper victim, Tina Oblitz. He explained Oblitz’s prior attempts to “cancel the order,” as LaMoia put it, and how he hoped he might gain insight into Hebringer’s and Randolf’s “vanishing act.”

She felt closer to John-his teasing bordered on flirting. His earlier struggle with the OxyContin had revealed a more human LaMoia. Some people were helped by such challenges, and LaMoia had the makings. She scribbled down his initials-this was how she took note of all such phone messages-a reminder to return his call.

The second message caught her by surprise, and because of her premonition, she mistakenly assigned the voice initially to Prair, though her brain quickly straightened her out. “Lieutenant Matthews?” It was Ferrell Walker. “I wondered if my gift helped you out? I don’t have a phone, so … listen … I’ll call you back.”

Her image was not of Walker at the ME’s half out of his mind with grief, nor was it the boyish man delivering his sister’s soiled sweatshirt as a gift; it was, instead, an image of Walker in his bloodied apron standing in the falling rain, his eyes bloodshot with fatigue but looking up and down her body, his wet, matted hair. One black rubber glove, one yellow-she remembered so many details of that interview.

“Pass,” she said aloud, deleting the message.

At the start of the third message, the first vestiges of concern warmed her, spreading through her like a shot of alcohol. “Me again.” She was mad at herself for being distracted by Prair, only to be blindsided by the much more obvious, emotionally unstable Ferrell Walker. Trouble came in threes-she’d heard detectives talk of this for years, though dismissed such super-stitions-and yet, it seemed she’d been served up a pair. Walker said, “I forgot to mention that I love what you’re wearing-especially the orange blouse.” It was peach, not orange, she thought as she looked down past the phone and took in her clothing. “Listen … we could have a beer, or coffee, or something. Talk about the case. Do you even drink coffee? So much to learn about you.”

How had he managed to see the color of her blouse? she wondered. She’d worn her gray rain jacket all day because of the persistent drizzle. She’d taken it off only when inside. The thoughts connected like a magnet picking up filings. She glanced over at her office window. The blinds were twisted open. Not possible! She pressed the keypad to save Walker’s message, then crossed the room, peered curiously out her seventh-floor window, and twisted the blinds shut. It wasn’t as if she wore her rain jacket zipped to her neck-he could have seen her anywhere away from the office. But to do so, he would have to have been watching her, and watching her closely.

The fourth message played automatically from the speakerphone as she stood across the room. Walker’s voice yet again: “Me again. Sorry. But we could take a walk or something. It doesn’t have to be a drink. Later.”

She took a deep breath to clear her thoughts. She’d worked with dozens upon dozens of disturbed men, some across an interrogation table, some in a corrections facility: sex offenders, drug addicts-homicidal, suicidal-social misfits. Ferrell Walker was still grieving, no doubt, and had clearly transferred some of his feelings for his unavailable sister onto her. Such transference was more typically directed at people considered close to the individual, not a virtual stranger, but there were no rules to such things, no commandments to follow.

Walker’s final message ran goose bumps up her arms then down her spine and into a nauseated stomach. “I hope I’m not scaring you with these messages. I know women-especially attractive women-must be scared in this city right now. I’m not going to hurt you or something. I want to help you get Lanny Neal is all. The sooner, the better, as far as I’m concerned.” The unspoken message there was that in fact he might be planning to hurt her if Neal was not brought in.

She sat down heavily into her chair, her hands steepled before her lips. One more thing to deal with. She struggled to evaluate him as she might a patient. With the death of his sister he had preexisting emotional conditions that allowed the possibility of a fantasy stage where Matthews was seen as his solution to all ills and injustices. She’d made a mess of it by not laying down strict guidelines at his first offer to help her. Worse yet, such a fine line existed between love and hate that she now faced a very difficult job of distancing herself without repercus-sions.

The sixth message was from Boldt-just the sound of his voice came as a great relief. Something about Mama Lu, an autopsy, and a possible connection to Hebringer and Randolf, though she didn’t focus on it clearly, Walker’s bloody apron still foremost in her mind. Without the mounting evidence against Neal, without Walker’s initial call-in and his attempt to assist in Neal’s prosecution by turning over that evidence, she might have believed Walker capable of having killed his only sister himself. She couldn’t rule it out entirely, even so.

“End of messages,” the voice mail announced. A pleasant, automated voice that had no idea of the worry those messages instilled in her. She stabbed the speakerphone button and disconnected, Walker’s messages and his unflinching tone echoing in her head. First things first: She would start a file, detailing the passing of the sweatshirt, making notes about the silhouette in the parking garage, transcribing the various phone messages.

If he continued to harass her, the existence of that file would help her make a case. She would not allow him to rattle her.

She’d seen much worse than Ferrell Walker, although in her patients the conflict, the violence, the obsession or fixation was always directed at others, not her. Always someone else’s problem. She was the facilitator, not the target. The cop. Not the victim.

She packed up and headed home, but found herself checking her rearview mirror a little more often, glancing around while stopped at red lights, and triple-checking the car’s automatic door lock. Walker had put the bug in her, and it wasn’t going away.

Her houseboat on Lake Union had been bought well before the city’s techno renaissance, when the floating one-and-a-half-story homes-actual houses on pilings and accessed by a wooden dock down the middle-had been a latent-hippie community, nonconformists who wanted a home in the city but not the cost of the land beneath. The houses had been dirt cheap back then, an awkward phrase given their setting. Now those same homes went for high six figures, and Matthews had long since realized she was living in her 401(k); at the very least, she had quadrupled her investment.

Her houseboat, last on the left of dock 7c, was constructed of gray shiplap. Thirty-gallon terra-cotta flower tubs sat to either side of the hemp rope railing that surrounded her deck. No green thumb, she’d tried annuals in the tubs for a while but kept killing them off. They currently housed a variety of Korean boxwood that required no attention.

She walked briskly down the dock, her Cole Haan flats clapping like gunshots, her heart rate elevated as she wondered if she’d been followed. Her houseboat’s front door was African mahogany and bore a carving of a dove she could do without.

She entered, locked the door, and threw its deadbolt. Removing and hanging up the rain jacket reminded her of the color of her blouse and reintroduced a wave of brief panic at the thought that Walker not only had managed to see her with her jacket off but was brazen enough to mention it.

The downstairs was finished cedar, the furnishings spare-a foldout couch, a wood-burning stove, a hand-carved cherry rocker. An eight-by-eight post in the center of the small living room supported the roof. The galley kitchen was separated from the living area by a small island countertop that hosted three stools, a walk-around phone, a cutting board, and a suspended wooden rack that was home to wineglasses. The killer home stereo had taken her three years to acquire. She fired up Sarah McLachlan’s Surfacing and cranked the volume. If anything eventually sank this place it would be the high count of books and professional journals that overflowed the bookshelves and rose to towering stacks on the floor. A narrow, padded window seat offered her favorite reading nest. Snuggled in there, a fire going, a throw pulled across her legs, she had consumed many hours of pure bliss-at least those hours that weren’t tied down.

They’d been increasingly few in the last several months. Something drove her to not just fill her schedule but pack it full of work, volunteering at the Shelter, running, and the gym-it didn’t matter as long as she filled 6 A.M. to exhaustion without time to think. For thinking was the real enemy: thinking about herself, the lack of romance in her life, the isolation, the poverty of public service, the missed opportunities.

After a dinner of broiled chicken breast and a green salad with rice vinegar, she changed into flannel PJs, built a fire, and tucked herself into the window seat, a glass of Archery Summit Pinot in hand. She felt a bit guilty about not stopping by the Shelter to inquire about Margaret, but Walker’s phone messages had unsettled her, and the comfort of home proved just what the doctor ordered, she being the doctor. Chapter by chapter, she lost herself to Barbara Kingsolver’s Prodigal Summer-a book she found unexpectedly titillating-a rare and much-needed escape from psychology reviews. She caught herself dozing off.

Luxury came cheaply these days.

At 11:32-she noticed the firm, bright green display of the kitchen’s digital clock-she heard what her mind registered as an unfamiliar sound. The houseboat had a life of its own, never perfectly at rest, battered by water and weather, always shifting, settling, creaking, and groaning. These pops and grunts, the wooden cries and long, eerie sighs helped to form a personality uniquely its own. Matthews knew that personality well. These same sounds lulled her to sleep. They woke her up. On some occasions they frightened her, as they did on this night.

She suddenly felt more awake. Her brain sorted through the database of familiarity with what she now heard, filtering out the noises that accompanied any night on Lake Union: the seaplanes landing and taking off, motor craft, highway traffic, distant ferry horns, sirens, and the noises of her neighbors going about everyday life. She lay there, ears ringing slightly, as she “stretched” to hear beyond the walls. She couldn’t be sure what she heard, or whether or not it was just a bad case of nerves.

Those phone messages had rattled her. So had her experience at the parking garage. More than she had thought. She promised herself that she wouldn’t let this get the better of her, yet she glanced across the room to her purse, which hung by its strap from one of the three ladder-back stools-her handgun, cell phone, the small can of pepper spray, and a mini Maglite. Barbara Kingsolver drew her eyes back to the novel as she told herself that noise carried well and did funny things across water.

No reason to get all worked up.

But she’d momentarily lost the chance at sleep. Another few minutes passed behind the efforts of the delicious pages, the melodious singing, and the sumptuous wine. Going on midnight.

Feeling tired again at a chapter break, she inserted the bookmark, spun her legs off the window seat, and mechanically folded the throw. She hand-washed the wineglass in the kitchen sink, its glass squeaking, and placed it carefully down into the drying rack. She watched a seaplane land-the last of the night-as it taxied across the lake’s black water. As the groan of the pro-pellers faded, she heard yet another unfamiliar creak from the bones of her houseboat.

This time she grabbed her gun and moved to the front door, intent on escorting Walker off the dock. Never mind that the residential phone numbers and addresses of police officers went unpublished, never mind that she’d carefully watched her car’s rearview mirrors and had assured herself she hadn’t been followed; she remained convinced it was Ferrell Walker creeping around out there, and it was beginning to get to her.

Thumbing aside the curtain on the narrow window to the left of the front door, she peered out toward Bob and Blair’s place.

Their downstairs lights were off, the blue glow of a television emanated from the window of the loft. She saw that Robert and Lynn were still awake next door. Lynn’s nephew, Gin, visiting from Japan was currently prowling the refrigerator. She’d been pulling the blinds extra carefully on that side of the houseboat, as Gin had a teenager’s voyeuristic tendencies. With all the sounds, she knew she wouldn’t sleep well if she didn’t take a security lap around the house. It wouldn’t be the first time she’d lapped the house. More typically, such trips were made to ensure structural integrity in the middle of a raging storm. Heading out now, on a relatively calm night with only a slight drizzle, while pushing her chest into a knot, hardly compared with challenging a forty-knot wind and sideways rain.

She grabbed the halogen penlight from her purse, pulled the Gore-Tex jacket over her pajamas, and let herself out while throwing the night latch to ensure no one sneaked in behind her.

Precautions. Any practicing forensic psychologist learned to live with them-ex-cons who blamed you for their incarceration returned to pay their respects; ex-cops who’d been tossed from the force for drug abuse or continued spousal abuse decided you were the instigation behind their removal; prosecutors and detectives arrived at all hours believing they had every right to free advice.

Barefoot on the redwood decking, she headed counterclock-wise around the corner, increasingly cautious with each turn. Her toes curled from the cold, wet wood, she tiptoed in bare feet, moving in a trained, controlled fashion, and snagged a splinter in her foot. Hopping on one foot to avoid the shooting pain, she balanced against the house and lifted her foot to the light. The thing was the size of a toothpick and sunk in pretty deep. Her focus shifted beyond her foot to the deck, where a thin film of rainwater left a silvery patina. Offset from that sheen were two muddy boot prints that led in succession from where she stood to her mudroom window. The window was beneath an overhang, dark in shadow. Suddenly it felt much colder out. There had been boot prints found at the construction site overlooking the hotel and Melissa Dunkin’s room. She envisioned a man-hands cupped to that window, peeping her. Her orbit of the house completed, her nerves tingling, she hurried around to the back door and the hidden house key. LaMoia needed to hear about this. A moment later she was locked and bolted inside, the splinter and the pain it caused a forgotten footnote.

She wanted to tell LaMoia immediately, given that he was currently working a similar case. His tour over, he’d likely be home by now.

She hurried through the house, pulling blinds and double-checking locks, feeling both exposed and vulnerable. She shed the raincoat but wrapped herself tightly in a thick robe, poured herself another wine, and sat down by the phone, staring at it.

What to do? A pair of possible boot prints? Was that any kind of evidence? A couple of noises heard outside? As it was, she walked a delicate line in the department, part professional head-shrinker, part cop. This duality, a full lieutenant who had been through the academy, yet a card-carrying Ph.D. in psychology, left most of the department thinking of her as a shrink, not a cop. An outsider. To raise a red flag over a pair of boot prints would make her look green, to say the least.

She picked up the phone and dialed. When LaMoia’s recorded voice spoke, she nearly talked over it. “You said it, I didn’t. So leave it, and don’t sweat it … I’ll get back to you.”

Beep.

She spoke his name, reconsidered, and hung up.

A minute later her phone rang. The caller-ID returned: OUT OF AREA. Her hand hesitated over the cradle, and she caught herself terrified to answer. Then her brain engaged-she would not allow anyone to do this to her.

She answered.

“You rang?” LaMoia, cool, calm, collected. She resented that tone of his.

“I got your machine,” she said.

“I screen,” he said. “Caller-ID caught your name and number.

You ought to be blocked, you know?”

She scribbled out a note to herself. “Got that right.”

“What’s up?”

She hesitated, his calm making her not want to sound like a schoolgirl.

He said, “Not to be rude, but I’m not exactly on your speed dialer. It’s going on one o’clock in the morning. The late late news is rolling around in a couple minutes. The weekend coming up or not, I picture you as an early-to-bed, early-to-rise kind of person, beauty sleep and all that, not that you need it; and so then I get to thinking that maybe you’re checking up on me, making sure I haven’t succumbed to the great temptation, and I want you to know-”

“I wouldn’t do that, John,” she interrupted. “Not ever. You know that. What we did-Lou and I-we did out of … friendship. It started and stopped in your kitchen that night. I’m not the Percodan police. Don’t think like that.”

“What am I supposed to think? Help me out here, Doc.

Why’d you call, if not to check up on me?”

She stuttered and said, “To … to … check up on the lab work of Neal’s.”

“At twelve-thirty?”

“At twelve-thirty, yes.”

A skeptical hesitation on his part. “Okay.”

“What do we know?” she asked.

“Nothing yet,” he suggested, clearly intrigued. “It’s a little soon, don’t you think?”

She couldn’t bring herself to sound like a whiner. She overheard detectives mocking such women all the time, women on and off the force. She told herself that if she’d actually seen someone out there with her own eyes, if she could have supplied a description, anything at all worth investigating, then yes, she would have included him.

He asked, “You wouldn’t happen to be lonely, would you?”

Back to his old self.

“I beg your pardon?” If she told him now, this far into their conversation, he’d either overreact or laugh out loud. She couldn’t handle either reaction right now.

“You sound … I don’t know … a little off,” he said.

“I’m fine.” She wanted to keep him talking, to hear his voice.

“You sure? I could rent a video, something like that. There’s a twenty-four-hour Blockbuster over on Denny. You got any popcorn?”

LaMoia offering friendship? Maybe she was the one on drugs. “It wasn’t a social call.”

“We could make it one.”

“No thanks,” she said, though surprisingly reluctantly. The offer didn’t sound bad at all. “You’re right about my hours. How about a rain check?” She felt touched that the usually selfish LaMoia could be so giving of himself. Ulterior motives? How badly did he want her at the hotel interview?

“Whatever,” he said.

“Thanks, John.” She felt an obligation to hang up, but at the same time, didn’t want to. She left a pregnant pause on the line.

“So, are we done here, or you got a minute?” LaMoia tested.

She liked the sound of his voice. “I’ve got a minute,” she said casually, trying to sound nonchalant and wondering if she’d pulled it off.

He said, “A businesswoman, name of Oblitz. The one that filed a complaint and then tried to withdraw it, the one I left a message about.”

“Who tries to withdraw a complaint?”

“Yeah, I know. I tried to explain that to her. Stenolovski before me. I thought you might tell me why a woman reports a peeper and then tries to back out of it.”

“That’s a no-brainer: She had a guest.”

“Or she’s being extorted.”

“Maybe, but more likely her friend pressured her to withdraw the complaint or they got there together.”

“Yeah? Well, it’s set up for four on Monday. The W-the suspender set, the new one across from the Olympic.” He said sarcastically, “She made an opening for me in her busy schedule.”

“Good of her.”

“We’ll crack Hebringer and Randolf wide open with this.

You and me. I can feel it. Whadda you think Hill would make of that?” Sheila Hill, their captain, Boldt’s immediate superior, had been LaMoia’s former lover, a fact that Matthews was not supposed to be aware of. But there wasn’t much she and Boldt hid from each other. They had once been lovers themselves-something no one was supposed to know, and no one did.

“No one would believe it.” She and LaMoia were known to tangle.

“Fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke.”

Hearing his voice brought her a long way out of herself. She wanted to thank him for that but held her tongue.

He asked, “You sure you’re okay? Offer of the video still stands.”

A LaMoia she didn’t know, and frankly didn’t trust. Had he run out of women in the department to conquer? Had someone in the locker room put him up to this, challenged him to go after her, because she had steadfastly refused to date anyone on the job? (She didn’t count Boldt as a date and never would.) Nearly one in the morning, and LaMoia making like it was early evening. Night tour did that to people.

“I’ll do the interview with you,” she agreed.

“Well, that’s a start.”

By the time she hung up, she had almost forgotten about the pair of boot prints.