The Art of Deception

Of Bridges and Badges

“Thank you for meeting me.”

“You didn’t say anything about him being here.” Deputy Sheriff Nathan Prair pointed to LaMoia like a man ready to pick a fight. Prair lived coiled like a snake, ready to strike.

“I’m the translator,” LaMoia explained. “You feed her the bullshit, and I’ll sort it out later.”

“Real cute.”

Prair’s round face and surfer-blond hair normally took ten years off his forty, but on this day fatigue painted his eyes a sickly gray. It wasn’t his workouts holding his shoulders square and high, but a steely determination not to appear intimidated in the company of a police sergeant and lieutenant bent on questioning him. He fought off that fatigue like a driver too long behind the wheel, blinking continually and overexposing his eyes so they looked, at times, wide with fear.

The three stood outside the Nordstrom’s Rack store on Pine, an unattractive street corner only yards from a bus tunnel station entrance. Matthews had let Prair name the spot, and it intrigued her that he’d chosen this place. He was on duty, but taking a few minutes of lost time to meet with her. A warm wind ripped off Puget Sound and carried a seagull at blazing speeds overhead. LaMoia tracked it like a hunter. His eyes fell onto Prair, and the deputy stiffened.

Against LaMoia’s wishes, Matthews handed Prair a photo-copy of the moving violation that Prair had written up on Mary-Ann Walker. She said, “We could probably give you a dozen false reasons why we’re here, Nathan. But the thing is, we’re all cops. We all know better. We could put you in the Box and talk around the edges of this and see if we couldn’t get something to spill out of you. But you’ve been through enough of that to know better. Don’t you think? I do. So I’m just going to put it to you straight: We’ve got the ticket that you wrote up for Mary-Ann Walker a week prior to her going off that bridge.

We’re asking ourselves why in the world you would withhold that information from the investigating officer, seeing as how it could come back to bite you, as now it has.”

Cars and trucks rumbled by. Some yahoo across the street had a blaster playing rap music at the decibel level of a jet taking off.

“And here I was thinking you were going to thank me for getting you out of a jam yesterday.”

“I guess I’m just lucky you showed up,” she said.

“Life is just chock-full of happy coincidences.”

“Like you knowing Mary-Ann,” LaMoia said.

“Just like that,” Prair agreed. He radiated a smile. “What?

You two think I actually had any way of knowing, standing up on that bridge, that the woman below was one of probably sixty or more violations I’d written up that week? Are you kidding me?” He addressed LaMoia, “You ever work traffic? You know what I’m talking about.”

Three kids in clothes too big for them went by on skateboards timed perfectly to catch the pedestrian crossing light.

“Never had the pleasure,” LaMoia said. “I came up gumming sidewalks.”

“The night Mary-Ann was killed you took forty minutes of personal time-”

“Killed? She was a jumper last I heard.”

“No way,” LaMoia said. “You were on that bridge. You knew we’d found the blood trail, knew what we were thinking.

You were there, Prair. We were all there together. Skip the theatrics. You’re ripping yourself a new one.”

“McD’s,” he said. “I went off the clock-eleven, eleven-thirty-for a quarter-pounder and fries.” Right or wrong, she read his face as truthful.

Whether Prair knew it or not, he’d just supplied the window of time suggested by the university’s oceanography department.

Neal’s claim of seeing 2:22 A.M. on the clock had proved far too late to account for the physical sciences of the ocean. Mary-Ann Walker had gone off that bridge before midnight. Matthews caught LaMoia’s eye and knew he was thinking the same thing.

LaMoia had his detective’s notebook out and in hand.

“Which McDonald’s?”

Prair buried his face in a large hand. “Shit.” He cleared his expression and supplied LaMoia with the address: Marginal Way at the turn for SEATAC.

Matthews asked, “Are we going to find you had a history with Mary-Ann Walker beyond this moving violation?”

“Excuse us a moment, would you?” Prair seized Matthews by the arm and led her out of earshot from LaMoia, who craned toward them as if hoping to hear. Seeing this, Prair moved her a little farther.

A couple of big, hefty women came out of The Rack carrying too many bulging plastic bags-they looked like elephants with saddlebags. Both talked at once, going on about the deals they’d just made and all the money they’d saved. Matthews thought: You’ve got to spend it to save it, does anyone see the irony?

He said, “Lieutenant, forgive me for saying so, but whatever was said in sessions with you was privileged and said in confidence, and is supposed to stay that way.”

“You have fantasies about having sexual relations with the women you pull over, Deputy. On several occasions those fantasies have had a direct influence on your behavior. Was that the case with Mary-Ann Walker?” Is that the case with me?

“That’s got nothing to do with this.”

“Prove it.” She was wondering if that was the case with her as well. Had Prair crimped her gas line in order to play the hero and save her? Had he hoped to win a roll in bed as her thank-you?

“I don’t have to. There’s nothing to prove. You’re coloring your opinion based on privileged information, Lieutenant. Never mind that there’s nothing to it-it wouldn’t hold up if there was.”

She broke his grip and stepped back. LaMoia moved in, ever the protector.

She said to Prair, “You should have come forward when the body was identified last week.”

“Would’a … should’a … could’a … let me ask you this: Would you have come forward if you’d been me? My history?”

She probably wouldn’t have, but she didn’t say so.

“That shooting colors every impression there ever is of me, never mind that it was ruled a good shooting. No one remembers that part. If I’d have come forward on Walker I’d have distracted the investigation-exactly what’s happening now-and that helps no one.”

“Especially you,” LaMoia said.

Matthews glanced over at the patrol car Prair was driving.

Registration plate: KCSO-89. She’d looked down at the rooftop of that same patrol car from the parking garage across from the Shelter. There was no room for coincidence in such matters. She felt the blood drain from her face.

“You just happened across me, broken down like that yesterday,” she said.

“What if I did?”

“I’m asking: Do you make a habit out of following women around in their cars?”

“It’s not like that.”

“Then write it up the way it is, the way it was,” LaMoia ordered. “Do it voluntarily, do it by tonight, or we’ll pass an official request through channels that’ll have you hoisted up a flagpole by your short hairs. Every meeting with Mary-Ann-chance encounter or not-every phone call, the four-one-one on your whereabouts every waking second the night she died. If so much as one comma is out of place, this thing is going to rain down on you, Nathan. We’re going to want your time sheets for the past month, we want copies of every moving violation you issued. If there are holes in your time sheet, we’re going to want detailed explanations of every missing minute. Witnesses to your whereabouts, you name it. You carried the gold shield once-you fill in the blanks.”

Prair’s eyes went icy. Knots formed like hard nuts at his jaw.

“That’ll be it for me. You two know that. My record? Time sheets? Ticket carbons? Are you shitting me? That puts me square in the crosshairs.”

“That’s where you are,” LaMoia informed the man. “Deal with it. Ten tonight, on my desk, or the shit starts raining down on you.”

With that, the skies opened up, as if on command, and dumped buckets. LaMoia and Matthews ran for the bus tunnel entrance. Prair headed for his patrol car. The seagull reappeared overhead, caught in the rain, barely able to fly. Matthews saw it struggling, and then it was gone, lost in the gray, along with hundreds of pedestrians scurrying for shelter from the storm.