The Art of Deception

Snuffing the Flame

They started with LaMoia entering the Shelter alone, just as he assumed Walker would have done. Matthews entered a moment behind him, waved hello to the attendant, checked the guest book, and then walked past a screen to roam the aisles between the cots.

With the midnight curfew a half hour off, a fairly steady stream of desolate young women trickled in as LaMoia stood before a gunmetal gray steel desk listening to a woman who had more chins than a shar-pei as she explained the Shelter’s women-only policy to him. The arriving girls read a page of rules and disclaimers before signing in. As the hefty woman in charge oversaw this procedure, a neglected LaMoia looked quickly for where Walker might have picked up Matthews’s cell phone number, his eyes combing several bulletin boards, paperwork on top of the desk, and a handful of flyers offered to arrivals. To his discouragement, the only phone number he could find on any of the literature was the Shelter’s toll-free hotline.

“Matthews,” he called out loudly, finding himself on the verge of being thrown out, cop or not.

Matthews found herself entering the dormitory and reliving the day she’d sat down with Margaret trying to convince the girl to contact her family-she recalled the conversation nearly word for word, her own frustration at Margaret’s impertinence. She remembered taking the Sharpie from her purse and using the indelible ink to make a point about her determination to help.

She remembered so well inking her cell phone number down the girl’s forearm. This recollection hit her like a slap in the face. She spun on her heels and ran, coming around the privacy screen and meeting back up with LaMoia. She stopped abruptly, unable to get a word out.

He tested, “You okay?” and stepped closer. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

Mention of this raised the head of the attendant. He had spoken a Shelter watchword without knowing it. Expectancy hung in the air like static before a storm as this woman and LaMoia awaited her response. The smell of hot chocolate permeated, as did the distant nasal whine of a girl’s earphones as she listened to rap music on a portable CD player.

“Other way around,” Matthews said hoarsely, her voice belying her stoic exterior. “I think the ghost saw me.”

“For once, Matthews, you lost me, not the other way around.”

“Her forearm,” Matthews said. “I wrote my cell number on her forearm with a Sharpie.” She hollered out the general alarm, “Man on the floor!” As LaMoia was led around the privacy screen, he saw several dozen teens-most all wearing surgical scrubs as pajamas. They sat on the edges of their cots aiming their hollow faces in open curiosity. Some girls came down a hall with wet hair. The announcement of a man had cleared the showers.

“Walk me through this,” LaMoia said quietly, aware of their audience. “I’m not sure what you’re getting at.”

“There are two possibilities,” Matthews said. “Either Walker met up with Margaret sometime later and she told him what that number on her arm was-”

“I have serious reservations about that.”

She nodded her agreement, surprising him. “Second possibility: He overheard my conversation with Margaret and saw me write my cell number on her arm … in real time … right as I did it. Right here.”

LaMoia mulled this over, his brown eyes shifting and lighting on various focal points: her face, the wall, her face again.

He asked, “That’s the best you’ve got?”

“John, you know when you know something, and you really know it, no matter how much you can talk yourself out of it?

You’ve been there, right? We’ve all been there before. This is one of those times. I’m right about this. One hundred percent.”

He glanced around the room, saw the girls watching them like some kind of freak show.

“And there’s something else,” Matthews said, her voice returning to that warm, dark, husky complaint she’d fallen into only moments earlier. Her tone suggested conspiracy, so he leaned even closer to her, to where her breath ran warm on his neck. “For months, the girls have been complaining about this place being haunted.” She caught his condescending expression.

“No, no. Hear me out! Not creaky-noises-kind-of-haunted, but being watched-the feeling they were being watched. Especially in … the … showers.” Was it her imagination, she wondered, or had the whole room gone quiet? LaMoia looked in the general direction of the showers. For her, the hallway suddenly seemed to stretch much longer. “John?” she asked.

“You trust this?” he questioned.

“Completely and absolutely.”

He whispered back at her, “Then we’ll start in the showers so the girls can’t see what we’re doing.”

“Agreed,” Matthews said.

“And Matthews, just for the record: If we strike out, you never talked me into doing this. If I get tagged as a ghostbuster, I’ll never live it down.”

“I was told this room was probably a salting room at one point,”

Matthews said, explaining the large drain in the shower room’s brick floor at which LaMoia was staring intently.

“Or a stable or carriage house,” LaMoia suggested. “You put a drain in a basement, Matthews, especially one close to water, as we are here, and you’re going to have water in your basement. Fact of life.”

“Meaning?”

“If the Sarge wasn’t all hot and heavy about these EMTs mentioning the Underground, then maybe I wouldn’t go there.

But a drain in a basement? I don’t think so. I think this thing was at ground level at some point.”

She looked around, studying the shower room’s old stone walls. Gray mortar, added sloppily in the not-too-distant past, lay frozen where it seeped from the seams. “You’re saying it isn’t dirt on the other side of these walls?”

“I’m saying the Sarge is trying to make a connection between a possible underground section of the old city and Hebringer and Randolf. He’s the one who put a bug in my ear. Now you raise the possibility of a peeper down here, and I gotta go with that, with you, because you’ve got this thing-you know what I mean? — and I’ve gotta take this wherever I can take it, as stupid as it may seem.”

“I’m not saying it’s stupid, John.”

“I am, Matthews. It is stupid. But to overlook it? That’s even stupider.”

“There’s no such word.”

“Yeah? Well, at the end of this there may be,” he said. “Stay tuned.”

The cast-iron drain, twelve inches across, was positioned directly in the center of the large room. Some white PVC plastic pipe had been suspended from the stone ceiling as temporary plumbing to supply the shower water. The space smelled of young women, shampoo, and soap, nothing like a men’s locker room, and this made LaMoia uneasy. In all his vast experience with women, he had never entered a girls’ locker room.

“Turn out the lights,” he instructed.

Matthews obeyed without comment, without interrupting his train of thought, ushering the room into total darkness-the only sounds the steady, rhythmic splash of water dripping from the showerheads. That, and LaMoia’s shallow breathing.

“How ’bout a flashlight?” she whispered expectantly, even a little anxiously.

Instead, LaMoia struck a match, shadows jumping and bending across the crumbling brick walls. The room was set into motion as he moved carefully along the far wall, the match held close to the bricks and mortar. The flame burned brightly at first, then shrank, the shadows fading, and LaMoia tossed it to the floor. He lit another. The dripping water mimicked a heart beating. LaMoia worked the flame high to low, left to right, his own pagan ritual. The fire flickered, danced, and then blew out, enveloping them in darkness once again.

“Bingo,” LaMoia said softly.

With another lit match, he tested the same spot again-a slice of mortar about shoulder height. Again, long shadows raked the walls as the small flame first flickered and then was extin-guished.

Matthews asked, “Why keep putting the match out? What’s the point?”

“It’s not me,” LaMoia answered. “It’s wind.” He held another match between them so they could see each other, but the effect was disorienting. Now the shadows waved and commingled on the floor. “There’s a hole poked through the mortar here,” he said, pointing, “and here. Peepholes, Matthews. Not ghosts. Not goblins. Dirty old men, I’m guessing. And maybe one much younger. One with a thing for a very pretty cop.”

She crossed her arms against the chill. “Oh, God,” she moaned. “We’d better call SID.”

“Let’s wait on that. It may be nothing,” LaMoia suggested, much to her obvious consternation. He stepped forward and whispered into her ear, “He may be watching.”

Twenty minutes later LaMoia had marked with chalk another four such rents in the mortar, all with unobstructed views of the shower stalls where the young women had bathed themselves.

He made one last test alongside the brick wall that faced the cot where Matthews and Margaret had spoken. The match’s flame blew out.

He and Matthews met eyes, hers filled with alarm. “Sometimes I hate being right,” she said.

One of the girls asked what was going on, and LaMoia vamped, saying he was a city engineer checking “structural consistencies of the chemical compounds used in the mortar mixture.” This seemed to satisfy the girl and confuse her as well.

“You’re working a little late, aren’t you?” He answered, “I’m volunteering my time, young lady. I haven’t been home for dinner yet.” “You’re pretty buff for an engineer,” she said. This, from a seventeen-year-old with a tattoo. LaMoia mugged for Matthews, shutting her up before she leveled him with another sarcastic remark. They reconvened outside the Shelter’s main door, in a musty basement hallway that was part of the church.

“I feel sick to my stomach,” she said, arms crossed tightly.

“That is so disgusting … so invasive … so awful!”

“So common,” he said. “Guys start poking holes in walls when they’re about eight, Matthews.”

“You?”

“Don’t ask. The point now is to find these bastards-because these aren’t prepubescent kids who don’t know any better. These are pervs, cave-dwelling troglodytes that deserve to have their equipment surgically removed.” He looked around somewhat frantically. “Give me the dime tour, would you? These guys are on the outside of these walls, and we gotta find out how the hell they got there.” He added, “Now, while we can still rain on their parade.”