The Art of Deception

Blurred Vision

A moment earlier, while out on the street, Matthews had been feeling sorry for herself for being alone. Now she wondered if she were alone, and wished more than ever that she was. She wondered if she’d tracked those prints into the apartment a half hour earlier herself. Had they already been there then, and she’d simply missed them because of Blue’s pestering?

“John?” She called his name three times, each louder than the previous attempt.

She backed up and blindly reached behind herself, never averting her eyes from the expanse of the loft and its long wall of rain-streaked windows, water tangled on the surface like silver thread. With her right hand she unlocked each of the three door locks that she had relocked only moments before-she wanted a quick exit if needed. Her left hand searched the slicker, located the Beretta, and slipped it quietly out of the pocket. She switched off its safety, chambered a round, and took it in both hands, barrel pointing down and slightly to her side.

She cleared her throat. As she spoke, Blue lifted his head attentively. “I am armed!” she called out loudly into the room.

“I will shoot on sight! Go away now, or announce yourself! I repeat: I am armed!” … and dangerous, she thought. She squat-ted, an act that Blue took as an invitation to be petted, friskily trotting his way over to her. She pushed the dog out of the way-an act he took to mean she wanted to play. She pushed him again. Blue nuzzled her, nearly tipping her over.

One set of prints, the beaded water thicker to her right, lessened to her left, the soles of the shoes having shed most of the rainwater after only a few steps. The angle of the track suggested an origin in the guest room-her bedroom.

“Go away now!” she hollered again. To Blue she whispered, “Find him,” motioning out into the room. The dog looked at her curiously, nearly obeying, but holding by her side uncertain of the game. “Find him!” she repeated, the dog thumping its tail, a mixture of excitement and confusion. She stepped deeper into the room, her head light, her arms heavy. She considered turning around and running, but only briefly. She was done running, tired of playing the victim. Sometimes the role of victim was a product of one’s situation; sometimes it came down to a matter of attitude, a series of choices. She was the one with the training, the one with the pistol, the one with the determination. It was Walker’s turn to fear her; Prair’s turn to fear her.

She reconsidered those shoe prints, slowly convincing herself that they were hers, as the mind is wont to do under such pressure. She wasn’t about to squat and spend more time inspecting the floor, wasn’t going to be caught off guard by the intruder.

“Walker?” she called out loudly, moving cautiously through the loft, Blue panting at her side.

She swung the weapon, still aimed at the floor in front of her, right to left, left to right, a slowly tracking metronome.

Sweat trickled down her jaw as she flashed with heat, her eyes dry and stinging. The windows rattled in unison behind a gust of wind. The air smelled of seawater and fresh rain, a combination that on any other night she would have found pleasant, even intoxicating.

Just get me through this, she pleaded internally.

Given the loft’s open floor plan and vastness of space, she felt like a bug in a terrarium-some unseen, monstrous eyeball tracking her as she moved. Her mind raced, a restless impatience nagging at her to clear the room as quickly as possible, secure the door and windows, and then call LaMoia. Blue followed on her heels, a worried whine escaping him like a leaking balloon.

LaMoia would return home at some point, she reminded herself. One option was to get her back against a wall with a good view of the entire room and simply wait for his return. She could call-get someone down here, regardless of the hour. Lou would come to her aid in a matter of minutes if asked.

The possibility of coincidence existed, as remote as it seemed to her at that moment. Some street skel, some addict, could have broken into the apartment looking to heist what wasn’t nailed down.

Blue’s whining irritated her. She wished he’d make like a dog and go flush the intruder instead of skulking behind her like a frightened child.

She cleared LaMoia’s bedroom, bath, and closet first, moving around and through the doorjambs nervously, in the jerky fashion to which she was trained. She’d not been in this part of the loft yet, and she tried not to pay any attention to the neatness of the room, the stack of self-help books by the bed, the perfectly folded towels on the chair that sat next to the ironing board that was no stranger to where it stood. This suite of rooms told her more about the man than five dinners out would.

She left the master, opened and inspected two oversized coat closets, again marveling at the level of organization in each, and moved through the kitchen/dining/living space (glancing toward the front door and making sure it remained shut). With only two more hallway closets (one of them a narrow linen closet, and an unlikely hiding place), the guest bath, and the guest bedroom to go, she picked up the pace, less nervous, less anxious than only minutes earlier. Blue had stopped whining, leaving her side in the kitchen to go lap at a bowl of water. His tongue slapped at the surface, his collar chimed on the bowl’s edge.

She moved closer to this, the final room, to inspect and clear.

“I’m armed,” she repeated for the benefit of hearing herself speak, her voice carrying little of the urgency or authority it had only minutes before. A part of her felt as if she were playacting, that the role of tough cop was ill suited for her. She understood and lived with the fact that she was far more feminine than most women on the force. Being one of “the girls” required a tough-ness of attitude that she’d never acquired. She was more woman than cop, more psychologist than cop, regardless of title, rank, or training. Hovering at the door to LaMoia’s guest bedroom, the Beretta beginning to weigh a hundred pounds at the end of her quivering arms, she thought herself a poor example of the woman cop. These seeds of self-doubt sprouted within her, and she found herself distracted rather than pitch-perfect; taut-nerved rather than ready for combat.

A movement or a sound-she wasn’t sure which-tripped an internal alarm. Someone was just outside the loft. She jumped into the guest room, leveled her weapon, and saw no one. She quickly locked the window, checked under the bed, under the desk, and then hurried to the front door, grabbing her keys.

A moment later, she and Blue were descending the apartment building’s stairs in a flurry of footwork, Matthews suddenly wanting a confrontation, wanting closure.

She had taken a flashlight of LaMoia’s from its plastic wall bracket on the way out, but found it clunky and awkward to hold in an over/under fashion with the handgun as she descended to ground level. She eased open the building’s stairwell back door, buffeted by the wind. The water’s edge was a couple of steel warehouses away. They’d be gone soon enough, condos in their place. She didn’t want Blue getting loose, so she sneaked out the door without him, immediately winning a complaint of incessant barking from the other side. The fire door clicked shut behind her. To reenter the building, she’d need to reach the front door.

Her back pressed to the wet wall, her nerves jumpy in the rain and dark, she swung the light and weapon around in what to others might have appeared to be a random, haphazard motion, but to her was a methodical sweep of the area. She walked up and over a low stack of shipping pallets, the wood creaking beneath her. She knew that the fire escape outside her west-facing window would terminate around the corner, on the west wall. A part of her didn’t want to confirm that its ladder was down, but that was how she found it a moment later, and the discovery pumped enough adrenaline into her to run a marathon.

Her vision blurred by the wind and rain, she cast the light about, looking for him, searching for him, prying the light into dark shadow in hopes of revealing him. She caught her finger on the trigger, and an eagerness in her heart. This was blood lust, something she’d read about, something others had told her about in sessions, but unlike anything she’d experienced. She wanted the excuse. She was ready to use the excuse-a bad shooting or not, she found herself preparing to do the unthinkable.

That thought made her recall Prair, and suddenly in the midst of the wind and rain, and the provocative urge to eliminate Ferrell Walker from the face of God’s earth, a pinprick of light formed at the end of what seemed a very long tunnel. She pushed these thoughts aside where they belonged, but the thought process had begun; it churned away inside her, running in her subconscious like a computer virus, just waiting to spring up when least expected.

The overhead lights down by the warehouses flickered once, a warning of a faulty wire. The water level reached through her clothes and undergarments to her skin, invoking a chill. Wet or not, she continued around the perimeter of the enormous building, aiming the flashlight as much overhead-directly into the rain-as anywhere else, hoping to catch movement on the fire escape.

Fear proved itself as insidious as ever, infiltrating her steely resolve. Suddenly she wanted nothing more than to be back in the loft, locked up safe and sound. The idea of shooting Walker seemed far less urgent than that of finding dry shelter and warmth. If anything, she felt bare and exposed, the penetrating cold, wet rainwater making her feel far more vulnerable than she had only minutes before.

“You motherfucker!” she shouted up toward the sky, not knowing who had said that, nor where it had come from. Her arms shook. The flashlight dimmed, smothered by the curtain of water. She’d been dragged out here against her better judgment, against her true will, manipulated in a way that felt both invasive and repugnant. In an effort to end it she’d resorted to his rules, his game, and this proved the most offensive of all.

Far away, she heard Blue’s hysterical barking. Beyond that, the dull grind of a jet’s turbines and the low grumble of a ship’s engine or thunder.

Again, she debated calling for backup, but she knew damn well that those who cried wolf quickly found themselves out of the pack.

She reentered the apartment building lacking confidence. One circling of the building carried with it a lingering doubt about who she was and what she was after.

She retrieved Blue from the stairwell and climbed the stairs, a sodden, dispirited shell of her former self. Whoever had entered the apartment had beaten her, and she resented the hell out of it. If they’d taken anything, they’d stolen a part of her as well.

The lights in LaMoia’s apartment flickered, and she cursed under her breath. She didn’t need any more drama at the moment; she wanted nothing more than to be locked up nice and tight, warm, dry, safe and sound.

Soaking wet, she patrolled the loft yet another time, inspecting every corner, every closet. Resolved that she was indeed alone and protected behind a series of deadbolt locks, she double-checked the window in her guest room, worked a chain to lower a bamboo shade, closed the door, placing a ladder-back chair against the knob, and undressed quickly, getting out of the wet clothes. She pulled on a T-shirt and a pair of underwear and the familiar sweatpants and ran a brush through her hair before crossing the kitchen and boiling water for tea.

Reinforced with the hot chamomile, she talked to Blue about nothing at all, found him a dog biscuit, and fed it to him from a stool at the kitchen bar. After that, he sat at attention by that stool unflinchingly devoted to her. She hated herself for wishing LaMoia would return home sooner than later. She didn’t want to go to bed without him being in the apartment, without relating her harrowing story of finding wet shoe prints down the center of his living room, without garnering some tiny amount of sympathy for what she’d been through, never mind that it was her fault in the first place.

Staring over the brim of her teacup at the apartment and its appointments, she immediately saw what was wrong then: nothing. Nothing was out of place. Not one thing, at least that she could see. If a common thief, one would expect a drawer or two left hanging open, a TV or DVD player gone missing.

Her hand hovered over the phone. She could call LaMoia and ask how long he thought he’d be. Better yet, she could find some clever way to determine his schedule and let him know someone had prowled his apartment-that was certain to bring him home in a matter of minutes. But if Lou Boldt had put him on an assignment and she subsequently pulled him off that assignment, there would be hell to pay. Lou was clearly jealous of their closeness as it was-misplaced jealousy as far as she was concerned. Aggravating that wound hardly made sense. Fur-thermore, Boldt’s efforts were aimed at bringing Walker in for questioning. She had no desire to hinder those efforts.

She glanced toward the guest bedroom and thought better of it. She didn’t want to fall asleep. There was a TV in LaMoia’s bedroom the size of Texas. She thought she might invite herself to surf for a movie-anything to fill the time. Anything but sleep.