The Art of Deception

Pretty in Pink

Late afternoon the following day, on the heels of several detectives-in-training poring over the two dozen local missing person reports, as well as the pages of six three-ring binders filled cover to cover with sheets of reported runaways suspected headed to the Northwest (these binders representing only the last two months of flyers sent to SPD), a phone call was taken by the duty sergeant at Public Safety.

“Yo!” LaMoia answered.

“Sergeant, it’s Phil at the front desk.”

“Yeah, Phil. Whassup?”

“Phone call just now come in. The individual is one Ferrell Walker. Male. Sounded kind of young. Claims the description in the paper fits his sister, and that for all he knows she’s gone missing-something about some asshole boyfriend who won’t return his calls. Should I kick it upstairs on a memo or what?”

“No. I’ll take it. Give me the four-one-one.”

The duty sergeant read the particulars to LaMoia and repeated his recollection of the conversation.

“Give me the TOD,” LaMoia said, wanting the exact time of day the call had been logged. All incoming calls to the switchboard’s main number were recorded digitally. LaMoia could access and listen to the message himself, but his preference was that I.T. lift the message off the master and preserve and protect it so they’d have it available later.

He caught up with Daphne Matthews in her seventh-floor office, a hundred and fifty square feet of femininity in an otherwise grayish male world. It always felt comfortable to him, which he supposed was the point-she did her counseling here-chintz curtains on the window, landscape artwork on the walls. But it was the personal furniture that made such a difference, even if it was from Home Depot as she claimed-dark wood and leather, instead of the gunmetal gray steel that came courtesy of the taxpayers. An electric kettle, a wooden variety box of tea, and packets of Splenda occupied a counter to the right of her desk.

“Here’s my problem,” he said without a greeting.

Matthews was packing up for the day, filling a narrow black briefcase that looked more like a handbag. “I’m done for the day.”

“The Sarge keeps asking me to rewrite the report on the bridge.”

“Try English, John.”

“Ha-ha. You’re really cracking me up, here.”

“I’m not writing your report for you.”

“And in the meantime,” he continued, “I got this guy that says his sister’s split the scene and that she matches the description we gave to the paper.”

She looked up.

“The thing is, I got to make like Shakespeare here for the next couple hours, and when you call the number this guy gave the desk it comes up some grouch who says our boy ain’t coming to the phone while he’s on the job-and the job turns out to be cleaning fish up at Fisherman’s Terminal-and seeing as how that’s damn near on your way home …”

“That’s a stretch,” she said.

“But you’ll do it.”

“I shouldn’t. I’m tired, and I want a glass of wine.”

“But you will.” He said, “I swear, if I didn’t have this damn report to write-”

“Yeah, yeah,” she complained. “And I’ll whitewash your fence while I’m at it.”

“I don’t have a fence,” he said, “but I do have a couple closets I just built that need a couple coats.”

“Rain check,” she said, standing at the ready. “Tell me again whom I’m looking for?”

She left the Honda alongside a rusted heap of a pickup truck in a parking lot of cracked and heaving blacktop that oozed a brown mud apparently too toxic to host even the heartiest of weeds. Dickensian in both appearance and smells, the commercial fishing docks of south Ballard had changed little in the last century. A dozen or more small trawlers, battered and destitute in appearance, evacuated their catch to cleaning tables with open drain spouts that ran pink with guts and grime emptied back into the canal water where overfed seagulls and shore birds battled noisily for territory, their cries piercing and sharp, yet apparently unnoticed by all but Matthews.

A few of the men, mostly young and scraggly, overtly inspected her as she followed directions down the line to the third of the cleaning tables. Even in jeans and a work shirt she would have felt self-conscious in this setting, but dressed in tweed wool pants pleated at the waist and crisp in the crease, and a navy blue Burberry microfiber rain jacket with leather trim, she felt about as comfortable as the silver salmon under the knife.

Ferrell Walker looked more seventeen than twenty. LaMoia had pulled two driver’s licenses for her: Walker’s and his sister’s, one Mary-Ann Walker, twenty-six. Matthews knew from the data that his eyes were listed as green, his hair brown, his weight 170 and that he wasn’t an organ donor. He wore a black rubber apron smeared with the snotty entrails of his livelihood.

The apron attempted to protect a pair of filthy blue jeans and a tattered sweatshirt equally smeared with resident stains. He pulled off mismatched thick rubber gloves, one black, one yellow, stuffing them into a torn pocket on the apron that hung down like a giant tongue. He rinsed his hands in cold water from a rubber hose that ran constantly above his cutting stand.

He dried them on a soiled section of torn towel and thankfully did not offer one to shake. Obliged to display her shield, she made sure he saw it.

Walker’s face was pinched, as if he’d been sat on as a baby.

She couldn’t see the green for the dark, deep eye sockets. Behind him, on the high wooden workbench where the water ran pink, a wood-handled fish knife rested, its curving blade like an ill-fashioned smile. Walker’s Adam’s apple bobbed like a buoy as he answered her first question. Had he called the police to report his sister as missing?

He looked at her almost as if he knew her-men did this to her all the time, but Walker’s variation was pretty convincing, and disquieting.

“Not like Mary-Ann to miss work,” Walker said. “And when that asshole said he hadn’t seen her either, that didn’t sound right, so I called you guys … you people … whatever.”

She asked for and received the sister’s pedigree, some of which matched what she’d learned from the driver’s license: twenty-six, blond, 135, five foot six, smoker, worked here at dock five. Last seen-and this was the most troubling to her of all-roughly three days earlier. Those in the know put her in the water over forty-eight hours. This timing made Mary-Ann Walker a likely fit. Matthews had a Polaroid of the woman’s waterlogged, crab-eaten face in her pocket but couldn’t bring herself to deliver it to this kid. Mention of “that asshole” made her think she might have another candidate to ID the body.

“You’re making reference to a boyfriend?” she asked.

“Wait, tell me it’s not Mary-Ann,” he said. “Tell me this didn’t happen.”

“What’s her boyfriend’s name?”

“Lanny Neal.” He still had hope in his voice. “The description in the paper … tell me I’m wrong about it sounding like Mary-Ann.”

Matthews looked around for a place to sit, but thought better of it. She didn’t like the smell here, the sound of the dead fish slopping wetly down onto the cutting tables. She didn’t like the sad look in Walker’s tired eyes, or the thought that LaMoia had passed this off to her so that she’d be the one delivering bad news.

“Anna’s a cleaner, too,” Walker said. “Boss is on me that it’s somehow my fault she hasn’t showed. So basically, I’m picking up her work, putting in a double.” He hesitated. “She wouldn’t leave me hanging like this-not without calling or something. This body … it looks like her?”

“Unfortunately, the body doesn’t look like much, Mr. Walker. Too long in the water. Now, you asked this Lanny Neal about her, and his reaction was what exactly? And I urge you to recollect what was said, not what you felt about what was said.” She interrupted herself again. “I take it your sister is living with this individual, or involved in a way that suggests he might have knowledge of her whereabouts?”

“He’s jumping her, if that’s what you’re asking. And, yeah, she’s pretty much shacked up, since we don’t have the boat no more. Which is on account of Neal anyway. ’Cause once they started hanging out, she bailed on me-thirty years of our family fishing these waters, down the drain-and that pretty much finished me off with the fucking bankers, thank you very much.”

“Mr. Neal’s reaction to your call?”

“Lame,” Walker answered. Dead fish were piling up, awaiting him. “You mind?” he asked, indicating the table.

She did mind, but she told him she didn’t, and so they stepped up to the cleaning table where Walker, gloved once again, worked the curved blade of that knife in such an automatic and efficient way that it bordered on graceful. He tore loose the entrails and tossed them into a white plastic pail.

“Take me through the call, please. You asked to speak with Mary-Ann.”

“Listen, lady … lieutenant … whatever … Neal’s a scum-sucking piece of shit. I know it, and he knows I know it. He beats her up, and she goes back to him, and I just don’t fucking get that, you know? And me? I’m looking out for her, and she blows me off like I’m the pond scum, not that dirtbag she’s hanging with, so what I’m saying is, we didn’t exactly get into it, Neal and me. He essentially blew me off.”

“His exact words were?”

“Just tell me it isn’t her.” His fingers moved, the blade sliced and another fish was processed.

She waited for his attention. He was sad-eyed by nature, a dog starved for affection. Her job biased her into such snap appraisals, and though loath to admit it, she went with first impressions. “I sincerely hope the Jane Doe is not your sister. The fact remains, your cooperation is essential if we’re to clear Mary-Ann’s name from our list, and that means answering my questions as they’re asked. Do you understand?”

Walker’s gaze lifted off the fish he was cutting, the look he gave her so penetrating that she averted her eyes.

“We haven’t identified the body.” She now wondered whether she had handled this correctly. She observed grief on a regular basis and tried to avoid labeling it. Some screamed, some cried, some went silent, some became violently sick. Some became violent, period.

“Neal said she wasn’t there, that he hadn’t seen her, and that at this point if he did it would be for the last time.”

Matthews scribbled down notes. “Okay …,” she said automatically.

“It’s not okay,” he said. “The guy beats her, lady. He’s awful with her, and if he’s done anything to her …” He lifted the fillet knife. “I’ll turn him into chum and feed him to the crabs.” His eyes reminded her of killers she’d interviewed. Grief could do that-make us do things we never intended.

“It’s important we all keep cool heads, Mr. Walker. We’re still just collecting the facts, the evidence. There has been no positive ID-identification-of the body we found. It would be a mistake to make assumptions about Mr. Neal’s involvement at this point.”

“I’m not making an assumption,” he said. “I’m just telling you how it is.”

“It isn’t anything until we know who, and what, we’ve got.”

He was more kid than adult, she thought. A lovesick brother with a fishing knife sharp enough to split hairs-she reminded herself to thank LaMoia for this one.

Rain fell, wetting her pad.

“Did she take prescription drugs? Recreational drugs?”

“If she was drinking and drugging, Lanny got her into it.”

She wrote that down as affirmative. Booze, drugs, abuse-the father, son, and holy ghost of domestic disturbances.

As the rain increased, she debated pulling up the hood on the jacket but decided she wanted him to know she could take the weather.

“Do you have an address, a phone number for Mr. Neal?”

Walker recited a Wallingford address and Matthews wrote it down. He went back to the fish. This time, he hacked the head off with a single blow, then the tail. Then he minced the body, entrails and all, into pieces and swept it down the drain and the seagulls attacked the surface of the water with a frenzy.

“Remember, Mr. Walker, we have not connected Mr. Neal to any suspicious act. This is the first I’ve heard of Mr. Neal.

Are we clear on this?” Matthews worried where a younger brother might take this. He’d lost the family boat, the family business. What had she been thinking, implicating Neal? She hoped she might steer her way back out. “Women disappear, Mr. Walker. Tens of thousands every year. Some just up and walk away, from their families, their husbands, their boyfriends-their brothers. That’s right. Most show back up, a few days, a few weeks later. I’d like to think we can pretty much put Mary-Ann in that last category.”

He dragged a salmon in front of him with the knife’s sharpened tip. “If it is Mary-Ann,” he said matter-of-factly, “then all the more reason you’d better talk to Neal. Anna’s afraid of heights.”

“Acrophobic?”

“Whatever.”

She made note of the phobia on the page of her notepad.

As it rained harder, she again almost pulled up the jacket’s hood but decided against it once more. Rain drizzled down both their faces. His eyes hardened, making him seem much older than his twenty years.

“So what do we do next?” he asked.

“You tell us if Mary-Ann shows back up.” She passed him a business card that carried the office number and wrote LaMoia’s extension on the back. “I’m concerned I may have given you the wrong impression, Mr. Walker. About this being Mary-Ann. I apologize for that. I don’t want you doing something stupid-harming Mr. Neal in some way. All for nothing.”

“People get what they give in this world. It’s no concern of yours.”

“Sure it is. It’s every concern of mine.” She added, “Could you give me a phone number? Residential. Something other than work.”

“I told you, after Neal got into her head … I don’t have a phone.”

“An address?”

“I’m kind of between places right now, okay?”

“This is pretty miserable weather, this time of year.”

“There’s ways around it.”

“So this is where I reach you,” she said, looking around.

“What’s your work schedule right now?”

He ignored the question. “I asked what’s next, in terms of if I don’t happen to call you, if Anna doesn’t happen to show back up.”

“We’re attempting to identify the body.”

“And I should be part of that.”

She heard herself say, “We could arrange for you to view the body, but there’s absolutely no requirement for you to do so at this time. Mr. Neal could do it, if you’d prefer.”

Walker read meaning into her statement. “That help you get him? Watching him look at her? Something like that?”

“I’m not going to speculate on where the lead detective might take this. I am not the lead detective.”

“You are as far as I’m concerned,” he said.

Matthews wished she could start again.

He said, “If Neal looks at that body, then I want to be there.

I got any kind of rights like that, me being her brother and all?”

“None whatsoever,” she said, unsure herself. “It’s all up to the lead detective.”

“Yeah? Well, you tell him I want to be there.”

“I’ll pass it along.”

“You do that,” he said, hoisting the next fish on the tip of the knife to its place of evisceration. “You help me, I’ll help you.”