The Art of Deception

Lost Time

In addition to the pink telephone memo that had inappropriately interrupted the interrogation of Vanderhorst, Matthews found a voice mail on her cell phone as well. “Miss Matthews?” Margaret’s warbling voice was itself enough to make Matthews feel sick. “I’m … I’ve screwed up, pretty bad. Real bad. You said to call. So … so I’m calling.” No address, no phone number.

Matthews dug around in her jeans pocket and came up with the folded memo. Thank God, she thought, glad she’d saved it.

There wasn’t any address to speak of, only the notation, “above Mario’s.” She pulled out the phone book and started thumbing through the yellow pages. She’d never felt right about Margaret’s mention of a place to stay. A roof overhead was one thing, but the baby needed prenatal care, square meals, doctor visits. A flophouse above a pizza parlor? Was it a crack house, a cum shop, a shooting gallery? She found it finally in the white pages: Mario’s Pizza. Time to move. She felt awful for having been out of touch with the girl, and especially for being unavailable for the past sixty minutes. With these girls, every minute counted. On the street, a life could change in a matter of seconds.

“Lost time,” she informed the civilian administrative assistant who managed the seventh-floor secretary pool-and whereas the expression meant the time clock stopped for lower-rank personnel, for lieutenants and above it meant their offices would be vacant, their phones picked up by voice mail. The assistant slid a thumb-worn in/out marker on a wall poster that tracked such things, and returned to her typing.

Matthews’s hand hovered over the phone on this assistant’s desk as she debated calling Boldt, two floors down. The Vanderhorst interrogation had gone well-better than expected-the two of them finding a mutually inclusive rhythm that to Boldt must have felt like a pair of musicians trading riffs. She owed him a report and knew he wouldn’t fancy her ducking out of the house until that homework was turned in. There was a series of psych tests to schedule; outside experts would have to be consulted to either support or challenge her professional evaluation. Each of these efforts required reports be written as well.

The complications of multijurisdictional warrants caused by a four-state killing spree would consume over half the detectives on CAP, a good deal of SID’s resources, and virtually all of her own time for the next several weeks. One man and his crimes would put a piece of SPD at a virtual standstill.

She tried LaMoia instead, the phone switching through to voice mail on the first ring, meaning he was either on the line or out of the office. She hadn’t seen him since breakfast-his showing up at the loft with Blue on his heels and a bag of hot sesame bagels under his arm.

She left him a message that she was running an errand to help Margaret. She left the name of the pizza shop in SoDo.

Her final attempt on the phone found Bobbie Gaynes at her desk.

“Would you mind taking an hour of lost time as a favor?” she asked.

“Name it, Lieutenant.”

“Take a ride with me? I could use some backup. A young girl from the Shelter-pregnant out to here-just left me a message that she and the baby are in trouble. She’s shacked up above this pizza joint, and I’m thinking if she’s got a room, then there’s a pimp or a dealer involved-you know what these girls get into.” She added, “Two of us, that’s better odds.” She smiled, trying to win Gaynes over. If this grew into anything more than a quick favor, Lou would turn it into a surveillance ops.

“Give me five minutes. I’ll meet you in the garage.”

Driving south of the Safe a few minutes later, Gaynes asked, “Anything more I should know, Lieutenant?”

Matthews briefly explained her relationship with Margaret.

She said, “I promised Lou I’d stay on the wire, but honestly, I don’t want dispatch monitoring this conversation, because I also made a promise to the girl, weeks ago, that I’d respond as a woman, not as a cop.”

“Those things only throw a signal about a hundred yards, Lieutenant. No way dispatch will monitor.”

“Yes,” Matthews said.

“So, I’ll listen in from the car and provide backup as necessary.”

“Yes, exactly.”

“No problem,” Gaynes said.

Traffic thinned past the two sports stadiums, the neighborhoods slowly deteriorating into a docklands, warehouse district.

As directed, Gaynes parked two blocks away from the pizza joint. She would drop Matthews off here and then move into position, closer to the shop, a minute later.

“So I lie low unless there’s trouble,” Gaynes asked. “If you need me, you want a code word?”

Matthews had considered something like this, but thought better of it. “No. I’ll just scream for help.”

Gaynes grinned. “Got it.”

Her academy training and past experience caused Matthews to take a few extra minutes to scout the immediate area, fully circling the block that included Mario’s Pizza.

On the last leg of this patrol, she spotted the chrome bumper and black trunk of a car parked down a narrow alley, less than a block from Mario’s. She held closely to a wall of an abandoned building, edging near enough to read the black decal numbering on the left of the bumper: KCSO-89.

She gasped aloud, then for the sake of the lavaliere microphone clipped beneath her shirt, she said, “Bobbie, I’ve got Nathan Prair’s patrol car in sight. One block south, on the west side of the street, down an alley. I’m going to take a closer look.

Stand by.”

She crossed the street, able to see through the car’s back windshield as she approached. The car stood empty. Her heart pounding, she slipped into the shadows of the alley alongside the car and peered into both the front and back seats, ready for Prair to jump out and surprise her.

“Officer?” she called out, to no answer.

Had Margaret been involved with Prair all along? Had she notified Prair, asking for help, after failing to reach Matthews?

Had some contact of Prair’s at SPD leaked the teen’s cry for help, inspiring attempted heroics on Prair’s part aimed once again at impressing Matthews? A dozen thoughts circled inside her, and Matthews nearly swooned, briefly off-balance, reaching out to steady herself.

“Bobbie,” she said, again speaking aloud into the cold air, for the sake of the small microphone clipped to her bra, “call KCSO and request … no, you had better make that insist …

that you speak with Prair. When you reach him, find out what the hell his patrol car is doing a block from Mario’s Pizza. Then call me back on the cell. I’ll leave the cell on until I hear from you.”

She crossed the street with a forced, stiff-legged stride, a renewed enthusiasm to get to the bottom of this. She resented the idea of Margaret being used as bait to get to her-if that’s what was going on. Nathan Prair had stepped way out of bounds.

Then again, she didn’t know what was going on-and that confusion made her all the more determined to find out.