The Art of Deception

Circling the Drain

The early reports of the situation were sketchy at best, and Boldt tried not to overreact. His tendency, when hearing one officer was down and another missing, was to assume the best while preparing for the worst. The job rarely involved much good news, and he’d developed a fairly thick skin, but one learned not to creatively interpret a simple radio code.

That this call involved members of his own unit-one a prote?geand friend, the other his friend and former lover-proved the exception to the rule. He fell to pieces with the news. Monitoring the tense radio traffic, he determined that ambulances were headed to the scene. Reports included a woman-quite possibly a civilian-badly cut and bleeding out. The pit in his stomach grew to nausea as he caught himself hoping that the vic was a civilian, a line he had no right to cross.

He rushed down the hall to the men’s room, the nausea escalating to where he felt his stomach preparing to void. In all his years on the job he’d never vomited over an earful of radio traffic.

He put out the fire with a dose of cold water to the face, and it worked. The nausea receded into a world of anger and frustration. What the hell had Daphne been thinking? She’d skipped out of Public Safety without notifying Special Ops. In a gust of ill temper, he slammed his palms down onto the sink with such force that he knocked the entire fixture off the wall. Water sprayed from broken pipes. Boldt jumped back, as the ceramic sink broke into several chunks that echoed as a small explosion.

Detective Gerald Millhouse rushed into the room fearing he’d be calling the bomb squad. “Shit, Boss. I’d thought we’d lost you.”

Boldt moved back and away from the encroaching flood of water on the tile floor. He heard Millhouse and knew well enough he should respond, but instead he found himself locked into a trance as he watched that floor water coil in waves as it formed an ever-tightening spiral and slipped down the floor drain.

Inevitably, you overlook the obvious, he thought, recalling the cliche?d line lectured to all rookie detectives. It was a Boldt version of Murphy’s Law that he’d seen in action more times than he liked.

“Lieutenant?” It was Millhouse again, trying to win his attention.

Boldt flushed crimson with embarrassment, not over his having broken a sink, but for having overlooked the simple law of gravity.

His instruction to Millhouse was oblique, for his mind was working too quickly to form a perfect sentence. “Dr. Sandra Babcock, Archaeology Department at the U.” He racked his brain for the name of the bus tunnel maintenance man. Couldn’t find it. Then, there it was. “And a Chuck Iberson over at WS-DOT … Third Avenue bus tunnel maintenance. Find them both and get them over here to the Pioneer Square station, A-SAP.

No tears.”

Millhouse lowered his voice and said tentatively, “But Boss, you heard about Matthews and Gaynes, right?”

“You’ll be chalking tires if those two aren’t in that bus tunnel in ten minutes,” Boldt replied matter-of-factly.

Millhouse fled the men’s room in a panic.

Boldt fought to keep emotion out of the decision-making process, fought the urge to fly down the fire stairs, climb into the Crown Vic, and race to the crime scene. He put the victims first, and one of them was missing. An extremely important one.

The water, collected on the floor, kept “circling the drain,”

police-speak for all hope being lost. But Boldt knew he wasn’t lost at all-he’d just found the missing piece to the puzzle.