The Art of Deception

Darkness, My Old Friend …

The space-an old tunnel of some sort-was wet, dark, and cramped. They had reached it fairly quickly by following a city storm sewer north a good several blocks. Walker had removed a large grate mounted in the side of the storm sewer and pushed her through. Matthews now walked hunched over, stepping sometimes through gooey mud, sometimes ankle-deep in extremely cold water. It smelled of earth and loam and vaguely of the sea. She paid little or no attention at all to the slimy objects in her path, which to her spoke volumes of the more pressing need to find a way out of this situation, for normally she would have reeled at the tangled contact with cobwebs and the awful sensation of the disgusting, unseen objects sucking past her bare ankles.

Walker remained behind her, egging her on with sharp jabs of his fingers in the small of her back, the first few of which she had thought were the knife. She had long since lost all sense of direction. His small flashlight provided the only light-it amounted to her shifting shadow stretching long and thin on the tunnel’s earthen walls.

Somewhere behind and above them lay Margaret with her abdomen sliced open and Gaynes, unconscious. A by-the-book detective, Gaynes would have called in a “510” requesting backup before she moved on the building. By now, Matthews could assume that backup was already on the scene. Lou would have been consulted. John would have been informed. A controlled but professional panic was sweeping through Public Safety, and she was the focus of it all. She had to stall Walker in order to buy herself time. She had to get to the surface. She possessed the facilities to accomplish both goals, as long as she kept herself collected and focused. The mind tended to jump almost randomly from one thought to another in such situations-the professional in her was very much aware of this. She needed focus. She needed clear, linear thought.

The floor of the tunnel dried to packed earth-they were on dirt now. At first she thought the crunching beneath her feet was gravel or rock. She encountered areas like this every twenty yards or so; there was no predicting when, or how much. Then she realized it was crushing under her footfalls, not merely shifting as gravel might. The dirt floor suddenly sparkled to life, a thousand jewels, and she realized they were walking atop broken glass-broken bottles, to be more accurate-the smugglers’ tunnel.

With no idea where she was headed, she nonetheless knew where she was, and this tiny seed of knowledge strengthened her, emboldened her to begin the task of breaking him down, piece by piece.

“This is kind of fun,” she said strongly, gathering in her strength and forcing it out her lungs. When the flashlight flickered away from her, she dropped a gold stud earring onto the dirt floor. Another crumb, she hoped.

Walker stumbled behind her, and she mentally marked one down in her column. The first of such marks. Hopefully, not the last.

56 The Tag

LaMoia stared at the rear bumper of KCSO patrol car #89, the phalanx of police and emergency vehicles only a block behind him. The pregnant girl was critical. Gaynes was conscious but in extreme pain, and was being carted off to Emergency. At that moment, he might have believed Nathan Prair had abducted Matthews, except for Gaynes having told him it was Walker.

Now he came to believe the obvious: that Prair had either responded to the same cry for help from the girl that Matthews had received, or that he’d intercepted the 510, the SPD radio call for backup, and had responded in hopes of rescuing Matthews himself.

“Over my dead body,” LaMoia heard himself say aloud.

He searched the car and found it locked. He searched the alley and found nothing but trash, a few needles, and the rotting carcass of a dead cat. The buildings off this alley were secure as well. The more he studied the situation, the more he believed Prair had simply stashed the car here so it might avoid being seen. He had wanted to buy himself a head start, and that pissed off LaMoia all the more. It would be just like Prair to observe something like this going down, only to realize too late that he’d better do something.

LaMoia left the alley, returning into the street, and carefully searched the block back toward Mario’s Pizza and the tenement that housed it, now off to his left. LaMoia knew Special Ops CO Chatwin to be a Neanderthal incapable of thinking outside the box. Matthews, in all her prescience, had nailed this on the head. Chatwin had his ERT troops and a traffic helicopter searching the surface streets-an urban commando exercise he was both familiar with and comfortable in exercising. LaMoia’s brief plea to designate a unit to search for an access to the Underground had left him snubbed. “What, you think this is fucking Disneyland, Sergeant?”

“The kidnapper has an established history of subterranean access.” LaMoia tried his best to make this sound official. But he couldn’t maintain his composure once Chatwin dismissed the suggestion. LaMoia said, “With all due respect, he’s a fucking troglodyte, sir. We’ve got him directly linked to at least two different areas of the Underground beneath the city.”

“What, the tourist place?” Chatwin asked, and LaMoia realized that any attempt at an explanation was not worth the wind.

“You’re looking in the wrong place,” he tried, one final time.

“Process of elimination, Sergeant. I’ll entertain your suggestion, but we work this my way first.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’m CO,” he reminded, a little miffed by LaMoia’s tone.

“Yes, sir.”

“If you want to be of help, get in your car and log in with dispatch. We could use you.”

“I don’t want to be of help, sir.”

Checking the street carefully now, LaMoia wanted to avoid another encounter with Chatwin at all costs. He held to his own.

Another alley up ahead caught his attention. The ERT guys had rushed through this area like a tornado. They’d been looking for an abductor and hostage. LaMoia was looking for something else entirely: access to an escape route Walker might have used.

Matthews had labeled the man an organized personality, and that was good enough for him. She’d foreseen her own abduction.

Who was he going to trust? He intended to work the scene methodically, as he’d been trained to do by Boldt, one of the best in the business.

He rounded the corner into that next alley, wondering all of a sudden where the hell Boldt was. Matthews as a hostage and the Sarge nowhere to be seen? The guy would have to be either locked up or dead to be kept from this crime scene.

His eyes lighted on that white fabric tab from fifteen yards away, the glare of his penlight illuminating the improbable color in a world of mud brown and ash gray. Perfect, pure, white. It called out as if it had yelled at him. He headed to it like a bloodhound-the thought of which made him wonder if the K-9

unit had been called up. He bent and retrieved it.

Victoria’s Secret, size medium.

There was no sound, no night air, no sirens, no radio squawks, no movement in his universe, only his trembling fingers and that white fabric tag clasped so tightly.

Debating whether or not to call for backup, he looked quickly around for something with which to lift that manhole cover. She had made it plain to him that if she went missing, she trusted him to do what was right. Chatwin seemed certain to bungle this, putting Matthews at risk. Backup could wait until he knew the full situation.

Victoria’s Secret. He would tease her about that when he found her. And he would find her, he told himself. He had to.

It was the only way he knew. John LaMoia always got the girl.