The Art of Deception

Life’s No Picnic

The houseboat stood empty, its hardwood floor gleaming clean because Daphne Matthews was not the kind of person to sell a house and leave it dirty. John had known this moment would hurt, and he’d offered to join her, but she’d made this pilgrimage alone.

She couldn’t leave without tears, and she’d wanted to be alone to suffer them in private. So much of her adult life had passed through these doors, even if limited in terms of years.

She’d both found herself here and lost herself here-several times, if she were being honest-and parting came hard. The lump in her throat practically stopped her from breathing. It had been more than a house, a home-this place had been a friend that had suffered her complaints, her joys, and two failed engagements. They knew each other. Yet she didn’t want to live the next chapter here.

Her cell phone rang-a new number-and she fished it from her purse, checking the caller-ID before she answered it. Seeing the number on the screen filled her with purpose and joy. She felt especially glad that it wasn’t John calling. He’d kept his word about giving her this time here. She hardly recognized the guy anymore. What on earth was she getting herself into?

She answered, the caller-ID having alerted her that it was her attorney. Quick hellos, a brief amount of small talk. Bursting with curiosity, Matthews asked, “Did you speak with the judge?”

“I did.”

“Has he made a determination?”

“There are waiting periods.”

“But the relatives declined custody.” They’d been through this so many times. It seemed so simple to Matthews. Why did the courts get involved and make it so complicated? She had butterflies. She wanted an answer. She knew she might lose John if this came to pass, and that worried her. A part of her questioned the wisdom in losing the one thing currently working in her life. She was happy for the first time in a long, long time.

“Yes, but a further search for blood relations must be made.

We’ll have to petition the court again on your behalf, and I’d be remiss if I encouraged you about the outcome.”

“And in the meantime?”

“State custody.”

“Which means exactly what, after the hospital stay, the in-cubators?”

“An institution for the waiting period. A foster home if she’s lucky after that while the paperwork makes her available.”

“Can I visit her?”

“In all likelihood.”

“And if I’m first in line for adoption?” She felt like reminding her attorney she’d handled an illegal adoption case a few years back. She knew a lot more about providing a good home than anybody would ever know.

“The watchword right now is patience, Daphne.”

“Patience,” Matthews repeated into the phone. She pulled the front door of the houseboat shut angrily, and it locked her out.

“None of this is bad news,” the attorney said. “But you have to stop thinking about this in terms of being first in line. The court looks at qualifications.”

“And I’m a single mother,” she said. “You’re saying that hurts us.”

“Not at all. Plenty of single mothers adopt. I’m saying you need patience. That’s all.”

“I can handle that,” she said, knowing it was the truth. She told herself repeatedly that she could handle it. She felt a wreck.

“But I don’t think it’s best for her.”

The attorney chuckled on the other end of the call. “I’ll call you as her situation changes. And you call me if you change your mind.”

“I’m not changing my mind on this,” Matthews said.

“No,” the attorney said, “I don’t believe you are.”

Matthews said good-bye and tripped the call to disconnect, returned the phone to her purse, and started down the dock. She stopped and grinned as she saw him.

Up under the shadow of a tree, staying out of the heat, John LaMoia was smiling that shit-eating grin of his. John LaMoia-she still couldn’t get over it. He held a picnic basket in his right hand. An incongruous combination if ever there were one.

But then again, John LaMoia had proved himself, if anything, unpredictable.

Please visit Ridley Pearson’s website: www.ridleypearson.com

If you enjoyed The Art of Deception, read on for an excerpt from Ridley Pearson’s next exciting thriller, The Body of Peter Hayes, in bookstores April 2004.

Lou Boldt picked up bits and pieces of the assault over an uncooperative cell phone. Paramedics were still on the scene-a trailer park near Sea-Tac Airport-a promising report because it suggested the victim remained at the scene as well. If he reached the site in time,Boldt meant to ride to the hospital in the back of the ambulance. He owed Danny Foreman that much.

The Crown Vic bumped through a pothole that would have knocked dentures out. Boldt’s eyes shifted focus briefly to catch his reflection in the silver of the windshield. Boldt had crossed forty a few years back,tinges of gray gave a hint of it. He was in the best physical shape of his professional career thanks to Weight Watchers,a renewed interest in tennis,and a regimen of sit-ups and push-ups in front of CNN each morning. He scratched at his tie,seeing that he was wearing some of his dinner,a familiar habit,and hit a second pothole because of the distraction. His head came up to catch a glimpse of a closed gas station. Plywood tombstones where the pumps should have been, the signs torn down,the neon beer ads gone from the windows.

He turned down a muddy lane,dodging the first of many emergency vehicles. The air hung heavy with mist,Seattle working its way out of a lazy fall and into the steady,cold drizzle of winter. Three to five months of it depending on El Nin?o or El Nin?a-Boldt couldn’t keep straight which was which.

Beneath twin sliding glass windows on the butt end,the once white house trailer carried a broken,chrome script that Boldt reassembled in his head to read EVERHOME. It had come to rest in a patch of weedy lawn that needed cutting and was accessed by a poured cement path,broken and heaved like calving ice-bergs. The emergency vehicles included a crime scene unit van, a King County Sheriff patrol car,and an ambulance with its hood up. Technically the scene was the Seattle Police Department’s,and therefore Boldt’s,but Danny Foreman’s career had landed him first in the Sheriff’s Department,then SPD,and now BCI,Bureau of Criminal Investigation,what some states called the investigative arm of the state police. Boldt wasn’t going to start pawing the dirt in a turf war. Danny Foreman was well liked,both despite and because of his unorthodox approach to law enforcement. To his detriment and to his favor he played it solo whenever possible; it had won him accolades and gotten him into trouble. The job was as much politics as it was raw talent,and Foreman lacked political skills,which to Boldt explained their mutual respect.

Foreman lay on a stretcher inside a thicket of blackberry bushes that grabbed at Boldt’s pant legs. A balloon-like device had been inserted into Danny’s mouth. A woman squeezed the bag while monitoring her sports watch. Foreman looked wiry and older than the early fifties Boldt knew him to be. Tired and beaten down. His nap was graying now and cut short,and a pattern of black moles spread beneath both eyes,lending him the mask-like look of a raccoon. Could it possibly have been as long as all that?

Boldt was quickly caught up to date by a deputy sheriff and a paramedic,both interrupting each other to finish the other’s sentence. The deputy sheriff knew the name Boldt and acted like a teenager in front of a rock star,trying to impress while fawning at the same time. Boldt had enough headlines to fill a scrapbook, but wasn’t inclined to keep one. He had the highest case clearance per average in the history of the Seattle Police Department.

He had rumors to defeat and stories to live up to,and none of it mattered a damn to him,which only served to provoke more of the same.

Foreman had apparently been hit by a projectile stun gun and “subsequent to that”-these people all spoke the same way,and though Boldt was probably supposed to as well,he’d never taken up the language-“the subject was administered a dose of an unknown drug with behavioral characteristics not dissimilar to those of Rohypnol.” The date rape drug of choice,alternately known as roofies,ruffies,roche,R-2,rib,and rope,produced sedation,muscle relaxation,and amnesia in the victim,more commonly a coed found later with her panties down than a cop on a stakeout.

The ambulance on the scene was having engine trouble,and though a second ambulance had been dispatched,efforts were being made to get this one started. Boldt’s chest tightened with anticipation as he learned that the combination of the medication and the stun gun had resulted in “respiratory depression.” Foreman had nearly stopped breathing. He’d been unconscious for almost fifteen minutes.

“Look what the dog drug in,” a blinking Foreman said suddenly,his voice slurred behind the drug.

His coming conscious sent the paramedic into high gear, shouting out numbers like a sports announcer.

“You took a stun dart,” Boldt said. “Then they roped you.”

“Feel like Jell-O. No bones,discounting the one I got for Emma,my nurse here.”

“Keep it in your pants,Danny,” the woman said,grinning, “or I’ll search my bag for the hemostats.”

“Emma and I went to high school together.”

“We went to the same high school,” Emma corrected for Boldt’s sake. “Only Agent Foreman graduated twenty-eight years ahead of my class.”

“Always technicalities with you,” Foreman said.

“We met outside of work,” Emma further explained. To Foreman she said,“And here I am with my hand on your heart.”

“Wish our situations were reversed.”

“It’s the medication loosening his tongue,” Emma said.

“Next thing he’ll be proposing. Good part is,he won’t remember any of this.”

“Seriously?” Boldt asked.

“Doubtful. He’ll sleep soon,and when he wakes he’ll have lost most of the last few hours.”

“Good God.”

“Bullshit,” Foreman said. “I’m as clear as day.”

“Starting when?” Behind him Boldt heard the ambulance’s engine rev and a handful of half-assed cheers.

“I’ve got a vague recollection of thinking a dog had bit me, or a bee stung me. That’s about it.”

“A stakeout?” Boldt inquired. “A solo stakeout?”

“Budget cuts.”

“Meaning you will,or will not,share the identity of whoever it was you were watching in that trailer?”

“I’ll need a kiss before I can answer that.” Foreman added, “From her,not you.”

“Fat chance,” the medic said.

As they strapped Foreman into the stretcher,Boldt collected more bits and pieces: Foreman had gone off-radio while on duty, which had eventually caused his own people to go looking for him. BCI had called King County Sheriff,asking for a BOL-Be On Lookout. A patrol unit had found Foreman’s car-a brand new Cadillac Escalade-which had eventually led to discovering Foreman out cold in the bushes. Boldt was told the house trailer held “a good deal of blood evidence.”

While the EMTs loaded Foreman into the ambulance Boldt conducted a quick examination of the trailer. A tube-frame lawn chair in the center of the small living room looked to be the origin of most of the blood. The scarlet stairs radiated out like the spokes of a wheel. Dirty dishes filled the sink and the television was on,tuned to a rerun of Con Air.

The gloved forensics guy told Boldt the only thing they’d touched was the mute button on the remote. “The volume was deafening.” Boldt filed this away as important information.

Several pizza boxes were stacked on the counter,the cardboard oil-stained,indicating age. In the back bedroom,a room about eight by ten feet,he took in the unmade bed and clothes on the floor.

“We seem to be missing a body,” Boldt said.

KCSO CSU was stenciled across the back of the man’s white paper coveralls,the crime scene unit of the King County Sheriff’s Office.

Boldt repeated,“Do we have a body?”

The man turned around. He wore plastic safety glasses over a pinched face. “We’re told we have an earlier ID made on the possible victim by the surveillance team. One Peter Hayes. Male.

Caucasian. Thirty-four. Our guy claims Hayes was observed inside this structure earlier this evening.” Boldt experienced a small stab of anxiety; he knew the name,yet couldn’t place it.

Another unpleasant reminder of his being on the other side of forty.

“Your guy,or BCI’s guy? Are you talking about Agent Foreman?”

“We are. We do BCI’s forensics,” the technician clarified.

Boldt had forgotten about the arrangement between BCI and the Sheriff’s Office. SPD had their own lab and field personnel.

The ambulance driver wouldn’t let Boldt ride along,so he followed in the Crown Vic. Once at the hospital,while they awaited processing,Boldt found himself a sugar-and-cream tea and joined Foreman in the emergency room. No one seemed in any great hurry to help.

“A pro job by the look of it,” Boldt said.

“Sounds like it.”

“Who’s Peter Hayes? And why is his name so familiar to me?”

“It’s a case we’re working.”

“We? Are you sure about that,Danny? Because I may have squirreled things for you there,without meaning to. I called your lieu on the way over here. He said they’d assigned CSU to your assault. He didn’t know anything about any stakeout,anything about a bloody trailer. You put CSU into that trailer when they showed up,Danny,didn’t you? This is before you lost your breath and went unconscious. Isn’t that right?”

“Hayes was paroled from Geiger four days ago. Two years in medium,two in minimum.”

“And someone wanted him more than you did. Why’s that?”

“Seventeen million reasons.”

The light finally went off in Boldt’s head. “He’s the guy-”

“That’s right.”

A wire fraud case involving Liz’s bank,six or seven years earlier. Seventeen million intercepted electronically. Not a penny recovered. “A Christmas party,” Boldt said.

“How’s that?”

“I met the guy,Hayes,at a Christmas party. For Liz’s bank.” Sparks firing on top of sparks. “You were with us at the time.”

“I was in my fifth year with Fraud. Yeah. Before Darlene’s illness. Before everything. Like eighteen-hour shifts for me.”

“It was wire fraud,right?”

“Fucking black hole is what it was.” Police used the term to define an unsolvable case. “We collared Hayes-by luck, mostly. We never recovered the software he used,and we never found the money. More important,we never uncovered whose money it was. We knew it was headed offshore,but it never got there. That means someone had seventeen million bucks he was willing to lose rather than identify himself. That’s what interested us.”

Boldt considered this and offered unsolicited advice. “A cop pulling an unauthorized stakeout on a guy who helped steal seventeen million dollars is going to get asked some questions, Danny.”

Foreman said nothing.

More of the case came back to Boldt. It had been a bad time for him and Liz. He remembered that especially. “So we put the bloodbath in the trailer down to the rightful owners of the seventeen mil coming after Hayes,” Boldt speculated.

Foreman changed the subject.

“We couldn’t prove the money ever left the bank. Bank figured it got deposited into some brokerage account,papered over by Hayes. Still inside the bank’s system. There,but not there.

A real whiz kid,our Peter Hayes. A real wunderkind,” he said with the animosity of a scorned investigator. Boldt knew the feeling. “He was twenty-two at the time,and the bank had basically given him control over anything with a chip inside it.

They even called him that: ‘Chip.’ His nickname.”

“Did you write this up? The stakeout?” Boldt brought it back to the here and now.

“No one in BCI gives a shit about a cold case like this. Ask around. I guarantee you this isn’t anywhere on SPD’s radar either.”

“Tell me you’re not pulling a Lone Ranger,because you know that’s how this is going to play.”

“Do I want the money? Yes. For me personally? Come on.

This is about closing a black hole,nothing more.”

“And you think that’s how it’s going to play?” Boldt repeated. “What the hell were you thinking?”

“We connect the dots on this,Lou,it’s going to prove me out.”

“We?”

“You’re investigating my assault,right? SPD is in on this now.”

It almost sounded as if Foreman had planned it that way. He wouldn’t put it past him. “You took a dive in order to get a five-year-old embezzlement case reopened?”

“It’s not like that.”

Part of Boldt wanted to congratulate the man if this were the case. Any cop taking a hit,even a Lone Ranger,was certain to awaken the sleeping giant of the SPD bureaucracy. The other part of him didn’t want to give Foreman that kind of credit, didn’t want to see a friend misuse the system,didn’t want to believe the assault had been anything but a surprise to Danny Foreman. Most of all,he didn’t want to think that Danny had caused that bloodbath inside the trailer and then done damage to himself in order to cover it up.

“Remember,Lou,this was Liz’s bank. Still is,right? Tell me they don’t want their money back. Or maybe you don’t remember. I promise you Liz remembers.”

Boldt felt stung by the comment,and he wasn’t sure why.

He remembered plenty. Just seeing Foreman’s face and hearing his voice triggered any number of memories. The cancer ward at University. Darlene Foreman’s funeral. A wake for her while Liz healed and grew stronger. A growing distance between them as Foreman stopped calling and stopped returning calls.

“What the hell happened to us?” Boldt asked.

“Liz lived,” Foreman answered, as if he’d been waiting to say this for years. And perhaps he had. “Resentment. Envy.

Hang any name on it you want-that’s what happened. And I’m supposed to tell you I’m sorry,but I’m not. I still can’t bear the thought of being around you two. Throws me right back into all my shit. Seeing you now,it’s a good thing,don’t get me wrong.

But not with her. Not the two of you. Not together. I feel cheated,Lou,and my guess is it’ll never go away.”

“You want me to pass this off to someone?” Boldt wanted nothing to do with the case,nothing to do with old wounds like these.

“It isn’t like that.”

“I’d offer LaMoia but he’s tied up in a seminar. Two weeks of counterterrorism.”

“Heaven help the enemy. Nah. My guys’ll take care of this in-house. I realize it falls within city limits,but cut us some slack and we’ll save you the paperwork.”

“That doesn’t sit right with me. You’re saying you don’t want me to open this up?” Was Foreman playing him? Taking it away so that Boldt would reach all the harder for it? And why was he suckering into it?

“It’s open now,isn’t it? I know how you are. Leave it be, Lou. Be a pal and pass it off to my guys.”

It still felt like an attempt at reverse psychology. The paperwork finally came through and Foreman was officially admitted.

An X-ray orderly arrived to escort Foreman to the “photo booth.” Boldt stayed seated in the uncomfortable chair,a three-week-old copy of People magazine dog-eared in the Plexiglas rack,Stephen King looking at him sideways.

Boldt called out,“I’ll wait and see if you need a ride home.”

Foreman trundled off,his walk giving away the lingering effect of the drugs. Boldt felt a knot in his throat,still stunned that friendship could go so far wrong,guilty for getting all the breaks while Danny Foreman had gotten none.

He hunkered down for a long wait,thinking to call Liz so she didn’t wait up. Liz lived. Boldt heard the words echo around in his head. Like it was some kind of crime.