The Art of Deception

Catch, As Catch Can

The ringing phone demanded to be answered, but John LaMoia hesitated. In Crimes Against Persons the telephone was its own kind of crapshoot, its own lottery. The detective that answered a call automatically accepted whatever case presented itself, sometimes a murder worthy of his time, but mostly domestics.

Beatings with baseball bats, stabbings with kitchen knives, gunshot wounds of every variety-it was enough to keep a man like LaMoia single. Enough for him to give it time to let someone else catch this one.

He’d had one bit of good news, and he felt reluctant to spoil it with some worthless case that would demand his time: A truck driver had read a story about Mary-Ann Walker and had called in that he’d seen a car parked on the bridge right before midnight. He hadn’t gotten a good look at the driver, but LaMoia had put a detective on a telephone follow-up (the trucker was currently on a run to Boise) to try to get a decent description of events. When the trucker returned to town, they would follow up yet again.

His office cubicle was personalized with a Sports Illustrated swimsuit calendar, an audaciously pink rabbit’s foot hanging from a thumbtack, a collection of classified newspaper ads, each offering a Chevy Camaro, and a Life in Hell comic-strip frame.

His home, eight to twelve hours a day, or night, or holiday.

Never mind the razzing he took for the pressed blue jeans, the ostrich cowboy boots, the deerskin jacket. He, and only one other CAPdetective, carried a sergeant’s shield. If he didn’t want to answer a cold call, then he wouldn’t.

Finally he picked up the phone-duty overcoming reason.

“LaMoia.”

“Is this a detective? Am I speaking with a detective? I’d like to report a Peeping Tom.”

He immediately had her in his mind as white, thirties, well educated. The caller-ID helped. The Market Inn catered to a certain set, a set that could make trouble for a detective.

He sat up in his chair and grabbed for a pen. Any homicide detective worth his salt would have paid attention to this call.

Susan Hebringer, one of the two women missing from downtown, had reported a peeper twenty-four hours prior to her going missing. An alarm sounded in LaMoia’s brain-he’d caught a good call.

“Sergeant, ma’am. Crimes Against Persons. It’s my squad.”

She whispered into the receiver. “He’s … right … across …

the … street. Right now. I can see him over there.”

“Let’s stay calm, okay?” He checked the clock and wrote down the time: 7:38 P.M. “I’m assuming you’re in the Market Inn. What floor?”

“Five.”

“Do you happen to know what direction you’re facing?”

“No.”

“The water? Do you have a water view?” LaMoia spun around to face the map of the city and the clearance board above it that tracked which cases remained active. Hebringer and Randolf were up there in red marker with Boldt’s name in the Lead column. They’d both been up there way too long.

“The living room. If I’m facing the water, this guy’s to my right.”

“North. Okay. Fifth floor. And you are currently where?”

“In bed.”

“Alone?”

“Yes, alone.” Indignant. Afraid.

“Clothed, or unclothed?”

“Not clothed, no. There’s a robe on the floor.”

“I’d rather you not move, if he’s still there.”

“He has binoculars, I think.”

LaMoia’s pulse pounded at his ears. A peeper with binoculars. Susan Hebringer.

“I’m going to ask you to sit tight. I’m going to take your room number and call you back on my cell phone. I’m maybe five minutes away, max. I’ll have patrol cars in the area in less than that. The key here is not to give this guy reason to bail. If he thinks you’ve made him, he’s out of there.”

“I want him out of there.”

“I understand that, Ms…. Your name please?”

He wrote down the particulars and practically begged her to remain in bed and to act calm. He made the calls on the run for the elevator. For a lousy peeper report, this would be the biggest show of manpower SPD had ever mobilized.

Susan Hebringer. If he had time, he’d get a call to Boldt. If not Boldt, then Matthews: top of the lineup; he needed the heavy hitters.

Assuming his role as commanding officer, LaMoia directed dispatch to put out an 041 for the Bay Tower construction site.

Officers in two patrol cars responded within seconds and were advised to enter the area “cloaked,” with a BOL (Be On Lookout) issued for an adult male possibly fleeing the area, possibly in possession of a pair of binoculars or a telescope. Another three foot soldiers called in, all in the general vicinity, and once advised of this fact, LaMoia used them to bracket the area in case the guy slipped the two teams from the patrol cars.

With just five minutes to act, he felt he’d done as much as humanly possible to throw a net around this peeper. The phone call to Boldt’s residence put him onto voice mail, and he left a cryptic message to return the call. He asked dispatch to send Boldt a page. A call to Matthews paid off-she was on her way over.

He juggled all this while keeping an open channel and something of a running dialogue with Melissa Dunkin, still curled up under a cotton sheet in suite 514. When Dunkin reported the peeper gone, LaMoia dialed up the urgency to his people on the ground. Ten minutes later, fifteen minutes after receiving the call from Dunkin, a search was on in the construction site with LaMoia fearing they’d lost him. Thirty minutes later, that search included fifteen patrolmen, the foreman of the construction site, and a vice president of the company putting up the building.

By the time the construction site was crawling with law enforcement, LaMoia found himself sipping coffee in the company of a visibly shaken Melissa Dunkin, who had eschewed the go-juice in favor of vodka on the rocks from little minibar bottles with tiny aluminum caps.

Dunkin wore a dark wool suit that she’d thrown on hastily, judging by the wrinkled and incorrectly buttoned blouse. Matthews arrived in blue jeans and a T-shirt, looking great. Introductions were followed by the explanation that the prosecuting attorney’s office no longer permitted a male detective to interview a woman without a female officer present. The truth, it was hardly why Matthews was there. A patrol officer would have satisfied regs. LaMoia wanted Matthews “to look under the hood,” and she was present to willingly oblige.

“A dot-com in Redmond?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“But you did tourist stuff around town here today.”

“After lunch. Yes,” Dunkin said.

“Shopping mostly?” Matthews asked.

“Not only shopping, but it included shopping. Yes. The aquarium. Pioneer Square. The monorail.”

“A busy day,” LaMoia said.

“Very.”

Matthews asked, “And did you then, at any time, sense that you might be being followed or watched?”

“Not at all. Not in the least. My God, you think this guy was following me?”

LaMoia recapped. “You came back to the hotel, locked the door to your room, pulled the drapes-as far as they’d go-and undressed for a bath.”

“That’s correct.”

“You were in a state of undress only twice when outside the bathroom,” he repeated from his notes. “The beer, and in bed after the bath.”

“I was in the tub,” she reminded, going on to describe her arrangement of using the door’s full-length mirror to afford her a view of the television.

This was a new one for LaMoia, and so he had her show him. He placed a hotel towel into the damp tub, stepped in, and sat down. She aimed the door until he could see the bedroom’s armoire. She asked for him to verify the angle.

“Yeah, there,” he said, stopping her. “I got the television, but I’m also looking right out that window at my men over there on the construction site.”

“He had a view of me,” she mumbled. He didn’t know if her slurred tone was a product of the booze or shock. “I think he had binoculars. He was holding something in his hands.”

LaMoia believed with certainty that a perv peeping a naked woman would most certainly be holding something in his hand, but he didn’t comment. Instead, he asked, “A camera?”

“Oh … God! You think? What, I’m going to find myself circulating the Internet?”

LaMoia doubted there was a lot of demand for pictures of naked middle-aged execs, even on the “Internet-ional House of Porncake,” as he called the Web, but he bit his tongue. “Let me ask you this, Ms. Dunkin, and I apologize in advance for the way this may sound, but is your business with the Redmond dot-com of such a nature that advantage might be gained by …

influencing you in any way?”

“Blackmail?”

“Influence can take many forms.”

“It’s an LBO.”

“Hostile or favorable?”

“I refuse to think-”

LaMoia interrupted. “Thankfully, you don’t have to. That’s why you brought me in on this-us-we do the thinking for you.” He offered her his well-practiced smile. “We consider everything-every possible scenario-and then go about eliminating them, one by one. The more options we eliminate, and the more quickly we eliminate them, the sooner we’re on the most probable set of circumstances, the sooner we’re on a suspect and putting that person away for this. It’s as simple as that.”

“All parties involved support this buyout,” she said. “This has nothing to do with that.”

LaMoia was inclined to believe likewise but also didn’t want to jump to the conclusion that she’d just been peeped by a serial kidnapper responsible for Hebringer and Randolf. He thought about Boldt, wondering why his lieutenant hadn’t returned his call.

LaMoia considered bringing SID techs into the room to determine the likely line of sight; that, in turn, might suggest the exact spot the perv had been standing. From the suite he could see his guys scouring the construction site across the street.

Dunkin saw this too, and for the first time it occurred to her that the police were working a little hard for a simple peeper report. “Hey,” she said, “what’s with all the guys over there anyway?”

“They’re looking for evidence.”

“I understand that, but why, exactly?”

Matthews said, “Hopefully to help identify the person responsible.”

“You do this for a peeper? A sergeant and a lieutenant? An evidence team? Am I in some kind of trouble here that I’m not aware of?”

“Maybe you’d better sit down, ma’am.” LaMoia indicated the padded bench at the end of the bed.

“This may take a minute to explain,” Matthews said.

Dunkin kept looking out the window. Several more officers had arrived to pull yellow tape around an area of the construction site.

“There have been some disappearances,” LaMoia said.

“Women,” Matthews added.

Melissa Dunkin sank to the edge of the bed and listened in stunned amazement.

It wasn’t long before the hotel bedroom hosted an elaborate setup of tripods, measuring sticks, and a portable laser meant to re-create the angle from which the perv would have been able to view the room.

A Japanese-American SID tech wearing a Don Henley World Tour T-shirt called out for LaMoia. He showed him the setup and explained that the laser would “lay a frozen rope” out the window, across the street to the construction site. He switched on the laser, allowed it to warm up, and then sprayed a fine powder into the room. A tiny stream of bright green light hung in the dusty air.

“You do the voodoo very well,” LaMoia said.

The radio crackled. “Got it,” a deep voice reported. One of the guys across the way had located the beam and was waving back at them as he spoke on the radio.

LaMoia said, “I want the mirror shot out of the bathtub as well. Combine them and have that section of the platform over there dusted for prints, photographed, you name it.”

“No problem.”

“It is a problem,” LaMoia corrected. “It’s just not your problem.”

Less than an hour later, LaMoia, Matthews, and two SID

techs stood on the fifth floor of the construction site. The laser work had identified a square yard of floor space where the peeper had stood. On the edge of that area, delineated by crime scene tape, a tiny plastic stand held a two-inch, yellow plastic triangular tag bearing the numeral 7 that indicated several small piles of geometric mud and dirt presumed to be, because of the vague pattern it formed, discharge from a shoe or boot sole.

The construction elevator stopped, clanged open, and a silhouette of a fairly big man emerged. LaMoia identified Lou Boldt by the determined stride of his brisk walk.

“Hey, Sarge.” LaMoia continued to address his lieutenant by his former rank, the same rank, the same job that LaMoia now occupied. Even in the relative dark of the construction site, Boldt looked tired and worn. LaMoia put this off to Susan Hebringer’s disappearance. Some said he was having trouble at home; others claimed he was sick. But LaMoia knew the true source of Boldt’s physical decline, whether his colleagues understood it or not.

“Good work, John,” Boldt said, shaking hands with his sergeant as they met. He nodded cordially at Matthews.

“Shoe treads,” said the evidence guy, a little overeager for recognition. Boldt had a Norman Schwarzkopf reputation within the department. Newcomers always sucked up to him.

LaMoia said, “Maybe it’s nothing more than some hump working his joystick.”

Boldt looked to Matthews for confirmation. “He stayed in here a long time. He had at least a couple of opportunities for full frontals of her. Lots of time with her stretched out on the bed-also naked. If it was masturbatory, as John’s implying, it would have been over much sooner.”

“Maybe the guy’s on Viagra,” LaMoia said.

Fighting a grin, she said, “Another explanation would be that it wasn’t masturbatory at all-but a collection phase, subsequent to trolling and prior to-”

“Abduction,” Boldt said, completing her thought.

“A possibility is all,” she said, “but yes.”

Upon learning, after the fact, that Susan Hebringer had reported a Peeping Tom to police just prior to her disappearance, CAP’s homicide squad had worked closely with Special Assaults to chase down each and every reported incident of sexual harassment and voyeurism, focusing a great deal of attention on any such reports in the downtown corridor, or filed by downtown residents. Uniformed patrols had been alerted to pay special attention to vacant buildings, billboards, parking garages, and construction sites-all possible viewing platforms for the peeper.

Private security firms directly responsible for these same structures were contacted as well.

“Do we have any idea how long he was up here?”

LaMoia held his flashlight between his teeth while consulting his notes to make sure he had it right. Boldt liked it right the first time. “The vic personally witnessed him out here for twelve minutes. Digital alarm clock on the bedside,” he explained.

“Could’ve easily been a lot longer than that, since she was in the tub for over twenty and on the bed snoozing for an unde-termined time.”

“Any fluids or emissions up here?” Matthews asked the SID

technician.

“Nothing to the naked eye so far. We could Luminol and the like, if you want.” Under black light, when reacting with the chemical agent Luminol, human blood glowed green. Other tests existed for bodily fluids of so-called secretors-people whose blood contained a set of specific blood proteins.

LaMoia answered, “We want.”

Boldt added, “Please. Any tricks you’ve got to detect saliva or semen. And if we come up with anything, I’d like it DNAed and run against the state and the fed’s databases. Whether you get a hit or not, I want everything kept on file, and full written reports.”

“Got it.”

“Along with every girder up here, I want you to dust for prints on the stairway railing at every landing, both sides of the turn.” He answered the technician’s curious expression: “It’s where people take hold. Just do it.”

He signaled LaMoia and Matthews to step away, and the three shared a moment of privacy.

“Anything?” Boldt asked.

LaMoia looked across to Dunkin’s hotel room. The Japanese tech was waving at him. LaMoia felt stupid waving back but he did so. These lab guys would never be cops.

“She’d done tourist stuff,” LaMoia answered. “Some shopping.”

“Anything specific in the shopping? Lingerie, swimsuit, anything that would have had her outside of a changing room partially clothed or at least wearing less than her street clothes?”

“I should’ve asked that,” LaMoia was ashamed to admit.

Boldt had been a paper shuffler for a couple years now yet still had better instincts than any two street detectives combined.

“Was it random?” Boldt asked.

“The million-dollar question.”

“Your gut check?” Boldt requested.

Matthews shook her head no. LaMoia said, “Not random.

Deliberate. But I got serious problems with that: Even if he trolls the tourist spots, even if he follows ’em to their hotels or their condos, how the flock does he know what room she’s in?”

“Unless it’s the other way around,” Boldt suggested.

They’d worked these angles raw back at the Public Safety Building. For the sake of hearing it aloud, LaMoia said, “He spots ’em from up here-wherever-then waits for them to leave the hotel, and knowing what they look like, he stalks them.

For whatever reason, at least twice he grabbed them.”

Matthews said, “Timing and location-those are your reasons. Nothing more complicated than that, which opens up the possibility-depending on why he took off-that our Ms. Dunkin just made his list.”

LaMoia told Boldt, “She leaves town tomorrow. Taxi, straight to the airport. He won’t be following her.”

“Lucky for her. Too bad for us,” Boldt said.

“We could still bait him,” LaMoia suggested. “Install some babe on one of our squads to strip in front of windows.”

Matthews said, “I wonder who’d be volunteering to oversee that operation.”

LaMoia mugged at her.

Boldt was not happy. “The problem is it’s not a specific hotel, a single building. Hebringer and Randolf both lived here. Ten blocks apart. You can’t bait every town house, every hotel.”

They’d been around this track enough times back in the situation room. Weeks, even months of it now. Boldt was in rough shape, under fire from the press, the brass, the families of the missing women, and even his own wife.

“So maybe Hebringer getting peeped was nothing but shitty coincidence,” LaMoia said, referring to what they knew about the missing woman. “Drawing a look from us when it doesn’t deserve it. Maybe it’s got us by a nose ring when it’s nothing but a black hole. Maybe I walked into that tonight.”

“Maybe not, John,” Matthews said. “We don’t ignore this,”

she told Boldt. “His sticking around-that counts for something.”

“Keep it up,” Boldt told them. Pointing to the cordoned-off area, he said, “Make him talk to us, would you, please?” He added with a snarl, “A confession would be nice.”