The Body of David Hayes

FIFTEEN

DEPUTY PROSECUTING ATTORNEY PAUL GEISER’S OFFICE reminded Boldt of a librarian’s or research assistant’s with its untidy stacks of papers covering every horizontal surface, the dust, the unsavory smell of old food. He knew Geiser by reputation: a courtroom bully; opinionated to a flaw; outspoken. He’d languished in the prosecuting attorney’s office significantly longer than even the prosecuting attorney himself, destined to never be recruited by the U.S. Attorney’s Office, the proper career track, because his mouth had made him more enemies than it had won friends. The question on Boldt’s mind was whether Geiser could help him learn more about the federal case against Yasmani Svengrad, and what, if anything, Geiser knew about Liz’s affair with Hayes, given his prints on the tape. If Boldt were going to attempt to sting the very investigation he found himself a part of-this in order to protect his family from Svengrad-he had to know all the players, their roles, and their weaknesses.

A man who probably sweated in his sleep, Geiser wore a sheen of perspiration, as if he’d showered too quickly after a run. He was said to be an expert in the martial arts, and this rumor was now confirmed by a group of photographs on the wall, one of which, a triptych, showed him breaking a small concrete brick in two with his bare hand gripped in a fist. He was said to play the bars for the young impressionable women new to jurisprudence, scoring more often than not, considering himself a real ladies’ man, though Boldt doubted real ladies ever looked his way.

“Lieutenant.” Geiser’s voice sounded sadly misplaced-a nasal-prone adolescent stuck in a forty-year-old’s well-conditioned body, a voice useful in court no doubt, but lost on conversation.

“You mind?” Boldt asked, indicating Geiser’s door.

Judging by his eyes, Geiser did mind, though he nodded. Boldt shut the door, moved a pile of papers aside without asking, and took a seat. By moving that pile, he wanted Geiser to understand he was taking charge. As a rule, attorneys believed they could win any argument. Boldt was here to prove that wrong.

“You’re familiar with David Hayes,” Boldt began.

“I convicted him. What’s this about?”

“Are you aware we found blood evidence in a cabin north of the city that we believe will come back positive for Hayes?”

“Yes, I am. Have you found a body yet? No?”

Boldt fought the urges that rushed to the surface, forcing an artificial calm in their place, believing it a mistake to confront Geiser on his prints being lifted from the videotape, because according to Foreman, Geiser didn’t know the content of the video. There was no sense in bringing his attention to it. Boldt toed a tentative line between exploration and revelation.

“I could use a favor,” he said, beginning to walk that line. Attorneys loved negotiation.

“What kind of favor?”

Geiser wore frameless glasses, a thin length of silver wire hooking behind each ear. He’d lost two front teeth-to the martial arts perhaps-their unnatural white giving his ironic smile a glint that drew Boldt’s eye. Boldt did not find him handsome, but saw how some might. He had an intensity about him. The type of man who might go unnoticed when entering a room and yet would later commandeer the conversation at the dinner table; not exactly charming, but not feckless either.

“You must have associates, within the USAO for instance, with whom you’re on good terms.” Boldt knew Geiser’s failure to reach the U.S. Attorney’s Office had to weigh heavily on the man, and tried to say this in a tone that did not imply he was taking a shot at him.

“Go on.”

“I need a case looked into. Quietly, if at all possible. There’s a situation-it could help us both-that apparently involves a federal ruling in favor of a position held by Fish and Wildlife.”

“You must know a few people over there yourself,” Geiser said. Not to be fooled, Boldt thought. “We’ve both been in this work a long time, eh, Lieutenant?”

“Yes, of course I do. But an inquiry coming from me is completely different than one from you.”

“Not necessarily. It depends on the request.”

“Yasmani Svengrad,” Boldt said, watching intently for a tic or other reaction, trying to drop it like a bomb so that Geiser couldn’t protect himself, knowing full well that experienced attorneys taught themselves to never visually react to any news, no matter the surprise.

“The Sturgeon General.” Geiser disappointed Boldt with his placid expression. “You are in the shit if you’re messing with Svengrad.”

“I’m not messing with anyone. I’m exploring the strengths and merits of a federal injunction preventing Svengrad from importing and selling caviar.”

“So the question that needs to be asked is why would you, a Seattle police lieutenant of some note, care what happens to the alleged don of this city’s Russian mafia?”

Boldt opened the bomb bay doors and dropped number two. “I think Svengrad may be the one whose seventeen million went missing.”

This won only a protracted stare from Geiser. “How certain are you?”

“Entirely speculative. But if I… if we, you and I… could use the lifting of that injunction as a carrot, something to bring to the table, I have a feeling we might win more than we lose.”

“IRS wants him on tax fraud. The injunction is nothing but a stall while they sharpen their pencils.”

“Then you’re familiar with the case?”

“That Internal Revenue is investigating S &G and Svengrad, yes. But don’t ask me in public, because I’ll deny it. As to this other possibility you’ve just now surfaced, no. That’s news to me.”

“Interested?”

“Interested enough to keep listening.”

“Do you know Svengrad?”

“By reputation.” Geiser clearly felt Boldt’s accusatory tone. “One of his guys surfaced as our primary in the Radley Trevor case.”

Boldt, along with everyone else in Seattle law enforcement, knew the Radley Trevor case. A twelve-year-old boy found buried alive, presumably held hostage for ransom. Boldt remembered now the whispers of Russian mob during the course of that investigation. His chest seized with the thought of his own children.

“Do you believe it possible that the seventeen million was his?”

“Anything’s possible, Lieutenant. The IRS plays it close to the vest, but let’s assume their case revolves around laundering or offshore accounts-that would dovetail nicely with your theory. We know for a fact that David Hayes intercepted at least one wire transfer from a dummy account at WestCorp intended for a Bahamian bank. That would fit what you’re suggesting.”

“I’m under the impression that if we get the injunction lifted Svengrad will provide information concerning several assaults we’re working. Might possibly even hand over a suspect.” This wasn’t Boldt’s impression at all, but instead that if the injunction were lifted, if Liz cooperated in transferring the seventeen million, then his family would be spared bloodshed. Until he found a way around this, a solution that might keep Liz out of it, he pursued the obvious.

“I’m not sure how that helps the prosecuting attorney’s office exactly,” Geiser said. “My interest is…?”

“We prosecute a man responsible for tearing the fingernails off of at least two individuals, and quite possibly for holding the LaRossa family hostage.”

“Your wife is going to help them, isn’t she, Lieutenant?” Geiser dropped a bomb of his own. “Svengrad’s turning the screws, is he? Since when does a Homicide lieutenant recommend aborting a multidepartmental federal investigation in order to apprehend a subordinate, some thug who slapped a few people around?”

“Since one of those he slapped around was a state investigator.”

“Danny Foreman and I discussed running your wife, Lieutenant. He detailed to me the contact made by Hayes, both by phone and in person, and we agreed that your wife remained our best bet of busting open this case. Now you show up in my office, just after our primary suspect disappears in a pool of blood, looking to help a mobster who may be behind the whole case? What exactly is my reaction supposed to be?”

Boldt experienced the rare sensation of being pushed back onto his heels. He was usually the one doing the pushing, not the other way around. “My wife’s cooperation is not out of the question at this point.”

“If Svengrad got to you, Lieutenant, the right and proper course of action is to seek protection. I can help with that, as can the USAO. What you do not want to attempt is to manage this yourself. Physician, heal thyself. Don’t believe it. That’s a mistake. If you came here seeking my help, if you’re concerned about confidentiality, I can assure you that as of this moment I can and will consider you a client.”

Boldt realized he had to push back now. “When’s the last time you spoke to David Hayes?”

“An individual identifying himself as Hayes telephoned me night before last. He said he wanted to cut a deal and suggested we should meet. Why?”

This matched with what Foreman had told Boldt. “And did you meet up with him?”

“It wasn’t Hayes. I couldn’t confirm it was Hayes calling me. In light of these assaults, I thought it a more prudent course of action not to take too many risks. I reached the rendezvous, but then left ahead of time. Left quickly. I never met with Hayes.”

“Danny Foreman received a similar call. Are you aware of that?”

“I am. You look puzzled.”

“Hayes makes pleas to both you and Foreman and within hours is bludgeoned or tortured, perhaps to death. Is there, was there, wire surveillance in place on that cabin?”

“I’m unaware of any. But Foreman is certainly in a position to have bypassed me and gone directly to an Assistant U.S. Attorney. My federal colleagues are far more facile when it comes to granting surveillance.”

“If not a wiretap… ” Boldt said, intentionally not completing his thought.

“Yes, I see,” Geiser said. “Then either Foreman or I would have been the source of such information to whoever did the punishing. One of us leaks that Hayes wants to cut a deal, and someone-let’s say Svengrad-steps in and teaches him a lesson in loyalty.”

“Or kills him,” Boldt said.

“Or that.”

“Which makes that person party to capital murder.” Nothing had gone as Boldt had foreseen or hoped. He wasn’t any closer to lifting the injunction against Svengrad, and instead of pinning down Geiser he felt as if he were coming away partially trusting the man. His detective’s sense told him it was time to check both Foreman’s and Geiser’s alibis for the night Hayes had been assaulted.

“So if you passed on the offer to meet Hayes, that left you where two nights ago?”

“Are you accusing me of something, Lieutenant?” Geiser seemed genuinely amused. “I’m offering to protect you, and you’re accusing me? Of what? Bludgeoning David Hayes? I’m a black belt, Lieutenant. If I wanted to hurt or kill David Hayes-or anyone else for that matter-I would never make such a mess of it. You just bit the hand that was feeding you. I’m going to ask you to leave now. I will keep what we discussed, in terms of you and your wife, in confidence, but I warn you again: Do not take on Yasmani Svengrad by yourself. In all likelihood, that’s what David Hayes seemed to have tried, does it not? And just look what it got him.”

“We don’t know what it got him.”

“Not yet we don’t. And if Svengrad doesn’t want us to, then we never will.”

Boldt and Liz were just sitting down to reheated gourmet dinners from the Whole Foods in the U District when the home phone rang. Neither knew when or even if the call to Liz was coming, so each ringing of the phone brought its own sense of dread. Boldt answered.

“Lieutenant? Sergeant Szumowski. Front desk.”

“Yes.”

“Sorry to bother you with this, but I just got me a caller asking for your mobile or home number. When I refused to give them out, this individual made me write down a message for you, word for word. You want the message?”

“Read it to me, please.”

“Okay. Here goes.” Szumowski cleared his throat as if auditioning for a part. “‘Has your wife watched any good movies lately? If so, you might want to let me have your numbers when I call back.’” He waited through a good deal of silence. “Lieutenant?”

“Did you get a caller-ID, Sergeant?” By agreement with the phone company, every call that came into SPD showed its caller-ID, even if the line owner subscribed to call-blocking. But not every caller-ID number was written down.

“I did, yes.”

“Run that number and get back to me the moment you have a location.”

“Yes, sir.” Szumowski paused. “As to that other thing, sir. How should I handle that? Giving out your numbers and all.”

“If he calls back before you get back to me, then yes, give him my mobile.” Boldt recited it for the man, sparing him the need to look it up in the SPD directory.

“Right back at you, Lieutenant.” Szumowski hung up.

“Lou?”

“Looks like I’m going out,” Boldt told Liz. “I’ll ask Gaynes to come inside with you. That’ll still leave the cruiser and Heiman’s unmarked out front.”

“I don’t need babysitting.”

“Not up for discussion,” Boldt said, and the air froze between them.

A moment later the wall phone rang, and Boldt answered. He scribbled down the physical address for the phone that had made the strange call. A bar in Fremont, only a few minutes by car from the Boldt home. He now knew where the call had come from; the caller didn’t know he knew. He felt a flutter in his chest.

“They may have made their first mistake,” Boldt told Liz, who appeared frightened. But then he saw it not as fright, but doubt-a keen and penetrating doubt-and as he replayed this statement in his own head, even he found the sound of it foolish.

Fire codes required all commercial businesses to provide a minimum of two points of egress. No cop in his right mind walked through the front door of a establishment like Tanker’s Tavern when looking for a possible suspect. Even in blue jeans and a dark windbreaker, as he was currently dressed, Boldt knew he stuck out, indelibly marked cop. Not to mention that whoever had called for him had the advantage of knowing what he looked like. Boldt entered the bar’s back door off an alley marked by dented Dumpsters and stacks of beer bottles awaiting recycling. The door opened onto a narrow hallway offering a men’s room and women’s room, marked TANKED and TANK TOPS, a battered pay phone, and an empty cigarette vending machine missing a front leg. Someone had key-scratched the words BLACK LUNG across the glass of the vending machine.

Boldt moved furtively down this narrow hall, alert for someone to spring out from the men’s room unexpectedly, attempting to grab him up. The miles he wore as lines around his eyes accounted for years of experience, qualities that could never be taught at the police academy or in college classrooms. They eventually instilled themselves as instinct, a kind of sixth sense of knowing when danger loomed. Boldt was not big on belief in a sixth sense, and yet he possessed the unusual ability to “see” crime scenes through the eyes of the victim, a faculty that he kept to himself, knowing others would not understand. He moved ahead with heightened senses, smelling the stale beer, disinfectant, and cigarette smoke, hearing the background grind of rock and roll behind loud conversation, seeing the spinning overhead fans in a kind of slow motion, the flickering television screen playing a football game, the bartender patrolling his narrow aisle between the regimented bottles and the cronies on stools, bent on elbows glued to the wooden bar that separated them from their spirits.

Mixed into this clamor, the faint but distinguishable ring of a telephone, a sound that Boldt’s brain elected to single out and bring to the forefront of his consciousness. Why, he wasn’t sure.

He stood with his back to a corner, the barroom now open before him. Pinball and a video game in a small room to his left, circular tables, mostly full, in front of him. Glassy-eyed men drinking beer. Women of every type, from fully available and advertising, to withdrawn and hurt, relationships forming and disintegrating before him.

From the din a word so incongruous in this setting that at first he fully ignored it, believing his brain was playing tricks on him, or perhaps not hearing at all. Not feeling. The events of late had numbed him, like a limb falling asleep and tingling without the ability to feel or stand. “Boldt?” a male voice called. Still his brain refused to process the information correctly. “Boldt?” Again.

He turned toward that voice. The bartender, his mustache and curly hair reflected in the mirror behind the bottles. He held a phone’s receiver, standing at the end of the bar, by a waitress with more cleavage showing than necessary, a tray filled with empties in her hand.

Boldt wondered if by identifying himself, he marked himself for abduction and a “manicure,” or if the call were actually a call meant for him. Then it slammed home: He’d been led here like a dog in heat, the caller to the police department knowledgeable enough to know how Boldt would proceed, that he would request the caller-ID information and investigate. And if not, what then? he wondered, believing a second or third call would have been placed, and eventually contact would have been made. But the caller had wanted this on neutral ground, someplace Boldt could not easily or quickly trace, and that implied either a substantial conversation or a threat that one wouldn’t want recorded. The first name to pop into his head was Svengrad’s, the Sturgeon General. When he accepted the phone and heard the metallic, distorted sound of voice synthesis, he felt caught off-guard. The caller was using a voice-altering device, readily available from Radio Shack, that made his voice sound inhuman, like a robot.

“Well done, Lieutenant,” the Darth Vader voice said. It sounded vaguely comical, and had the circumstances been different, he might have experienced it as such. As it was, he suffered under the realization he’d been sucker-punched.

Not Svengrad, Boldt decided immediately. He couldn’t see the Russian wanting to obscure his identity-Svengrad’s power and authority came out of his personage. Why hide it?

Boldt resented his being so predictable, so easily baited.

“Why the cloak-and-dagger?”

“You have forty-five minutes to retrieve the software carried by Tony LaRossa when he collapsed in the bank lobby. I need your cell phone number. I’ll contact you.”

“I don’t think so.” Boldt hung up the call. The bartender flashed him an expression that asked if he was done with the phone. Boldt held up a finger, begging more time. He asked if this bar phone was used a lot by customers. The bartender replied that the one in the hall hadn’t worked in over a year.

“Anyone make a call from here about an hour ago?” Boldt asked.

“I don’t pay much attention.”

“You paid attention to me,” Boldt said.

“I don’t know you.”

“Know most of your customers, do you?”

“Part of the job.”

Boldt said, “Including the guy who used this phone about an hour ago?”

The bartender offered a smug look. Boldt flashed his shield, and the man’s composure wavered. He pulled out a twenty, and then another, and laid them both on the bar.

“Put it away,” the man said, somewhat apologetically. “I came on thirty minutes ago. I have no idea who used the phone an hour ago.”

“Someone we can check with?” Boldt inquired.

“Listen, it’s so damn busy in here between five and seven, there’s no way anyone’s going to be able to help you.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“Okay, listen… ” The bartender stood within inches of the bar and leaned toward Boldt. “Truth is, officer, the hall phone is kinda wired into the house line. It don’t ring there; it rings here. But customers dial out on the hall phone.”

“And the house pockets the money from the pay phone.”

“Something like that. Hey, I’m not the owner.”

“So unless you were in the hall, you wouldn’t know who used the phone.”

“That’s about it.”

The phone rang. The bartender reached for the receiver, but Boldt held him off. “This is for me.” Boldt yanked up the receiver. “Boldt.”

That same synthetic voice said, “Your wife has nice hands. You hang up again, she’s wearing gloves for the next six months, and her little pussy dance is on the evening news.”

“I don’t talk to robots,” Boldt said. Inside, he decided he’d gone too far. He wasn’t sure what had possessed him to hang up the first time, to feign a lack of cooperation, except that it went so against his nature. This was, he decided, the call Liz had been expecting, except that the first step was apparently to collect the coveted software. Boldt had read two department e-mails on the analysis of the LaRossa disk. The first expressed optimism that the password cryptography on the disk could be “cracked.” The second explained in some detail the sophistication of the security protecting the software contained on the disk, and how it was never going to be compromised.

The bartender overheard Boldt’s comment, twisted his face, and walked away to service a customer.

“Forty-five minutes. Your cell number.”

Boldt repeated his cell number into the phone.

“You do this alone, or it all comes back on you and yours. Tomorrow, next week, next month-listen, you’d better keep looking over your shoulder if you bring others in on it, or do anything but what I say.”

“You don’t know me very well,” Boldt said, again wondering why his mouth got ahead of his brain.

The line went dead. Boldt hung up the receiver. The guy was smart, and that worried him.

He called Pahwan Riz, the Special Operations commander, before he even reached the Crown Vic. Hell if he was doing this alone. He could smell a trap a mile away.

Discovering himself the target of a surveillance operation left Boldt with mixed feelings. He couldn’t remember ever having been on the receiving end of such attentions, and he found it off-putting. The arrangements were made hastily, primarily because of the time restrictions imposed by his anonymous caller, but the brilliance of some of these guys never ceased to amaze him, and by the time he bumped the Crown Vic into the restricted parking garage attached to the Public Safety Building, the operation was already well under way.

Suspecting, but not quite willing to believe, that whoever had called him might have civilians paid off within the department-spies-he obeyed Pahwan Riz’s choreography to the letter. The Crown Vic was already equipped with GPS transmission equipment because, like patrol cruisers, it carried a Mobile Data Terminal on the dash-the equivalent of a built-in laptop computer that allowed text to be sent to and from the car. Limousine services and some taxis, parcel delivery and express delivery vans, all carried similar equipment-and all contained the satellite tracking device allowing dispatchers to locate any vehicle at a moment’s notice.

The trick was to get some of this same equipment-a small GPS and a voice-recording device-onto Boldt without him being descended upon by technicians. Riz’s solution was to leave the equipment in a men’s room stall, and to direct Boldt to visit the rest room upon his arrival at SPD, which he did. From the bathroom, now wearing the two devices, he proceeded directly to Property and signed out for the bright red disk that had been in the possession of Tony LaRossa as he’d collapsed from his heart attack. He took the man’s bank ID access card as well, already foreseeing its future use. With Boldt being lieutenant in charge of Crimes Against Persons, there wasn’t anything the Property sergeant was going to deny him. He signed the requisite forms, accepted the plastic bags bearing the chain of possession, all carefully detailed in indelible marker, and returned to the Crown Vic at a slow jog, moving a few uniformed officers out of his way while checking his watch on the fly. Ten minutes in which to reach the exit of I-5 north.

Whoever had planned this for him had timed it to within seconds. He knew immediately that the drop was to be just as perfectly timed, that he would be pushed right to the limit to accommodate the demands.

As it was, he hit the street with the pedal down, built-in grill and window lights pulsing the blinding blue light, clearing traffic.

Eight minutes to go. It would be a miracle, but he just might make it.

Several miles above him, in the cold black void of space, satellites tracked his every turn, and Pahwan Riz-in the steam-cleaning van, with a team of four unmarked vehicles-followed at a distance, never letting Boldt out of his sight.