The Body of David Hayes

SEVENTEEN

BOLDT PULLED INTO THE WEDGE of white hash marks separating the northbound lane of I-5 from the NE 45th Street exit ramp leading into the U District, believing whoever was behind this was ingenious for his choice of locations. The highway traffic to his left moved at sixty miles an hour or better, the exit traffic to his right only slightly slower given that it was a multiple-lane ramp. The SPD car following him was forced to drive past, remaining on I-5. By the same token, whoever was behind this could also drive right past, Boldt never the wiser. He thought it more promising that his mystery man was parked with a good view of his position, monitoring him, interpreting the degree to which he was willing to cooperate. If this person wanted him off the highway, he could direct him to exit right. If he wanted him back on the highway, that was possible too.

Boldt waited.

He answered his purring cell phone with a steady voice despite the way he felt inside. Pahwan Riz spoke his rank. “Lieutenant.”

“I’m assuming you lost visual,” Boldt said. “That’s okay, Reece.”

“Affirmative. Give us about three minutes, we’ll have someone break down in the opposite lane.”

“Too obvious.”

“Let me do my job.”

“My terms. That was the agreement.”

“Which is why I’m doing the service of calling you,” Riz explained. A commander, Riz was not used to taking orders.

“You’ll have to do better than a breakdown in the opposing lane, that’s all I’m saying. They’ll spot that in a heartbeat.” His own heart beat somewhat frantically. Boldt longed for a cup of tea. It never failed to settle his nerves.

“We’ve got you on radar,” Riz said, meaning the Global Positioning System. “We’ll stay with that for the moment, circle the wagons, and let you come to us.” Boldt found this acceptable. Riz would establish perimeter surveillance positions and wait for Boldt either to drive past one of his people or to provide the team the color of a car or a description of the individual who showed up to receive the encrypted computer disk.

Boldt’s cell phone beeped in his ear, indicating call waiting-an incoming call. He told Riz to sit tight and answered this second call, placing Riz on hold in the process. The synthesized voice named another location. “I-5 south. The Boeing Access Road exit. Pull into the wedge between the highway and the exit lane and await instructions. You have seven minutes.” The line went dead.

An unreasonably short amount of time. Boldt jerked the wheel right, getting off the exit in order to cross and return in the southbound lanes. Once onto the highway, he’d have to invoke his siren and dashboard bubble flasher if he were to make it on time. He switched the phone call back to Riz. “I’m heading south toward Boeing Field.”

“We’ve got you,” Riz said. Again, Boldt believed he meant they could see him on the GPS system.

“Visual?” Boldt asked.

“Negative. Will have any minute. I’m signing off for now. Hang in there, Lieutenant.” The phone clicked and Riz was gone.

Somewhere, somehow, this man who ran him intended for Boldt to pass the disk or make a drop. But with Riz’s team lurking a short distance away, it seemed unlikely a runner could get very far without becoming a target of the same surveillance. Boldt brought the Crown Vic up to eighty-five miles per hour on his way toward the bridge. Even in light traffic, he’d have to slow somewhat when he reached the narrowing stretch of highway that ran through the city. He wondered how the drop would be engineered, confident in the abilities of Riz’s team.

Boldt understood better than anyone the precarious situation he was in. He had to control Hayes’s software in order to ensure the recovery and transfer of the money, if he were to safeguard his family. He still hadn’t settled on a way to allow Liz to help Svengrad, but no matter what, this software was the key. His inclusion of Special Operations was mandated by the fact that someone wanted him to make that drop in the first place. If Svengrad or Hayes were behind this plan, then why not just have Boldt remove the software from the property room and hand it over to his wife? Why bother with this elaborate and risky scheme? The first answer that came to Boldt was that Svengrad or Hayes had determined a way to get the money out of the bank without Liz’s involvement. He/they needed the software, but not Liz. This didn’t make a lot of sense, since Svengrad had taken an enormous risk by pressuring Boldt for his wife’s involvement. And if not Svengrad or Hayes, then who, and why? Boldt couldn’t make the drop without knowing this, and he couldn’t know this without Special Operations.

The second thought that came to him was this elaborate plan was simply a way for Svengrad to protect Boldt from being seen as cooperating, a way to tangle up the investigation. Handing the software to Liz would signal the endgame, would give investigators a head start on surveillance of every kind. Boldt’s cooperation in that event might be construed as a criminal act. At some point Boldt would answer for that. A shiver ran through him as it occurred to him that Svengrad had wanted to protect him merely because he was a police lieutenant, a Homicide lieutenant at that, and a good cop to have in your pocket. Had this drop been orchestrated merely to make Boldt look less culpable than he really was? This idea hit him hard-that he was now seen as an asset by the Russian mob, a turned cop worth preserving.

He slowed and stopped the car in the triangle of paint that separated the highway from the exit ramp. He wiped his brow with a Starbucks napkin. Raindrops on the windshield grew in size. Boldt switched on the wipers. A semi-truck rolled by, the concussion of its wake rocking Boldt’s car. He pulled ahead a few feet and angled the car slightly, pointing in toward the highway traffic.

His mobile phone rang. The caller-ID read OUT OF AREA. No number to trace. He answered the call, but the reception made it impossible to hear.

“Wait!” he shouted into the phone, afraid he might miss an instruction, his eyes fixed on the flickering small black bars indicating reception. He hurried out of the car, into the rain, running up a slight embankment, his head aimed up, looking hopefully at the phone’s signal indicator as it moved from one bar to two and then three. He clamped it to his ear and said, “Is this any better?”

“Don’t fuck with me,” the eerie electronic voice warned.

“I’m not,” Boldt shouted.

“Webster’s,” the voice said. “It’s a bar just south of northeast Forty-fifth on Brooklyn.”

“I’ll find it.”

“Leave your phone on. And come alone.” The line died.

Boldt was still looking up into the wet night sky, eyes searching for a cell tower’s blinking red light when something winked at him through the rain. Binoculars?

Boldt moved his head, trying to force that wink to appear a second time. And there it was! Another wink of light from a spot slightly above the overpass. Some spy looking down, perched in a tree beyond? he wondered. But then he saw it again. Not a person at all. A camera lens mounted high atop an aluminum light post. A traffic cam.

He was being watched, but from a distance. Cell phone in hand, he wanted badly to make a call but thought better of it, not knowing if in the rain and the dark that camera could see him or not, but not wanting to test it. He headed back to the car at a run, slipping once on the wet grass, smearing his knee down into the muddy incline, and jumping back up. He hurried toward the car realizing the traffic camera, if accessible from the Internet, which he was guessing would prove to be the case, allowed those running him to look for ground surveillance while at the same time confirming Boldt did exactly as he was told. Big Brother, and in the hands of the wrong people.

Back in the car, yanking the wheel to make the exit ramp so he could reverse directions and return to the very exit where he’d been parked only ten minutes earlier, Boldt pulled the phone to his ear to report his situation. But the idea that the person on the other end of these calls might not be Svengrad or Hayes stayed with him, and for a moment he resisted connecting with Riz. The idea of a third party, an unknown, instilled fear. On some level, Boldt believed he could fight the enemies he could see-but was he putting the kids or Liz even further at risk if this proved to be an unknown? He took a moment to think.

As he drove, he typed the bar’s name into the Mobile Data Terminal to confirm its existence. After a long hesitation the computer’s tiny screen returned:

DO YOU MEAN: “Web-Stirs, 1100 NE 45th Street”??? (Y)es (N)o?

Boldt pushed Y, and the terminal offered to compute the quickest course, but Boldt declined, well aware that I-5 was the fastest way there.

Web-Stirs, he realized, was an Internet bar, and now he raced to conclusions. Weighing risks, he nonetheless called Pahwan Riz and caught him up to date on the traffic camera and his next destination being an Internet café. Before Boldt was off the phone Riz had confirmed that the traffic camera he’d seen was one of about fifty viewable live on the state’s highway website. Whoever had arranged this was able to watch Boldt move place to place in the comfort of his living room. It made him feel all the more like a pawn and brought his blood pressure considerably higher.

“I’m not liking this,” Riz said. “An Internet café. Get it?”

Boldt was no techno-wizard unless it related to the crime lab, an area where few could outdo him. “No.”

“Ingenious.”

“How so?”

“David Hayes? Web-Stirs an Internet café? That means a small office network hub, a router. Simple stuff. For a guy who could probably hack the Pentagon, kid’s stuff.”

“He’ll hack the computer network at the bar,” Boldt said, feeling his way through this.

“He has long since hacked the network. He’s established drive sharing on one or more of the machines. This guy is good,” Riz said with a distant respect. “What he’s going to do is direct you to a particular machine. You’ll insert the disk, and the rest will be history, he’ll take it from there. He’ll enter the correct password that we could never determine, copy the disk, reformat it, destroying all its contents. Brilliant.”

“Can we stop praising him and start figuring out some way to prevent this?”

“No,” Riz answered. “Not unless you simply refuse to show up.”

“That’s not an option.”

“I’m aware of that.”

“He’s got us?” Boldt asked.

“He’s got us,” Riz confirmed. “You’re about to turn over the software to him.”

The Crown Vic screamed over the bridge through the pouring rain, Boldt bothered not only by what he heard, but by something else, something intangible, indefinable, like a moving shadow. Highways? he wondered. Cars? Websites? Something in the back of his mind that he couldn’t quite pull forward.

Riz, on the other hand, proved prescient, and for the first time a tingle of suspicion entered Boldt’s thought that a police insider like Riz could mastermind all of this from behind the scenes, no one ever the wiser. Make it all seem like the work of someone else while this person manipulated events for his own personal wealth.

This thought churning inside him, Boldt parked and walked a wet block to Web-Stirs, a glass and tile, ultra hip, ultra modern interior with colorful graphics and odd shapes hanging from the ceiling that Boldt assumed were meant to be art. A twenty-something bartender with slicked-back hair and black-framed nerd eyeglasses served food-coloring-hued mixed drinks in exotic plastic stemware. James Bond on a budget. The beer looked like a dark amber. The crowd was a surprising mix of women and men-Boldt had expected all men for no reason other than his own prejudices. The women showed their navels above their pants’ waists, as provocative as the waitresses, one of whose buttocks cleavage showed when she bent to retrieve a fallen napkin.

His phone rang again and, for a second or two, Boldt debated what Riz had said, debated not answering it, or walking out of the bar altogether. But it was not to be. He answered the call, stuck the phone to his ear, and was dictated a simple instruction. “Machine in the corner, when it comes open. Insert the disk into the drive bay and walk away.”

An Asian girl occupied the machine at the moment. Boldt wondered if the caller knew that, and what it meant if he did. Boldt scanned the room’s ceiling for security cameras and spotted two in opposite corners, wondering if a hacker could gain access to these as well. His world felt smaller and more claustrophobic everywhere he went, people watching. The girl looked over her shoulder at him and smiled, and he wondered if she were a plant or an innocent. Then he wondered if there were any innocents anywhere, taken in again by the sexual, casual dress of these kids-from his angle it was nearly impossible not to look directly down the shirt of this Asian girl. He turned and walked toward the bar, keeping a fuzzy eye on her in the smoked-glass mirror behind the bar.

“Get you something?” the bartender asked.

“Hot tea to go?”

“Two doors down.” The owner was not stupid enough to go up against the coffeehouses.

“Something soft,” Boldt said.

The guy ran off a list of pop drinks and bubbling waters. Boldt requested a ginger ale. The Asian girl spun out of the chair. Impossibly tight pants wrapped around a firm body. She headed in Boldt’s direction. He felt ancient in this company. He wondered if she were a messenger, a spy, a twenty-something prostitute. She walked right at him, her young nipples showing darkly through the T-shirt, the not-so-gentle sway of her hips emphasized by the low cut of the corduroy pants, the straight-cut black bangs so classic and timeless.

“Lieutenant Boldt?” she asked.

He felt a spike of heat, deciding someone had sent her, perhaps believing Boldt in need of a computer coach. He doubted immediately they’d ever trace the twenty or fifty he believed he’d find in her pocket to a suspect. At every turn the person behind this proved himself clever, and that pointed increasingly away from Svengrad and toward Hayes in Boldt’s mind. No way he had died in that cabin horror.

She said, “I’m Ming Lee, a junior at the U. Your lecture series: The application of the physical sciences to the detection of crime… I made criminalistics my major.”

Boldt felt catapulted into another realm. This bursting package of primal youth, a person he felt sure connected to the case, nothing but a secret admirer.

“What are you doing at Web’s?” she inquired. Then she blushed, glanced around, and said in a forced whisper that proved just as loud as her normal voice, “Are you undercover or something? Oh, my God! How totally cool is that?” She stepped closer and again he looked away, for as short as she was, his aerial view left little to the imagination. “Did I just blow this, or what?”

“Nothing so dramatic as that,” Boldt lied. “I live near here and our home computer went down. That’s all. Missing some e-mail.”

“You gonna have a drink?” she asked, and he expected that the next thing out of her mouth was going to be her coming on to him and he didn’t know what to make of that. So-called badgers came in every age, every ethnicity, but usually went for the young, hard, and handsome men in uniform.

“Nonalcoholic,” he said. “I’m on duty.” Immediately regretting the pat response.

“I thought you said your home computer went down… ” Then she blushed again. “Oh, my God,” she repeated, covering her mouth. “I’m so sorry.” Now more convinced than ever she’d interrupted an undercover op. “Can I sit with you?”

“I think not,” Boldt said.

“I won’t say a word.”

“Better not,” Boldt said. “We can discuss this at the next lecture.”

“After the next lecture?” she pressed, and there was no mistaking that look in any woman’s eyes, even a woman this young. He felt his face flush and his groin stir.

“Another time,” he said. “Good to meet you, Ming.” He stepped past her, leaving a whole other world behind him and wondering why a collision like this would present itself just now. Other than during his occasional teasing with Matthews, no woman had openly flirted with him in at least a decade, certainly not a child. The repartee with Matthews had ground to a halt once she’d attached herself to LaMoia. The implied interest of this girl nearly derailed his thought long enough for him to forget himself. But he moved to the computer terminal in the corner, sat down on the warm stool, reminded once again of his eager student, and leaned to slip the disk into the machine.

Within seconds the disk drive began to whir. With it, in Boldt’s mind, a resurrection. Yes, David Hayes was very much alive.

Driving home twenty minutes later, the disk coming out of the machine blank, as Riz had anticipated, and Boldt momentarily blank along with it, Boldt crossed I- 5 in the Crown Vic, catching sight of the painted triangle where he’d been pulled over and waiting for a call only an hour before. He yanked the wheel, hit the emergency flashers, and pulled over in traffic on westbound NE 45th.

“Command,” Riz answered the phone.

“The Forty-fifth Street exit off I-5 north,” Boldt said, without further introduction. “Is there a traffic cam that watches that location as well?” As Riz checked, Boldt ended the call and crossed the busy street and peered over a low rail at the interchange in question, his mind whirring. He had briefly held suspicions that Riz, or another SPD officer, was involved in this. It was certainly not beyond the realm of Yasmani Svengrad to “turn” a cop through extortion or threat, or to entice a cop with the smell of that kind of big money. Now, watching the highway traffic stream past, Boldt’s phone rang and it was Riz.

“Affirmative,” Riz said. “They had you in plain sight for both stops.”

They discussed the possibility that Hayes might have been able to access Web-Stir’s video security cameras, and Riz confirmed this possibility, “depending on the firmware they’re using.”

Working on the notion that the obvious is always the solution to a certain level of crime, and rarely the solution to sophisticated crime, Boldt placed a call to his department’s traffic division. He felt like a spider carefully laying out his web while knowing all along his predatory victory amounted to little more than haphazard chance. The fly had to be in the room for the web to be effective.

Boldt requested any and all reports of breakdowns or accidents for late afternoon into the early evening hours of Wednesday on highway 520-the day Hayes had apparently been tortured-and Foreman had allegedly been stuck in traffic on state highway 520. A few minutes later he received the report. He disconnected the call and hurried back to the Crown Vic.

His phone purred as he climbed back inside behind the wheel.

“It’s me.” Liz.

“Hey.”

“Everything okay?”

“In a manner of speaking. He… or someone else, has the software now. He did it smart, and we’re not going to trace it.”

“He?”

“We believe it’s Hayes. There’s only one thing left they need now.”

“Access,” she said. Her.

“Yes.”

“That’s why I’m calling,” she said. She detailed Foreman’s visit, leaving out nothing, including the Palm Pilot. “They made it look like torture and then they hid him. Danny’s convinced they can bring in whoever’s money it is, and then that’s that. He suspected I’d tell you, but needs it kept confidential. Says Geiser will deny knowledge of any of it.”

“SID found tooth chips, an excessive amount of blood, and pieces of two fingernails at that crime scene,” Boldt told her. “That doesn’t fit with what you’re telling me.”

“They wanted it to look right?”

“Maybe,” Boldt allowed. Foreman and Geiser would both know the details of the other tortures. It suddenly explained to Boldt why he’d felt so uneasy about the Hayes crime scene-the lack of cigarette ash and shoeprints among the missing pieces.

“The thing is,” Liz said, “if I am involved, if I do make this wire transfer for someone, and I send the money to an account Danny specifies, where’s that leave us if Danny doesn’t catch Svengrad? The tape? The kids? You said these people are not to be toyed with.”

“That’s right,” Boldt said, his head throbbing as he tried to set this straight in his thought. Once the tape went public, their lives-quite possibly their children’s lives-would never be the same.

“I’ll think of something.”

“Danny was off, Lou. Wasn’t himself.”

“Pressuring you couldn’t have been easy. It was right of you to tell me.” Boldt figured Geiser had put him up to it. Paul Geiser was pulling the strings now. “Thank you for that.”

“You don’t sound convinced.”

“You’re going to get the call,” he said. “We have to prepare for that.”

“There’s not much to prepare for. I wait and see what it is they ask me to do.”

“There’s a call I need you to make,” Boldt said. “It’ll have to be from your cell phone.”

“What’s going on, Lou?”

“Not now,” he said, imagining his home line tapped. “Call me back from your cell phone.” He took a moment to sign off politely and cradled the mobile phone in a cup holder.

He no longer trusted his own people.

There had been a time when rousting LaMoia, morning, noon, or night, would have been easy. Here was a cop who seemed to approach the job, each day, with youthful enthusiasm. The tougher the work, the better. The more risky, the better. But home life had changed all that, and Boldt resented Daphne Matthews taking that part of LaMoia from the job. Now LaMoia wanted to be home with Daphne and Margaret, a toddler who seemed destined to be swallowed by the state’s child protection laws despite the loving care she was receiving from Matthews, who’d been assigned temporary guardianship. Only a state government could consider over fourteen months of daily care “temporary.” But LaMoia felt the pressure, along with Matthews, of the child possibly being taken away, and the result was a man who never wanted to leave his loft condominium.

Boldt finally laid out his suspicions to LaMoia in a desperate act he’d hoped to avoid. It wasn’t his way to voice those suspicions until he had more to go on than hunches. But none of this was going “his way,” and so he resorted to outright manipulation, knowing LaMoia wouldn’t be able to resist.

“Two visits in the same day. To what do I owe the pleasure?” Dressed in blue jeans and a plaid flannel shirt, Paul Geiser looked nothing like the attorney who occupied the small office in the Justice Building. He’d become so predictable in his gray suits, white shirts, and conservative ties, that this alter ego at the front door surprised Boldt. Geiser looked at them over a pair of dime-store reading glasses perched on the end of his nose.

He admitted Boldt and LaMoia with no reference to the late evening hour, no questions on why the surprise visit. “Beer? Coffee? Tea for you, Lieutenant?” He motioned for them to follow him when they failed to answer. Geiser might have lost the suit but not the swagger of confidence that epitomized prosecuting attorneys.

The room smelled of airplane glue, a potent odor that took Boldt back to his youth. “Models?”

“Close,” Geiser said, impressed that Boldt had picked this up at such a distance.

The trio passed through another door and into a leather-and-mahogany paneled library that belonged in a faux English manor, not in this clapboard two-story with aluminum windows. The built-in stacks ran floor to ceiling, a trick chair unfolded into a small ladder in the far corner. But all of it looked purchased from a catalog instead of inherited. It was a would-be world in the heart of middle-class suburbia.

A dark leather globe stood in a stand next to the reproduction desk. Newsprint had been laid down to cover the desk, atop which a green glass bottle rested on its side. The first pieces of a ship’s hull could be seen inside it. A set of long tweezers lay at rest, accompanied by a magnifying glass, spools of thread, a small pile of dark wood the size of toothpicks, a razor knife, and a stack of wood-sticked cotton swabs.

“Who is she?” Boldt asked, easing into an uncomfortable leather captain’s chair facing the desk. LaMoia fit himself into the other, looking all around.

“The Francis and Elizabeth. Seventeen forty-two, Rotterdam and Deal to Philadelphia.”

“Impressive,” LaMoia said, unconvincingly.

Geiser picked up the magnifying glass and studied the beginnings of the ship inside the bottle, then set it down and addressed his visitors. “I apologize for continuing this, but I can’t stop in the middle. I have glue drying.” He scooted the reading glasses back up his nose, picked up a pair of forceps, and displaying impossibly steady hands, delivered a structural element to the side of the tiny ship’s hull.

“Our glue’s drying too, Paul. And we can’t stop in the middle either.”

“So talk,” Geiser said, never taking his eyes off the model.

Questioning a DPA about his personal involvement on a case was dangerous ground and Boldt knew it.

“We need to know where he’s being kept.”

“Who?” Eyes on the model.

“We need to know now,” Boldt said. “We can’t do the dance. Not tonight.”

“How can we even dance if you won’t share the music? I don’t know what you’re talking about, Lieutenant.”

There was no forcing the man, so Boldt thought he might try to break him down a piece at a time. This had not been entirely unexpected. LaMoia was in attendance primarily as a witness. It occurred to Boldt that Geiser had figured that out already, and if so, he was already on notice that Boldt’s visit was formal.

“What did you leave out about the proposed meet with Hayes?”

“I told you: It failed to materialize,” Geiser said. “Am I supposed to waste your time?”

A legitimate reply, but not to Boldt’s satisfaction. “You said something came up.”

LaMoia said, “You didn’t even watch the bridge? Like from a distance, or a building, or something?”

“I did go to the bridge, in fact. I parked where I was told to park. But when Foreman informed me he was stuck in traffic, I got the hell out of there.”

Boldt asked, “Do you happen to remember if Danny told you where he was when he let you know he wasn’t going to make it?”

“You want me to provide an alibi for Danny Foreman?” Incredulous, Geiser carefully wiped the tips of the forceps with a cotton ball and solvent. He placed them down and looked up at Boldt for the first time. “Or perhaps you want an alibi for me as well, eh, Lieutenant?”

Boldt felt himself flush with heat. He told Geiser what the man knew already. “SID is processing the cabin.”

“Good for them.” Geiser went back to his model.

Boldt repeated, “Did Foreman mention where he was when he was stuck in traffic?”

“He was on highway five-twenty, I think. Construction backup. Rush hour. A breakdown in the opposing lane. Same old, same old.”

This roughly matched what Boldt had been told. In another witness Boldt would have questioned the degree of accuracy, the level of detail, but attorneys guarded their facts. “The Pine Street overpass? Your choice, or the voice that called you?”

Geiser hesitated, either to attend to his model, or because he was considering how to answer, and this bothered Boldt. The man bothered Boldt. The resolute calm.

“Are you laying traps for me, Lieutenant? Do you not trust me?”

That didn’t answer the question, but for Boldt to press a DPA, treating him like a suspect, would be a mistake.

Geiser sat up and pushed back from the desk admiring his handiwork, the model still a long way from looking like much. “Listen, can’t you people check this kind of thing?” Looking between the two cops, he said, “I’m sure Foreman mentioned construction and something about a car in the breakdown lane. Somebody’ll have that, right?”

Foreman had mentioned traffic problems to Boldt as well, and Boldt had already made the call, but Geiser didn’t need to know that. Boldt stuck his neck out as far as he dared. “An attorney and an investigator… working together… could make a whole hell of a lot of trouble if they wanted.”

“One hell of a team,” LaMoia said.

“Now wait just a goddamned minute,” Geiser said, not taking any time to catch on to the suggestion.

LaMoia said, “They could sequester a state witness for instance.”

Boldt added, “Covering their tracks by leaving a bloody crime scene behind but with the body missing.”

Geiser’s narrowing eyes tracked back and forth between the two. “Give me a break. Do you have any idea of the hoops we’d have to jump through to pull that off? Do you honestly believe the U.S. Attorney’s Office or my own office would condone misleading an investigation in order to sequester a witness?” He could see on the men’s faces he wasn’t gaining ground. “We start down that road and when would we ever mend that fence? Huh? You tell me. SPD would never cooperate with our office again. Not ever. And who could blame you? Listen, I’m not saying we might not try something like that. It’s pretty ingenious, you ask me. Damn good ruse. But it would be in concert with you guys-someone in your department would catch wind of it well before it ever went down. You’ve got to see that, right?”

It made sense to Boldt, but he was loath to admit it. Horrified even to think that his captain, Sheila Hill, or some other gold badge would cut a deal with the attorneys and leave him in the wind. But his wife was involved, and that might account for any number of things. A sense of near panic filled him. Was his own department running him around in circles while they had plans of their own?

He found himself believing Geiser, and it bothered him. He said, “I need to know if something like that is in play.”

“I imagine you do.”

“Do you believe Danny Foreman was stuck in traffic at the time he called you?”

“Well, now we’re getting to the heart of it, aren’t we, Lieutenant? The hell of it is, there’s no way I can know that, is there?”

“Would you know if Hayes had cut a deal for protection?”

“I should. It should go through my office. Absolutely.”

“But it wouldn’t have to.”

“It could just as easily go through the U.S. Attorney. Maybe more likely, you think about it. The USAO can negotiate with Treasury for witness protection. I can’t offer that.”

“Danny Foreman told my wife that you and he had Hayes under protection and that you’d deny it ’til hell freezes over.”

“Well, he’s right on one account, isn’t he?” Geiser said. He scooted his chair up to the desk again and met eyes with Boldt. “You’d better move before your glue dries, gentlemen. You can find your way out.”

Paul Geiser was in the middle of a tricky bit of business on his model when his kitchen doorbell rang only minutes after Boldt’s departure. Angry that Boldt would play the “oh, I forgot something” technique on a seasoned attorney, Geiser hurried through the house to the kitchen’s back door, ready to give Boldt a mouthful. His glue was indeed drying. He yanked open the door, already mid-sentence. “This is the oldest game in the book-” but cut himself off, not recognizing the two men in the suits who faced him. FBI, by the look of them. Treasury, he thought, reminded again of the discussion of witness protection. Boldt had been followed, or the house had been watched. Fucking feds were full of such tricks.

Seeing two strangers at his back door was jarring; he had expected Boldt and LaMoia. In those few seconds it took his facile mind to clear the slate and begin again, one of the two stepped through the door and hit him with two open palms squarely in the center of his chest. Not federal agents after all. The impact not only threw him across the kitchen like a puppet, it froze his lungs and vocal cords in a nerve-deadening spasm.

One of them spoke to the other, his words clouded by an unfamiliar accent. Only then did he fully register what was going on. Only then did his thought finally catch up to real time, the specter of Boldt and LaMoia fading like the orb left behind by a camera’s flash.

Thugs, goons, a dozen different names. Geiser called them “apes” around the office. One was dropping the blinds while the other was shoving a damp and smelly kitchen rag down Geiser’s throat, pulling him by the hair and standing him up while wrestling his arms behind him. If his feeling had returned sooner, he might have fought them both, given his training.

The interrogation was conducted by mobile phone so that Geiser never saw his questioner-a walkie-talkie feature that allowed use of a speakerphone so that it didn’t need to be held to Geiser’s ear, and so the two men could follow instructions where necessary as well. The advantages of modern technology. His back ached from the way they’d bound his torso to the chair, sitting up so perfectly straight, hands out in front of him, also taped to the arms of the chair. They’d moved him into the basement by simply throwing him down the stairs, part intimidation, partly a way to keep him physically stunned. They knew their work well.

When he answered questions incorrectly, the big one shoved the musty kitchen rag back into his mouth as the smaller guy pulled a Leatherman out of a belt case and worked the polished metal multi-tool device into a pair of pliers.

“Please… no,” Geiser gagged, tape wrapped around his head holding the rag in his mouth. His words came out as only deep grunts, nearly indistinguishable, except in volume, from the cries of pain that followed.

“Where is he?” the voice asked over the phone’s thin speaker.

Geiser shook his head. He had no idea.

“Nyet,” the ape said for the sake of the interrogator, which caused Geiser to loosen his bowels.

The voice on the other end of the phone wanted answers he didn’t have. He understood the frustration of such a position from his years of working as a trial attorney. There were times he’d wanted to use these same methods on some of his unforthcoming witnesses. Wild with desperation-that ape stepping closer, the pliers extended like a prosthesis designed with only one purpose in mind-Paul Geiser understood that it promised to be a long night.