Boldt played on that. “Unless you beat them to it. This is our city, John. Those are our marinas.”
“Exactly! Don’t I know it? Damn right. Our city, god damn it! But the shot! Look at those two pictures. There’s nothing in them but a bunch of masts. Nothing to identify them. It’s like Anderson worked on screwing it up. You know how many boatyards and marinas there are? Lake Union. Lake Washington. The shore. Mercer Island. Kirkland. Medina. Jesus! Vashon. The islands, for Chrissakes. It’s endless.”
“And you want me to find it for you,” Boldt said, knowing and exploiting LaMoia’s needs. Intentionally misusing their friendship. He wanted to crawl into a hole and die.
The comment sobered LaMoia’s hysteria. He looked his former sergeant in the eye and nodded grimly. “You mean I’m using you?” he asked, getting it all wrong. “Yeah, that’s about right. If I have anything to do with this, the existence of Anderson’s photos gets out and I’m butting heads with Flemming, which means I’m butting heads with Hill, which means I’m screwed. Anyone I ask to look into this is going to know it’s task force related. But Intelligence? No one knows what the hell you do up here all day. Everyone’s worried you’re looking up their skirt. And with manpower being what it is-”
“I use the snitches to do the legwork.”
LaMoia acted slightly embarrassed. “That’s what I was thinking. Yeah. A color Xerox. Pass ’em around and see if we can’t kick a location.”
“My snitches don’t exactly work the yachting circuit. They aren’t the deck-shoe set, John.” He couldn’t jump at the offer without raising suspicions. No cop glorified himself with extra work; he or she spent too much time and effort defending turf and protecting positions. Boldt had to dismiss the offer. “You could use a few uniforms.”
“It would leak.”
“It might.” Both knew damn well it would.
“I gave you forty-eight hours with the Spitting Image evidence,” he reminded, playing the trump card Boldt hoped he might use.
“I was doing the legwork. This is a little different,” Boldt countered. It took all his strength not to agree too quickly.
“Seventy-two hours,” LaMoia requested. “Work the photos for three days. After that, I take it to the task force.”
“Forty-eight.” Boldt wanted the evidence for a week or two, and there he was suggesting a shorter period than he was being offered.
“It’ll take you one day just to get the pix out on the street. Right? Once they’re out there, you’re giving me forty-eight, same as I’m giving you.” And then the word LaMoia rarely, if ever, spoke. “Please, Sarge.”
“You’ve changed,” Boldt said, knowing correctly that LaMoia would take it as a backhanded compliment.
“‘You don’t work cases, you work deals,’” LaMoia quoted the man sitting in front of him. “A wise old soldier once told me that.”
“Get out of here,” Boldt said, his fingers sweating on the photographs he held.
As had LaMoia before him, Boldt worked the photocopies with a magnifying glass and a jeweler’s loupe. He pored over the images for the better part of an hour and then, just ready to give it up, he noticed what he had missed in all the other passes. It came under the heading “forest for the trees.”
Of late, he realized, a detective mined his crime scene for evidence that he then turned over to SID for lab tests. Too often, that reliance translated into a dependence on the lab-a belief that the lab had all the answers. In the process, old-fashioned police work suffered.
For an hour, Boldt searched the photos for a readable license plate, a landmark, any unique piece of evidence that might help. He sought out patterns, anything unique.
What he discovered was easily missed. It was not a sign, nor a number or a name. It was much more simple. It was right there in the center of the photo. Right there staring back.
CHAPTER 40
Dr. Ronald Dixon’s home was an impressive three-story Victorian, on the west side of 16th East, near Volunteer Park. Appointed with marble and antiques, Heriz rugs and a Steinway Concert grand, the living room had at its center two couches that faced each other across a low walnut coffee table and were perpendicular to the fireplace, its mantel painted an eggshell enamel white and holding a glass-encased clock whose pendulum issued a steady click, click, click.
Boldt knew the living room well, having spent many hours there exchanging jazz favorites with Dixie, who opened the front door admitting Boldt. Dixie thanked him for coming over.
“You made it sound so urgent,” Boldt said of the request for a lunchtime meeting. Their friendship went back decades, not years. Dixie rarely, if ever, asked favors.
His host motioned Boldt toward the living room. The lieutenant rounded the corner and stopped cold, glancing back at his trusted friend and then into the room again and the people assembled there. A trap! Boldt realized, his first instinct to run. Run and never trust anyone again.
Daphne Matthews stood admiring one of the antiques, a hammered brass lamp and mica lamp shade.
LaMoia also stood, though with his back pressed firmly against the mantel, his bloodshot eyes trained on his mentor. SID’s Bernie Lofgrin was on the couch working a beer. Bobbie Gaynes occupied the end of the piano bench. She straddled it, legs spread, leaning on her hands planted together in front of her. A group that knew each other well, a working family. Boldt did not like the looks, nor the silence. He had been found out! By whom? LaMoia? Daphne?
But one other person appeared to his right, stepping out of the sunroom. Liz said, “This is an intervention.”
It was not Boldt’s life that passed before his eyes, but the image of Sarah on the video clip: the pleading eyes, the frightened voice, “Daddy!” It wasn’t these people to whom she was calling out, but to him, her father. He wanted no part of an intervention, whatever the hell that meant; he wasn’t an alcoholic, he was a cop who wanted his daughter back.
Liz said, “You can’t do this alone, love. No matter how badly you want to, and God knows I love you for it-” She was crying now, “You can’t. We can’t. We made the decision to save her. These are our closest friends. They can help.”
“Liz!” he protested.
“If we’re careful-” Daphne began, immediately interrupted.
“No one asked you!” Boldt shouted, his skin numb and tingling. Liz had killed their child …, “or you, or you,” he said to the others.
“Your wife asked me,” Daphne contradicted in the voice of a friend, not a psychologist.
“You could have told us,” an angry LaMoia delivered. “What’d you think I’d do, rat on you?”
Daphne said, “This isn’t about you, it’s about Sarah-”
“Don’t lecture me on what this is about.” To his wife he complained bitterly, “We talked about this. No one was to know.”
“And no one does,” Dixie pointed out in his resonant baritone. “Only we know, Lou. Only those of us in this room. It isn’t a conspiracy with only one person. You need us.”
LaMoia jumped in. “You want to find her, we’ll find her. You want to screw up the task force, brother we’ll fuck it up but good!” He smiled a patented LaMoia smile. Overconfident to the point of cocky.
Lofgrin said, “We can misplace some evidence if necessary.”
Bobbie Gaynes stood from the piano bench. “Sarge, I got to get back to the Park and Ride surveillance. What you got to know-we’re with you on this. We all love little Sarah. We all love you. So stop being so ungrateful and figure out a way to put us all to work. John, you’ll catch me up?”
“Got you covered.”
Gaynes walked to Boldt, leaned forward on her tiptoes and kissed him on the cheek. She had never done this before and it brought a frog to his throat. “You got your own secret little task force now, Sarge. Take advantage of it.” She left, the large front door thumping shut behind her.