"Any suggestions?" Boldt asked. He'd been up all night with Dixie at the bone dig.
He could hardly keep a thought straight in his head.
Lamoia said, "Like you said, a task force would sure help. We could pull guys from County Police; the FBI boys would be able to help out maybe. We've got to have more manpower."
"And womanpower," Daphne corrected. "I said I'll try," Boldt snapped irritably. "Sorry," he apologized.
Lamoia drained half the Coke. Daphne wrote herself a note.
She said, "I'll do what I can to narrow down the vet list. Maybe Maria can help me out."
Lamoia offered tentatively, "I'm overseeing the Maybeck surveillance, but J.C.'s got it pretty well handled. I'll still be putting in a lot of office time. I'm available."
It was times like this, when,everyone reached deep and suddenly rallied around each other in the crunch, that Boldt remembered what it was like to be a team, what he had missed about this job. just yesterday he had wondered why he had come back; now he wondered why he had ever left. God, was he tired.
He consulted his list again and said to Lamoia, "There's more."
"Always is."
"Now that we've located these bones, I want a follow-up.
Granted, anybody and their brother with a four-wheel-drive has access to that area of the Tolt River, but I want to search county records for any landowners out there. Forestry anything we can think of. We cross-check anything we get both with the AMA's list of surgeons and with the list of vets that you put' together," he said to Daphne. "Sometimes people bury bodies a million miles from home-just as often, in their own backyard. Let's check that out." "I'm on it," Lamoia said, writing it down, trying his best to mask his discouragement. "I know that it's a long shot and a hell of a lot of work," Boldt admitted. He also knew that Lamoia didn't like this kind of paper research; he preferred street work. "But these bones are part of this thing. Dixie proved that with the tool markings. We can't let this slide." He encouraged, "If we go to task force status, we may be able to wrestle loose a chopper to do an aerial search of the Tolt region. Maybe that would speed it up."
Daphne suggested, "U.S. Geological might have satellite maps of the area. We could look for structures, identify locations, and check county records. Kind of work it backwards. Our friends at the Army Corps might be able to help us with the maps." "I'll call them," Boldt said, making a note. "What else?"
Watson entered and took a seat in a chair over by Daphne. His glasses were filthy. He needed new blades in his electric razor his face looked like an old weed patch. He adjusted his glasses and said, "I won't bore you with the details."
"Good," Lamoia said, intimidating the man.
Watson looked a nervous wreck. His domain was wires and cathoderay tubes. He didn't take to a meeting like this.
Daphne advised him, "Don't worry about John. He has a testosterone problem."
"To every problem, a solution," Lamoia chimed in, trying to stare her down. "Not in your wildest fantasies." She stared back. "Watson?" Boldt asked. When people came under too much stress, it found strange ways of manifesting itself. "That's not my name, you know," he complained. "With a name like Clarence, you should be grateful, " Lamoia advised him. "The database?" Boldt reminded. "The laptop. Did you print up the database for us?"
He handed Boldt a sheet of paper. The database looked like a spreadsheet, a grid of rows and columns. There were seven columns and had they been titled across the top, which they were not, Boldt guessed they might have been labeled, DATE, NAME, FILE NUMBER, ADDRESS, PHONE NUMBER, BLOODTYPE, (?). The rows were created by the -names of the donors, listed alphabetically.
"The minute we had this list, we faxed it down to Bloodlines for comparison. According to them, what distinguishes ours from theirs-in terms of layout-is the addition of a new column-the last column over-which contains as yet unexplained four-digit numbers. This column is unique to this laptop database; that is, there is no such column in the Bloodlines database. The other distinguishing feature is that the date column-far left has also been modified so that only a small percentage of the records now contain a date. They should all be dated. "It is sorted alphabetically by the donor's name," he continued. "What's interesting is that if a name has a date, it also has an entry in this new column. There are twenty-eight such dated fields."
"Twenty-eight?" Boldt asked, flipping forward. "It's the donor list," Daphne speculated. A silence hung over the room. Daphne broke it. "Is Sharon on there?"
"Twenty-eight donors," Boldt repeated, looking ahead on the list. How many dead? How many victims of electroshock? He spotted the name. "She's on here," he confirmed.
Daphne went a sickly pale and excused herself from the room.
Boldt fought his stomach. Lamoia killed the Coke. Watson toyed with his glasses nervously. Boldt waited for Daphne's return. She didn't look much better.
He ran down the column of names, calling out: "Blumenthal, Chapman, Shaffer, Sherman, Walker: They're all here." He felt it as both a nauseating moment of reality and a major moment of triumph the extra care they had taken with Maybeck had proved worth it.
He noticed for the first time that the date alongside Sharon Shaffer's name was not a date in the past, but was for two days from now: Friday, February 10. "Lou?" Did it show that easily? Or was it her? She always seemed to know his thoughts.
in less than forty-eight hours, Sharon Shaffer would be cut open, According to Dr. Light Horse, it was likely to be a major organ.
There would be no time to organize a task force, no time to sort through a list of three-hundred-seventy veterinarians. They would have to force every lead they had. Every suspect. Sharon Shaffer's life had a burning fuse attached to it now. Look for the good, he reminded himself-they were too tired to take a setback like this. "Accentuate the Positive"-it was one of those songs occasionally requested in a piano bar. He missed The Big joke; he wondered how Bear was doing with the IRS. "She's alive," he said. "Sharon Shaffer's alive."
"Lou?" she asked again, sensing something wrong. He slid the printout over to her, pointing to the date. He watched as her eyes glassed up.
A confused Lamoia asked, "But that's good, right?" Daphne slid the sheet to him, and he too fell silent. "What did I miss?" Watson asked.
Boldt inquired, "What do these four-digit numbers mean?"
"I can tell you what we ruled out," Watson explained. "We know it's not phone numbers. Not social security numbers. Not zip codes."
"But what is it?" Boldt asked angrily. "What are they?" Watson leaned away from him sheepishly.
The coffee room's phone rang. Boldt answered it. He listened.
He said to the receiver, "Can't you just tell me?" He paused.
"I'm on my way." He hung up. "What's up?" Daphne asked.
"Dixie's got something."
Boldt turned the car into the back of the Harbor View Medical Center and started hunting for a parking place. Five minutes later, two blocks away, he found one across from the Lucky Day Grocery.
He climbed out of the car. A student cycled past him on a mountain bike. The tires splashed street water onto Boldt's shoes and onto a section of newspaper that was stuck to the pavement. A display ad for an American Airlines special to Hawaii looked up at him. This meant something. He studied it more closely. It was the airplane in particular. And then it occurred to him. He unlocked the car, so nervous with the keys that he dropped them. When he finally got inside, he shoved the key into the ignition, turned it to battery power, and punched in the cellular's security code.