At that moment, the hissing made sense to him: a Coleman lantern. He leaned forward, peering around the corner of the rotten doorjamb and down a long corridor, several doors to either side. The charcoal gray progressed to an elephant gray and, by the far end of the hallway, a pigeon gray-these were the colors that Sarah would name, and he thought of his children and family as he rounded the corner and stepped into the hallway,
Gaynes close behind. Neither he nor Gaynes wore a vest, and he thought it a foolish oversight. He'd long ago promised Liz and himself to avoid harm's way whenever possible, understanding the importance of keeping their family whole. Susan
Hebringer had drawn him down into the Underground. Had clearer thinking prevailed, he might have sent LaMoia or Heiman or someone else.
The hallway seemed to dim, though so faint was any light that he couldn't tell. Gaynes tapped him on his shoulder, switched on her gel-covered flashlight, and holding it in her left hand, quickly formed a fist around it. Boldt stopped, as the hand signal directed. She touched her ear. For a moment Boldt could hear only the rhythmic pulsing at his temples and the high pitched whine of blood pressure. Then, he understood why: The hissing had stopped. He heard a hinge creak, and this, he thought, was what Gaynes had wanted him to hear.
At the same instant, their two-way radios crackled and screeched-a broken signal of code calls from the patrol cars overhead. Neither Boldt nor Gaynes had thought to turn their volumes down. They might as well have shouted out a warning to whatever, or whoever, lay up ahead.
That door creaked again, followed by the unmistakable sound of a person running.
Boldt, and Gaynes as well, took off, dodging fallen objects, ducking out of the way of hanging pipes, his head a knot of pain, his throat dry. Those promises made to Liz raced to the forefront of his thought-he was a father, a husband, he owed people his safety. But at the same instant, Susan Hebringer was being dragged down the hallway that he now ran, and there was nothing to stop him. He rushed through an open doorway and turned left, throwing his right hand out in front of him to send Gaynes straight into another huge room.
They split apart.
The sound of the person running came from farther away, not closer.
He felt he was in some central hallway shared by the back of what had once been stores. Huge sections of plaster and lathe walls were missing, exposing rooms of all sizes, shelving, overturned furniture, and piles of junk. He made a wrong turn and found himself in a small room, instead of another hallway. He turned around and tried another door, trapped yet again. A maze. Retraced his steps, pushed on a door-a hallway, at last. He charged forward at a run.
"Lieu?" Gaynes, her voice muffled by walls.
"Here!"
"Lost him!"
His radio carried her voice then, as she attempted to alert the patrols up top to keep an eye out. Boldt's radio picked up her signal with ease, but the lack of acknowledgment from above indicated the signal was blocked and had not reached anyone else.
Boldt hurried ahead, making a series of wrong choices, landing in dead ends, in rooms cluttered with dusty junk. The enormity of an entire city block underground registered in him. He'd lost his way entirely, suddenly facing a series of windows, the dirty glass still intact, finding himself looking out onto yet another section of sidewalk. He used the radio, whispering to try not to give away his position. "Gaynes. I'm facing a section of sidewalk. Looking south, I think. Your ten-twenty?"
"Right here, Lieu. Center of the building, I think. A big room. A bar, or drugstore maybe."
"Anything?"
"Nothing."
He waited, straining his ears to hear, well aware the person who had fled could easily still be down here, crouching, hiding, waiting for a chance to slip away.
"I'm going to work west and then north, circling back toward you," he told the radio. "You hold, all eyes."
"Copy."
"Lights on," he said, ensuring they could discern one another from the person they pursued.
"Copy."
Boldt carefully negotiated his way around the perimeter of the enormous underground city block, backtracking and retracing his steps where necessary. He crawled under fallen timbers, stepped through vacant window holes, and eased his way through doorways, alert for rotten beams or other debris raining down onto him unannounced, alert for his suspect to spring up from behind, unexpectedly, and take a swing at him. He found himself in a full sweat, damp and burning up from head to toe, the toxin of fear escaping.
All at once there was more mud, Boldt wondering if he'd gone full circle. He stepped through the goop, reaching a doorway, and scrambled over a hill of metal that had once been a fire escape. His flashlight found Gaynes looking back at him bewildered.
"Gone," she said. "He vanished."
"But who? A homeless person? Susan Hebringer's abductor? Chen's killer?" He tried the walkie-talkie again, to nothing but static. He said, "Maybe they got him up top."
"You can't see five feet with these things." She tore off the flashlight's colored gel. Boldt did the same. They made their way back, Gaynes in the lead.
"That hissing we heard," Boldt said, announcing what they were after.
"Yes," she agreed.
It took them twenty more minutes of false turns and opening doors, of hallways and storage closets and more discarded junk and litter than seemed possible, before Boldt carefully pushed open a door, revealing a cluttered, lived-in room, twelve by fifteen feet. The former storage room had red brick walls and no windows, a mattress with blankets, plastic milk crates containing cardboard boxes of food. Boldt's gloved fingers triggered a battery-powered fluorescent and the room came to life. This hideaway was an investigator's treasure chest.
Its conversion into a living space included a door on cinder blocks that held a camper stove, several white plastic tubs filled with water, and a box of books. Boldt picked up immediately on the cleanliness to the air, the musky stink of the basement barely discernible. Only then did it dawn on him that the light in this room was battery-powered, not Coleman gas, and his eyes drifted slowly behind him as he spun around to see a half dozen four-foot-tall pressurized tanks. Green tanks. Oxygen tanks. One of them with its valve cracked open and hissing.
"Lieu?" Gaynes asked. She knew that perplexed look of his meant he had thought of something she had not.
Boldt said, "Suddenly, the elevated oxygen level in the late Mr. Chen's blood gas makes a hell of a lot more sense." Boldt reached down into one of the milk crates and came up with a New Year's Eve party favor, the kind that uncurls when you blow into it. "I think our Mr. Chen might have spoiled someone's party."
Misplaced Affection
With little or nothing to do without her suspension first being lifted, Matthews made Margaret her top priority once again, unable and unwilling to take the downtime for herself. She knew this obsession with filling her time went beyond accepted limits, knew she had real problems when it came to allowing herself to relax, knew that at some point such obsessions came to a head and stung you, usually when you could least afford it. Most of all she secretly knew that downtime would allow her the opportunity to take stock of herself, to examine her goals and aspirations, to come to grips with the fact that she had none beyond getting through the day. She had no idea what she wanted for herself-a man, a family, a career, time off, independence, a hobby, a cause? If she took time to stop and think of it, she feared the emptiness of her current existence might prove too overwhelming. Currently, she lived to solve other people's problems, whether at Public Safety or the Shelter. Facing her own was nowhere on her radar, and this, in turn, led her back to finding Margaret and doing something to help her.
A call to the Shelter confirmed what she already knew, because even if Margaret had been thinking of staying there, by mid-morning the place was virtually deserted, the girls back on the street. There were any number of haunts where she could look for her: Pioneer Square, the Market, the area in front of the Westlake Center, several of the malls. Sometimes these girls just rode the bus routes, back and forth, sitting in the last row, talking, hours at a time. As pregnant as she was, Margaret wasn't stripping, wasn't hooking, but she might be drugging, and this Matthews wanted to prevent at all costs. The girl had mentioned eating pizza crusts-"I'm eating Italian"-but Matthews couldn't remember a particular pizzeria. She walked a few more blocks until locating a pay phone that actually had the phone book intact. She was flipping through the Yellow Pages under Italian restaurants, hoping to jog her memory, when her cell phone rang. She turned the face of the phone so that she could read it: BLOCKED CALL. A sharp shudder passed through her.