She shed the robe, slipped into the foaming tub, and nearly squealed with delight it felt so damned good. A moment later, she climbed back out, ignored the robe, and sneaked into and across the suite's living room where she snatched a beer from the minibar. She returned to the tub a conquering hero.
Twenty hedonistic minutes later, Melissa Dunkin dried herself off with a towel the size of a rug, slipped back into the robe, and headed straight for bed. Do not pass Go. The covers drawn, she shed the robe and lay back into the crisp sheets, naked, glowing, the bath's heat slowly seeping out of her flushed skin. She zapped the TV's sound and dozed, as relaxed as she'd been in ages. If that dinner hadn't been on her Palm Pilot, she'd have let herself sleep until morning.
She would never have accused herself of woman's intuition. She left that for the touchy-fee lies the Birkenstock set who frequented the whole-food stores and took Chinese supplements they couldn't pronounce. Melissa Dunkin considered herself pedantic but effective and efficient as a businesswoman, adequate as a mother, accomplished as a lover. She pulled the sheet up over her chest as she cooled, luxuriating in the serenity of a self induced stupor.
It was at that moment she saw the man's reflection in the bathroom mirror, which, at its present angle was trained with a view out the bedroom window. He glowed red, then suddenly green as a traffic light changed. He held something to his face.
Binoculars.
Aimed into her window.
At her.
Naked, until only seconds before.
Oh, my God!
She coiled into a fetal ball, stretching for the phone while clinging to the sheet that hid her from him. She snagged the handset and ended up dragging the phone by its cord across her oversized pillow. She was dreadfully cold all of a sudden, her skin coursed with gooseflesh, her teeth actually chattering. The talking head on the TV looked out at her, so calm and collected. The collision of fear and dread inside her left her nauseated.
She wasn't about to call some minimum-wage hotel receptionist.
Not Melissa Dunkin. She dialed 9 for an outside line and punched in 9-1-1.
Catch, As Catch Can
The ringing phone demanded to be answered, but John LaMoia hesitated. In Crimes Against Persons the telephone was its own kind of crap shoot its own lottery. The detective that answered a call automatically accepted whatever case presented itself, sometimes a murder worthy of his time, but mostly domestics. Beatings with baseball bats, stabbings with kitchen knives, gunshot wounds of every variety-it was enough to keep a man like LaMoia single. Enough for him to give it time to let someone else catch this one.
He'd had one bit of good news, and he felt reluctant to spoil it with some worthless case that would demand his time: A truck driver had read a story about Mary-Ann Walker and had called in that he'd seen a car parked on the bridge right before midnight.
He hadn't gotten a good look at the driver, but LaMoia had put a detective on a telephone follow-up (the trucker was currently on a run to Boise) to try to get a decent description of events. When the trucker returned to town, they would follow up yet again.
His office cubicle was personalized with a Sports Illustrated swimsuit calendar, an audaciously pink rabbit's foot hanging from a thumbtack, a collection of classified newspaper ads, each offering a Chevy Camaro, and a Life in Hell comic-strip frame. His home, eight to twelve hours a day, or night, or holiday. Never mind the razzing he took for the pressed blue jeans, the ostrich cowboy boots, the deerskin jacket. He, and only one other CAP detective, carried a sergeant's shield. If he didn't want to answer a cold call, then he wouldn't.
Finally he picked up the phone-duty overcoming reason.
"LaMoia."
"Is this a detective? Am I speaking with a detective? I'd like to report a Peeping Tom."
He immediately had her in his mind as white, thirties, well educated. The caller-ID helped. The Market Inn catered to a certain set, a set that could make trouble for a detective.
He sat up in his chair and grabbed for a pen. Any homicide detective worth his salt would have paid attention to this call. Susan Hebringer, one of the two women missing from downtown, had reported a peeper twenty-four hours prior to her going missing. An alarm sounded in LaMoia's brain-he'd caught a good call.
"Sergeant, ma'am. Crimes Against Persons. It's my squad."
She whispered into the receiver. "He's ... right... across ... the ... street. Right now. I can see him over there."
"Let's stay calm, okay?" He checked the clock and wrote down the time: 7:38 P.M. "I'm assuming you're in the Market Inn. What floor?"
"Five."
"Do you happen to know what direction you're facing?"
"No."
"The water? Do you have a water view?" LaMoia spun around to face the map of the city and the clearance board above it that tracked which cases remained active. Hebringer and Rando/fwere up there in red marker with Boldt's name in the Lead column. They'd both been up there way too long.
"The living room. If I'm facing the water, this guy's to my right."
"North. Okay. Fifth floor. And you are currently where?"
"In bed."
"Alone?"
"Yes, alone." Indignant. Afraid.
"Clothed, or unclothed?"
"Not clothed, no. There's a robe on the floor."
"I'd rather you not move, if he's still there."
"He has binoculars, I think."
LaMoia's pulse pounded at his ears. A peeper with binoculars.
Susan Hebringer.
"I'm going to ask you to sit tight. I'm going to take your room number and call you back on my cell phone. I'm maybe five minutes away, max. I'll have patrol cars in the area in less than that. The key here is not to give this guy reason to bail. If he thinks you've made him, he's out of there."
"I want him out of there."
"I understand that, Ms.... Your name please?"
He wrote down the particulars and practically begged her to remain in bed and to act calm. He made the calls on the run for the elevator. For a lousy peeper report, this would be the biggest show of manpower SPD had ever mobilized.
Susan Hebringer. If he had time, he'd get a call to Boldt. If not Boldt, then Matthews: top of the lineup; he needed the heavy hitters.
*
Assuming his role as commanding officer, LaMoia directed dispatch to put out an 041 for the Bay Tower construction site. Officers in two patrol cars responded within seconds and were advised to enter the area "cloaked," with a BOL (Be On Lookout) issued for an adult male possibly fleeing the area, possibly in possession of a pair of binoculars or a telescope. Another three foot soldiers called in, all in the general vicinity, and once advised of this fact, LaMoia used them to bracket the area in case the guy slipped the two teams from the patrol cars.
With just five minutes to act, he felt he'd done as much as humanly possible to throw a net around this peeper. The phone call to Boldt's residence put him onto voice mail, and he left a cryptic message to return the call. He asked dispatch to send Boldt a page. A call to Matthews paid off-she was on her way over.
He juggled all this while keeping an open channel and something of a running dialogue with Melissa Dunkin, still curled up under a cotton sheet in suite 514. When Dunkin reported the peeper gone, LaMoia dialed up the urgency to his people on the ground. Ten minutes later, fifteen minutes after receiving the call from Dunkin, a search was on in the construction site with LaMoia fearing they'd lost him. Thirty minutes later, that search included fifteen patrolmen, the foreman of the construction site, and a vice president of the company putting up the building.
By the time the construction site was crawling with law enforcement,
LaMoia found himself sipping coffee in the company of a visibly shaken Melissa Dunkin, who had eschewed the go juice in favor of vodka on the rocks from little minibar bottles with tiny aluminum caps.