“This again?”
“Yes, I suppose so: this again. And again, and again. And I hate it as much as you do-for the record. I’d like nothing more than to rewind and erase the tape, forget it ever happened. But we can’t, right? We’re stuck with it. We’re both going to have to live with it, maybe forever. I appreciate your efforts at forgiveness, but you don’t just jump there all at once. It’s a process, not a destination.”
His mouth opened twice, and he even raised his hand as if about to speak. But then he pounded a fist against the doorjamb, his jaw muscles knotted. He choked out, “I don’t want this.”
“Well, I’ve got news for you: Neither do I.”
“I’m going to go sleep with Miles.”
“All I’m going to say is that if you start that kind of thing, it’s hard to undo it.”
“So what do you want from me?” he asked, frustrated.
She considered this deeply and finally waited for eye contact before delivering her response. “Time,” she said.
Boldt slept in their shared bed that night, and through the weekend, though fitfully, if at all. Mercifully, work saved him from his insomnia in the wee hours of Monday morning.
The alert came from his pager at a few minutes before four. The code was for an assault, the address not one he recognized. But he knew damn well that even the dumbest dispatcher would not page a lieutenant unless the reported crime was of incredible importance to either the department as a whole or the lieutenant personally. Sergeants and their squads kept on-call hours, but not lieutenants.
He hung up the bedside phone.
Liz spoke through a dry throat. “Sweetheart?”
“It’s Danny Foreman,” Boldt said.
“What’s he want at this hour?”
“Not the call,” Boldt answered, correcting her. “The victim. Robbery/assault. Someone beat him up pretty badly and robbed him. I gotta go.”
“Is he going to be okay?”
“I think so. Get back to sleep if you can.”
“I’m up,” she said. “You call me when you can.”
“Maybe I just had to get that off my chest Friday night,” he said.
“Meaning?”
“I feel better for having said what I said. I feel more like a team all of a sudden. Us, I mean.”
“Music to my ears,” she said.
“Speaking of which… ”
“I’ll pick up Miles, yes,” she said. “I’ll get them both and be home around six.”
“I’ll get the team back here to watch the house as soon as I can.”
“Okay.”
He was dressed now, standing at the closet safe, fetching his gun. He slipped the blazer on, tugged on his shirtsleeves. She called him over and scratched out a stain.
“Can’t take me anywhere,” he said.
“Oh, I don’t know about that.”
He hesitated a moment, but he leaned over then and kissed her on the lips, a little peck, but a kiss nonetheless, and she felt like a high school girl who didn’t want to wash her face for a week.
A mile down Martin Luther King Boulevard, Boldt turned right and worked his way into the middle-class, mostly black, neighborhood. Foreman’s house was a modest one-and-a-half-story clapboard.
Inside the front door, Boldt met with the familiar smell of a crime scene: male sweat. He walked through the house and descended steep stairs into the dank cellar.
It was dark and bitter down here, a tomb with stale air that carried on it the rusty tang of fresh blood. Clusters of halogen lights on aluminum tripods, stenciled “SPD,” blinded the man who remained in the wooden chair at their center.
Foreman sat slumped forward, doing his best to hide the pain.
The smell of solvent stung Boldt’s sinuses. Acetone. It didn’t make sense that SID, the department’s Scientific Identification Division, would “fume” for prints down here with rescue crews still in attendance. “Glue?”
“Duct tape and Superglue,” answered the female half of the two personnel working on Foreman. “Wrists and ankles to each other, and the chair to the floor.”
Foreman’s left hand was missing two fingernails, accounting for the pool of blood on that side of the floor.
“Twice in a week,” Boldt said.
Foreman didn’t react.
The rescue woman informed him that Foreman had been given a sedative to help with the pain.
The basement space was small, with little room for more than a heating system, a hot-water tank, and a beat-up washing machine. Add to that two light stands, the chair and the man at their center, the two Search and Rescue personnel attempting to free Foreman, and a pair of EMTs standing by half tucked under the wooden staircase, and it was approaching claustrophobic.
Foreman’s lip was split, and his right eye swollen. Boldt pulled out a handkerchief and gently wiped the man’s face clean. Foreman lifted his head and the two met eyes, and Boldt felt pain tingle clear through him.
“Bastards,” Foreman managed to mutter.
“Who?”
“No fucking clue.”
One of the EMTs piped up that the small spot on the right side of Foreman’s neck “was consistent” with an injection.
“They got you again.” Rohypnol, the “date rape” paralysis drug. Truth serum, Boldt thought.
Foreman merely rolled his eyes. He appeared ready to pass out.
Boldt made a quick study of the basement, disappointed to see so many people and so much equipment. The scene was now contaminated beyond recovery.
The young woman said he could try his wrists now, but it might hurt. Danny Foreman tore a four-inch strip of his own flesh away, he pulled so hard. His face grimaced and his eyes shone, but he did not cry out. An EMT shot forward and went to work bandaging the wounds. Boldt saw more blood now. It was everywhere. Sprayed around like a kid with a garden hose.
Boldt took in some of the odds and ends piled on a dusty shelf. A faded Frisbee. Well-worn work gloves. A pair of hiking boots. A waffle iron with a cracked black cord. Two or three cardboard boxes that Boldt knew without looking contained Darlene’s things: clothes and accessories and maybe some photo albums; a hospital bracelet cut off a limp wrist three years earlier.
Seeing the damage to the skin, the rescue woman told Foreman they were going to give the solvent a few minutes longer on the ankles.
Foreman gushed through a string of expletives, still under the influence.
The rescue worker called for Boldt’s attention and pointed out what appeared to be the carcass of a dead bug, a housefly or larva, to the left of Foreman’s chair. When that bug rolled lightly a few inches across the floor, Boldt identified it as cigar or cigarette ash.
“Any of you smoke down here?” Boldt stepped carefully toward the evidence. No answers. “I’m going to ask all of you but this woman to leave now.” He instructed them on how to leave in single file, being careful to set their feet down slowly and gently and only in a clear area of the floor.
Boldt knelt down and eased the small worm of gray ash into a three-by-five manila envelope that he kept on his person for evidence collection. Foreman tried to speak, but ended up drooling and spitting instead. “Fuck!” he finally managed to moan, throwing his head around like a blind man at the piano.
Other than the pulled nails, Foreman’s hands showed no signs of struggle, no indication he’d fought back. A moment later, the rescue worker had Foreman’s ankles free and asked Boldt’s permission to summon her partner and the EMTs in order to get Foreman into the waiting ambulance. Boldt acquiesced, again trying to minimize the crime scene contamination.
Once Foreman was gone, Boldt searched the house, now joined by the timely arrival of his own department’s Scientific Identification Division.
“Better late than never,” Boldt told the anemic thirty-year-old wearing the blue windbreaker marked with his department’s acronym. The guy had thin, bluish lips and the pale skin of a cadaver. Boldt had never seen him before.