Lou Boldt kept the song going with his right hand while he sipped some very cold milk, using his left. It was a good happy-hour crowd, all things considered. Some pretty coeds had wandered in, no doubt expecting stand-up, but had stayed the better part of an hour, were presently on the back end of several rounds of margaritas and, without knowing it—or maybe they did—were providing eye candy for the true jazz aficionados who populated the lounge.
Boldt brought the bass line back into the improvisation, but didn’t have time to wipe his mouth so he wore a Who’s Got Milk mustache for as long as it took him to lean into his own shoulder and drag his lips across the white button-down oxford. If you looked closely, you could see the JCPenney fabric tag escaping the starched collar for it was half-torn off and trying to act as a small flag beneath the buzz cut, graying stubble of head hair that held the texture of a kitchen scrub brush. Boldt smiled and grimaced when he played, his face a marvel to watch as it reacted to the shapes of the sound and the story his fingers told, as if surprised himself by what he heard. Enigmatic in conversation and generally not known for talking much at all, here at the piano, Lord of the Eighty-Eight Keys, Lou Boldt shined. For ninety minutes, once a week—sometimes twice—he revealed things about himself that only his closest friends understood. Bear Berenson was one of those friends. So was Phil Shoswitz, a former lieutenant himself, then a captain, now a deputy commissioner. He wasn’t a regular to these happy-hour performances, but he was no stranger, either. His presence at the moment, however, signaled something else to Boldt. Boldt had been black-balled by anyone of equal or higher rank within the department during his suspension, a leave of absence now in it’s third month. Only his homicide detectives treated him humanly. The inquiry had seen to that. Internal Investigations. Unsubstantiated charges of criminal misconduct meted out in a brutally partisan moment of city politics—as far as Boldt was concerned. I.I. looked at it a little differently—they believed they had proven that Boldt had sneaked nearly ten thousand dollars in cash back into the property room in an attempt to save a former homicide detective’s “past, pension and future,” who’d been stupid enough to “borrow” it in the first place.
For the past forty-three minutes—but who was counting?—Boldt had been assuming that Shoswitz had been sent here to dole out his sentence, to deliver the ruling, to answer the one question that had been hanging over Boldt’s head for the past eighty-seven days.
Did he, or did he not have a job?
For him it wasn’t about guilt or innocence, because he knew the truth. It was about how far I.I. could wear that stick up their ass and still sit down at the table. It was about ignoring fact for fiction, the exact way so many young detectives chose to do when first on the job—on Boldt’s homicide squad. People like Barbara “Bobbie” Gaynes, who was also in the crowd, but back in a dark corner staying away from Shoswitz as if the man were an AIDS carrier. The two had gotten along once—Gaynes and Shoswitz—back when Boldt had promoted her into the ranks of homicide detective, breaking a glass ceiling that still had shards on the floor.
You learned to tiptoe on the job. Gaynes was as good, or maybe better, at it than most. Than most of the most. A clear thinker and possessing single-minded determination, she fit the qualifications that Boldt sought for any and all of his teams. His staff. His bloodhounds. Her being here didn’t surprise him: she loved jazz piano, or claimed to. But she kept her eyes on Shoswitz the same way that Boldt tried not to. She knew. He knew.
But what did Shoswitz know? And when the hell was he just going to march up to the slightly raised platform and “Deliver us from evil,” as Boldt thought of it.
It was either a pardon or a pattern. Boldt was resolved to it being either. But the waiting. God…the ninety-minute set had never—not ever—dragged on for this long.
This was pain.
The call that came into the Seattle Police Department’s Broadway substation set off a controlled series of events that echoed through the halls of the sound-dampened Public Safety building, bouncing from one department to another over a series of three days that would later be put onto the official books as a period lasting precisely forty-nine hours. It wasn’t often the clocks were adjusted inside SPD, and it would take weeks for the adjustment to be made, but by then “the damage had been done,” as Lou Boldt put it to the press. Boldt, who had nothing to do with making three days look like two, could only reflect on what might have been had his department been informed of the missing person some twenty hours earlier. Perhaps nothing, he mused. But then again, maybe several lives would have been saved.
“What are you doing here at this hour?” the woman asked from the open doorway to his lieutenant’s office, one of two such offices in Crimes Against Persons. It was day three since the call had come in—the exact hour that the report had first appeared on Boldt’s desk. “I thought you were playing happy hour.”
“Was. Yes.”
“But you headed back downtown.”
“I did.”
Daphne Matthews had a radiance about her. His compass pointed to her true north; always had, always would. He’d sensed her before she’d spoken, the way a bird knows to signal dawn before the night sky lightens a single lumen. Some of this he could put off to her unusual, though plain, beauty—a combination of girl-next-door and smoking hot babe that she could ignite with a look or a stance or a new texture to her sultry voice. But only some. Most of the attraction came at a level that neither of them understood well enough to voice, something subcutaneous, like an agreeable infection.
“Is it going to be twenty questions?” she asked.
“The lieu was there,” he said, referring to Shoswitz by his former rank; Boldt had never fully adjusted to his own role of lieutenant, nor to Shoswitz having moved upstairs.
“I’m sensing anxiety. Hostility. You’re closed off from me.”
“Once a psychologist…” he said.
“Too close to home?”
“Don’t leave.”
She had turned to go.
“Please,” he added.
“You sure?”
“It’s not directed at you. None of it is meant for you.”
“For Phil?”
“I’m to take Reamer’s place,” he told her.
“Reamer,” she said. Her eyes rolled as she scanned her mental Rolodex. “Your Reamer?” She had a look like she’d been punched.
He felt that same thing in his belly.
“My Reamer.”
“Kansas City?” she asked.
“St. Louis,” he answered. “Which leaves his desk open beginning next week.”
“Reamer’s a sergeant,” she said.
“Now you’re catching on.”
“No way,” she said more boldly, now stepping inside.
“I’m told it’s never happened at my pay scale,” he said. “I think that was intended to make me feel better, but it didn’t work.”
“You’re moving back to the sergeant’s desk?”
“If I want to stay on, I am. I could have taken my twenty nearly a decade ago. We both know that. They know that. They obviously want me to take it now.”
“And you?”
“I don’t golf. I have two kids in elementary school who will go to college someday. If I sit around at home, I’ll eat my service revolver. So what do you think?”
“Jesus, Lou.”
“Yeah.”
“Are you seriously going to take it? You could get a rep to—”