The three moved as a unit, a team, as they first walked and then ran from the Command Center, down the hall with such intensity that everyone moved out of their way; others jumped up from their desks and peered into the hallway to see what was going on. Gaynes knocked, but LaMoia didn’t wait for an answer. He pushed through the door.
“Men inside,” he announced.
A woman cursed and complained from inside a stall. A toilet flushed.
Boldt went to the janitor’s closet. “It’s locked! I want this unlocked!”
Gaynes hurried from the bathroom, shouting for a key.
LaMoia dropped to a knee, stood and started opening stalls. He banged on the locked stall from where the woman had cursed. “Open it! Now.”
“I’m a little busy here.”
“Open the fucking door!” LaMoia ordered.
The woman leaned forward and threw open the lock and covered her legs as LaMoia swung the door open.
He stared at the tile floor.
His voice rasped as he said, “Finish with your business. Stick to this panel as you stand. You go out to my right. You understand?”
“You have no right—”
“Shut up and do as I say.”
The woman came off the toilet, pulled up her underwear and pants and was holding them as she nudged by LaMoia and then Boldt, who was by now looking over LaMoia’s shoulder.
The toilet flushed automatically.
“It’s just not possible,” Boldt whispered gravely.
“You and Matthews,” said her lover, “your photos were in the paper two days ago. She brought it home to show me. Her photo. He saw her photo. He knew she was looking for him. He’s a sick fuck. That much we know already.”
“Are you sure it’s hers?”
The two men had not stopped staring at the tile floor where a wire hoop earring lay.
“I bought it for her,” LaMoia said. “The six-month anniversary of her moving in. It was the last really good night we had,” he said.
Boldt didn’t want to hear such things.
Gaynes returned with the closet key in hand, out of breath.
“S.I.D.,” Boldt said to her. Scientific Identification Division. “Get them up here.”
“What is it?” Gaynes said desperately.
“Get them up here,” Boldt repeated, his head beginning to spin.
Boldt had been through this once before, back when the fires had been hotter between them, back when he’d been younger and less experienced with the overlap of personal and professional. He had that behind him now, had that to build upon, but still felt his knees weak with terror and his mind a runaway train careening down memory and emotion toward an unknown abyss.
He couldn’t think about her. That was the point. He had to make the disconnect to give her the best chance of being found alive. Regulations called for LaMoia to step aside. Boldt wouldn’t force the issue, but John knew enough to keep his mouth shut and his ideas to himself. He could share them with Boldt in private, but to actively push his own agenda would only drive himself out of the wheelhouse. He was an observer now, not even that if he misstepped.
There was no time to pull the threads together. Boldt had done the best he could: he turned up the heat on the team trying to identify area bridges; he doubled the man power reviewing traffic cams and assigned two other detectives to review Public Safety surveillance video to locate the imposter housecleaner and follow him to wherever he’d gone. He worked Shoswitz to provide the department’s helicopter, either to race him and a small team to possible sites, or for use as air surveillance if they got a bead on what vehicle the man was driving.
Boldt fought to remain focused, to forget about who was riding in a trunk or the back of a van, to forget about the cadaver he’d seen so recently he could still smell the room, about the victim being stripped naked and trussed and thrown off a bridge.
Not this life. Not her. Not on his watch.
The worst moment came as the Control Center lulled into a library silence, as the initial adrenaline subsided, giving way to police work—the often monotonous, repetitive process of attempting to move from wide angle to telephoto.
LaMoia spoke up for the first time in ten minutes. “It’s been on the skids for months. I told you that, right?”
Boldt didn’t answer.
“I don’t know if it was…you know…the little one, or just a mismatch or what, but we’ve both known it was over for way too long. Funny how you hold on to things you know are broken. Right? Like you’re going to find the glue. You’re going to find out how to fix it? And we both did that. She did it, too. And the thing is, we never said a thing about it. It was all done with looks and silences and fake smiles and forced sex—”
“That’s enough,” Boldt said.
“I’m just saying…shit, I don’t know what I’m saying.”
Boldt heard him sniff.
“We’ve got video!” Taggart shouted from across the room. “Screen two.”
Everyone in the room watched a housecleaner pushing a garage bin down the hall. It looked heavy and difficult to control. The person stopped in front of the service elevator. It took Taggart another five minutes to call up the elevator’s interior in the correct time frame. But there was the housecleaner looking calm and easy, the trash can beside her. She wheeled it off the elevator.
Another five minutes to pick up the parking garage.
“He found himself a dark enough corner,” Boldt said. The video showed nothing of his transferring Daphne to the car. They couldn’t be sure that a transfer had ever happened.
“Get S.I.D. down there,” Boldt called out.
“Done!” Taggart answered.
The car pulled out. Taggart and his team did a phenomenal job of freezing the picture at just the right moment where the camera afforded the best clarity. It was an older model Ford Taurus. They had a partial plate: 43 2. The photo suggested a number preceded the four, but no one could be certain. Not knowing the position of the plate numbers increased the database exponentially.
The machine of the Seattle Police Department continued to roll forward. The description of the vehicle went out along with the partial. The same information was transmitted to King County Sheriff’s Department and other regional law enforcement. Police cruisers across five jurisdictions were mobilized to inspect and station themselves on all area bridges. In the Control Center the deployment of personnel was kept track of on screen 4. Bridge by bridge, they accounted for those now under the observation of law enforcement.
Boldt watched all this as a disconnected observer. As, one by one, the area bridges were accounted for, a feeling welled up in him that he couldn’t shake, and he’d been here too many times before to ignore such feelings.
“It’s Deception Pass,” Boldt said aloud, speaking to no one. Then he turned to LaMoia to press his point. “This guy isn’t creative enough to reinvent the wheel. He showed us that today and we’ve not paid any attention. He went about this in the exact same way as he did before. The same MO. Daphne called this—she said he’d throw them at sunrise before traffic of any sort developed. She said he might change his location if we made our knowledge of the bridge public, but we never did that. We made our knowledge of the killing public, yes, but we left the bridge out.”
“He’s keeping her overnight?”
“Yes, he is. Either in the vehicle or at a home or apartment or trailer. Keeping her. Daphne said how this is some kind of ritual for him. The preparation. The trying to make her fly. It’s reverential. That’s why he didn’t assault them, didn’t harm them. Bottom line, John—we have time. The one thing we didn’t have with the other two. We have that here. She has time. We can keep people on the bridges but move them to where they can’t be seen so easily. We can lay some traps. He’s giving us the time we need to be in position.”