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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 JCPe
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 i
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 sca
He felt that same thing in his belly.
“My Reamer.”
“Kansas City?” she asked.
“St. Louis,” he answered. “Which leaves his desk open begi
“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-”
“No. This is their ruling. No more hearings. No more of this.”
“But they’re false charges. We all know that. There’s no way they ruled against you in this.”
“They just did. Of course they’ll say they ruled in my favor. Phil…he can’t say what he’s thinking, but he all but did. They want me out. While respecting the record, they don’t want the baggage.”
“It’s because so much of the force looks up to you. Hell, you’re a living legend. That must scare the pee out of them.”
“You know I hate that. Why do you do that? You, of all people?”
“You are what you are. You can swim in de Nile, or you can make for shore and climb out. But don’t lay it on me. I don’t mean ‘legend’ in the sense of superhero. I mean, the rank and file looks up to you in a way few, if any around here-I would say none-are looked up to. That’s your burden, and that’s a threat to everyone above you. Everyone but Phil because he gets it.”