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“I’m not saying I’m buying that.”
“I’m not selling,” she said. “And as to that, you’ve never bought in to it, but that’s because you can be as blind, deaf and stubborn as a mule at times. Brilliant at others. Right now you’re sitting on the pity pot, and it’s your pot to sit on, but dammit, Lou, when people around here fear you, you’re doing something right. Carpe diem.”
“I was never comfortable looking out the window.”
“You invented ways to get yourself onto investigations. The brass knows that about you. They’re doing you a favor. Long-term, this is a favor. You just can’t see it yet.”
“Nearly a thirty percent pay cut.”
“That hurts. That’s supposed to keep you from accepting it.”
“Shorter vacation. Back to a pool car.”
“Ditto and ditto.” She stepped even closer to him. It felt dangerous and warmer at the same time. “Did Phil give any opinion? Did he steer you one way or the other?”
“He said he wished they’d let him take my desk. That the only real police work is on the streets. Always has been. Says it’s more like a corporation upstairs every day.”
“That’s a nice compliment, don’t you think?”
“LaMoia and I the same rank,” he said. A loaded statement because she’d been living with LaMoia for nearly a year now. The world’s oddest couple, and yet they were still together. A rocky year, he thought, looking on from a distance. They’d struggled with Social Services to maintain guardianship of a young girl. There was no way it was going to happen. They weren’t married. They weren’t in the system for adoption. But LaMoia knew enough judges and had enough friends to keep pushing back the decision a week here, a month there. It was all thumbs and toes in the dike at this point. They were about go get washed downstream and he had a feeling the whole thing would go if the child led the way.
“He won’t treat it that way. You know that. You walk on water for him.”
“Anything but.”
“It’ll be your squad. Both teams. I pity the lieu who comes in above you.”
“You make it sound as if my decision’s been made.”
“Hasn’t it?”
There were times, like right now, that he wanted to take her by the hips and pull her close to him. He wanted to experience her. Not so much sexual as just a physical contact to bridge all the words that flowed between them. Liz, his wife, would never understand. LaMoia would never understand. But he felt they would-he and Daphne. They would get it. They wouldn’t abuse it, or misuse it or push it. But it wasn’t to be. Not today. He’d learned to contain it, like locking up the neighborhood dog. He muzzled its bark. He tried not to feed it, hoping it would just roll over and die. But it never did.
Not ever.
“Yeah,” he said. “I suppose it has.”
“Can I help you move your things across the room?”
“I’d like that,” he said.
“Do you need to call Liz?”
“Do you need to call John?”
They were maybe a foot apart. Her chest rose and fell more quickly than only a minute earlier. There was mirth in her eyes-he could swear there was-and invitation on her lips, and God, he didn’t dare look below her waist. He’d been there once, a long, long time ago, but he remembered it like they were still tasting the other’s skin. How could time stand still like that, while the world rushed by?
The phone at the sergeant’s desk rang.
His desk.
It rang and rang, and Lou Boldt marched toward it with both reluctance and hunger, the same way he would have marched toward her-just this once-if she had dared to ask.
“Get used to it,” Boldt said. He was standing outside an office high-rise at the northern end of Third Avenue where no local had ever foreseen a high-rise taking root. He addressed John LaMoia, who wore his trademark deer-skin jacket, so soft and supple it looked like a chamois, and the pressed jeans above the exotic cowboy boots. He couldn’t see Daphne pressing the jeans as other girlfriends had done for him over the years; it meant he had to send them out, had to actually pay to have them that way, and the thought of that amused Boldt to no end.
“I’m good,” LaMoia said. “Welcome back, Sarge.”
Technically, the graveyard was Boldt’s shift-another disincentive Shoswitz had thrown at him. LaMoia would be the day sergeant for CAP for the next month. But apparently Daphne had said something, and a phone call had followed, and just as Boldt had been about to tap one of his team to join him, LaMoia had volunteered “for old time’s sake.”
“So?” LaMoia said.
“Call’s been on the books over two days,” Boldt said. “How that happened has to be looked into, but the fact is, a woman’s gone missing and we’re now officially past the first forty-eight-”
“So we’re screwed.”
“We’re challenged,” Boldt said.
“And we’re here because this is where she was last seen?”
“We don’t know if she was seen. We’re here to check the surveillance cameras because work was all the boyfriend gave me.”
“You brought him in?”
“Phone call.” Boldt answered LaMoia’s questioning look. “I wanted to expedite things. The extra day and all.”
“All that time behind a desk,” LaMoia said, “can’t help a person’s game.”
“One phone call,” Boldt said. “It saved us something like two, three hours.”
“I’m not arguing,” LaMoia said. But he clearly disapproved of Boldt’s cutting a corner, and Boldt marveled how quickly his world had turned upside down: LaMoia-the rogue of all time-questioning his practices!
“I’d like to find her alive.”
“Would the boyfriend?” LaMoia asked, knowing that statistics put the crime squarely on the man.
“Who knows? He sounded genuine enough, but maybe he’s taking Internet acting classes.”
Boldt called into the high-rise over his mobile and they were approached moments later by a uniformed guard. As the man worked to open the doors, LaMoia spoke.
“How can we gain access to security tape at this hour?”
“Frankie Malone’s the top guy.”
“No way.”
“I called him at home. He gave us the keys to the store.”
“When it works, it works,” LaMoia said.
They were ushered in and taken to the security department and shown an hour of tapes. They had the missing woman arriving two days earlier. Had her going out to lunch with friends. Back in the hallways and elevators upon her return. Couldn’t find her leaving the building. Boldt asked the tapes be set aside and that half-inch copies be sent over to Public Safety by noon the same day.
Boldt and LaMoia walked the hallways. Rode the elevator. Repeated what they’d seen.
“I doubt it was here,” Boldt said.
“I’m with you.”
“But then how’d she disappear?”
“That’s quite a crush at the end of the day.”
“True enough.”
“We might have missed her.”
“You think?”
“No.”
“Me, neither.”
“So it was here?” LaMoia ventured.
“Don’t see how. But, yeah, maybe.”
“Locked in a closet somewhere? Down in parking in a trunk?”
“Dogs?” Boldt asked.
“Expensive.”
“We’re past the forty-eight,” Boldt said. “We’ve cut the probability of finding her alive by-”
“Fi’ty, sixty percent. I know the stats, Sarge.”
“If we did miss her in the crowd, then it was between here and home.”
“And the boyfriend gets a much closer look either way,” LaMoia said. “Did you search for similars?”
“With the number of missing persons reports we get? I didn’t have all night.”
“We do now,” LaMoia said.
“Don’t you have to get home to the baby?”
“Let’s not go there, okay?”
The men were outside the building now, the background whine of rubber on I- 5. A jet just behind the Space Needle, on final approach to SEATAC. A motorboat was cutting across Lake Union. Some rowdy voices echoed from a half block away. The city stayed up later and later. It was in its adolescence. Boldt felt as if he’d known it from birth.