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“Two-thirds…hell, more like ninety-five percent, are going to be underage, or just overage girls,” LaMoia said. “We toss them, the database is manageable.”
“You know me and computers.”
“I got it, Sarge,” LaMoia said. “We can crunch this data in minutes. Trust me.”
He would never fully trust LaMoia again. With Daphne he’d made his peace, but LaMoia’s going after her would never sit right. He let it pass. For now.
An hour later they were sitting alongside one another, staring at a flat-screen display. It was nearing midnight.
“Should we run it again?” Boldt asked.
“That’s the third time, Sarge. It ain’t lying to us.”
“How could this have slipped through? They put me on leave and no one mans the shop?”
“It was DeFalgo. You know how he is. He’s waiting out his twenty-two. It’s all done with mirrors with him anyway. Always has been.”
“Buddy DeFalgo couldn’t figure out a scratch-and-win lotto card,” Boldt said. “What are they doing putting him in my chair?”
“It’s more like a corporation upstairs,” LaMoia said. “That’s what I hear.”
Boldt wanted to smack him. Had Daphne told him that as she’d gotten home?
On the screen was a woman’s face. Attractive. Early to middle thirties. A driver’s-license photo, but one that Boldt assumed would be on every morning news show in town by 6:00 a.m.
It was on.
They weren’t trying to find a missing woman.
They were trying to find two.
The facts of the reports were far too similar to put it off to chance: last seen at work. Never made it home.
“Maybe not the boyfriend,” Boldt whispered, his throat dry, his chest painful.
“Yeah, “LaMoia said. “I was just thinking the same thing.”
Rastus Malster applied the finishing touches. This was no dab-on-some-blush exercise. The fact that he had to accomplish it inside a restroom stall only added to the thrill. He heard the unique, whistling stream of a female peeing from the adjacent stall and looked low to see a wide, black leather toe-end of a shoe pointing toward him to where he swore if he’d bent over he could have seen his face in its polish. But he kept his eyes, if not his mind, on the work before him-the small mirror hanging from a wire thrown over the coat hook on the back of the door. Every line was carefully applied. If he didn’t like his work, he used a moist towelette to clear the slate, and tried again. A great deal of admiration went into his work; he took time to study and appreciate his expertise. Transformation took time; Rome wasn’t built in a day. The soiled, white leather work shoes helped him-in case Miss Hissy Thighs next door was looking at his footwear the way he was looking at hers. But no: she was in and done, up and gone before the automatic flusher had a chance to catch up with her. Besides, even if she had glanced his way, he’d Naired both legs the night before to baby-bottom-smooth; he might look a little thick at the ankle, but not everyone fit into a size two.
The trick now was to time his exit well. He’d entered when there was no one in here; he hoped to leave the same. Long on patience-for he would never have taken on any of this without his mother’s patience-he found himself in no hurry. He waited for the last click of a heel, the last spray of a toilet flushing or the electronic peal of the automatic paper dispenser. Then he gave it an extra thirty seconds. Twenty-eight…twenty-nine…
And, having collected his small mirror and his bag of goodies, he swung open the stall door to behold true artistry at work.
He slipped out the printout of the Intelligencer’s Web page from his pocket, took one last look at it, memorizing both the face and the name, and crumpled it up. He disposed of it immediately in front of him. She had a royal, almost equestrian look about her-a high princess, a lady-in-waiting. He looked like a corn-fed Midwesterner with a graying buzz cut.
If they wanted to make comments about him to the press, then they deserved the opportunity to meet him. They’d earned it.
When a uniformed woman entered the restroom, Rastus startled, his heart racing.
“Hello,” she said.
Reconsidering his location, he heaved a sigh of relief as the woman slipped into a stall and immediately was heard unzipping her pants-all without waiting for any kind of reply from him.
Rastus moved along the sinks, pleased as punch she’d never given him a second glance.
The piece of paper he’d tossed into the trash uncurled slightly, like the dancers at the begi
oldt and Lieutenant D. Matthews, seen here at a DARE fund-raiser in 2006.
The first body surfaced at sunrise, bobbing up out of murky depths of Bowman’s Bay like a decomposing mermaid. Phen Shiffman was who spotted her as he motored out for his morning work of checking the hatchery. He’d been enjoying a smoke and a fresh cup of strong coffee when her breasts arched out of the water, followed by the dark trim between her legs. It was like one of those synchronized swimming moves he’d seen on the Olympics-“only she was naked as a jaybird, not wearing any kind of bathing suit or undies or nothing,” as he would later tell Mike Rickert, the prosecuting attorney whose desk the case landed on. Though he hadn’t seen it, he supposed her head had surfaced first, led by her arms, maybe. Whatever the case, she’d continued in a graceful, back arch, like a dancer: head, shoulders, chest, groin, knees, feet, and she was under again. If he’d been drinking the night before, or he’d been smoking some rope on the way out, as he sometimes did, he might have considered saying nothing about her because once she was gone she was gone. But on the other hand, he knew this was serious-she was as dead as a salmon, bruised and fed-on some, as pale as the silver flash of a trout. This, he had to call in.
Boldt read about it on a briefing page that arrived on one’s computer screen at the start of every shift. The victim’s toenails had been elaborately painted in a way that suggested city life, not Skagit County. Rickert, for his part, had done his homework; he knew of the missing Seattle women. He posted the information and made a few calls suggesting SPD might want to visit the county morgue, or might want some dental records sent down-the crabs had gotten half her face. By midafternoon, Boldt and Daphne had made the ninety-minute drive north together, arriving at the county hospital. Dental records had confirmed the deceased’s identity: the second of the two women who’d gone missing.
Dressed in surgical kits, and wearing paper masks over their faces, having smeared Mentholatum liberally beneath their noses-because floaters were the worst of the worst-they studied the rotting corpse. At one point Boldt looked over at Daphne and wondered if the stains on the mask beneath her eyes were tears of emotion or from the Mentholatum vapors getting in her eyes.
They worked with a young pathologist who seemed to know his stuff. Boldt longed for his longtime friend, Dr. Ray, but the man had retired and would likely never stand under the lights again.
“Her spine is broken,” the pathologist explained in a toneless voice. “Cracked clean in half, which might explain the dance the fisherman saw in the water when she surfaced. There are severe ligature marks, here and here. Two more on both shoulders. Her vaginal and rectal area are torn, though from the same ligature, I’m suggesting.”
“She was trussed,” Boldt said.
This won a sharp snap of Daphne’s neck as she looked up at Boldt.
“Couldn’t have said it better,” the pathologist said. “Bound and trussed…and…well, maybe not.”
“Please,” Boldt said.
Daphne’s eyes said, “Please don’t.”
“It’s just…if I had to guess…and this is only wild speculation with only a small amount of science to support it…Nah…I shouldn’t.”