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“I want a positive ID,” Riz said, “and I want it now.”
Damn him, Boldt thought. Riz had always been one of the smarter ones. Boldt phoned Daphne Matthews to warn her that Riz’s team was inspecting the patrons more closely in order to obtain a positive ID.
A moment later Matthews said, “I see them. It’s Brandy and Klinderhoff, each coming down an aisle.” Judging by her suddenly muffled voice, he pictured that she’d bent forward, head to the theater floor. “But it’s crazy in here.”
“I need at least ten to twenty minutes, Daffy.”
He heard a loud cheer and music in the background.
“The purse!” Boldt shouted. “Make sure they see the purse.” He knew how a cop’s mind worked. The purse would convince either Brandy Schaeffer or Howie Klinderhoff as easily as if either saw Liz’s face.
Daphne disco
Riz cut in, demanding once again that Liz be identified in the film audience.
The umbrella woman entered an elevator and rode it one floor to ground level, where she had to switch elevators in order to continue into the office tower. The wheelchair officer followed on the next elevator car, reporting every few minutes.
The bus pulled away, scattering pedestrians, most of whom stayed on the WestCorp block, requiring Cretchkie to account for them.
In all of the commotion, little if any attention was paid to the homeless woman’s abandoned supermarket shopping cart, now canted into the wall just outside the entrance to the bank’s underground parking garage.
Boldt fixed upon that shopping cart. A smile crept slowly across his face.
Liz was inside.
Liz struggled to clear her head. During the walk with LaMoia at intermission he directed her across the street and down into a sunken courtyard plaza that fronted a Japanese restaurant. There, she jettisoned Maria’s frock, covering her little black dress with a street urchin’s Salvation Army wardrobe.
LaMoia indicated a street person’s shopping cart packed with aluminum cans and some other junk. It had been secreted into some bushes in the courtyard.
He then smeared her face with some brown base, making her look street dirty. “There’s a damp towel in the cart. Use it to clean this off.” Lou had pla
David Hayes had put her here, and the level of her resentment briefly stole all thought and clarity. Despite her usual Christian thinking, she vowed to have some kind of revenge against him. Ultimately, recovering the money would be the revenge, and she steeled herself to make it through the next hour of her life and to put things straight.
When the bus pulled up, at the very minute LaMoia had told her it would, she pushed the junk-laden supermarket cart against the concrete wall and slipped into the shadows of the underground garage, already pla
She headed directly to the glassed-in area that contained the elevators and stairs. It was from this garage that she had first sneaked away to a rendezvous with David Hayes, from this garage that she had left on maternity leave.
As she heard the distant hiss of the bus brakes releasing, she reached into the waiting elevator and tripped the button for the ground floor, then jumped back out of the car. As she pulled open the heavy door to the fire stairs, immediately adjacent to the elevators, she heard the elevator doors slide shut behind her. She stepped inside the stairs and began to undress immediately. She cleaned her face in the reflection of a fire extinguisher box.
Lou believed her sending the elevator up might distract the minimum-wage security team, whose job it was to monitor television screens in a darkened room somewhere in the building. Dressed now in her black cocktail dress, Liz climbed the stairs. The garage stairs deposited her into the main lobby. She still had to pass through security in order to reach the main bank of elevators.
Liz said hello to Dilly, the portly security man with whom she was friends. As she did so, she used Tony LaRossa’s ID card on the turnstile in front of the metal detector through which she would pass. Lou had no doubt that Pahwan Riz had cued security’s computers to watch for Liz’s entrance to the office building. It was even possible the security computer had been set for a special notification when Liz’s ID card entered the system. Lou’s gamble that Riz would not have given the same consideration to Tony LaRossa’s card paid off. The light turned green, the turnstile moved, and Liz passed her purse to Dilly while she stepped through the metal detector.
Dilly looked shell-shocked to see her. She stepped up to him, physically closer to the man than she’d ever been, and whispered clearly into his ear. “I know you’re supposed to report my arrival, Dilly. Believe me, I know all about it. And that’s a decision you will have to make. But if you do, what happened to Tony LaRossa will happen to me.” She kissed him on the cheek, took her purse, and walked away, not looking back.
The elevator typically required the use of an ID card to reach the restricted floors, including the twenty-fifth floor and I.T.’s data processing. For the sake of the reception, that requirement had been overcome by stationing a security guard as an elevator operator to shuttle guests. This came as an unexpected complication. Liz’s way around being seen by this security guard was to use the stairs once again, for one reached the stairs before the bank of elevators. She climbed twenty-five floors in less than ten minutes, her heart and lungs burning, her calves aching. Using Tony’s security card, she entered the floor at the end of a hall that had been taken over by the caterers. The roar of conversation and the smell of chicken satay greeted her. A moment later she was just another little black dress in a reception with dozens of invited guests.
Lou had taken it on faith that Hayes’s software would reach her. She felt less inclined to believe this, knowing David was under watch and believing that without his direct participation the transfer would not happen. But it was Lou’s show, and she played her role as directed. In her head an imaginary clock continued counting down the minutes to the corporate switchover.
Boldt called Gaynes on her cell phone and asked her location.
“Heading into the lobby from the shopping area.”
“They saw you enter. They put guys on it.”
“The mark?” Gaynes asked, meaning Liz.
“She’s in.”
“Oops,” Gaynes said. “Gotta go. Looks like I’m about to be caught.”
She disco
He encouraged his cell phone to ring, awaiting confirmation that Liz had reached the twenty-fifth floor. Even if the empty-elevator ploy got security’s attention, Boldt expected no drastic action to be taken by the bank. No one in his right mind was going to shut down this merger reception as the couple approached their wedding bed.