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Today, she was chasing down Jasmina Vladavich, a Bosnian housecleaner who’d failed to show to work for two days, had not answered her phone and, as it turned out, had not been seen by her cousin, the woman she’d listed as her emergency contact. Jasmina had a good track record with the department, but was rumored by the cousin to be in the early stages of pregnancy. She was unmarried and distraught about it. Cynthia and her supervisor had decided Jasmina worthy of a house call, to make sure that the baby had not led to prenatal depression or illness.
She rang the bell. It was an apartment complex twenty minutes south of the city, near SEATAC, a neighborhood known for strip joints, drugs and borderline import/export businesses. Laundry hung from wires on half balconies attempting to dry in a climate that dictated otherwise. The sound of televisions competed. Jasmina didn’t answer the bell—no surprise there—but Cynthia used her credentials to talk the super into having a look. The elevator had not worked for three years, she was told. She trudged up five flights, down a hall marked with graffiti and was let into 514.
“Jasmina?” she called out. The super waited at the door. “Hello?”
She heard the groan. It came faintly from the back, barely heard over an episode of In Living Color playing next door. “Stay there!” she told the super, who looked ready to bolt.
“Hello?” She followed the soft groans into a back bedroom where a woman was hog-tied and lying on her belly. She’d soiled herself, and her face was streaked with tears and mucus. A nylon knee sock had been used to gag her. She was wearing only underwear and a bra, and there were raw bruise marks—she’d been rocking on her legs, rolling around the room.
“Call 911!” she hollered. “We need an ambulance right now!”
She approached the woman cautiously. Jasmina looked a little wild around the eyes. “I’m going to help you, okay?”
Jasmina nodded.
“I’m going to remove the gag and the ropes. Jasmina? Do you hear me?”
But the woman had lapsed into unconsciousness.
Cynthia got the gag off and Jasmina sucked for air and came back awake.
“Baby…” the woman moaned.
“We’ll get you the hospital! Who did this to you, Jasmina? The father of the baby?”
“No. Was my card,” the woman moaned. “My card.”
“It’s all right. It’s all right.” She was talking nonsense, Cynthia realized.
“Man…took my card. My ID card.” With her hand free now, she touched the plastic ID card that Cynthia had fastened to her own belt. “Public Safety card.”
Cynthia didn’t care about any work card. Her concerns were dehydration, malnutrition and the condition of the baby inside this woman. “We’ve called an ambulance,” she reminded.
“Why this for stupid card?” Jasmina groaned. She shook as she began to cry.
Why indeed? Cynthia now thought as she focused more on what she was being told. She reached out, somewhat reluctantly because of the filth, and cradled the crying woman in her arms.
Why indeed?
Daphne had been briefed over the phone by an energetic Lou Boldt she had not known for the past three years. When he locked onto a case he not only possessed, but emitted a contagious energy, a force field of curiosity, optimism and bizarre self-confidence that she found utterly intoxicating and physically stimulating. She responded to his passion bodily, so privately that were her condition ever known to others it would have proved embarrassing. Her skin prickling, she stepped around the yellow Wet Floor cone and entered the women’s washroom to relieve her bladder and check her makeup. She feared her chest was likely flushed, along with her face.
A cleaner was doing the sinks. She had a large brown trash canister behind her and appeared to be emptying the trash containers of used hand towels.
Bothered by an earring that hadn’t sat right all day, she un-hooked it from her ear.
“Okay if I…?” she asked the cleaner, motioning to the stall.
“Mmm.” The woman nodded back at her.
Daphne took two steps and felt a shock of electricity so powerful she could neither scream nor move. Her mind flashed unconscious, but only for a split second.
“Shit! Shit! Shit!” she coughed out softly, the pain so intense, so immobilizing and overpowering. She wanted desperately to blink; her eyes stung. But instead her eyelids fluttered, partially open, as if the juice were still flowing through her. She gasped for air.
The woman picked her up then, and Daphne understood from the strength and the way the person cradled her, that this wasn’t a woman after all. It was a man in drag.
It was the man Boldt had just described to her.
She was his captive.
He folded her into the trash can and then began stuffing newsprint and damp paper towels on top of her. The next blast from the stun stick co
Public Safety.
The guy—it had to be a guy—was taking her out of the building.
She tried to raise her voice, to say something—anything. Tried to call out but either her lungs or vocal cords were in full disco
An elevator grunted and jerked—it could only be a service elevator by how poorly it was operating.
Her heart beat so strongly in her chest she feared it might stop beating altogether. Surely no heart could take such abuse. It was as if all the adrenaline summoned by the thousands of volts of electricity had concentrated into the center of her chest and was now looking for a way out.
She moved her mouth to say the word help but nothing came out.
A dark purple cloud loomed at the crown of her head, a massive headache like an avalanche awaiting release. It shifted like Jell-O, an amorphous orb of unconsciousness. Now a black goo as thick as tar pitch.
It flowed down toward her ears, as well as into the vacant space behind her forehead where her sinuses should have been. But nothing was right. It was only this oozing purplish black wave of silence that descended.
Then, it owned her, and she was no more.
“Where’s Matthews?” LaMoia asked Bobbie Gaynes, a detective who’d worked his squad for the past few years. “She was supposed to pull together the squad and get the Command Center ready for us.”
“No clue,” answered Gaynes, returning to what she considered a stupid report. She was a terrible typist, and her own limitations frustrated her. Seeing Boldt in the office, she rolled her chair away from her terminal and leapt out of the chair, and just stopped herself short of hugging the lieutenant-turned-sergeant. “Welcome back…Sarge!”
“She said she would pull the Command Center together for me,” Boldt said.
“Little girls room, I think,” Gaynes said. “I saw her in the hallway heading that direction.”
“Go check, would you? We need her, you, and everyone we’ve got in the building who’s a detective. Command Center. Five minutes.”
“Yes, sir.”
Boldt raised his voice and made an a
The coach was back. The game was on. And everyone in the room knew it.
The players assembled in the Command Center briefing room. Designed like a college lecture hall, it could seat fifty, all with Internet access, all facing a lectern and PowerPoint projection screen, five 42-inch LCD HD monitors suspended from the ceiling and two large white boards. There were eleven detectives facing Boldt and LaMoia, who quickly brought the others up to speed. Most had read their daily briefings, as charged, and needed nothing more than to be caught up on the discovery of the bridge and the co
Teams were created to chase down specifics: other area bridges to consider; the traffic cams that might reveal a vehicle going out to Deception Pass bridge; area retail stores that sold Asian wigs; costume shops or tailors that might have provided the coveralls specific to the office buildings where he/she had preyed on his victims. They were smart cops and barely needed instruction to get started. Within minutes, the Command Center hummed with conversation. Some teams stayed. Some broke off to other parts of the building. But a machine had been started with Boldt and LaMoia sharing the driver’s seat, and that machine was intent to narrow down various aspects of the case and begin to focus on suspects.