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When Bobbie Gaynes stepped into the center and shrugged across the room at Boldt, Boldt felt his hackles raise. He pulled out his cell phone and speed-dialed Daphne. It went immediately to voice mail, indicating the phone was turned off.
“Why would Daffy have her phone off?” he asked LaMoia, her lover.
“She wouldn’t.”
“She does.”
LaMoia pulled out his mobile and gave it a try. “No,” he said, disco
“Not there.” Gaynes looked worried. “And her car’s downstairs. I checked.”
LaMoia dialed another number, presumably his loft apartment where Daphne now lived with him. He disco
“I’d like to say that there’s a reason for this, but we both know her too well,” he said.
“This is not like her,” Boldt said.
“No.”
“So?”
LaMoia stepped to a landline. “Let me check my office voice mail.” He did so. No message.
Gaynes had joined them. “I’m sure she was headed to the bathroom. Earlier. When I last saw her.”
Photographs of the two women victims: one deceased, one still missing, played on the center LCD TV overhead. It was here that LaMoia looked. “Oh, shit,” he said.
Boldt looked up, as well.
“Hair color. Eyes. You and Daphne said—”
“She said. Not me. Yes,” Boldt interrupted. “A similarity between his victims.”
“You see the resemblance?”
“I do. It’s unmistakable.”
“But it’s just not possible,” LaMoia said. “Not with our level of security.”
“If I may?” Gaynes asked somewhat timidly.
“Go ahead,” Boldt said.
“You’re suggesting that Lieutenant Matthews shares a certain look with the two prior victims?”
“We are. Yes.”
“And that…well…” She stepped up to the computer that ran the various overhead displays. She called up the daily alerts that opened with one filed by Cynthia Storm of HHS.
Boldt and LaMoia spun around to read the alerts on the overhead screen.
“My eyes suck,” Boldt said anxiously. “What the hell does it say?”
LaMoia’s voice broke as he read aloud, summarizing. “One of our staff…a housecleaner…Jasmina Something-avich…was found tied up in her apartment. This is like, three hours ago. She’d been there, left that way for nearly…forty-eight hours. Thirty-nine hours,” he corrected himself. “She said the doer…it wasn’t burglary or sexual assault. He wanted…he confiscated her photo ID. Her Public Safety ID.”
The three moved as a unit, a team, as they first walked and then ran from the Command Center, down the hall with such intensity that everyone moved out of their way; others jumped up from their desks and peered into the hallway to see what was going on. Gaynes knocked, but LaMoia didn’t wait for an answer. He pushed through the door.
“Men inside,” he a
A woman cursed and complained from inside a stall. A toilet flushed.
Boldt went to the janitor’s closet. “It’s locked! I want this unlocked!”
Gaynes hurried from the bathroom, shouting for a key.
LaMoia dropped to a knee, stood and started opening stalls. He banged on the locked stall from where the woman had cursed. “Open it! Now.”
“I’m a little busy here.”
“Open the fucking door!” LaMoia ordered.
The woman leaned forward and threw open the lock and covered her legs as LaMoia swung the door open.
He stared at the tile floor.
His voice rasped as he said, “Finish with your business. Stick to this panel as you stand. You go out to my right. You understand?”
“You have no right—”
“Shut up and do as I say.”
The woman came off the toilet, pulled up her underwear and pants and was holding them as she nudged by LaMoia and then Boldt, who was by now looking over LaMoia’s shoulder.
The toilet flushed automatically.
“It’s just not possible,” Boldt whispered gravely.
“You and Matthews,” said her lover, “your photos were in the paper two days ago. She brought it home to show me. Her photo. He saw her photo. He knew she was looking for him. He’s a sick fuck. That much we know already.”
“Are you sure it’s hers?”
The two men had not stopped staring at the tile floor where a wire hoop earring lay.
“I bought it for her,” LaMoia said. “The six-month a
Boldt didn’t want to hear such things.
Gaynes returned with the closet key in hand, out of breath.
“S.I.D.,” Boldt said to her. Scientific Identification Division. “Get them up here.”
“What is it?” Gaynes said desperately.
“Get them up here,” Boldt repeated, his head begi
Boldt had been through this once before, back when the fires had been hotter between them, back when he’d been younger and less experienced with the overlap of personal and professional. He had that behind him now, had that to build upon, but still felt his knees weak with terror and his mind a runaway train careening down memory and emotion toward an unknown abyss.
He couldn’t think about her. That was the point. He had to make the disco
There was no time to pull the threads together. Boldt had done the best he could: he turned up the heat on the team trying to identify area bridges; he doubled the man power reviewing traffic cams and assigned two other detectives to review Public Safety surveillance video to locate the imposter housecleaner and follow him to wherever he’d gone. He worked Shoswitz to provide the department’s helicopter, either to race him and a small team to possible sites, or for use as air surveillance if they got a bead on what vehicle the man was driving.
Boldt fought to remain focused, to forget about who was riding in a trunk or the back of a van, to forget about the cadaver he’d seen so recently he could still smell the room, about the victim being stripped naked and trussed and thrown off a bridge.
Not this life. Not her. Not on his watch.
The worst moment came as the Control Center lulled into a library silence, as the initial adrenaline subsided, giving way to police work—the often monotonous, repetitive process of attempting to move from wide angle to telephoto.
LaMoia spoke up for the first time in ten minutes. “It’s been on the skids for months. I told you that, right?”
Boldt didn’t answer.
“I don’t know if it was…you know…the little one, or just a mismatch or what, but we’ve both known it was over for way too long. Fu
“That’s enough,” Boldt said.
“I’m just saying…shit, I don’t know what I’m saying.”
Boldt heard him sniff.
“We’ve got video!” Taggart shouted from across the room. “Screen two.”
Everyone in the room watched a housecleaner pushing a garage bin down the hall. It looked heavy and difficult to control. The person stopped in front of the service elevator. It took Taggart another five minutes to call up the elevator’s interior in the correct time frame. But there was the housecleaner looking calm and easy, the trash can beside her. She wheeled it off the elevator.
Another five minutes to pick up the parking garage.
“He found himself a dark enough corner,” Boldt said. The video showed nothing of his transferring Daphne to the car. They couldn’t be sure that a transfer had ever happened.