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He was a soft-looking man, with piggish, squinting eyes smudged with a horrid blue eye shadow, and a pallor to his facial skin.
Her comment stopped him. She seized upon his hesitation.
“You broke her back. She…was too relaxed. The drugs…whatever it is you’re about to give me…it’s what killed her…what will kill me. If you…take away my strength to resist the force of the fall…you’ll break my back.”
He stared at her expressionless. He seemed to be thinking: How could she read my mind like this? How could she possibly know…?
“You want them to fly…want me to fly, don’t you?” she said, gaining some strength to her voice, though not much. The lingering effect of the stun stick was a massive migraine, a dry throat and pain radiating throughout her body. On top of that she was absurdly cold, chilled to the bone, a kind of chill that might be chemical, or a response to shock, but was unlike anything she knew.
“I can’t fly if you drug me. The harness…must dis-tri-bute the force of the fall better. Shoulders to hips. Bigger harness…maybe.”
He held up a series of nylon straps and buckles. It look liked he’d made it himself—there were nuts and bolts where a harness might have had stitching or grommets.
“You don’t need…to drug me…to put that on,” she said. “I won’t fight. I want…to help you…be the first to fly.”
She watched his eyes mist. She’d triggered something painful in him. She clawed through the purple and black orbs that threatened on the sides of her vision, that warmth flowing down from her skull, trying to overtake her.
He looked her over, head to toe, his eyes lingering where a woman always felt men looking. She thought perhaps she didn’t fit the look—the look that he sought. The victim they’d seen had been slightly heavier, wider in the hips. Maybe he was considering rejecting her. Maybe she’d spoken too much. But speaking was her living. Her life…depended on it.
“To make this work,” she said, “we must be a team. The two of us.” She thought that more than anything he missed whatever angel he was trying to recreate, that to include him, to embrace him, to let him in was the secret to unlocking him.
“What do you know about the two of us?” He appeared bewildered and confused.
She understood she had caused this. Had her mind been clearer, she could have had more tools at her disposal, but her education took a backseat to instinct—it came down to getting him to loosen the ropes; everything depended on his loosening the ropes.
“We should…try on the harness. You think?”
“You didn’t know her.”
“I’d like to have.”
“Shut up.”
“She meant a great deal to you.”
“I said shut up!”
He lashed out with the harness, whipping her bare skin across her middle and raising welts.
She shut up. She looked away, her arms begi
“You didn’t mean to do that,” she said. “I forgive you.”
His gaze locked onto her.
“I forgive you for all of this. I can see it stems from your pain. I will fly for you. I will help you. But if you drug me, you’ll break my back. You’ll kill me. Now…what about the harness? Shouldn’t we get the harness on?”
She had him. She fought through the goo, the descending veil of approaching unconsciousness long enough to understand she’d gotten through to him. As a psychologist, she’d learned to spot these moments. To seize upon them.
His arm moved toward the knot that tied one ankle to the other, but it was a motion filled with suspicion and distrust.
Come on! she silently pleaded.
The man untied the first knot.
Five khaki-clad sheriff deputies stormed the Malster residence with a precision Boldt had not expected. He and LaMoia, wearing flak jackets, followed closely behind.
“Dead body,” Boldt said, knowing that smell.
The deputies quickly swarmed through the rooms, shouting, “Clear!” within seconds of one another.
“Got something!” a voice called out.
LaMoia and Boldt slipped down a narrow hallway to one of the home’s two bedrooms. It was a small room, crowded with a double bed and a low dresser. Atop the dresser were several photographs of a younger woman wearing clothes and a haircut from a decade earlier.
“Burrito,” LaMoia said.
A human burrito. A wrap of thick plastic tarp secured with a half roll or more of duct tape. Whoever had done the job had tried to seal the body inside, but the putrid smell overcame the room.
“Weeks,” Boldt said, his gloved hand pressing the plastic closer to where the face should have been. The corpse was in a high degree of decay, squirming larvae smeared the plastic from inside.
“Oh…crap,” LaMoia said. “This guy is sick.”
“This guy is trying to hold on to the one parent he had left,” Boldt said. “Daphne said the doer would be living with a single parent.”
“So where is she?”
“He’s not living here,” Boldt said, back in the hall now, looking around. The place had been cleaned up. The kitchen was immaculate but a wire strainer had left a rust ring in the sink, suggesting the passage of a good deal of time. “This is his mausoleum.” He indicated the small living room where two of the deputies stood awaiting instruction. There were no fewer than twenty framed photographs of the same woman spread around the room.
“We gotta find him,” LaMoia insisted, stating the obvious. “How’re we going to do that, Sarge?” He sounded on the edge of tears.
“We’re good,” Boldt said. “Basement?” he called to the deputies.
“Clear,” a deputy answered.
Boldt stepped into the living room, studying the various photographs more closely. Answers weren’t handed you; you had to extract them.
“It’s here somewhere,” he told LaMoia. “Start looking.”
LaMoia joined him. They worked the house: drawers, closets, cabinets.
Boldt made a phone call and a
He called out for LaMoia to bring him the photos from the bedroom. Even with the front and back doors open it reeked inside the small house, but Boldt wasn’t going anywhere.
Together the two lined up and rearranged the nearly three dozen framed photographs. Then they reshuffled them several times.
“These five,” Boldt said, rearranging them yet again. All were taken in bright sunlight. In three of the five, water could be seen behind the woman’s head. One was clearly taken on a boat, but not a pleasure craft.
LaMoia turned to say something but Boldt’s phone rang. It was his contact at the Sheriff’s Office.
“We struck out on the tax records, at least for this guy, but we did pick up tax records for a commercial trawler, registered to Norman Malster. It’s in arrears, but until about a year ago it had been paid up regularly for nearly twenty years.”
“A brother?”
“Not a common name,” the sheriff’s deputy said.
“Do we know where—?”
“I got my guys making some calls. Everyone knows everyone here. It shouldn’t be—”
“Orange metal,” Boldt said, pulling one of the photos closer. “One piece is curved down, the other straight.”
“That’s not Oak Harbor. Hang on a second…” The deputy went off the line. When he returned he said, “La Co
Boldt and LaMoia were out the door to the shouts of deputies. Across the street to a vacant lot where the helicopter waited.