Middle of Nowhere (9 page)

The last three weeks of reported burglaries arrived on Boldt’s desk ninety minutes later, most of them nothing more than the requisite property loss report—one hundred and fourteen in all. Boldt switched on his desk lamp, a cup of Earl Grey at the ready. If there had been a night shift it would have been just arriving, but the Flu had killed such shifts. Civilians still manned their desks, but with the detectives out “sick,” the place was a graveyard. He rubbed his eyes, cleaned his reading glasses with a long, slow breath and a piece of tissue, and examined the reports.

Each report detailed a burglary represented by a numbered code. This was followed by name, address, time of day. First officer. Investigating detective, if any. List of stolen goods. A concise summary of events:
returned home, broken window, missing stereo; awoke to a noise, entered the living room, suspect seen fleeing.
Eyenumbing repetition. Uniformed patrol officers going through the routine of making the ripped-off public think someone cared. No one did but the insurance companies. They wanted a report filed and signed off on. Boldt studied those reports, fighting off drowsiness.

He looked first to the list of stolen goods, separating out those that inventoried large-screen TVs, home computers, cell phones—all items believed stolen from Sanchez. A single TV didn’t count. A single computer didn’t interest him. With the exception of a cell phone, the items stolen from Sanchez each had retail values in excess of a grand. Picky. Exact. Kawamoto’s 37-inch TV had clearly been targeted; the VCR’s wire had not been coiled. Had it been too inexpensive to worry about? Or had Kawamoto’s interruption come before the burglar had enough time to examine it? TVs and stereos would normally be considered the domain of a junkie looking for his next fix, but junkies didn’t put white plastic ties around the electrical cords. Junkies didn’t trick home security systems by tying up the phone line.

Boldt suspected that this particular rip-off artist sought out high-end electronics in enough quantity to justify the risk. A computer, a couple TVs and a cell phone to be cloned later might net him fifteen hundred from the right fence—not bad for a day’s work. Better than cop pay.

Based on the list of stolen goods, Boldt narrowed his pile to twenty-three reports. Some of the forms had the small box checked off that indicated home security systems, but not all. On two of these reports he noted that the officers made mention of the security systems being compromised. Boldt smelled a possible insurance fraud—homeowners arranging for the “theft” of their own electronics; they would then collect the insurance money, have the electronics returned, and pay out a percentage of the take to he who committed the “burglary.” The Stepford Thieves. Wouldn’t be the first white-collar crime investigated by SPD.

Boldt flipped through the stack of pink, archived triplicate copies, wanting some other identifier. He read each of the twenty-three reports in more detail, taking the time to study the notes, wanting something to narrow these to a more manageable number. Twenty-three phone calls would take days, if not weeks, under the current caseload. Even shared with Daphne, he thought the job could take a week or more. Two or three weeks was not out of the question if they reached a bunch of answering machines. Shoswitz’s comments about his relationship with Daphne troubled him, stayed with him. He wanted to see it as exaggeration. Lies. He wanted to feel it in his heart as schoolhouse rumor, but it triggered fear instead—as if he’d been caught at something, and that bothered him most of all.

His blunt concentration passed the time quickly. The tea went cold. His butt hurt. All the little pleasantries of police work. City traffic had slacked off outside. He heard a distant whine of tires, but not the up-close-and-personal street traffic with which he hummed along by day. The place smelled of janitor’s disinfectant, a chemical lime smell that had a hint of melting rubber to it. The janitor had passed through unnoticed.

He glanced up at the clock—it was late; he owed Liz an apology. But before he picked up the phone to call her, he checked the clock a second time, recalling that Kawamoto had been hit in the daytime—extremely unusual. Sanchez had not, but for the moment he managed to separate the two cases and keep them that way. Back through his pile of reports he went. From the stack of twenty-three, he began pulling out reports, his heart racing as the new pile grew to six burglaries—the shared element: broad daylight.

He went through all hundred-and-something files again. This time, a total of nine reports made up his pile. Nine burglaries. Nine violations of private property in broad daylight, all with thousands of dollars of high-end electronics stolen. Big hits. Tricky hits. Some with home security devices apparently compromised. Well-orchestrated crimes. Practiced. Judging by Post-it notes and stapled attachments, Shoswitz’s detectives had apparently spotted some of these same similarities—these overlapping loose connections—had probably been developing leads when the Flu came along and sent them home to watch reruns. Now Boldt had them, and he suddenly felt like a runner being passed a baton.

There was no mention of white plastic ties. No assaults. Just nine pink sheets on missing electronics and some attached notes from bone-weary detectives. Police work.

The smell of burned coffee drifted down the hall. The janitor had forgotten to turn off the pot. Boldt did so, stretching his legs, appreciating the moment away from the eyestrain and the tight back. He yawned. He washed out the coffeepot and shut the door to the lounge to keep the smell contained. All the while, he kept a weary eye over one shoulder. He kept thinking of that blue brick lying on his living-room floor, his wife in a sea of glass and her strained voice choking out, “I thought it was a bomb.” He thought of his kids, his responsibility, his promises. He recalled Shoswitz’s warning that his intrusion into Burglary’s turf and open cases would not be appreciated. But Sanchez’s eyes came back to haunt him.

He would want to speak with all nine burglary victims; visit them in person, if possible. Daphne should accompany him, to read their answers. What they didn’t say, and how they didn’t say it, was often more important than what they put down for the record. He felt high, his spirits lifted by the discovery. Taken together, the reported crimes had been committed in broad daylight, in houses where the occupant had vacated the premises, in houses left locked, often with the home security system armed—with
not one
of the security systems announcing an intruder. Sanchez’s assault remained the anomaly—committed at nighttime, with the security system engaged, but the same high-end electronics stolen. Location was another possible tie—some of the burglaries had occurred in the North Precinct; others in the East or South, but always in white, upper-middle-class neighborhoods.

Boldt’s excitement grew as he sat back down. The cases looked damned good strung out in a line. Stacked in a pile. They made sense as a package. It was dark outside and nine o’clock. He had missed the family dinner at John and Kristin’s, had missed putting his kids to bed. Had worked through a date with his wife and family and friends. At 9:30 he called Liz and apologized. She sounded a little upset but said she missed him, which he reciprocated. He didn’t mention his partial victory on the case because it didn’t seem appropriate at the moment. Missing dinner was one thing in their family; missing the kids’ bedtimes another. He hated to disappoint Liz, even for a good cause.

He and Liz had formed their courtship around jazz, films of every kind, and late-night dinners filled with stories and laughter. He had thought her too pretty for him; she’d feared even early on that he was too much of a workaholic. They had married young and for years had kept the marriage that way as well. Careers and the pressure to consider a family had briefly driven Liz to an affair, which in turn had encouraged Boldt to give in to temptation with Daphne Matthews for a single night. But that original connection between husband and wife had never been severed—it remained strong, if strained. They rarely made it to movies as a couple any longer—it was all Disney videos and the occasional Ice Capades musical. Boldt sometimes played Happy Hour jazz piano as a distraction, but Liz stayed home with the kids. The connection remained. Sometimes it took the form of a late-night movie or a rented video, a shared bath, or love-making on the couch with the kids asleep. Sometimes, nothing more than a look or a tone of voice. A long talk. They practiced mutual tolerance, mutual support; they limped through the challenges thrown up by daily life, sometimes overcoming, sometimes only surviving. But on this night he could feel Liz attempting to be tolerant and not entirely succeeding.

“Call me in the morning,” she suggested, a little too quietly, but still gently.

“Sure will.”

“Maybe you can come over for eggs.”

“Maybe so,” he replied.

“You’ll keep working tonight,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Okay.” She didn’t sound overjoyed about that.

They said their good-byes and hung up.

With a monthly calendar laid out on the desk before him, Boldt charted the nine burglaries that seemed to have led up to Maria Sanchez’s tragedy. Sanchez—if part of that string—was number ten. Kawamoto, eleven. There was no particular day of the week to tie the events together, no exact hour, though all but the Sanchez crime had occurred during daylight; nor had there been a particular neighborhood. At first blush, a detective’s nightmare—circumstantial connections linking the crimes but lacking the hard evidence necessary to provide a trail to follow. Nonetheless, for Boldt the similarities remained substantial enough to impress him. He believed all eleven were connected, even if it wouldn’t be easy to prove it. He had yet to discover how the burglar selected or targeted the homes—and this was, of course, of primary importance to the possible identification of a suspect. Certainly the residences had not been chosen at random—not since they were loaded with high-end electronics. The connection between these targets—an insurance provider? a security company?—eluded him, but remained a top priority.

Or so he thought. Those priorities began to shift when he noticed a circled pair of initials on the top of one of the nine files. The initials crowded the box reserved for the investigating detective, for in this particular box two detectives had left their initials. The home belonged to a couple listed as Brooks-Gilman, living over in Queen Anne, a mitt-shaped neighborhood immediately north and west of downtown. The Brooks-Gilman case had been passed to a second detective, probably as a result of the Blue Flu. The circled initials were elegant and easily read:

MS

Maria Sanchez? he wondered, as he then noted the date on which the detective in question had accepted responsibility for the case. That date was just two days before the Sanchez assault. That exceeded the boundaries of acceptable coincidence. MS. Maria Sanchez. Had to be.

“I
don’t see what we’re after,” Daphne said, hurrying to keep up with Boldt as he ascended the hospital stairs.

“Her connection to the Brooks-Gilman burglary investigation,” he answered.

“I understand that much,” she said, a little miffed that he wouldn’t give her at least some credit. “I read the memo!” Boldt had circulated an interdepartmental E-mail requesting any information on all cases Sanchez had been working prior to her assault. “But how does that get us any closer to the thief? So she took over some cases after the walkout happened. We all did. So what?”

Boldt didn’t answer her. Not one person had responded to his E-mail, again reminding him that the Flu had sympathizers still on the job. He felt disheartened, even defeated.

Daphne matched strides with him in the long hallway. “Lou, she’s my case. It’s only right you tell me what you’re thinking.”

“Shoswitz said his boys would not appreciate any of us doing their work for them. The implication being pretty obvious.”

“We’re considered scabs,” she gasped, “just because we accept some assignment passed to us by Dispatch?”

“Maybe Sanchez was. Maybe they got pissed off at her for crossing over into their department. The only way a strike is effective is when the work doesn’t get done. Maybe I got that brick through my window because I’m supposed to stay in Homicide, not take cases from other departments.”