The Art of Deception (45 page)

“It’s like a fucking dating service.”

“So you were
there
that night,” LaMoia pressed, wondering how far he could push this. The thought occurred to him to escape from the car while he still had both legs, both arms. Then he saw that bloated body floating facedown in the black water, and he stayed put.

“I hung around out back, yeah. Fifteen, twenty minutes.”

“This is gospel?”

“Okay … truth told, I’d been there a couple nights before looking for an opening. I got a little hung up on this one.” Prair gripped the wheel tightly. The power steering mechanism under the hood cried out loudly if he moved the wheel even an inch. Prair didn’t seem to hear this.

“If we’re gonna sort this out,” LaMoia said, “we gotta have all the cards.”

Prair nodded. He’d started the process—he knew there was a logical conclusion to it. “Okay, so that particular night, that Saturday night, I’m doing a drive-by as they’re coming back to his place.”

“What time is this?”

“Little after ten. I’m thinking, I’ll let her see the cruiser, catch up alongside them at a light. Surprised the shit out of her, I want to tell you. But at least she knew I was there now. She knew there was help available if she needed it. I hang out in the cruiser, the back of his place. Ten forty-five, maybe eleven o’clock, she climbs out onto the fire escape and lights up a cancer stick. I’m thinking she’s signaling me, right? So I get out of the car. I got my juices going—I’m thinking it’s show time. But as I’m coming around the cruiser, all of a sudden she turns around up there, and I see she’s on the phone, the fucking phone! Then, like seconds later, I see this guy climbing the fire escape toward her, and now I got my piece out. Who the fuck is this? He’s got to have been hanging around just like I have. Fuck if the creep doesn’t wave to her on his way up, and she waves back. He sits down a couple steps below her—like at crotch level, right?—and the two of them start chatting it up, and I’m out of there.”

“You saw this guy?”

“Saw how? Not like that. No fucking way. He’s a phantom is all. But me, I’m gone. The rendezvous she’s having ain’t with me, so I’m the fuck out of there. Just wanna make sure they
don’t make the cruiser on the way out. And they don’t, so I’m good.” He paused. “Good until she’s found fucking bobbing for apples Tuesday night, and me, I’m right in the middle of it.” He faced LaMoia. “Can I pick ‘em or what?”

LaMoia let some skepticism show. “That’s the way you want to call this?”

“That’s the way it went down, LaMoia. Swear to God. But think about it. What was I supposed to do? There was no way … I mean,
no way,
I was going to detail any of this to you guys up there on that bridge. You fucking kidding me?” He mimicked himself. “‘Hey, by the way, LaMoia, I was scouting this peach the other night. Watching her smoke a cancer in her fucking panties on the fire escape.’ What the fuck is that about? Then, later, what was I supposed to say, ‘By the way, I may have forgotten to mention …’?”

“Wouldn’t have been too cool.”

“No shit. And these girls. I’m already down in the books on that. You know that. Something like this gets out…” He looked over at LaMoia, the pall of realization taking hold. “You understand, John,” use of the first name did not come easy for Prair, “this cannot get out.”

As the extent of his confession began to sink in, for Prair, LaMoia calculated the time needed to escape the front seat—the doors were power locked, necessitating several steps.

“I mean … in terms of helping you out… that’s been bugging me, sure it has. I’ve got a duty to help out, and I know my duty.” Prair was talking to himself now, and that bothered LaMoia all the more. “I should have said something early on, okay? I’m good with that. But you can see my side of it.”

“Of course I can.” It didn’t sound convincing, even to him.

“Something like this, and I’m done. I’m running a cash booth in a mall parking garage. Give me a fucking break.”

“There’s definitely room to work this right,” LaMoia said.

“You give anyone your source on this, and I’m fucked. You can see that, right?”

“Oh, yeah,” LaMoia said, “we’re good on that.”

“How good?”

“Let me get something straight,” LaMoia said. “You saw this other guy, the one on the fire escape, but not any kind of good look.”

“I got the hell out of there. I told you.” Prair paused, considering this. “You’re thinking it was the brother, this creep bothering Daphne.”

LaMoia said nothing. He didn’t like hearing Prair calling Matthews by her first name. He felt incredibly protective at that moment.

Prair said, “I’m good with saying I saw him, if that’s what you need, if that would help your present situation. If maybe you and I could do a little business here. Maybe you see clear to get around directly involving me in this.”

Did this clown hear himself? LaMoia wondered. He was dealing with a pathological liar, a man who’d say anything to a woman to get himself laid, anything to a fellow cop to keep his record clean. LaMoia said, “My opinion, Nate: You’ve got some issues here need working out.”

“Issues,” Prair agreed, nodding slightly. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you.”

“We’re gonna want to go over this again,” LaMoia said.

“Not officially, we’re not. No fucking way. You can forget about it. You call me in, and I’m making like Sergeant Shultz. You’re gonna see my guild rep’s ugly ass. Me? I’ll be swigging tall boys over at the Cock and Bull.”

LaMoia’s right hand found the door lock button—he kept the move as subtle as possible. For him the air heated up a few hundred degrees. He popped the button, the loud click like a
muted gunshot. “You know, Nate, shit like this works out for the best.”

“You bring me in, and I’ve got me a bad case of laryngitis.”

“SPD and KCSO, we’re talking apples and oranges here,” LaMoia reminded. “One hand doesn’t always wash the other. We put you down as an informer, and we can block your identity.” It didn’t work like that, but a guy like Prair thought he knew more about detective work than he actually did.

A cell phone rang. LaMoia reached for his, only to realize it was Prair’s ringing. The cop answered the phone. “The fuck you say!” His eyes tracked to LaMoia, and for a moment the detective believed he might be the topic of discussion. Had Sheila Hill jumped the gun with her phone calls? Had Prair just been alerted he was under investigation for something that showed in one of his ticket books nearly two years earlier? “Maybe you will, maybe you won’t,” he said. He ended the call, studied LaMoia out of the side of his eyes as if about to say something. He then looked out the windshield at the appealing skyline. LaMoia wished he could have enjoyed the moment. Prair said, “We’re all done here, Cool. I gotta roll.”

LaMoia felt the relief loosen his muscles and allow him to move. For a moment, he’d been frozen in the seat. “We’ll work this through, Nate. No sweat.”

“Just remember what I told you: I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine. But if you turn Dick Tracy on me, my memory’s gone to shit.”

“Got it,” LaMoia said, managing to open the car door and connect with the security of the sidewalk. He fingered the lump of the tape recorder in his coat pocket.

“You want me to drop you, it’s on the way.”

“I’m good,” LaMoia said.

“Whatever.”

LaMoia slammed the door shut. His left thumb turned off the tape recorder as Prair pulled into traffic. It was raining. But like everyone else in this city, LaMoia didn’t feel it.

A little over twenty minutes later, having headed directly back to Public Safety and winded from hurrying down the hall, LaMoia knocked on the office’s open door, expecting to see Matthews behind her desk. Ironically, Matthews understood Prair better than anyone—she’d freak when she heard what he had on tape. His shoulders slouched in disappointment and he turned to the secretary pool. “Matthews have a meeting or something? Where can I find her?”

“Lost time,” the closest of the secretaries answered, glancing up to the grid on the wall.

“What are you
talking
about?” he said, his voice noticeably louder.

“Lost time, Sergeant.”

“She’s on a wire. She’s under surveillance,” he said, though he wasn’t sure. He didn’t want her out there unprotected.

The snotty secretary answered, “So how hard can it be to find her?” She mumbled under her breath something about his being a detective after all, and the woman next to her grinned with the comment.

LaMoia said sternly, “Make some calls and find her. I’m on my cell phone.” He started off at a walk and broke into a run as he avoided the elevator and took to the stairs. He had her mobile number ringing in his ear by the time he reached the fifth floor. Her voice mail answered. What was with that?

He called Special Ops dispatch from his office cubicle. They’d heard nothing about Matthews leaving the building. “You check the ladies’ room?” the dispatcher asked.

LaMoia mumbled back at the man, incoherent. She wasn’t in the bathroom—he knew this in his gut. Something, someone, had drawn her out of the building, and LaMoia was bound and determined to find out what was going on. He’d find Boldt, he’d page the day-shift squad detectives to call him back. He’d check with the lab, the MEs. Anyone else he could think of.

He’d broken into a clammy sweat. His eyes stung; his palms were damp.

What the hell was happening to him?

In addition to the pink telephone memo that had inappropriately interrupted the interrogation of Vanderhorst, Matthews found a voice mail on her cell phone as well. “Miss Matthews?” Margaret’s warbling voice was itself enough to make Matthews feel sick. “I’m … I’ve screwed up, pretty bad.
Real bad.
You said to call.
So … so I’m calling.”
No address, no phone number. Matthews dug around in her jeans pocket and came up with the folded memo.
Thank God,
she thought, glad she’d saved it.

There wasn’t any address to speak of, only the notation, “above Mario’s.” She pulled out the phone book and started thumbing through the yellow pages. She’d never felt right about Margaret’s mention of a place to stay. A roof overhead was one thing, but the baby needed prenatal care, square meals, doctor visits. A flophouse above a pizza parlor? Was it a crack house, a cum shop, a shooting gallery? She found it finally in the white pages: Mario’s Pizza. Time to move. She felt awful for having been out of touch with the girl, and especially for being unavailable for the past sixty minutes. With these girls, every minute counted. On the street, a life could change in a matter of seconds.

“Lost time,” she informed the civilian administrative assistant who managed the seventh-floor secretary pool—and whereas the expression meant the time clock stopped for lower-rank
personnel, for lieutenants and above it meant their offices would be vacant, their phones picked up by voice mail. The assistant slid a thumb-worn in/out marker on a wall poster that tracked such things, and returned to her typing.

Matthews’s hand hovered over the phone on this assistant’s desk as she debated calling Boldt, two floors down. The Van-derhorst interrogation had gone well—better than expected—the two of them finding a mutually inclusive rhythm that to Boldt must have felt like a pair of musicians trading riffs. She owed him a report and knew he wouldn’t fancy her ducking out of the house until that homework was turned in. There was a series of psych tests to schedule; outside experts would have to be consulted to either support or challenge her professional evaluation. Each of these efforts required reports be written as well. The complications of multijurisdictional warrants caused by a four-state killing spree would consume over half the detectives on CAP, a good deal of SID’s resources, and virtually all of her own time for the next several weeks. One man and his crimes would put a piece of SPD at a virtual standstill.

She tried LaMoia instead, the phone switching through to voice mail on the first ring, meaning he was either on the line or out of the office. She hadn’t seen him since breakfast—his showing up at the loft with Blue on his heels and a bag of hot sesame bagels under his arm.

She left him a message that she was running an errand to help Margaret. She left the name of the pizza shop in SoDo. Her final attempt on the phone found Bobbie Gaynes at her desk.

“Would you mind taking an hour of lost time as a favor?” she asked.

“Name it, Lieutenant.”

“Take a ride with me? I could use some backup. A young girl from the Shelter—pregnant out to here—just left me a
message that she and the baby are in trouble. She’s shacked up above this pizza joint, and I’m thinking if she’s got a room, then there’s a pimp or a dealer involved—you know what these girls get into.” She added, “Two of us, that’s better odds.” She smiled, trying to win Gaynes over. If this grew into anything more than a quick favor, Lou would turn it into a surveillance ops.

“Give me five minutes. I’ll meet you in the garage.”

Driving south of the Safe a few minutes later, Gaynes asked, “Anything more I should know, Lieutenant?”

Matthews briefly explained her relationship with Margaret. She said, “I promised Lou I’d stay on the wire, but honestly, I don’t want dispatch monitoring this conversation, because I also made a promise to the girl, weeks ago, that I’d respond as a woman, not as a cop.”