The Art of Deception (48 page)

With no idea where she was headed, she nonetheless knew where she was, and this tiny seed of knowledge strengthened her, emboldened her to begin the task of breaking him down, piece by piece.

“This is kind of fun,” she said strongly, gathering in her strength and forcing it out her lungs. When the flashlight flickered away from her, she dropped a gold stud earring onto the dirt floor.
Another crumb,
she hoped.

Walker stumbled behind her, and she mentally marked one down in her column. The first of such marks. Hopefully, not the last.

LaMoia stared at the rear bumper of KCSO patrol car #89, the phalanx of police and emergency vehicles only a block behind him. The pregnant girl was critical. Gaynes was conscious but in extreme pain, and was being carted off to Emergency. At that moment, he might have believed Nathan Prair had abducted Matthews, except for Gaynes having told him it was Walker. Now he came to believe the obvious: that Prair had either responded to the same cry for help from the girl that Matthews had received, or that he’d intercepted the 510, the SPD radio call for backup, and had responded in hopes of rescuing Matthews himself.

“Over my dead body,”
LaMoia heard himself say aloud.

He searched the car and found it locked. He searched the alley and found nothing but trash, a few needles, and the rotting carcass of a dead cat. The buildings off this alley were secure as well. The more he studied the situation, the more he believed Prair had simply stashed the car here so it might avoid being seen. He had wanted to buy himself a head start, and that pissed off LaMoia all the more. It would be just like Prair to observe something like this going down, only to realize too late that he’d better
do
something.

LaMoia left the alley, returning into the street, and carefully searched the block back toward Mario’s Pizza and the tenement that housed it, now off to his left. LaMoia knew Special Ops
CO Chatwin to be a Neanderthal incapable of thinking outside the box. Matthews, in all her prescience, had nailed this on the head. Chatwin had his ERT troops and a traffic helicopter searching the surface streets—an urban commando exercise he was both familiar with and comfortable in exercising. LaMoia’s brief plea to designate a unit to search for an access to the Underground had left him snubbed. “What, you think this is fucking Disneyland, Sergeant?”

“The kidnapper has an established history of subterranean access.” LaMoia tried his best to make this sound official. But he couldn’t maintain his composure once Chatwin dismissed the suggestion. LaMoia said, “With all due respect, he’s a fucking troglodyte, sir. We’ve got him directly linked to at least two different areas of the Underground beneath the city.”

“What, the tourist place?” Chatwin asked, and LaMoia realized that any attempt at an explanation was not worth the wind.

“You’re looking in the wrong place,” he tried, one final time.

“Process of elimination, Sergeant. I’ll entertain your suggestion, but we work this my way first.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’m CO,” he reminded, a little miffed by LaMoia’s tone.

“Yes, sir.”

“If you want to be of help, get in your car and log in with dispatch. We could use you.”

“I don’t want to be of help, sir.”

Checking the street carefully now, LaMoia wanted to avoid another encounter with Chatwin at all costs. He held to his own. Another alley up ahead caught his attention. The ERT guys had rushed through this area like a tornado. They’d been looking for an abductor and hostage. LaMoia was looking for something else entirely: access to an escape route Walker might have used. Matthews had labeled the man an organized personality, and that was good enough for him. She’d foreseen her own abduction.
Who was he going to trust? He intended to work the scene methodically, as he’d been trained to do by Boldt, one of the best in the business.

He rounded the corner into that next alley, wondering all of a sudden where the hell Boldt was. Matthews as a hostage and the Sarge nowhere to be seen? The guy would have to be either locked up or dead to be kept from this crime scene.

His eyes lighted on that white fabric tab from fifteen yards away, the glare of his penlight illuminating the improbable color in a world of mud brown and ash gray. Perfect, pure, white. It called out as if it had yelled at him. He headed to it like a bloodhound—the thought of which made him wonder if the K-9 unit had been called up. He bent and retrieved it.

Victoria’s Secret, size medium.

There was no sound, no night air, no sirens, no radio squawks, no movement in his universe, only his trembling fingers and that white fabric tag clasped so tightly.

Debating whether or not to call for backup, he looked quickly around for something with which to lift that manhole cover. She had made it plain to him that if she went missing, she trusted him to do what was right. Chatwin seemed certain to bungle this, putting Matthews at risk. Backup could wait until he knew the full situation.

Victoria’s Secret. He would tease her about that when he found her. And he
would
find her, he told himself. He had to. It was the only way he knew. John LaMoia
always
got the girl.

“Where’d all the water go?” Boldt asked Iberson and Babcock. She wore blue jeans, a brown sweater, and rubber boots. Iberson was dressed for the ball game in tennis shoes, khakis, and a red thin shell that zipped down the front. The two looked back at him blankly. A double dragon swept past them, lifting dust and sand and grit in its wake. The bus tunnel’s oddly sterile mercury vapor lighting turned everyone’s skin a bluish green.

Boldt said, “The water main. All that water… enough to drown a man. So where’d it go? Where’d it end up?” He said to Babcock, “It was damp but not flooded in that lower level.”

Iberson answered, “I told you, it came out our wall vents.”

“Some of it, sure. But all of it?” Boldt asked.

“Enough to shut us down,” Iberson reminded.

Babcock understood him. “What prompted this?” she asked.

He wasn’t interested in such chitchat. “We have an officer wounded. Another’s missing. A girl, a young woman, is in critical condition and probably won’t make it. I’m up against a clock here. The guy I’m after got hold of that key on that lower level. That suggests access that we don’t know about. The water from that broken main, it went somewhere. And not just here, into this tunnel. Most of it
had
to have gone down to that lower level—that’s just physics. So what happened to it? It should have been a swimming pool down there.”

Babcock lost a shade. She nodded. “You’re right. Of course, you’re right.”

“Is anybody going to fill me in?” an irritated Iberson asked.

Boldt had left Iberson behind, focusing now only on the academic. “But where? Another level? A sewer system? An aquifer?” He had trouble getting the words out, the bubble in his chest from Matthews missing too big to swallow away.

He picked up a flicker in her eyes. “What?” he asked. She shook her head. “Anything,” he stressed. “He’s got our officer underground somewhere. I’d guarantee you that.”

“Rumors is all,” she said, her throat dry, her words raspy.

Boldt nodded furiously. “I’ll take rumors.”

“There are old references to a smugglers’ tunnel. Supposedly, it connected speakeasies and the hotels to the waterfront during Prohibition. Dug by the Chinese. Controlled by the Chinese mafia in those days,” said the historian.

“The International District?” He thought of Mama Lu, the very woman who had set him on this quest in the first place. Matthews had gone missing within a stone’s throw of the I.D. “Connecting this place to the I.D.?”

“I’m just saying it’s possible. Not probable. Not even
likely.”

Boldt yanked out his cell phone and then shouted at Iberson. “I’ve got to get topside. I’ve got to make a phone call.”

Iberson flagged down the next bus that approached. Boldt and Babcock hit the surface streets less than two minutes later.

The low tunnel bent around a turn, a good deal of the wooden posts and beams—old railroad ties in all probability—badly rotted. Matthews struggled to fight off the fear that wanted to own her.

Walker stopped her, instructing her to stand out of his way. They hadn’t traveled terribly far, the going slow. She watched as his fading flashlight caught the edge of a large hole in the earthen wall. Walker stepped up to it and peered inside, and she came away with the sense that it was familiar to him.

She couldn’t see into that hole, but she prayed silently that he wasn’t going to make her go through it. It looked like one of those places a person never came out of. It failed to give her any sense of hope that it might lead to an escape route.

Walker turned and faced her, shining the light first onto her, then directing it onto himself, enabling her to see him. In a childish tone that sent shivers through her, he said, “It’s important to me you know how much I care.”

“Ferrell—”

He shushed her and said, “To understand the extent to which I’m prepared to go to help you. You found the room. It’s why …” His voice tapered off.

She worried he couldn’t hold a thought, that the synapses might be misfiring in his brain, either as a result of stress or some organic malfunction that she’d failed to identify in the
course of her contact with him. That face-to-face contact had, in fact, been precious little. “Why what?” she asked.

“Well… it’s the purpose of all this,” he explained.

“So if we’ve already accomplished that purpose, Ferrell… maybe we should head up topside together.”

“It’s way beyond that now, isn’t it?” He tried to smile, but his unwilling face would only pinch further, into a snarl. “Come look. It’s for
you.”

“No, thank you.”

“Come. Look.” His hand went to the butt of the knife, and Matthews felt herself moving, as if on the ends of marionette strings.

“I’d like to go back up to the street now,” she said, pressing for his cooperation in a period where he acted at least somewhat conciliatory toward her.

He positioned her in front of that dark hole in the wall. It looked as if a course of water had ripped loose this rent some years before. The sickening smile he managed should have forewarned her. He turned slowly, training that yellow light with him.

Sitting on a natural throne carved out of the mud like some kind of shrine was a decapitated corpse of a man in a brown uniform. Matthews cried out loudly and jumped back, as the flashlight caught up to the head of Nathan Prair that sat in his own lap, his big hands coddling it.

“For you,” Walker said. “He was bothering you, right? I saw you two outside the Shelter that night we were supposed to meet. I saw you push him. Him grab you …” His voice trailed off as he realized she was upset with this, not pleased as he’d intended. “You were … upset… with him.”

Walker had been watching her outside the Shelter on the night they’d agreed to meet—the night Nathan Prair had arrived unexpectedly, a result, no doubt, of a phone call or message
from Walker himself. She realized he must have followed her back to LaMoia’s—probably knowing about the loft already—must have gone through that window to leave the key as she’d taken Blue for a walk. He’d been playing her all along like a fisherman with a prize catch.

Her vision zoomed in on the faint edge of that light in a staccato way that brought everything closer to her in a series of jerky movements: Prair’s service pistol was still snapped into the holster on his work belt, now, just to the right of his ear. Next to it, an unmarked black can of pepper spray. Next to that, a Maglite. Walker, who had shown no interest in Gaynes’s weapon, had clearly ignored Prair’s as well. It took every ounce of strength and composure she could summon, but she stepped forward, toward the shrine. “I was upset with him,” she said. “You’re right about that.” She made a point of making contact with Walker and allowing a smile to grace her lips. “You did this for me?”

Walker nodded, but his eyes ticked back and forth distrustfully as he sought out hers, and she wondered which Walker had come out to play, the one with the boyish crush on her or the knife-wielding woman killer?

She edged yet another step closer to both Walker and that hole, wondering if she could bring herself to dive in there with that severed head, reach the gun, and still have enough time to present it as a threat. The air tasted metallic and smelled putrid.

“I wanted to help,” Walker said.

“It’s not what I expected.”

“I love surprises,” he said.

Gooseflesh chased up her arms and down her spine.

She said, “Do you? Oh, good.” With that, she recoiled, wound up, and then leaned forward, driving her weight into the shove that lifted Walker off his feet and sent him flying. She dived to her left, into that hole, slipped and scrambled up the muddy slope, facedown next to Prair’s severed head as she
fumbled with the holster’s snap, grabbed hold of the weapon, racked the slide to chamber a round, thumbed the safety off, and rolled. Walker was on his feet, at the mouth of the hole, as she squeezed the trigger.
Click.
The trigger then stuck. She frantically tried to clear the jammed round as Walker took hold of her ankles and pulled, dropping her flat onto her back. Prair’s head rolled off of his lap and up onto her chest, and she threw it aside, screaming. She felt the weight of the gun then, and she knew: Its magazine was missing. Walker had emptied the gun. Walker had baited her, yet again.

He clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth, shaming her. “Someone’s been a bad girl,” he said.

She lunged for the can of pepper spray in Prair’s belt.

“Empty,” Walker called out.

She threw the weapon at him, but he deflected it.

“I’ve never liked guns,” he said. “I feel much safer with this.” He held the curved gray blade between them.

Bloodstained and mud-covered, Matthews took a moment to regain her breath. She had disassociated from him, a conscious effort on her part that now would not come without consequences. He had tested her, and she had been suckered into it. And she had failed.