The Body of David Hayes (31 page)

“What if I’d gotten the call last night?” she asked over a salad at a sandwich shop after church.

“You didn’t.”

“But if I had?”

He shrugged off the question. “You roll the dice, you take your chances.”

“We weren’t ready.”

“The costume was delivered to my office late Friday,” he said. “I checked,” he said, when she gave him an inquisitive look. “After we talked last night, I thought I’d better check.”

“So why’s it so important?” she asked. “The costume? Or aren’t you going to tell me?”

“You have enough on your mind.”

“That’s a lousy excuse.”

He stabbed his salad. A little salty for his palate. “Too much anchovy in the dressing.”

She eyed him across the table, annoyed by his avoidance. “So we were ready,” she asked, adding, “if I’d gotten the call?”

He said, “The complication was no delivery on Sunday. I had to find a way around that. John’s gone to help us out. Then again, maybe it won’t be you at all. Maybe you’re a
diversion, nothing more. Maybe Phillip is inside the bank at this very moment making the wire transfer.”

“You’d have heard, wouldn’t you?” She sounded deeply concerned, and he realized that she was already exhibiting some hostage traits, involving herself emotionally to the point that if someone took her place it registered as disappointment instead of relief.

“I would have,” he confirmed, worried about her once again. His concern came in waves, but he noticed a tendency for the troughs to run lower as the minutes ticked on. “If the call had come early, my plan wouldn’t have flown,” he admitted. By prior arrangement, they both knew what came next. Liz was to throw herself into it, while Special Ops looked on in befuddled confusion. If all went well, for a brief few minutes Daphne Matthews would play his wife. There had been a time when he would have welcomed that thought. He now understood far better the pain such fantasy represented.

“What are you thinking?” she asked. “You’ve gone silent over there.”

For over six years he had kept a secret, and now it seemed there was no room for such artifice. Her past had been stripped off her without choice, dogs tearing at the hem of her clothing until exposed. The process had allowed Boldt to remain sanctimonious, when in fact he had his secrets too. “The woman I slept with…the one-night stand when we were separated—”

“I don’t begrudge you that,” she said, interrupting. “I was running around with David. You were hurt. We’ve been through this.”

“It was Daphne,” he said, identifying his partner for the first time. Crushing Liz, judging by the surprised look on
her face. She gently placed her fork down onto the edge of her plate, some salad still attached, the dressing now dripping onto the table. Too salty, he thought, as she quietly excused herself from the table and walked toward the rest rooms.

A full ten minutes passed before she returned solemnly to the table, her face and neck glowing red as they did after a hard cry. Boldt had paid. She stood there by the table, never making any move toward the chair. “Ready?” she asked. She turned toward the door before he answered, and he followed, resisting her effort to make him feel bad for telling the truth. In his mind there was a time and a place for everything, and this had been both. He felt he needed to explain Daphne’s willingness to go along with this, to put herself and her job at risk; he felt obligated to be as honest with her as she had been with him, and there was just no good time for such revelations. They came when they came, and his had come in a sandwich shop after church and the call for redemption in the beautiful hymns. The other thought on his mind, the one he dared not share with her, was that he might be in jail by the end of the night, and that if he were arrested, the one person he could count on to fight for him was Daphne Matthews, and that Liz should understand the connection they all three shared. The truth could hurt no one.
Our strength is not lessened by giving utterance to truth
. One of the readers had read that line during the service and it had stuck in Boldt’s craw as he had realized all the pain she carried for bearing the burden of her truth, while his own truth remained guarded. No more. He had not said this to wound her, despite what she might think. He told her because he had a bad feeling
about the events to come, and he needed to bare all before their arrival.

She kept to their bedroom for the first few hours of their return to the house, and he left her there to deal with it.

She ventured out only once, stopped in the doorway, and said to him, “It’s all right. What you did. Telling me, I mean. It’s my problem, not yours.”

“If you believe that, we’re in trouble.”

“If you believe we’re not in trouble already, you’re fooling yourself,” she fired back. “Danny Foreman said I’d get a call Sunday evening. Tonight. That the call would arrange for me to pick up David’s software, that I’d make the transfer and the money would go to a government account.”

Boldt had expected the conversation to remain on his brief affair with Daphne Matthews—that Liz would make him pay for that. But now he realized she was looking for a way out of that morass while at the same time attempting to remain clear about what was expected of her. He picked up her lead and explained, “Danny is the one who’ll be making the call. Danny must be the one with the software. I’m guessing he was the one who ran me on my goose chase. The Palm Pilot—when he was talking to you—wireless Internet access. He was following my every move in the car that night. According to Geiser, there is no deal between him and Danny Foreman, which means either Geiser is lying as Danny said he would, or Danny is pulling a Lone Ranger in order to make these arrests and recover the money. The third possibility is that Danny’s planning an early retirement by keeping the money for himself. I don’t want to believe that. The one who got burned by Hayes’s disappearance is Svengrad—and he’s also the one with the long reach, the one to watch, which is why he
directed that you would be using his account for the transfer and no one else’s.”

“But
what
account? Where’s the number? He should have given it to me by now.”

“He can’t. He knows Pahwan would stick some electronic glue onto that account number and that he, Svengrad, would never be free of us. He’s too smart for that.” Boldt asked, “So the question is: How and when will he get the account number to you?”

“And why has he waited until now?”

Boldt felt a flash of heat pulse through him, as if he’d accidentally grabbed a live wire. Past conversations percolated through him like groundwater rising during a flood. He answered, “Because he knows you aren’t in the bank… that you aren’t anywhere near that server.” It hit him so clearly—it explained so much.

“He’s watching me? Having me watched?” she said, suddenly looking left to right as if expecting to catch someone staring.

The tumblers fell into place and the truth unlocked for him. He felt an immense sense of relief, wondering at the role of random chance and whether he or Liz would have reached this same place, made this discovery, had he not confessed to her.

He continued by saying, “Listen carefully to what I’m about to tell you.”

SUNDAY AT 5 P.M. BOLDT’S
cell phone rang as if he’d set an alarm clock. He and Liz were sitting in the living room, the shades drawn, she on the couch, he in a chair, she pretending to thumb through a catalog, he monitoring the surveillance radio channel via an ear bud. For the past thirty minutes no words had been exchanged, as the clock moved toward the bank reception.

A thirty-year-old female officer, whose name Boldt had already forgotten, remained within earshot at the kitchen table. Liz continued scanning gift items as he answered the call, didn’t succumb to the gravity of the moment. Boldt terminated the call and said to her, “There’s a taxi out front. The driver’s on his way up to the door with a box.”

Liz checked her own phone, then glanced up at Boldt before he turned his attention to the kitchen where the officer was already receiving orders over the secure walkie-talkie.

Boldt jumped up and waved Liz into the bedroom and the backup officer out of sight, cradling his handgun behind his back and moving toward the front door. All for show.
Liz knew this taxi’s arrival was Lou’s doing. He waited for the doorbell to chime, gave it an appropriate pause, and opened the door. The cab driver sounded half Indian, half Arab. “Happy birthday to the Missus,” he said. The box was wrapped in a flower-print paper, torn and untaped on one side. The driver explained, “I don’t deliver nothing without seeing what’s inside. But it’s okay. Only clothes. Forty bucks for a five-dollar fare, what the hell?” He added, “There’s a note,” pointing out the unaddressed white envelope taped to the top.

Boldt stepped back, leaving the door ajar, and told the driver to open the box. “Empty the contents.”

“Listen, Mister.”

Boldt displayed his shield and repeated himself.

The driver tore off the paper and nervously upended the box. A pile of black and white clothing spilled out. Boldt instructed him to shake out the clothing, which the driver then did. Boldt returned the gun to its holster, tipped the man ten dollars, and attempted to send him away, at which point the driver said he’d been instructed to wait for the fare.

“To take her where?” Boldt inquired.

The man shrugged. “I wasn’t told. Listen, you want me to take off—”

“No.” Boldt put on his best face of confusion for the sake of the backup officer. He sent the driver to wait in the cab and then pushed the door shut. He held up the first of what turned out to be several oddly shaped pieces of clothing. A nun’s habit.

Boldt locked the door, called the Command van and suggested they double-check the cab number to verify it
was legitimate. He quickly filled in Riz on the little he knew of the situation, and promised “more to come.”

Boldt carried the box and the note into the living room, summoned Liz and the officer, and placed everything on the coffee table. Boldt handed Liz the note that he himself had printed out.

The envelope was not sealed. She slipped out what turned out to be a movie ticket.

“This is them,” she said, again for the sake of the plainclothes officer.

“Yeah. We can still call this off,” he offered, as she sized the clothing.

“They don’t gain anything from hurting me as I leave the house. They need me inside the bank. Willing to cooperate.”

The plan called for Officer Malone, already dressed identically to Liz by prior arrangement, to switch out and take her place ahead of Liz’s arrival at the bank’s merger party. There were several contingencies available to accomplish this. At present Malone remained on her stomach in the back of Liz’s minivan in the Boldt garage. That could change as needed, but those changes would take time and Boldt had the advantage now. Special Ops had expected a phone call with an account number. They’d gotten much more.

Boldt heard over the radio that the cab was legitimate. He checked the window and confirmed it remained parked at the curb, engine running.

“No minivan,” she said.

“Yeah, I know,” Boldt said.

“So we’ll have to do the switch somewhere else.”

“Right,” he confirmed, making sure the woman officer overheard all this.

Liz moved into the bedroom and donned the nun’s habit over her existing clothing, a smart black cocktail dress, sheer pantyhose, and a pair of low heels. The officer pointed out she’d have more mobility if she lost the heels but that Malone wore the same shoes and so she’d better keep them on. Liz agreed.

Boldt hung up from a cell phone call. “It’s a sing-along, like
Rocky Horror
. Costumes. Twenty bucks a seat.”

Trying to make light, Liz said, “I’d make a better Maria, don’t you think?”

The officer reminded her that her bra contained a tracking device and assured her that they’d never be far away. Husband and wife met eyes—a covert exchange that the officer was not allowed to see.

Liz added a starched white section over her shoulders. Boldt helped secure it in place with Velcro.

Liz donned a Flying Nun headdress. He found it odd that a few pieces of clothing could add so much innocence and virtue. Her face looked peaceful and beautiful, not a strand of hair showing. Even as pale as she’d been lately, next to the stark white fabric her skin looked Italian olive, healthy and vibrant. All lies.

They met eyes in the mirror. Boldt forced a smirk.

“If you’re thinking of making a joke, don’t.”

He grinned and nodded. “You’ll be fine.”

Boldt answered his cell phone and heard Danny Foreman’s voice. Foreman occupied his Cadillac Escalade, parked down the street from the Boldt home, riding alone. Boldt walked into the living room to take the call in private, knowing that at this same moment, Homicide detective Mark Heiman was at On-Sat, keeping track of the location of Foreman and his car. Boldt still didn’t trust Foreman despite Hayes having no recollection of who had beaten him.

Foreman asked, “What the hell is going on?”

“Some kind of attempt to spoil our game plan, I imagine.” Boldt explained the movie ticket and the nun’s costume.