The Body of David Hayes (29 page)

“You found Foreman,” Boldt stated. “Tonight, I mean.”

“Yes. Geiser was persuaded to make a phone call for us. Foreman took the bait.”

“Foreman gave you the location of the warehouse—where to find Hayes. And your guys pursued it.”

“Yes.”

“Who tortured Hayes out at the cabin, if not you?”

“Not me,” Alekseevich confirmed. “I don’t know who.”

“Someone else you work with?”

“No. It would have been me,” the man said, indirectly confirming he’d done the others.

Regardless of gaining some clarity, Boldt felt pushed more deeply into the labyrinth rather than finding a clear way out. He then asked the question that LaMoia had posed to him, converting it into a statement. “Paul Geiser is on Svengrad’s payroll.”

Alekseevich hesitated, looking over at Olson.

She said, “You’re dipping into privileged territory, Lieutenant.”

“It’s not privileged because it’s not on the record, Detective.”

She nodded back to Alekseevich. “Perhaps,” the Russian said. “That’s not good enough.”

“It is best I can do. I have seen this man, Geiser, only but once, out at the Whidbey house.” Alekseevich was slowly working away from plain answers, and Olson, to her credit, was making no attempt to stop him.

Boldt asked Olson about the Whidbey house and she informed him this was the Svengrad residence, a palatial estate on the southwest shore of Whidbey Island.

Boldt said, “Geiser was supposed to help get the injunction lifted—get Svengrad’s caviar out of federal impound.”

The man shrugged. “I do not know.”

Olson explained, “Malina happened to see Geiser in a hall over at the U.S. Attorney’s Office during a grand jury prep. It was a fluke—a dedicated elevator stopped and opened on the wrong floor. Malina looks out and recognizes Geiser from seeing him at Svengrad’s estate. We never connected the dots any further than you just did, assuming the meeting had something to do with the caviar, but we’ve been careful to shelter ourselves from the prosecuting
attorney’s office. That’s why we’re dealing with the U.S. Attorney’s Office instead—because of this thing.”

This turned Boldt’s world upside down. He now believed that for the past several hours he’d had Foreman’s and Geiser’s roles reversed. None of this fully ruled out that Hayes had been hidden by Foreman as part of a cooperative deal between the state’s Bureau of Criminal Investigation and Geiser’s office, as Foreman had told Liz. It seemed entirely possible that the two agencies might have discovered Alekseevich’s informant status and wanted to protect the “ownership” of the Hayes case by keeping Alekseevich all to themselves. Turf wars could make monsters out of a common investigation.

Even if it proved true that Geiser had taken a bribe, or was still on Svengrad’s payroll, it might involve nothing more than working on Hayes’s parole and the injunction on the caviar. Svengrad’s knuckle man wasn’t going to have the answers to these deeper questions. The bottom line was that Boldt could trust neither Foreman nor Geiser. He knew Svengrad was seeking answers to some of the same questions that he had, meaning the race for the money still seemed to be on, which kept Liz squarely in it. This both excited and terrified him.

“Does Svengrad plan to kidnap my wife?” Boldt asked. The big man shrugged, and Boldt accepted the answer, believing Svengrad unlikely to include his subordinates in his long-term plans. It didn’t confirm or deny the possibility.

“The comment about my son and his playing piano,” Boldt said, distracted from his intended line of questioning. “Is Svengrad willing to play that card? My children? A police officer’s children?” Boldt felt a bubble in his throat.
Olson tensed; this was clearly news to her. LaMoia looked unruffled, but Boldt could feel his concern like heat.

“Not me,” Alekseevich said. “I not harm children. This man from bank? The one with heart problem? This was not me.”

He meant Tony LaRossa and the abduction of LaRossa’s family.

Boldt pushed, “But Svengrad is willing to play that card.”

Alekseevich stared across the table and took a long sip of the vodka, draining it.

“Answer the question,” Olson told him more vehemently than anything she’d said yet.

But Alekseevich already had answered the question, whether she’d picked up on it or not. That cocksure silence of his spoke loud and clear.

“What now?” Alekseevich asked, never breaking eye contact with Boldt.

That was Boldt’s question as well.

THE SATURDAY BEFORE THE GALA
reception and the ceremonial switchover from WestCorp to MTK proved the longest day of Liz’s life. The waiting for the phone to ring; the surveillance/protection by both uniformed and plainclothes SPD officers, some of whom lingered in her living room; the temptation to call Kathy and the kids, versus Lou’s determination not to make any contact whatsoever for fear of Svengrad somehow tracking it.

The only break in the day arrived in the form of a briefing. Pahwan Riz, the director of Special Operations, asked for a meeting with Liz and Lou to discuss what was expected of her “in the event” she was contacted. Lou agreed to the meeting, in part because he had to, in part because she was looking to relieve the tedium and monotony of waiting for the phone to ring. But Lou’s primary reason for taking the meeting was to gather as much information about Riz’s plan as possible in order to thwart it. If the combined efforts of Seattle Police and BCI prevented Svengrad from getting his money wired out, then the video was certain to surface, damaging if not ending both their careers.
Quite possibly Miles and Sarah would be put permanently at risk. Lou had to defeat his own people while figuring out a way to protect his family. If he could double-cross Svengrad in the process—so much the better. Whatever Riz planned played into that.

Lou briefed her before the others arrived. “I’m cooking something up.”

“I thought so.”

“It’s complicated.”

“It is, isn’t it?” She enjoyed the irony, though Lou seemed to miss it.

“It’s going against my own guys. You’ve got that,

right?”

Her faced knotted in concern. “You can’t do that, Lou. Not for me. Not for anyone.”

“The kids?” he inquired, silencing her. “Going against the very people who are about to be in this room, which is why it’s important you go along with anything they tell you. It doesn’t mean you
will
go along with it, but for now you’ll tell them you will.”

She nodded, cringing at the idea of his turning against his own team.

“Danny Foreman is not to be trusted. The deeper I look into all this, Danny keeps showing up.”

“And he’ll be here?”

“I suspect he will.”

“I told you he seemed off when he paid me that visit,” she said.

“The point is, I don’t want us giving anything away, to Danny or any of the others, something they could use later on or something to tip them to my plan, so for now I’m keeping some things from you, and I just wanted to be up front about that.”

“So noted.”

Lou took in a lungful of air and held it, and she knew this to signal something important about to be said. She felt herself brighten with anticipation.

He said, “But you need to know that John and I took Hayes into custody last night.”

She felt faint, unable to speak.

“Private custody. Not downtown. We got him out of a difficult situation, and I’m hoping he’ll repay us by cooperating. That’s a work in progress.”

She clarified, “You got him
out
of a difficult situation. That’s what you’re saying?”

“However improbable, it’s true.”

“Private custody? What does that mean?”

“The point is, I’m working on something.”

“I never doubted that, Lou. I just regret—”

He interrupted. “It’s a long shot. In all honesty, it probably has only a faint chance of succeeding. But for right now, it’s all I’ve got. And it’s already in motion.”

“In all honesty.” She repeated his words with desperation in her voice. Her own lack of honesty had brought all of this upon him. She hated herself at that moment.

To her surprise, a man named Marc O’Brien ran the meeting. She didn’t recall having ever met the man, and his attendance reinstalled her sense of violation—that some stranger had, at least in his mind, taken control of her life, was here to dictate to her what had to be done and how to do it. Judging by looks, O’Brien belonged in an Irish pub with a pint in hand to fuel his glowing cheeks and bubble nose. His loud voice supported his demeanor of reckless overconfidence. Here was a man who, on a sinking boat, would announce to anyone who would listen what a great
day it was for a swim. His next-in-command, Pahwan Riz, the dark-skinned Malaysian, tracked Liz’s every reaction, her every movement with his crisp green eyes, like a cat watching the family dog.

Lou, John LaMoia, and Daphne Matthews all sat stiffly on the same couch together, Matthews in the middle, lined up like Kewpie dolls at the county fair. Maggie, the infant child under Matthews’s legal guardianship, slept in a car seat propped up between two chairs in the kitchen, turning the new mother’s head that direction whenever an errant sound surfaced. Danny Foreman, looking worse for the wear, two fingers of his left hand bandaged, occupied a needlepoint bench against the wall that fronted the stairs leading to the home’s second floor. Unseen up there, a police officer sat near a window keeping watch. Another indignity she could not get used to: the castle keep. Foreman sat forward, resting on thick forearms that pressed into his thighs. He lifted his head every so often looking as if he might speak, but apparently not finding the strength to do so.

She knew that if he’d had his way, Lou would have kept Foreman out of the meeting. But as he’d explained it to her, he couldn’t block BCI from sitting in on the briefing, and he didn’t have anything more than circumstantial evidence to bring against Foreman, not to mention that one cop charging another cop was fraught with bureaucratic red tape and could not be done without the inclusion of the very highest brass—and Lou wasn’t prepared to go that route, given that he was planning to end-run his own department himself.

Riz announced, “The purpose of this meeting is that at some point in the next twenty-four to thirty hours, we expect
that the conversion of funds resulting from the merger will necessitate an attempt to move the embezzled seventeen million out of the bank. That will apparently require your participation,” he told Liz. “Your cooperation.”

O’Brien said, “We believe you will either be contacted or abducted.”

He said this loudly, and in a way that to her sounded grossly impersonal. She felt shivers ripple up her arms.

Riz clearly felt the man’s insensitivity as well. He lowered his voice, looked directly at Liz, and continued, “We don’t know where or when. We don’t know how. Our intel is basically nil on this case. All we have is you, Mrs. B., and it’s time we laid down some ground rules.”

Liz had hoped to sit around as a spectator, a listener, to avoid any direct participation in this meeting, to let Lou do the talking for her. But she felt her mouth move, and out came words. “Yes…well…I don’t know how many of you have ever been on the other end of this kind of surveillance, but I find it claustrophobic, invasive, and oppressive. So the sooner it’s over, the better.”

Riz and O’Brien ran down a number of possible scenarios for her abduction or participation.

Liz said, “You must be aware that there are at least four other people with security clearance to access the IBM AS/ 400s.”

Pahwan Riz said, “Detective Foreman?”

Danny Foreman came awake, like one of Miles’s toys that reacts to sound. Lou had mentioned that Danny had been tortured a second time, but there was no evidence of that. “Liz, BCI has had its eye on those of you with access since the day Hayes was paroled. You and LaRossa are the only two they’ve contacted, and LaRossa is now in ICU
and not an option. That is not to say we aren’t paying attention to the others. Of course we are. But the bets are on you.” He sagged his head again, the doll back asleep. He sucked down his coffee as if it were juice.

O’Brien said, “Our play is that you’re their target. Keep in mind that we are substituting one of our people for you, so there is basically no situation in which we see you in any kind of trouble. But we must take precautions. Our primary concern is what actions we take as a group, and specifically you as an individual, if we in fact experience an ACL. To brief you on the various proactive responses at your disposal.”

All Contact Lost. Lou had coached her on some of the abbreviations, all of which she felt sounded childish and unnecessary. The secret codes made it more serious to them but more ludicrous to her—like a bunch of kids up in a tree fort planning a raid. O’Brien had begun the meeting laying out the difficulties of surveillance, of hostage situations, raising the possibility that her surveillance team might lose track of her at some point. The moment he said that, she realized a pawn had no choice but to move where and when the player dictated.

“If I carry one of those tracking boxes, they’ll search me and find it, right?” she asked. “I mean, assuming they realize they’ve got the wrong woman and then somehow get hold of me.”

Riz explained that there were other, smaller devices available that could be rigged inside her bra or in a hem, the toe of a shoe, or even her underwear or “on her person,” which she took to mean a body cavity, and she felt briefly ill.

Riz added, “With the smaller devices transmission distance
is considerably reduced.” He made it sound like he was selling her a vacuum cleaner.

“So put one in my clothes. I’m okay with that.”

“Fine,” Riz said.

Lou met eyes with her, admiring her. She appreciated the gesture, but realized that at that moment he had little idea what she was going through.

“Your options include,” O’Brien listed, “your playing by their rules and waiting it out; your attempting to give us some way to locate you; or—”

“Escape,” LaMoia said, interrupting.

“Consideration of escape is
not
an option,” Matthews said, objecting. “Trying to outrun organized crime single-handedly is simply not an option.”