Middle of Nowhere (15 page)

The Brooks-Gilman house had views of both Puget Sound and the downtown skyline. Before Boldt led the way up the walkway to the front door, he stood out on the street and tried the garage door clicker.

The door lifted open.

Daphne let out a small cheer. “Sometimes,” she said, “I actually get off on this stuff.”

Boldt said, “We were stupid.”

“Were we?” she asked.

“In every case, the doors to the burglarized homes were reported locked. Even our own first officers put it down this way.”

She continued his thought. “We wrote that off to doors being jimmied and owners panicking and locking up once they realized they’d been hit. But it wasn’t that. It was that so few of us lock the door that leads into the house from the garage.”

Nodding, he pushed the clicker and stopped the garage door. “Sanchez understood that. She saw the one point of vulnerability and pursued it.”

“But one still needs the clicker,” Daphne said. “What? This guy steals them from the car’s visor in car washes and parking lots?”

The garage door opened again, but this time Boldt had not triggered the device. He looked first toward his hand and then toward the house, and pointed to the silhouette of the woman standing at the mouth of the garage. “She may be able to answer that,” he said.

Helen Brooks-Gilman. A hyphenate. A dot-com mom. Whole neighborhood was probably hyphenates, he thought. He attempted to return the clicker to the woman as he explained that detective Sanchez had been hospitalized and that he and Daphne had taken over the burglaries. She accepted the clicker, cautious until Daphne produced her ID wallet and Boldt unfolded a photocopy of his lieutenant’s identification.

“You don’t have a badge?” she inquired.

“My ID wallet was . . . stolen. It’s a long story,” Boldt answered, tempted to lift his shirt and show her his bruises.

Holding up the device, Daphne asked, “Is this clicker yours?”

The woman invited them inside. “It’s a long story,” she answered, purposely matching Boldt’s tone.

The interior was pastels and hardwoods. Programmers and internet CFOs took these 1930s clapboards and sunk a small fortune into flooring, moldings and windows. Boldt knew firsthand: He and Liz had done much the same to their place fifteen years earlier for a third the price, and a second mortgage they were still paying off.

“The first officer’s report said there was no sign of forced entry,” Boldt said in a voice that bordered on impatient. He had a theory on that now; he needed it proved out.

Helen Brooks-Gilman wore a combination of REI and Nordstrom. Tipped hair cut cleanly above her shoulders. A small Rolex, but a Rolex nonetheless. Leather deck shoes, though he doubted she sailed. “Cup of coffee?”

Boldt declined the offer. Coffee went through him like acid. “Were there, by any chance, any doors left unlocked?”

“No. It’s funny. That’s what the insurance people asked as well. All the doors have night latches, and we leave them that way all the time—with the buttons in. It can be inconvenient. For example, you take the trash out, and the kitchen door shuts behind you, and you need a key to get back in.”

Boldt asked, “How about the door leading in from the garage?”

Helen Brooks-Gilman looked perplexed. “Well, no. That’s never locked. But the garage door is—” She caught herself, catching up to his reasoning. “That’s why the other detective wanted our spare remote.”

Boldt nodded. “I think so, yes.”

“You loaned officer Sanchez the garage door opener?” Daphne asked.

Brooks-Gilman confirmed this with a nod. “Our spare. She requested it.”

Boldt asked to see the garage and she showed them into the kitchen. Sub-Zero refrigerator and Viking range. He opened the door into a garage cluttered with gardening tools and sports equipment surrounding a gray minivan—the luxury model with leather and electric windows. He and Liz had looked at the same car, but couldn’t go the four grand for all the bells and whistles.

“Your sheet lists a television and camcorder taken from your bedroom. A computer, wasn’t there?”

“Our son’s iMac.”

Boldt pulled out the white plastic tie from his pocket and asked, “Any of these found since the theft?”

She looked a little stunned. “Yes. In our bedroom. That’s why I called back to you people in the first place.”

“And you got Detective Sanchez,” Daphne suggested.

“An operator took down my name and Detective Sanchez was the one who called me back.”

“And subsequently paid you a visit,” Boldt said.

Helen Brooks-Gilman explained, “The strike had started. She explained to me she didn’t typically work robberies.”

“Burglaries,” he corrected. “And it’s not a strike, it’s a sickout.”

Daphne chided him with a single disapproving expression. She intervened. “We need you to answer a couple more questions, Helen. We’d like you to sit down and get comfortable.” Brooks-Gilman led them to the kitchen table. This time she offered them decaf. They declined. Boldt and Daphne sat across the table from her so that they could measure her physical reactions as well as her facial expressions. Daphne continued, “Detective Sanchez took your call, and then what?”

“She came over, as I mentioned. I gave her the thingy I’d found.”

“That would be the white plastic tie,” Daphne said.

“Yes, that’s correct.”

Boldt said, “And she looked around?”

“Top to bottom. She was very thorough. I liked that about her. She took it seriously. The other officer—the one who came after my nine-one-one—he just wanted the forms filled out.”

“The garage?” he asked.

“Yes, she looked at the garage.”

“And then?” Daphne asked.

“She asked to borrow the clicker. She didn’t say why and I confess, I didn’t ask. She was doing her job. That was good enough for me.”

Boldt’s turn. “She asked you some other questions as well. Like who, if anyone, had serviced your home appliances recently. Pizza deliveries. That sort of thing.”

Daphne added, “Any phone calls you’d received, especially any where the person on the other end hung up on you when you answered.”

“I’ve hung up on a few of them,” she told them. “Dinnertime phone solicitations! My husband will talk to them—don’t ask me why!—but I absolutely will not. I find the whole idea offensive.”

Boldt pushed her a bit more. “As to the repairs . . . Washing machine . . . fridge . . . any deliveries?”

“She and I went over this, yes,” the woman answered. “All I can tell you is what I told her: I have no idea how this guy picked us to rob, but it wasn’t any of those ways. No deliveries. No strange phone calls— other than the usual phone solicitations.”

“You loaned her the clicker,” Daphne suggested. “She said she’d return it?”

“Said she’d return it in a day or two. Yes.”

“Tech Services,” Boldt suggested to Daphne, who nodded. He suspected that would have been Sanchez’s next stop. It would have been his.

Daphne apologized to the woman. “I’m afraid we’re going to have to borrow it again.”

B
oldt guessed right—Sanchez had in fact paid a visit to SPD’s Tech Services and had asked a lab rat named Tina Ming a variety of questions about cloning garage door openers. Ming confirmed that duplicating the radio frequencies used by such a device was scientifically quite simple. They had not ended up providing Sanchez with a clone however, because their work had been delayed by the Flu. Ming suggested Boldt consult the FBI.

Flu or not, the FBI was never the fastest agency to respond. Boldt would seek solutions elsewhere. He thought he now understood where Sanchez had been headed: a black-market source for a cloned garage door opener. Nine of them, to be precise—over the course of the last several weeks. A way into homes otherwise believed locked up. If he could find that supplier and squeeze out a name of a buyer, he might have the repeat burglar—and quite possibly Sanchez’s offender— behind bars by the end of the day. He felt pulled between two theories—cop on cop or burglary gone bad— but the solution to the Sanchez assault seemed paramount to both.

The apartment occupied the floor above the Joke’s On You, Bear Berenson’s comedy/jazz club that enjoyed an odd combination of a Happy Hour police crowd and a prime-time college clientele. Boldt pulled the Chevy down the back alley and parked, making sure to put the laminated blue POLICE—OFFICIAL BUSINESS card that would keep the tow trucks away. He hoped to only spend a few minutes with Bear, but the pot-smoking, angst-ridden, longtime friend could make a scenic drive out of the shortest errand. He practiced patience, preparing himself for an extended stay.

Required to address a white plastic box housing a badly scratched TALK button and a speaker grid that had inherited some chewing gum, Boldt gained admittance through a buzzing door jamb with Bear’s distorted voice welcoming him. He climbed the long, dark stairwell, the smell of stale beer and cigarettes familiar to a man who occasionally worked the Happy Hour piano on the other side of the communicating wall. Where others might gag, Lou Boldt felt comfort. He had spent a lot of good hours at this bar, and its predecessor, the Big Joke. A few million notes had passed through his fingers here.

The steep stairs presented a challenge. His battered and painful body was still unwilling to climb. But he managed. Nearing the top landing, he smelled the weed. Knowing Bear, he had opened a window trying to air out the apartment, but his attempt had backfired and instead was blowing the smoke toward the stairwell. Boldt forgave him the habit, but asked that he not smoke in front of him, for obvious reasons.

“Sherlock!” Berenson had a smoker’s rasp, a neatly trimmed black beard with gray streaks coming down like fangs, and something of a beer gut, maintained by the contents of the long-neck bottle gripped casually in his right hand.

“Live, and in person,” Boldt said.

“Tea?”

“You think I’d risk contamination?”

“You look a little
off,”
Bear said.

“And you a little sideways,” Boldt observed. He won a smile for that comment.

“I’m always sideways.”

“Sore is all,” Boldt explained. “I’ve been dodging baseball bats lately.”

“Sit down before you fall down,” Berenson advised.

Bear loved an audience; he paced from side to side, as if working a stage.

Boldt said, “I’d love to say it’s a social call.”

“Did I forget to pay you or something?”

Boldt explained, “It’s more of a research visit.”

“Weed? Women? Retail sales?”

“Frankie,” Boldt said.

“Frankie?” Bear asked, wounded.

“I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important.”

“Frankie?” Bear repeated. He sucked down some beer and wiped his mouth.

“I’m not after him—even if he’s involved. I promise him a free ride. A name is all I’m after. One name.”

“Are you paying?” Berenson asked.

“You’re his agent now?”

“Just asking,” Bear replied.

“I’m paying,” Boldt answered.

Bear had a tendency to put himself in the middle of things, and no one wanted to get between Frankie and anything, including Boldt.

“Frankie isn’t going to want
anything
to do with you—for obvious reasons. It had better be a shitload of money. Know what I mean?”