Middle of Nowhere (2 page)

Then another kidney punch. Sanchez felt herself sag, her resistance dwindle. She hadn’t put up much of a fight, but now she knew she was going to lose it. She suddenly feared for her life.

Her reaction was swift and intense. She forced herself up, managing to head-butt a chin or a forehead.

The viselike hold on her neck slackened. She felt the warmth of blood surge toward her brain. Briefly, relief. She tried once again to rock forward and this time break the grip for good.

But now the grip intensified. This guy meant business. He cursed and jerked his locked hold on her neck, first right and then sharply left. She heard her own bones go, like twigs snapping. And then cold. A brutal, unforgiving chill, racing through her body. In seconds, all sensation of her body was gone. She sank toward the mud and her face fell into the muck. Raspy breathing from above and behind her. And then even it disappeared, overwhelmed by a whining in her ears and that desperate cold that finally consumed her.

T
he night air, a grim mixture of wind and slanting rain, hit Boldt’s face like needles. Seattle was a police beat where the weather could and did compromise a crime scene, often in a matter of minutes. On the advice of Bernie Lofgrin and his forensic team—the Scientific Identification Division, or SID—the department had issued foul weather directives for all first officers— the first patrol person to arrive on the scene. Regulations now required plastic tarps and oversized umbrellas as mandatory equipment for the trunk of every cruiser. But mistakes were still made, and that night seemed ripe for them.

As Boldt hurried up the home’s short poured-cement driveway, he faced the garage, behind and to the left of the house. A basketball hoop and paint-chipped backboard faced the street. Boldt ignored the garage for the time being, his attention instead focused on the SID van parked there in the drive. Of all the divisions, SID should have understood the importance of protecting evidence, should have respected the department’s attitude toward parking on private property. And yet there was the SID step van, inexplicably parked in the victim’s driveway. One expected the occasional procedural error from the medical examiner’s chuck wagon, even tolerated it when, as had happened earlier that night, an ambulance had been required to carry away a victim, and so had likely parked in the drive. But as the collectors and keepers of evidence, SID had no excuse for parking in a crime scene driveway for any reason. Some SID tech had wanted to avoid the rain, that was all, and that wasn’t good enough. The infraction incited Boldt’s temper, and in a rare display of emotion, he exploded at the first SID tech he encountered. He ordered the van relocated to the street.

Privately, Boldt blamed the “Blue Flu,” SPD’s first sickout by its officers in the history of the department. The Flu had so overwhelmed morale that it now apparently offered even civilian employees—like those who peopled SID—an excuse to turn in shoddy, rushed work. He wondered what chance law enforcement had if the five-day-old sickout continued. He also feared the consequences; shoddy work wasn’t the only outcome of the Flu—officers, including Boldt, had been threatened by anonymous calls. Lines were being drawn. Violence bubbled beneath the surface.

A first-degree burglary indicated an assault, in this case a broken neck and the probable rape of Sanchez, a cop. Boldt felt the urgency of the situation—this case needed to clear before the press had a chance to run with it, before the press became fixated on the vulnerability of a police department weakened by the Flu.

Already on the job, Detective Bobbie Gaynes offered Boldt and the investigation a ray of hope. Because of the Flu, and a lottery-like case-assignment strategy that had the depleted ranks—lieutenants and above, mostly, accepting whatever cases Dispatch threw at them—this crime scene belonged to neither Boldt nor Gaynes, but to Lieutenant Daphne Matthews, whose official posting was that of staff psychologist. Boldt expected Matthews on the scene momentarily, even looked forward to it. They worked well together.

A woman in her early thirties who regularly altered her looks for the fun of it, the diminutive Gaynes currently wore her hair cut short and colored a dark red. The heavy rimmed black “Geek” glasses and light makeup created a style that was a cross between hip urban single woman and computer programmer, which actually went a fair distance to describing her personality as well. Gaynes lived for computer chat rooms these days.

Her prompt arrival on the scene came as no surprise. Boldt had personally brought Gaynes to Homicide following her stellar work on a serial killer case some years earlier. Before that, she had worked Special Assaults—Sex Crimes, as her fellow officers called it. With the Sanchez crime scene initially reported as a burglary/assault, rape couldn’t be ruled out. Gaynes was a good detective to have on hand.

Boldt kept expecting the press. The lights. The questions. They would need answers immediately.

“You knew Maria Sanchez didn’t you?” Gaynes asked.

“I
know
her personally,” Boldt corrected. “Yes.”

“I only meant—”

Boldt interrupted. “She sat the kids a few times.” He added, “The kids loved her.”

Violent crimes against fellow police officers held special significance for anyone carrying a badge. All crimes were not investigated equally—a fact of life. Members of the immediate police family deserved and received special attention. Maria Sanchez would be no exception.

Daphne Matthews arrived and checked in with Boldt and Gaynes. As lead, Matthews handed out the assignments. Boldt deferred to her—a reversal of their usual roles.

Boldt thought of Daphne as a thoroughbred: dark, lean, fit and strikingly handsome. His system always ran a little quicker when in her presence, in part out of necessity. She possessed both a facile mind and a trained eye. Technically it was her case, but they would all three work the crime scene together.

A civilian employee at first, a decade earlier, Matthews had undertaken the six-week academy training so that she now carried not just a title but a badge, rank, and weapon.

She assigned Boldt the second-floor crime scene, where the victim had been discovered, with Gaynes to assist. She would interview the first officer and speak to the SID team leader.

Even though Maria had been whisked away in an ambulance, the importance and power of the crime scene preoccupied Boldt as he approached the bedroom. Out on the street, the first of the press arrived. There would be more.

“How’d we find her?” Boldt asked Gaynes. He felt surrounded by women: Liz, Daphne, Gaynes, his own CAPers captain, Sheila Hill, even his little Sarah. He felt isolated but not alone, actually far more comfortable surrounded by these women than by a bunch of car-talking, sports-crazed men who commented on every chest that passed. He wondered why, of the seventeen detectives and two hundred uniformed patrol officers remaining on the job, some eighty percent were women. Why, when the going got tough, did the men quit and the women stay behind? Maybe it would be the topic of one of his guest lectures over at the U.

Boldt felt time getting away from him. He hoped for a clean crime scene and good evidence—something obvious that pointed to a suspect. He might as well be asking for a miracle, and he knew it.

Gaynes answered, “House has a silent alarm installed. Security company telephoned the home when the alarm tripped, then responded in person, finding the place locked, then finally contacted us because they’re not allowed to kick a door. All told, it took about forty minutes before our officers arrived.”

“Nice response time,” Boldt snapped sarcastically.

“First officer was . . . Ling. Patrolman. He kept the security guys out, made the necessary calls and did a pretty fair job of protecting the integrity of the scene.”

Boldt said, “Matthews and I will visit the hospital on our way home. See how she’s doing. We not only want this one cleared, we need it cleared. A cop assaulted in the middle of the Blue Flu? Press will have a heyday.”

“Got it,” Gaynes confirmed.

The bedroom where Detective Maria Sanchez had been discovered naked and tied to the bed still smelled of sweat and fear. Sanchez’s shoes, clothes and undergarments lay strewn across the pale carpet: gray blouse and dark pants heaped together to the left of the bed, underwear up on the foot of the bed, which remained made but rumpled. The woman’s bra lay up by the pillow. An SID tech was working the adjoining bathroom for evidence and prints. Boldt studied the layout carefully, snapping on a pair of latex gloves almost unconsciously. He circled the bed carefully, like a photographer planning a shoot.

“No evidence of fluids,” he observed, “other than the blood on the pillow. Not much of it.”

“The ligatures?” Gaynes inquired, pointing to the head of the bed.

Boldt noticed the two bootlaces tied to each side of the headboard. He glanced back down to the floor and the ankle-high, black-leather-soled shoes missing their laces. His stomach turned. The scene was confused. It didn’t feel right to him.

“Ling cut the shoelaces himself, before the ambulance arrived,” Gaynes explained.

Both laces had been cut with a sharp knife, though remained knotted where they had been tied to the bed.

“Photos?”

The SID tech answered from the reverberating bathroom, “We shot a good series on her.”

“Close-ups of the ligatures?” Boldt inquired loudly.

“Can’t say for sure. You want it on the list?”

“Please,” Boldt answered, now at the head of the bed, studying one of the cut shoelaces himself. He’d had a case earlier in the week involving rape and a young girl bound by shoelaces. The similarities were obvious. He regretted that. A serial rapist was the last thing anyone needed—and most likely the first thing the press would suspect.

“Done,” the tech answered from the bathroom.

Boldt glanced around. “Tied the wrists, but not the ankles?” His earlier rape had been tied by all limbs. The similarities suddenly lessened. A copy cat? Boldt wondered. The Leanne Carmichael rape had made the news.

Gaynes replied as if it were a test. They worked this way together—pupil and student. “I caught that too, and I could almost buy it if the bed were more of a mess. But a woman left with her legs untied? The bed covers should be a mess.”

“Boyfriend? Lover? We want this wrapped and cleared,” Boldt reminded her. The department was grossly understaffed because of the Flu, and they each had too many cases to handle. A so-called black hole— an unsolved case—would incite the media and make trouble for everyone concerned—Maria Sanchez most of all. She deserved closure.

“You’re looking a little sick, Lieutenant.”

“Feeling that way.”

Gaynes, standing on the opposite side of the bed from Boldt said, “On Special Assaults I worked dozens of rapes, L.T.” Unlike Detective John LaMoia who out of habit addressed Boldt by his former rank of sergeant, Gaynes at least paid Boldt the respect of his current promotion, though called him not by name, but by his rank’s initials. “Maybe in one out of ten, the clothes are still in one piece. Usually torn to shit. No fluids? Listen, if the stains aren’t in the middle of the bed where you expect them, then you find them on the pillow or the bedspread or the vic’s underwear. But a clean scene? You ask me, this is date rape. Look at those clothes! Not a button missing! Spread out in a line, for Christ’s sake.”

Boldt studied a large dust ring on the dresser. A television had been removed. A small, gray electronics device bearing a set of wireless headphones lay in a heap to the side of the same dresser. He picked the headphones up in his gloved hands.

Gaynes said, “You use ‘em so the spouse can sleep while you watch the tube.”

“She was single,” Boldt reminded.

“A visitor maybe,” Gaynes said. “Date rape,” she repeated with more certainty. “Guy ties her up and gets too aggressive. Accidentally snaps her spine and takes off.”

“The television?” he asked his former protégé.

“Stole it to cover up it was him. Make it look like someone broke in. The papers have been filled with stories about all the break-ins since the Flu hit.”

Studying the headphones, Boldt said, “Maybe she just appreciated music or maybe she subscribed to the cable music channels.” He pointed to the stack of recent best sellers on Sanchez’s bedside end table.

Boldt walked around the bed with a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach. He and Gaynes traded places. Police ballet. Since the advent of the Flu, reports of robberies and burglaries were up exponentially. “We’ll want to check our sheets,” he suggested. “See if this fits any patterns.”

“Got it,” she replied. She lifted the top book off the end table, an Amy Tan novel. “Bookmarked with a receipt dated two days ago. And she’s . . . a hundred and seventy pages into it—”

“And we’re in the midst of a Flu,” Boldt pointed out. “Not like she has a lot of fun time.”

“Maybe six, seven hours a night at home, max.”

“So she didn’t watch much television,” Boldt concluded.

“Which means you’re probably right about the cable music. A hundred and seventy pages in two nights? You think she’s been entertaining a lover?” she asked rhetorically. “Sounds more like insomnia.”