Middle of Nowhere (28 page)

“In Etheredge,” Boldt said.

“Correct.”

“He’s out in two with good behavior,” Boldt said.

“Correct. Which means we have all sorts of leverage. If we convince younger brother David that with both the Sanchez and LaMoia assaults, Bryce faces bullets from the first uniform to make him, maybe he gives us a lead. Or maybe we simply hold the threat of an added ten years over him, although that sure didn’t work the first time.”

“I like playing him for the brother’s safety. The only thing is, we don’t have either brother for Sanchez—no phone solicitation records, remember?—and we don’t have Bryce for LaMoia. He never saw his attacker’s face. So we’re looking at burglary at best, unless Kawamoto can make him.”

“Someone walked away from that blue van and never came back. How difficult is it for a judge or jury to see that?”

“It’s circumstantial. When and if we catch up with Bryce, he’ll tell us the van was stolen an hour before. We can’t disprove that.”

“What about the convenience store’s security camera? Did it pick up his face?”

“The system’s VCR was lifted a month ago and never replaced by management. There is no tape. We can’t put Bryce Flek at that gas station.”

She said, “What exactly are you saying?”

“David is our way to find Bryce. We find Bryce, maybe we wrap this thing up.”

“Maybe,” she said. “But Bryce would have to confess to Sanchez to get any decent charges to stick.”

Boldt answered, “Maybe not.” He hoisted a black-and-white mug shot of Bryce Abbott Flek and turned it to face Daphne. “What if Sanchez can ID him?”

Boldt’s private line rang, and he took a call. Hanging up a moment later, a satisfied grin playing across his lips, he informed her, “We found the apartment where Flek has been staying.”

B
ryce Abbott Flek’s photo was recognized by a guitar maker. The rented room, one of five that occupied the two floors above Fletcher Brock’s custom instrument shop, consumed three SID field technicians who combed it floor to ceiling. LaMoia’s assault could be felt here too—normally Boldt would have been lucky to get even one tech to a potential suspect’s abode in under an hour.

“What have we got?” Boldt asked a SID tech from just inside the doorway. He wore latex gloves and a snarl. The place was a pig sty.

“Stroke mags, beer drinker, junk food, dirty laundry. Three cellular phones, all apparently working. Could be a college dorm room, if I didn’t know better.”

“The phones? Clones?” Boldt said.

“Three of ‘em? Probably.”

“Weapons?”

“Negative.”

“Prints?”

“A lot of lifts—mostly the same guy. Maybe a woman, by the size of the others. Box of Tampax on the floor by the toilet. Blond pubic hairs mixed in with the more abundant darker ones, collected from the sheets, toilet rim, and shower drain—platinum blond.”

“Shoes?”

“Pair of high-top sneakers, is all.”

“Nike?” Boldt asked, recalling the shoe at his own assault. Had that been brother Flek?

“Converse. We’ve already bagged and tagged the clothes. We’ll go over them for hairs and fibers. If there’s anything that links this place to Sanchez or your other sites, you’ll hear about it.”

“Drugs? Alcohol?”

“Valium and amphetamines in the bath. Street grade. No prescription bottles. The beer. Some Cuervo Gold. That’s about it. Purely recreational stuff.”

“Not in combination,” Daphne said softly into Boldt’s left ear. “Two bennies, one Valium, and a shot of Gold. That’s a street cocktail they call a glow plug. A couple glow plugs and a guy’ll think he’s bulletproof.”

“As in beating up a cop from behind?” Boldt suggested to her.

“That would certainly fit.”

He turned to the tech and asked, “Electronics? Parts? Computers? Anything in that category?”

“Just the three cell phones.”

“Any of these?” he said, pulling from his pocket one of the plastic ties he’d recovered from the Kawamoto crime scene.

“Not here, but in the van,” the man answered.

“You did the van?”

“The blue van. Colorado plates? All three of us,” the tech replied, indicating the woman and man still busy behind him. He stepped forward and picked the white plastic tie from between Boldt’s fingers. “Must be a couple hundred of these lying around loose in that van.”

Boldt looked over his shoulder at Daphne and said, “That’s a start.”

Revisiting the hospital wasn’t easy for Boldt. This time he was there to see Officer Maria Sanchez.

He perked up the moment he and Daphne entered the room, as the woman lying there was able to somewhat jokingly wave hello to them with her toes. Movement had returned to the digits of both feet, and with a great deal of concentration, her left ankle could be flexed. Though she remained paralyzed from the knees up, the woman’s hopefulness and enthusiasm now filled the room like warm sunlight, replacing the fear and terror that had so recently been in evidence.

“We have a suspect,” Daphne announced.

The woman looked right, signaling “yes.”

“Not yet in custody,” Boldt added. “We would like to show you a photo array. You know the drill, Officer.”

Another “yes.”

Daphne explained, “There are six faces in the array, all numbered. If you recognize one of the individuals as your assailant, we would like you to blink the number to us. Number two—two blinks, et cetera. Is that okay with you?”

“Are you up to this?” Boldt asked.

“Yes,” came the indicated reply.

“If you have doubts,” Boldt continued, “we’ll get to that. For the moment, we simply need to know if any of these faces looks familiar to you.”

The woman looked right with her dark eyes. “Yes.”

“Good,” Daphne said, checking with Boldt who nodded to go ahead. Daphne pulled the array from her shoulder case. Sandwiched layers of heavy stock, the six head shots sat behind equally sized cutout windows, a number below each. Four were black-and-white, two color. She held it an arm’s length from Sanchez’s pillowed head, and knew within seconds that the victim did not recognize any of the men in the photos. Then she reminded herself that Sanchez was incapable of facial expression, and because of this, she held out hope.

Sanchez closed her eyes.

Boldt held his breath in anticipation, ready to count the number of blinks. He wanted desperately for the number to be four: Flek’s position in the array—though doubted she could identify the man who had done this to her. If she identified Bryce Abbott Flek then they had linkage between all the robberies. Either way, they still needed Flek in custody if Boldt hoped to pry the lid off the I.I. investigation.

When she opened her eyes, Sanchez looked left.

“No?” Boldt questioned.

“You don’t recognize any of them?” Daphne clarified.

“No,” came the woman’s answer.

“You’re sure?” Daphne asked.

“She’s sure,” Boldt answered. An assault at night. Boldt had been through that. He knew. “The victim doesn’t recognize any of the faces in our array,” Boldt pointed out. “We take it from there.”

“We take it where?” Daphne asked, “Without Flek in custody—”

“So we get him in custody,” Boldt fired back. “And when we do we’ll sit him down, and we’ll question him. And then maybe we get some answers.” He added in a hoarse whisper, “If we’re really lucky, then whoever brings him in has a hard time of it, and makes him pay for what he did to LaMoia.” His eyes sparkled. “Which is why I hope I’m the one to bring him in.”

M
eeting in the fifth-floor conference room with a deputy prosecuting attorney named Lacey Delgato, a woman with whom he’d worked a dozen other cases, some successfully, some not, Boldt struggled to find a way to bring David Ansel Flek to the table as a witness. The Prosecuting Attorney’s office was crucial to his effort.

Delgato’s unflattering nickname, “The Beak,” was a result of her oversized nose. With a low center of gravity, and a voice that could etch glass, Lacey Delgato surprised anyone who made the mistake of judging her by her appearance. To Boldt, she represented the best and the brightest of the up-and-coming trial attorneys in the PA’s office. Her loud mouth, and the fact that she wasn’t afraid to jump in with locker room vocabulary, turned off some people, but not Boldt; for anyone who worked with LaMoia and Gaynes, all else was tame.

Into their second hour of discussion of the brothers Flek, Delgato and Boldt had yet to solidify a legal strategy that might force the incarcerated David Ansel Flek to open up and provide leads to help police locate his older brother. With this the most obvious and direct way to end the case, Boldt pressed on relentlessly.

“Maybe we should be looking at the girlfriend,” Delgato suggested.

“We’ve got some pubic hairs and a box of Tampax,” Boldt reminded. “That’s a pretty wide-open field.”

“And some lifts,” Delgato reminded, indicating SID’s record of the fingerprints developed inside Flek’s boarding room.

Boldt explained, “Lofgrin ran them through ALPS”— the state’s automated latent print system used to analyze and identify latent fingerprints—”and struck out. We’ve posted them on the Bureau’s database.”

“And if he brought her from Colorado with him?” Delgato asked.

The missed opportunity stabbed Boldt in the center of his chest. Such a simple idea, and he had overlooked it for the better part of the last eighteen hours. “Damn,” he mumbled.

“Just an idea,” Delgato said in a doubtful tone of voice that implied he had screwed up.

Boldt placed a call down to the lab. The unidentified fingerprints lifted from Flek’s apartment would be posted over the Internet to Colorado’s Bureau of Criminal Identification—CBCI—in the next few minutes.

“That’s why they pay me the big bucks,” Delgato said once Boldt was off the phone.

“You might be the better cop of the two of us,” a somewhat defeated Boldt suggested.

“A woman looks at the relationship between the principals. A guy looks at the evidence. That’s the only difference. It’s what makes you and Matthews such a good team. You’re lucky to have her.” Boldt didn’t touch that. He thought of her too often. That kiss had still not left his lips, and he knew that wasn’t right.

Delgato continued, “The whole time we’re sitting here, I’m looking over this SID report—the pubic hair the lab ID’d as being bleached blond—and I’m thinking, what kind of babe dyes her privates? You know? And I’m thinking stripper. Sure it could be an older woman who’s trying to dye a few years off the truth by taking the gray out of
anywhere
it shows. But someone hanging with a burglar? More likely young and obedient—black leather pants and a halter top. A real gum chewer. Flek says, ‘I want you a blond all over,’ and little Miss Junior Mint is off to the pharmacy for some Nice ‘n Easy. Which just about describes her perfectly. And if she is who I think she is, then she’s not so different from Flek. Some drug charges, some soliciting. Maybe some fraud. Maybe even armed robbery, who knows? Maybe she drives for him. A lookout? Maybe she’s giving him a hum job before the hit for good luck. Maybe she knows nothing about his game. But I like her for a juvie sheet. She has that feel about her. She’s the kind that smiles for the mug shots. You know the type.”