The Body of David Hayes (16 page)

“Danny?”

“In here.”

It was Foreman’s voice.

“I’m at the back,” Boldt announced, playing it safe, not wanting to walk into a trap.
Let him come to me
.

Foreman entered the kitchen casually. He looked tired. He wore a disposable glove on his right hand but not on his left because of the two heavily bandaged fingers. “Hey.”

“Hey,” Boldt echoed, returning his gun to his belt holster.

Foreman led the way through the tiny kitchen. “Guy used this place as his hang. Belongs to a friend. When Liz mentioned it, I knew exactly where she meant. We did some surveillance out here back during the embezzlement.”

Some surveillance
. “What kind of surveillance, Danny?”

“Meaning?”

Boldt didn’t answer. Like an emcee, Foreman swept his left arm out, indicating the room before them. The cabin’s central room was contaminated with spilled blood. Boldt slipped on gloves and squatted and touched a droplet on the floor. It was tacky, not wet, but not dry.
Less than four hours old
.

“Another one,” Boldt said, noticing the two fingernails on the cabin floor next to the leg of a blood-covered wooden chair to which the victim had been taped with duct tape. All of this came into his mind effortlessly. He didn’t merely surmise the crime scene, he
saw
it as an eerie black-and-white moving image. A man in the chair struggling. Gagged, blindfolded. Another man in front of him, a pair of vise-grip pliers in hand. Boldt shook this image out of his head and continued to collect information.

“I don’t know about that,” Foreman said. “It certainly looks like another one. Hayes, then me, now this. Similar. But I don’t know…something’s not right. It’s almost like me and Hayes were clinical, you know? Whereas this one … this looks emotional. Angry. The guy doing the deed lost it and got all wild like.”

Boldt took in the carnage. “I don’t know. At your scene we found blood on the ceiling as well. The walls.”

“Yeah, but look at this place!”

Boldt recalled that Bernie Lofgrin’s Scientific Identification Division had determined that Foreman had probably been beaten using a plastic bag filled with wet sand—this theory supported by forensic evidence recovered at the scene. At some point the bag had torn open, spraying sand into the bloody mix and matching the splatter patterns.
Boldt carefully dodged the chair and examined some blood splatter on the far wall. He didn’t see any sand mixed in. Foreman had been here longer, had a head start.

Boldt said, “You’d think a person could maybe narrow this down by method. Rohypnol, duct tape, fingernails. That’s got to be a signature crime. I ran it by Matthews and didn’t get very far. I think I’ll try OC this time.” Organized Crime.

“We got to ask ourselves,” Foreman said, “if this
vic—
and I’m assuming it to be David Hayes—got up and walked away or was hauled out of here in a Hefty lawn bag; ‘cause one thing that ain’t part of the original signature is the lack of a body. I was in that chair, Lou, and I’m telling you there’s no way you get yourself out of this and go for a stroll.”

But there had been no body at the trailer either. It seemed odd that Foreman would overlook the obvious.

Boldt circled the bloody chair and again watched his theory play out briefly as film. Hayes, or whoever had occupied that chair, was taking a beating, his head snapping left and right. Boldt studied the splatter patterns on the ceiling that supported this determination. The blood was dense immediately above the chair and more sporadic and separated farther out from this epicenter. All this made sense to him. Some of it did not, however.

“What do you think?” Foreman asked, as if the two were regarding a painting in a museum.

“I’ve got some questions.”

“What kind of questions?” Foreman clearly didn’t like the sound of that. He wanted this cut-and-dried. He wanted his assumption—that Hayes had probably been killed in this chair—front and center.

“Questions for SID.”

“I’m first officer,” Foreman declared. “It won’t be SID, it’ll be our guys.”

The State Bureau of Criminal Investigation outsourced their field detection and lab work to King County Sheriff’s. The lab had a good reputation, but Boldt didn’t personally know anyone there, and it was the personal relationships that got investigations cleared.

Foreman repeated, “What kind of questions?”

Boldt doubted then that Foreman had read the preliminaries from the two other such beatings—including his own. He wasn’t sure he wanted to give something away for nothing. There were answers he needed as well.

Boldt wandered into the doorway of the adjacent bedroom and suddenly felt breathless, his chest tight, his imagination besieged by images. It was a twin bed, pulled off the wall, a nightstand shoved into the corner. It faced a closet with louvered panels on the folding doors. Boldt looked away just as quickly.

He asked, “How’d you manage getting the camera into the closet?”

“What?” Foreman answered.

“The video. It’s why they beat you, wasn’t it, Danny? That video? Pulled your nails and drugged you until you coughed up the combination and location of the safe. You had the video in the safe.
Six years
you kept that thing. Why? Just tell me you didn’t drag it out at night and slip it into the VCR, Danny. Tell me that’s not why your prints were on it.” Boldt felt sick, a combination of this bedroom, the smell of blood and vomit, and other images now swarming his brain. He didn’t need to see the video.

Foreman let himself down into a wooden chair just outside
the bedroom door. “I obtained the warrant through an Assistant U.S. Attorney at the time. I lured Hayes away from the cabin with an anonymous call. The hope was for data capture—to record his keystrokes. In all, three cameras were installed, each covering an area that included a phone jack because we assumed he was doing this online. Tech Services did it for me, under the protection of Special Operations.”

“You were with us at the time,” Boldt said. Seattle Police.

“Correct. He used a laptop. Moved around. We couldn’t predict what room he’d use. I had
no idea
, Lou. I went fishing, and I caught the wrong fish. If it hadn’t been relevant—”

“It
wasn’t
relevant!”

“A bank officer? It was very much relevant. For two or three days, she was a primary suspect. Your
wife
I’m talking about. The only thing that saved her, the only
one
who saved her… you’re looking at him. I kept the tape to myself, explored what needed exploring, and never surfaced her name. We went through the treatments together,” he said, meaning their wives’ cancer treatment, “and it just got harder and harder to look you in the eye. And then Darlene slipping and Liz recovering. Uglier and uglier.”

“What were Paul Geiser’s prints doing on the video?” Boldt asked, trying to keep their personal history out of this, but seeing clearly how entangled it all was. “Get your story straight, Danny. That way you only have to tell it once.”

“To hell with you!” Foreman shouted.

“You should have destroyed the tape.”

“You mean I should have told you about it, don’t you?”

“That’s
not
what I said.”

“A bank exec is sleeping with my embezzler—my
suspect
—and I’m supposed to destroy that evidence? Would
you
have destroyed that evidence?”

“Six years,” Boldt said, his throat dry. “Yes, I would have.”

“The tape wasn’t the only thing in my safe. Every scrap of information pertaining to this case was in there with it, most of it burned to disk. All of it gone now. Destroyed? I don’t know. This is the first I’ve heard about the tape resurfacing.” A pause as Foreman added it up. “So they got to Liz again. That’s what you’re telling me.”

In fact, Boldt was telling him more than he wanted to, the result of allowing his emotions to play into this. “Was it the only tape? Of them?”

“Yes.”

“And Geiser’s prints?”

“I can’t answer that,” Foreman said. “News to me. My
guess
would be that all the tapes at some point crossed his desk. I don’t have a specific memory of Liz’s tape being grouped with the others. I do remember clearly the first time I saw it, and the realization—the need—to protect you, if possible. My memory is that I got this tape out of the group. But they were numbered at the time, you know? And I can see me keeping tabs on it, but including it, so nothing fishy surfaced—a tape being noticed missing—and maybe it was in the stack that crossed Paul’s desk. Early on, as inventory was being matched against the warrant. Something like that.”

Boldt didn’t like the explanation—it felt to him as if Foreman were making this up on the fly—but he accepted it for the time being.

“I feel a little sick,” Boldt said.

“Probably the air. It stinks in here.”

“You must have surveillance notes putting Liz with Hayes last week.” He wondered if they’d met here at the cabin. Was Foreman aiming to involve Liz?

“No. I wasn’t watching this place.”

Was this credible?
Boldt wondered. A location under surveillance six years earlier and Foreman doesn’t chase it down when the man’s released from prison?

“I sat on the rental—the mobile home—thinking he might make a move. Got stung instead.”

“They got you twice, and now they appear to have gotten Hayes twice. Why risk that?” Boldt asked. “Why not do what had to be done the first time?”

“They weren’t going to torture me out in the damn woods,” Foreman complained. “And these guys are smart: They don’t put kidnapping on the rap sheet. Assault. Maybe second-degree manslaughter. But it’s in the victim’s home. It’s breaking and entering. Robbery. Light stuff compared with kidnapping.”

That argument wasn’t quite right, but Boldt didn’t push it. “They got Hayes that first time. We know that by the blood type at the scene. Why risk, why bother with a second event?” This stuck in Boldt’s craw. These people seemed smart—as Danny had just said. Even Liz’s assault in the van looked more like robbery. They were carefully avoiding the charges that drew mandatory time and a maximum-security facility. So why risk a second attack on Hayes? Especially given that he might be being watched.

Boldt gestured at the torture scene. “Did you see this go down, Danny?”

“Of course not.”

“But Liz had told you about the cabin. You were watching the cabin. You said so.”

“That’s you talking, not me.” He added, “I was suckered away from here. Anonymous call saying I should take a meeting in town. That Hayes was thinking of turning. I ended up stuck in a traffic jam on the 520. I’d been over in Bellevue. Missed the meet entirely. Fuck me.”

Boldt felt a measure of pride at having successfully distracted Danny Foreman away from asking again about the forensic evidence that Boldt found inconsistent at the scene. Veteran cops rarely snuck something past one another, and Boldt had done just that by focusing Foreman on himself—a subject most people found irresistible.

“You know what happens when I call in the lab techs?” Foreman asked. “They’re going to go
room by room,”he
said, “dusting, developing prints.”

Boldt felt a spike of heat travel up his spine.

“Thing about latents,” Foreman said. “They can’t be dated. They could be from yesterday, or they may be
six years old
, and they all look the same.”

Boldt paced back to the doorway and glanced into the bedroom again. This time the film that played in his head had his naked wife grabbing headboards, touching the bedside lamp, pressing her sweating palm on the wall. With her prints in the WSW database, it would be only a matter of time until she’d be placed in the cabin and questioned. A matter of time until she’d have to detail the affair with Hayes.

He felt himself shrink and recoil. Would Foreman now suggest or offer to destroy evidence and wipe down the cabin? Where was this going? What was it Foreman wanted?

“I need her to go along with whatever they ask her to do,” Foreman said.

There it was, words hanging between them, as if stopped in space and floating. Boldt’s response determined their power or impotence.

“I need her safe,” Boldt said.

“You walk out of here now, and there’s no record of your having been here. What forensics finds or doesn’t find is a product of what there is to find in the first place. But when the prelims on this cabin come back clean for Liz, you’ll know why. She gets another call, and I’m the first one you contact. She gets asked to do something for these people and she does it. No more substitutions, coach. If they were gonna snatch her up, they’d have done it. Clearly, she’s of more use to them on the outside. They aren’t going to harm her, they’re going to
use
her. And you’re going to let them.”

The message didn’t surprise Boldt, but Foreman’s edgy, demanding tone did. The ordeal that Foreman had gone through had taken its toll. Boldt had no idea what it was like to have fingernails pulled, no idea what that did to a person.

“It’s seventeen million dollars, Danny. WestCorp was insured. They’re not out a cent. I know they’d love to prevent something similar from happening again, but the only person who seems to really give a damn about closing this case is you. As for me…my concern is for Liz, and only Liz. I want her out. I want her disconnected. Neither of us needs to relive this. All it can do is hurt us. What you’re asking is impossible. It’s the
one thing
I’m working against: her involvement. As to my condoning the destruction of evidence—I can’t do that either. Her prints or not, the cabin
needs to be gone over by the technicians. We need every scrap of evidence there is. And I’ll tell you why,” he said. “Because this crime scene—whatever happened here, whoever it happened to—is wrong. Can I put my finger on it? No, I can’t. Not yet. But it’s wrong. You don’t do this twice to the same guy. I just don’t see professionals doing that. That’s why we need the technicians. That’s why I’m going to stay right here with you until they arrive. Liz’s prints can and will be explained, no matter the outcome. Does anyone think she possesses the strength to tie David Hayes into a chair? Even with Rohypnol? Not a chance. She
will not participate
beyond serving as a comm center. They want to call her, fine. Beyond that, it’s surrogates, undercover officers, and that’s that.”