Middle Of Nowhere

The houses north of Miller Bay were black and without power. Boldt dragged himself to the chain-link fence, a section of which had been melted by that tongue of fire, and crawled out and onto the wet ground, half-walking, falling, stumbling, rolling his way toward that Eldorado. LaMoia would later say that he looked like a man who'd spent weeks in the desert.

   LaMoia came the long way around, over a mile of roadway, the last half of which he hitched a ride with a volunteer fireman; he wasn't going anywhere near that water, littered as it was with the carcasses of dead fish and the gruesome remains of one human being. De spite the time it took him to reach the Eldorado, LaMoia arrived to find Boldt still crawling, twenty yards out. He briefly kept the fireman at bay, helped the lieutenant to his feet, and together they approached the Eldorado, from which there was no movement, no sound.

   "Please, God," Boldt whispered under his breath.

   "Matthews?" a tight-jawed LaMoia called out, his crippled body attempting to support Boldt. The blind leading the blind.

   "Daffy!" Boldt hollered.

   The exploding windshield had rained cubes of tempered glass into the vehicle so that she seemed covered in huge, sparkling diamonds. For a moment the scene looked almost beautiful. But her body was slumped against the car door, perfectly still, her face scratched, her chin bleeding.

   "She's bleeding!" Boldt chortled excitedly. "She's bleeding!" he said, gripping LaMoia's shoulder with enthusiastic force.

   A heart had to be beating for a body to bleed. Homicide cops rarely saw bleeders.

   "I believe she is!" LaMoia said, tears choking him as he leaned Boldt against the car and he and the fireman hurried to the passenger door to try for a pulse.

C H A P T E R

64

"My last conscious thought was that we needed him alive." Two days after her ordeal, Daphne's voice remained weak and trembling.

   They sat in the front seat of Boldt's Crown Vic, outside the home of Ron Chapman, awaiting LaMoia. Boldt wore a walking cast on his left leg. Daphne wore a cast on the same foot. Ever the pair.

   "He didn't feel the same way about you," Boldt reminded her.

   "He assumed he'd be blamed for Sanchez, but he didn't do her. He claimed to have an alibi. The AirTyme cellular records put him on the Bainbridge ferry for the night you were shot at. Flek did the burglaries, no question about it. He pushed Kawamoto down some stairs. But not Sanchez. Not you. Certainly not Schock and Phillipp. He's not good for any of that."

   "Which is why we're here—to get to the bottom of it."

   "Despite the obvious risks to our careers that video represents," Daphne reminded him.

   "Leave well enough alone?" he asked. "Is that what I'm hearing? We put Flek down in the books for the Sanchez assault, and we walk away from it?"

   "There are those who wouldn't give that a second thought, given the stakes."

   "And are we them?" he asked. "Daffy, I'm not going to force this on you. It's both of our careers. We either do this unanimously, or not at all." He added, "I thought we'd—"

   "Been over it?" she interrupted. "So did I. But sitting here now, ready to dig back into it, it feels a lot different. It would be so easy to cover it up."

   "Say the word," Boldt advised her, glancing up at the dashboard clock.

   LaMoia parked across the street. He crossed, and slipped into the backseat. He carried a file under his arm that Boldt had been expecting. "It arrived a few minutes ago," he informed his lieutenant. "Typical I.I.— they hand-delivered it, and made me sign off on it twice." Speaking to Daphne, LaMoia said through his wired jaw, "If it's any consolation, Matthews, I've been jammed in a lot worse ways than this—the video, I'm talking about—and I know the value of a person keeping his mouth shut, if it comes to that. No pun intended."

   Daphne thanked him.

   Boldt flipped open the folder LaMoia had delivered and angled it to catch the street light. He read the contents, flipped pages and read some more. "Ronnie wasn't cut out for this."

   "He denied any involvement when Sanchez interviewed him," LaMoia pointed out.

   "Hopefully, we can change that," Daphne said.

* * *

"I feel like I'm visiting a convalescent home," Ron Chapman said, sitting across from Boldt at his own kitchen table. He'd been reluctant to speak with them, but Boldt flashed him a look at the I.I. folder, and Chapman had acquiesced. The story of Bryce Abbott Flek's fiery death had already come and gone from the papers and newscasts. Public interest in the case had faded as quickly as the fish had washed out to sea from Miller Bay, as quickly as it had taken work crews to restore power to eleven hundred households. In the world of local TV, two days proved to be an eternity.

   Boldt, Daphne and LaMoia sat side by side across the table from Chapman.

   "Between us we've got over forty years, Ronnie," Boldt reminded the man.

   "Some good, some bad," Chapman said. "I've never had a beef with you, Lou."