Middle Of Nowhere

   "Let's take you out of the equation, Ron. That's what I'm suggesting. Let's put Schock and Phillipp working the Cock and Bull—it isn't their usual bar, or yours either, Ron." He let this sink in. "They're looking to work someone. That leaves me asking who. Who in your opinion, might they have been looking for up there?"

   "I know what you're asking," Chapman said. "And you got this all tangled up."

   "So help me untangle it."

"I was in for a drink is all."

"And Schock and Phillipp? A drink as well?"

"I didn't talk to them. Wouldn't know."

   "Sergeant," Daphne said calmly, "you've stayed on through the Blue Flu. Precious few others have been so . . . bold as to do so. If you hadn't stayed on, others who've never worked Property would have been assigned to that duty. But you stayed. One could almost imagine you're protecting Property from outside eyes. And now these assaults . . . Sanchez, Schock, and Phillipp. Someone even showed up in Lieutenant Boldt's backyard uninvited. You want to talk about mistakes? That was a mistake. You know the lieutenant's reputation as an investigator. Do you think he's going to let this go . . . four brutal assaults?"

   "You two do what you have to. You come to whatever it is by yourselves," Chapman suggested. "Leave me out of this."

   Boldt craned forward. "But then there is something, right, Ron? Something to leave you out of?"

   "You're tangling this all up."

   Boldt repeated slowly. "So . . . help . . . me . . . untangle . . . it."

   "Dinner's getting cold."

   Daphne said, "We can be convinced otherwise. Tell us it was Schock and Phillipp doing the dirty work. Tell us they pursued you into that bar. What do they have on you? What do you have on them?"

   "I'd like it if you left now," the man said.

   Daphne stepped closer to Chapman. Boldt admired

her technique. "He's Property, Lou. There have to be people who owe him favors." To the subject she said, "Is covering for someone the right way to play this?" "It's not like that!" Chapman shouted. "Now leave!"

* * *

Twenty minutes later Boldt pulled the Chevy to a stop at the end of the dock that led to Daphne's Lake Union houseboat. He escorted Daphne to her front door. He wasn't going to add her to the list of assaults.

   "So we know Chapman's caught up in something," the psychologist said.

   "Yes, we do."

   "But not what, nor to what degree."

   "No."

   "So what's next?"

   "I go back to John for an update. You start working the phone tree. We save as many people as we can before the axe falls."

   "And if John has something, you'll call?"

   "Your line'll be busy," he said, "from all that calling you'll be doing."

   "Lou. . . ."

   For a moment, the connection between them was everything, and he had to remind himself of Icarus's perilous journey too close to the sun, or that even the most loyal husband remained subject to the laws of gravity. They paused at the front door to her houseboat, and for one awkward moment it felt to him as if they might kiss; then he turned and left.

* * *

John LaMoia lived on the third floor of a waterfront loft that thirteen years earlier had been a drug lab in the heart of a gang-controlled neighborhood. The lab had been busted by police, including a wet-behind-theears patrolman who, when the raid was concluded, noted the spectacular view on the other side of the painted-over windows. LaMoia had never forgotten that view, nor the neighborhood, because of the repeated radio calls taking him there: disruptions, street wars, stabbings. He bought low, well ahead of the gentrification that followed, restored the interior, installed security, and scraped the paint off the windows, so that now he commanded views of the waterfront—the piers and tourist restaurants on Alaskan Way—as well as Elliott Bay's sublime gray-green waters and the whitecapped peaks of the Olympics beyond.

   It wasn't often that a blue-collar policeman like LaMoia celebrated a capital gains cut, but when Congress voted a lowering of the surcharge to twenty percent, John LaMoia threw a beer bash for fifty of his closest friends—mostly women.

   Boldt stepped inside, and LaMoia threw a lock behind him. It clicked into place with authority.

   He caught him up on the Chapman visit. "I wanted to go back over what you saw at the bar before you went to bed and lost the immediacy of the moment."

   "Worried my memory will slip? That sounds like something Matthews would say," LaMoia countered.

   "Does it?" Boldt questioned, distracted—even disturbed—by the comment. "The Flu," Boldt said apologetically, "has thrown us together round the clock. You know how it is."

   LaMoia said, "Hey . . . I was just teasing, Sarge."

   "Let's go back over who was there tonight at the Cock and Bull," Boldt said.

   "Sarge, it's a pub. Probably a hundred of us in there. All unemployed cops. You expect me to recite the roll call?"

   Boldt interrupted. "Anyone from Property at the bar?"

   "Property?"