No Witnesses

Daphne blushed and held herself back in a formidable show of internal strength.

“You did Fowler favors,” Boldt repeated.

“Like this ATM thing. Yeah.”

“Do not say anything more!” her attorney advised.

“Shut up,” Uli told him.

“I can’t represent you if-”

“Shut up!” To Boldt she said, “I went where he told me to. I did what he said to do.” To Daphne she said, “And yeah, he jumps my bones now and then. And no, I don’t particularly like it. But it’s not like it’s something new, okay? He’s been doing it since back when he was a cop. He had a lot of the girls doing it back then. If Kenny busted you, you went down on him. No charges. It was that simple. That’s what I’m saying. You get why I’m afraid of cops? It started when I was fifteen and running with a gang. Kenny liked me. Too bad for me.” She seemed to be apologizing to Daphne. “You get kinda used to the ones like Kenny Fowler. But it’s better than the alternative, and that’s the way it works out there. Doing favors for people beats the hell out of living under bridges in cardboard boxes. Getting gang-banged. Getting bad needles. You don’t know until you’ve been there.”

“You’re right,” Daphne said, overcoming her personal agenda and striving to establish rapport with the suspect. Daphne’s friend Sharon had been there. Daphne knew all about it, but was not going to say so, was not going to defend herself. Boldt admired her for that.

“He gave you the ATM card,” Boldt began for her.

“And the number. And he told me which machines to hit. Big deal. He gave me a hundred a night.”

“Generous,” Boldt said.

“It’s a living,” Uli replied dully.

“Sergeant?” It was Penny Smyth. She asked for a conference in the hall. Daphne stayed with the suspect.

Smyth said, “What I’m seeing here is that it’s going to come down to her word against Fowler’s. Is there any other evidence tying them together other than this? Because I’ve got to tell you, a judge is not going to like her. Will Fowler have the money on him? No way. It’s long gone-the minute you picked this girl up, it was gone. He was a cop, right? He knows the game. He’ll have something planned; he used her for a reason. Am I right, or am I right? I’ll run with this if you want. I can take it up the ladder and see what they think, but it stinks, if you ask me. She’s young-she has reasons, serious reasons in her past to hate Fowler and want to do him harm, and that’s going to come out in any testimony. It stinks, Sergeant. Matthews cannot say for sure it was this girl in Fowler’s apartment that night.”

Boldt countered, “We have the PIN number. We have the former arrest.”

“The bank account was opened by her. She uses Fowler’s badge number as a way of getting back at him, just in case she’s caught, which she was. I’m showing you the spin that can be put on this. As a witness she stinks, I’m telling you. Your call. You tell me what you want me to do.” She met and held eyes with him.

“I hate attorneys,” Boldt told her.

“Me too.” She smiled. “All my friends are cops.”

He smiled back. “So what do you suggest, Counselor?”

“I suggest she wears a wire for us. We plea her down to six months in medium with good behavior. Carsman will do back flips to get that. We send Fowler to the Big House until he’s gray.”

Boldt asked incredulously, “Do you actually think that Kenny Fowler will get within a six-state region of this woman? No way in hell. Maybe to kill her, but not to-” He caught himself.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Maybe we let Fowler do our work for us. I think he owes us that.”

Boldt had his car swept for listening devices before driving Daphne out to Alki Point, where he parked with a view of the water and a volleyball game being played out at sunset. Thankfully, no devices had been found.

A body had washed ashore here once, and had changed a case and their lives along with it. He had not chosen this place to park at random.

“I don’t want to ask this of you, Daffy.”

“Then don’t.” She knew already. But she had agreed to the drive, so perhaps he stood a chance of convincing her. She looked away from him, out her window. “Please don’t,” she repeated.

“You have to be living back there if this is going to work. We’ll have to script some things for you and Adler to say. We have to chum the water, or he’ll spot the hook.”

“Do you understand what you’re asking?”

“I know what I’m asking-I don’t know what it would be like. I don’t know that I could do it.”

“And Watson and Moulder-they would see me, too, if all this works the way you have planned. On the toilet, in the shower … My God, Lou!”

“We gave him the mug shot, Daffy. We know he showed it around the processing plants, the warehouses. At some point someone must have recognized it. Caulfield delivered there on a regular basis. Fowler kept that information from us, all so that he could continue the extortion. He’s as guilty as Caulfield is. If we’re to put him away for that, we need a huge case against him. We need to build it from the ground up and show that Kenny Fowler, because of greed, allowed these poisonings to continue. But to do that, we have to have him dead-to-rights on the extortion. Honestly?” he asked. “I don’t care much about the extortion. I care about these lives. I care about being lied to and strung out because of Fowler’s greed. He deserves more than a slap on the wrist. And yes, it means that you have to take your clothes off. Yes, you have to do all the private things we all do every day of our lives. And yes, you have to do them as if there is no camera watching you, no microphone listening. And no, I don’t know how a person does that. But I know you want him as badly as I do-otherwise, I couldn’t have asked.”

She sighed, and she scratched the dashboard with a fingernail. “Thank you for not saying that he’s seen it all already-that he may have hours of me on tape-so what does it matter? And thank you for not saying that I’m strong enough to pull this off. That is a sentiment that would not be appreciated, I can tell you that. We won’t know about any such strength until I try-if I try. And so that would only be manipulative garbage.” She smirked and added, “More my territory than yours. I could blow this, Lou. And thanks also for downplaying the report on that witness from the loading dock. We know Fowler received confirmation of Caulfield’s identity and did not act on it. I read that report. That makes him guilty of these crimes by omission.”

Boldt did not realize that she had read it. “Whatever,” he said. But his heart was pounding strongly, for it sounded to him as if perhaps she had made up her mind.

“They ask too much of us,” she said, her lips tight as if fighting off her emotions. “We give too much, and we get so little back. The media tears us to pieces. The sixth floor rains hell on us. And all for what?”

“Cold pizza and Maalox,” Boldt answered.

She sputtered a laugh. “Yeah. Job benefits.”

“Right.”

The wind blew across the water like a shadow, and sand swirled in the air, and the people playing volleyball shielded their eyes from it.

“As a teenager, like all teenage girls, I wanted to be a movie star. I thought it looked so easy. ‘Be careful what you wish for. Someday it may be yours,’ or however that goes.”

“You have to do this willingly; it’s not something that will work if you feel pressured into doing it. You have to sell him on the idea that everything you say, everything that goes on at that houseboat is for real.”

“Business as usual,” she said spitefully.

He was not going to touch that comment.

“I’m in,” she announced. Facing him with hard eyes she said, “But for my own reasons, Lou. For my own damn reasons.”

Everyone called the man Watson, and he ran Tech Services as if it were his own department, which it was not. He had been called Watson for so many years that Boldt did not remember his real name. He was a bald man with glasses and thick red lips, and was commonly mistaken for Bernie Lofgrin’s younger brother. If it ran on electricity, then Watson could build it, modify it, copy it, or compromise it.