Matthews.
“Shoe treads,” said the evidence guy, a little overeager for recognition. Boldt had a Norman Schwarzkopf reputation within the department. Newcomers always sucked up to him.
LaMoia said, “Maybe it’s nothing more than some hump working his joystick.”
Boldt looked to Matthews for confirmation. “He stayed in here a long time. He had at least a couple of opportunities for full frontals of her. Lots of time with her stretched out on the bed-also naked. If it was masturbatory, as John’s implying, it would have been over much sooner.”
“Maybe the guy’s on Viagra,” LaMoia said.
Fighting a grin, she said, “Another explanation would be that it wasn’t masturbatory at all-but a collection phase, subsequent to trolling and prior to-”
“Abduction,” Boldt said, completing her thought.
“A possibility is all,” she said, “but yes.”
Upon learning, after the fact, that Susan Hebringer had reported a Peeping Tom to police just prior to her disappearance, CAP’s homicide squad had worked closely with Special Assaults to chase down each and every reported incident of sexual harassment and voyeurism, focusing a great deal of attention on any such reports in the downtown corridor, or filed by downtown residents. Uniformed patrols had been alerted to pay special attention to vacant buildings, billboards, parking garages, and construction sites-all possible viewing platforms for the peeper.
Private security firms directly responsible for these same structures were contacted as well.
“Do we have any idea how long he was up here?”
LaMoia held his flashlight between his teeth while consulting his notes to make sure he had it right. Boldt liked it right the first time. “The vic personally witnessed him out here for twelve minutes. Digital alarm clock on the bedside,” he explained.
“Could’ve easily been a lot longer than that, since she was in the tub for over twenty and on the bed snoozing for an unde-termined time.”
“Any fluids or emissions up here?” Matthews asked the SID
technician.
“Nothing to the naked eye so far. We could Luminol and the like, if you want.” Under black light, when reacting with the chemical agent Luminol, human blood glowed green. Other tests existed for bodily fluids of so- called secretors-people whose blood contained a set of specific blood proteins.
LaMoia answered, “We want.”
Boldt added, “Please. Any tricks you’ve got to detect saliva or semen. And if we come up with anything, I’d like it DNAed and run against the state and the fed’s databases. Whether you get a hit or not, I want everything kept on file, and full written reports.”
“Got it.”
“Along with every girder up here, I want you to dust for prints on the stairway railing at every landing, both sides of the turn.” He answered the technician’s curious expression: “It’s where people take hold. Just do it.”
He signaled LaMoia and Matthews to step away, and the three shared a moment of privacy.
“Anything?” Boldt asked.
LaMoia looked across to Dunkin’s hotel room. The Japanese tech was waving at him. LaMoia felt stupid waving back but he did so. These lab guys would never be cops.
“She’d done tourist stuff,” LaMoia answered. “Some shopping.”
“Anything specific in the shopping? Lingerie, swimsuit, anything that would have had her outside of a changing room partially clothed or at least wearing less than her street clothes?”
“I should’ve asked that,” LaMoia was ashamed to admit.
Boldt had been a paper shuffler for a couple years now yet still had better instincts than any two street detectives combined.
“Was it random?” Boldt asked.
“The million-dollar question.”
“Your gut check?” Boldt requested.
Matthews shook her head no. LaMoia said, “Not random.
Deliberate. But I got serious problems with that: Even if he trolls the tourist spots, even if he follows ’em to their hotels or their condos, how the flock does he know what room she’s in?”
“Unless it’s the other way around,” Boldt suggested.
They’d worked these angles raw back at the Public Safety Building. For the sake of hearing it aloud, LaMoia said, “He spots ’em from up here-wherever-then waits for them to leave the hotel, and knowing what they look like, he stalks them.
For whatever reason, at least twice he grabbed them.”
Matthews said, “Timing and location-those are your reasons. Nothing more complicated than that, which opens up the possibility-depending on why he took off-that our Ms. Dunkin just made his list.”
LaMoia told Boldt, “She leaves town tomorrow. Taxi, straight to the airport. He won’t be following her.”
“Lucky for her. Too bad for us,” Boldt said.
“We could still bait him,” LaMoia suggested. “Install some babe on one of our squads to strip in front of windows.”
Matthews said, “I wonder who’d be volunteering to oversee that operation.”
LaMoia mugged at her.
Boldt was not happy. “The problem is it’s not a specific hotel, a single building. Hebringer and Randolf both lived here. Ten blocks apart. You can’t bait every town house, every hotel.”
They’d been around this track enough times back in the situation room. Weeks, even months of it now. Boldt was in rough shape, under fire from the press, the brass, the families of the missing women, and even his own wife.
“So maybe Hebringer getting peeped was nothing but shitty coincidence,” LaMoia said, referring to what they knew about the missing woman. “Drawing a look from us when it doesn’t deserve it. Maybe it’s got us by a nose ring when it’s nothing but a black hole. Maybe I walked into that tonight.”
“Maybe not, John,” Matthews said. “We don’t ignore this,”
she told Boldt. “His sticking around-that counts for something.”
“Keep it up,” Boldt told them. Pointing to the cordoned-off area, he said, “Make him talk to us, would you, please?” He added with a snarl, “A confession would be nice.”
Room with a View
Doc Dixon, a big bear of a man with hooded eyes and a wide face, signaled Matthews and won her attention before pointing toward his receptionist, who manned a sliding glass window looking out onto the medical examiner’s waiting room. His sign meant Langford “Lanny” Neal, the possible boyfriend of their Jane Doe, had just arrived and was being kept waiting.
Matthews acknowledged, checked the wall clock, and debated calling LaMoia one more time, resigning herself to the fact that a phone call wouldn’t help the traffic situation. Nothing would help Seattle’s traffic, not even an act of God.
Feeling obliged to do so, she’d left a message at the fish dock where she’d met with Ferrell Walker, providing the time and location of the identification at the medical examiner’s office, hoping the message might not reach the grief-stricken brother in time. But one eye continually tracked to the reception window, wondering if Walker might appear.
Matthews had never liked the medical examiner’s office and avoided it whenever possible. Dixon ran the ME’s more as a doctor than a bureaucrat, displaying a keen interest in each and every body that passed through his doors and the legal system that claimed control of them in death. Matthews didn’t have the same kinship or friendship with Dixon that Boldt shared, but through Boldt she had acquired a profound respect for the man.
Where most of the homicide detectives had developed at least an uneasy comfort at the ME’s, Matthews, a
