Two of them were collecting her blood. One of them was assigned to figure this all out and attribute it to someone.
Matthews was there to observe. But as the pale, swollen mass that had once been a woman came to the surface with the three divers, she turned and walked away, very much aware that Nathan Prair watched her every step from his huddle with several other KCSO officers. She crossed her arms a little more tightly.
Happy to be gone from the scene, she realized she might leave, but she could not, and would not, leave this case behind.
This one was hers as much as it was LaMoia’s.
Pretty in Pink
Late afternoon the following day, on the heels of several detectives-in-training poring over the two dozen local missing person reports, as well as the pages of six three-ring binders filled cover to cover with sheets of reported runaways suspected headed to the Northwest (these binders representing only the last two months of flyers sent to SPD), a phone call was taken by the duty sergeant at Public Safety.
“Yo!” LaMoia answered.
“Sergeant, it’s Phil at the front desk.”
“Yeah, Phil. Whassup?”
“Phone call just now come in. The individual is one Ferrell Walker. Male. Sounded kind of young. Claims the description in the paper fits his sister, and that for all he knows she’s gone missing-something about some asshole boyfriend who won’t return his calls. Should I kick it upstairs on a memo or what?”
“No. I’ll take it. Give me the four-one-one.”
The duty sergeant read the particulars to LaMoia and repeated his recollection of the conversation.
“Give me the TOD,” LaMoia said, wanting the exact time of day the call had been logged. All incoming calls to the switchboard’s main number were recorded digitally. LaMoia could access and listen to the message himself, but his preference was that I.T. lift the message off the master and preserve and protect it so they’d have it available later.
He caught up with Daphne Matthews in her seventh-floor office, a hundred and fifty square feet of femininity in an otherwise grayish male world. It always felt comfortable to him, which he supposed was the point-she did her counseling here-chintz curtains on the window, landscape artwork on the walls. But it was the personal furniture that made such a difference, even if it was from Home Depot as she claimed-dark wood and leather, instead of the gunmetal gray steel that came courtesy of the taxpayers. An electric kettle, a wooden variety box of tea, and packets of Splenda occupied a counter to the right of her desk.
“Here’s my problem,” he said without a greeting.
Matthews was packing up for the day, filling a narrow black briefcase that looked more like a handbag. “I’m done for the day.”
“The Sarge keeps asking me to rewrite the report on the bridge.”
“Try English, John.”
“Ha-ha. You’re really cracking me up, here.”
“I’m not writing your report for you.”
“And in the meantime,” he continued, “I got this guy that says his sister’s split the scene and that she matches the description we gave to the paper.”
She looked up.
“The thing is, I got to make like Shakespeare here for the next couple hours, and when you call the number this guy gave the desk it comes up some grouch who says our boy ain’t coming to the phone while he’s on the job- and the job turns out to be cleaning fish up at Fisherman’s Terminal-and seeing as how that’s damn near on your way home …”
“That’s a stretch,” she said.
“But you’ll do it.”
“I shouldn’t. I’m tired, and I want a glass of wine.”
“But you will.” He said, “I swear, if I didn’t have this damn report to write-”
“Yeah, yeah,” she complained. “And I’ll whitewash your fence while I’m at it.”
“I don’t have a fence,” he said, “but I do have a couple closets I just built that need a couple coats.”
“Rain check,” she said, standing at the ready. “Tell me again whom I’m looking for?”
She left the Honda alongside a rusted heap of a pickup truck in a parking lot of cracked and heaving blacktop that oozed a brown mud apparently too toxic to host even the heartiest of weeds. Dickensian in both appearance and smells, the commercial fishing docks of south Ballard had changed little in the last century. A dozen or more small trawlers, battered and destitute in appearance, evacuated their catch to cleaning tables with open drain spouts that ran pink with guts and grime emptied back into the canal water where overfed seagulls and shore birds battled noisily for territory, their cries piercing and sharp, yet apparently unnoticed by all but Matthews.
A few of the men, mostly young and scraggly, overtly inspected her as she followed directions down the line to the third of the cleaning tables. Even in jeans and a work shirt she would have felt self-conscious in this setting, but dressed in tweed wool pants pleated at the waist and crisp in the crease, and a navy blue Burberry microfiber rain jacket with leather trim, she felt about as comfortable as the silver salmon under the knife.
Ferrell Walker looked more seventeen than twenty. LaMoia had pulled two driver’s licenses for her: Walker’s and his sister’s, one Mary-Ann Walker, twenty-six. Matthews knew from the data that his eyes were listed as green, his hair brown, his weight 170 and that he wasn’t an organ donor. He wore a black rubber apron smeared with the snotty entrails of his livelihood.
The apron attempted to protect a pair of filthy blue jeans and a tattered sweatshirt equally smeared with resident stains. He pulled off mismatched thick rubber gloves, one black, one yellow, stuffing them into a torn pocket on the apron that hung down like a giant tongue. He rinsed his hands in cold water from a rubber hose that ran constantly above his cutting stand.
He dried them on a soiled section of torn towel and thankfully did not offer one to shake. Obliged to display her shield, she made sure he saw it.
Walker’s face was pinched, as if he’d been sat on as a baby.
She couldn’t see the green for the dark, deep eye sockets. Behind him, on the high wooden workbench where the water ran pink, a wood-handled fish knife rested, its curving blade like an ill-fashioned smile. Walker’s Adam’s apple bobbed like a buoy as he answered her first question. Had he called the police to report his sister as missing?
He looked at her almost as if he knew her-men did this to her all the time, but Walker’s variation was pretty convincing, and disquieting.
“Not like Mary-Ann to miss work,” Walker said. “And when that asshole said he hadn’t seen her either, that didn’t sound right, so I called you guys … you people … whatever.”
She asked for and received the sister’s pedigree, some of which matched what she’d learned from the driver’s license: twenty-six, blond, 135, five foot six, smoker, worked here at dock five. Last seen-and this was the most troubling to her of all-roughly three days earlier. Those in the know put her in the water over forty-eight hours. This timing made Mary-Ann Walker a likely fit. Matthews had a Polaroid of the woman’s waterlogged, crab-eaten face in her pocket but couldn’t bring herself to deliver it to this kid. Mention of “that asshole” made her think she might have another candidate to ID the body.
“You’re making reference to a boyfriend?” she asked.
“Wait, tell me it’s not Mary-Ann,” he said. “Tell me this didn’t happen.”
“What’s her boyfriend’s name?”
“Lanny Neal.” He still had hope in his voice. “The description in the paper … tell me I’m wrong about it sounding like Mary-Ann.”
Matthews looked around for a place to sit, but thought better of it. She didn’t like the smell here, the sound of the dead fish slopping wetly down onto the cutting tables. She didn’t like the sad look in Walker’s tired eyes, or the thought that LaMoia had passed this off to her so that she’d be the one delivering bad news.
