The U.S. Attorney’s office could facilitate this request. Ferrell Walker was complicating things. Boldt wanted a rendezvous. He wanted answers.
Less than an hour later, Sandra Babcock finally came through, providing a list of property ownership of eight businesses and stores that she believed might offer access into the section of Underground where Billy Chen had lost his life. This access would circumvent the city’s refusal to allow Boldt down inside the sinkhole. Boldt gumshoed for ninety minutes, business to business, store to store, eventually gaining an audience with the vice president of SeaTel Bank, a balding man who smelled of cologne. The VP confirmed the bank sat atop an old basement and summoned a maintenance man to escort Boldt downstairs.
Boldt knew that both Randolf’s and Hebringer’s finances had been checked and double-checked. Certainly if both had been customers of this or any bank, it would have been red-flagged, but he didn’t recall that information off the top of his head, and this left him wondering if his team hadn’t made a mistake. Did the abductor troll bank lobbies looking for women cashing large checks? Looking for brunettes who wore their hair to their shoulders? He grew irritable through the waiting, wondering what the hell took a maintenance man eight minutes to reach the lobby.
There were times eight minutes meant nothing, and then there were times like this when thirty seconds could set his teeth to grinding.
“That’s him,” the VP said, pointing across the lobby. Boldt saw a gaunt man with sleepy eyes, a bad set of teeth, and tight, sinewy arms bearing a tattoo of a red rose on his left forearm.
Boldt hurried across the lobby and introduced himself. Struggling against allergies or asthma, the man wheezed, “Basement’s over here,” forgoing his name. The plastic tag on his coveralls read Per Vanderhorst. He seemed nervous, as did most people when meeting a cop for the first time. Boldt doubted he was the first cop a guy like Vanderhorst had met, but at the same time, if the guy had felony priors he wouldn’t be working for a bank like SeaTel.
“I wanted to ask if you saw any flooding in your basement when that water main broke,” Boldt said, as Vanderhorst led the way.
“Not a drop.” He forced his reply dryly from his throat, sounding like someone was choking him.
Vanderhorst used one of about twenty keys on a ring to open a door marked PRIVATE, then led Boldt down an unattractive corridor past an EXIT sign on the right and another PRIVATE door to the left. At the end of this hall they entered one marked AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY and descended two short flights of concrete-and-steel stairs, at the bottom of which Vanderhorst hit a second light switch and motioned into a sterile, immacu-lately kept basement area that provided storage.
“My daughter has a friend Vanderhurst,” Boldt leaned on the “u” in the name. He wanted to get Vanderhorst talking, open him up about the water main break, rumors of the Underground’s existence, anything he could get from the man, but he’d been given a guy who could hardly breathe, much less make conversation.
“I heard it was the Underground that flooded in this block,”
Boldt tried.
Vanderhorst wheezed. “This is dry storage mostly.” It was stone and concrete walls, steel beams supporting the low ceiling, tube lighting bouncing off white and gray paint. Rows of industrial shelving aligned north to south stretched like library stacks floor to ceiling. Cardboard boxes bearing codes in thick black marker occupied every available inch of space.
“How about below this floor?” Boldt asked. “Anything?”
“Not that I’m aware of.” The thin man stood there like a statue. Boldt asked if he’d ever found people down here who didn’t belong.
“I’m not going to say it has never happened, because I haven’t been here all that long. But this is a bank. They don’t like the idea of strangers cruising around.” They moved on.
“Couple more rooms down here you might want to see.”
He showed Boldt three other rooms, one jammed with heating/ventilation ducts and equipment; another tangled with electric, phone, and communication wires; a third, larger and much older, that housed plumbing and steam heaters no longer in use.
The walls of this third room were brick covered in thick layers of paint. Generations earlier, some window openings had been bricked closed and painted over. Those window holes suggested an outside wall. Boldt rubbed his hand on the cool brick. “I’m looking to get on the other side of this.”
Vanderhorst remained disinterested, a maintenance guy going through the motions. “Wouldn’t that be dirt?”
Boldt repeated his earlier question about flooding, somewhat astonished that the quantity of water so close wouldn’t have resulted in any flooding.
“Listen, what do I know? You could check with my boss.”
He asked irritably, “You seen enough?”
Still touching the wall, Boldt asked, “Have you ever come across any doors, holes in the wall, the floor … anything that might lead somewhere outside this basement?”
“The bus tunnel … they had problems with that water main thing, I think.”
This comment stirred Boldt’s interest-a light went off inside him. “Which wall is that?”
Vanderhorst pointed to the nearest wall of the rectangular room. With some checking, Boldt determined it was the same wall as the one in the utility room with the bricked-up windows.
“We’re done here,” an excited Boldt announced.
Vanderhorst led the way back upstairs, letting Boldt go ahead as he lagged behind to shut off the lights.
Boldt reached the EXIT door down the hall, which was alarmed with a red panic bar.
“You’ll get me fired, you push that.” Vanderhorst stood a few yards behind Boldt, watching him. He’d crept up on Boldt, and that bothered him.
“Where’s it lead?”
“Onto Columbia. It’s a fire exit. You want to see the security people, they’re the first door to the right, upstairs, in Admin.”
Boldt thanked Vanderhorst and walked through the lobby back out onto the street, debating his next move. He had other businesses yet to explore within this city block, all with potential access to the Underground, according to Babcock.
Frustrated by his lack of discovery at the bank, Boldt called into the office and assigned two of his detectives to do that door-to-door footwork for him.
To his right, he saw the entrance to the bus tunnel station that fronted Public Safety. He made up his mind, choosing the tunnel for himself.
When Washington State builds a transportation project, 1 percent of the contracted cost is budgeted to the arts, for aesthetics.
The result is an eclectic mix of sculpture, writing, music, and painting, little gems that catch the public unaware. In the case of the pedestrian entrances to the bus tunnel, it included poetry engraved into the kick plates of the stairs, as well as colorful sculpture attached to the walls.
At the Pioneer Square station, escalators, stairs, and elevators lead down first to a vast tier, an open plaza that spans the tunnel traffic below, providing passengers access to any of several additional stairs and escalators for northbound or southbound bus routes. The incandescent lighting is bright; sounds echo off the concrete and tile, and because the buses run electrically once into the tunnel, there are virtually no odors other than a faint trace of burning rubber, a condition that put Boldt ill at ease.
The underground bus tunnel stations had not proven popular enough to account for the enormity of such a facility. It swallowed up the two dozen passengers down on the platforms awaiting the arrival of a bus, and Boldt along with them.
The director of bus tunnel maintenance, a man named Chuck Iberson, was a big man with florid cheeks and thinning white hair. Iberson’s military background showed in his attentiveness and respect for Boldt. He had treated Boldt’s summons with the utmost seriousness, arriving to meet him in less than fifteen minutes. By nature Boldt couldn’t help looking at people as possible suspects. Iberson’s overzealous willingness to respond so quickly, like Per Vanderhorst’s mealy and vaguely sleazy sniveling persona, made the detective think twice about the personalities that lurked beneath. A bank janitor might have a shot at an unsuspecting woman, as might a man in a position of authority like Iberson. Boldt knew from his years of experience that suspects often surfaced in the most
