reaching overhead, fingering the crack at the hinges. In a voice he did not recognize as his own, he asked, “How often are the alarms checked? The door alarms,” he clarified.
“I … ah …”
Boldt motioned for Iberson to step through the fire door with him, and the two stood in the steel hallway, and Boldt pulled the door shut behind them. “Arm the door,” Boldt instructed.
Iberson’s hand shook slightly as he keyed the panic bar.
“Okay?” Boldt asked.
“Okay,” Iberson answered.
Boldt pushed against the door’s panic bar and swung the door open. No alarm sounded. Boldt shot Iberson a knowing look.
“No fucking way,” Iberson said, astonished. “Pardon the French,” he said, covering himself.
Boldt examined the doorjamb and located a wire intended for the panic bar. The wire’s insulating sheath had been cut open, a thin blue jumper wire twisted to connect two of the four multicolored wires. The main part of the wire had been cut, no longer connected to the panic bar. Boldt pointed out the modi-fication to Iberson.
“Fuck me,” Iberson said, no longer apologetic for his language.
“Check the other one,” Boldt said, pointing back toward the tunnel. Iberson took off at a run. The hallway was like a jetway at an airport. It thundered as Iberson ran.
Boldt turned and studied the hallway as Iberson stepped through the far emergency door and back into the bus tunnel.
The man pulled the door shut behind him. A moment later when he pushed through, it was to silence. No alarm.
“I’ll be goddamned. How’d you know that?” Iberson’s surprise seemed authentic. If he’d had anything to do with the tampering of these doors, he was a damn good actor.
Boldt reasoned it through-the disarmed doors gave the perpetrator access from both the tunnel and from wherever the basement exit led. He reconsidered: Was it access, or an escape route? Was it both? His chest tight with anticipation, he knew this was a solid discovery-the tampering all but confirmed it.
He thought it through again: an exit or entrance from the bus tunnel, an exit or entrance from the basement of some building up on Third Avenue. “It doesn’t help him,” he muttered.
“What’s that?” Iberson asked, studying the sabotaged wiring on the tunnel door as Boldt had on the interior door. “Same story here.”
Boldt moved panel to panel along the hallway wall. He pushed, thumped a fist against the steel, then jammed his fingers into the cracks and pulled hard as if trying to open a cabinet that had lost its handle. One after the next, he proceeded down the length of the hallway, crossed over, and started up the north side of the hall. The third panel away from the bus tunnel rattled loudly when he thumped it with his closed fist. He signaled Iberson to join him, and the two of them ran their fingers into the cracks, attempting to pry. All at once, the panel jumped off its frame several inches. It was held by a wire-a section of the same colored wire used to bypass the alarm systems- twisted on the far side of the panel. In the dark.
A damp, heavy air surged through the open crack. It smelled like a swamp in there.
Reaching for a pair of latex gloves, Boldt said, “You’re going to have to close the southbound tunnel. Make an excuse.”
“Like hell!”
“In about ten minutes, this place is going to be crawling with lab personnel.” Boldt checked his cell phone service. No signal.
“I’ve got to get to the surface,” he said anxiously. “In the meantime, we lock this up. You and I go out together. No one touches anything. And if anyone asks, you tell them it flooded again.
Whatever you want, I don’t care. But I want no mention of police, no mention of my visit, no mention of the lab guys. You screw it up, I’ll not only have your job, I’ll have you in for obstruction. Are we clear on that?”
“I got it,” Iberson said. He glanced back at the partially open wall panel and shook his head. “If I hadn’t seen it with-”
“You didn’t see it,” Boldt said.
“Yeah, yeah.”
“You didn’t see it,” Boldt repeated sternly.
“The hell I didn’t,” Iberson said. “I gotta put my boss into the loop. You want, I can put you two in touch directly. Closing down a tunnel, that’s serious business.”
More serious than you think, Boldt nearly said. “I saw pay phones on that upper level.”
Iberson checked his pants pockets as he shut the EER behind them. “You got any quarters?” he asked.
Running Blind
Four out of the six available patrol cars were stationed around the section of downtown defined by Second and Third Avenues and Columbia and James, respectively. The officers on duty in these cars had been issued a Be On Lookout for any individual, most likely male, fleeing any door or trapdoor that could be construed to be a part of any building in that block or adjacent to that block. Basically, if anyone or anything looked or moved suspiciously, he was to be taken into custody immediately and brought to Public Safety’s central booking.
The remaining two cars cruised the immediate area. These two “rovers” also monitored the city bus dispatch radio channel on handheld walkie-talkies, in case a bus driver reported anything unusual.
The pieces in place, and with Boldt turning over the underground hallway to SID, he and Detective Second Class Bobbie Gaynes, a member of LaMoia’s CAP squad and the department’s first female homicide detective, lowered themselves through the space created by the removal of the steel panel in EER 19 and slipped into the darkness of a section of Underground that had likely seen few living people in well over a hundred years.
Boldt might have preferred three or four specially trained urban warriors from the Emergency Response Team-ERT-as backup, but such a request would have required a formal appeal to Special Ops and would have wasted too much time. Boldt’s impatience had worn thin as it was, it having taken nearly an hour to do what he’d been ready to do the moment he’d pulled that panel off.
The air, extremely cool and smelling dank and musty, hit Boldt in the lungs and he nearly coughed. He and the detective both carried flashlights with theatrical red gel taped over the light, casting a dull, reddish purple light that carried only about eight feet, helping to protect their approach.
They ducked and crawled through infrastructure-gas pipe and a tangle of wires. Boldt shone his light behind them, illuminating an imposing stone and mortar wall that rose beyond the abilities of his flashlight. They climbed over a small mound of chipped and broken brick. Boldt thought he heard rats scurrying but didn’t want to think about it. Not his favorite house-hold pet.
He and Gaynes emerged onto what had once been a city sidewalk on what had once been a different level of Third Avenue or whatever they’d called the street in the late 1800s. The sidewalk consisted of short, heavy redwood planking, some of it now rotten, most amazingly strong and intact. To Boldt’s right, he saw the old storefronts, ghostly and disturbing. Overhead, more of the clumsy network of pipes and cables braided into an unforgiving mess. LaMoia had described some of this in his report on the arrest made at the church. There really was another city down here, Boldt realized, and the student in him found it somewhat fascinating.
Overhead, steel I-beams shouldered a huge pipe that he assumed to be the water main. After another ten or fifteen yards, the sidewalk gave way to several inches of imposing mud-an area that proved to be the edge of the flood wash from the broken main. He trained his flashlight’s red glare down onto the mud, where he saw a series of tracks-shoe or boot prints. A disadvantage of the red light was that it blurred edges. With his heart fluttering in his chest, Boldt leaned closer. Recent tracks, without a doubt. Chen? he wondered. The EMTs? Or did these belong to someone else, the very person Boldt now pursued?
As they waded into the ankle-high muck, the sucking sound proved noisy and concerned him. Boldt led the way, careful not to disturb the existing prints that he wanted preserved for collection by SID. He was not one to believe in prescience or su-pernatural gifts; it was true that he, at times, possessed an uncanny ability to place himself inside the head of the victim, to experience the crime from this point of view in a visceral, almost tangible
