“Me being here? Have I overstayed my welcome?” Why had she said that? She felt herself blush.
“What? No! It’s me … my stuff,” he said. He stood and the dog rallied. “Come on, you idiot.” He petted Blue’s head.
“Would I be in the way?” she asked.
“You still don’t have it figured out, do you, Matthews?”
“Probably not.”
“You’re not in the way.”
“Okay.” She fought back a flicker of anger. At herself? At him? She wasn’t sure.
He turned toward the couch, looking away momentarily.
“What you said just now … self-medicating …”
“Was stupid,” she interrupted.
He had sadder eyes than Blue. “Listen, Matthews … I stole two caps from your bathroom on my last visit. I tucked them away in my pocket and I walked around with them there for days, and I never said a thing to you, to Boldt. At the meetings.
Nothing.”
Somehow this scared her more than Walker had. Her words caught in her throat. “Did you … take them?”
“No, I tossed them, but I was this close to taking them,” he said. “I stole from you, and I didn’t tell you. I lied to myself that tossing them made it fine, but it didn’t make it fine. It sucks.
What an asshole I am. The worst of it is that I haven’t stopped thinking about them. I keep thinking how stupid it was to toss them.”
“You tossed them, John. That’s the point.”
“Listen, Matthews, this is as much about you as it is about those caps.”
“I understand that,” she said.
“Do you? I don’t think so. You don’t know the half of it.”
Indicating Blue, she said, “I think he’d rather we continue this outside.”
LaMoia found a slight grin. She thought: That’s better.
They moved toward the front door, the three of them. He hooked her arm and said, “The guys in the cruiser out front.
They’ll see us. You know they’re gonna talk if we walk armin-arm.”
“So they talk. They’re already going to talk.”
“It’s not like we’ve done anything,” he said.
“No, it’s not,” she agreed.
His words hung in the air on the way out.
They passed the cruiser and LaMoia waved.
“Well,” he said to Matthews, “I guess it’s all downhill from here.”
Downhill, but a slippery slope, she thought.
Blue found a hydrant and watered it down.
Matthews knew she would sleep alone that night, but catching herself even thinking about this had her wondering what she was getting herself into.
The Door
She loved it like this: She, LaMoia, and Boldt as a team, descending the Public Safety fire stairs so fast she could hardly keep up.
“What’s going on?” she asked, rounding a landing and continuing down with them. Boldt had nearly everyone on CAPs in the offices on a Saturday. SID was on its way in. Special Ops had been placed on call. Everyone awaited orders, knowing this was the moment for the Hebringer/Randolf case. She’d been told to leave her office and rendezvous with them on the stairs. She was to have a coat with her, which she did.
Boldt had this amazing charisma that instilled energy in everyone around him, an uncanny leadership quality that accounted for the uncompromising devotion of his squads, to where even a wise-ass like LaMoia stayed reined in under his command.
“We’re holding Vanderhorst under the state terrorism act, based on his having oxygen tanks in his possession, any one of which could cause a massive explosion. Together, they’re more like a small nuke.” For a big man, he moved fluidly, the railing slipping through his left hand used more as a guide than a support.
“But we released Walker?” LaMoia asked, clearly voicing a complaint. “What’s with that?”
“The bloodstains on his clothing are corrupted-some fish, some human, but none of it’s going to tell us anything specific, no matter what tests we run. The fiber workup failed to connect him to the lair, which is understandable since it’s clearly Vanderhorst’s lair.”
“But can’t we hold him on something?” LaMoia said, trying to keep Boldt focused on his own complaint about Walker.
“What if he still has it in for our friend here?”
At the next landing, Boldt looked back at him. “You tell me what we hold him on, and I’ll be the first to consider it.”
“Obstruction!”
“We can’t prove it,” Boldt returned.
LaMoia pressed, “Then let’s at least keep Matthews on a wire.”
“No way!” she said.
Two floors to go. It seemed impossible, but Boldt was moving even faster now-taking three stairs at a time. She didn’t have that reach. Both men moved ahead of her, but only briefly.
She took two stairs, but outran them, and quickly caught up.
Boldt said, “Consider it done. Daffy, you’ll wear the wire whenever you’re out of this building.”
“Lou,” she protested.
It wasn’t up for discussion. Boldt changed subjects, “I got Babcock a photo of that skeleton key, which she subsequently determined was late nineteenth, early twentieth century-at least twenty years past the construction of the section of the city that’s currently beneath the church.”
“Twenty years?” she asked, not following what this determined.
“Construction spread uphill after the great fire.”
“As in Columbia and Third?” LaMoia asked.
“Granted,” Boldt said, finally reaching the building’s garage level, “any lock could have been put in any door at any time.
But if we’re playing percentages, then that lock is more likely from this area of town-right where we’re standing, for that matter, than down the hill toward Pio Square.”
“And that’s where we’re headed?” she asked. “Across the street?”
“Each level of the Underground is over a hundred thousand square feet. That’s three football fields or so. At this point, SID
has been through ninety percent or more of that level where we found Vanderhorst’s lair, and so far no sign of Hebringer or Randolf.”
He held the door for them.
“We put a pair of K-9s into that space about an hour ago, each scented for one of the missing. They led us straight back to the elevator shaft. A drain. Vanderhorst had sealed it with black plastic so the smell couldn’t escape.”
“He put them down a drain?” LaMoia asked. “In one piece?”
Boldt held up the skeleton key, still in the evidence bag. “The drain leads down to yet another level of Underground,” he said.
“That’s why the jackets. We’re going to be the first inside, and I’m betting it’s chilly down there.”
It felt damn near freezing to her. She wasn’t sure if that was the actual temperature or her own heightened
