anxiety over what they expected to find, but the coat didn’t help, and that was her first big clue. Preparing to lower themselves through the open storm drain at the bottom of the elevator shaft, itself now lit by halogen lights running off extension cords lowered from the bank’s basement, Boldt passed out latex gloves and shared a tube of Men- tholatum to smear above the lip to help mask the smell. The rituals of homicide came painfully. All three knew that odor, and “it ain’t dead rats,” as LaMoia had put it.
Squeezing through the open drain into a dark, damp space in which the stench was far more concentrated felt to Matthews like willfully entering a portal into hell.
She interviewed them, she counseled them, she analyzed them, she predicted them, and she evaluated them, but she would still never fully understand why human beings treated their own species with such willful disdain, disrespect, and distemper.
The going was relatively dry underfoot. For all of Boldt’s rapid descent in Public Safety, he moved down this hallway at a snail’s pace-mindful of every footfall, stepping this way and that and indicating for the two others to follow in his exact footsteps, the protector and keeper of evidence in all its possible forms. Ancient gaslight fixtures held to the crumbling red brick walls. This subterranean area had either been stables or cold storage back in the days of the Yukon gold rush, when Seattle rose from a tiny fishing village to a commercial metropolis nearly overnight. In those days, when a nickel or dime would buy a man a dinner, each and every prospector was dropping nearly two thousand dollars to be supplied for a year in the northern prov-ince, as twelve months of provisions were mandated by the government before anyone would be allowed aboard a ship heading north. Basements like this ran full of beef jerky, oats, sugar, and salt. Cattle and swine, horses and mules. Now it was empty space behind locked doors, and it was in front of one of those doors that Boldt stopped, having nearly walked past it, his nose turning him around, as well as a keen eye that picked up the drizzle of key oil staining the wood beneath the wrought iron of a keyhole.
Three flashlights found that keyhole at once. It was a heavy wooden door that hung on hinges pounded flat by the muscle of a blacksmith.
“No one enters until we get a good look,” Boldt told them.
He broke open the evidence baggie that contained the key left by the tooth fairy beneath Matthews’s pillow.
Boldt inserted the large skeleton key into the lock. He met eyes with Matthews in the dim light. She thought she saw his lips barely moving and she wondered if he was praying-beyond reason, it seemed to her-that Susan Hebringer had been spared. The key turned with a loud click of the tumblers. For Matthews, his turning that key was to expose a part of the human condition that would kill off yet another fraction of the optimism she maintained that mankind could and would someday work through its problems.
Not likely, she thought, finding herself only able to moan as she witnessed the scene before them.
The sterile light from the flashlight revealed the corpses of two women. They were still partially clothed, but their breasts and pubic symphyses were exposed. They both hung by their wrists from nylon strapping, secured to large iron rings mounted to the rock wall. Massive yellow and brown bruises cried out from their chests, rib cages, and swollen faces. Their legs had been bent back at the knees, ribbons of silver duct tape binding their ankles to their thighs so they could neither kick nor fight their attacker’s intentions to repeatedly rape them.
Evidence suggested he had kept them alive: There was packaged food discarded on the floor, some of which had spilled down their clothes or adhered to their skin. He had revisited them, a fact that would contribute to the profile Matthews would later build. He had kept them awake, used them up, one at a time until replacing them became necessary. He had kept them on the wall like trophies.
“ ‘Strung up like marlins,’ ” Matthews quoted. “I remember Walker saying that. Walker, not Vanderhorst.” This revelation clearly stole Boldt’s attention briefly from the bodies. Walker had supplied the key as well, but this was Vanderhorst’s scene-Boldt said so in a whisper.
He added, “The ATM connection was Vanderhorst’s, not Walker’s.”
“Oh … God … no …” They heard a gurgle and splat behind them. Babcock, the university professor, had somehow talked her way down here. Heads would roll. But in the meantime they had her vomit to deal with.
“Help her out,” Boldt instructed Matthews, refusing to move himself, refusing to break his train of concentration. She understood the importance of everything Boldt took in now, before he steeled himself to the sight and smell, before the SID techies stuck little paper flags around the room making it into a parade route, now, before any other living person, except one (the killer), experienced this horror for what it truly was. The crime scene offered insight into the events that had taken place here, insights that could prove invaluable to the prosecution of Per Vanderhorst. Boldt’s latex gloved fingers slipped out his notepad and she watched as he began to sketch. “John?” he said. “The camera?”
LaMoia had brought along the department’s pocket-sized digital camera as well as a handful of evidence bags.
“What the hell’s going on here?” Babcock moaned.
“Shhh.” Matthews attempted to console the woman. “He’s working the scene.”
Double Team
For several hours Boldt and his team managed to keep their discovery confidential, avoiding the inevitable media stampede that promised both to steal their focus and to give Vanderhorst’s defense attorney information the PA’s office didn’t want him having. Knowing that even on a Saturday such a news blackout wouldn’t last forever, Boldt had asked Lofgrin to pick his two most trusted SID technicians to work the site. Boldt had also tasked his information technology squad to work the National Crime Information Center’s database for like crimes, and they had already produced results. Three of the seven pages he now carried were crime scene photographs gleaned from an advanced search on the NCIC database. Filling out a detailed database query that included such information as the use of duct tape, the sustaining of the victim’s life, the blood type of the secretor (semen had been collected from both Hebringer and Randolf, and was currently being DNA-typed), the age and specifics of the two victims, SID-IT had matched the Hebringer/Randolf murders to three other similar unsolved cases. These results, once the product of weeks, months, or even years of interstate detective work, had been accomplished in less than forty minutes.
“So far, so good,” Boldt put to Matthews when asked how things were going. “Though that may be about to change.”
She indicated the door to the interrogation room, on the other side of which sat Per Vanderhorst, waiting. “You can’t honestly think that Walker was any part of these murders.” Following the trip into the Underground, she’d changed into a pair of blue jeans that she normally reserved for weekends and, tucked in at the waist, a white, oversized, tailored shirt belonging to LaMoia.
She had the shirt’s starched sleeves and cuffs rolled up on her forearms nearly to her elbows.
“Walker delivered the key. That puts him in this, like it or not.”
“There’s an explanation for that,” she said.
“Not that I’ve heard, there isn’t.”
“So Vanderhorst will explain it to us now,” she said.
“He’d better. No matter what, Walker faces obstruction charges. At the very least, he knew about that death chamber.
If Vanderhorst doesn’t sort it out for us, I’m going to tie them both up in this.”
“Lou, that’s preposterous, and you know it! Walker stumbled onto this in the Underground, nothing more.”
“The various sections of Underground don’t connect, Daffy.
You’ll need a better explanation than that.”
“Maybe they do somehow and we just haven’t found it yet.”
Reading his wristwatch, Boldt signaled the end of the discussion, telling her, “In twenty-five minutes Tim Peterson from the U.S. Attorney’s office is going to be arriving here to meet with Mahoney and Tony Shapiro.”
“Shapiro?”
“There’s a report he took the case pro bono as of about an hour ago. That’s why I said I think things may
