set, the motivations and factors that had turned him from a benign mourner into an unpredictable, homicidal killer. Some trigger had been thrown, and she believed her continued existence turned on her ability to identify it, expose it, and manipulate it to her advantage.
As if hearing her internal thoughts, he turned to her halfway down the alley and said with wild eyes, “Don’t worry, you’re going to like this.”
That made her worry all the more.
They stopped in front of a steel-plate manhole marked SWD-Seattle Water Department. Walker retrieved a crude tool fashioned from bent rebar that he’d hidden behind a pile of soggy cardboard boxes. The reinforcing rod was bent like a giant meat hook. He instructed Matthews to sit down on the pavement, and she obeyed, ill prepared to try to outrun the man. He slipped the hook end of the bent rod through a ventilation hole in the manhole cover and hoisted the heavy lid. It came off the exposed hole with a rattle of metal. As he did so, she used the cover of the noise to reach behind her, grope down her backside, and tear loose the small tag inside her panties. She let it fall onto the pavement. Leave them crumbs, she thought, her cop’s mind beginning to separate from her personal emotions.
A flicker of light swept through the looming darkness that seemed to overwhelm her at that moment. She was letting him win without intending it. She said to him, “We found the room, Ferrell. The bodies. We know all about it.” She saw disappointment crease his face-she’d guessed the contents of the gift before allowing him to unwrap it for her.
He told her to get to her feet. He pointed down the black hole in the pavement. “Ladies first,” he said.
Circling the Drain
The early reports of the situation were sketchy at best, and Boldt tried not to overreact. His tendency, when hearing one officer was down and another missing, was to assume the best while preparing for the worst. The job rarely involved much good news, and he’d developed a fairly thick skin, but one learned not to creatively interpret a simple radio code.
That this call involved members of his own unit-one a prote?geand friend, the other his friend and former lover-proved the exception to the rule. He fell to pieces with the news. Monitoring the tense radio traffic, he determined that ambulances were headed to the scene. Reports included a woman-quite possibly a civilian-badly cut and bleeding out. The pit in his stomach grew to nausea as he caught himself hoping that the vic was a civilian, a line he had no right to cross.
He rushed down the hall to the men’s room, the nausea escalating to where he felt his stomach preparing to void. In all his years on the job he’d never vomited over an earful of radio traffic.
He put out the fire with a dose of cold water to the face, and it worked. The nausea receded into a world of anger and frustration. What the hell had Daphne been thinking? She’d skipped out of Public Safety without notifying Special Ops. In a gust of ill temper, he slammed his palms down onto the sink with such force that he knocked the entire fixture off the wall. Water sprayed from broken pipes. Boldt jumped back, as the ceramic sink broke into several chunks that echoed as a small explosion.
Detective Gerald Millhouse rushed into the room fearing he’d be calling the bomb squad. “Shit, Boss. I’d thought we’d lost you.”
Boldt moved back and away from the encroaching flood of water on the tile floor. He heard Millhouse and knew well enough he should respond, but instead he found himself locked into a trance as he watched that floor water coil in waves as it formed an ever-tightening spiral and slipped down the floor drain.
Inevitably, you overlook the obvious, he thought, recalling the cliche?d line lectured to all rookie detectives. It was a Boldt version of Murphy’s Law that he’d seen in action more times than he liked.
“Lieutenant?” It was Millhouse again, trying to win his attention.
Boldt flushed crimson with embarrassment, not over his having broken a sink, but for having overlooked the simple law of gravity.
His instruction to Millhouse was oblique, for his mind was working too quickly to form a perfect sentence. “Dr. Sandra Babcock, Archaeology Department at the U.” He racked his brain for the name of the bus tunnel maintenance man. Couldn’t find it. Then, there it was. “And a Chuck Iberson over at WS-DOT … Third Avenue bus tunnel maintenance. Find them both and get them over here to the Pioneer Square station, A-SAP.
No tears.”
Millhouse lowered his voice and said tentatively, “But Boss, you heard about Matthews and Gaynes, right?”
“You’ll be chalking tires if those two aren’t in that bus tunnel in ten minutes,” Boldt replied matter-of- factly.
Millhouse fled the men’s room in a panic.
Boldt fought to keep emotion out of the decision-making process, fought the urge to fly down the fire stairs, climb into the Crown Vic, and race to the crime scene. He put the victims first, and one of them was missing. An extremely important one.
The water, collected on the floor, kept “circling the drain,”
police-speak for all hope being lost. But Boldt knew he wasn’t lost at all-he’d just found the missing piece to the puzzle.
Darkness, My Old Friend …
The space-an old tunnel of some sort-was wet, dark, and cramped. They had reached it fairly quickly by following a city storm sewer north a good several blocks. Walker had removed a large grate mounted in the side of the storm sewer and pushed her through. Matthews now walked hunched over, stepping sometimes through gooey mud, sometimes ankle-deep in extremely cold water. It smelled of earth and loam and vaguely of the sea. She paid little or no attention at all to the slimy objects in her path, which to her spoke volumes of the more pressing need to find a way out of this situation, for normally she would have reeled at the tangled contact with cobwebs and the awful sensation of the disgusting, unseen objects sucking past her bare ankles.
Walker remained behind her, egging her on with sharp jabs of his fingers in the small of her back, the first few of which she had thought were the knife. She had long since lost all sense of direction. His small flashlight provided the only light-it amounted to her shifting shadow stretching long and thin on the tunnel’s earthen walls.
Somewhere behind and above them lay Margaret with her abdomen sliced open and Gaynes, unconscious. A by-the-book detective, Gaynes would have called in a “510” requesting backup before she moved on the building. By now, Matthews could assume that backup was already on the scene. Lou would have been consulted. John would have been informed. A controlled but professional panic was sweeping through Public Safety, and she was the focus of it all. She had to stall Walker in order to buy herself time. She had to get to the surface. She possessed the facilities to accomplish both goals, as long as she kept herself collected and focused. The mind tended to jump almost randomly from one thought to another in such situations-the professional in her was very much aware of this. She needed focus. She needed clear, linear thought.
The floor of the tunnel dried to packed earth-they were on dirt now. At first she thought the crunching beneath her feet was gravel or rock. She encountered areas like this every twenty yards or so; there was no predicting when, or how much. Then she realized it was crushing under her footfalls, not merely shifting as gravel might. The dirt floor suddenly sparkled to life, a thousand jewels, and she realized they were walking atop broken glass-broken bottles, to be more accurate-the smugglers’ tunnel.
With no idea where she was headed, she nonetheless knew where she was, and this tiny seed of knowledge strengthened her, emboldened her to begin the task of breaking him down, piece by piece.
“This is kind of fun,” she said strongly, gathering in her strength and forcing it out her lungs. When the flashlight flickered away from her, she dropped a gold stud earring onto the dirt floor. Another crumb, she
