Walker’s face tightened, a mass of pain, and she expected tears from his eyes. But he proved far stronger, far more resil-ient, than she’d expected. He’d already processed some of this, and that brought Matthews back to his confrontation with Mary-Ann. Raising the knife between them, he said, “Accidents happen.”
59 Chasing a Cry
The first scream turned LaMoia in the right direction. Prior to that, he’d been following the city storm sewer out toward Elliott Bay. But that cry, a woman’s cry, spun him on his heels and he rapidly retraced his steps, his cell phone immediately in hand.
When the phone proved useless, its signal blocked by his depth underground, he debated climbing back up the chimney of concrete to the manhole through which he’d come-he was passing by this exact same spot again- debated enlisting the support of Special Ops, but recalling her request to avoid tying up her rescue in department- dictated procedures, something she had somehow foreseen, he passed beneath the manhole entrance, ignoring it, determined to follow the sound of her voice before he lost it, and her with it.
Heading in this direction, his flashlight picked up two pairs of muddy shoe prints that, a few minutes later, led to a woven metal grate in the wall of the storm sewer’s concrete tube. He pulled on the grate, and it came free in his hand. He stuffed the small flashlight into his mouth like a cigar and used both arms to set the grate aside so he could climb through. The muddy tracks continued on the other side-a low horizontal shaft that reminded him of a mining tunnel. The thing looked ancient …
and then his mind seized upon what he was looking at. He knew next to nothing about storm sewers and tunnels, and yet the detective in him believed that in all probability this was the smugglers’ tunnel the minister had mentioned.
A voice shouting came from far away down the tunnel-barely audible. This voice was male.
Ferrell Walker.
LaMoia’s chest tightened painfully. He trained the Maglite into the dark. He ducked through the hole and stepped inside that tunnel. It smelled familiar-like death, he thought.
“I’m coming,” he whispered under his breath, already moving quickly into the dark.
A Matter of Trust
In all his visits to Mama Lu, Boldt could remember seeing her out of that rattan throne only twice, surprised once again by how short she was. Not small, he thought, but short.
“I appreciate this, Great Lady,” he said. He and Babcock, Mama Lu and her two trained polar bears in the black garb stood behind the butcher’s meat counter where a crippled stairway led down into the glare of overhead bare bulbs. The Korean grocery smelled of fresh ginger and exotic spices. Korean talk radio played from a nasal- sounding AM radio behind the cash register at the other end of the room.
“This been family secret many generations, Mr. Both.”
“We understand.”
“You, I know, I trust. Yes. But woman? Mama Lu no know.”
“You’ve nothing to worry about,” Babcock said.
“I give you my word,” Boldt said, knowing the commitment that statement represented.
“Police no know this. Nobody know.”
Boldt said, “Understood.”
“Only because this friend of yours.”
“Matthews,” Boldt said.
“I do this only for you. For her. You good man, Mr. Both.
You clear Billy Chen’s good name.”
He didn’t want to have a twenty-minute discussion about it, but he knew her ways. “We’ll eat a meal together,” he said.
“We’ll celebrate.”
She grinned across lipstick-smeared teeth. “But later.”
She knew him better than he thought.
“Yes, later.”
“Show them,” she said to the larger of her bodyguards. To Boldt she said, “Saved my life three times, this secret. Maybe save your friend, too.”
Boldt nodded, a frog caught in his throat. “Thank you,” he said. He ducked his head, and the three descended the cramped stairs to the storage room below.
“This is old,” Babcock informed him excitedly, well before the bodyguard pulled on the gray boards of built-in pantry shelves, opening and revealing a narrow passageway into darkness. “This is it.”
Boldt nodded to the big man and led the way through to the damp smells and pitch-dark. “Let’s hope so,” he heard himself say.
Seeing Double
Sitting on a damp ledge in total darkness, Walker having turned off the flashlight to save batteries, Matthews adjusted the broken piece of bottle glass in her left hand. To make the laceration count she would need a good deal of pressure, and this made her realize she needed her own hand protected or she might let go of the glass as it also cut into her.
Walker turned the light back on, surprising her, and took her right hand in his, examining her cut. “It’s not so bad,” he said.
He pulled a soiled rag out of a back pocket-she didn’t want to think where it might have been-and he stuffed it into the hand to stem the bleeding. Without knowing it, he’d just passed her a shield for her piece of glass.
She tried to understand his patience. Why wasn’t he in a hurry? Did he fail to realize that half the city’s police department was by now out looking for her? Or was it simply that he trusted these tunnels-virtually untraveled by all but the homeless for the past hundred years-to protect him from discovery? Or was it something much worse, that he wanted to put off what he had in mind for her for as long as possible?
Hostage negotiators never pushed the abductor into making hasty decisions. Walker’s obvious patience came to her as a blessing. He might know the tunnels beneath the city, but she knew the tunnels of the human mind.
Consumed in total darkness once again, she prepared to move the chunk of glass to her right hand. “How did it start … the idea of him having an accident?”
“Leave it.”
“That’s not something that comes out of nowhere. That builds over time. What was it: He criticized you? Thought he’d taught you to be a better fisherman than you were? Something like that?”
“You don’t know anything.”
“But isn’t that why we’re here?”
“We’re here because I wanted you here,” he said. “We’re here because I helped you and I wanted to show you-”
She cut him off. “No, you wanted to test me.”
“And you failed the test.”
“I’m here because I understand you, Ferrell.” She got the glass set in her right palm. “Take a good long look at your reasons, because that’s why I’m here. It was your decision, not mine, and you need to face this.”
She allowed the resulting silence to settle around them, like listening for animals in the woods.
“Was it Mary-Ann?” she asked in a whisper. “Something he did to Mary-Ann?”
The flashlight popped back to life. He scooted away from her, and she resented not having taken a swipe at him while she’d had the chance.
“Something you saw him doing to her. Something you heard him doing to her. What? Out on the boat, where
