search was on in the construction site with LaMoia fearing they’d lost him. Thirty minutes later, that search included fifteen patrolmen, the foreman of the construction site, and a vice president of the company putting up the building.
By the time the construction site was crawling with law enforcement, LaMoia found himself sipping coffee in the company of a visibly shaken Melissa Dunkin, who had eschewed the go-juice in favor of vodka on the rocks from little minibar bottles with tiny aluminum caps.
Dunkin wore a dark wool suit that she’d thrown on hastily, judging by the wrinkled and incorrectly buttoned blouse. Matthews arrived in blue jeans and a T-shirt, looking great. Introductions were followed by the explanation that the prosecuting attorney’s office no longer permitted a male detective to interview a woman without a female officer present. The truth, it was hardly why Matthews was there. A patrol officer would have satisfied regs. LaMoia wanted Matthews “to look under the hood,” and she was present to willingly oblige.
“A dot-com in Redmond?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“But you did tourist stuff around town here today.”
“After lunch. Yes,” Dunkin said.
“Shopping mostly?” Matthews asked.
“Not only shopping, but it included shopping. Yes. The aquarium. Pioneer Square. The monorail.”
“A busy day,” LaMoia said.
“Very.”
Matthews asked, “And did you then, at any time, sense that you might be being followed or watched?”
“Not at all. Not in the least. My God, you think this guy was following me?”
LaMoia recapped. “You came back to the hotel, locked the door to your room, pulled the drapes-as far as they’d go-and undressed for a bath.”
“That’s correct.”
“You were in a state of undress only twice when outside the bathroom,” he repeated from his notes. “The beer, and in bed after the bath.”
“I was in the tub,” she reminded, going on to describe her arrangement of using the door’s full-length mirror to afford her a view of the television.
This was a new one for LaMoia, and so he had her show him. He placed a hotel towel into the damp tub, stepped in, and sat down. She aimed the door until he could see the bedroom’s armoire. She asked for him to verify the angle.
“Yeah, there,” he said, stopping her. “I got the television, but I’m also looking right out that window at my men over there on the construction site.”
“He had a view of me,” she mumbled. He didn’t know if her slurred tone was a product of the booze or shock. “I think he had binoculars. He was holding something in his hands.”
LaMoia believed with certainty that a perv peeping a naked woman would most certainly be holding something in his hand, but he didn’t comment. Instead, he asked, “A camera?”
“Oh … God! You think? What, I’m going to find myself circulating the Internet?”
LaMoia doubted there was a lot of demand for pictures of naked middle-aged execs, even on the “Internet- ional House of Porncake,” as he called the Web, but he bit his tongue. “Let me ask you this, Ms. Dunkin, and I apologize in advance for the way this may sound, but is your business with the Redmond dot-com of such a nature that advantage might be gained by …
influencing you in any way?”
“Blackmail?”
“Influence can take many forms.”
“It’s an LBO.”
“Hostile or favorable?”
“I refuse to think-”
LaMoia interrupted. “Thankfully, you don’t have to. That’s why you brought me in on this-us-we do the thinking for you.” He offered her his well-practiced smile. “We consider everything-every possible scenario-and then go about eliminating them, one by one. The more options we eliminate, and the more quickly we eliminate them, the sooner we’re on the most probable set of circumstances, the sooner we’re on a suspect and putting that person away for this. It’s as simple as that.”
“All parties involved support this buyout,” she said. “This has nothing to do with that.”
LaMoia was inclined to believe likewise but also didn’t want to jump to the conclusion that she’d just been peeped by a serial kidnapper responsible for Hebringer and Randolf. He thought about Boldt, wondering why his lieutenant hadn’t returned his call.
LaMoia considered bringing SID techs into the room to determine the likely line of sight; that, in turn, might suggest the exact spot the perv had been standing. From the suite he could see his guys scouring the construction site across the street.
Dunkin saw this too, and for the first time it occurred to her that the police were working a little hard for a simple peeper report. “Hey,” she said, “what’s with all the guys over there anyway?”
“They’re looking for evidence.”
“I understand that, but why, exactly?”
Matthews said, “Hopefully to help identify the person responsible.”
“You do this for a peeper? A sergeant and a lieutenant? An evidence team? Am I in some kind of trouble here that I’m not aware of?”
“Maybe you’d better sit down, ma’am.” LaMoia indicated the padded bench at the end of the bed.
“This may take a minute to explain,” Matthews said.
Dunkin kept looking out the window. Several more officers had arrived to pull yellow tape around an area of the construction site.
“There have been some disappearances,” LaMoia said.
“Women,” Matthews added.
Melissa Dunkin sank to the edge of the bed and listened in stunned amazement.
It wasn’t long before the hotel bedroom hosted an elaborate setup of tripods, measuring sticks, and a portable laser meant to re-create the angle from which the perv would have been able to view the room.
A Japanese-American SID tech wearing a Don Henley World Tour T-shirt called out for LaMoia. He showed him the setup and explained that the laser would “lay a frozen rope” out the window, across the street to the construction site. He switched on the laser, allowed it to warm up, and then sprayed a fine powder into the room. A tiny stream of bright green light hung in the dusty air.
“You do the voodoo very well,” LaMoia said.
The radio crackled. “Got it,” a deep voice reported. One of the guys across the way had located the beam and was waving back at them as he spoke on the radio.
LaMoia said, “I want the mirror shot out of the bathtub as well. Combine them and have that section of the platform over there dusted for prints, photographed, you name it.”
“No problem.”
“It is a problem,” LaMoia corrected. “It’s just not your problem.”
Less than an hour later, LaMoia, Matthews, and two SID
techs stood on the fifth floor of the construction site. The laser work had identified a square yard of floor space where the peeper had stood. On the edge of that area, delineated by crime scene tape, a tiny plastic stand held a two-inch, yellow plastic triangular tag bearing the numeral 7 that indicated several small piles of geometric mud and dirt presumed to be, because of the vague pattern it formed, discharge from a shoe or boot sole.
The construction elevator stopped, clanged open, and a silhouette of a fairly big man emerged. LaMoia identified Lou Boldt by the determined stride of his brisk walk.
“Hey, Sarge.” LaMoia continued to address his lieutenant by his former rank, the same rank, the same job that LaMoia now occupied. Even in the relative dark of the construction site, Boldt looked tired and worn. LaMoia put this off to Susan Hebringer’s disappearance. Some said he was having trouble at home; others claimed he was sick. But LaMoia knew the true source of Boldt’s physical decline, whether his colleagues understood it or not.
“Good work, John,” Boldt said, shaking hands with his sergeant as they met. He nodded cordially at
