like a kid with a garden hose.
Boldt took in some of the odds and ends piled on a dusty shelf. A faded Frisbee. Well-worn work gloves. A pair of hiking boots. A waffle iron with a cracked black cord. Two or three cardboard boxes that Boldt knew without looking contained Darlene’s things: clothes and accessories and maybe some photo albums; a hospital bracelet cut off a limp wrist three years earlier.
Seeing the damage to the skin, the rescue woman told Foreman they were going to give the solvent a few minutes longer on the ankles.
Foreman gushed through a string of expletives, still under the influence.
The rescue worker called for Boldt’s attention and pointed out what appeared to be the carcass of a dead bug, a housefly or larva, to the left of Foreman’s chair. When that bug rolled lightly a few inches across the floor, Boldt identified it as cigar or cigarette ash.
“Any of you smoke down here?” Boldt stepped carefully toward the evidence. No answers. “I’m going to ask all of you but this woman to leave now.” He instructed them on how to leave in single file, being careful to set their feet down slowly and gently and only in a clear area of the floor.
Boldt knelt down and eased the small worm of gray ash into a three-by-five manila envelope that he kept on his person for evidence collection. Foreman tried to speak, but ended up drooling and spitting instead. “Fuck!” he finally managed to moan, throwing his head around like a blind man at the piano.
Other than the pulled nails, Foreman’s hands showed no signs of struggle, no indication he’d fought back. A moment later, the rescue worker had Foreman’s ankles free and asked Boldt’s permission to summon her partner and the EMTs in order to get Foreman into the waiting ambulance. Boldt acquiesced, again trying to minimize the crime scene contamination.
Once Foreman was gone, Boldt searched the house, now joined by the timely arrival of his own department’s Scientific Identification Division.
“Better late than never,” Boldt told the anemic thirty-year-old wearing the blue windbreaker marked with his department’s acronym. The guy had thin, bluish lips and the pale skin of a cadaver. Boldt had never seen him before.
“The only espresso was a twenty-four-hour drive-thru on the other side of Broadway. And believe me, you do not want to see me before my first espresso.”
“I believe you,” Boldt said, leading the man into the bedroom, guarded by a uniformed patrol officer.
The bedroom was undisturbed, except for the closet. There Boldt saw a number of shoes swept aside, a hinged shoe rack swung out of the way, and an empty wall safe hanging open with no sign of tampering.
Boldt said, “The combination probably came sometime around the second fingernail.”
“How’s that?” Captain Espresso had not seen Foreman’s left hand.
“It’s nothing,” Boldt replied. “Develop prints if you can, inside the safe and out, and keep alert for cigar or cigarette ash anywhere in the house. Check all the trash cans, the sinks, the perimeter outside. I’d love an extinguished butt if we can find it.”
“Got it,” the SID man replied.
“This guy’s in the family. On the job. You understand that?”
“I got it, Lieutenant. We’re all over this.”
“Tell Bernie Lofgrin I’m lead.”
“You, Lieutenant?”
“My squad.” Boldt would have to put this off on someone; lieutenants didn’t run cases. “But I want Bernie calling me.”
“Got it.”
“And try eating some red meat,” Boldt said. On his way out of the small bedroom Boldt thought he heard the guy mumble “Fuck you” under his breath, but didn’t return to challenge him. He deserved it.
Danny Foreman had not deserved it, however, and Boldt resolved to bring somebody in for gluing wrists together and using vise-grip pliers to extract fingernails. And also to learn whatever it was that his former friend and colleague, Danny Foreman, wasn’t telling him.
EIGHT
LIZ SKIPPED HER RUN, GOT the kids up and fed, and dropped them off at school with little fanfare, one of their better mornings. At work now, she felt the presence of her cell phone weighing on her purse, hoping it might ring, that she might hear from Lou about Danny Foreman being a “victim” and what that meant to the investigation. Still caught up in the events of Friday, culminating in the discovery that Hayes had used her maiden name on his safe-deposit box, she felt hypersensitive to her surroundings and the goings-on within the bank. Asked to turn over the list of names of bank employees with security clearance to the UNIX and AS/400 servers, Liz also felt obligated to personally notify all five of them of this development, not so much as a warning but as a courtesy, one colleague to another.
She spoke to Phillip in person, clearing both her release of the names and letting him know that she intended to make the calls herself. His reaction was positive, though guarded. As WestCorp’s CEO, he wanted his employees and his computer systems protected, but he reminded Liz no less than three times of the impending merger and how any negative publicity could affect the company’s stock price. With equity markets tanking, many a merger had been put off or canceled outright. WestCorp could ill afford any such setback this late in the game.
Liz’s first warning was to go out to Tony LaRossa, her director of Information Technology, seemingly a target for Hayes since Tony knew the bank’s computer systems inside and out and was one of a select few who could program an IBM AS/400. She decided to see Tony in person as well, using her security pass to allow her access to the twenty-fifth floor. The elevator doors slid open and she stepped through to the quiet chaos of the busiest division in the company: hers. With the technical transfer of the merger only days away, her people were basically working around the clock. And they showed it.
“Two-five,” as Liz’s I.T. team referred to this floor-never “twenty-five”-was of an open floor plan: eleven office cubicles with walkways between them. All but two were currently occupied. To her right, a meeting was under way in the larger of two corner conference rooms. To her left, the entire north end was now screened off by a wall of thick shatterproof, bullet-resistant glass and the buffed steel girders to support it. This dividing wall had been erected after the fact, post-9/11, and offered but a single door, accessed by one of the now infamous electronic palm-scanners. Inside this glassed-in room there was also a door accessing a second server. To her left was Tony’s private office, one of two executive offices on this floor.
Liz approached Tony’s secretary, a sweet-faced Hispanic woman who favored a good deal of makeup. “Can he see me?” She barely hesitated, already moving toward his office door.
“He could if he were here,” the secretary responded.
Liz checked her watch and then the wall clock: 9:20. Tony LaRossa was typically the first to arrive and the last to leave.
Liz teased, “He’s not allowed to be sick this week. Call the CDC.” But then the more dreaded conclusion seeped into her consciousness. “When you say he’s not here, since when?”
“Not here, since all morning.”
“You’ve called home? Spoken to Beth?”
“Called home, of course. No answer. And his cell. Voice mail. He missed a very important conference call with MTK. No one ever heard from him, which was when I heard about it. And believe me, I
Liz clarified, “Beth didn’t answer the home phone?”
“No, ma’am.”
“The twins,” she said. “The twins must be sick.” Beth and Tony had adopted Russian twins less than six months earlier.
“You all right, Mrs. Boldt?”
“Fine,” Liz said. “Concerned is all.”
“I’m sure he’s all right.”
