The Body of David Hayes

Boldt reached the edge of the trees and worked his way around back, the blood pressure building in his chest and surging past his ears as a low whine. He paused along the way to allow his ears to stretch and his eyes to scan.

The backyard was small. Ankle-high field grass and weeds ran up to a poured concrete patio that housed a rusted barbecue grill and twin beach chairs that had seen better days. A frayed patio umbrella listed above the chairs, anchored in a stack of rock and brick. A can of charcoal starter caught his eye. Concrete steps led up to a back door that had been left open an inch. Not taking his eyes off the door, he withdrew his weapon, crossed the spongy backyard, and eased the door fully open. Using the jamb as cover, he called out.

“Danny?”

“In here.”

It was Foreman’s voice.

“I’m at the back,” Boldt announced, playing it safe, not wanting to walk into a trap. Let him come to me.

Foreman entered the kitchen casually. He looked tired. He wore a disposable glove on his right hand but not on his left because of the two heavily bandaged fingers. “Hey.”

“Hey,” Boldt echoed, returning his gun to his belt holster.

Foreman led the way through the tiny kitchen. “Guy used this place as his hang. Belongs to a friend. When Liz mentioned it, I knew exactly where she meant. We did some surveillance out here back during the embezzlement.”

Some surveillance. “What kind of surveillance, Danny?”

“Meaning?”

Boldt didn’t answer. Like an emcee, Foreman swept his left arm out, indicating the room before them. The cabin’s central room was contaminated with spilled blood. Boldt slipped on gloves and squatted and touched a droplet on the floor. It was tacky, not wet, but not dry. Less than four hours old.

“Another one,” Boldt said, noticing the two fingernails on the cabin floor next to the leg of a blood-covered wooden chair to which the victim had been taped with duct tape. All of this came into his mind effortlessly. He didn’t merely surmise the crime scene, he saw it as an eerie black-and-white moving image. A man in the chair struggling. Gagged, blindfolded. Another man in front of him, a pair of vise-grip pliers in hand. Boldt shook this image out of his head and continued to collect information.

“I don’t know about that,” Foreman said. “It certainly looks like another one. Hayes, then me, now this. Similar. But I don’t know… something’s not right. It’s almost like me and Hayes were clinical, you know? Whereas this one… this looks emotional. Angry. The guy doing the deed lost it and got all wild like.”

Boldt took in the carnage. “I don’t know. At your scene we found blood on the ceiling as well. The walls.”

“Yeah, but look at this place!”

Boldt recalled that Bernie Lofgrin’s Scientific Identification Division had determined that Foreman had probably been beaten using a plastic bag filled with wet sand-this theory supported by forensic evidence recovered at the scene. At some point the bag had torn open, spraying sand into the bloody mix and matching the splatter patterns. Boldt carefully dodged the chair and examined some blood splatter on the far wall. He didn’t see any sand mixed in. Foreman had been here longer, had a head start.

Boldt said, “You’d think a person could maybe narrow this down by method. Rohypnol, duct tape, fingernails. That’s got to be a signature crime. I ran it by Matthews and didn’t get very far. I think I’ll try OC this time.” Organized Crime.

“We got to ask ourselves,” Foreman said, “if this vic-and I’m assuming it to be David Hayes-got up and walked away or was hauled out of here in a Hefty lawn bag; ’cause one thing that ain’t part of the original signature is the lack of a body. I was in that chair, Lou, and I’m telling you there’s no way you get yourself out of this and go for a stroll.”

But there had been no body at the trailer either. It seemed odd that Foreman would overlook the obvious.

Boldt circled the bloody chair and again watched his theory play out briefly as film. Hayes, or whoever had occupied that chair, was taking a beating, his head snapping left and right. Boldt studied the splatter patterns on the ceiling that supported this determination. The blood was dense immediately above the chair and more sporadic and separated farther out from this epicenter. All this made sense to him. Some of it did not, however.

“What do you think?” Foreman asked, as if the two were regarding a painting in a museum.

“I’ve got some questions.”

“What kind of questions?” Foreman clearly didn’t like the sound of that. He wanted this cut-and-dried. He wanted his assumption-that Hayes had probably been killed in this chair-front and center.

“Questions for SID.”

“I’m first officer,” Foreman declared. “It won’t be SID, it’ll be our guys.”

The State Bureau of Criminal Investigation outsourced their field detection and lab work to King County Sheriff’s. The lab had a good reputation, but Boldt didn’t personally know anyone there, and it was the personal relationships that got investigations cleared.

Foreman repeated, “What kind of questions?”

Boldt doubted then that Foreman had read the preliminaries from the two other such beatings-including his own. He wasn’t sure he wanted to give something away for nothing. There were answers he needed as well.

Boldt wandered into the doorway of the adjacent bedroom and suddenly felt breathless, his chest tight, his imagination besieged by images. It was a twin bed, pulled off the wall, a nightstand shoved into the corner. It faced a closet with louvered panels on the folding doors. Boldt looked away just as quickly.

He asked, “How’d you manage getting the camera into the closet?”

“What?” Foreman answered.

“The video. It’s why they beat you, wasn’t it, Danny? That video? Pulled your nails and drugged you until you coughed up the combination and location of the safe. You had the video in the safe. Six years you kept that thing. Why? Just tell me you didn’t drag it out at night and slip it into the VCR, Danny. Tell me that’s not why your prints were on it.” Boldt felt sick, a combination of this bedroom, the smell of blood and vomit, and other images now swarming his brain. He didn’t need to see the video.

Foreman let himself down into a wooden chair just outside the bedroom door. “I obtained the warrant through an Assistant U.S. Attorney at the time. I lured Hayes away from the cabin with an anonymous call. The hope was for data capture-to record his keystrokes. In all, three cameras were installed, each covering an area that included a phone jack because we assumed he was doing this online. Tech Services did it for me, under the protection of Special Operations.”

“You were with us at the time,” Boldt said. Seattle Police.

“Correct. He used a laptop. Moved around. We couldn’t predict what room he’d use. I had no idea, Lou. I went fishing, and I caught the wrong fish. If it hadn’t been relevant-”

“It wasn’t relevant!”

“A bank officer? It was very much relevant. For two or three days, she was a primary suspect. Your wife I’m talking about. The only thing that saved her, the only one who saved her… you’re looking at him. I kept the tape to myself, explored what needed exploring, and never surfaced her name. We went through the treatments together,” he said, meaning their wives’ cancer treatment, “and it just got harder and harder to look you in the eye. And then Darlene slipping and Liz recovering. Uglier and uglier.”

“What were Paul Geiser’s prints doing on the video?” Boldt asked, trying to keep their personal history out of this, but seeing clearly how entangled it all was. “Get your story straight, Danny. That way you only have to tell it once.”

“To hell with you!” Foreman shouted.

“You should have destroyed the tape.”

“You mean I should have told you about it, don’t you?”

“That’s not what I said.”

“A bank exec is sleeping with my embezzler-my suspect-and I’m supposed to destroy that evidence? Would you have destroyed that evidence?”

“Six years,” Boldt said, his throat dry. “Yes, I would have.”

“The tape wasn’t the only thing in my safe. Every scrap of information pertaining to this case was in there with