moment. Her heart felt ready to explode. She opened the bag and peered inside: a pair of black slippers with red roses embroidered on the toes. Her throat tightened— they were Melissa’s. She moved them aside. The small tape was there as well. She didn’t understand the next few seconds when blood chemistry and emotions overcame all rational thought, when memories of Melissa and those slippers were all that mattered. Tears erupting from her eyes, she took the man by his sport coat, pulled her face to his and shook him, crying, ‘‘Where
The stunned man plunged his hand into the shopping bag and came out with her wallet. ‘‘The money!’’ he said, his head lifting, his dark eyes flashing as he saw one of the detectives reaching for a weapon.
The man pocketed the wallet, turned Stevie, and shoved her into Boldt. He dodged across the entrance lobby, weaving through tourists, using them as protection. Stevie stumbled into Boldt’s arms. He stood her up and took off at a run.
Detective Mulgrave shouted loudly, ‘‘Police! Everyone stay where you are!’’ The English-speaking visitors dove to the carpet. The Japanese smiled and took a moment longer to react. Shouts and cries followed. A uniformed museum guard stepped forward to block one of the exit doors.
Boldt and Mulgrave ran toward the entrance as the suspect dropped his shoulder into the guard driving him through the glass door. The guard went down hard. The suspect fled outside, Boldt and Mulgrave immediately behind.
Boldt shouted at the suspect. Mulgrave called into his handheld for backup. The man crossed through traffic stopped at the light and ran hard, heading south on First Avenue.
Boldt caught a glimpse of LaMoia and a uniform out of the corner of his eye and, at the same time, a cameraman trailing black wires as he leaped out of KSTV’s large blue panel truck which was stopped in traffic. The cameraman hit the sidewalk running. LaMoia and the uniform hit the cameraman’s wires and all three went down.
Boldt dodged through the traffic and took off after the suspect, Mulgrave still shouting orders into his radio.
The suspect ran left at the next corner and disappeared from view.
His lungs burning, his right knee tightening, Boldt lost ground to Mulgrave and called out, ‘‘Backup?’’
‘‘On route!’’ the detective answered.
They needed this man in custody. To lose the suspect was not an option. Both cops turned left at the corner, Mulgrave already breaking across the street, the suspect nowhere in sight.
Sirens approached. The street rose up a hill. No suspect. Mulgrave headed across the street and down an alley.
Boldt stopped and spun in a circle. Their boy had either entered one of the buildings or had gone down that alley. Faced with a tough decision—await the radio cars and the uniforms so that they sealed off any chance of the suspect sneaking past, or pick one of the buildings to search before the suspect had time to escape—Boldt studied the wall of brick buildings that lined the northern side of the street, his eyes darting window to window, one building to the next.
It appeared first as a shadow, then an image: a woman in a third-floor window, one hand spread open on the glass. Descending a stairway, she had clearly stepped aside for someone. It was that spread hand that convinced him—the fear it implied. Boldt took the chance.
His police shield displayed in his coat’s breast pocket, Boldt took two stairs at a time, passing the middle- aged woman on the second floor’s landing. She pointed up. Boldt kept moving, never breaking stride. He had the advantage of surprise now. He had to move fast before he lost it.
By the fourth floor he was severely winded but still climbing. The movement came from his right as he turned left toward the final flight of stairs. It came as a change of color, of lighting, as if someone had dropped a curtain or waved a flag. It came as a flash of heat up his spine, his right arm climbing instinctively but opening him to the blow to his ribs. His momentum moved him away from the blow rather than into it; he was thrown off balance, careening into a chair that sat alongside a standing ashtray. He grabbed hold of a leg of that chair and hurled it in the general direction of his assailant, simultaneously reaching for his gun. The chair’s four metal feet screeched like fingers on a blackboard, then traveled toward the stairs and, as if planned, as if calculated, flew off the top edge, rebounded off the far wall and headed end over end as if aimed at the unfortunate soul in its path.
The suspect, after shoving Boldt and then starting back down the stairs, never saw that chair. It came after him as if it were tethered to him, jumping and springing into the air and crashing only to lift again, gaining velocity. Boldt was back to his feet by the time the chair impacted, not only tripping up the man but sending him down the subsequent flight of stairs following the same route the chair had traveled. A tumbler, a circus act gone awry, the dull snapping of bone on stone.
Despite the fall, the man clamored to his feet but then sagged under the pain and Boldt was upon him. A handcuff snapped around the wrist in a ritual all too familiar to both men. Boldt patted him down for weapons while reciting the Miranda like a man talking in his sleep. He arrested the suspect on charges of trafficking in stolen goods and assaulting a police officer.
‘‘I didn’t steal nothing!’’ he complained as he was led down the stairs.
‘‘You’ve got some thinking to do between here and downtown,’’ Boldt cautioned the man. ‘‘If you’ve got half a brain in there, you’ll
trade a walk for the talk.’’
‘‘Yeah, yeah . . . but I’m telling you, I didn’t steal nothing!’’
‘‘If you’re smart, you’ll lose the broken record,’’ Boldt advised. ‘‘Then again,’’ he reconsidered, ‘‘if you were smart, we wouldn’t be here, would we?’’
CHAPTER 32
aylord Riley dragged his fingers against his sweating cheek as if rubbing a lantern for good luck, stoically proud of his refusal to talk to police and patiently awaiting his attorney. His stained polyester shirt stuck to him like cellophane so that his chest hairs rose like tree roots struggling up through old asphalt. The Box had warmed behind LaMoia’s mounting frustration to where both men were panting and in need of a glass of water.
‘‘The thing a prick like you doesn’t understand, Riley, is that this is the wrong time to lawyer-up.’’
‘‘As if there’s ever a right time as far as you’re concerned.’’
‘‘I got a PA outside who will repeat to you everything I’ve been saying. You’re a known fence. Fraud has you on file.’’
‘‘Never been convicted of nothing!’’
‘‘You give up whoever laid this gear on you and you walk out of here, no harm, no foul.’’
‘‘That’s bullshit and we both know it. That big guy . . . he said assaulting an officer. He fell down is all—a shoelace or something. I didn’t assault no officer!’’
‘‘You want me to get him in here? Hang on a second!’’ LaMoia went to the door. Boldt, who had been looking on through the one-way glass was already at the door by the time LaMoia opened it.
Boldt stepped inside. Old times: he and LaMoia working a suspect. All they needed was Daphne in the room for the picture to be complete. Boldt said, ‘‘You talk, you walk. I told you that.’’
‘‘I’d rather hear it from a lawyer,’’ the suspect said.
‘‘By which time, you won’t hear it,’’ Boldt answered.
LaMoia sat back down in the chair facing the man. ‘‘Stupid is one thing. You were stupid to get into this—to call the station, set up the meet. But don’t be dumb. Don’t be an asshole, who thinks he knows more about how this works than we do. We’ve got jails filled with those numb-nuts, I’m telling you. You lawyer-up, you start things in motion that we’re helpless to stop. You bring in the college boys and you, me and the lieutenant are in chairs
