Boldt said, “Am I mistaken, or will an animal control van have a radio capable of-”
“Oh, shit, you’re right,” interrupted Lee. “She’s restricted to line-of-sight reporting over the unicom. Emergency reporting of contact with the suspect.” To minimize radio traffic and to reduce the chance of the press catching on, most of the radios in use were under the same restrictions.
Shoswitz chimed in. “So we put it out over the unicom that we want Branslonovich to make a land line call to headquarters. That will force her back into the truck, to a pay phone, and we can deal with it from there. Settled?” he asked rhetorically, his mind already made up. “Do it,” he instructed the dispatcher. He glanced over and caught Boldt staring at him. “What?” he asked, still at a shouting volume.
“I didn’t say anything,” Boldt objected. But inside he was thinking that Branslonovich was Vice and was more than familiar with field operations, and such a summons would mean only one thing to her: She was being called in. So, he reasoned, the first time she received the message over the unicom she would ignore it and say later that bad reception had interfered with the signal. The second time she might be forced to respond, but at her own speed; she would take her sweet time about coming in. With each successive attempt by dispatch, she would increasingly suspect that the only explanation for these attempts was that she was in a hot zone and because she was a woman officer the male pigs that controlled such operations were recalling her. This, in turn, would keep her in the field all the longer. And the truth was, as far as Boldt could tell, she probably was in the operation’s hot zone, somewhere within a city block of Boldt’s house.
“You’re pissing me off,” Shoswitz declared, glaring at his sergeant.
“Then give me your keys,” he said, standing up from the milk crate and hunching into an uncomfortable stooped crouch. He sensed that at first Shoswitz was reluctant, but the change in expression on the lieutenant’s face revealed his decision to pick his fights carefully. This fight would be lost on his part, no matter how adamant his attempt. He handed Boldt the keys. They both understood that Boldt intended to go after Branslonovich himself. He rarely felt prescient about a situation, but Branslonovich was in danger. Lou Boldt felt certain of it.
Shoswitz directed his anger to the dispatcher. As Boldt slipped out the back of the step van he heard the lieutenant bark, “Try sending it out over the unicom again.”
It was a moonless night, inside-the-stomach dark. An ocean smell permeated the chilly air and brought back images of Alki Point, where Boldt had once stood staring down into the crab-eaten eyes of a decomposing corpse.
A dead body, he thought, hurrying toward Phil’s car. All at once it felt as if he might be too late.
Cole Robbie found the darkness of the trees comforting. A moment earlier he had been ordered to adopt his night-vision goggles, which meant discontinued use of the flashlights. It was a good call on the part of the ERT commander, because it allowed a return to hand signals and silenced the winking flashlights that seemed to shout every time a signal had been sent.
The world was now a green and black place, with few shades of gray. The tree trunks rose like black cornstalks from the forest floor, looking to Robbie like irregularly placed bars to a jail cell. Three dimensions were reduced to two-he felt as if he were walking inside a green and black television set. Inside these goggles, motion blurred; fast motion sometimes vanished completely. It was rumored that the FBI had seriously superior night-vision headgear presently “in testing,” which was a euphemism for proprietary ownership. What the FBI got, others waited for-sometimes for years.
A hand signal from his right. Robbie caught it, returned it, and then passed it along to the officer twenty-five yards to his left. All this occurred with Robbie feeling as if he were on autopilot. He noticed that the line was stretching apart, stretching thin. Pretty soon they would be too far apart for hand signals. He wondered if anyone else had noticed. It was just such sophomoric mistakes that hurt operations. Just the kind of thing that got someone killed.
Up ahead to the north, the park fed into a hillside neighborhood falling toward Green Lake. The occasionally glimpsed light from those houses momentarily blinded the night-vision goggles, burning a bright white hole in the dense green and black. For that reason, no sooner had Robbie donned the night-vision goggles than he shifted them to his forehead and avoided their use. Previous experience with “golf balls”-the ERT name for the blinding flashes and burnouts in the light-sensitive goggles-had educated him to avoid the goggles in the presence of any artificial light. Whether or not any of his other teammates also elected to skip the goggles, he couldn’t be sure. He would still need to use them every four minutes for hand signals, but in the meantime he preferred the uniformity of the darkness.
Immediately a slight glint of yellow light high up in a distant tree caught his attention and provoked him to stop. An airplane light seen through the towering limbs? he wondered. Something wet in the tree, reflecting light from the ground? A person? He quickly tried the goggles but preferred it without them, his peripheral vision expanded. He hadn’t seen exactly where … the sound of an airplane briefly convinced him that it was nothing…. There! Another glint of light, thirty or forty feet up in a tree perhaps fifty yards directly ahead.
He depressed a small button on the device clipped to his belt that allowed him radio transmission within the ERT team. “Operative Three.” He announced himself at a whisper. “Eye contact with possible suspicious object. Five-zero yards. Eleven o’clock. Elevation: four-zero feet. Advise.”
“All stop,” came the commander’s voice through Cole’s earpiece. The line hissed static as the commander checked in with the command van, but Cole knew what was in store for them. A minimum of four operatives would converge on that tree.
With God’s guidance, Cole Robbie thought, this one was over before it had barely begun. They had their man. He stayed where he was, eyes fixed on that elusive spot, hoping beyond hope that what he had just witnessed had nothing whatsoever to do with aviation traffic and everything to do with the suspect they pursued.
As it turned out, because of his disdain for the night-vision device, when the first and only firestorm occurred Cole Robbie was the sole ERT officer not wearing goggles and so not blinded, the only operative able to function, the only operative to see a spinning body burning as clearly as if it were a Christmas tree afire. He was immediately struck by the irony of an arsonist setting himself aflame.
But then, as he began to run toward the animated orange puppet that spun like an unpracticed dancer, he heard it screaming like a woman-worse, in a voice familiar to him. It was, in fact, a woman, a woman consumed by pain and fear. By fire. Worse yet, the voice of a friend. The closer he drew, the more convinced he was that it-however indistinguishable, for it was no longer human-was the voice of Vice officer Connie Branslonovich.
Boldt found the animal control truck parked well up the hill from his house, half a block from Greenwood, two blocks from Woodland Park and the well-discussed anticipated escape route of the arsonist.
He glanced down driveways, around corners of houses, up and down the road, hoping for a glimpse of Branslonovich. He carried a unicom walkie-talkie concealed inside his sport coat, a single wire leading to an earpiece. He hoped like hell to hear Branslonovich or the dispatcher announce that she had reported in. Instead, he heard the order for the thirty-four uniforms to leave the buses and begin closing the net. The operation was in full swing.
The radio channel came ablaze with communication traffic as a small army of uniformed patrol officers was unleashed onto a four-block area.