‘‘To transport their workers,’’ the INS man stated matter-of-factly. ‘‘I can’t think of a vehicular bust we’ve made in the last three years that didn’t involve either a stolen vehicle or stolen plates. The thing about what we do?’’ he asked rhetorically. ‘‘None of these people exist. Can you imagine? They don’t exist. There is no paperwork on them: no birth certificates, credit information, tax records—no nothing. That’s what we’re up against: phantoms. We pull ’em over; they scatter into the streets and we have nothing to follow . . . because they are nothing. A confirmed stolen vehicle? In terms of probable cause this bust just got a whole lot easier.’’
‘‘Agreed,’’ Boldt said.
‘‘Have you been shot at lately?’’
‘‘Only by my captain,’’ Boldt said, causing Coughlie to laugh.
‘‘I’m from the George Patton school,’’ Coughlie told him, reaching into the backseat for a Kevlar vest. ‘‘I don’t believe in sending my guys into any battle that I don’t engage in myself.’’
‘‘You don’t have kids,’’ Boldt observed.
‘‘No kids, no family, no no one,’’ Coughlie replied dryly. He strapped on a throat-mounted microphone that straddled his voice box, and he then inserted an earpiece. The device allowed hands-free conversation between team members. He toyed with a small black box that he then clipped to his belt. ‘‘You guys with me?’’ he spoke for the benefit of his team. ‘‘Yeah, we’re going in.’’
The bullet-resistant vest was not physically heavy, but its presence was. It meant battle; it meant risk. For Boldt a vest was a symbol of youth. It had been well over a year since he had worn one. Ironically, as he approached the hangar’s north door at a run behind his own four heavily armored Emergency Response Team (ERT) personnel, he caught himself worrying about his hands, not his life. He didn’t want to smash up his piano hands in some close quarters skirmish. One of his few selfish pleasures in life was the piano—his evening practice and the occasional happy hour performance at Joke’s On You. To break a finger or a wrist was to dislocate more than bone and ligament, it was to sever him from personal expression.
Unlike a typical SPD covert operation, Boldt had no way to monitor communications. His own ERT officers were outfitted with hands-free radios, but they were short sets for both LaMoia and Boldt, who were to rely on hand signals. Absurdly, in the name of government secrecy, the feds used their own protected radio frequencies, meaning that even though they wanted to, the two teams, INS and ERT, could not hear the other’s radio traffic: hand signals were used to communicate between the two digitally equipped units. Well aware that they had thrown this together a little too quickly, perhaps hastily, and that he was relying on men he’d never met, Boldt kept pace with the ERT operative in front of him, eyes ever vigilant for the hand signals that controlled his movement and thought process. When that hand reached up, fingers open, and then closed firmly, cementing into a fist, Boldt stopped and squatted down. When it made numbers—four and four—Boldt paired up with another of the ERT operatives and stepped to the left of the door.
The eight men crouched. The door was knocked in with a ram, and they streamed into the building, the line dividing in two. Boldt followed the yellow letters POLICE printed onto the black nylon vest in front of him.
It was a chop shop, not a sweatshop, the enormous area littered with automotive parts and vehicles in various stages of disassembly, the air reeking of welding torch and burning paint. Boldt’s team took shelter behind the disembodied shell of a gutted pickup truck. Coughlie’s team ducked behind a pile of automobile doors.
The first shot to ring out came from the far side of the room. Men scattered in all directions. Once provoked, law enforcement returned fire. Some of their targets dove to the floor, arms spread. The rest fled like rats.
A few hand signals and the weapons went quiet, gray smoke lofting into the air.
Two of the opposition were down, but squirming. Alive, but wounded. In all, nine men were cuffed and read their rights. SPD officers caught two more suspects fleeing on foot. The remainder escaped.
Within the hour, the scene began to sort itself out, the suspects having been transported downtown and run through booking. A computer was seized. A thorough inventory began.
Bernie Lofgrin’s SID technicians went to work—photographing, cataloguing, developing prints, accounting for the wounded— attempting to ensure that the charges would stick. Surfaces were swept, evidence bagged and collected.
Finding a free moment, Boldt stepped aside and called Liz just to hear her voice.
‘‘If it hadn’t been early in the alphabet we might not have caught it for a couple weeks,’’ the Robbery detective, Chuck Bandelli, explained to Boldt from the other side of Boldt’s desk back at Public Safety. Bandelli had a crude look to him, like a horse left out in the rain. ‘‘But as it is, two of us got given the job of notifying all them people whose vehicles were chopped, and we divided up the list by threes, you know?—A through C, D through F, this kinda thing—to make things faster. So I’m the one got stuck with the Cs. And when I seen that girl’s name right there on the list, I figured I better clue you in.’’
CHOW, M. / VIN:3678 90 8754C65E7/613 1ST AVE. #2C SO./SEA
Boldt stared at that line on the computer printout for the longest time. A world of confusion. Her car—it was a van—had been stolen and gutted for export. Boldt did not want to believe that she had met a similar fate, but the cop in him had his doubts.
‘‘Listen, Bandelli,’’ Boldt said, ‘‘I’d appreciate it if this didn’t get around the house. The press gets a whiff of this and we’re going to be in the middle of a big stink.’’
‘‘Sure thing, Lieutenant.’’
Boldt knew it would leak. The question was when.
CHAPTER 41
he gravedigger was not the man Boldt expected. Others had interviewed him the first time around, and so his slight frame, his aged gaunt face and hollow, ice-blue eyes came as a surprise. Boldt had envisioned a thick, burly man with dirt under his nails and a cold distance in his eyes. The one major requirement of the job, as it turned out, was to operate a backhoe.
Boldt stood on the far side of the observation glass, hoping that this man might connect them to whoever had buried Jane Doe. Melissa’s mention of the graveyard and Boldt’s subsequent visit to Hilltop had sparked a thought: they had been intentionally misled. It was LaMoia’s interrogation. Friday afternoon. Everyone wanted to get home.
The detective kicked his two-thousand-dollar boots up onto the Formica table and leaned his head back. ‘‘You know why you’re here?’’
‘‘More questions.’’ His voice was as thin as he was.
‘‘You’re right about that.’’ LaMoia waited a moment. ‘‘What do you think we want to ask you about?’’
‘‘That girl?’’
‘‘Which one?’’
‘‘The one I found. That Chinese girl.’’
‘‘That’s something we need to clear up,’’ LaMoia informed him. ‘‘That’s a good place to start.’’
‘‘What’s that?’’
‘‘We’re thinking it wasn’t you who found her.’’
‘‘Of course it was. I called the police. You people must have recorded—’’
‘‘Yeah, you called the police. And you played it out real well. But someone else found that body. Isn’t that right, Mr. Caldwell? Someone visiting Hilltop early that morning. An old lady maybe? An old man? This person reported it to you, and you made the call to us. I mean if you make the call, why should we look at you very hard? And of course that’s what happened.’’