"I don't know anything about any key," Walker said-deliberately unconvincingly?-bending to look past LaMoia, who attempted to block the man's view of the mirror, "but I'm sure you'll figure it out." He looked up into LaMoia's eyes. "You don't need my help with everything, do you?"
"I don't need your help with anything," LaMoia snapped. "You've got that turned around, friend."
"The deal was to put Neal away. He gets put away, maybe you find that door."
"It could work the other way," LaMoia proposed.
"Could it, you think?" Walker asked.
"It's a two-way street."
"Is it?" Walker let the animal loose then. He bared his teeth, his eyes rolling white into the back of his head, his neck a fan of tight wires from jaw to collarbone. "We ... had ... a ... deal!" he screamed, actually driving LaMoia back a step.
His raw voice distorted the observation booth's small speaker.
Spittle dripped down his chin. He wiped it off on his shirtsleeve.
He had never taken his eyes off Matthews, reconnected now by LaMoia's movement.
LaMoia said, "We get this thing right without you, and you're buried."
"Nice choice of words, Detective. Tell him, Daphne."
"You're a fucking freak show," LaMoia said, approaching Walker once again. He leaned in closely and said, "You leave her out of this, Walker. It's me you've got to worry about."
Keeping his eyes directly on her, not on LaMoia, Walker said, "She wants out of this, she's out of this. Simple as pie.
Mary-Ann wanted out, and look what happened to her." He found LaMoia again, back on track, a sail filling with wind. "Look what Neal did to her."
LaMoia said, "The church has doors that take skeleton keys. The church at the Shelter. We're checking that entire section of Underground as we speak." He repeated, "We solve it without you-"
Walker interrupted, "And I'm buried. Yeah, I got that the first time." He threw open his arms. "Bury me, Detective. At least charge me. Do something other than just harassing me, would you please? Ask her what she wants. Ask her what comes next. She knows, Detective. Do you? I don't think you have a clue." He stood out of his chair and pointed, "But she does! Is it over, Daphne? Is it?" To LaMoia: "She's living with you now. You ask her."
LaMoia shoved the man down hard, returning him to his chair. He leaned into the man's ear and whispered softly enough to avoid the recorder. "You ever set foot in my place again, Einstein, and I'll rip you a new asshole and make you eat your own shit."
He stepped back. Walker blanched, his lips wet with saliva, his eyes watery and hard. "We'll see," he said.
"Yes, we will," LaMoia said.
"You ask her," Walker said. "She knows what comes next."
Magoo
"Here's what we've got so far," said Dr. Bernie Lofgrin, a squat, balding man with eyes so magnified by his goggle-sized glasses that they looked more like hard-boiled eggs cut in half when he got excited. He was a favorite among the SPD detectives, his nickname an appropriate Magoo.
As the civilian director of SID, Lofgrin had worked cases with Boldt for more than a decade, his forensics lab supplying the technical pieces of the puzzle so necessary to an investigation and the subsequent prosecution. An arrest might come from information supplied by a snitch or a witness, but convictions came from evidence supplied by the lab. Where some detectives worked their contacts, their informants, their resources, Boldt chose to rebuild the life of the victim just before death, and to rely upon the physical evidence to tell the real story of what had happened. Every investigator did this to some degree, but Boldt had made his own science of it, and as such, had formed both a partnership and a deep friendship with Lofgrin. Both jazz aficionados, the currency of their exchanged favors was rare recordings or treasured masterpieces. Building one's collection was as important as growing one's IRA. Boldt's collection of more than ten thousand LPs dwarfed that of Lofgrin or Doc Dixon, and as he was typically the one in need of favors at the office, his cassette recorder was the one that was more active.
Lofgrin loved to hear himself talk. He was meant more for the university than the laboratory. "We patched together a full set of latents from the one hundred and thirty-seven lifts we developed down there. You can be fairly confident that a high percentage of those are all from the same individual. More to come.
"There was no apparent effort to keep the place wiped down," he continued. "Your resident wasn't thinking he'd have visitors. And yes, we're running the latents through the state database and we're passing them on to the nationals as well." He recited, "If this guy's ever been printed, we're going to know about it." His stained smile revealed he'd taken up smoking again. The smoking concerned Boldt: Lofgrin's heart suffered inside a nervous, agitated body.
SID had failed to locate the suspect's escape route out of the Underground, leaving more questions than answers.
"Did we check the prints against-"
"Ferrell Walker?" Lofgrin interrupted. "I read my e-mails, Lou. The answer is yes, Matthews got Walker to roll some prints for us. If he was ever in that lair we're never going to prove it. The prints aren't his."
Lofgrin gained energy when Boldt took notes, so sometimes Boldt scribbled things into his notebook just to appear active, as was the case now.
Boldt said, "At this point it wouldn't surprise me if this guy Walker goes down for several of our open cases. The more we look at him, the more it looks that way-to me, to LaMoia, even Daffy." When an investigator pushed the lab in one direction, it tended to prejudice and speed up results, but Boldtwho rarely used such ploys-couldn't be sure if Lofgrin had even heard him.
"I won't bother you with the Home and Garden tour, but I'm telling you: The prints aren't his. It was pure oxygen in those tanks as you suspected. It's your job to find out where he stole them."
"Could they be one-half of an oxyacetylene rig?" Boldt asked.
"Welding? Absolutely."
"As in construction sites?"
"Are you going somewhere with this?" Lofgrin asked.
"Our hotel peeper... the construction site."
Lofgrin nodded slowly. "Ah-so," he said.
Boldt's scribbling was for real, as he made a note to check all recent downtown construction sites for reports of stolen oxygen.
When things began to come together on a case, an investigator could feel the momentum shift his way. It brought on an almost childish giddiness sometimes-a visceral high that was one of those things you lived for, the way a marathon runner knew when he'd hit his stride and the training was finally paying off. The Big Mo was in this lab with him, and Boldt took it for a ride.
"Go," he encouraged.
"Hairs and fibers workup," Lofgrin said, aiming his distorted eyes toward Boldt. "I caution that this is all prelim, but we did lift seventeen black hairs from a five-gallon tub of wastewater, presumably where this guy washed up. Head hairs. We also ran all the clothing we found into the scrape room and collected a sizeable amount of fiber evidence. Initial examination of the black head hairs was conducted both macroscopically and microscopically.
Cell structure confirms they're from an Asian. We picked up chromosomes on the sheath material from one sample that confirms it's male hair. This particular Asian male had smoked pot within the last month. That shouldn't be too hard to confirm for your Mr. Chen, should it?" Boldt's pen went to work. "We've asked Dixie for comparison head hair samples from Chen. If we get a good probability, and I think we will, then we'll perform STR-short tandem repeat-DNA analysis. It's quick and reliable, and cheaper than the old RFPL. I could have something for you by tomorrow or the next day."
Boldt mentally assembled the pieces. In all likelihood Chen had had physical contact with whomever had been in residence at the underground hideout. This, in turn, implied the obvious. He asked, "Blood evidence?"