The eighth time Laura Stowle signaled LaMoia it was for a tall Hispanic male wearing a dark sweatshirt with a hood. LaMoia buried his face into a six-week-old copy of People; the janitor with the bucket and mop kneeled down to work a piece of gum from the stone floor; a wiry-looking woman in hot pants and platform shoes pulled out her lipstick and used the mirror of her compact to get a good look at the door behind her; a woman in civilian clothes, typing at a station behind Stowle, took her fingers off the keyboard and took hold of her weapon, beneath the table.
The big man was told to wait. He took a seat two chairs away from LaMoia, who had the audacity to turn to the man and say, ‘‘How ya doing?’’
‘‘Feel like shit, man,’’ the other said, his nose running, his voice rough.
‘‘I hear that,’’ LaMoia said, returning to his magazine.
After five minutes the Hispanic male was handed a form to fill out. He looked at it with contempt. Standing in front of him, Stowle explained in a bored voice, ‘‘We need your name, place of employment, if any, and relevant phone numbers for notification of follow-up. They’re very important. If you need the Spanish form-’’
‘‘Yeah,’’ he grunted.
She returned with a different clipboard and spoke Spanish. ‘‘You can skip the insurance part because the treatment you’ve requested is free. Fourth line, date of exposure, is extremely important because it will determine the extent of treatment you receive and therefore the effectiveness of that treatment. Repeated exposures don’t matter to the physician. It’s the initial exposure that is critical to proper diagnosis and subsequent treatment. If there’s anything I can help you with-’’
‘‘You could speed things up a little,’’ LaMoia said, interrupting in English. ‘‘Or maybe a drink after you’re through here.’’
Stowle glared at him.
The Hispanic sniffled, coughed and scribbled his name onto the top of the form in crude but legible handwriting: Guermo Rodriguez.
Stowle returned to her place behind the counter.
LaMoia was called a few minutes later under the name Romanello. ‘‘ ’Bout time,’’ he said, placing the magazine down. ‘‘Good luck, man,’’ he said to the other. ‘‘You’ll be a couple years older by the time they call you.’’
Rodriguez stood simultaneously and returned the clipboard and form to the receptionist, who passed it on to the officer at the keyboard station behind her, the woman’s loaded weapon still available on the shelf by her knees.
LaMoia passed into the back and took up a position in the examination room adjacent to the room where Rodriguez would be examined, effectively blocking any use of the building’s back exit. They had him cornered now. LaMoia waited impatiently for information back from downtown. The keyboard operator’s input of the outpatient form was not headed for the clinic’s medical records but instead was connected by modem to the department’s criminal records bureau. The name Guermo Rodriguez came back negative: no criminal arrests or convictions. The system also failed to kick a driver’s license or a registered vehicle. Guermo Rodriguez did not exist. He was, however, a man who might ride the city buses. Rodriguez had more than likely listed a bogus address on the clinic’s form, as well as a bogus phone number. Rodriguez was probably himself an illegal, a connection that could easily put him into service for a corrupt INS official.
‘‘He’s gotta be our guy,’’ Boldt announced over the radio. ‘‘The sweatshirt matches what we saw on the videos. We go with it.’’
A few minutes later Rodriguez was given an injection of a placebo, told to take aspirin and drink plenty of water, and released.
By the time Guermo Rodriguez left the clinic, SPD had fifteen officers in ten vehicles assigned to his surveillance-the largest surveillance operation conducted by the department in the past eleven months.
CHAPTER 60
With SPD monitoring his every footstep, nearly his every breath, Rodriguez was carefully followed, first to an all-night pharmacy where he bought a bottle of aspirin, some cough syrup and a head cold decongestant, and subsequently to ‘‘A place on Military Road in Federal Way,’’ as LaMoia explained to Boldt, who had returned to the office to oversee and direct the surveillance from the situation room. ‘‘He climbs up into an eighteen-wheeler cab-a flatbed-and takes a two-hour nap. I got a hunch that truck’s his home for the time being. But then he fires it up and drives off. What’s that say to you, Sarge?’’
‘‘Mama Lu was right about the new moon,’’ Boldt answered. ‘‘There’s a shipment coming in. Tomorrow? The next day? Soon!’’ The truck was intended to move a container.
‘‘So then he drives a couple miles, parks it and takes a lawyer’s lunch at a greasy spoon-only it’s after midnight. He’s in no sign of being in any hurry.’’
‘‘We know for certain he’s in there?’’ Boldt pressed.
‘‘Cranshaw is getting his fill of cherry pie and coffee. We got a visual.’’
‘‘Waiting for a meet?’’ Boldt proposed.
‘‘That or a call. Got to be. You want I should bring him in for a chat?’’
‘‘Negative,’’ Boldt stated. The evidence they had against Rodriguez was entirely circumstantial. ‘‘I could try for a trap-and-trace on the diner’s pay phone-’’
‘‘Now there’s a long shot.’’
‘‘Never get it,’’ Boldt admitted.
‘‘Let’s hope this guy’s girlfriend doesn’t have a thing for the inside of truck cabs or something. I hope to hell we’re not wasting our time
here.’’
‘‘Is sex the only thing you think about?’’ Boldt asked.
‘‘No way!’’ LaMoia answered without missing a beat. ‘‘I’m pretty fond of money, too.’’
At 3:00 A.M. Wednesday morning the flatbed semi with Rodriguez behind the wheel finally left the diner’s gravel lot. Boldt was awakened from a nap in a storage room where a bunk bed offered detectives a chance to lie down. Surveillance was tricky at that hour, and with Boldt’s request for a phone warrant denied, all the police could do was guess at the call Rodriguez had been seen making from the diner and to follow him at a comfortable distance.
Thirty minutes later he used a bolt cutter to enter the gates of a naval storage depot that proved to have been part of the 1988 base closures that had caused a brief downward blip in King County’s otherwise stellar economy. Rodriguez pulled the flatbed down to a dock area where a pair of towering cranes pointed up toward the night sky. It was those cranes that caught everyone’s attention.
Fifteen minutes later, as LaMoia and two other detectives made their move to get a better vantage point, Rodriguez was spotted crossing through the navy yard’s side gates on foot. A moment later he dragged a motorcycle out of the weeds and took off without lights, catching the surveillance team by surprise and LaMoia in the midst of cutting a chained gate accessing a dark spit of land that looked directly across a small thumb of water at the navy yard. Detectives pursued in unmarked cars, but Rodriguez took the cycle off-road and disappeared.
‘‘Eluded?’’ Boldt roared into the phone.
‘‘We screwed up, Sarge.’’
‘‘And then some,’’ Boldt said.
‘‘Didn’t expect the bike.’’
‘‘Don’t try for sympathy from me. You lost our prime suspect.’’
‘‘We still have the flatbed,’’ LaMoia reminded, attempting to salvage something from his loss, ‘‘and the two cranes. Gaynes is still on Coughlie. He paid a visit to KSTV. He took a brief ride on a city bus. You got that, Sarge? A city bus!’’ He added cautiously, ‘‘This navy yard has got to be the place. It’s perfect. The cranes, for Christ’s sake! I’m gonna issue a Be on Lookout for Rodriguez. We’ll set up out here. If we’re right about this drop, Sarge, we had better be prepared for an all-out war. I’m thinking Mulwright and Special Ops.’’