“What do you think?” Foreman asked, as if the two were regarding a painting in a museum.

“I’ve got some questions.”

“What kind of questions?” Foreman clearly didn’t like the sound of that. He wanted this cut-and-dried. He wanted his assumption-that Hayes had probably been killed in this chair-front and center.

“Questions for SID.”

“I’m first officer,” Foreman declared. “It won’t be SID, it’ll be our guys.”

The State Bureau of Criminal Investigation outsourced their field detection and lab work to King County Sheriff’s. The lab had a good reputation, but Boldt didn’t personally know anyone there, and it was the personal relationships that got investigations cleared.

Foreman repeated, “What kind of questions?”

Boldt doubted then that Foreman had read the preliminaries from the two other such beatings-including his own. He wasn’t sure he wanted to give something away for nothing. There were answers he needed as well.

Boldt wandered into the doorway of the adjacent bedroom and suddenly felt breathless, his chest tight, his imagination besieged by images. It was a twin bed, pulled off the wall, a nightstand shoved into the corner. It faced a closet with louvered panels on the folding doors. Boldt looked away just as quickly.

He asked, “How’d you manage getting the camera into the closet?”

“What?” Foreman answered.

“The video. It’s why they beat you, wasn’t it, Danny? That video? Pulled your nails and drugged you until you coughed up the combination and location of the safe. You had the video in the safe. Six years you kept that thing. Why? Just tell me you didn’t drag it out at night and slip it into the VCR, Danny. Tell me that’s not why your prints were on it.” Boldt felt sick, a combination of this bedroom, the smell of blood and vomit, and other images now swarming his brain. He didn’t need to see the video.

Foreman let himself down into a wooden chair just outside the bedroom door. “I obtained the warrant through an Assistant U.S. Attorney at the time. I lured Hayes away from the cabin with an anonymous call. The hope was for data capture-to record his keystrokes. In all, three cameras were installed, each covering an area that included a phone jack because we assumed he was doing this online. Tech Services did it for me, under the protection of Special Operations.”

“You were with us at the time,” Boldt said. Seattle Police.

“Correct. He used a laptop. Moved around. We couldn’t predict what room he’d use. I had no idea, Lou. I went fishing, and I caught the wrong fish. If it hadn’t been relevant-”

“It wasn’t relevant!”

“A bank officer? It was very much relevant. For two or three days, she was a primary suspect. Your wife I’m talking about. The only thing that saved her, the only one who saved her… you’re looking at him. I kept the tape to myself, explored what needed exploring, and never surfaced her name. We went through the treatments together,” he said, meaning their wives’ cancer treatment, “and it just got harder and harder to look you in the eye. And then Darlene slipping and Liz recovering. Uglier and uglier.”

“What were Paul Geiser’s prints doing on the video?” Boldt asked, trying to keep their personal history out of this, but seeing clearly how entangled it all was. “Get your story straight, Danny. That way you only have to tell it once.”

“To hell with you!” Foreman shouted.

“You should have destroyed the tape.”

“You mean I should have told you about it, don’t you?”

“That’s not what I said.”

“A bank exec is sleeping with my embezzler-my suspect-and I’m supposed to destroy that evidence? Would you have destroyed that evidence?”

“Six years,” Boldt said, his throat dry. “Yes, I would have.”

“The tape wasn’t the only thing in my safe. Every scrap of information pertaining to this case was in there with it, most of it burned to disk. All of it gone now. Destroyed? I don’t know. This is the first I’ve heard about the tape resurfacing.” A pause as Foreman added it up. “So they got to Liz again. That’s what you’re telling me.”

In fact, Boldt was telling him more than he wanted to, the result of allowing his emotions to play into this. “Was it the only tape? Of them?”

“Yes.”

“And Geiser’s prints?”

“I can’t answer that,” Foreman said. “News to me. My guess would be that all the tapes at some point crossed his desk. I don’t have a specific memory of Liz’s tape being grouped with the others. I do remember clearly the first time I saw it, and the realization-the need-to protect you, if possible. My memory is that I got this tape out of the group. But they were numbered at the time, you know? And I can see me keeping tabs on it, but including it, so nothing fishy surfaced-a tape being noticed missing-and maybe it was in the stack that crossed Paul’s desk. Early on, as inventory was being matched against the warrant. Something like that.”

Boldt didn’t like the explanation-it felt to him as if Foreman were making this up on the fly-but he accepted it for the time being.

“I feel a little sick,” Boldt said.

“Probably the air. It stinks in here.”

“You must have surveillance notes putting Liz with Hayes last week.” He wondered if they’d met here at the cabin. Was Foreman aiming to involve Liz?

“No. I wasn’t watching this place.”

Was this credible? Boldt wondered. A location under surveillance six years earlier and Foreman doesn’t chase it down when the man’s released from prison?

“I sat on the rental-the mobile home-thinking he might make a move. Got stung instead.”

“They got you twice, and now they appear to have gotten Hayes twice. Why risk that?” Boldt asked. “Why not do what had to be done the first time?”

“They weren’t going to torture me out in the damn woods,” Foreman complained. “And these guys are smart: They don’t put kidnapping on the rap sheet. Assault. Maybe second-degree manslaughter. But it’s in the victim’s home. It’s breaking and entering. Robbery. Light stuff compared with kidnapping.”

That argument wasn’t quite right, but Boldt didn’t push it. “They got Hayes that first time. We know that by the blood type at the scene. Why risk, why bother with a second event?” This stuck in Boldt’s craw. These people seemed smart-as Danny had just said. Even Liz’s assault in the van looked more like robbery. They were carefully avoiding the charges that drew mandatory time and a maximum-security facility. So why risk a second attack on Hayes? Especially given that he might be being watched.

Boldt gestured at the torture scene. “Did you see this go down, Danny?”

“Of course not.”

“But Liz had told you about the cabin. You were watching the cabin. You said so.”

“That’s you talking, not me.” He added, “I was suckered away from here. Anonymous call saying I should take a meeting in town. That Hayes was thinking of turning. I ended up stuck in a traffic jam on the 520. I’d been over in Bellevue. Missed the meet entirely. Fuck me.”

Boldt felt a measure of pride at having successfully distracted Danny Foreman away from asking again about the forensic evidence that Boldt found inconsistent at the scene. Veteran cops rarely snuck something past one another, and Boldt had done just that by focusing Foreman on himself-a subject most people found irresistible.

“You know what happens when I call in the lab techs?” Foreman asked. “They’re going to go room by room,” he said, “dusting, developing prints.”

Boldt felt a spike of heat travel up his spine.

“Thing about latents,” Foreman said. “They can’t be dated. They could be from yesterday, or they may be six years old, and they all look the same.”

Boldt paced back to the doorway and glanced into the bedroom again. This time the film that played in his head had his naked wife grabbing headboards, touching the bedside lamp, pressing her sweating palm on the wall. With her prints in the WSW database, it would be only a matter of time until she’d be placed in the cabin and questioned. A matter of time until she’d have to detail the affair with Hayes.