First Victim (Boldt/Matthews, 6, Band 6) - Softcover

Pearson, Ridley

Softcover

ISBN 10: 140130818X ISBN 13: 9781401308186

Verlag: Hyperion-Acquired Assets, 2005

Inhaltsangabe

Lieutenant Lou Boldt, the Seattle cop who stars in Ridley Pearson's deservedly popular series, is a sharp and touching figure--perhaps the most believable police officer in current fiction. Early in this ninth book about his public and private life, Lou has to put on a bullet-resistant vest to lead a raid against some dangerous criminals. "The vest was not physically heavy, but its presence was," Pearson tells us.

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 light run behind his own four heavily armored 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. . . . Boldt plays jazz piano one night a week in a local bar, and despite his concern for his hands, he takes every opportunity he can to get away from his desk and into the streets. But money pressures, caused by his wife's recent illness, also make him think about the possibility of a better-paying job in the private sector.

Meanwhile, some extremely ruthless people are murdering illegal Chinese immigrant women and leaving their bodies buried in newly dug graves. An ambitious local TV journalist named Stevie McNeal and the young Chinese woman she thinks of as her "Little Sister" risk their lives to investigate the killings, while Boldt and his team round up a most unusual array of suspects.

This combination of hard-edged realism and softer sentiment has become Pearson's trademark, and once again it works smoothly. --Dick Adler

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ridley Pearson is the award-winning co-author, along with Dave Barry, of Peter and the Starcatchers, Peter and the Shadow Thieves, Peter and the Secret of Rundoon, Peter and the Sword of Mercy, Escape From the Carnivale, Cave of the Dark Wind, Blood Tide, and Science Fair. In addition to Kingdom Keepers: Disney After Dark, Kingdom Keepers: Disney at Dawn, Kingdom Keepers: Disney in Shadow, and Kingdom Keepers: Power Play, he is also the author of the young adult thrillers Steel Trapp: The Challenge and Steel Trapp: The Academy. He has written more than twenty best-selling crime novels including Killer View and Killer Weekend. He was the first American to be awarded the Raymond Chandler/Fulbright Fellowship in Detective Fiction at Oxford University.

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The First Victim

By Ridley Pearson

Hyperion Books

Copyright © 2005 Ridley Pearson
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9781401308186

Chapter One

PUGET SOUND, WASHINGTON

It came off the northern Pacific as if driven by a witch's broom: theremnants of typhoon Mary, which had killed 117 in Japan, left6,000 homeless in Siberia and flooded the western Aleutians for thefirst time in sixty-two years. In the ocean's open waters it drove seasto thirty feet with its eighty-five-mile-per-hour winds, dumping threeinches of rain an hour and barreling toward Victoria Island, the SanJuan Islands, and the largest estuary in North America, known oncharts as Puget Sound. It headed for the city of Seattle as if it hadpicked its course off a map, and it caused the biggest rush on plywoodand chipboard that King County had ever seen.

    In the partially protected waters west of Elliott Bay, one nauticalmile beyond the established shipping lanes that feed Seattle's EastWaterway docklands, the pitch-black night was punctured by theharsh illumination of shipboard spotlights that in clear weather mighthave reached a half mile or more but failed to stretch even a hundredyards in the dismal deluge that had once been Mary. The freighter,Visage, a container ship, rose and sank in fifteen-foot swells, raindrumming decks stacked forty feet high with freight cars. The Asiancrew followed the orders of the boatswain who commanded a battery-operatedmegaphone from an upper deck, instructing them to makeready.

    The huge ship pitched and yawed and rolled port to starboard,threatening to dump its top-heavy cargo. The crew had been capturedinside Mary's wrath for the last three hundred nautical miles?threeimpossibly long days and nights?rarely able to sleep, some unable toeat, at work all hours attempting to keep the hundreds of containerson deck secure. Early on in the blow a container had broken loose,sliding across the steel deck like a seven-ton brick and crushing theleg of an unsuspecting crewman to where the ship's medic could findno bones to set, only soft flesh where the shin and knee had oncebeen. Three of the crew had tied themselves to the port rail where theyvomited green bile with each and every rise and fall. Only four crewmenwere available for the transfer that was to come.

    The neighboring tug and barge, seventy feet and closing off Visage'sstarboard bow, were marked by dim red and green runninglights, a single white spot off the tug's bow, and a pair of bright halogensoff the tower of the telescoping yellow crane chained down to thecenter of the barge. The tug and barge disappeared into a trough,rising and reappearing a moment later, only to sink once again intothe foam, the crane as ominous and unnatural as an oil platform. Thestorm prevented any hope of docking the barge to the freighter, butboth captains had enough motivation in their wallets to attempt thetransfer nonetheless. Like two ends of a seesaw, the vessels rose andfell alternately, the crane's tower pointing like a broken finger into thetar black clouds. Radio communication was forbidden. Signal lightsflashed, the only contact between the two captains.

    Finally, in a dangerous and daring dance, the two vessels drewclose enough for the crane's slip harness to be snagged by the freighter'screw on an upward pendulum swing. Briefly, the barge and containership were connected by this dangling steel cable, but it brokeloose of their hold, the barge lost to another swell. It was twenty minutesbefore the crane's steel cable was finally captured for a secondtime.

    The vessels bobbed alongside one another, the slack in the crane'scable going dangerously tight with each alternating swell. The exhausteddeckhands of the Visage worked furiously to be rid of thiscontainer, to a member wondering if it was worth the bonus pay theyhad been promised.

    When the moment of exchange arrived, the crane made tight thecable and the deckhands cut loose the container's binding chainswhile lines secured to winches on both vessels attempted to steady thedangling container, for if it swung too violently it was likely to capsizethe barge. As the first of these four lines snapped, the container, danglingprecipitously over the void of open foam between barge and ship,shifted awkwardly, suddenly at a treacherous angle. Above the deafeningwhistle of wind and the lion's roar of the sea came the muted butunmistakable cry of human voices from within this container.

    A crewman crossed himself and looked toward heaven.

    A second line snapped. A third.

    The container swung and slipped out of the harness, splashinginto the water. It submerged and then bobbed back up like a whalesurfacing.

    The captain of the Visage barked his orders. The mighty twinscrews spun to life, the gigantic ship lumbering to port and away fromthe barge and crane in an effort to keep the container from beingcrushed between the vessels.

    The spotlights on the freighter were ordered extinguished as theship was consumed by the storm, lumbering back toward the shippinglane where it belonged.

    Behind it, in its wake, the abandoned container, singing of humanscreams and cries of terror, rode the mounting swells into darkness,lost to the wash of the waves and the whim of the wind.

Chapter Two

On the evening of Monday, August 10, when the coattails of typhoonMary had receded into little more than a torrential downpour,a rust orange container appeared bobbing in the churning greenwaters and whitecaps of Puget Sound. Spotted by a copilot of a testflight returning to Boeing Field, it was immediately reported to theCoast Guard. Loose containers were not an uncommon occurrence inthe Sound. The urgency behind the Coast Guard's efforts to recoverthe orphaned container began as a result of the threat to navigation,especially with night closing in. "Metal icebergs," they were called.This urgency was heightened, however, as the Coast Guard's patrolboat came alongside the partially sunken container and human crieswere heard from within. At that point, the call went out to the SeattlePolice Department.

* * *

The piano sounded better than ever. For an old beat-up baby grand ina smoke-filled comedy bar where no one paid the instrument any attentionexcept for the homicide cop who presently occupied its bench,his large hands and stubby fingers evoking a somber rendition of"Blue Monk," its tone was earthy and mellow, just the way jazz andblues were supposed to sound. The notes flowed out of Lou Boldt withoutconscious thought or preparation, sounding of the torments born offorty-odd years of life and a job involving all too much death.

    Boldt aimed his interpretation toward the table where his wife andfriends sat. If his five-year-old son and three-year-old daughter hadbeen there he would have had everything and everyone that matteredto him in this one room: Elizabeth, his sweetheart, wife and partner;Doc Dixon, the county medical examiner who'd been his friend formost of Boldt's twenty-plus years with Seattle Police; John LaMoia,who had taken Boldt's place as a Crimes Against Persons' squad sergeant;Bobbie Gaynes, the first woman cop to join that squad; DaphneMatthews, forensic psychologist and confidante; and the lab's BernieLofgrin, with his...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Hyperion-Acquired Assets
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2005
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 140130818X
• ISBN 13: 9781401308186
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 448
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: HACHETTE LIVRE SA; https://www.hachette.fr/; ; 1 AVENUE GUTENBERG; MAUREPAS CEDEX; 78319; Frankreich