Beyond Recognition lbadm-4

by Ridley Pearson

  “The reason I ask is because it might help explain the threats coming to you-someone who knows you’re connected with the women.”

  Garman said brusquely, “Not connected. I never knew either of them, never had so much as heard their names. Listen, I don’t want these things. Have you guys checked with the other Marshal Fives, other firemen? Do we know for sure that I’m the only one getting them?”

  “I haven’t heard otherwise.”

  “Well, neither have I, but that doesn’t mean anything.”

  “One of the things Sergeant Boldt has asked me to do is act as liaison. There’s the Arson Task Force investigation, and there’s the Homicide investigation,” she said, indicating one of her hands for each department. Weaving her fingers together, she said, “My job is to help marry the two, now that Bahan and Fidler are so actively involved. We don’t think the weekly meetings are enough, and Boldt is no fan of meetings to start with. He says everything gets talked about and nothing gets done.”

  Garman allowed a grin. “I’d go along with that.”

  “You’ve worked over two hundred arson investigations,” she informed him, without consulting any notes. She wanted him to know she had been researching his record, wanted to have her eyes on him to judge any reaction. She was disappointed by the slight blush to his neck. He averted his eyes in what to her was an act of modesty. She realized she had lumped all firemen into cocky macho types despite her efforts to avoid prejudging.

  “Suspicious fires,” he corrected. “Some we call as arsons. Some not.”

  “Twenty-two arrests, nine convictions,” she added.

  “Listen, I don’t keep notches on my gun or anything. It’s a job. You quote those numbers, and it depresses me. We only clear fifteen percent of our cases. You guys, it’s what? Seventy or eighty, I think? Vehicle fires are the worst. Last year we lost forty-five thousand vehicles in this country to suspicious fires. Forty-five thousand! Can you believe that? And we wonder why our insurance costs so much! Maybe half my stuff is vehicles. Most of the rest, abandoned structures. Every now and then revenge or a vanity fire.

  “First thing I did,” he continued, “when I connected the Enwright fire to that note, was go back through my files. That’s what Boldt asked about; that’s what you’re going to ask too, so I’ll save you the time. I can’t place a single one of those shitbirds in something like this. A couple are still locked up, a couple more moved on. And every one of them was an obvious pour. Gasoline. You don’t convict them on anything less. Every drop of gasoline has its own fingerprint, did you know that? Every batch that comes out of a refinery is a little bit different, chemically speaking. A guy does a pour; we pursue him as a suspect; we find a can of gas in his garage and, bingo! the lab gives us a match. At that point we convict. Anything short of that, they walk. And I’ll be damned if I can make any one of my convictions stick for this thing.”

  “Your arrests?”

  “Same thing.”

  “But why are you receiving these notes?” she asked. Again, Garman’s neck went florid, but this time his soft eyes went cold and hard; he nervously rolled a pen between his fingers. It was not what she expected; she registered that look, not wanting to forget it.

  “Marshal Five, I suppose. There are only a few of us. Could have mailed it to any one of us. I got lucky, I guess.”

  “Enemies?” she asked. “Anything in your past that might-”

  “No,” he interrupted. The pen began to spin again. She used it as a barometer.

  “How about your Air Force serv-?”

  “Listen!” he interrupted again. “What is it with all the questions about me? It’s this torch we’re after, okay?”

  “He’s chosen you for some reason, Mr. Garman.”

  “Steven,” he corrected.

  “Do we chalk it up to coincidence? To chance? Let me tell you something about Lou Boldt, if you haven’t already heard it. The word coincidence isn’t in his lexicon. It doesn’t exist. He’s a fatalist: Everything happens for a reason; there’s an explanation for everything. These victims?” she asked rhetorically. “Chosen at random? Don’t suggest that to Lou Boldt. There’s a reason, no matter how obscure. And Boldt will find it, mark my words.” The pen stopped moving. “These notes coming to you?” she asked in the same tone. “To Boldt there’s a reason for that. No roll of the dice is going to explain it. And my job is to provide him with a believable explanation. There isn’t a hell of a lot to go on in this one. You are about all he has. Why Steven Garman? he keeps asking. He wants an answer-and let me tell you something else about Boldt: He gets to the truth.” The pen started spinning. “He gets the answers. You want to talk clearance rates? Boldt’s is in the nineties-and we’re talking over a fourteen-year career on Homicide. You want to talk amazing?” The red flush crept back into Garman’s neck, and Daphne knew she had a live one. Like every other living human being, the man had secrets.

  “So that’s the question he wants answered: Why Steven Garman?” A thin film of perspiration glistened under his hairline. “I’m asking myself if it doesn’t go back to your Air Force days. Something out of your past.”

  Garman swallowed heavily. His eyes were soft again, but they were scared. His pupils were dilated; he was mouth breathing.

  Talk to me, she encouraged silently.

  “Nothing I can think of,” he said. His voice cracked and belied his words.

  Got you!

  She wanted to stay there the rest of the day, to keep working on him until he asked if she were hot or loosened his tie or opened a window. She had no idea what was hidden inside him, or if it bore any real significance to the investigation. People inflated their own self-worth. But she wanted to get at it. She wanted to sweat him. There were a dozen ways to trip him up, but she would go gently. Consult Boldt, play it his way. She said, “You mentioned that you were stationed on a base.”

  “It isn’t relevant. Seriously. It was-what? — nine, ten years ago. The world changes a lot in ten years.”

  “You were married then,” she said, adding a little tug to the hook.

  Garman’s eyes went to glass. If the pen had been a pencil it might have snapped between his powerful fingers. He glanced away, then back at her, then away again, unable to decide where his eyes should light. There was anger concealed within him. Rage. Its bubbles broke the surface, indicating the roiling boil below. “Exactly what is the purpose of this meeting?” he inquired tightly.

  Instinctively, she switched off the role of interrogator. She had more than enough to present to Boldt. To push further without backup, without surveillance in place, would be a mistake. Garman was a suspect. She felt a flood of hot, almost sexual energy pass through her chest and through her pubis and down to her toes. “The purpose of this meeting was to get to know each other, that’s all. I have the jump on you in that regard. Sorry if it came off as the third degree. Product of the profession, I’m afraid.” She had saved one last gem, held it in her bag of tricks from the moment he had confirmed his service in the Air Force. Kept it ready, compartmentalized in her mind, one hand on the door. She opened that door by telling him, “The ATF lab believes the accelerant was some kind of rocket fuel.”

  For a split second Steven Garman appeared chiseled in stone. Daphne wished she had a camera.

  She continued, “You see the possible connection to the Air Force, I’m sure.”

  Garman seemed incapable of speaking. She knew that look. She had seen it a dozen times: He was devastated. She had touched his most sensitive nerve. Rocket fuel, she thought.

  She looked over at the photograph of the Challenger explosion. Framed beneath it, she recognized salvaged pieces of the craft spread out on a hangar floor. He must be something of an expert. That was how Garman looked too: blown apart, his world a mass of smoke and flames.

  26

  “Looking good, Detective,” a female voice cooed from behind Boldt.

  The sergeant turned in time to see the target of the comment, John LaMoia,
strutting his stuff-creased blue jeans and all-heading in the general direction of his sergeant. LaMoia was style: those pressed jeans, a crisp Polo shirt, ostrich cowboy boots, and a rodeo belt for taking second in bronco riding when he’d been seventeen and stupid enough to enter. He had a bony, thin face, wiry hair, and a prominent nose. Exactly what women saw in LaMoia was a mystery to his senior in rank, a man whose job it was to solve mysteries, but women flocked to him, even if one discounted his reported conquests by half, which was only sensible given LaMoia’s tendency toward exaggeration.

  Maybe, Boldt thought, it was that walk-confident and tall, with a certain swagger to the hips. Maybe it was the large brown eyes, or the way he used them so unflinchingly on his targets. Or maybe it was simply his self-centered, cocky attitude, a quality that clearly endeared him to the uniforms as well as the brass. Whatever the case, LaMoia led, he didn’t follow. He’d have his own squad someday if he wanted it. He’d have a wife and five kids, or a woman in every part of town, or both. One liked the man from a distance, trusted him up close, and could rely on him, unequivocally, in any situation. Boldt tried to disguise his admiration but not his fondness. He didn’t need a loose cannon-and LaMoia trod dangerously close most of the time.

  LaMoia began as he so often did, without any greeting. He simply rolled an office chair into Boldt’s cubicle and straddled it backward, leaning his frame on the chair’s hinged back. “Needless to say, you have no idea where any of this came from.” The detective had enviable connections to the private sector: credit unions, insurance companies, banks. Some believed it was past or current women who supplied him with such broad access. Shoswitz said it had to do with LaMoia’s military service, though Boldt thought it was nothing more than the man’s undeniable charm and his incredible ability to network. If you met him, you liked him; if he asked a favor, one was offered. If he received a favor, valuable or not, he reciprocated. He knew people: how they thought, what they wanted. He knew the streets. He could probably supply anything to anyone, though Boldt turned a blind eye to this possibility. He had the knack. He was envied by most, hated by few, and always at the heart of controversy.

  LaMoia placed a folder in front of Boldt. He explained the contents. “Enwright and Heifitz-their financials: credit cards, banking. Nothing there to connect one to the other-in terms of buying patterns, restaurants, health clubs. Nothing that I could see. But there it is for you.”

  “Too much cologne,” Boldt said.

  “It wears off. It’ll be all right in another hour.”

  “We could suffocate by then.”

  “You like the shirt? It was a gift.”

  Boldt said, “You’re saying there’s nothing at all to connect them to each other? It doesn’t have to jump out at you; I’d take something peeking around the corner. A department store they both shopped? A gas station?”

  “The wheels.”

  “What?” Boldt asked.

  “Has anyone worked the wheels?”

  “Cars?”

  “The houses were torched, right? Toast. So what was left behind?” LaMoia asked rhetorically.

  “Their cars!” Boldt said, his voice rising. Investigations took several sets of eyes-that’s all there was to it. Boldt had not given the victims’ cars a second thought.

  LaMoia shrugged. “Not that it means shit, mind you. How would I know? But I’m not seeing a hell of a lot of physical evidence to chase. The wheels kinda jumped out at me-or maybe they just peeked around the corner,” he teased.

  “Check them out,” Boldt offered.

  “Moi? And here I was thinking you’d be more interested in the ladders.” LaMoia studied his sergeant’s expression.

  Caught by surprise, Boldt asked, “The ladders?”

  The grin was contrived, full of arrogance. “Are you feeling lucky?”

  “I could use some luck.”

  “Werner ladders are sold through a single distributor here, which is good for us, but they do one hell of a lot of business, and the chances of our tracing sales back to a particular buyer would typically be zilch. But we got lucky for once. The model with this particular tread pattern had a manufacturing problem with the shoes-the little things bolted to the bottom of the ladder-and the production run lasted a total of six weeks. They issued a recall, which meant this particular model only stayed in stores for a little over two weeks. The distributor can account for all but a hundred of his initial inventory.”

  Boldt understood the significance of such a number. There were several hundred thousand people living in King County. LaMoia had just narrowed the field to one hundred.

  The detective continued proudly. “With the one distributor it’s a piece of cake to track down his retail customers: hardware stores, building supply, a couple rental shops. Count ’em! Seventeen in western Washington, but only four in King County. It’s a high-end ladder-pun intended-the BMW of ladders, which is nice for us because they restrict the number of retailers allowed to carry them. Another thing: They’re spendy things, meaning that when some Joe buys one he pays by check or credit card. Check it out: Not one of these ladders went out the door for cash. We’ve gotten that far already.”

  “You’ve already talked to the retailers?” Boldt felt a surge of optimism; LaMoia had a way of making even the smallest crack of light seem blinding.

  “You bet. And this no-cash thing plays well for us,” LaMoia continued. “Because all these places use computerized cash-register inventory systems, we’ve asked for itemized sales records. Some have been able to supply those directly to us. Others provided their cash register tapes for the couple of weeks in question.”

  Boldt felt all the air go out of him. “We’re supposed to go through a bunch of cash-register tapes item by item, pulling ladder sales?” he complained. He considered this a moment. “I’d say forget it, John. Too big a long shot. Abort. Too time-consuming.”

  “Wait a second!” the detective objected, still wearing his trademark cocky expression. “Do you want to know who bought those ladders or not?”

  “Not if it requires that kind of manpower. In the past, I might have handed off a job like that to one of the college criminology courses, let them do our dirty work, but-”

  “Wait!” LaMoia repeated, interrupting. “You’re not listening.”

  There were few if any other detectives who could talk to Boldt that way. He crossed his arms tightly and withheld comment. LaMoia was careful about how he played his cards; he would not have been so abrasive without something to back it up.

  “We’ve got scanners,” LaMoia said. “Handheld jobs you run over a newsprint article, or an ad, or a map you want on your desktop machine. We’ve got OCR-optical character recognition-software that converts printed text from a scanned graphic image to data that word processors and database programs can manipulate. We’re in the fucking computer age here, Sarge. Leaves Neanderthals like you in the dust.”

  “I understand scanning technology,” Boldt countered. “Not real well,” he conceded, “but the fundamentals.”

  “So what we’re in the process of doing is scanning those cash register tapes. Doesn’t take long at all. When that’s done, we run OCR on them, and then we can search for anything we like: Werner, the word ladder, the product code, the price point. Guaran-fuckin’-teed to give us a hit for every ladder sold. Every sale is accompanied by method of payment, check or credit card. The account number is right there on the tape. By this afternoon … tomorrow … day after, we’ll have every sale of every ladder accounted for. We’ll have a checking account or credit card number we can trace-right back to the individual buyer.” He said proudly, “I’m telling you, Sarge, we’ve got this guy.”

  It was good work, and Boldt told him so. What he didn’t bring up was that a hundred names might not get them any closer to the arsonist. They still needed the method of selection, the method of entry into the victims’ homes. There were too many unanswered questions, too many loose ends. He didn’t want to deflate LaMoia. They need
ed a decent break-perhaps the ladder was one of them, as LaMoia believed. The job of lead detective was to cast a dozen nets into the water and hope for fish in a few.

  “Mind you,” LaMoia interjected, “the ladder was probably ripped off. Ten to one, that’s what we find out. But from what neighborhood, when? We might get something out of it yet, Sarge. You want me to chase down the wheels, I got no problem with that. But don’t drop this ladder thing. I’m telling you: I can smell it. The ladder is a good thing. It’s worth going after.”

  “It’s good work,” Boldt repeated, though with discouragement sneaking through. “Honestly.”

  “This computer stuff helps.” For the first time, LaMoia sounded tentative. “Something’s gonna break, Sarge. We’ve got six dicks on this thing working damn near around the clock. That ups our odds significantly.”

  “Get someone to look at the cars. Maybe they shopped the same convenience store, ate a burger at the same place; maybe that’s how he spotted them. Maybe there’s a wrapper on the floor or a receipt or something. A bag. I like the cars. I want to work the cars. But if you want the ladders this badly, John, go ahead and stay with them. We need a quick education about rocket fuel, as well. We need Bahan and Fidler to step up to the plate. An arson is another world, at least to this cop it is.”

  At that moment, Daphne burst through homicide’s security door, her face flushed, her chest heaving. It was a Wonder Bra again, as far as Boldt could tell. She marched over to Boldt and LaMoia with a defiant stride that at once alerted the sergeant to some kind of breakthrough. He knew that fire; he had tasted it. There wasn’t a male eye in the bull pen that missed her.

  She stopped in front of them, attempted to collect herself, and, filling her chest with a lungful of air, said, “Steven Garman is hiding something. He knows a hell of a lot more than he’s letting on. I want to hit him, and hit him hard. I’m going to crack the son-of-a-bitch wide open.”

  27