Beyond Recognition lbadm-4

by Ridley Pearson

  “A bandanna,” Daphne said.

  It amazed Ben how quickly the artist adjusted to every comment, how quickly it went down on the page. His hands moved in a flurry of activity, and when he pulled them away, it seemed like a Polaroid developing, the image growing out of nothing.

  “Jeans?” Boldt asked.

  “I couldn’t see his legs much,” Ben answered, more interested in the artist than Boldt. “No, not like that. Not a turtleneck, I guess.” The man erased it and tried a bandanna. “No. I don’t think so.” A moment later the man’s head changed completely. “Oh, wow! That’s it. That’s him.” The artist had drawn a hooded sweatshirt onto the man, the strings pulled tightly under his chin so that, when combined with the glasses, almost nothing showed of his face. “That’s it!” Ben repeated.

  “The hood up like that?” Boldt asked.

  “Just like that,” Ben answered.

  “Any markings on the clothes?” Boldt questioned. “A sports team? A company logo? The name of a city or town?”

  “You can shut your eyes if it helps,” Daphne said.

  Ben tried shutting his eyes, and the image that was frozen while on the artist’s page suddenly came to life. He could smell the car exhaust, hear the airplanes and car traffic; the guy moved his head back and forth, first looking toward the truck where Ben hid, then toward the elevator and Nick with that duffel bag. Light sparked off his mouth. Ben decided to mention this. “His teeth are shiny.”

  “Braces?” Boldt asked.

  “I don’t know,” Ben said, his eyes still squinted shut. “Can’t see. Not exactly.”

  “A gold tooth? A silver tooth?” Daphne asked.

  “I don’t know,” Ben answered honestly. “Can’t see much.”

  “What’s the man doing?” Boldt asked.

  Ben described the scene for them, the guy in the shadows checking out Nick and the truck. “He’s careful, you know? He’s waiting for Nick to get on the elevator. And then he does-Nick does-and the guy is coming for me, right at me!” He talked them through his panic as the guy headed toward the truck, the sense of panic, of diving back under the seat, of the truck never moving under the weight of the man, and then hearing that lock click into place. His terror at being locked up for a second time.

  “As he walked toward the truck,” Daphne said calmly, “he came closer to you, didn’t he, Ben?” She added, “Maybe he stepped out of the shadows a little. Into the light a little. Go ahead and shut your eyes and try to picture that for me, would you? Can you remember? Can you see it?” Her voice was soothing, the same voice that had comforted him in the car, and so he closed his eyes, just as she said to do, and sure enough, the dark sinister form stepped out of the shadows, and for an instant Ben thought he could see part of the man’s face. What made the experience especially strange for him was that he didn’t remember this at all. Instead, it felt as if Daphne had made him see something he had never seen.

  “I don’t know….” he mumbled.

  “Go ahead,” she encouraged.

  “I’m not sure.”

  “It’s all right, Ben. You’re safe here. It didn’t feel safe then, did it?”

  “No way.”

  “You were scared. He was coming toward you.”

  “I can’t get out,” he told her. “The door is unlocked and I don’t dare go out there.”

  “He’s coming toward you.”

  “Yeah.”

  “But there’s more light.”

  “Headlights. A car’s headlights,” he said, for he could see the image inside his head: it was in black-and-white, not color, and it happened quickly, and no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t slow it down. “He’s wearing a mask, I think. Plastic. A white plastic mask. Shiny, you know? Like a hockey goalie, maybe.”

  “He wore a disguise,” Boldt said in a voice of disappointment. “Damn.”

  The artist said, “A mask inside the pulled-up hood. Glasses over the mask. Hell of a disguise.”

  The artist held up the sketch for him. It was just the guy’s head and shoulders, the parking garage a blur behind him. He had the sweatshirt up over most of his face, wore big dark glasses and had plastic-looking skin. The hat topped off the image. It was creepy to Ben how close that drawing came to real life.

  “That’s him,” Ben whispered. He didn’t want to talk too loudly. The picture seemed real enough that the guy might hear.

  43

  Boldt thought of himself less as a public enforcer, more as a paid puzzle solver. Forensic evidence, testimony of witnesses, medical examiner reports, unforeseen events-all added up to a giant puzzle that the lead detective was supposed to solve. In the case of an ongoing serial homicide investigation, failure to solve the puzzle resulted in more deaths, the loss of innocent lives. It proved to be potent motivation. It robbed one of a private life, deprived one of sleep, gnawed at one’s self-confidence. Boldt disliked himself and felt himself a failure-he couldn’t even blame Liz for her affair, if it was real; he’d been consumed with work for months.

  When he reached his hotel after questioning Ben and the clerk handed him a brown paper bag-and it wasn’t his laundry coming back-the sergeant experienced a pang of dread. His first thought was that it was a bomb. He carried it to his room carefully and spent five long minutes inspecting it. Perspiration breaking out on his brow, he dared to uncurl the top of the bag slowly and open it equally slowly. Inside was a note from LaMoia and a half dozen items purchased from a hardware store-items purchased by Melissa Heifitz on the same day as her fire.

  Boldt clicked the TV on to CNN and went about examining the contents of the bag: a compressed air canister called E-Z Flush, rubber gloves, a sponge head to a mop.

  The items from Enwright were in the dresser’s bottom drawer. He took these out and compared. Common to both groups were sponges and gloves. A bottle of Drano in the Enwright group, E-Z Flush in the other; a bottle of compressed gas to be used as a plunger to clear the stubborn drain. Boldt spun the device around in his hands. On the can’s back panel was a simple illustration of a sink and another of a bathtub. In his mind’s eye he recalled his own bathtub having trouble draining, and a moment later he placed it as on the night of his family’s evacuation.

  Clogged drains! he realized. A common link between Enwright, Heifitz, and even himself!

  He called Bernie Lofgrin at home. The lab man answered cheerfully. Boldt did not introduce himself, for Lofgrin knew his voice. He said, “What are the chances that the hypergolics, that the ignition system, is somehow related to plumbing, to the house plumbing? To clogged drains?”

  After a long silence, Lofgrin said, “I’m thinking.” He mumbled, “Plumbing?” But Boldt did not interrupt. “Clogged drains?”

  Boldt waited another few seconds and said, “One of the victims bought a New Age toilet plunger on the day she died. The other, some Drano.”

  “A plunger!” Lofgrin shouted excitedly. “A plunger?” he repeated. “Hang on. Hang on!” Then he said, “Just hang on a second,” as if Boldt was prepared to interrupt. Boldt overheard Lofgrin calling out to his wife. Carol came on the line and asked about Liz and the kids, stalling while her husband busied himself. She sounded good. Carol was given to fits of depression but had been stabilized by some recently developed drug, and the word from Bernie was that she was “back to normal,” though Boldt and others of his friends had come to distrust Bernie’s assessment; in the last two years, Carol had been involved in two bad traffic accidents later deemed attempted suicides, these during periods when Lofgrin had been convincing others that she was stable. Bernie Lofgrin carried his own cross, same as anyone else-more than most, Boldt decided. Perhaps the man’s work was his best escape. Perhaps it explained why he was so damn good at it, so dedicated.

  Lofgrin’s strained voice thanked his wife, interrupting her, and said, “Page two-fifty-seven. Do-It-Yourself: The Visual Dictionary. You got a copy?”

  It was a rhetorical question. Lofgrin had given Boldt two copies: one f
or home, one for the office. He’d done the same for several of the other detectives in Robbery/Homicide. Boldt told him, “No. I’m in my second week at this damn hotel.” His copy was in a small bookshelf that had been in his bedroom but had been moved to the front hall when the crib-currently occupied by Sarah-had entered their lives.

  “Page two-fifty-seven shows a cutaway illustration of a house, revealing the plumbing. Everything from the water meter to a P trap. Left of the page is a stack vent. Right of the page, a waste stack. Drains from the toilet, a sink, a tub, another tub, are all connected by a common pipe labeled ‘branch.’ On either end of the branch is a vertical riser that passes through roof flashing to the outside air. The diagram shows two such risers.

  “Draining water or waste creates a vacuum in the pipe,” Lofgrin continued. “The waste pipes need to be vented in order to allow draining. Think of a drinking straw with your finger over the top end. As long as you keep your finger tight-no venting-the straw holds whatever fluid is in it. But if you vent the straw by lifting your finger, the fluid drains out. Same in a house. Only the drains have stinky stuff in them, so the vents go out the roof, so you don’t smell them. Two of them, Lou. You get it?”

  “You lost me,” Boldt admitted.

  “It’s ingenious because it ensures the person living there is home at the time of the combustion. Two vent stacks: two parts to the hypergolics. Right?”

  “What the hell, Bernie? The hypergolics are in the vent stacks?”

  “I imagine so, yes. Seal the vent stacks with a thin membrane: wax paper? cling wrap? I don’t know. Place the two parts of the hypergolics above those seals. It might not take much-maybe just draining a full bathtub or running the clothes washer-and those seals break and run down the vent stacks. The two elements of the hypergolics make contact in the branch pipe. You’re looking for a way to burn the whole house, to destroy as much evidence as possible, and the plumbing gives it to you; it runs through the wall one floor to the next, one wall to the next. You open the bathtub drain or flush a toilet and suddenly every plumbing drain, every fixture in the house is a rocket nozzle. The porcelain melts, Lou: That was the clue I missed. Damn! That should have jumped out at me. Porcelain does not melt easily; it would have to be near the source of the burn. I let that confuse me. Every single piece of porcelain in the house was involved in the actual burn. You’ve got the answer, Lou. You figured it out!”

  “A plunger?”

  Lofgrin exclaimed, “He can set the explosives without ever entering the house. Do it all from the roof.”

  “He wasn’t even in the house,” Boldt mumbled. The method of planting the explosives had stumped him all along. He felt giddy. High.

  “His cover. Sure. Wash a few windows, climb up on the roof, fill the vent stacks with the hypergolics. A matter of minutes is all. He takes off.” It only took Lofgrin a second to make the connection that Boldt also made. “Jesus, Lou. Your house.”

  “I know.”

  “Your vents could be set. We could have proof here.” He sounded thrilled. Boldt felt terrified.

  “We need to evacuate the neighbors,” Lofgrin said.

  Boldt told the man, “Consider it done.”

  “Give me forty minutes,” Lofgrin requested. “I’m gonna need a big crew.”

  Boldt wandered the sidewalk in front of his home in a daze, wanting to go inside and take everything with him in case Bernie Lofgrin’s attempt to defuse his house failed. A home became a kind of kid’s shoe box, a collection of odds and ends, books, music, furniture. Boldt owned over ten thousand LPs and about two thousand CDs. Every inch of wall space in the house not previously occupied contained music. Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of the LPs were priceless.

  Each room through which he mentally wandered brought a tighter knot in his throat. His son had grown from an infant to a little boy in this house. Sarah had been conceived within these walls. His marriage had fully recovered here, resuscitated from the gagging spasm of its past.

  If he could have gone inside, he would have taken the bronzed baby shoes belonging to his son. A photo album of their marriage pictures, another of Liz giving birth to Miles, and a video of Sarah’s entrance into the world. A Charlie Parker first pressing, and a pair of ticket stubs to Dizzy Gillespie and Sarah Vaughan. An eagle feather found in the Olympics, and a lock of Liz’s hair cut before the birth of their son. A blue bowling shirt that read, MONK over the breast pocket and THE BOWLING BEARS on the back; he had only bowled on Berenson’s team once, but the shirt was a keeper.

  It was more than a house, it was his family’s history museum. The idea of losing it terrified him. It made him want to drive to the cabin and see Liz and the kids.

  He prayed to God that the arsonist be caught.

  The first man to reach the roof ridge of the house wore a fireman’s turnouts complete with hat and mask and carried a hands-free walkie-talkie that communicated with Lofgrin on the ground. Lofgrin and Boldt and the others-Bahan and Fidler among them-stood behind a fire line established on the sidewalk. The six adjacent houses had been evacuated and two patrol cars blocked the street from vehicle traffic. Four ERT officers had sequestered themselves in two of the evacuated houses, alert for signs of interest from the arsonist.

  The roof man told Lofgrin, “Four stacks.”

  Lofgrin looked over at Boldt and said, “I gotta warn you: we’re gonna find hypergolics. Why else go up the tree and watch the place, right? He was waiting for the show.”

  “I’m a nervous wreck,” Boldt admitted.

  “Think how Rick feels,” he said, pointing to the roof man. “That fuel goes and he’s got about twenty seconds to get off that roof before he’s three thousand feet up. “If he doesn’t jump, his ass is ash. No time for the ladder. No time for the walkie-talkie. He knows that,” Lofgrin added, answering Boldt’s curious expression. “You ever seen a guy take a running jump from a two-story building?” He answered himself. “Me neither. And I don’t intend to tonight, just for the record.” Into the walkie-talkie he said, “You go easy up there, damn it. Use the scope.”

  The roof man was equipped with a fiber-optic camera about the size of a pencil eraser on a flexible aluminum cable about the diameter of a shoelace. His job was to lower the cable into each stack and report what he saw. Boldt looked on as the man gingerly crossed the roof between vent stacks. He knelt awkwardly and fumbled with some equipment.

  “He’s nervous,” Lofgrin observed. “Good. I’d rather that than cocky.”

  The roofman’s voice, made scratchy by the radio, reported, “Going down.”

  “Nice and easy,” Lofgrin ordered.

  Boldt looked up as the man fed the cable with his right hand, his left holding a Sony Watchman video monitor. “Two feet … three feet …” he reported.

  Lofgrin told Boldt, “The cable is marked in inches, feet, and yards.”

  “Four feet … five feet …”

  “You know what I think?” Lofgrin asked rhetorically. “That’s a front stack. Front of the house. Unlikely he would rig that one. Too visible, right? If I’m him, I rig the back stacks and seal the front stacks. Less time on the front roof that way.”

  His radio squawked. “Seven feet … eight feet …”

  Into the walkie-talkie Lofgrin said, “Let’s try one of the back stacks, Rick. You copy that?”

  “I copy,” the roofman reported.

  “Back of the house is where the action is,” Lofgrin informed Boldt. “Count on it.”

  Overhead a news chopper aimed a blinding light down on the top of Boldt’s roof, its cone sweeping back and forth, and isolated the man in the turnouts.

  Lofgrin said, “Well, one thing’s for sure: You’ll never be invited to a neighborhood function again.”

  The spotlight left the roof, scanned the yard, and lighted on Boldt and Lofgrin. A considerable amount of wind was generated by the blades, and the noise was deafening. Lofgrin waved it off, but it continued to hover above them. The roofman lost his balance becaus
e of the generated downdraft; he slipped on the shake roof but managed to reach out a hand and catch himself. Boldt glanced over to the parked patrol cars. Shoswitz was shouting into his radio handset while looking up at the helicopter. Boldt didn’t need to read lips to see how angry the man was. Thirty seconds later the helicopter gained altitude and the associated noise lessened, but the spotlight continued to jump between the roofman and Boldt and Lofgrin’s position on the sidewalk.

  “I’m at the northernmost stack on the back side,” announced the roofman through Lofgrin’s radio.

  “The kitchen,” Boldt explained.

  Lofgrin said, “Go easy, Rick. This may be a live one.”

  “Copy that,” answered the roofman.

  Boldt could not see Rick working, and this bothered him. He heard him announce that he was feeding the camera into the stack, and Boldt could picture the tiny camera sliding down the black plastic vent; he could imagine the man keeping an eye on the Watchman while the fiber-optic camera with its tiny light disappeared down the tube.

  “One foot …” the voice announced.

  “Slowly,” Lofgrin cautioned. Boldt sensed in him an added worry, a heightened concern.

  “Howdy hey,” the roofman said into the radio. “I’m showing a translucent membrane at the eighteen-inch mark.”

  “Hold it!” Lofgrin spat into the radio. He turned around and waved one of his assistants over. She had a handsome face, was somewhere in her early thirties, and was clad in turnouts too big for her. She carried a gray plastic toolbox in her right hand, heavy, by the look of it. Lofgrin told her, “The kitchen. Use the back door. Take it exceptionally slowly, as we talked about. It will be in the vertical somewhere. Give me a distance readout from the bottom of the vertical. Got it?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Okay,” Lofgrin said. “Go ahead.”

  “Young,” Boldt said, as she hurried away from them, the toolbox dragging on her.

  “They all look young anymore. She’s got a four-year-old. Husband works for Boeing. Maybe the biggest overachiever I’ve got. She begged me for this assignment. Despite the risk, despite the obvious danger, despite the fact that the bomb boys were jockeying for this work, she wanted to run one of the cameras. She’s the one who did the ventilation work over in the New Federal Building-you remember that camera work? Worked the thing up three stories and into the men’s room. Remember that? It was a narcotics sting. Busted a seventy-thousand-dollar cash gift to a dealer from Vancouver. That was Goldilocks. You want fiber optics up somebody’s butt hole without them the wiser, she’s the one.”