Beyond Recognition lbadm-4

by Ridley Pearson

  “Why send her inside?”

  “We need to check the stack from below. Rick can’t head down through that membrane, so now we go from the bottom up. That should give us some idea how to neutralize.”

  “Meaning what?” Boldt questioned.

  “I see two options here. One is he trapped part A and part B in two different stacks. A thin membrane on the bottom, all the other stacks sealed off. Someone goes and uses a plunger, the membranes go simultaneously and the place goes up. The second option I see is both parts in the same stack. One atop the other, a membrane between. The advantage is you only have to break that bottom membrane. The point is, we don’t know what he’s done, so we sure as hell can’t go popping membranes.” He explained, “We’re prepared to siphon off liquid, or vacuum up a powder, but there’s a remote chance he’s done this a third way. Casterstein found evidence of a possible detonator. We know the guy was up a tree watching the place. What if that detonator is a pressure switch?”

  “What if it is?” Boldt asked.

  “In the case of these single mothers-Enwright and Heifitz-he watches until he’s certain the kids are gone. From his tree he activates the pressure switch-he could retrofit any remote-control toy to do the trick. Not a big deal. He can deactivate if necessary, should the kids return. And there’s the kicker: Deactivated, the drains don’t work well but the place doesn’t blow. Activated, the first time she flushes a toilet-boom! Running a little sink water probably wouldn’t do it. A toilet, five gallons all at once-boom! A plunger, same thing. If both parts of the hypergolic are in the same stack and we go messing around, we could make one hell of a Roman candle. Know what I mean?”

  The next few minutes progressed painstakingly slowly. The woman technician maintained a running description of every wrench turn, every joint loosening. Finally, she announced, “Okay, I see an opening to a riser up ahead. I’m twenty inches to the right.”

  “Good. Let’s follow it. But be careful, for God’s sake. That membrane may be transparent.”

  “Copy.”

  Wincing, Lofgrin began nervously stroking the stubble on his chin, as if rubbing himself clean. The change in behavior made Boldt restless. The lab man pulled off his Coke-bottle glasses and cleaned them on his shirttail. Once the glasses were in place, he took to scratching the top of his head. “She’s in the vent stack … heading up the vent stack…. If she breaks whatever barrier he has in place-” He didn’t complete the sentence; there was no need. Their eyes met-Lofgrin’s the size of golf balls behind the glasses-and Boldt understood that all the confidence in their techniques would not save this woman’s life, did not guarantee this woman’s life, and that Bernie Lofgrin was directly responsible. Lofgrin, dropping his eyes to the walkie-talkie, said in a coarse voice, “She’s a good kid. A damn good kid. Hell of a worker. You hope for her kind. You don’t often get them.” Into the radio, he spoke in a voice suddenly stronger, for he would not allow her to hear any uncertainty. “What’s the scenery like?”

  The woman’s voice sounded strained as she reported. “Thirty-one inches. Condensation on the pipe walls has increased noticeably.”

  Lofgrin said to Boldt, “We’re close.” Into the walkie-talkie, he said, “Let’s use half-inch increments.”

  “Copy.”

  Boldt felt overly warm. He could picture the small camera creeping up the inside of the pipe.

  Lofgrin said to him, “This is a little like aiming a pin at a balloon but not wanting it to pop.”

  “I understand,” Boldt replied.

  “Serious condensation,” the woman reported. “It’s fogging the lens. Blurring it.”

  “Shit,” Lofgrin hissed, and glanced once at Boldt with wild eyes. The sergeant saw beads of perspiration covering the man’s brow.

  “My image is cloudy,” the technician reported. “I’m not liking this.”

  Lofgrin directed her, “Let’s retract, clean it off, and try again.” He added, “Make note of your distance.”

  “Thirty-three and one half inches,” she reported.

  “Copy,” Lofgrin said.

  “Retracting.”

  Lofgrin nodded, as if she could see him. He wiped his brow. To Boldt he said, “That’s why we use our people instead of bomb squad: She may have been up against the membrane right then. It may have been the membrane blurring the lens, not water, not condensation. She knows that. A different guy, someone who doesn’t know this gear intimately-” He left it hanging there, left Boldt with an image of the walls of his house sucked in and white-hot light flooding from the windows.

  “The lens is occluded,” the woman reported. “I’m cleaning it and trying an application of defogger.”

  “Condensation,” Lofgrin explained to Boldt. “So she was right. Score one for us.”

  A minute or two passed. Boldt glanced at Bahan and Fidler, who had joined them.

  “Well?” Boldt asked.

  Bahan answered, “The pressure switch makes sense to me. It allows the victim to actually light off the fire.”

  Fidler said, “It leaves it a little bit random-a little more exciting.”

  “Opinions?” Boldt asked.

  Bahan said, “We circulated the artist’s sketch to every firehouse in the city. Maybe we get lucky.”

  There was no one standing within fifty yards; a line of uniformed patrol officers was holding back a sea of onlookers, including a group of reporters. Fear is like fire, Boldt thought: It infects randomly, and with great haste.

  “All set,” the woman said by radio. “We’ll give it another try.”

  She reported when she made the turn into the vertical stack, and again at twenty, and then at thirty inches. She counted off in quarter-inch increments from thirty and one-half. Boldt tensed with each report. Lofgrin inquired about condensation and she answered. “Looking better this time. I’ve got a good image…. Stopping at thirty-three and a half.”

  “Image?”

  “Going to thirty-three and three-quarters … thirty-four. Okay…. Okay ….” Her voice sounded strained over the radio. “I’m picking up a slightly reflective black image. Okay…. Okay…. This is a foreign object. Repeat”-she was nearly shouting into the radio-“a foreign object obstructing the passage. Black plastic.” Boldt felt heat prickle his scalp. She said, “I’m going a little closer: thirty-four and a half. Copy?”

  “Thirty-four and a half,” Lofgrin acknowledged.

  “Maybe send a bomb boy in to look at this. I’ve got a rubber O-ring holding it in place. It appears to be a detonator.”

  “I fuckin’ knew it!” Lofgrin exclaimed to Boldt. “They don’t pay me the big bucks for nothing.”

  The joke was not lost on Boldt; the pay was horrible. “What’s next?” he asked.

  “We send in the bomb man to have a look, and then we attempt to neutralize. We’re looking at about eighteen feet of four-inch vent stack packed with hypergolics, Lou. We’re talking Apollo Eleven here. If we fuck this up-” He didn’t finish the sentence. “We should evacuate a few more houses. I did not expect this kind of volume.”

  Boldt’s knees felt weak. He whispered, “My family was in there. Liz, the kids!”

  Thirty minutes passed incredibly slowly. The bomb man confirmed the existence of a detonator. A wet-vac vacuum canister was sent to the roof. Tension filled the air as the top membrane was intentionally punctured and the vent stack’s contents carefully removed.

  One of Lofgrin’s assistants approached him and spoke to him in private, out of earshot from Boldt. Lofgrin returned to Boldt’s side and announced proudly, “Silver and blue cotton.”

  “What?”

  “We lifted some fibers from the windows we know he washed. You remember those fibers we found alongside the ladder impressions at Enwright? Muddy. We didn’t get a very good look at color, they didn’t wash well, but PLM-Polarized Light Microscopy-told us they were a synth/cotton blend. I ruled out window washing at the time because cotton sucks for windows, it leaves itself all over the gl
ass. Newsprint is good, oddly enough, but not cotton. But this guy was washing windows-Liz saw that. And a synth/cotton blend is better than pure cotton, at least. But a silver and blue washrag or towel? Mean anything to you?”

  “Silver and blue. The Seahawks,” Boldt replied. Seattle’s failing football team.

  “Bingo,” said Lofgrin. “And to my knowledge we don’t sell Terrible Towels to our fans the way they do in a place like Pittsburgh, right? Do we?”

  “I don’t follow the Seahawks,” Boldt confessed, thinking: Charles Mingus, Scott Hamilton, Lionel Hampton, Oscar Peterson, but not the Seahawks.

  “What I’m saying is, This is unique evidence, Lou.”

  “Silver and blue towels,” Boldt answered, his heart racing a little faster, his eyes trained intently on the operation being conducted on the roof of his house.

  “That’s right.” Lofgrin said, “Department stores? A uniform? How the fuck do I know? That’s your job.”

  Boldt said nothing, images of his house going up in flames occupying his thoughts. Towels were the farthest things from his mind.

  “We have fiber samples now, Sergeant. We can compare these to any evidence you might provide us. Understood?”

  “We’ll search Nicholas Hall’s trailer and vehicle again, this time for blue and silver towels or uniforms or T-shirts,” Boldt said, still watching the house.

  “Those fibers can put this boy away, Lou. Are you hearing me?”

  That comment, the way Lofgrin whispered it in a menacing tone, broke Boldt’s attention away from his house. He looked down into those bulbous eyes, magnified to the point of grotesque. “Blue and silver fibers,” Boldt repeated. “I’m with you, Bernie.”

  “Found on at least two crime scenes. Just so we understand each other.” Nothing infuriated Lofgrin more than providing a detective with key evidence, only to have it overlooked. Boldt knew this, and because of that exchange, because of Lofgrin’s delivery, he took the information to heart: Lofgrin believed in those fibers.

  “I’m at eight feet, six inches,” the man operating the vacuum reported.

  Lofgrin called him off. A decision was made to drill through Boldt’s kitchen wall and drain the Part B chemical from below. As this decision was being relayed, the night sky lit up with a thin column of purple flame that raced up through the clouds and disappeared. It was less than four miles away, in Ballard. Within minutes it was a five alarm fire. Lofgrin’s attention remained on the delicate job before him. The distant sound resembled that of a jet taking off. That purple column lasted perhaps ten seconds. Sirens screamed in the distance.

  Lofgrin said, “We’re okay here, Lou. You go see if your boy’s up a tree with a carving knife.”

  Boldt didn’t want to leave his own home, but he did. The crime scene work lasted until three in the morning, at which point he drove to his own home and found it standing.

  Another woman was believed dead, another life lost. There was word that all three networks were sending New York crews to shoot the fire remains.

  An exhausted Shoswitz reported that despite the cooperation at the field level, the FBI, military CID, ATF, and upper brass of SPD were fighting for control of the investigation. His final comment was, “It’s coming apart on us, Lou. Talk about blowing up! Too many cooks, and this thing will die in bureaucratic backstabbing and name calling. We’re looking at one giant cluster fuck. And it’s you and me bending over, pal.”

  Boldt did not remember drifting off to sleep but was awakened at his desk at 7 A.M. by an alert and excited John LaMoia. Boldt’s neck was stiff and his head dull. LaMoia waited a moment to make sure he had his sergeant’s full attention. “You remember Garman telling us his truck was stolen, his Werner ladder in the back?” He continued, “The truck was for real. He owned it, all right. But he’s got a little explaining to do. He never reported it stolen to us, Sarge. More incredible, he never claimed the insurance.”

  Boldt focused on this a moment, allowed his head to clear. “Let’s pick him up,” he ordered.

  LaMoia nodded and beamed. “It’s a beautiful morning, isn’t it, Sarge?”

  It was pouring rain outside.

  44

  On the way to Garman’s house, LaMoia and Boldt, accompanied by a patrol car following at a close distance, listened not to KPLU, Boldt’s jazz station of choice, but rather a random sampling of the AM radio talk shows and all-news stations. The latest victim was identified as Veronica DeLatario. She was the Scholar’s fourth known murder victim, and Boldt could describe her before he ever saw her: dark hair, nice figure, mother of a boy between the ages of eight and ten. The radio shows blasted police for arresting the wrong man, in Nicholas Hall, and chastised all city services for the huge display of manpower at a police sergeant’s home-“one of their own”-while Veronica De-Latario was “being stalked” and burned to death by a serial arsonist.

  It came out that the police had received another poem earlier in the day, accompanied by a melted green piece of plastic, and “had done nothing about it.”

  There were animated discussions on the talk shows of the “need for new leadership.” Federal agencies had made some well-placed leaks about their desire to run the show and take SPD out. Boldt resented this most of all, because he knew that on the officer level SPD and the agencies were cooperating just fine. It was only at the administrative level that the power plays were under way.

  LaMoia, unable to bear it any longer, switched the radio back to Boldt’s favorite, KPLU, and they listened to the horn of Wynton Marsalis.

  I-5 traffic was unbearably slow in both directions. Even with police lights and sirens, they crawled along.

  When Boldt’s pager and telephone rang within seconds of each other, he knew there was trouble. Perhaps Shoswitz intended to pull him from the investigation, now that Boldt felt within a few miles of its resolution. Garman’s role had nagged at him from the beginning: his being the target of the notes and, later, his Air Force service with its direct connection to missile bases. Their one interrogation had gone poorly, and even now, as they drove to bring him down for another round of questioning, no hard evidence existed against him.

  Perhaps the call and page were from Liz, who had told her husband in no uncertain terms that she intended to return to Seattle on that very day, Tuesday. Perhaps Marina was unavailable and he was expected to be father for the day, while his wife did God-knows-what with God-knows-whom. He bristled with anger, even before he connected the call by flipping open the cellular phone. “Boldt,” he said sternly, drawing LaMoia’s attention.

  “Are you near a radio?” It was Daphne.

  “In the car.”

  “Well fasten your seat belt and tune into KOMO AM.”

  “We were just there.”

  “Then you heard Garman?” she said heatedly.

  “What about Garman?” Boldt asked, at which point LaMoia was nearly leaning onto Boldt trying to hear. Boldt elbowed him away.

  “You ready for this?” she asked rhetorically. “Steven Garman, Marshal Five fire inspector, is currently in the process of confessing publicly to being the Scholar, our killer.”

  Boldt nearly drove the car into a sideswipe. LaMoia snagged the wheel and saved them in a brilliantly timed reaction.

  Boldt told his detective, “Garman just confessed.” With LaMoia still steering the car, Boldt punched the radio and located the station. It was Garman, all right. And he was well along in describing every last detail of his crimes.

  It was fifteen minutes later before they pulled up in front of Garman’s residence, and the man was still live on the radio, by that point answering a string of questions offered up by the jock that seemed more an attempt to stall the man. Two local television remotes had beaten Boldt to the scene, and both stations went live with the arrival of the police.

  “He’s locked in his apartment,” a reporter shouted at Boldt, sticking a microphone into his face. “What’s the position of the Seattle Police?”

  Boldt wanted to iss
ue a “no comment,” always the safest decision. But he feared a backlash if he came off as soft or undecided. “We’re here to arrest Mr. Garman on a variety of charges stemming from a string of fatal arsons within King County.”

  A helicopter roared onto the scene and landed incredibly quickly in a vacant lot. Boldt recognized Special Agent Sanders hurrying through the swirling dust and debris.

  LaMoia pushed away the reporter’s microphone, leaned into Boldt, and said, “We better be first to take him.”

  They ran up the steps, Sanders shouting from behind. Boldt nodded to his detective, who tried the door, called out a warning, and then reared back and kicked the door twice. It remained locked but broke away from the splintered doorjamb and banged open.

  Steven Garman sat peacefully in a recliner, telephone in hand. He spoke into the receiver. “Looks like my ride has arrived.”

  LaMoia began calling out the Miranda above the roar and chaos and shouts coming up the steps behind them.

  Lou Boldt, charged with anger and rage, nonetheless walked calmly up to Garman, took the phone out of his hand, and cradled the receiver. Under no conditions could he reveal his emotions to the suspect, give himself away. Garman had proven himself cool to the point of cold; Boldt needed all his wits about him.

  Meeting Boldt’s eyes, Garman said venomously, “If you had caught me sooner, fewer would have died. You have to live with that, Sergeant, not me.”

  Boldt answered, “I may have to live with it, but you’re going to die with it. Given the options, I’d say I got the better deal.”