Beyond Recognition lbadm-4

by Ridley Pearson

“It’s unsettling,” Boldt admitted.

  “I should say it is. The real battle is psychological. Attitude is ninety percent of the game.”

  “Yeah,” Boldt agreed.

  “How about the kids?”

  “The kids?”

  “Miles and Sarah,” McClure answered.

  “They’re fine, I think,” Boldt answered. “I haven’t seen them in a while, quite honestly. Liz has had them.”

  “Well, I certainly understand that,” McClure replied.

  “You know, Roy, I get the feeling that we’re having two different conversations here.”

  “You’ll feel that way from time to time. The world won’t make any sense. The temptation may be to bury yourself in work, but the more prudent course is to talk it out. Sit her down and tell her how much you’re rooting for her, give her every ounce of support you can.”

  “I was talking about work,” Boldt stated. He felt too tired for any conversation. He wished McClure would go away.

  “I’m talking about Elizabeth.” It wasn’t the doctor’s words that jolted Boldt so much as the ominous tone of voice in which they were delivered. Boldt felt a sickening nausea twist his stomach.

  “Liz?”

  “You’re not in denial, are you?”

  “Roy, what in bloody hell are you talking about?” the sergeant blurted out. “I’m too tired for this.”

  “I’m talking about your wife’s lymphoma, Lou. I’m talking about your wife’s life. Your children. You. How you are all coping with this.”

  Boldt’s ears rang as if someone had detonated an explosive in the room. He felt bloodless and cold. His head swam and he felt dizzy. His eyes stung, and his fingers went numb, and though he struggled to get out some words, nothing happened. He was paralyzed. He could not move, or speak, or even blink his eyes. Tears gushed down his cheeks as if someone had stuck his eyes with a knife. He felt himself swoon. McClure’s mouth was moving, but no sound issued from it. No words came forth. The doctor’s face twisted into a knot of concern, and it was clear to Boldt that the numbness and the ringing in his ears was his flirtation with unconsciousness-he was passing out.

  McClure’s strong grip upon his shoulders brought Boldt back just far enough to hear the words, “She didn’t tell you.” It was a statement. Definitive.

  Boldt felt himself shake his head. “Is it …?” He couldn’t say the word. To speak it was to cast negative thoughts. He convinced himself that he had heard wrong. “Did you say …?” But McClure’s expression was enough. Boldt pictured her looking so sad in the bathtub, recalled the regular baths that had seemed so out of place, her request to spend time with one of the children by herself. The pieces of the puzzle suddenly came together like they did occasionally in an investigation.

  “It metastasized quickly,” McClure answered. “Stage Four by the time we caught it. She must have known, Lou, but she evidently couldn’t bring herself to face it. It was the kids, I think.”

  Tears continued to cascade down his face.

  “The surgery is scheduled for next week,” McClure said, soberly and dryly. “I’m counting on your support through all this. She needs every bit of strength we can offer her.”

  Boldt felt trapped inside a small dark box. He could shout as loudly as he wanted, but no one could hear him. He could open his eyes wide, but could not see. It was a dream, he convinced himself, nothing more. A nightmare. He would awaken and find himself at Harborview, on the couch, awaiting his meeting with Dixie. It was guilt playing a nasty trick on his subconscious.

  But McClure did not go away.

  “The baths?” Boldt mumbled, and somehow McClure understood the question.

  “They help with the pain,” he said. “She’s in a tremendous amount of pain.”

  There were many shades to gray. There was the gray of forgiveness between the black and white of knowledge, the gray of age at the temples, the gray of a mirror’s reflection, the gray of a weathered headstone in a graveyard. Boldt caught a glimpse of himself in the crooked rearview mirror as he drove straight home.

  He drove with tears in his eyes, his shoulders shaking, his lips trembling; only the siren filled his ears. Time had stopped, and yet a clock ran inside his head and heart as never before. So many memories, all tangled up in a man’s stubborn refusal to let go. Guilt banged at his chest for distrusting her. He recalled their baby in her arms and at her breast, the two of them in the bath, and he dragged his shirtsleeve over his face to relieve his eyes.

  Every second, every moment seemed a lost opportunity. So many had passed while he took their love and their life together for granted. At that point, racing toward the final turn in the road, he wanted it all back, like an athlete with a lost game. It seemed so fast, so quick. They had been building toward something, making a life. In the process their lives had been crossed, lost a few times. They had drifted apart and back together, like boats riding the ebb and flow of the tides. She so private-so unfair. He felt anger, love, fear, and terror all combine in an inescapable emotional avalanche, with him at the bottom looking up. One did not run for cover from such things but steeled the body and soul to face the inescapable. He didn’t want to believe it, to buy into it. There was always hope, he reminded himself, always a miracle waiting. Was it too late to pray? Anger surged through him. He didn’t want this life alone. He didn’t want a world without Liz. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t what they had planned.

  He pulled to a stop, the siren running down and silenced but the light still flashing on the dash. His terror erupted as a brief sputter of laughter-it was a joke, some kind of mistake, McClure confusing one patient with another.

  “They help with the pain.” Boldt pressed his hands to his ears. He didn’t want McClure’s words circulating inside his head. He didn’t want to hear his voice. He wanted peace, release. He wanted to awaken, to wash the nightmare from his face with a quick splash of cold water. “Wake me up,” he muttered.

  Marina opened the door, the smile on her face running off like melted wax, replaced with a troubled look of concern. “Mr. Boldt?”

  “She here?”

  A shake of the head. “Work.”

  Was she back at work? He couldn’t remember where he had slept last night, what day it was. “The kids?”

  On cue, Miles rounded the corner, yelped, “Daddy!” and held his arms outstretched for his father, who scooped him up and then broke into tears. Marina, arms crossed as if freezing cold, stood in the entranceway, unable to take her eyes off Boldt and his tears. She gasped, “Everything okay?”

  Miles cuddled himself around Boldt’s neck, clinging tightly. The father’s eyes met those of the woman, and she sobered. “I’m right here,” the woman told Boldt. He passed Miles back to her and nodded, the tears dripping from his chin. He felt embarrassed, exhausted, terrified. He didn’t want a world without Liz; he didn’t want to think of her in pain. He wanted to take her away, as if by leaving she might leave the illness behind as well.

  His car flew down the road, driven by someone else. Car horns complained behind him as he ran intersections, his vision more occupied by a stream of memories than by the road he traveled. He was a flood of regret, seeing so many chances to be a better person to her, a better husband, a better lover, a better friend. How much of illness is physical, he wondered, and how much a product of one’s environment? If he had been more available, less self-absorbed, would she even be sick? His thoughts played tricks on him: self-pity, shame, a bone-numbing fear. He pushed on the accelerator and begged to be released. “Make it not so,” he mumbled.

  The office building towered over downtown, stretching for a piece of the sky that would offer a glimpse of Elliott Bay and Puget Sound beyond. It had been erected in the mid-seventies at the start of an economic boom that foreshadowed the high-tech revolution and the invasion of the Californians. Boldt parked illegally, pulled his POLICE ON DUTY sign onto the dash to keep the meter readers at bay, and hurried up the long procession of low steps that eventually
rose to meet the glass and steel of the lobby.

  He turned heads as he marched toward the elevators in long, defiant strides. He rode the elevator alone, which was the first decent thing to happen to him that day.

  “Elizabeth Boldt,” he informed the receptionist. In all the years of his wife’s working here, Boldt had visited the offices only a handful of times. He realized then that he brought his work home almost every night, whereas Liz did so only occasionally. She earned nearly four times his pay and had pleaded with him regularly to give up the badge-or, at a bare minimum, the field work-in part because she couldn’t stand the tension resulting from the danger involved. The two years in which he had taken a leave of absence for the arrival and care of Miles had been among their most happy. He’d been seduced back into public service, in part by a bizarre case involving the theft of human organs, in part by the ways and means of Daphne Matthews. But looking back while he awaited the receptionist to notify his wife of his arrival, Boldt thought the return to service a mistake. They had found each other again during those two years, Boldt with late-afternoon happy hour piano gigs, Liz with a husband who wasn’t mentally and emotionally preoccupied by his work.

  “She’s in a meeting. It’ll be a few minutes.” The woman pointed to the waiting area’s three couches. “Can I get you some coffee?”

  “No, it’ll be now,” Boldt told her. “I’m her husband. It can’t wait. Where’s the meeting?”

  The woman said kindly, “I’m sorry, sir-”

  “Jenny,” Boldt said, naming Liz’s assistant. “I need to talk to Jenny.” He didn’t wait for this woman’s approval, but instead charged off with his heavy strides in the direction of Liz’s office. As it happened, he passed a conference room immediately, voices chattering inside. He swung open the door without knocking, looked around, and did not see her. “Elizabeth Boldt,” he told the gawking faces. They shook their heads nearly in unison, but one of the women pointed farther down the hall. “Thank you.” He pulled the door shut quietly.

  Jenny was already heading toward him at a run. The two were phone pals but rarely met face-to-face. “Lou?” she called out in a voice of alarm. She apparently knew him well enough to recognize disaster on his face, or perhaps-he thought-it wasn’t so difficult to see. “It’s not one of the kids, is it?”

  “Where is she?”

  “A meeting.”

  “I need to see her now!”

  “It’s with the president and the chairman. It shouldn’t run much longer.”

  “I don’t care who it’s with,” he snapped. “Now!” he shouted loudly. Looking directly into her brown eyes, he said, “I will make a scene you won’t believe, Jenny. Now! Right now. No matter how important that meeting. Is that clear?”

  His pager sounded. Jenny looked down at his waist. Boldt moved his jacket aside and looked at the device as well. It seemed attached to a different man, someone else. He glanced down the hall to the corner turn that led to the “hallway of power,” as Liz called it. She was down there in one of those rooms. The pager had a sobering effect on him. He switched it off. There he was, once again faced with his job versus his relationship, and despite all the reasoning, all the regret of the last hour, it wasn’t as simple as dropping the pager into the trash. The Scholar was out there preparing to kill people. He knew this to his core.

  And Liz was in a meeting, and Jenny seemed prepared to put her body between Boldt and the hallway of power.

  “How long?” Boldt asked her, pulling the pager off his belt and angling the LCD screen so that it was legible. It was that move that seemed in such violation of everything he had been thinking. An internal voice asked, How could you? And there was no immediate answer from the defense. He had responsibilities to his team, to the city, to the innocent, but none of that entered his mind. All he could think was that he knew he was going to call in the page, the summons, and that whatever it was would take him away from there, from her. She would remain in her boardroom and he would be back in his shitheap of a department-issue four-door, racing off to the next emergency.

  He looked down at Jenny with sad eyes.

  “She called the meeting, Lou,” Jenny said. “Whatever it is, it has to be important. I don’t dare interrupt it.”

  Boldt nodded. “It’s important, all right,” he agreed. She had to be offering her resignation. She wanted time with the kids. He felt his throat constrict with grief. Deciding to spare this woman his bubbling and gushing, he forced out the words. “Tell her I came by. Tell her it’s important. I’m on the cellphone,” he said, pulling himself back together. Mention of the phone caused him to check it. LO BAT it read. It was dead-just like everything around him. “I don’t know,” he said to her, feeling beaten. He turned and headed back toward reception.

  Jenny followed him the whole way, but she never said a word. She held the door for him and then stepped out into the hall and called an elevator for him, perhaps because he seemed incapable of even the simplest act. Boldt stepped onto the elevator. Their eyes met as the doors closed. Hers were sympathetic and troubled. His were stone-cold dead-and watery, like melting ice.

  He reached the office on the radio from the car. The dispatcher put him on hold; he felt it was something of a permanent sentence.

  The man came back on the channel and said to Boldt, “Message is from Detective John LaMoia. Would you like me to read it?”

  “Go ahead,” answered Boldt, driving the car into traffic.

  “Message reads, Must talk immediately. Please notify ASAP.”

  Boldt squeezed the talk button and said, “Tell him I’m on my way.”

  He felt like a traitor and a cheat.

  He stopped at a church on his way downtown. To his surprise, he felt a lot better.

  49

  As the elevator doors slid open on the fifth floor of the Public Safety Building, the painful silence inside Boldt’s shattered psyche was cracked open by the cacophony of a dozen reporters all shouting at once, boom microphones waving in the air, and the blinding glare of television floodlights. One of the reporters shouted, “Do you have the Scholar in custody or not?” Shoswitz anxiously fought a path through the press, made his way to Boldt, and escorted his sergeant to Homicide’s door, shouting, “No comment! No comment!”

  As the door opened for the pair, the press remained at bay, stopping at an unmarked line like a dog pulling up short at a buried invisible fence. But the noise of the reporters was not silenced, only replaced by the comments of half as many of his own people. They fell in around him and behind him like the Texas Rangers. Bobbie Gaynes was speaking, but Boldt couldn’t hear her. LaMoia was there, Bernie Lofgrin from the lab, and several of the uniformed officers who had previously volunteered on the task force. He noticed a woman named Richert from the prosecuting attorney’s office. All spoke at once, some shouting to be heard over others. Shoswitz joined right in with them. They continued as a group, making for the conference room. There was only one person noticeably absent, and then Boldt caught sight of her standing alongside the briefing room door, arms crossed at her chest, hair impeccably groomed, eyes trained on him, an expression of concern worn like a veil. Only she knew him well enough to take note of his condition; Shoswitz had missed it, too concerned with the media; the others had missed it, more intent on reading from their notes than studying their sergeant. But she saw it. She knew, well before the moment they came face-to-face, and asked him, “What is it?”

  He felt himself on the verge of telling her, when an exasperated Shoswitz proclaimed, “You know what it is! It’s another poem!”

  She informed Boldt privately, as if it hardly mattered, “He’s all worked up because a reporter found it in Garman’s morning mail. Not us.”

  “The Scholar is still out there!” Shoswitz declared.

  Boldt just looked at him and shook his head. “Everybody out!” he told those gathered. He held Daphne by the elbow, retaining her. “John, you stay.” When the room was empty, Boldt closed the door and the
three of them were finally alone.

  LaMoia explained. “A reporter for the Times thought to check Garman’s mail each day. He probably had some inside help, but whatever the case, he knew in advance of that latest threat being delivered.”

  Boldt said, “And of course it’s postmarked after Garman’s arrest.”

  LaMoia nodded, “You got it.”

  “What is it, Lou?” she repeated, still showing concern.

  His look told her to drop it. That hurt her all the more. She turned away briefly.

  “The content of the poem.” Boldt asked, “Is it significant?”

  She answered with her back to him. “Significant? I fouled up. He’s no scholar, Lou. Probably not well read at all. The profile is off.” She faced them both. Her confession won LaMoia’s undivided attention. Boldt was able to leave his own sorrows briefly and recognize how upset she was. “There’s a park built on top of the I-Ninety tunnel coming in from the floating bridge, a bike path running through it.” She described her discovery of the various drawings and quotations, though she didn’t say she had taken Ben there to meet Emily. She repeated reluctantly, “The profile is all wrong.”

  An uncomfortable silence was broken by LaMoia. “How wrong?”

  “Uneducated. Sociopathic. If I didn’t know the facts of the case, I would have put money on there being a revenge issue with Garman.”

  “That fits with what I’ve found out,” LaMoia said, surprising Boldt, who expected LaMoia to pounce on Daphne’s misfortune. The detective continued, “Garman’s tax returns for the seventies show two dependents.”

  “Two?” Boldt echoed curiously, marveling at the detective’s contacts.

  LaMoia said defensively, “I tried calling you on the cellular but you weren’t picking up. I wish I could take credit, but Neil”-Neil Bahan, he meant-“has been digging into Garman’s past since the arrest, trying to develop a book on the guy. He’s got the firehouse connections, so it only made sense. He came to me to dig up the tax records. He had evidently heard something. I know you kicked him out of here just now, along with the others, but you may want to talk to him.”