Beyond Recognition lbadm-4

by Ridley Pearson

  “It’s early yet,” Boldt reminded.

  “Bullshit. These fires go off early. We both know that. Early? Bullshit.” He stopped and stared at Boldt. “It’s late is what it is. We are way fucking late with this Jonny Garman crap and they,” he said, pointing overhead, “are not going to buy it. We’ve got nada. Zilch. Zippo. A kid with an applesauce face drying windows in a car wash.”

  “We’ve got the towels. The fibers.”

  “A thousand fucking towels over a six-month period.” He began pacing again. “Jesus H. Christ! This Garman shit was a bonehead move, Lou. Strictly bonehead material. We let Matthews wind us up and we marched to her tune, and the only fucking way out of this is to drop it. I mean drop it. Gone. Forgotten. We pull Martinelli and send her home, we say a few thank-yous to all those involved, and we go home to bed. You need it, my friend. You need bed. You look like shit. I feel like shit. I need a Scotch. Two or three would be better. We pull it, we bag it, we bury it in the budget somewhere, and we hope no one asks any questions.” He stopped and looked directly at Boldt’s pants, of all things. “Where do you buy those khakis?”

  “Mail order.”

  “Not Brooks Brothers? They look like Brooks Brothers.”

  “Mail order,” he said again. “I think we should keep it up and running for tonight-the surveillance. It started to rain. Maybe that was why he took Madison up Broadway and the school. Maybe just to get out of the rain. It doesn’t mean he’s dropped it.”

  “Did you watch the same video I did?” the lieutenant asked, perplexed. “Drop what? He never picked up the ball. He never went for that glove box.”

  Repeating what Daphne had mentioned to him, Boldt said, “Maybe the truck is kept at the university somewhere. Maybe he has access to computers there and can run the tags or something.”

  “We can’t even confirm this guy’s name.”

  “LaMoia, Gaynes, Bahan, and Fidler,” Boldt said. “Give me my team for another day. One day. Martinelli too. She stays. Drop the vans, the techies, the overtime payroll.”

  “No fucking way!” he bellowed. “Bahan and Fidler stay where they are, working up Garman Senior into something we can take to court. Something we can work with. Something I can explain.” He pointed to the ceiling for a second time. “You and the others? I turn my back. I don’t see. But I don’t hear about it either. No one hears about it. As far as I’m concerned, you’re working on evidence against Garman. You need his son as a possible witness-there! You hear that? I amaze myself sometimes. A witness. That’s all. Someone who can provide the state with damning testimony about Steven Garman setting that arson you were telling me about. Fucking genius, is what I am. Be glad I’m the one looking out for you, Lou. You’re in good hands here. I may have just saved your ass with this idea of mine.”

  “A witness,” Boldt repeated.

  “Exactly.” The lieutenant appeared more his own color. “You eaten anything lately?”

  “Not hungry.”

  “Order some pizza in.”

  “No, thanks.”

  “The Scotch sounds better anyway.” He looked at Boldt’s pants again. “Do they shrink?”

  “Jonny Garman is the Scholar, Lieutenant.”

  “Don’t fuck with me, Lou.”

  “If you’d been there when we spoke with Garman, you’d know it’s true. He’s covering for him, that’s all.”

  “And doing a fine job of it.” He walked over to Boldt and felt the khaki fabric between his fingers. He clearly liked what he felt. “Go find your witness. Bring him in and we’ll chat him up and maybe something changes. But until then, not a peep. Not to anybody. No hysterical comments about the Scholar still being out there, no casual talk. No dispatch. No crying wolf. Goes for your people as well. I watch your ass, you watch mine.” He looked Boldt directly in the eye. “Don’t fuck this up. You do, and you’re all alone.”

  Boldt nodded. He felt the tears coming again. “All alone anyway,” he mumbled, heading to the door, thinking of Liz and the life they’d lost. Shoswitz said something about the khakis, but Boldt didn’t hear. His ears were ringing, and his right hand had tensed into a solid fist.

  56

  “Where is he?” Daphne demanded.

  Ben’s eye was trained to the peephole in Emily’s kitchen wall, but he couldn’t see the front door, where Emily had just gone to answer the doorbell.

  He recognized Daphne’s voice. His heart sank and he felt desperate. Why was it that, no matter what he did, he disappointed someone?

  “Ben? He’s not here,” Emily said defiantly. “You’re supposed to have him!”

  “I didn’t hear that,” Daphne said. “Let’s try again, and before we do let me remind you that to shelter him is to harbor a witness. Think carefully. Have you seen Benjamin today?”

  “Get out.”

  Daphne informed her, “I have enough probable cause to search this property, and that is exactly what I intend to do.”

  That was enough for Ben. He had stepped toward the back door before he remembered Daphne nabbing him there once before.

  He used the bathroom window. It was on the side of the house away from the driveway, facing the neighbors.

  He hit the ground with his feet running, thinking ahead. They were sure to check his house as well-unless they had already. He could get the sleeping bag from his room and head up to the tree fort. He could spend the night there and come back to Emily’s in the morning.

  It was raining out, but he barely felt it. He felt as if he ran faster than he had ever run. He splashed along sidewalks, down alleys, and through familiar back yards. He ran as if his life depended on it. He ran for his freedom.

  Nothing so sweet.

  57

  “Believe it or not, we’re getting somewhere with this ink,” Bernie Lofgrin informed Boldt, stopping him in the hallway. Boldt was on his way to the communications room to initiate the dismantling of the surveillance of 114 Lakewood, where Marianne Martinelli waited as a possible target. He intended to leave LaMoia on that surveillance and move Gaynes to the tunnel park where Daphne had found the quotations, his two best chances at picking up Garman’s trail again. He would take the graveyard shift from LaMoia and allow the park to go unwatched from two to six in the morning. Even with this skeleton crew, he believed it possible to keep the surveillance up and running. He wasn’t sure what else to do.

  Lofgrin’s glasses were smudged, obscuring his magnified eyes. Physically, he looked bone-tired, yet he remained animated and enthusiastic. Boldt envied him this.

  “It’s not a Bic, a Parker, a Paper Mate, a Cross, or any of a dozen other mass-produced pens commonly available. That’s good news, believe me. What we do is graph the ink’s chemical components-”

  “Look, Bernie. I appreciate it, I really do, but Phil has pulled the plug, okay? No more cross-departmental stuff unless it pertains to suspects in custody.”

  Lofgrin appeared crushed. “So what does he know from what we’re talking about?” He whispered, “Fuck Shoswitz. I’m a civilian. You think they’re gonna fire me? Do you? No fucking way.” He stepped even closer. His breath was sour. Boldt was in no mood for a forensics class. “So we say we’re doing this to confirm Steven Garman as the Scholar. Who’s to know? Listen, the Bureau has all this shit on file, chromatographs of every goddamn ink manufactured: ballpoint pens, felt tips, typewriter ribbons, computer printer cartridges, you name it. We’re downloading a bunch of the graphs now, for comparison purposes.” Boldt stiffened; he didn’t want a Lofgrin lecture. “We’re going to ID this ink, Lou-and I’m telling you, it’s significant. Every single one of those notes is written in the same ink. You bring me this guy with a pen in his pocket, and I can tie him to these poems.”

  “We lost him, Bernie.”

  “A bicycle. I heard. Yeah.”

  “No. I mean we lost him. If he shows up at the car wash tomorrow, which he very well may, Shoswitz will call for an interrogation. He’ll want a statement from young Garman about his fath
er’s prior arson history, I know he will. And that will be that. This guy’s too careful. We won’t get squat from him if we go at it that way.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” Lofgrin confided, his enthusiasm shaken. “Well, then,” he said, reconsidering, “Toni and I will just have to work right on through, won’t we?” He checked his watch. “You going home?”

  “Can’t do it,” Boldt said. He wanted to go home, yet he didn’t want to confront Liz. He wanted to comfort her, but he wanted her to tell him about the illness, not the other way around. He wasn’t sure what he wanted.

  The evening’s twilight was quickly fading. It would be dark soon, which would make surveillance efforts at both sites all the more difficult. Daphne had jumped out of the van forty minutes earlier, and Boldt hadn’t heard from her since. If he could talk her into helping, he had a team of four-down from twenty-odd only a few hours earlier. But four people could probably hold it together overnight.

  He hurried on toward the communications room to make the necessary arrangements. He willed his pager not to sound, for he feared if it did it would mean another fire, another victim. And though that might prove him right about the Scholar still being at large, it was a price he was unwilling to pay.

  At that point in time, failure seemed the best solution of all.

  58

  Daphne pulled up a chair in the small Tech Services room. Its walls were hidden by metal shelves containing tape recorders and video machines. The room smelled sour like sweat and burned coffee. She plugged in the car wash surveillance tape and hit PLAY.

  Ben had not been at Emily’s, was not at the houseboat; Emily had threatened to file a complaint. Daphne couldn’t believe how quickly the investigation had deteriorated. She felt responsible, having convinced herself that a close look-alike to Garman’s mother would distract him. She felt as if all her training and education had failed her. She had been so convinced. She had to see the tape to believe it. She found the taped image considerably clearer than the live transmissions.

  Jonny Garman entered the vehicle, took one long look at the photo of Ben, glanced around the front seat and into the back, assessing how dirty it was, and then set about squirting the inside of the windows with his spray bottle and wiping the glass clean with that towel. He conserved his movement within the vehicle, stretching to reach the far window, and performed his duties efficiently and quickly. He cleaned the inside of the windshield, both side windows, the rearview mirror, and the dashboard-in that order. To her surprise, he spent added time working on the sticky stain Martinelli had asked him to clean.

  At the gap in the machinery that came ahead of the dryer, Garman climbed out of the front seat and into the back, where he attacked the rear window and both small side windows. He leaned over, nearly vanishing from sight, and then surfaced with an ashtray in his hand, the unseen contents of which he dumped in a plastic trash bag tied to his belt. As the car reached the end of the line, he shuffled out backward and closed the door.

  He never looked in the glove box.

  She rewound and replayed the tape for a second viewing, resorting to advancing the tape one frame at a time, hoping this might reveal an action overlooked in real time. But there was no such action on the tape. Garman did his job and climbed out of the car. The only brief moment he disappeared was when he was in the back seat, not the front-and that did her no good whatsoever. It seemed impossible.

  Over the years she had come to develop certain instincts about her work, her patients. She could sense when a suspect was lying, could feel the truth. She knew when to push and when to pull back, when to work psychological games on an individual and when to talk straight. Jonny Garman would have taken the bait; she felt it to her core. The tape proved her wrong.

  She ejected the tape and placed it to the side. The screen was a sky blue. She shut off the gear, the sense of failure a bitter taste in her mouth. Danny Kotch of Tech Services, who had always had a crush on her, caught up to her in the hallway and handed her Ben’s backpack, returning it, reminding her of the boy and further disappointment. She carried it to her car and tossed it onto the seat.

  Daphne drove with her headlights on through early evening rain that continued to hold the city in a perpetual dusk. She was going a little too fast for conditions when the light changed. She always drove fast anyway, and her anxiety over Ben only served to increase her speed. Green to yellow: She downshifted and tapped the brakes. The rear end swerved, but she recovered with a tug on the wheel. Yellow to red: She downshifted again and gave the brakes an extra effort. The rubber met the road cleanly and firmly, and the car slowed hard.

  The backpack flew off the front seat and onto the floor mat.

  The car lurched to a stop at the red light and rocked on its springs.

  Daphne leaned forward and grabbed for the small backpack and hoisted it by one of its black straps up onto the seat.

  The light changed, but Daphne didn’t see it.

  A car horn sounded behind her, but Daphne didn’t hear it.

  Traffic swerved around her, taking advantage of the green light, and one of the drivers flipped her his middle finger. Daphne did not see this either. Her full attention was fixed on the backpack. In her mind’s eye she saw Garman briefly glance into the back of the Explorer as he climbed into the car to wash its windows; she measured a count of two, as Garman, then in the back seat, dipped out of sight, coming back up a moment later with an ashtray that needed dumping.

  The backpack had been in the back seat-she had placed it there herself. The same backpack that was currently in the seat alongside of her. She stared at it, transfixed. For there on the backpack, slipped into a plastic window designed for just that purpose, was a small identification tag listing Ben’s name and Jackson Street address. Even the phone number was there, she noted.

  Jonny Garman had not needed to open the glove box. The address he sought was available to him in the back seat, something he had probably determined within seconds of climbing into the car. She recalled the video tape and Garman’s brief disappearance as he sat up with an ashtray in hand. Ben’s backpack had been in the Explorer’s back seat. Garman would have had time to memorize the address.

  The police had established an elaborate surveillance operation at the wrong address. If Garman was watching any house, it was the Santori house on Jackson, not 114 Lakewood where Martinelli was ensconced.

  As she hung a U-turn in the middle of oncoming traffic, Daphne wasn’t thinking about Boldt or the investigation; she was thinking about Ben and the fact that she had not bothered to check his home, where he clearly might hide in a panic. She would not tell Boldt or the others, not yet. They would want Martinelli, not Daphne, to arrive at the house on Jackson, more worried about their trap than the emotions of a frightened runaway boy.

  She owed this to Ben. She would not drive him away again.

  It never occurred to her for a minute that at a distance, in the dusk, she and Martinelli did not look so very different.

  59

  Boldt was both annoyed with and concerned about Bobbie Gaynes. She had called in to dispatch an hour earlier, explaining she was going to walk to Seattle University-the location of Garman’s surprise bicycle disappearance-and had not been heard from again. She didn’t carry a cellular phone and she was clearly away from her vehicle, because she wasn’t answering radio calls. She was one of only two detectives to whom Boldt could turn for his surveillance team, and he felt forced to chase her down.

  He drove to the corner of Broadway and Columbia and immediately spotted her department-issue four-door parked a half block down the hill. At that point, his concern gave way to worry.

  He parked and walked quickly through the small campus, eyes and ears alert. There was no more daylight left, only a strong twilight glow off the clouds, bouncing back a muted, ambient light that stuck to anything pale in color. Gaynes could have covered the area in no time, he realized, wondering why she had not returned to her car and reported back to dispat
ch. He had no time to chase detectives around the city. Increasingly impatient, he widened his area of search as he believed she would have. He had been on foot for twenty minutes when he found himself waiting for a car to pass at the intersection of Broadway and James.

  He looked up at the many office buildings surrounding him, at first taking in their contrasting brick and concrete architectures, preferring the older brick look, but then assessing their purpose as professional buildings-medical offices. The area was known as Pill Hill. All at once he knew why he had lost Bobbie Gaynes; she too had made this same discovery. Medical offices, and their suspect with a reconstructed face.

  Boldt began to run in the direction of Harbor-view, where he hoped to catch Dixie, still in his offices. As medical examiner Dixie would have access to professional listings. The man often worked late; Boldt felt he had a chance.

  Each building he passed had some connection to the medical world. The signs, the names shouted out at him. He couldn’t run fast enough. He cut across to Boren and down Boren toward the hospital, out of breath but not slowing his stride.