6
Nothing much changed. If Ben had one complaint in life, this was it. He felt powerless to change things himself, and, left to grownups, things remained too much the same. School was school; home was home. He felt pressure from Emily to give the social workers the evidence they needed, but he wasn’t about to give in, so in the end he blamed himself for his situation, and it hurt.
He had Monday Night Football to thank for keeping Jack Santori away. His stepfather wouldn’t come home from work but, instead, would head directly to the bar for the game. He wouldn’t come home from the bar until late, because he placed bets on football and he drank heavily, win or lose. Sometime around midnight he would stumble in downstairs, bang around, and find his way to bed—if he was lucky—or more likely end up passed out on the couch with TV fuzz hissing back at him. By that same time, Ben would be safe, locked behind his bedroom door, having spent the late afternoon and evening with Emily.
There had probably been a time when he had been afraid of the dark, though it had long since passed. He had other things he feared more. Jack had a way, with his eyes and voice, of terrifying Ben so that his legs suddenly went to Jell-O and his thoughts became tangled and confused. There were times when for no reason at all he would press Ben to the floor and, holding a pillow against Ben’s back, would beat him, hammering away with his drunken, reckless fists so that the bruises ended up buried deep inside Ben’s flesh, not on the surface where they might show. Ben’s pee stung for days in a row and his poo was tar black. “You’re going to do as I say, right?” Jack would ask, as he carried out this punishment. And if Ben was stupid enough to answer, stupid enough to open his mouth, the punishment continued until Jack grew physically tired or lost interest. For Ben to cry aloud was unthinkable.
Ben liked Seattle in September. Less people than in the summer, fewer cars on the streets. Ben had heard it called a transition neighborhood: blacks, mostly; very few whites. Ben knew which streets to avoid, which hangouts to circumvent. Most of this he had learned the hard way, although being shoved around by a bunch of zit-faced bullies was nothing compared to things at home. Fear was like water: it sought its own level. For Ben, it took some kind of threat to make him afraid, discounting the effect of Jack calling upstairs, “You going to do as I say or not?” That was an entirely different kind of fear. One of these days, the guy would go too far. Emily kept warning of that.
The neon sign in Emily’s window was lighted—YOUR FUTURE, YOUR PAST: AT LAST!—which meant she was home and open for business. She got a lot of customers in the evening. Her business was both repeats and drop-ins.
There was a car parked out front, so Ben didn’t disturb her. He recognized the car as Denise’s, an Emily regular. He went quietly around back and tried the kitchen door and, finding it locked, sat down in the cool September evening and waited. The city hummed. Somewhere out there was his mom. He wondered for the thousandth time why she had left without taking him with her. Fear. He had Jack Santori to thank for that.
After a few minutes he got lonely and bored and decided to climb the cedar tree. From the hastily erected platform high in the tree, he could see the traffic over on Martin Luther King. He saw the blinking lights of planes crisscrossing the sky. The downtown skyscrapers rose dramatically, creating a city skyline he knew by heart. He could point to and identify the various buildings like an astronomer with constellations.
When the car below him started up and pulled out of the drive, he realized he had been daydreaming. He hurried down through a pattern of limbs he knew by heart: down, down, down. Monkey man, Emily called him.
She greeted him as if she hadn’t seen him in months, when in fact it had only been a couple of days. She gave him a huge hug, told him how good it was to see him, and immediately insisted that he eat something. She was warming up some lasagna in the microwave when the doorbell sounded.
“You go ahead and eat,” she said. “You don’t need to help me tonight.”
“I want to,” he protested, jumping up and pulling open the drawer that contained their wireless radio system.
She didn’t stop him. He tested the system by speaking softly into the walkie-talkie. She nodded at him that it was working. She checked her appearance in a mirror, pinched her cheeks, and headed out to answer the door. Ben slipped out the back.
The vehicle parked in Emily’s short driveway was a beat-up blue pickup truck with a dented and chipped white camper shell. It had a cracked windshield and a broken outside mirror on the passenger side. Ben went around to the driver’s window, because from here he couldn’t be seen from the front door, allowing him to hide if the customer unexpectedly came outside. On the back bumper was a Good Sam Club cartoon of a stupid-looking guy with a halo over his head. Through the driver’s window he saw a pair of sunglasses on the dash, and a cardboard cutout of a nude woman hanging by a thread from the rearview mirror. A man, he decided. Light from the street penetrated the cab, but it wasn’t as if it were daytime; he couldn’t see much of the floor—and there was a lot of stuff down there, probably trash. The ashtray was filled with butts. “He smokes,” he said into the walkie-talkie. “Parking sticker on the windshield for Chief Joseph Air Force Base.” He strained to see the dash. “Nice music system, considering the condition of the truck. He’s into music.” How badly Ben wanted to open the door or, even more tempting, check to see if the camper shell was unlocked, but Emily had her rules. He was breaking no laws by simply observing. To enter the vehicle was a different story.
There wasn’t much more to see. He stepped back, studying the camper shell. He mentioned the Good Sam Club to her, because maybe it would tell her something about the kind of person he was. He noticed the camper had a rooftop skylight that was partially open, and he could picture himself slipping down inside and finding out everything there was to know about the guy. He wanted to know everything there was to know. He wanted to give Emily something worthwhile. One of the lower limbs of the cedar tree went out just above the camper shell, and he debated climbing out on this limb and trying to see down into the shell, but the skylight didn’t look like it was open far enough, and everything was too dark.
He circled the vehicle once more and then crept quietly into the kitchen, taking up his favorite spot at a peephole that Emily had put into the wall just for this purpose. She liked to leave the room every now and then and spy on her customers to see what they did when she was gone; she claimed this could tell her a lot about a person. Ben placed his one good eye to the wall, blinked repeatedly, watched, and listened, his heart racing, his skin tingling.
The guy was built solid, with wide shoulders, thick arms, hard features, and pinpoint eyes. His hair was buzz-cut down to nothing, blond maybe, and his jaw was square as if sawed off at the chin. Ben looked first to the man’s face and then at his right hand, which was ugly and hard not to look at. His last three fingers were fused together with pink, shiny skin so they looked like a small flipper. Ben, because of his glass eye, knew what it was like to be a freak, and rather than wince at the sight of this hand, he felt empathy toward the man. That hand would be a tough thing to live with.
“Are you sure?” Emily asked her customer.
“Yes, ma’am. Just October second. That’s all. Wednesday, the second. Just whether or not that’s a good day for me—you know, as far as the astrology stuff goes.”
“Just that one day.”
“That’s all. Whether or not it’s a good day for me to do some business.”
“I’ll need to do a chart and then make a reading. It’s not something I can do just like that.”
He said, “I understand. A girl I know is into the stars. How long?”
“Four or five days. You’ll have to come back.”
“That’s okay. I can get up to the city, no problem.”
“I charge fifty dollars for a chart. But once it’s done,” she added quickly, “it’s just ten dollars a reading from then on—if you wanted more readings.”
“I might
.” He added, “The money’s all right. The fifty bucks.”
Ben thought the man looked nervous, and he wondered if it had to do with that hand, if this guy always felt uncomfortable, always thought people were staring at it. Ben knew that feeling. He had worn dark glasses for the first year after the operation, but the glasses had attracted more attention than the fake eye. He wondered what was so important about October second. He learned things hanging around Emily. Watching her work. People wanted someone to tell them what to do, and when to do it. They would gladly shell out ten or twenty dollars just to hear it. Emily said her customers were sheep desperate for a shepherd. She drummed a single message into him constantly: Believe in yourself.
“Fifty for the chart, ten for the reading,” Emily clarified, ever the businesswoman.
“That’s okay.”
“Good. I need your birth date, time of day, and the location—”
“Time of day?” he asked, interrupting.
“It’s important, yes.”
“I don’t know what time of day I was born. Who knows that?”
“Could you call your mother?”
“No!” he said sharply. He seemed to grow larger. “There’s no one.”
Ben felt a chill run from his toes to his scalp. The words swirled in his head. They might have been his words if he hadn’t had Emily. No one. They had more than a disfigurement in common.
“I have my birth certificate,” the man said. “Is it on there?”
“Very likely.”
“Then I can get it for you. No problem. Can I call you or something?”
“That would work.”
Suddenly irritable, he said, “Shouldn’t a person like you know these things?”
“You think I don’t know about you?” she asked.
He squinted back at her, like Jack when he was drunk and trying to concentrate.
“You’re a military man,” she informed him. He looked shocked. Ben swelled with pride. “Air Force. You live by yourself. You’re considerate of others, the type of man to help someone out who needs a hand. Money is a little tight right now, but things are looking up. There’s a deal on the horizon ….”
His eyes were the size of saucers, though he tried to contain his shock. He rubbed his hands together briskly, although the flipper stayed out of it, as if the knuckles didn’t bend. He glanced up at Emily and said, “Okay, so I’m impressed. So what?” He waited briefly and asked, “How could you know any of that?”
“It’s my gift,” she said.
Pride surged through Ben, warming him. He’d done a good job out at the truck. Emily needed him. They were a team.
7
Homicides were about victims. The way a victim had lived often told more about his or her death than the way a victim died.
Boldt was scheduled to meet with Dorothy Enwright’s mother and sister. It was an interview that he would have rather pawned off onto a detective, but he did not. He wanted to know what kind of life the dead woman had lived, her friends, her enemies. Something, somewhere in Dorothy Enwright’s past, had ensured her untimely death. She had most likely been robbed, caught in some act, or loved the wrong person. It was Boldt’s job—his duty—to identify that individual and bring him or her to the courts with enough incriminating evidence to win a conviction. A deputy prosecuting attorney would accept nothing less.
Lou Boldt would accept nothing less. From the moment that Dixie had confirmed the existence of a bone in the rubble—a body—Boldt’s central focus was to see a person or persons brought to justice, to force Enwright’s murderer to capitulate and repay society for the victim’s undeserved and unwarranted death.
Arson investigator Sidney Fidler showed up at Boldt’s office cubicle just in time to delay the sergeant’s departure for the interview with Enwright’s relatives. Boldt felt like thanking him.
Fidler was anxiously thin and prematurely bald. He wore clothes that didn’t match, and he always looked half asleep, though he had one of the finest minds of anyone Boldt had worked with in years. It was too bad that Fidler was a fireman on rotation to SPD rather than a permanent member of Boldt’s homicide squad. In terms of ability, there weren’t many Sidney Fidlers out there. Single and a loner, he looked and acted about sixty. He was somewhere in his early thirties.
“I thought I might interpret this lab report for you, Sergeant.” Despite his diminutive size, he had a deep, rich voice. He looked Boldt directly in the eye. “And to bring you up to date on some of the particulars.” He didn’t wait for Boldt’s reply but continued on, confidently, passing Boldt the report. “It’s a preliminary report in the form of a memo, to give us an idea of what we’ll receive.” Boldt adjusted himself in his seat. Such memos were courtesy of the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab, typically offered only on cases where the information was so hot as to ensure it would leak. The memos gave investigating officers a head start on the findings and were themselves rarely leaked to the press. But the existence of a memo told Boldt that the lab findings were significant enough to expect a leak. Not good news.
“Sure thing,” Boldt said.
“Bahan and I had a parley with a couple of the task force boys—”
“Was Garman there?” Boldt interrupted.
“As a matter of fact, he was. You know him?”
“Not well,” Boldt answered. “Go on.”
“These Marshal Five guys are older by a few years, but they’re wiser too. There’s five thousand firefighters in this city, assigned to forty-two stationhouses. There are only seven Marshal Fives, okay? Between them they’ve got maybe two hundred years’ experience on the line. I say this for your own education, Sergeant. Forgive me if I’m telling you something you already know.”
“No, no,” Boldt corrected. “I appreciate it. Go on,” he repeated. He felt anxious about these findings. Fidler’s setup had left him guessing.
“A fire inspector, a Marshal Five, follows a burn to its area of origin, hoping to lift samples of the accelerant for the chemists. As you know, the Enwright fire was a bastard because the area of origin was nearly entirely destroyed. Maybe that explains it, and maybe not, but the guys on the task force think not. The thing of it is, Sergeant, the lab report is going to come back negative for hydrocarbons. That’s about the gist of it. I imagine in your area of expertise it would be like finding a drowned body with no water in the lungs. Quite frankly, it’s baffling.”
“What’s it mean?” Boldt asked.
“Honestly? Not much. But it won’t look good. Our best defense to the press is that we didn’t locate a good pour, so the analysis came back negative. It also happens to be the truth. But we did locate the spalling and the blue concrete, and that sure as hell should test positive for accelerant, and that’s the baffling part, if you ask me. Why no hydrocarbons, no petroleum products whatsoever? This is not the end of the story, not by any means. The collective wisdom of the Marshal Five boys is that we repackage some new samples and send them off to Chestnut Grove, the ATF lab. They’re good guys, great chemists. And Chestnut Grove specializes in arson and bombs. We ask for a rush, maybe we hear back in a couple of weeks. Most likely they pick up what we missed.”
Fidler paused, training his rich brown eyes on the sergeant, allowing a moment for his words to be absorbed. He then said, “You asked what it means. There had to be one hell of an accelerant in that fire. You don’t go to eleven hundred feet and turn concrete blue with only a match set to the two-by-fours. We could have missed it for any number of reasons. Best bet is to send it to the Feds and try again. They’ll scare up something.”
“Hydrocarbons,” Boldt provided for him. “They’ll find hydrocarbons.”
“It would certainly surprise me if they didn’t.”
“And if they don’t?” Boldt inquired.
“Let’s take it one square at a time.”
Boldt didn’t like the sound of that. “Maybe you should brief me, just in case.”
“Clutter your mind with worthless facts
? What kind of person does that?”
“Ignorance is bliss?” Boldt asked. He suddenly felt uncomfortable with Fidler. Was he trying to hide something?
“If you want to take a master’s in pyrotechnic chemistry, that’s your business, Sergeant. Me? I like waiting for the lab reports and learning what it is I need to know for that particular burn. How were you in organic chemistry?”
“Next question,” said Boldt. He didn’t want to admit that as a junior in high school he had taken the senior chemistry course and earned one of two A’s given out for the year. It would mark him as a nerd. His comment caused Fidler to grin; the man needed some dentistry. Boldt said, “Blue cement and negative lab reports. Is that about the sum of it?” He paused. “Tell me, Sid, what do you think of the stuff that Garman received? Related or not?”
“The timing’s good. Weird note. Don’t know about the plastic.”
“I sent it all downstairs for analysis.”
“What’s your opinion?” Fidler asked.
“We would give it weight in a straight homicide, especially if the victim had received it.”
“But if you had received it?”
Boldt answered, “Yeah, I suppose if I’d received it I might give it weight too.”
“So it’s Garman getting it that bugs you.”
“He’s on the arson task force, I understand that. But Enwright’s home isn’t in his district.”
“His battalion,” Fidler corrected.
“Whatever. So if it’s legitimate, why did the torch send it to a different Marshal Five? I mean, if he knows so much about the internal structure of fire investigations, why send it to the wrong guy?”
Fidler’s face screwed up into a knot and his lips pursed. “Hadn’t thought about it that way.”
“It bothers me,” Boldt said.
“Yeah, right. You’re right,” Fidler agreed, “he screwed up.”
“People screw up for two reasons, Sid. Either they make a mistake or you make a mistake in thinking that they made a mistake.”
Boldt - 04 - Beyond Recognition Page 5