Boldt - 04 - Beyond Recognition

by Ridley Pearson

  “It’s a start,” he said, trying to be upbeat.

  “Just the point,” she fired back. “A start for us, an end for him. Twelve years old, Lou. Murder. Some kind of exchange at the airport. She was protecting him from us: the courts, the truth. Can you blame her?” She sucked down a good deal of beer.

  “I’ll drive you and take a cab back. I insist.”

  “Then I’ll take another,” she said, holding up the empty can.

  The beers were on ice in the ice bucket.

  “First class service,” Boldt said nervously, delivering the beer.

  “I won’t bite,” she said, popping the top.

  But Boldt wasn’t so sure. He wasn’t sure of anything anymore. The cellular phone rang for a second time. Boldt didn’t even bother going for his, but when Daphne answered hers and shook her head, the sergeant thought better and lunged across the small room.

  “Boldt!” he answered curtly. Cupping the phone, he told her, “LaMoia.” He grunted into the receiver several times, impatient for his detective to get to the point. He was talking excitedly about scanners and hits and making a big point about his personal contacts in the banking industry.

  Boldt listened intently as LaMoia finally got to the point. Boldt disconnected the call with a heart in his chest that couldn’t find the beat.

  “Good God!” she said, seeing his reaction. “What was that?”

  Boldt took a deep breath, exhaled, and closed his eyes. When he opened them he said, “He got back the information on the ladders, the credit card accounts, and the bank accounts—the names, the mailing addresses …” She knew better than to interrupt. Boldt met her eyes and said, “Steven Garman bought one of the Werner ladders two years ago at a hardware store up on Eighty-fifth.” He took a breath. “The thing to do now is see if he still has it.”

  Boldt did not drive Daphne home. Having interviewed Garman in the first place, she insisted on tagging along. During the hurried drive to a neighborhood twenty blocks north of Boldt’s house, she spared no opportunity of reminding Boldt of that initial assessment of hers.

  “One doesn’t make arrests based on opinion,” he replied, following her third reminder.

  “It’s the beer talking, not me,” she apologized.

  “Well, please ask the beer to be quiet when we get there,” he snapped testily. “This is an inquiry, nothing more.”

  But the beer spoke again. “Bullshit, and you know it. If that ladder’s there, its pads match. But it won’t be. He knows all about that evidence.”

  “Which leads one to ask,” Boldt countered, “why, if he knew about the impressions found at Enwright, did he use the same ladder at my house?”

  The words flew around the inside of the car like trapped birds. Boldt ducked from them, shrinking from the logic of his own statement. Why indeed?

  “You’re not going there just to chat him up, and we both know it. Why did you ask for a patrol backup? I’ll tell you why: Because you intend to cuff him and bring him downtown for the Box. That’s why you need me along.” She grabbed for the dash as Boldt pulled sharply off the road. “What are you doing?”

  “I never thought I’d be glad about an espresso shop on every corner.” She looked blank. He told her, “You’re right. We had better get you a cup of strong coffee.”

  Despite her protests, at Garman’s Daphne remained in the car. Boldt and LaMoia, who arrived only two minutes behind, approached the front door. The patrol car and its solo uniformed officer idled at the curb.

  Garman wore reading glasses, a cotton sweater, and blue jeans. His pager was clipped to his belt. “Gentlemen,” he said, not a trace of concern or anguish in his voice.

  There were times when Boldt liked to skirt the issue, make small talk, or bring up a subject completely away from his central point, establish a rapport, and ease his way into it, but he had a working relationship with Garman, and that evening he went straight for the jugular. “You bought a twenty-four-foot extension ladder manufactured by Werner Ladders from Delliser Brothers up on Eighty-fifth.”

  “Summer before last,” Garman informed him, nodding. “You boys are thorough. I’ll say that. You might have asked. I could have saved you the trouble.”

  Boldt and LaMoia engaged in a quick eye check, both surprised by Garman’s forthcoming nature.

  “We’d like to see that ladder,” LaMoia told the fire inspector. The detective had called in a telephone search warrant that had been authorized by Judge Fitz. He informed Garman of this, hoping he might ruffle the man.

  “You’re welcome to come inside,” Garman offered, opening his door wide. “You don’t need a flipping warrant.” The two detectives stepped in. Boldt heard a car door shut. He didn’t need to look to know it was Daphne. “But you won’t find a Werner ladder,” Garman added, without a hint of remorse. “I replaced it with a different brand, one of those aluminum numbers that hinges in a couple of places. You know the kind?”

  “Replaced it?” Boldt asked.

  “It was stolen,” Garman informed them. “Six, maybe seven months ago.” He nodded, his lips pursed. “Swear to God.” Daphne knocked. Garman admitted her. They shook hands. “Listen,” Garman said, “you want to do this downtown, or can we do it here?”

  Boldt felt out of sync, the fireman anticipating his every move, his every question. He wanted to take him downtown, use the Box, intimidate the man. Work a team interrogation, LaMoia the bad guy, Boldt the friend, Daphne the outsider. Loosen him up at the edges. Trip him up. But he wondered all of a sudden if it would work with a man accustomed to conducting his own investigations, his own interrogations. It felt a little bit like looking at himself in the mirror.

  “Here will do,” Boldt said, wanting to give the man nothing, wanting an explanation for the two dead women and the threat on his own family, but torn by the necessity of an assumption of innocence. Cops didn’t work from such an assumption, they left it to the judges and juries. Boldt saw the man as a killer—clever, perhaps, professional, but a killer nonetheless. He owed him nothing.

  “I’ll look around,” LaMoia said, directing one of his patented expressions of loathing toward the suspect. LaMoia was a cop who cut to the chase, rarely, if ever, electing subtleties. His method was more head-butting, beating a suspect down into submission. He produced a flattened Dunkin’ Donuts bag with a bunch of writing on it. He said, “Just to make it official. This is the warrant the judge signed off on.”

  The bag was oil-stained, the writing illegible. Garman accepted it, looked it over, nodded, and handed it back. “Very official,” he said, trying for a joke.

  LaMoia recited the Miranda. Garman just smiled, miming the words along with him.

  Boldt wanted to pop the guy. Garman was too smug, too prepared—or innocent as the day he was born. Boldt knew before they started that they weren’t going anywhere with this one. Daphne asked for a cup of coffee. Garman made her a cup of instant; made one for himself as well. Boldt and Daphne sat on a couch that had seen better days. Garman took the La-Z-Boy recliner upholstered in a maroon Naugahyde.

  Fifteen minutes into the questioning, Boldt taking furious notes and double-checking Garman’s exact language, LaMoia joined them. He shook his head at Boldt from behind Garman and held both hands into a large zero. Boldt was hardly surprised.

  They talked in circles for the better part of the next hour, returning to some of Garman’s statements and attempting to catch him in a misspeak, but the Marshal Five’s performance—if that’s what it was—seemed utterly convincing. Here, Boldt realized, was a man who had achieved an honored position among firemen. He had served his city well, earning several merits of distinction for both his professional life and his volunteer work with teens. Put him in front of a jury with all the damning evidence in the world, and you might not win a conviction.

  One hour and twenty-two minutes into the interrogation, Daphne scored the first big points. “Tell us again about your service in the Air Force.”

  He nodded. “I
was stationed two years at Grand Forks AFB and six at Minot. I was married then. Young. Good times, for the most part.”

  “Not much up there,” Daphne said.

  “Even less than that,” Garman replied, winning a smile from her.

  “Must get to know the other guys real well,” she said.

  “You know everybody real well: guys, wives, families. Grand Forks is a big base. It’s a town, a small city really.”

  LaMoia said, “Those are missile bases, aren’t they?”

  Garman smirked at the question. “Look it up, Detective. It’ll give you something to do.”

  LaMoia bristled and shifted uncomfortably where he stood. He sought out a kitchen chair, brought it around to face Garman, and straddled it backward.

  The lines were drawn—and by Garman himself, Boldt noted. He would work with Daphne, respect Boldt at a distance, and spar with LaMoia. What bothered Boldt the most was that he had sussed out the exact way Boldt would have done it.

  “Your marriage?” Daphne asked.

  “Out of bounds, counselor,” Garman replied.

  “I’m not a lawyer.”

  Garman stared at her. “We never did establish your exact role in this, did we? As I recall, you kind of skirted the question.”

  LaMoia said, “Look it up. It’ll give you something to do.”

  That caused a brief crack in Garman’s armor.

  Boldt felt a little more optimistic. He said, “So you didn’t lose the ladder or loan it to a friend—it was stolen.”

  “I’ll answer for a fourth time if you want,” Garman replied. He pursed his lips, looked each of them directly in the eye and said, “You’ll find this out anyway. The ladder was the least of my concerns. It was my truck that was stolen. A white pickup. Damn nice one, too. Ford. Bucket seats. Electric windows. The ladder, some turnout gear, my clipboard. Cars … trucks … stolen every day in this city, right? I figured it was probably chopped and on its way by ship to Singapore or wherever they end up. Until the poems, the notes. Then I wondered if maybe I was some kind of target all along.” He looked directly at LaMoia. “Of course, maybe I stole it myself and stashed it somewhere to use later in these arsons. Great excuse, a stolen truck.”

  LaMoia had his hands full. Boldt was used to rapid-fire comebacks, but the detective was slow off the blocks. All he managed to say was, “Yeah, great excuse.”

  They did the dance for the next forty minutes, but nothing worthwhile surfaced. Only LaMoia’s questions were answered sarcastically. If Daphne repeated the question, Garman answered it. Boldt saw through the ruse. It meant that Garman feared LaMoia most of all—and he was correct in doing so. LaMoia didn’t do the dance, he just stepped on toes and crashed his way through. When he got on a roll, when he got hot, he could pin a suspect in a matter of a couple of questions. Garman had sensed this quickly and did his best to prevent LaMoia from getting a rhythm going. That particular session was won by Garman, but there would be others.

  He was the closest thing they had to a suspect, and Boldt was not about to let him go. He would cut him distance, give him some rope—hopefully enough to let him hang himself.

  The interrogation was, in fact, little more than a stall for time.

  Twenty-four-hour surveillance began thirty minutes before their departure.

  Steven Garman was suspect number one.

  35

  Ben’s world had gone down in flames. First the guy trying to kill him, then the discovery of the body … he couldn’t even think about it. Calling 911 and returning to watch his stepfather being arrested. It had a dreamlike quality, distant and yet present at the same time.

  And whereas he had forgotten so much of his mother, her reality clouded by his stepfather’s unyielding demands and punishments, she was suddenly a much greater part of him. He found her present in his thoughts, before him as a vision, a soothing, calming force at once transparent and yet palpably real, like an ocean current. Taking him somewhere new and different.

  The days immediately after the incident had been among the best in his life. Emily had given him his own room, his own towels; she had cooked his meals and even made him a sandwich for school lunch. He didn’t tell her that he didn’t go to school for those days—he was too terrified the blue truck might return, that the nightmare might start all over again. So he skipped school, climbed trees, and watched boats and Windsurfers out on Lake Washington, looking like moths on a window. He didn’t even have the five hundred bucks. It was at the house, hidden in his room, and he sure wasn’t going back there.

  They were good days, even though Emily wouldn’t let him help her with her clients, something Ben didn’t understand but didn’t protest too loudly. He wasn’t going to push things. At night she turned off her neon sign and locked her door, and together they either played cards or worked on a jigsaw puzzle. Emily didn’t own a television, something that stunned Ben when he had first learned of it, but he hadn’t missed it at all. Before bed she would read to him, which was a first. Aside from teachers at school, no one had ever read to Ben in his twelve years.

  Being caught by the police had scared him to death. Convinced that they knew about the five hundred dollars, he had refused to speak at first. But when Daphne Matthews had given him the choice of a juvenile detention center or going home with her to her houseboat, Ben had spoken up loud and clear. He had never seen a houseboat; he could just imagine the detention center. Speaking had broken the ice. It had been hard not to talk, given all that had happened. Daphne proved to be both a nice woman and someone easy to talk to—almost as if she knew what he was thinking before he said anything. She amazed him that way.

  Even so, he missed Emily with an ache in his heart unmatched since he discovered his mother’s ring in the crawl space.

  At that moment he sat on a couch in Daphne’s houseboat, the television tuned to a black-and-white rerun on Nickelodeon.

  For the past two days he had never been alone, except in the bathroom. When Daphne wasn’t there, Susan was. He considered running away, though the only place he could think to go was Emily’s, and it would be the first place they would look for him. Besides, Daphne had warned him that if he “misbehaved in any way whatsoever” it would hurt Emily. She hadn’t spelled it out, but it was pretty clear to him that Emily would be out of business and he would lose any chance of ever living with her again. That was unthinkable. Emily was all he had. No running away. He missed her something awful.

  Daphne picked him up every afternoon from “school,” a place surrounded by wire fence, for juveniles in detention. They went for snacks. They drove around. She had taken him to the Science Center, a place he’d never been. After dinner she took him to her houseboat and he watched television or read a book. The houseboat was small, but he liked it okay. The walls were thin. When she thought he was reading, he was actually listening to her on the phone. She spoke to someone named Owen, and he knew enough to know that things weren’t going great between them. Twice she had hung up and started crying. It had never occurred to him that police ever cried.

  Twice, he had stolen a look at Daphne’s papers, because she wrote at the little desk downstairs where Ben slept, and he had to know if it was about him or not. So he read everything he could find, including the thick file she carried back and forth between home and the office. To Ben it wasn’t much different from peering in car windows.

  He wasn’t sure exactly why, but she made him write one page in a diary every day. If he wrote in the diary, he didn’t have to sit down and talk to her at night—only to the other woman, Susan, during the day. To avoid the extra talking, he did the writing. She had told him he could write about anything—school, home, Emily’s, his dreams—or he could make up a story.

  The night before, he had dreamed about being part of an Egyptian archaeological dig, like on the National Geographic specials. He had to crawl on his belly inside the pyramid, crawl over rocks and dirt and mud. It reminded him of Indiana Jones. And when he got to the tomb, there was a
ll this gold—gold rings of every size—and a mummy of the queen, all wrapped up in gauze. And when he unwrapped the mummy, it was his mother’s face. Frightened, he had run from the place, leaving all the gold behind. Losing his way. He had awakened right there on that fold-out couch.

  He put his pencil on the third page of the diary and began to slowly scrawl out his dream.

  Last nite I dreamed I was in Egipt….

  36

  Boldt likened an investigation to an enormous rock or boulder on the summit of a mountain. Initially, the investigator’s job was to climb that mountain, gathering up whatever tools made themselves available—whatever evidence could be found. Reaching the rock, tools in hand, the investigator went about trying to leverage the rock, summoning whatever size team was necessary. Together, the team went about the job of displacing the rock, prying, pushing, shoving. The better organized the team, the better directed, the quicker the boulder gave way. Once displaced, the investigation was rolled toward the edge, given one final push, and gravity took over, at which point the task was to stay with it—all teammates pursuing it simultaneously—a mad, frantic race down hill in the midst of a landslide created by the beast itself. The job at hand by now: to keep the rock from exploding into bits at the bottom.

  Boldt was caught in that landslide.

  He didn’t recognize it at first, and this typically proved the most difficult task of all—understanding what phase of the investigation one was in—for inevitably some of the team were still uphill with the pry bars while the rock itself was hurling toward the bottom. The possible involvement of the psychic’s military man with the burned hand, the ATF lab’s suggestion of rocket fuel as the accelerant, and finally Garman’s purchase of a Werner ladder had sent the rock tumbling downhill. At that point it became Boldt’s job to stay with it, to shape the investigation into something manageable. That task was made more difficult by two subsequent occurrences.