She wanted it over with.
Inside the house again, she ripped open the package. Included was a spare battery for her radio, which she replaced just in time for her to receive the surveillance team communication.
Jonny Garman had just left the car wash.
SURVEILLANCE 1: We got a problem. Suspect is leaving by bicycle, not a car! He’s heading east on Eighty-fifth. He’s wearing a blue sweatshirt, hood up, jeans, riding a gray mountain bike. Sunglasses. No helmet.
BOLDT: A bicycle. East on Eighty-fifth. Copy. Stay with him, One.
Daphne and Boldt were still inside the steam-cleaner van parked two blocks away. The dispatcher barked a series of orders, deploying various surveillance teams. But the mood was ugly; a bicycle would be nearly impossible to follow. Garman rode fast, passing cars on the right, crossing on red lights at the pedestrian crosswalks, all the tricks. Dispatch scrambled to keep up, barely able to do so. He rode hard and he rode long, south through the U-District and across Montlake Bridge. The road grew steep and difficult, and had he suspected surveillance he could have lost them. In fact, twice all visual contact was lost, only to have him ride past a surveillance point, legs flailing. At Madison, he turned west toward the city, wreaking havoc with the team that endeavored to keep up with him. The expectation was that he would continue south, and the shift in manpower required to follow spun the radios into a hum of confusion. With no apparent intention on his part, Jonny Garman was giving them hell.
When Boldt called for a helicopter, Daphne realized they were in trouble. The choppers went out at several hundred dollars an hour, and rather than instill confidence in her, the result was quite the opposite: panic seized her chest. The team was desperate.
The order for the chopper came too late. Again without warning, the suspect, heading south on Broadway, turned left at Columbia, entered a short cul-de-sac, and jumped the sidewalk that allowed him through a series of posts installed to stop vehicular traffic. He shot down the hill, crossed 12th Ave. E. and literally vanished.
An unmarked car jumped the grassy knoll at James Way, skidding and spraying mud, but never regained visual contact.
Jonny Garman had disappeared.
A bead of cool sweat trickled down Daphne’s rib cage, and she itched it away. Boldt’s body odor gave away his own tension. “Shit,” he mumbled, as the radio reports confirmed the disappearance.
“He was heading south, Lou. Lakewood is south,” she reminded him, naming the street where Martinelli waited as a possible target.
“Then why take Madison? Why that move on Broadway?” Boldt answered rhetorically, “I’ll tell you why: He spotted us. He made us.”
“I don’t think so,” Daphne said. “Not one surveillance report indicated any paranoid behavior on his part. He was riding a route, that’s all. To the truck? To his lab? Who knows? A route, is all. To a computer somewhere he can run Martinelli’s tags? A route, is all.”
Boldt ordered the tunnel park kept under surveillance. He was frantic, not at all himself. Despair paled his skin and glassed his eyes. Two teams were added to the surveillance on Lakewood Avenue. “He burned us!” Boldt said. And then, catching the irony of the statement, he began to laugh. A sick, pathetic laugh.
Daphne felt tempted to reach over and touch him, as much from her own need as his. He had tears in his eyes—again—and she thought he might break, but he recovered as he had a dozen times before, that same afternoon.
She recovered less well, as it turned out, torn by her failure to predict Garman’s behavior and her fears over the impending fire she felt certain was to come. But the final straw was neither of these. It was the dispatcher calmly turning around in his chair—the van bumping along the Seattle streets—and saying to Daphne, “Matthews, a message for you from headquarters: They want you to know that someone named Ben has escaped. I didn’t get a last name, and I don’t know from where he escaped, but they said you would want to hear about it.”
Daphne gasped, her body cold with fear. “Pull this thing over!” she shouted.
54
Ben waited across the street from the small purple house with its familiar neon sign, though each passing minute felt more like an hour. Home: There was no other way for him to describe it. There was a Chevrolet truck parked in the driveway, and Ben immediately slipped into his role of detailed scrutiny and analysis, noting the bumper sticker that declared the driver was a proud parent of an honor roll student, the steel toolbox mounted into the bed, probably indicating a construction worker or some other handyman.
Fifteen minutes later the driver of the truck, a lady who looked old enough to have kids, left Emily’s, climbed behind the wheel, and drove the truck away.
Ben started out walking but ended up running across the street, up the short driveway, and to the back door. He beat a three-knock summons onto the chipped paint, and when Emily answered, her face lit up, her arms swung open, and he threw himself into that warmth and love, hoping beyond reason that she might never let go.
A few minutes later she was offering him tea, toasting a slice of sourdough bread, and preparing a string of jams and jellies for him to choose from. Pouring them both a cup of tea, she delivered the toast and sat down across from him. She watched him with tear-pooled eyes as he tore into the toast and slurped down the tea.
“You ran away,” said the psychic.
Ben felt a spike of heat flood his cheeks. He forced a shrug, as if it wasn’t anything to get excited about.
“You ran away from the police,” she completed.
“They were busy,” he said. “Daphne was supposed to meet me.” Emily’s face screwed down a little tighter.
“What?” he finally asked her.
“We had a deal, Ben, you and me.”
“I know, I know, but—”
“Not buts. We had a deal. The police are looking after you. They’re trying to do their job.”
“They threatened you.”
“It’s not that,” she objected. “The police have been on my case for years. Sometimes they love psychics, like when they need them; sometimes they want to run them out of town. Believe me, I’m plenty familiar with the police. I can handle them. It’s you I had the deal with, not them.”
“I know.”
“And you promised me.”
“I missed you,” he said honestly, daring to look up at her, though afraid of her anger with him.
Tears sprang from her eyes. She blinked them away. Black ink ran down her cheeks, carried by the tears. Her lips were wet and puckered, and they quivered as she tried to speak. But then she came out of her chair, and around the table toward him, and took his head between her hands and drew him into her for another of those wonderful hugs.
And Ben knew he wasn’t going anywhere.
55
Lou Boldt was a tangled knot of emotions. He had gone from the high of a surveillance operation to the low of losing the suspect amid a light drizzle that turned the air the same color gray as the sky, and everything in it the same color gray as the rain, until the world was a blur of gray images that blended together so that buildings, streetlamps, vehicles, people on bicycles, formed a homogeneous mass, and Jonathan Garman vanished into it like something in a magic trick.
The fact that the video tape shot at the car wash did not show Garman going for the glove box, did not support a subsequent surveillance operation, meant that when Shoswitz looked for a scapegoat he did not have to look very far. That Boldt had engaged the follow-up surveillance operation before studying that video was at least explainable—he had wanted to protect Martinelli at all costs. But with nothing more than a psychological profile that played well, Boldt had only his twelve-year-old witness to connect Jonathan Garman to any crime whatsoever—and he had lost both of them, Garman and the witness.
Boldt found himself in the unenviable position of preparing to eat crow. They had a fire inspector in lockup who had confessed to the arsons. They had Nicholas Hall’s admission that he had sold hyper
golic rocket fuel to an unidentified third party. Garman had, under questioning, also confessed to the additional crime of setting fire to his estranged wife’s house trailer, a fire that had burned his son to disfigurement, proving in the eyes of many that he was capable of just about anything.
With Garman’s first confession firmly in hand, the upper brass and the mayor had put the Scholar’s reign of terror to bed, assuring the public the fires were over. This had been done without Boldt’s involvement, just as the subsequent surveillance of Jonathan Garman had been done without their involvement. Shoswitz, the middleman, pushed Boldt to a decision the sergeant did not want to make.
The lieutenant’s office smelled of foot odor and old coffee. Boldt remained standing despite the lieutenant’s repeated offer of a seat. Shoswitz confirmed himself as a pacer, working up a sweat between the back corners of his office. “I don’t know what to believe,” he finally said, in a tone that Boldt interpreted as his rambling phase. “Believe it or not … I mean, you want to know what the real truth of the matter is … Your ass, my ass … if we want to go upstairs tomorrow morning and try to tell them the fucking Scholar is still out there playing his games, the truth of the matter is we need another fire. I’m not shitting you. No fire, no sell. I’m not kidding. We got the note … every note meant a fire … so if there’s no fire tonight they’re going to say Garman mailed it to himself before we arrested him—and don’t go fucking waving the postmark at me, because I know all about it, and my career, your career, is not going to hang on a fucking postmark.”
“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 father’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?”
Boldt - 04 - Beyond Recognition Page 39