Boldt - 04 - Beyond Recognition

by Ridley Pearson

  The truck picked up speed. Ben held on for dear life. Up ahead, the tiny image of the Face on the bike grew larger as the truck closed the distance. He felt the wind in his smiling face and wanted to cheer, to shout, to show everybody what he’d done. The poor little boy with one eye. The kid doing thirty-five, one-handed, on a bicycle. He felt as if he were riding a rocket, as if it were strapped right onto his bike.

  The Face was in plain sight again and, if Ben had it right, was slowing down. They had come a mile, maybe two. Green lights the whole way. He felt empowered. He felt like a grown-up. A hero.

  They closed fast on the other bike, and suddenly Ben lacked the nerve to let go and release the truck. The idea terrified him. He had grabbed on okay, but he wasn’t so sure about letting go. Those wheels were right there, grabbing the pavement, bumping, bouncing. Ben could just see himself squashed under them.

  Let go! a voice inside him announced. But his hand wouldn’t do it. It just couldn’t do it.

  Worse, the Face was getting closer by the second, by the yard. He had slowed down to nothing.

  At once, without a hand signal, the Face turned right and the bike pulled to a stop and the guy jumped off. The truck, and Ben along with it, went whizzing right by—Ben looking back quickly to mark the location.

  U-STOR-IT—SELF-STORAGE UNITS AVAILABLE

  He looked ahead then, the road conditions worsening, potholes everywhere. Just like that! One minute smooth asphalt; the next, land mines. He swung the wheel left and right, dodging the holes, slaloming between them.

  The light up ahead was green.

  “Turn red,” Ben begged, repeating it like a mantra. “Red,” he pleaded.

  The light changed to yellow. The gears ground as the driver downshifted; the truck slowed noticeably. Ben dodged one last pothole, pulling the bike too far to the right and breaking his grip. Without intending to, he let go.

  He snapped his other hand onto the handlebars and hung on tight as he squeezed the back brake, the front wheel vibrating and dancing with a life of its own. He pulled, but the front wheel would hardly move. The truck lumbered on up ahead. Ben lost control, hit the curb, and was launched through the air onto a patch of grass and a pile of dog shit that smeared all the way down his back. He came to a stop sitting up, facing backward, dizzy and unable to focus. He sat there for a long time waiting for his vision to return, his head to stop swimming.

  The bike looked okay. He felt his arms and legs. Nothing broken, he decided, for the second time in the same night. He glanced around at his surroundings: Spiro Aviation, Glyde Avionics and Engineering. Not a pay phone in sight.

  U-Stor-It was only a half mile behind him.

  64

  Daphne found herself sitting in the Santori home doing nothing, wondering why she was there. Fifteen minutes had passed since she had heard one of the neighborhood boys scream out from the woods. Kids! She had actually allowed herself to believe it had been Ben. How paranoid can a psychologist get? she wondered.

  Her biggest mistake was leaving her cellular phone in her car, plugged into the cigarette lighter. She had debated walking the one block to get it but worried that it might attract Jonny Garman’s attention to her red Honda; Martinelli had been driving an Explorer. This car difference was what had kept her grounded in the house. If Garman was watching the place—and she believed he could be—and she returned to the wrong car or he got a good look at her, the game was up. They were back to square one.

  For the last quarter hour she had been attempting to develop the nerve to call Boldt and tell him her latest theory—that Garman had lifted the wrong address off the backpack. But Boldt had been cut back to one or two detectives, and she didn’t want to be the one to screw things up again, to pull LaMoia off Martinelli just in time for Garman to fry the woman.

  But she had to check in. Officially off-duty, she knew Boldt was nonetheless counting on her. She called her voice mail, to check messages, with one eye on her car, wondering how she had been so stupid as to park directly under a streetlight. When things went wrong, she decided, they went wrong in a big way.

  There were six messages: one from Owen, two from Susan, two from Boldt, and one from Emily Richland. Of all the calls, it was Emily Richland’s she returned; the woman had sounded half out of her mind.

  “Daphne Matthews,” she announced when the woman said hello.

  “He was here,” Emily Richland confessed immediately, without introduction or small talk. “When you came looking for him, he was here. I hid him. I lied, and I know now that was stupid.”

  Daphne felt her heart racing away from her. She tried to calm herself, but the woman’s agitation was contagious.

  Emily continued, “He ran away. Left the house while we were talking, I imagine. But of course I expected him back, and he never returned. He hasn’t returned. A long time now, and he hasn’t returned.”

  “Probably doesn’t trust either of us,” Daphne allowed, trying to calm the other.

  “No, it’s not that,” said Emily nervously.

  “Then what?”

  “Listen. I don’t expect you to believe this…. I know you don’t believe this. Maybe it’s impossible for you to. But I beg you to believe just this one time. At least hear what it is I have to say.”

  “Go on.” Daphne fought against her own desire to shout, to scold the woman. Get on with it! she wanted to say.

  “I do have visions. I really do. You must believe me. And I’ve had one tonight. Several times. The first time …”

  Daphne could hear the woman’s voice falter, and the tears begin. She struggled with her own emotions to keep from giving in to the other’s. Tricks! she reminded herself. Emily Richland was a professional liar, nothing more.

  “He was dead. On the ground, his eyes open.” Emily broke down crying—sobbing—into the phone. If it was an act, it was a damn good one. “Ben,” she muttered, “lying there on the ground. Oh, God…. And then, just now—right before you called—a second image. All dark and a fence, and Ben’s face pressed up against it. He’s in trouble, I know he is! I know this. I’ve seen it! And I don’t know what to do about it!”

  Daphne did not want to reveal the terror she was experiencing. The images of the boy were fixed in her head. To give the woman some encouragement seemed the best route. “Anything else you can tell me? Anything at all?” As a psychologist she simply could not allow herself to believe in paranormal activity; as a woman who loved this boy herself, she believed every word.

  “A fence … darkness … chain link, you know? Looking through it. Boxes. Blue boxes.”

  “Train cars?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Containers. Ship containers?”

  “I can’t see it clearly. Blue boxes…. fence … darkness.”

  “I’ll call,” Daphne said. “If we find out anything, I’ll call.”

  Emily Richland was still crying as Daphne hung up the phone.

  One hell of an act indeed, if that’s what it was.

  She needed no more courage than that call. She lifted the receiver and dialed Boldt’s cellular.

  65

  “Check it out,” Lofgrin said proudly, hoisting a pair of graphs up for Boldt to compare. “The one on the left was downloaded from the FBI database I told you about, every goddamn kind of ink manufactured. The one on the right is the chromatograph of the ink used on the Scholar’s threats.” The match, though not perfect, was unmistakable.

  Boldt said, in a voice that sounded more like a prayer, “Tell me that two hundred thousand people in Seattle don’t own this same pen.”

  “They don’t, not by a long shot. Maybe it helps us locate him. It’s from a company in St. Louis that specializes in cheap custom pens: giveaways. The kind that advertises in the back of magazines: Your logo here!” Lofgrin was so excited he was shouting. “You’ve seen ’em: golf clubs, hardware stores, rental shops. You name it.”

  “No, you name it,” Boldt said, turning the man’s phrase and soberin
g him some. “How big a field, Bernie?”

  “We’re a long way from St. Louis, Lou. It’s not like a company like this would be flooded with Seattle orders.”

  “How many Seattle clients?”

  “How many? How should I know? That’s your job. I match the fucking graphs. That’s my job. It’s your phone call to make, not mine. And don’t expect miracles. Firms like this make a lot of models, you know? And it’s not like we know the model.”

  “The shape, you mean?”

  “Shape, size, color. All that would narrow the field.”

  “You make the call, Bernie. Wake someone up if you have to. Threaten them. I don’t care what you do. But get someone down to their records—tonight—right now! Every Seattle client, every customer.” Boldt took off quickly down the hallway.

  “And what the fuck are you going to do?” the man called out indignantly. “I am not a detective!”

  Without looking back, Boldt broke into a jog and shouted into the hallway, “I’m going to get a description of the pen for you. I’m going to get you the model.”

  Kotch was already at work at the video monitor when Boldt entered the smoke-filled room. The big man waved the air. “Hasn’t anybody here heard that this building has been no smoking for about seven years?”

  The offending cigarette dangled from Kotch’s pinched lips. “So arrest me.” He exhaled.

  On the large monitor, Boldt saw a portion of the grainy video shot inside Garman’s rooming house. “Fast-forward,” Boldt ordered.

  “I was just—”

  Boldt interrupted, repeating the order. He steered him to the section of tape where the contents of the desktop were revealed. First the envelopes, then the cards. In the background, Boldt saw the tin can filled with pens and pencils. He directed the man to freeze-frame.

  “Can you enlarge this?” Boldt asked.

  “We’ve got some cool toys, Sergeant. We can enlarge anything, though we’ll lose resolution pretty fast on a tape this small.”

  “Give me the pens and pencils,” Boldt said, pointing to the screen. Static sparked off the tip of his finger, and Boldt jumped back with the spark.

  “A little tense, are we?” Kotch inquired.

  The can of pens and pencils grew ever larger on the screen. What writing may have been on the pens was lost immediately, but it became quickly apparent that of the few items in the can, three of the pens were the same—button-operated ball points, short and thick. Cheap pens. Just what Lofgrin needed.

  “Can you print that?”

  “It’s not a very clear image. I can doctor it up some.”

  “No time. Print it. It’s gorgeous. It’s exactly what we need.”

  “The pens?” Kotch questioned earnestly. “You’re interested in a bunch of junk pens?”

  “Interested? With those pens, the Scholar just signed his own death warrant.”

  The printer began to sing.

  Boldt smiled for the first time in days.

  66

  Ben pressed his face closer to the chain link fence outside the automated gate to the U-Stor-It facility, his fingers laced through the metal webbing. The Face had evidently used the keypad to open the gate, which was now closed. And although Ben was curious to find out where the guy had gone to, once inside, his eye was not on the endless rows of storage units but on the pay phone outside the door marked OFFICE.

  That pay phone called to him. Up and over the fence, a quick run across the open pavement (that to Ben seemed a mile wide), and over to that phone. Call Daphne. Tell her the Face was here at the U-Stor-It on Airport Way. A hero. Back over the fence. Ride like hell. A plan. Pretty simple at that. Hardest part would be the climb over, and again on the way back, but he could climb sixty-foot trees so why not a ten-foot-high chain link fence?

  He looked around for some options. Airport Way seemed about a thousand miles long in both directions, and with virtually no traffic. The industrial businesses that lined the street were closed, every one of them. He remembered passing an old rundown hotel way back there, but it looked a lot scarier than that telephone only twenty yards away.

  The thing that tore at him was he knew it was wrong. He could feel it clear down in his stomach. Climbing the fence was no different from climbing into that blue pickup truck. He wondered where to draw the line between just doing something wrong and doing it in order to do good. He didn’t need any more trouble. He had plenty. He was all through with trouble.

  He checked for traffic and began to climb.

  It surprised him how loud the fence was. It rattled like a bunch of cans. Scared the life out of him the way it made so much noise. The more noise, the faster he climbed; the faster he climbed, the more noise. His brain told him to slow down, take his time. His legs went like mad. But the faster he went, the worse his toeholds; his feet kept slipping out from under him, leaving him dangling and scraping for purchase, his toes attempting to run up the fence, his fingers pinched against the wire and hurting badly.

  Finally, he reached the very top and threw a leg over, but the fence was cut ragged along the top edge. His pants caught and the wire bit into his thigh, stabbing him, and before he could stop himself he let out a shout that cut off halfway out when his brain kicked in and told him to shut up. He threw himself over to the other side, clawed his way down a few feet, and then bailed out, letting go and dropping to the blacktop.

  What a mess, he thought, sprinting for the phone. A person would have to be deaf not to have heard that. What a stupid jerk! What a mess.

  It was one of those things he knew without needing anyone to tell him: He’d screwed up big time. He’d screwed up so badly that halfway across the vast sea of blacktop separating the fence from the phone, he chickened out and froze, feeling the urgency to get back over that fence and flee. But then his legs moved again and the phone drew ever closer, looking to him like an oasis to a man too long in the desert.

  He scooped a hungry hand down into his pocket and came up empty. No quarter. No way to make the phone call. He punched in 911—a number he was getting kind of used to.

  “Emergency Services,” a man’s voice said.

  “This is Ben … Ben Santori.” He hated using that last name; his father’s name had been Rice, and it seemed more right to him. “You gotta get a message to Daphne Matthews. She’s a cop.”

  “I’m sorry, fella, we don’t—”

  “She’s a cop. Listen to me!” he hissed in a whisper. “She’s at my house: S-A-N-T-O-R-I.” Ben spelled it for him. “Call her. Tell her I followed the guy with the face. The face—remember that. It’s an emergency—” He broke off. It sounded like a garage door. The Face! he thought. There it was again, the same sound, the door closing maybe. He dumped the phone into the cradle and debated sprinting for the fence. The Face had heard him come over that fence; he was coming around to check it out.

  The storage units were built in long rows, Ben closest to the end near the gate. He spied more fence at the far end of the units and wondered if it wouldn’t be safer to try getting over down there, somewhere away from the entrance. He sneaked off along the side of the building, in the building’s shadow, more scared than he had ever been of Jack Santori. He moved a few feet and paused, listening, looking, his heart hurting in his chest.

  And then he saw a man’s long thin shadow stretch across the pavement to his right. It was the Face, out prowling the grounds.

  Out looking for him.

  67

  Bernie Lofgrin came through. An 800 number for the St. Louis pen company’s twenty-four-hour catalog had in their possession a phone number for the manager. Marv Caldwell kept his client information on a laptop computer that he took with him everywhere, even home at night. Along with relevant contact information, the client list also showed what product had been ordered and the quantity and date of the last order.

  Within fifteen minutes of Lofgrin’s first call, the printout from the rooming house video that showed a close-up of three similar pens had been faxe
d to Caldwell’s laptop and the manager had identified the product as most closely resembling their model AL-440 ballpoint. His client list showed eleven Washington State customers as having ordered AL-440s, four of them in the Seattle area: a golf course north of town, a dry cleaner in Ballard, a self-storage company on Airport Way, and a Japanese restaurant on 5th Avenue.

  Without hesitation, Boldt, sitting at Lofgrin’s side, took the self-storage company. Marv Caldwell had three phone numbers on his client list for U-Stor-It, including the supervisor’s home number. Boldt telephoned that number but got a message machine.

  He double-checked with both of his detectives on surveillance, LaMoia and Gaynes. Neither reported any activity at their locations. He filled them in on the most recent lead and left them both with the address of the storage facility, a nagging sense of urgency getting the better of him. He couldn’t free LaMoia from his post, because he couldn’t put Martinelli at risk. Likewise, he wanted Gaynes to keep an eye on the rooming house in case Garman returned. He debated calling Shoswitz at home and requesting additional manpower, but knew in advance the lieutenant would want some confirmation of Garman renting at the site before committing any additional manpower or resources. He could practically hear the man saying, “Scout the place and let me know. We’ll reassess at that time.”

  He decided to place the storage facility under surveillance for a few hours, though he didn’t want to drive too close without a first look. He stopped three blocks short on Airport Way and shut down the car’s radio and turned off his cellular phone so it wouldn’t suddenly ring and announce his whereabouts in the middle of his poking around. He left his pager on but switched it to vibrate.

  He parked in a parking lot for a helicopter maintenance company, locked the car, and headed off on foot, the U-Stor-It sign dimly visible a hundred yards ahead. The optimism that had begun with the discovery of the rooming house, and then spread to Lofgrin’s identification of the ink, built to a drumming of adrenaline through his system. He experienced an increasing sense of certainty with each step that brought him closer to the storage facility. Garman could keep his father’s stolen pickup truck there, could have his lab there, or both. Self-store units were the perfect anonymous address. Used in drug deals, as chop shops, and even as body storage in homicides, they proved to be fertile ground for criminal activity of every sort. That Garman might have an unknown quantity of rocket fuel stored there did little to settle Boldt’s nerves.