Beyond Recognition

by Ridley Pearson

  The ground was soggy beneath Boldt’s boots. The air smelled bitter, a mixture of the wet, smoldering materials and a taste of charcoal. Neil Bahan led Boldt through a gaping hole in the side of the building, saying, “Keep a close eye on your footing. I’ll keep watch overhead. If I tell you to duck or jump, don’t hesitate, just do it. That’s why you want to be looking down—you need to pick a good spot to move to.”

  Both Bahan and Boldt carried strong flashlights, illuminating the wreckage. Boldt was surprised at how unrecognizable it was and said so. “There’s not much left to look at,” he commented, pointing down into the basement area where the two Marshal Fives were already at work.

  “It was overhauled,” Bahan explained, sounding disappointed. “The firefighters basically tear the structure apart to be sure all the fire is caught. It’s good fire fighting, but we encourage the IC to hold off on any overhaul in suspicious fires, because it hurts the investigation. Thing is, a fire this hot, it creeps into all kinds of hidden spots. To make it safe, to keep it out, you basically have to overhaul it; it’s simply a matter of timing. We—the inspectors—would rather the overhaul came later. Let us in when it’s still hot but under control. Investigators have to look at everything before it moves, to stand much of a chance. By the time Marshal Five is through with this, they’ll have it cleaned down to the cellar’s slab pour. You could eat a meal off it, swear to God.”

  The structure was a tangle of charred and smoldering lumber, bent aluminum window frames, toppled furniture, soggy carpet, and broken glass. Bahan and Boldt carefully dodged their way through the maze. Well over half the house was missing, a gaping round hole open to the sky above and the basement below, where Garman and the other Marshal Five rummaged through the remains. The fire had run like a pillar through this center section and had chewed whole sections of walls toward the back of the building. Bahan mumbled, “Never seen anything like this.” He added, reconsidering, “Except in the Enwright pictures.”

  “Worse than most?” Boldt attempted to clarify.

  “Not even close. Worse by a long shot.”

  “What exactly should I look for?” Boldt asked.

  “Most of it will probably be down there,” Bahan answered. “The cellar catches most of the debris. It falls into it like a cup: lumber, glass, tile, electrical conduit, insulation.” He shined his flashlight into the hole. Garman glanced up at them and went on about his work. “You see what’s missing?” Bahan asked Boldt. Pointing, he said, “Sinks. Toilets. Where are they? Same as Enwright. I’ll tell you where: They’re down there, melted flat, which means we’re looking at temps in excess of two or three thousand degrees Fahrenheit, which basically puts this baby into a class by itself. Add to that the fact that the adjacent structures did not catch fire—because the thing burned so frigging fast—and you have one confused fire inspector.”

  “So the evidence is down there?” Boldt questioned.

  “And not much of it at that. Most everything in this center core was vaporized.” Bahan repeated for the sake of emphasis, “Vaporized.”

  A news helicopter flew overhead, training a blinding spotlight onto the structure. Bahan’s face was dirt-smudged and his eyes were bloodshot. The air smelled suddenly different, yet familiar, and Boldt glanced around anxiously.

  “What is it?” Bahan asked, sensing Boldt’s agitation.

  “It’s a body,” Boldt answered solemnly.

  There was traffic noise and ambient two-way radio sounds and the occasional shudder of helicopter thunder. An angry dog barked in the distance.

  Bahan dragged his forearm across his face, mopping sweat and smudging himself. “You sure about that?”

  “I’m sure,” Boldt answered. Panic gripped him. The neighbors who had been interviewed could not swear that anyone had been inside at the time of the fire. “Maybe a pet. Maybe not a human.” Though he suspected it was. It was wafting up from below. Did only homicide cops know that smell? he wondered. He had no desire to be on hand when a cooked body was found. He’d seen one in autopsy. Once was enough.

  He reached for Bahan’s arm and caught the man, saying, “If it’s all the same with you, someone should conduct a perimeter search before we lose it to contamination. Gum wrappers, Popsicle sticks, bottle caps, toothpicks, pieces of clothing—”

  “I’m with you.” He pointed down. “The action is all down there, anyway. Area of origin was right in the center of the structure. They don’t want us in their way. It’ll be another hour or two at least.”

  “We’ll each take a side and then swap.” Boldt felt on familiar ground as they cleared the structure and reached dirt and mud. “Eyes to the ground,” he instructed. “Eyes wide open.”

  Understanding what Boldt was after, Bahan said, “Anything this close to the structure went up with the fire. Not gonna be any gum wrappers on the ground.”

  Boldt appealed to the man. “Humor me.”

  “Hey, gladly,” Bahan replied. “Beats wandering the charcoal waiting for Marshal Five to move his sorry butt.”

  Boldt winced and glanced down into the black pit where Garman and the other inspector searched the rubble. He thought everything was too far burned to find a body, and without a body there was no homicide. No investigation. His squad had a knifing up on Pill Hill to work, an apparent drowning near Shilshole. His nose knew what eyes could not confirm. Perhaps the body he had smelled would never be found.

  The grass surrounding the structure’s foundation was charred black from the heat and the ground beneath it soaked to a spongy mud by water from the fire hoses. Boldt looked for bottle caps, cigarette butts—anything at all that might tie in to a suspect. As he moved around the concrete foundation of the burned-out home, he attempted to reconstruct the crime. There were mythic stories of cops able to “see” a crime—to visualize a killing. Boldt possessed no such prescience. But on occasion he could reconstruct the methodology of a homicide based on the observable facts. On rare occasions, his imagination overpowered him, ran away from him, leaving him a spectator as the crime played out before him. That night in early October was just such an occurrence.

  He looked up, and suddenly the unburned house stood before him, a house he had never seen. It had brown shingles and chipped white paint trim around the windows. It was a simple saltbox, two-story. No chimney, only an old TV antenna, bent and rusting, long out of service to the cable system. He saw a ladder leaning against the side of the house and the back of a man climbing up this ladder.

  A siren sounded behind him, and Boldt lost the image. He looked around, taking his bearings, like a person just coming awake. These hallucinations were never shared with anyone, not even Liz. Part of his reluctance arose from the potential for embarrassment, part from superstition—he didn’t want to do anything that might jinx his ability to occasionally transcend.

  He knew enough from past experience not to move from this location. He knew from his discussions with Daphne that such moments of vivid “imagination” were typically triggered by an observation, a sound, a smell; that such stimuli imprinted themselves subconsciously. He understood that the trigger was probably close by or just past. He listened first for any sounds in the air. Then he paid attention to the burn smells overpowering him. All the while he visually scanned his surroundings.

  The answer lay at his feet, not in the smells or sounds. Twin impressions in the mud. Two rectangular indentations in the black grass. Next to the right-hand dent were some blue flecks in the mud. He crouched and studied the area, disappointed as he identified them as ladder impressions. Firemen, he thought. The legs of the ladder had sunk about two inches into the turf and mud, leaving a distinctive stamped imprint of chevrons.

  Boldt immediately sketched what he saw, after which he looked up to see Bahan standing alongside.

  “Got something?” Bahan asked.

  Boldt pointed, “I take it the fire crew used ladders fighting this one?”

  “No way. Too hot for that. Besides,” he said, pointing to th
e area in front of the impressions. “There was no wall there at all; the fire destroyed it. A little hard to lean a ladder against that.”

  Again Boldt glanced up into the air where the wall should have been, and again he was overcome with the image of a man climbing a ladder. He took time to mark the area with police tape before continuing around the foundation. By the time they had finished, only the ladder impressions were of interest to him.

  Boldt telephoned the office and requested Bernie Lofgrin, the senior Identification Tech, to send someone out to cast and photograph the impressions and take samples of the colored flecks alongside. Excitement welled inside him. Crime-scene evidence, any evidence at all, is paramount in a case. Two fires too many, he thought. No more, he promised himself.

  It was only as Boldt stepped inside his house later that night that another piece of crime-scene evidence revealed itself. He had stayed on-site for hours, overseeing the collection of the ladder evidence, and had been on hand for the grotesque discovery of the charred partial remains of a body discovered in the basement, trapped underneath an overturned bathtub. The removal of the remains had been conducted carefully. Dixie had showed up personally to help, something Boldt appreciated. The sex and age of the victim remained undetermined. More would be revealed in autopsy the following day.

  But it was back at his house that Boldt stumbled—literally stumbled—onto that additional evidence, for his boots stuck to the kitchen floor as he stepped inside. They stuck, and Boldt fell forward and tumbled like a drunkard after a long night out.

  He pulled them off and almost touched the melting rubber sole before thinking better of it. Whatever could disintegrate a Vibram sole was nothing to mess with. He wondered if any of the others had experienced the same phenomenon. Or had he been the only one wearing civilian shoes?

  He called Bernie Lofgrin, awakened him, described the soles of his boots, and was told to wrap them thoroughly in aluminum foil and bring them into the lab in the morning.

  “What’s it mean, Bernie?” Boldt asked his friend, when the man was through with the instructions.

  “A strong base or acid,” Lofgrin replied, his voice puzzled. “But what that’s doing in a fire is anybody’s guess.”

  12

  Behind his Coke-bottle glasses, Bernie Lofgrin’s eyes looked like hardboiled eggs cut in half. Lofgrin stood five feet five inches off the ground. He was balding and overweight. He wore baggy khakis and a button-down blue oxford with no tie. There weren’t many stars in any city government department, including the police, but Lofgrin stood out despite his diminutive size. As senior identification technician, Lofgrin had two decades of experience and a nose for evidence collection and analysis. Rookies observing him at a crime scene for the first time would say he possessed a sixth sense. But it had nothing to do with paranormal ability; it was a trained eye. Lofgrin knew his stuff.

  He and Boldt and Dixie shared a love for their work. Perhaps, Boldt thought, this was what made them such close friends and allies. A common interest in bebop jazz brought them together, but it was dedication to the job that fixed the bond. When Lofgrin was definite about an opinion, Boldt ran with it and placed his faith in it, no matter how tempted to do the opposite.

  There were only a few people on the department who would travel across town on a Saturday morning to sit around a kitchen table and talk shop. Bernie Lofgrin was one of them. Boldt fixed him a pot of coffee, put on a Scott Hamilton album, and cut open a cantaloupe. He cleaned out the seeds and cut off the rind and served them on a plate. Lofgrin dug right in. He spoke with his mouth full. “I came to get those shoes of yours.”

  “Have you been up all night?” Boldt asked.

  “I went in at five and worked these impressions, and not because I love you. Your obsequious captain put me up to it. The shit is flying now that there’s a second victim. The media is blaming a serial arsonist. The match has been dubbed the Scholar.” He grimaced. Lofgrin, a civilian employee of SPD, was constantly put off by politics. He said, “You know how many ladders are sold in and around this city in any given year?”

  “No idea,” Boldt replied, thinking: Too many.

  “Me neither.” The little man laughed, and when he did he squinted his eyes closed and shook his head as might a man about to sneeze. There was only one Bernie Lofgrin.

  Boldt bit into a slice of melon and waited for him to get to the point. Lofgrin had a way of taking his time.

  “You wouldn’t have noticed it, neither did I, but the width between the pads on the ladder’s feet is significant. And we got good impressions of those pads, which serve as good strong fingerprints for us. Retail extension ladders, the kind you buy in hardware stores and discount houses, come in a variety of widths. Some manufacturers use twenty-four inches, some twenty-five or twenty-five and a half, depending on the tensile strength of the materials used—commonly aluminum or an aluminum alloy. All retail extension ladders are required by OSHA to have small pads, or feet, that grip the ground-level surface and help keep the base of the ladder from slipping. Each company goes with a slightly different grip pattern for those bottom pads, like tire treads in tire companies. What we’re looking at is a Werner ladder. And that’s significant, because it’s not your weekend chores ladder, your honey-do around-the-house kind of ladder. Werner manufactures wooden, aluminum, and fiberglass lines. The imprints you found are from the high end of their fiberglass line, considered a professional line: electricians, painters, that sort of work.”

  “Firemen?” Boldt asked.

  “Not fiberglass, no. It’s flammable. Aluminum is the ladder of choice for firefighting, steel alloy for the hook-and-ladders.”

  “And do we have a particular model we’re looking at?” Boldt asked. He knew Bernie well enough to know that he wouldn’t come with his gun half loaded; the man was just taking his time giving Boldt the good news.

  “It’s a Werner twenty-four-foot fiberglass extension ladder,” Lofgrin said proudly. “Manufactured between July ’93 and August ’94. Sold, probably, into ’95. They changed the tread pattern and grip material in September ’94.”

  “Do we have any idea how many Werner twenty-four footers were sold in this area?”

  “Not a hard figure to get,” Lofgrin answered. “That’s your job.” He added, “It wasn’t many. It’s the top of their line, and in ’94–’95 they only had one wholesaler in western Washington.”

  “Good stuff, Bernie,” Boldt said.

  Training his bulging eyes onto the sergeant and slipping a curve of melon into his hungry mouth, Lofgrin said, “What, you think that’s all I’ve got?” Feigning a wounded air, he crossed his arms and leaned back in his chair. “O ye of little faith.”

  He passed Boldt a black-and-white Polaroid of the cast impressions made at the fire site.

  “Impressions are their own science,” he explained, elevating his own importance, as he did whenever possible, “and it’s anything but exact, I’m sorry to say. But, that said, we can make certain educated assumptions, given soil-compression ratios and water content. It takes a specific weight to effect a specific depth of impression.”

  “Are you telling me you can guess the weight of the person who climbed the ladder?”

  “Estimate,” Lofgrin corrected sternly. “You guess, I estimate. Let’s get that right, Lou. We measure, we test, we simulate, we analyze, we scrutinize. Guess? What do you think they pay me for?”

  Boldt held his tongue.

  “Soil compression is difficult to re-create, to measure, and I’ve only had a few hours, don’t forget. But give me a few days and I’ll have a minimum and maximum weight for your ladder climber, and with that we can estimate his height. For the cloth fibers—and that’s what they are, by the way—give me the better part of a week.”

  “Can you memo me the Werner ladder info?” Boldt asked. “I want to get LaMoia on it.”

  Lofgrin passed Boldt a handwritten note containing the details. “Consider it done,” he said. “And don’t call
me, I’ll call you.”

  Boldt reacted physically to the information, a knot forming in the center of his chest. He retrieved his damaged shoes, already ensconced in aluminum foil.

  Lofgrin took the last piece of melon, stood, and left. “Thanks for the coffee,” he said.

  Boldt followed the man with his eyes, out the door, down the drive, still chewing the fruit. Court cases relied so much on physical evidence that Bernie Lofgrin was arguably the most influential person on the force. A civilian with an attitude and a good ear for bebop trumpet.

  Boldt held the memo in his hand: hard evidence at last.

  13

  Ben awakened in Emily’s cedar tree to the sound of a car pulling into her driveway below. Collecting his bearings, he realized he was lucky not to have rolled off the platform, for he was precariously close to the edge, lying face down, one arm dangling off into space. As he sat up, he winced with pain and recalled the whipping that sleep had kept him from thinking about. He wondered if it was time to give Emily the evidence against his stepfather that she requested, time to do something, but he shuddered with the thought, terrified of what would become of him if the guy ever found out.

  He heard the car door open below him and looked down to see not a car but a blue truck with a white camper shell, and his heart raced in his chest as the man with the buzz-cut hair climbed out and headed for Emily’s front door. Ben remembered the man with the fused fingers. She had said his name was Nick and had called him a criminal; her powers of observation had filled in a dozen details about him.

  The camper’s skylight window was open.

  Ben moved around the trunk of the tree and lowered himself to the next branch, telling himself he was just climbing down, but feeling his curiosity getting the better of him. Two sides of his thought process entered into competition, as if both arms, fully outstretched, were being tugged on at the same time, threatening to pull his joints apart. He didn’t want to descend and go wait in the kitchen, eye trained to the peephole; he wanted a look inside that camper shell.