Beyond Recognition

by Ridley Pearson

  She wrapped a warm arm around him. It was all he lived for. How would she react if he told her what he had done? “You know, you have an advantage in life, Ben,” she said, confusing him. “You’ve grown up quicker than most people. No, I mean it,” she said, answering his expression. “You think things that even some adults never get around to. But the point is, the world is a good place, despite the way it looks sometimes. Life is good, despite the way it feels sometimes. Where you are right now, your age, the best thing to do is enjoy it as much as you can. I know that’s not always easy. Don’t think about it too much. Just kinda let life happen around you, you know? Basically, I think what you’ll find is that things pretty much work out if you let them, if you don’t get in their way. If you think good thoughts. If you do good things.”

  His throat tightened, his eyes stung, and he felt himself begin to shudder and then cry. She consoled him with another squeeze of her arm, but it made him feel even worse, and he struggled to be free of her, leaning away.

  “Ben?”

  “I’m not good.”

  “Sure you are. Of course you are.”

  “I’m not.”

  “You mustn’t let Jack do this to you, Ben.”

  He shook his head, the tears falling all the harder, tears like the rain falling only a few yards away. How easy it would have been to allow her to believe it all Jack Santori’s fault. How simple and convenient. “It’s not that,” he squeaked out.

  “Your mother,” she whispered.

  He shook his head again. His memory of his mother was only a face, a smell, a smooth hand rubbing his back or tousling his hair. His mother was something, someone, too long ago to remember. “If I lost my wallet in his truck, he’ll know where to find me. My address is in the wallet.” It just kind of tumbled out of him.

  “Who, Ben? What truck?” He heard concern in her voice.

  He looked up at her, his vision blurred by his tears. She looked back with sympathy and love, and he knew he was about to tell her everything. He was about to offer her the money—the whole $500—and ask if he could stay with her. He knew her answer long before he uttered his first stuttered sentence of explanation, but that didn’t stop him. Nothing stopped him. The truth fell hard, like the rain. It poured out of him.

  Emily Richland, reaching out to comfort him, never stopped holding him. She drank up the truth like the garden with the rain. She listened to every word, nodding as he spoke; her own eyes filled with tears; and the two spent over an hour there on the back porch, right through the squall and into a patch of blue sky, welcoming the sun’s penetrating warmth that followed behind, flowed through it, like the intense love that Ben felt for this woman.

  20

  When his pager sounded, Lou Boldt cringed. The effort to pull its tiny LCD screen into view was as automatic as turning the ignition key of his car or pulling on a pair of socks. At that very moment he had been wondering what to do about his suspicions about Liz, because if he was right about her it started a series of unthinkable, problematic choices that questioned the survival of their family.

  Liz was taking a bath. Taken in and of itself, this was no big deal, except that in this family it was Boldt who usually took the baths and Liz, ever in a hurry, who always took a shower. But three times this week she had come home from work and immediately drawn herself a bath. And it was only a few minutes earlier that Boldt realized she had taken baths on the same days the week before: Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday. All three days she had come home an hour and a half late. His imagination raced. As a detective he was trained to see patterns. He regretted this ability, this talent; most of all he resented that his work should intrude into his private life to this degree. He was engaged in maintaining a thoughtful surveillance on his own wife, based on distrust and fear and driven by palpable memories of the past. He hated himself. Coincidence was not in Lou Boldt’s vocabulary. He heard Sarah crying and felt on the verge himself.

  He scooped up his infant daughter from the crib, nuzzled her, and inhaled the sweet-milk fragrance of her skin that he treasured. She reached out, her tiny fingers locking onto his hair.

  “Knock, knock,” he said, toeing open the bathroom door, trying to release the vise of her grip on his hair.

  Liz’s face was bright red, her chest flushed, her body stretched in the tub and magnified by the water. She looked so incredibly appealing, the florid skin tones of a Rubens. He felt a pang of protective jealousy. There was no such thing as ownership; he knew this consciously, and yet …

  “I think it’s dinnertime,” he said, his voice cracking, emotions and memories welling up from within him. She had betrayed his faith once before; was it so impossible again? Many of the same elements were in place: both of them working too hard, ignoring the other’s needs. The two kids placed impossible burdens on their attentions. There was little time left for their marriage. It was all about the family now. It was different.

  He didn’t want to cry in front of her, to set her off, to start something he felt so unclear about, so incapable of articulating. He wanted to treasure her, to trust her, to believe. He feared the truth; he didn’t want to know—and the realization swept through him that this was the first time he had purposely and intentionally not wanted the truth. As an investigator, curiosity drove him, fed him. It was the fuel of his professional existence, and yet now he stifled it, like throwing a wet blanket over a fire. To him this was a profound and significant difference, and one he interpreted as a weakness. A crack in the armor.

  The mother beckoned with outstretched arms, and the child, seeing this, stopped crying and wiggled to be free. Boldt envied Liz this biological connection and for a moment felt himself a visitor in his own home. Liz sat up high in the tub and, cradling the child, offered her ripened breast. The hungry lips drew her mother into her and Liz smiled slightly, closed her eyes, and leaned her head back against the tub. Boldt studied his wife’s nakedness from head to toe, her youthful breasts, trim waist, the grassy swatch of black hair between her long legs. He didn’t want anyone else having this. He felt possessive. He wondered why he had allowed his own body to train-wreck the way it had. He blamed himself.

  “Didn’t I hear your pager?” she questioned, her eyes still closed.

  Did she want him out of the house? He felt a flood of anger surge through him. He stood taller and drew his stomach a little tighter. He suddenly wished he looked different, less disheveled, more hair, better tone to his muscles. Had her eye wandered? Was he aging too quickly for her?

  “Yeah,” he answered. Was she going to blame the pager for awakening Sarah? It wouldn’t be the first time. She had fallen into the habit recently of blaming him for all sorts of things, many out of his control. He had let most of these complaints pass unchallenged, but they had eaten into him like dry rot, damage unseen to the naked eye.

  “You going to call it in?” she asked. The lines of her naked form were a work of art. He wished the tub were big enough for both of them. He wanted to feel her skin against his, warm and wet.

  “Yeah.” When had he not called it in? he wondered. He was a slave to his work. He lived for it.

  She opened her eyes slightly, like a person drugged—dreamy and quiet. The baby suckled her. Again he was struck by how he envied that connection. He wondered what it must feel like to her, the aching swelling of the breast relieved, her fluids giving life to another. “You okay?” she asked, her brow knitted sharply, her eyes suddenly pained.

  “Sure,” he replied.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Fine,” he lied to her, wondering when and how that had become such an easy thing to do.

  “You know what it is?” she asked. He looked back at her curiously, wondering if this was to be her moment of confession. Strangely, he didn’t want that just now. “The pager,” she explained. “Do you know what it’s about?”

  “No, it’s not that,” he informed her.

  “Then what?”

  “Regrets. Concerns.” He he
ard his voice betray him. Betrayal fed on itself, he thought, like those insects that eat their mates.

  Her eyes came open wider. Her hips rolled in the water as she leaned toward him. She floated there, motionless. She cradled the baby tighter to her. “Honey?”

  He had an urge to make love to her. Possess her. He knew it was for all the wrong reasons. “Maybe we should talk at some point,” he said, though he sounded defeated and he knew she picked up on it.

  “I’m all yours,” she said.

  I wonder, Lou Boldt thought. He nodded, though insincerely. She took the baths to clean herself up, to keep him from knowing. A cleansing. Purify her from whoever else had been with her. He ached, wondering what drove such thoughts.

  “Go to work, Sergeant,” she ordered. “I’m not going to get mad about it.”

  “I’ll call in,” he said. “Check it out.”

  “I’ll wait up,” she told him, acknowledging with more certainty than he wished that the page was going to take him from their home. She was right, of course, it nearly always did. The pager was the giant stage hook, designed, it seemed, to steal him from his home life. To disrupt. He had come to hate it. “Or I’ll try to, depending how late you are.” She chuckled. The baby lost her mother’s nipple, and Liz helped her to find it again.

  “You two are beautiful,” he said, still living with the urge to have her sexually. He felt his throat choke and turned toward the phone to prevent her from seeing the betrayal of tears that filled his eyes.

  Out of the frying pan and into the fire, Boldt thought, the wind blowing through his close-cropped hair—what was left of it; her silhouette caught by a streetlamp that lit the running path that surrounded Green Lake. Daphne Matthews was a little too fit, a little too pretty; she never quite looked the part.

  The lake was several acres of black water surrounded by the running path, a perimeter road lined on the east with cafés and a quality restaurant or two. Lush wooded hills, densely populated with neighborhoods of two- and three-story clapboard houses built in the city’s first big boom—the timber era—seventy years earlier, rose on three sides, containing the lake in a jeweled bowl of window lights. Green Lake was picturesque and charming, like something from a New England village postcard. South of the lake were recreation fields for softball and soccer, lit at night by steel towers projecting a harsh, stark light visible at a great distance. At 8 P.M. the lake’s running path still saw a great deal of use, men and women running or walking alone for the most part, as contrasted with the pairs of couples and friends and associates that exercised in the early morning and at lunchtime.

  Daphne wore jeans and a stone-washed blue silk jacket over a crisp white shirt buttoned to her neck. He joined her and they started walking, holding to the right side of the path, allowing the breathless joggers to pass. The lake was convenient to both their houses. She had recommended they meet there, as they had so many times before.

  “Emily Richland uses a shill who checks the cars of her clients. Information about the cars is passed to her, and she can make some damn good educated guesses as to who is sitting in front of her.”

  “Am I supposed to be surprised?” he asked, his mind elsewhere.

  “The guy with the burned hand came to her place looking to check a couple of dates: October second, two days before Heifitz; and then again on Saturday. Lou, I think it’s the arsonist.” Before he could speak, she said, “His right hand—the last three fingers are fused in a kind of paddle. Badly burned. He’s military. Air Force, maybe. I think she’s holding out on me. I think she has more.”

  Boldt’s mind raced away from him, removing his concern about Liz’s affair and focusing solely on the suspect. He realized that he buried himself in work for a reason. “His car?”

  “A truck.” She gave Boldt the description that Emily had given her.

  “Air Force,” Boldt mumbled.

  “She thinks this guy is involved in drug deals, not arson. And maybe that’s right, maybe he’s dealing in drug lab chemicals, maybe that’s how he got the burned hand, maybe it has nothing whatsoever to do with arson, but I think it’s one hell of a lead.”

  “A psychic,” Boldt said. “Do you know how Shoswitz is going to react to this?”

  “A fraud,” she reminded him. “If we get her accomplice, the one who actually saw this guy’s truck, Jesus, I think we’ve got a hell of a witness. The two of them? Are you kidding me? One of them studied the truck, the other spoke to the man. He was nervous, real concerned about October second.”

  “Or maybe he’s just a middleman,” Boldt was thinking aloud. “Maybe he’s selling some chemicals to our boy. Maybe he even thinks they’re for a drug lab. We won’t know until we get there.”

  “I paid her two hundred. I think another two and we’ll get more. I think if we sat on the place we’d ID her accomplice. She needs the spy. The scam doesn’t work without the spy. Furthermore,” she added, pulling on his elbow to keep him from interfering with an approaching runner, “she thinks he’ll return.”

  Boldt stopped walking. Daphne went on a step or two. He said, “Return?”

  “He’s already been there twice,” she said proudly.

  “Military? Maybe Garman was military, maybe Air Force. Maybe they served together. Maybe that’s the connection.”

  “A woman was involved,” she said, reminding him of the connection between the two victims. “A divorced woman.”

  Boldt walked to catch up to her. The two started walking again. “Heifitz was widowed,” he reminded.

  “She was separated,” Daphne corrected. “As good as divorced, I’m told, when her former husband up and died on her. Went down on the records as widowed.” She walked a few more steps and then said emphatically, “Divorced single moms, Lou. That’s what we’re looking at. Count on it.”

  He was a cop who based his investigations on the information a victim could reveal. He caught himself walking faster, out of excitement. Thoughts sparked in his head; he could barely contain them. “We can link the victims!” he nearly shouted.

  “Why do you think I paged you? Link? I don’t know. But we’ve got some obvious common denominators.”

  “Divorced single mothers,” Boldt repeated. “Both of them,” he stated. He could barely contain his excitement. He felt like screaming. The victim! he thought. The victim can tell more about a homicide than a pile of crime-scene evidence.

  “That’s it,” she confirmed. “Age of the kids?”

  “Didn’t check.”

  “We need to.” Searching for a way the two women might have been targeted by the killer, Boldt listed, “Group therapy—you know, coping-with-divorce classes—church groups, what else?”

  “Book clubs,” she suggested.

  “Cooking classes, gyms.”

  “Plumbers, electricians—”

  “Ladders!” he barked, stopping again. His excitement bubbled out of him. He could see it become contagious in her. “We’re close! Plumbers, electricians …”

  “Roofers, masons, chimney sweeps …”

  “A house painter!” he exclaimed. “The cotton fibers at the base of the ladder.”

  “What?”

  He spoke so rapidly that his words blurred. “We found cotton fibers alongside the ladder … at the base of the ladder. Bernie’s working on them. What do you want to bet they come up positive for petroleum products?”

  “Slow down,” she said. “I mean, slow your walking. You’re practically running.”

  “Both of them divorced,” Boldt repeated for the third time.

  “Dating services,” she offered. “It’s hell out there as a single mom.”

  “Both divorced,” Boldt said gleefully. He stopped her, grabbing her by the shoulders, overwhelmed with a feeling of accomplishment. “You’re a genius!”

  They stood face-to-face, both breathing hard, the path light catching half their faces, their eyes locked, his large hands firmly gripping her narrow shoulders. Electricity sparked between them, a famil
iar energy, and Boldt sensed how precariously close he was to kissing her.

  He released her and backed off.

  “Oh, God,” she gasped, maintaining eye contact, confirming her own desires.

  Lou Boldt nodded imperceptibly, his heart pounding in his chest and then breaking into pieces.

  21

  Walking to the school bus stop on a wet Friday morning in mid-October, cars everywhere, their drivers anxious and agitated, everyone in such a hurry, Ben sensed he was being followed. Spilling the beans to Emily had not quieted the sensation, as Ben had hoped. He dreamt about it. He felt it at all times. He had absolutely no doubt that someone was back there. It was not something that needed proof. He knew! If Emily could know things, why couldn’t he? Perhaps he possessed the Power as well.

  For Ben, all fear, all terror, all misgiving had previously existed in the form, the shape, the image of his stepfather. He had compartmentalized it, defined it, so that he recognized it. For years it had been the only fear he knew. All else was tame by comparison.

  Tame, until that moment when Ben realized a second, more palpable fear: fear of the unknown, the unexpected. He had an idea about the identity of the person following him. And of this he had no doubt: He was being watched. It had to do with the money from the truck. Emily had said that things would work out. Ben was not so sure.

  To Ben, the sidewalk suddenly felt soft, spongy, like walking across a mattress, and it took him a few strides to realize it was his knees, not the sidewalk. His vision darkened on the edges, as if he were suddenly walking down a poorly lit hallway. As he hurried, nearly running, he gained the courage to glance over his shoulder and sneak a look.

  The blue truck! He staggered, nearly collapsing. It moved so slowly that traffic rolled around it as it held to the curb. Ben could not see Nick’s face, but he knew the identity of the driver. He knew what the driver wanted.