Beyond Recognition

by Ridley Pearson

  Boldt said, “Which was closed down in round three.”

  “But round three was not full closure for a lot of the bases. They reduced them to something called maintenance status. They maintained inventory but shut down barracks—it was a pork-barrel scheme to maintain the bases in an election year; no one had to say the bases were being closed, just scaled down. Fluff. The result was, a few administrators stayed on at each of these bases, a few MPs to watch the place, guard the gates. But for all purposes there was no one left. And the security details are less than twenty-five percent of what they were at full operation.”

  “Vulnerable.”

  “Exactly. Especially to an inside job.”

  Boldt speculated, “Nicholas Hall was an MP at Chief Joseph.”

  “That he was. Whether he figured it out himself or was paid off to do an inside job, who knows? But Mr. Paddle Paw in there skimmed off a little juice and cashed in his retirement plan.” Looking through the one-way glass at the suspect, LaMoia said, “I wonder if he’s considered a career in Ping-Pong.”

  Boldt exhaled loudly said, “Good work, John.”

  “Damn right. I’d say it earns me ten minutes with him, right, Sarge?”

  Daphne stepped out of the Box at that moment and, overhearing the request, objected. “Let’s give him a rest. Please. Then the sergeant will go back at him.”

  LaMoia had proved himself incredibly effective in past interrogations. Boldt thought of him as his wild card. He knew few boundaries. He could be a suspect’s instant friend, or worst enemy. Boldt told his detective, “Don’t touch him.”

  Daphne, knowing Boldt’s mind was made up, advised LaMoia, “Don’t ask any questions. Just statements, John.”

  “Matthews,” LaMoia said, “have I told you lately that I like you?”

  She repeated, “No questions. Push him with statements.”

  LaMoia moved to the Box, pulled up his pants at the waist, and opened the door. Facing Boldt, he whispered, “You might want to turn off the tape.”

  He walked in with a swagger—in his trademark pressed jeans.

  Boldt and Daphne watched and listened. Through the speaker mounted below the one-way glass they heard LaMoia say, “I bet you’re a killer at handball, Nicky.” He kicked the empty chair away from the desk and sat down in it, craned forward on the edge. “You could always get a job as an inspector at a mitten factory. You know: Inspected by number thirteen. That kinda shit.”

  LaMoia stared for a moment.

  “What was life like out at Chief Joseph once everybody left?”

  The suspect paled noticeably.

  He asked this, breaking Daphne’s request immediately. No answer from the suspect.

  “What else?” he asked. “You could play bass drum in a marching band. Direct traffic! Hey, what about that? You could be a traffic cop, Nicky. Pay sucks, and the company you keep isn’t so great, but you always have the fact that you’re working for the betterment of society, you know?” Then he said, “You could drive a pickup truck, I bet. One-handed, but so what? You could sell out your country. You could probably shove that thing up your cell mate’s ass, with a little help.

  “You know who I am, Nicky? I’m the one you’ve been worried about. I’m the one you’ve been thinking was going to come through that door. You met me in boot camp. You see me in some of your nightmares. I’m the one that those guys”—he said pointed to the glass—“can’t control. I’m the one who doesn’t give a shit. Boldt and Matthews, they’re on a break. But not me. I’m the one who does the dirty work around here. You know football at all? I’m the safety, the last guy on the field between you and the end zone. Safeties are always the crazy motherfuckers, you know? Stand in the way of a three-hundred-pound running back. You gotta be crazy, right? So what?” LaMoia slapped the table so loudly that the speaker went fuzzy. “You worked security at Chief Joseph. You decided to make a few bucks. Don’t shake your fucking head, pal, because I know what I know. And I know all about you. You know I do. You want to nod, that’s okay. But don’t lie to me. Don’t fuck with me. Matthews, she’s the exception to the rule around here. And that makes me the rule. You’re going to live with that, or you’re going to die with that—I don’t give a shit. But you’re not going to lie to me. Under no circumstances are you to lie to me.

  “Maybe I need a little introduction,” LaMoia continued. “I’m the guy who knows everybody. Ask anyone. I’m the guy who tells the screw to put you with the soapies and he does it; I’m the guy who says to put the roaches in the soup, and the cook does it. I have friends. I make friends easily. Like with you, right, Nicky? Buddies, right? Let’s have a little nod, Nicky.”

  If Boldt hadn’t seen it a dozen other times, he might have been shocked to see the suspect nod.

  Daphne, clearly amazed, said, “I could study LaMoia for a decade and never write a comprehensible paper about how he does what he does. It’s not simply intimidation, it’s something beyond that.”

  “It’s LaMoia,” Boldt said.

  “That’s what I mean,” she agreed. “He’s despicable, and yet he’s lovable.”

  “I’m just glad he’s on our side.”

  “Sometimes I wonder,” she said.

  “He called me,” Hall said, the first break in his silence.

  Suddenly quiet and a fellow conspirator, LaMoia said, “Give us what we need, Nicky, and you just might walk out of here. No promises. But the flip side is that we can make life hell for you. It’s like a game show, Nicky. Choose the door. Go ahead and pick. But don’t waste any more of my time, and don’t make them send me on any more errands to clean up your shit for you. You got into this shit all by yourself. Now you need me to get out of it. The doors are right in front of you: Truth or Dare. Your choice. Pick one, Nicky, and pick fast, because I’m running out of time here. I’m going home at the end of the day, just remember that. You’re not. Not yet. I’m going home to my own bed, my TV, and a warm little friend from Puerto Rico with a pair of cheeks that just sit in the palms of your hands, you know? Sweet stuff. Truth or Dare, Nicky? Time’s up!” LaMoia was out of the chair, leaning across the table at the suspect. “Buzzer’s ringing. Nicky Hall: Come on down!”

  Even without seeing the detective’s face, Boldt knew that the man looked insane and ready to crack. LaMoia lived on the edge, and at times like this it was impossible to tell how much was acting and how much was real.

  Daphne said, “I can’t believe this. It’s going to work.”

  “Yeah,” Boldt echoed. “I know.”

  LaMoia pounded the table again. “Truth or Dare, Mr. Paddle Paw! You start talking or I start walking. Matthews can’t save you. Boldt can’t save you. Only I can save you. What’s it going to be?”

  “He knew that both parts of the stuff were stored on the base,” Hall explained. “He had to have either been stationed there or worked there at some point. I figured that out right away.”

  “Brilliant. Pray continue, my man.” LaMoia kicked his feet up onto the table, stretched his hands behind his head, leaned into the cradle, and said, “I’m listening, Nicky. I’m listening.” He glanced toward the glass and winked.

  Boldt reached down and turned on the tape recorder.

  As if cued to do so, LaMoia said, “My name is Detective LaMoia, Mr. Hall. Tell me what you know.” He did this for the sake of the tape, which he knew was running by then.

  Hall picked up where he had left off. “I was working MP duty. I’d driven by those buildings for years and never did know what was inside.”

  LaMoia glanced back at the window with a cocky, proud expression and grinned widely.

  “Sometimes I hate LaMoia,” Daphne said.

  “Yeah,” Boldt answered. “I know what you mean.”

  40

  On Saturday Daphne took Ben to the Seattle Aquarium. He’d never been, and it was a place she enjoyed so much that she often went there simply to relax, to stroll and think in what to her was another world. She never took notice of the t
anks, rarely read the descriptive labels; it was the fish that captivated her attention, the unflinching eyes, the pulsing gills, the gentle-paced wandering through the kelp and imitation coral. Despite her frequent visits, she didn’t know one fish from another, couldn’t tell a dolphin from a porpoise, a pilot fish from a pike.

  Ben, on the other hand, was a product of TV documentaries and knew the names of the various species, as well as their feeding and mating habits. “I taped most of them late at night, once Jack had passed out, because he only liked sports and sitcoms.” He said it as if this was to be expected, and it cut to Daphne’s core. He would toss such things her way, slowly opening the door to his existence, and the wider that door opened, the more she glimpsed of what Ben accepted as a normal life, the more she ached to change his existence. It was this mutual desire to improve his environment that connected Daphne, however indirectly, to Emily Richland.

  “Have you ever felt that way?” Ben said, pointing at a red snapper kissing the transparent walls of the tank. They were in what to her was the most exciting section of the aquarium, a large open room exposed to several large fish tanks that housed entire communities of oceangoing species.

  “Which way is that?” she asked. She wanted to see the world through his eyes, experience the world through his developing senses.

  “Trapped like that,” he answered pensively, stopping at the tank and studying the fish that appeared to be kissing the boy. “What’s it like for him, banging up against that wall? He probably can’t figure it out. And what’s he think of us? This whole other place he can see but can’t get to. Like that.” He looked deeper into the tank at the lumbering fish. “They flush seawater in here at night. It has the nutrients and stuff. It feeds them. And then they filter it out to make the water clearer so we can see them.”

  “Do you feel like that, Ben? Trapped?”

  “Not by you,” he clarified. “Not you. But yeah.” He pointed to the snapper, which continued to push on the clear barrier. “That’s me at my window at night, you know? Looking out at other people’s houses. Wondering what it’s like. If their lives are any different.” He led her a few feet forward but stayed with the same tank. “Emily says it doesn’t have to be that way, but I’m not so sure. People are different than what they seem. That’s just the way it is. Not Emily. Not you. But most people.”

  “I don’t think you can group people together, lump them together like that.” She wondered why she and Owen discussed the next party they were supposed to attend, and here she was with a twelve-year-old discussing the hard points of life. “I think it’s possibly better to take people as individuals, weigh them on their own merits, and try not to be too judgmental.”

  “Yeah, but how do you do that?” Ben questioned. “First thing I do when I meet someone is size them up. You know? Like that guy,” he said, pointing into the tank. “See him checking everyone out? Looking over there, over here. On the prowl. That’s me. He’s thinking someone’s going to sneak up and try to eat him—that’s what he’s thinking. And that’s right too, because one of those fish probably is thinking that. I’m telling you. That’s how it goes out here, too, pal. You look the other way, someone’s after your ass.”

  “Watch the language,” she scolded, but Ben didn’t respond. He walked on and Daphne followed. If Owen had been here, she would have tried to lead him around, she realized. Why was she willing to follow the boy, when she didn’t like to follow anybody?

  He glanced back at her. “Are you crying?”

  “Allergies,” she lied.

  “I wonder if fish have allergies,” he said innocently, turning back to the tank. “Check out that guy’s fin. You see that? Someone womped on him, took a chunk. That’s what I’m telling you, D. You turn your back, someone womps on you.”

  He had been using this nickname for her occasionally, and she had cautioned herself not to allow its use to draw them closer—to remain professional—but in this she had failed. Boldt called her Daffy. Everyone else, even Owen, called her either by her first or last name. Only this little bundle of energy called her by that nickname. It endeared him to her.

  “Can you swim?” she asked.

  “Nah. Not so you’d notice. Sink to the bottom if you put me in there. I’m a retard in water. Scares me, and I start flapping around, and that’s pretty much it. Down she goes. You?”

  “Yes. I swim.”

  “Teach me sometime?”

  “Yes,” she answered softly, wondering if this too were a lie. She thought him so special, and though it occurred to her that there were perhaps dozens, hundreds, just like him, she thought it wrong to lump people together. She refused to see it.

  “If you could pick,” he said, “which one would you be?”

  Such a simple question, but for her it seemed profound. She studied the inhabitants of the tank. One was long and thin and exceptionally beautiful and she singled it out for him.

  “But he’s small,” Ben complained.

  “She,” Daphne corrected, not knowing the fish’s sex.

  “Not me. I’d go for size. Speed. That guy, maybe. I’d pick the shark, but that kind doesn’t eat other fish, only that stuff—what’s its name?—in the water.”

  “Plankton.”

  “Yeah, that stuff. So what’s the point of being a shark if you only eat that stuff? Maybe that guy over there,” he said, pointing. It was a big, ugly fish that looked menacing.

  “Do you love her?” she asked him, having no idea where the question had come from and wishing immediately that she could withdraw it.

  “Emily? Yeah. She’s the best. I know you don’t like her, but she’s really cool.”

  “I never said I didn’t like her.”

  “No, you didn’t say it, I guess,” he offered in a voice that bordered on complaint. He attempted to quote her: “I think it’s better to take people on their merits.” He crossed over to the opposing tank then, carefully picking the moment so as not to have to look at her. She felt herself slip into his path, obediently following behind. Felt herself reach out and nearly take his shoulders in her hands. But she was tentative in this approach and she never did actually touch him. Instead, she lowered her arms in unison, a drawbridge going down but not quite connecting, and allowed him to slip away from her, like a prayer silently spoken, wondering if the words had found a home.

  41

  The rock that Boldt and his investigators had started downhill began to run away from them, momentum and gravity prevailing.

  The arrest of Nicholas Hall was broken by KOMO television and within minutes was the subject of talk radio. Both papers proclaimed Hall’s arrest in splashy front-page headlines. For Boldt, the public euphoria was subdued by a memo received by him the Monday morning after the arrest.

  TO: Sergeant Lou Boldt, Homicide

  FROM: Dr. Bernard Lofgrin, SID

  RE: Nicholas Hall, # 432–876–5

  Lou: FYI, Hall’s weight and

  height do not agree with our

  assessment of ladder impressions

  dated Oct. 4th this year. The suspect

  is twenty to thirty pounds heavy and,

  by our estimates, three to five inches

  tall (based on average weights) for

  whoever climbed that ladder.

  Furthermore, as so noted per our

  recent telephone conversation, the

  individual that climbed the tree at the

  Branslonovich killing was most

  definitely right-handed. Hall’s

  disfigured right hand would suggest

  he was not a viable suspect for

  attendance at that crime scene. I will

  write this all up for inclusion in the

  file, but wanted to give you a first

  look. Any questions, I’m

  around.

  —Bernie

  They had the wrong man. An accomplice perhaps, a co-conspirator possibly—but not the man the papers had dubbed the Scholar. Boldt and Daphn
e had both sensed this from the start of the sting operation and had felt more certain of it throughout LaMoia’s interrogation, in which Hall detailed the theft, transportation, and sale of the binary rocket fuel. Worse, Hall’s story hung together well. A search of his Parkland mobile home, on the north boundary of the base, revealed no notepaper, no storage of hypergolic fuel, no ladder. Hall had given up most, if not everything, of what he knew about the hypergolic fuel. The man appeared to be a dead end. One positive note of the follow-up investigation was lab man Bernie Lofgrin’s decision to run an analysis of the ballpoint pen ink used in the threats, in hopes of discovering a like pen in Hall’s possession.

  But Boldt knew the truth: The killer remained at large. The one blessing was that the publicity of Hall’s arrest had apparently scared off the arsonist—no fire had followed the most recent poem. Or had it merely delayed him?

  He experienced an overwhelming bout of depression and frustration: so close, only to fail. He wanted an hour with a piano. He wanted Liz home. The kids.

  The investigation rolled on, regardless of his wants. He took a walk downtown for forty-five minutes, up past the Four Seasons and down 5th Avenue’s fashion stores and office malls. He wanted a shot at what the kid knew. Kids saw a lot more than adults. Maybe a lead to the accomplice. Open him up with a lineup, something to jog his memory, work him into the smaller details. Pick his brain. He bought tea to go at a coffee stand by Nordstrom’s and came back up 4th, stopping to window-shop at Brooks Brothers, where a gray cashmere sweater costing most of a week’s pay teased him. He moved on, weary and worried. Pedestrians avoided him.