Beyond Recognition

by Ridley Pearson

  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 hypergolic 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?”

  “Can’t do it,” Boldt said. He wanted to go home, yet he didn’t want to confront Liz. He wanted to comfort her, but he wanted her to tell him about the illness, not the other way around. He wasn’t sure what he wanted.

  The evening’s twilight was quickly fading. It would be dark soon, which would make surveillance efforts at both sites all the more difficult. Daphne had jumped out of the van forty minutes earlier, and Boldt hadn’t heard from her since. If he could talk her into helping, he had a team of four—down from twenty-odd only a few hours earlier. But four people could probably hold it together overnight.

  He hurried on toward the communications room to make the necessary arrangements. He willed his pager not to sound, for he feared if it did it would mean another fire, another victim. And though that might prove him right about the Scholar still being at large, it was a price he was unwilling to pay.

  At that point in time, failure seemed the best solution of all.

  58

  Daphne pulled up a chair in the small Tech Services room. Its walls were hidden by metal shelves containing tape recorders and video machines. The room smelled sour like sweat and burned coffee. She plugged in the car wash surveillance tape and hit PLAY.

  Ben had not been at Emily’s, was not at the houseboat; Emily had threatened to file a complaint. Daphne couldn’t believe how quickly the investigation had deteriorated. She felt responsible, having convinced herself that a close look-alike to Garman’s mother would distract him. She felt as if all her training and education had failed her. She had been so convinced. She had to see the tape to believe it. She found the taped image considerably clearer than the live transmissions.

  Jonny Garman entered the vehicle, took one long look at the photo of Ben, glanced around the front seat and into the back, assessing how dirty it was, and then set about squirting the inside of the windows with his spray bottle and wiping the glass clean with that towel. He conserved his movement within the vehicle, stretching to reach the far window, and performed his duties efficiently and quickly. H
e cleaned the inside of the windshield, both side windows, the rearview mirror, and the dashboard—in that order. To her surprise, he spent added time working on the sticky stain Martinelli had asked him to clean.

  At the gap in the machinery that came ahead of the dryer, Garman climbed out of the front seat and into the back, where he attacked the rear window and both small side windows. He leaned over, nearly vanishing from sight, and then surfaced with an ashtray in his hand, the unseen contents of which he dumped in a plastic trash bag tied to his belt. As the car reached the end of the line, he shuffled out backward and closed the door.

  He never looked in the glove box.

  She rewound and replayed the tape for a second viewing, resorting to advancing the tape one frame at a time, hoping this might reveal an action overlooked in real time. But there was no such action on the tape. Garman did his job and climbed out of the car. The only brief moment he disappeared was when he was in the back seat, not the front—and that did her no good whatsoever. It seemed impossible.

  Over the years she had come to develop certain instincts about her work, her patients. She could sense when a suspect was lying, could feel the truth. She knew when to push and when to pull back, when to work psychological games on an individual and when to talk straight. Jonny Garman would have taken the bait; she felt it to her core. The tape proved her wrong.

  She ejected the tape and placed it to the side. The screen was a sky blue. She shut off the gear, the sense of failure a bitter taste in her mouth. Danny Kotch of Tech Services, who had always had a crush on her, caught up to her in the hallway and handed her Ben’s backpack, returning it, reminding her of the boy and further disappointment. She carried it to her car and tossed it onto the seat.