Beyond Recognition

by Ridley Pearson

  “Okay?” she asked.

  “Okay,” he answered. But it didn’t feel okay. As they crossed the blacktop toward the first row of units, an increasing sense of foreboding filled him. Daphne’s intuition was right; Ben was in trouble.

  They moved methodically through the rows of storage units, and much to Boldt’s surprise Daphne stayed in lockstep, following Boldt’s plan to the letter. The sound of traffic on I-5 was oppressive, interrupted only by the drumming in Boldt’s ears. He rolled his shoes across the blacktop to avoid being heard, keeping himself alert for the unexpected.

  Beyond the third set of blue units, all doubts concerning Garman’s whereabouts were suspended. A wash of pale light illuminated the fronts of the units that Boldt and Daphne faced; the source of that light, the unit immediately to Boldt’s right. At the far end of the row of units, Daphne’s face appeared. Boldt signaled her. Together, they moved toward each other, ducking from one doorway to the next, moving toward the center of the row. Less than a minute later, they stood on opposite sides of the garage door that was leaking light, ten feet apart. Boldt’s heart pounded heavily in his chest and clouded his hearing as he tried to discern the sounds coming from within. It sounded like a fan. Like a cat hissing, or water just beginning to boil. But it was none of these, he realized; it was a gas lantern and the voice of Jonny Garman, coming from a throat burned in a fire in North Dakota, a voice trying to make itself heard.

  When Boldt signaled Daphne to withdraw from their positions by Garman’s storage unit, her first temptation was to disobey—allow him to take a few steps back and then throw open the garage door and face whatever Garman had to offer. But intelligence, training, and discipline won out, leaving her feeling a victim of her profession.

  Step by step they pulled away from the unit, back to the far corners, and finally retreated until they caught sight of each other once again in the second aisle. Boldt motioned toward the office, where they met outside a few minutes later.

  “We’re going to assume it’s Garman”—Boldt led off at a fraction of a whisper—”and work from there. If Gaynes or LaMoia spot a suspect, we’ll reconsider, but buying this as coincidence is too great a stretch for me. Garman came here to prepare—”

  “For Martinelli,” Daphne informed him, mouthing her words more than speaking them. She explained to him her discovery of the backpack with the Santori address and how, in her opinion, the bait of a woman so close in appearance to his mother had overridden the other arson he had planned. She admitted reluctantly, “I have no idea how Ben became involved.” And those were the last words she could manage, her emotions winning out.

  “If Ben isn’t in hiding—”

  “—then he’s inside that storage unit,” she completed for him. “Garman won’t harm a child—especially not a young boy. He won’t even use him as a hostage, Lou. He won’t risk the boy’s life.”

  “We don’t know that.”

  “Yes, we do,” she contradicted. “We know the great lengths he went to in order to avoid harming the offspring of his victims. He stayed in those trees to make sure the young boys were out of the house. He knows Ben’s face, Lou, it’s the face he saw on the sun visor. That will have an effect on him; he will empathize with Ben. He will think he’s doing him a favor by burning up his mother, which is exactly what he has planned. He will not harm him in any way. If anything,” she suggested, “Ben’s presence reduces the chance that Garman will resist arrest.”

  “No, no, no,” Boldt objected, sensing where she intended to take that line of argument. “We are not confronting the suspect.”

  “Of course we are!” she protested. “What we are not going to do is turn this thing into a circus. He’s an introvert, a paranoid, a man afraid of society because of society’s reaction to his disfigurement. He’s angry. He blames his father. You surround a person like that with flashing lights, bullhorns and armed men in uniforms and he’ll lose it. Reality will blur for him. Who knows what he’ll do?”

  “Daffy—”

  “We confront him, Lou. You and I. We stand outside that door, our weapons put away, and we talk to him. We reinforce that he doesn’t want the boy hurt and that he doesn’t want to contend with an army of trigger-happy cops. We make, and we keep, a promise to bring him in quietly. He’s not a headline hunter, Lou, not this one. This is a family matter—between him and his father, him and his mother. We can resolve this right here, you and I.”

  “And if you’re wrong, the place we’re standing will look like ground zero by tomorrow morning.”

  “I’m not wrong,” she stated bluntly. “Work with me here, Lou. There’s a right way and a wrong way to a Jonny Garman. You know that’s right; you know I know what I’m talking about. You bring the circus, and he’ll join it. You bring a show, and he’ll outdo your show. We offer him a way out, and he’ll take it.”

  Boldt shook his head no. She wanted to take him by the shoulders and shake him. He looked exhausted. She convinced herself he wasn’t thinking clearly. He said, “We wait him out. It’s the long route to discovery, admittedly, but it’s the safe way. We may wait only to find out that it’s not Garman, but we will not corner him in a place where he may be storing that kind of firepower.”

  She was ready to interrupt, vehemently, but she held her tongue, sensing his own difficulties. Perhaps he wanted to do exactly what she had just described. Perhaps it was better to allow him to talk his way through it and reach the same conclusion.

  “If he comes out on his bicycle, without a backpack, say, we pick him. If he comes out with the boy, we watch but we don’t pick. If his father’s truck is in the storage area—and I’m betting it is—we’ve got big problems, because he’s going to leave here sometime before tomorrow morning, ready to do a little window washing and set up the Santori house, believing it to be Martinelli’s. Once he’s in that truck, he’s too dangerous—”

  “You see,” she objected, “we should do it now.” She heard him explaining their situation and knew he was right, but the objection came out anyway.

  “No, the point is not to do it now,” Boldt countered, “but to find a way to separate Garman from his truck, if that’s what it comes to. We’re going to need a way to distance him from his materials. Once we accomplish that, we pick him and it’s over.” He added, “And it isn’t a matter of simply waiting for him to do his thing at Santori’s, because he’ll have the accelerant with him, on his person. We cannot move on him until he’s away from that fuel—with or without Ben involved.”

  It was no place to argue, standing in shadow less than a hundred yards from the assumed location of their suspect. Nonetheless, she heard herself say, “You won’t get him away from that truck.”

  “No,” Boldt agreed—too quickly, she thought, sensing she had been tricked. “That’s your job. You know him so well,” he suggested, “you figure it out.” He added, “And don’t move from this spot. I’m going to check on the bicycle and see about the backup.”

  Her loyalty to Lou Boldt, her love for him, was far too great. She would not willfully corrupt the investigation. She nodded, though with great disappointment written on her face.

  “Promise me, Daffy. Nothing stupid.”

  “We’ll wait,” she agreed reluctantly. “But you won’t get him out of that truck. We’d be smarter to do this now.” Her eyes pleaded with him. Listen to me, they said.

  But Boldt walked off into the darkness.

  By the time the inspiration came to her, she had settled down onto the blacktop, knees into her chest, hidden in shadow. Boldt walked right past her, and she could feel him thinking that she had gone ahead without him.

  “Right here,” she whispered.

  He pulled her up by the hand and led her around to the far side of the office, where they could talk a little more normally.

  “Bike is still there,” he announced gravely. “We have two north,” he said, pointing, “and one south—five of us on the ground. I put Richardson up high,” he said, indicatin
g the interstate, a good distance away, “with a set of glasses. He’s got a clean line of sight on the storage unit. He’ll page me if there’s any activity.”

  “He’s there for the night,” she speculated.

  “Yes,” Boldt agreed. “Until morning.” He wanted to encourage her. “The car wash, the baiting worked. You saved a life last night.”

  “And put another at risk,” she said, meaning Ben.

  “If we shoot out a tire,” he said, speculating, “or somehow cause a flat, he’d be forced out of the truck. But if we blow it, or if the truck goes off the road or into traffic, we could cause a disaster. If he picks up on what we’re up to, who knows what he might do? Surrender? I don’t see that.”

  “Not once he’s out there,” she said, indicating beyond the fence. “The time to do this is now, Lou.” She wanted one last try at him, for she believed herself right; if coaxed properly, Garman would give it up. “The wild card is his father,” she explained. “We bring Steven Garman down here and him in front of that storage unit. The son is doing this to prove something to his father. They both hate the mother. Jonny Garman never for a moment sided with his mother. If we believe the husband, and we have no reason not to, she had sex with strangers on a regular basis, sometimes in the presence of her son, possibly even in the company of her son. Jonny Garman is trying to one-up his father, show he can do what the father failed to do—kill the mother. Burn her to death. If we get Steven Garman down here, Jonny will walk right out of that storage unit.”

  “The father is an arrested felon,” Boldt reminded her. “And no one but the bomb squad is going anywhere near that storage unit until Jonny Garman is a mile away from here. This isn’t productive,” he said. “We’re supposed to be focusing on how the hell to get him out of that truck.”

  She felt a confusion of emotions—knowing she had the answer and knowing Boldt, for whatever reasons, felt obligated to lessen the risk for all involved. She couldn’t blame him; she wanted to do the same thing.

  “We need to focus on Garman and that truck, Daffy. You asked what I would do if it were Miles. What I know is, if Miles came out of that storage area inside a truck containing that kind of volatile fuel, I would want Jonny Garman as far away from the truck as possible.”

  In the silence a corporate jet came in low and loud overhead. It felt to her as if the ground actually shook. She thought again about raiding the storage unit, how they could use the cover of a jet landing to make their move. But then she considered the idea of Ben caught in an inferno of purple flame rising thousands of feet in the air. If it was her plan, and it failed, could she ever find her way out? In that same instant, she wondered how Boldt could live with the pressure of such decisions. She had an immediate out: She could leave it up to him.

  “I know how to get him out of the truck,” she announced proudly, surrendering to his plan, prepared to share her moment of inspiration with him.

  His face filled both with excitement and doubt. He too had given it much thought but had come up blank.

  She answered his expression with a single word. “Fire,” she said. Then, explaining quickly, “The one thing irresistible to Jonny Garman is a fire.”

  72

  In the hours between 2 A.M. and 5 A.M., sixty-seven on-call patrol officers from seven policing districts, and twenty-four regular-duty firemen, along with four Marshal Fives, organized into an instant task force whose sole mission was to burn an abandoned machine shop to the ground and divert morning traffic south of the International District so that it was required to pass within a city block of the fire. This involved a staged vehicular accident, a road construction crew, and six dozen pink Day-Glo traffic cones.

  The building was one of seventeen on various lists for demolition, some of which had been offered to the city—in lieu of tax breaks—for fire training.

  For Lieutenant Phil Shoswitz, it was a bout of heartburn and temper tantrums. From the moment Boldt proposed the operation, the lieutenant objected, claiming Boldt had yet to confirm the identity of the individual inside the storage unit. This hurdle was overcome at 2:20 A.M. when Boldt, under advisement of the facility’s manager, entered the U-Stor-It offices, disabled the security device, and confirmed not only that Jonny Babcock—aka Garman—was a paying customer but that he rented unit 311, the very same unit from which the light had come and the voice had been heard. That same unit, 311, went dark at 1:15 A.M., but the door never opened and no one ever left the property. At that point in time, seven different sets of eyes and a video camera using infrared night-sight technology had all aspects of unit 3, as the row was called, under surveillance.

  Boldt never experienced a moment of feeling tired. To the contrary, he had to slow himself down on several different occasions, simply to be understood. The nearly one hundred participants engaged in Operation Inferno were his orchestra; Lou Boldt was the conductor. Neil Bahan and Sidney Fidler were his first chairs, for only Bahan and Fidler understood both the fire and the police sides of the planned incident. Shoswitz, Bahan, Fidler, two Marshal Fives, an ATF man named Byrant, and three FBI special agents, along with two dispatchers, worked out of the conference room in the Seattle Field Office of the FBI, whose communications capabilities dwarfed any resources owned or operated by the city. Dozens of radios and cellular phones were all tied into a central dispatch, coordinated by the team assembled there.

  The Santori house was under full surveillance. A part of ERT was in position to move on Garman if the ruse failed. With that considered a last resort, the emphasis of the police side of the operation was on field coverage. By 6 A.M., there were police officers and federal agents in place posing as telephone linemen, street people, construction workers, garbage collectors, electric company meter readers, a variety of delivery men, and assorted other occupations. Every major intersection between Airport Way and the Santori house had some degree of representation by armed law enforcement. It was a virtual gauntlet—with Jonny Garman its sole target.

  At 8 A.M. the U-Stor-It office was opened by an FBI special agent, who took his place behind the desk inside and went about his work as if it had been part of his daily routine for years. At 8:12 A.M., the first report of activity at storage unit 311 was verified by three separate scouts and delivered to Boldt over a radio earpiece. At 8:15 A.M. a light rain began to fall. Lou Boldt felt it a bad omen.

  To have driven Airport Way on that morning would have seemed no different than any other, except for a few detours that required different routes. But in Seattle, as in any major city, construction was a daily part of urban life and traffic accidents were a regular part of morning delays. Heading north into the city was not discernibly different from any other day: hurry up and wait.

  A white pickup truck bearing Nevada plates pulled out of unit 311 and stopped. A man with a disfigured face, wearing a sweatshirt hood drawn tightly around his head and a pair of sunglasses, was seen climbing out of the truck and returning to shut and lock the unit’s door. For approximately fifteen seconds, Jonny Garman was nearby but out of his truck. This possibility—which some viewed as an opportunity—had been discussed in great depth among various factions of the operation’s coordinators. In the end it was decided that he would be too close to both his lab and his truck to attempt any kind of pick at that location. A suggestion had been made to use a sharpshooter on Garman, but with the boy’s life at stake it had been quickly dismissed. The suspect climbed back behind the wheel of his truck and drove out through the facility’s automatic gate, joining the slow-moving traffic, hindered by detours more than a mile ahead.

  “This is Birdman,” reported a voice in Boldt’s ear. The helicopter was owned by KING radio and used for traffic reports. On that day, it was being used for surveillance. “Looking down through the windshield, I’m not showing a hostage. Contents in the back of the truck don’t look as promising. There appear to be two fifty-five-gallon drums, a variety of boxes, and assorted other items. No tarp in place.”

  Fifty-five-gallon
drums, Boldt thought. Enough to burn a hotel or a shopping mall to the ground. Either Garman had packed up shop or was planning an enormous hit. A flurry of radio traffic passed along the Birdman’s observations. Traffic moved slowly, Garman’s position reported every fifteen to thirty seconds.

  At the Santori house, Marianne Martinelli prepared to make herself seen leaving the home, if it came to that.

  At the abandoned machine shop, three ladder trucks and two pumpers stood by, lights flashing, hoses ready. Inside, last-minute preparations were made as the incendiary charges and detonator wire were checked and double-checked.

  Dressed in coveralls, Lou Boldt threw a pickax into a dirt hole in a vacant lot across from the machine shop. The three men around him, including Detective John LaMoia, also wore coveralls but were working shovels. Boldt didn’t understand why he always got the pickax.

  “Dig,” Boldt said. “He’s a half mile and closing.”

  LaMoia jumped on the shovel and dug into the wet earth. Boldt’s hands were wet on the pickax’s handle, but it had little to do with the rain. His weapon weighed down the coverall’s right pocket, within easy reach.

  “Hey,” LaMoia said, sensing everyone’s sudden tension. “This is a damn good-looking hole. Listen, if we fuck this up, Sarge, maybe we’ve found ourselves a second occupation.”

  “Gravediggers?” one of the shovelers asked.

  The three other workers stared this man down.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  73

  When Garman’s vehicle crossed an imaginary line one mile from the U-Stor-It facility, two members of the SPD bomb squad moved into place, accompanied by Tech Service Officer Danny Kotch and psychologist Daphne Matthews.

  Kotch worked flawlessly with the fiber-optic camera, Daphne immediately alongside. The thin black wire was fed under the gap in the garage door and the first images of the unit’s contents were revealed.