Boldt 04 - Beyond Recognition

by Ridley Pearson

  They played the video for him then, and it looked just as it did on TV, with a line of five guys shoulder to shoulder standing in front of a white board that had lines for different heights drawn onto it. They kept their arms and hands behind their backs. There was a short guy with a beard, and next to him a taller blond guy with a tattoo showing at his chest, and then Nick, and then another tall guy with a messed-up ear, withered and small, and then a guy who looked pretty much like Nick but not really. They all turned right, then left. They spoke the same line, one right after another, so Ben could hear their voices. But he didn’t need to hear the guy’s voice.

  “The guy in the middle,” Ben said. “The duffel bag had drugs in it.”

  “You’re absolutely sure?” Boldt asked. “If this is the man at the airport, the one in the truck, that’s important to us. We need to confirm that. We don’t want to mix things up. But if not—”

  “His name is Nick. He was a customer of Emily’s. He has his name on the back of his belt. He drives a light blue pickup with a white camper shell. There’s a Good Sam’s Club sticker on the back bumper, and there was a gun inside the camper shell: a pistol like the cops use on TV.”

  “You saw the gun in the camper?” Boldt asked.

  “I was in there,” Ben said.

  “Drugs?”

  “Stuff to make them, I think. Milky stuff. I saw a TV show about a drug lab one time. Like that.”

  Boldt said, “And the duffel bag had this stuff in it.”

  “In plastic things. Like for leftovers. Must have been a dozen of them.”

  “Tupperware.”

  “Taped shut with silver tape. And they had chemistry stuff written on them. You know? Letters and numbers.”

  “What else did you find in the camper?” Boldt asked. Eye to eye with Ben, who remained on the stool, Boldt told him, “You know what immunity is, Ben? You have immunity. Nothing you tell us can get you in trouble. We didn’t read you your rights, did we? Because you’re not a suspect, you’re a witness. Whatever you did is behind you. You can’t get in trouble for any of it. And Emily’s not going to get in trouble either. Okay? You don’t have to worry about it.”

  “I didn’t take any money,” Ben stated.

  Daphne said, “Ben, Sergeant Boldt didn’t mention money. If you lie to us, even once, then we can’t trust anything you tell us. Does that make sense to you? Do you see the importance of not lying?”

  “Let’s forget about the money,” Boldt said, as much to Daphne as to Ben. “Let’s talk about who was there at the airport. When you called nine-one-one you said it was a drug deal, didn’t you, son?”

  “I’m not your son.”

  “How many people were there, Ben,” Daphne encouraged.

  He didn’t think he should tell. Emily had warned him to never so much as touch one of the cars. It was illegal. But Daphne’s asking made it different.

  “Two,” Ben answered. “Nick and this other guy.”

  “The other guy,” Daphne said.

  Ben felt himself nod. The thing about Daphne was that she could get him to do things he didn’t plan on doing. It was almost as if she played tricks on him. The guys scared him, but not Daphne. He wanted her to hold him again; he wanted the others to leave so he could be alone with her. “What?” he asked her, seeing a strange look on her face.

  “Sergeant Boldt needs a description of the other guy.”

  “I didn’t see his face. He was over by some cars. It was dark. I couldn’t see him so good.”

  The artist, on a stool alongside Ben, started sketching. Ben watched in amazement as the inside of the parking garage came to life on the page. “You were looking toward the inside or the outside?” the man asked.

  “Inside,” Ben answered.

  Boldt considered his words. “What’s amazing about when you see something is that there is stuff you see that you don’t even know you saw. You say you didn’t see his face because it was dark. That’s okay. Was he standing between some of the cars?”

  Ben could recall the image clearly in his mind’s eye: a dark shape looking toward the truck. He felt the fear he had experienced, not knowing what to do. He nodded at Boldt. “Yeah, between some cars.”

  “And was he taller or shorter than the cars?”

  “Taller.” Ben understood then. “Yeah, taller,” he said proudly.

  “My size? Danny’s size?” Boldt asked, pointing to the artist, who was shading the cars and making the page look even more realistic.

  “Not as tall as you,” he told the sergeant. “Skinnier.”

  Daphne smiled, and Boldt looked at her disapprovingly.

  Boldt said, “Smaller all around, then? Shoulders, waist—a smaller frame?”

  “Yeah, I guess that’s right.”

  The artist worked furiously. On the page the shape of a body formed between two of the cars. Ben instructed the man, “He was standing back farther … was a little taller than that.” He couldn’t believe how clear it was in his mind. Seeing the artist’s sketch made it all so real for him—he knew exactly what was wrong with the picture. “There was a column there, you know? Yeah … like that. He was kinda leaning against it…. Yeah! There! That’s cool. Real cool.” He waited for the artist to get more of the guy on the page, then said, “His head was … I don’t know … thinner, you know?”

  “Narrower?” Boldt asked.

  “Yeah. Narrow. He had glasses. Big glasses, I think.” The artist corrected the head to where it was just right. He added the glasses three times until Ben said he had it. “A hat. One of those stretchy ones.”

  “A knit cap,” Boldt said.

  “Yeah. And a turtleneck up over his chin, I think. Or maybe a scarf or like the guys in the Westerns.”

  “A bandanna,” Daphne said.

  It amazed Ben how quickly the artist adjusted to every comment, how quickly it went down on the page. His hands moved in a flurry of activity, and when he pulled them away, it seemed like a Polaroid developing, the image growing out of nothing.

  “Jeans?” Boldt asked.

  “I couldn’t see his legs much,” Ben answered, more interested in the artist than Boldt. “No, not like that. Not a turtleneck, I guess.” The man erased it and tried a bandanna. “No. I don’t think so.” A moment later the man’s head changed completely. “Oh, wow! That’s it. That’s him.” The artist had drawn a hooded sweatshirt onto the man, the strings pulled tightly under his chin so that, when combined with the glasses, almost nothing showed of his face. “That’s it!” Ben repeated.

  “The hood up like that?” Boldt asked.

  “Just like that,” Ben answered.

  “Any markings on the clothes?” Boldt questioned. “A sports team? A company logo? The name of a city or town?”

  “You can shut your eyes if it helps,” Daphne said.

  Ben tried shutting his eyes, and the image that was frozen while on the artist’s page suddenly came to life. He could smell the car exhaust, hear the airplanes and car traffic; the guy moved his head back and forth, first looking toward the truck where Ben hid, then toward the elevator and Nick with that duffel bag. Light sparked off his mouth. Ben decided to mention this. “His teeth are shiny.”

  “Braces?” Boldt asked.

  “I don’t know,” Ben said, his eyes still squinted shut. “Can’t see. Not exactly.”

  “A gold tooth? A silver tooth?” Daphne asked.

  “I don’t know,” Ben answered honestly. “Can’t see much.”

  “What’s the man doing?” Boldt asked.

  Ben described the scene for them, the guy in the shadows checking out Nick and the truck. “He’s careful, you know? He’s waiting for Nick to get on the elevator. And then he does—Nick does—and the guy is coming for me, right at me!” He talked them through his panic as the guy headed toward the truck, the sense of panic, of diving back under the seat, of the truck never moving under the weight of the man, and then hearing that lock click into place. His terror at being locked up for
a second time.

  “As he walked toward the truck,” Daphne said calmly, “he came closer to you, didn’t he, Ben?” She added, “Maybe he stepped out of the shadows a little. Into the light a little. Go ahead and shut your eyes and try to picture that for me, would you? Can you remember? Can you see it?” Her voice was soothing, the same voice that had comforted him in the car, and so he closed his eyes, just as she said to do, and sure enough, the dark sinister form stepped out of the shadows, and for an instant Ben thought he could see part of the man’s face. What made the experience especially strange for him was that he didn’t remember this at all. Instead, it felt as if Daphne had made him see something he had never seen.

  “I don’t know….” he mumbled.

  “Go ahead,” she encouraged.

  “I’m not sure.”

  “It’s all right, Ben. You’re safe here. It didn’t feel safe then, did it?”

  “No way.”

  “You were scared. He was coming toward you.”

  “I can’t get out,” he told her. “The door is unlocked and I don’t dare go out there.”

  “He’s coming toward you.”

  “Yeah.”

  “But there’s more light.”

  “Headlights. A car’s headlights,” he said, for he could see the image inside his head: it was in black-and-white, not color, and it happened quickly, and no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t slow it down. “He’s wearing a mask, I think. Plastic. A white plastic mask. Shiny, you know? Like a hockey goalie, maybe.”

  “He wore a disguise,” Boldt said in a voice of disappointment. “Damn.”

  The artist said, “A mask inside the pulled-up hood. Glasses over the mask. Hell of a disguise.”

  The artist held up the sketch for him. It was just the guy’s head and shoulders, the parking garage a blur behind him. He had the sweatshirt up over most of his face, wore big dark glasses and had plastic-looking skin. The hat topped off the image. It was creepy to Ben how close that drawing came to real life.

  “That’s him,” Ben whispered. He didn’t want to talk too loudly. The picture seemed real enough that the guy might hear.

  43

  Boldt thought of himself less as a public enforcer, more as a paid puzzle solver. Forensic evidence, testimony of witnesses, medical examiner reports, unforeseen events—all added up to a giant puzzle that the lead detective was supposed to solve. In the case of an ongoing serial homicide investigation, failure to solve the puzzle resulted in more deaths, the loss of innocent lives. It proved to be potent motivation. It robbed one of a private life, deprived one of sleep, gnawed at one’s self-confidence. Boldt disliked himself and felt himself a failure—he couldn’t even blame Liz for her affair, if it was real; he’d been consumed with work for months.

  When he reached his hotel after questioning Ben and the clerk handed him a brown paper bag—and it wasn’t his laundry coming back—the sergeant experienced a pang of dread. His first thought was that it was a bomb. He carried it to his room carefully and spent five long minutes inspecting it. Perspiration breaking out on his brow, he dared to uncurl the top of the bag slowly and open it equally slowly. Inside was a note from LaMoia and a half dozen items purchased from a hardware store—items purchased by Melissa Heifitz on the same day as her fire.

  Boldt clicked the TV on to CNN and went about examining the contents of the bag: a compressed air canister called E-Z Flush, rubber gloves, a sponge head to a mop.

  The items from Enwright were in the dresser’s bottom drawer. He took these out and compared. Common to both groups were sponges and gloves. A bottle of Drano in the Enwright group, E-Z Flush in the other; a bottle of compressed gas to be used as a plunger to clear the stubborn drain. Boldt spun the device around in his hands. On the can’s back panel was a simple illustration of a sink and another of a bathtub. In his mind’s eye he recalled his own bathtub having trouble draining, and a moment later he placed it as on the night of his family’s evacuation.

  Clogged drains! he realized. A common link between Enwright, Heifitz, and even himself!

  He called Bernie Lofgrin at home. The lab man answered cheerfully. Boldt did not introduce himself, for Lofgrin knew his voice. He said, “What are the chances that the hypergolics, that the ignition system, is somehow related to plumbing, to the house plumbing? To clogged drains?”

  After a long silence, Lofgrin said, “I’m thinking.” He mumbled, “Plumbing?” But Boldt did not interrupt. “Clogged drains?”

  Boldt waited another few seconds and said, “One of the victims bought a New Age toilet plunger on the day she died. The other, some Drano.”

  “A plunger!” Lofgrin shouted excitedly. “A plunger?” he repeated. “Hang on. Hang on!” Then he said, “Just hang on a second,” as if Boldt was prepared to interrupt. Boldt overheard Lofgrin calling out to his wife. Carol came on the line and asked about Liz and the kids, stalling while her husband busied himself. She sounded good. Carol was given to fits of depression but had been stabilized by some recently developed drug, and the word from Bernie was that she was “back to normal,” though Boldt and others of his friends had come to distrust Bernie’s assessment; in the last two years, Carol had been involved in two bad traffic accidents later deemed attempted suicides, these during periods when Lofgrin had been convincing others that she was stable. Bernie Lofgrin carried his own cross, same as anyone else—more than most, Boldt decided. Perhaps the man’s work was his best escape. Perhaps it explained why he was so damn good at it, so dedicated.

  Lofgrin’s strained voice thanked his wife, interrupting her, and said, “Page two-fifty-seven. Do-It-Yourself: The Visual Dictionary. You got a copy?”

  It was a rhetorical question. Lofgrin had given Boldt two copies: one for home, one for the office. He’d done the same for several of the other detectives in Robbery/Homicide. Boldt told him, “No. I’m in my second week at this damn hotel.” His copy was in a small bookshelf that had been in his bedroom but had been moved to the front hall when the crib—currently occupied by Sarah—had entered their lives.

  “Page two-fifty-seven shows a cutaway illustration of a house, revealing the plumbing. Everything from the water meter to a P trap. Left of the page is a stack vent. Right of the page, a waste stack. Drains from the toilet, a sink, a tub, another tub, are all connected by a common pipe labeled ‘branch.’ On either end of the branch is a vertical riser that passes through roof flashing to the outside air. The diagram shows two such risers.

  “Draining water or waste creates a vacuum in the pipe,” Lofgrin continued. “The waste pipes need to be vented in order to allow draining. Think of a drinking straw with your finger over the top end. As long as you keep your finger tight—no venting—the straw holds whatever fluid is in it. But if you vent the straw by lifting your finger, the fluid drains out. Same in a house. Only the drains have stinky stuff in them, so the vents go out the roof, so you don’t smell them. Two of them, Lou. You get it?”

  “You lost me,” Boldt admitted.

  “It’s ingenious because it ensures the person living there is home at the time of the combustion. Two vent stacks: two parts to the hypergolics. Right?”

  “What the hell, Bernie? The hypergolics are in the vent stacks?”

  “I imagine so, yes. Seal the vent stacks with a thin membrane: wax paper? cling wrap? I don’t know. Place the two parts of the hypergolics above those seals. It might not take much—maybe just draining a full bathtub or running the clothes washer—and those seals break and run down the vent stacks. The two elements of the hypergolics make contact in the branch pipe. You’re looking for a way to burn the whole house, to destroy as much evidence as possible, and the plumbing gives it to you; it runs through the wall one floor to the next, one wall to the next. You open the bathtub drain or flush a toilet and suddenly every plumbing drain, every fixture in the house is a rocket nozzle. The porcelain melts, Lou: That was the clue I missed. Damn! That should have jumped out at me. Porcelain does not melt easily; it wo
uld have to be near the source of the burn. I let that confuse me. Every single piece of porcelain in the house was involved in the actual burn. You’ve got the answer, Lou. You figured it out!”

  “A plunger?”

  Lofgrin exclaimed, “He can set the explosives without ever entering the house. Do it all from the roof.”

  “He wasn’t even in the house,” Boldt mumbled. The method of planting the explosives had stumped him all along. He felt giddy. High.

  “His cover. Sure. Wash a few windows, climb up on the roof, fill the vent stacks with the hypergolics. A matter of minutes is all. He takes off.” It only took Lofgrin a second to make the connection that Boldt also made. “Jesus, Lou. Your house.”

  “I know.”

  “Your vents could be set. We could have proof here.” He sounded thrilled. Boldt felt terrified.

  “We need to evacuate the neighbors,” Lofgrin said.

  Boldt told the man, “Consider it done.”

  “Give me forty minutes,” Lofgrin requested. “I’m gonna need a big crew.”

  Boldt wandered the sidewalk in front of his home in a daze, wanting to go inside and take everything with him in case Bernie Lofgrin’s attempt to defuse his house failed. A home became a kind of kid’s shoe box, a collection of odds and ends, books, music, furniture. Boldt owned over ten thousand LPs and about two thousand CDs. Every inch of wall space in the house not previously occupied contained music. Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of the LPs were priceless.

  Each room through which he mentally wandered brought a tighter knot in his throat. His son had grown from an infant to a little boy in this house. Sarah had been conceived within these walls. His marriage had fully recovered here, resuscitated from the gagging spasm of its past.

  If he could have gone inside, he would have taken the bronzed baby shoes belonging to his son. A photo album of their marriage pictures, another of Liz giving birth to Miles, and a video of Sarah’s entrance into the world. A Charlie Parker first pressing, and a pair of ticket stubs to Dizzy Gillespie and Sarah Vaughan. An eagle feather found in the Olympics, and a lock of Liz’s hair cut before the birth of their son. A blue bowling shirt that read, MONK over the breast pocket and THE BOWLING BEARS on the back; he had only bowled on Berenson’s team once, but the shirt was a keeper.