Beyond Recognition lbadm-4

by Ridley Pearson

  Dixie’s round face looked Asian in certain expressions, his eyes wide-set, his nose flattened by a college intramural football game. There was a look of intelligence in his eyes. One sensed a formidable presence, a busy mind, just looking at the man. He came out from behind his desk and sat at a small conference table, using a jeweler’s screwdriver to clean his impeccably clean nails. He grimaced a smile at Boldt and indicated a plastic evidence bag left on the table.

  On the wall was a framed poster for a performance of Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona by the Seattle Repertory Theater and a black-and-white time exposure showing lightning strikes hitting the Space Needle at night. Boldt always found himself mesmerized by that photo, by the power of nature. There was also a pair of pen-and-inks of western subjects-horses and cabins-that reminded Boldt of Zane Grey.

  Boldt examined the contents of the bag, a blackened bone three inches by three inches. Dixie said, “From that fire the other night.” Several days had passed since the Dorothy Enwright arson. Until that moment, Boldt had not known which of his squad’s cases were involved. He took a deep breath and reminded himself that he had a lot to learn about fires.

  “Is this all?” the sergeant asked.

  “All that’s worth anything,” Dixie replied, working the screwdriver under his thumbnail. “It’s fairly common in burns for the spine and pelvis to go last. That’s a piece of the pelvic bone. Pelvis gives us sex. Spine gives us age. Do you see the calcification on the inside edge?” he asked. Boldt pointed. “Right. That indicates some aging. This wasn’t a teenager. Probably wasn’t even in her twenties.”

  “Her?” Boldt inquired, his own spine tingling. He had yet to see any paperwork confirming Witt’s mention of an eyewitness.

  “What we can tell you is that it was most probably a female. Beyond that, I’m afraid ….” His voice trailed off. “We sifted the site thoroughly. So did Marshal Five and the other inspectors who helped him out. I would have expected to see more than this,” he admitted, sensing correctly that it was to have been Boldt’s next question. “Fingers, toes, ankles, wrists, they can go pretty quickly.” He made it sound like a grocery list. Boldt held a vision of a woman burning to death. He trusted that eyewitness, paperwork or not. “But the femur, the spine, the pelvis … depending on how she fell, they take awhile to cook, even longer to reduce to ash.”

  “Time or heat?” Boldt asked.

  “The rate of destruction is a product of both.”

  “This was hot,” Boldt informed him. As suggested, he had spoken with air traffic control. The initial spike of flame had stretched eleven hundred feet into the night sky. No house fire had ever caused such a phenomenon. It was the kind of record setting of which Boldt wanted no part.

  “We’re hoping for some bone frags to come out of the lab work. We sent off a garbage can of ash and debris. Some metals hold up pretty well in fire. We might get something there. Quite honestly, it’s unusual to come away with only that.” He indicated the contents of the plastic evidence bag. “Highly unusual, one might even say. If an assistant had performed the site work for us, I’d send him or her back to try again. But I did this one myself, Lou. There just wasn’t anything to work with.” He paused. “You okay?”

  “I wouldn’t want to die like that.”

  “No.” Dixie added, “You wouldn’t like the autopsy either. Toasters and floaters, the two worst bodies in the business.”

  “So I’m working a homicide,” Boldt confirmed.

  “‘Circumstances of discovery raise a suspicion that this was a violent death.’ That’s how I’ll write it up. Are there circumstances of disappearance? That’s your bailiwick.”

  “There are,” Boldt confirmed. “One Dorothy Elaine Enwright went missing the night of the fire. An eyewitness saw a woman fitting Enwright’s description in the house just prior to the fire.”

  “Well, there you are,” Dixie said.

  “There I am,” Boldt replied.

  The medical examiner’s determination of a body present in the rubble threw the investigation into high gear and even higher profile. Local news agencies clamored for information. Boldt assigned two of his squad’s detectives to the investigation, John LaMoia and Bobbie Gaynes, to be joined by two probationary firemen, Sidney Fidler and Neil Bahan, loaned to the Seattle Police Department as arson investigators. Boldt would act as case supervisor, reporting, as always, directly to Phil Shoswitz.

  A coordinating meeting, arranged for the SPD fifth floor conference room, came off on time, as scheduled on Monday at 10 A.M., six days after the Enwright fire. It included Boldt’s team and four members of the King County Arson Task Force, an alliance formed of Marshal Five fire inspectors representing various fire districts within the county.

  Boldt had never been fond of meetings involving more than three people; to him, they seemed exercises in tongue wagging. But this meeting went differently. The four fire inspectors worked well with their brethren assigned to police duty, Fidler and Bahan. Boldt, LaMoia, and Gaynes participated primarily as onlookers while the technical details of the fire were discussed. A burn pattern on wood known as “alligatoring” had steered the inspectors toward the center of the structure, where destruction was so severe there was literally no evidence to be gathered. The area of origin-an essential starting point for any arson investigation-was therefore impossible to pinpoint.

  The longer the meeting went, the more anxious Boldt became. Reading between the spoken words, he experienced a sinking feeling that the fire’s intense heat had destroyed any and all indication of its origin. Worse, all six experts seemed both intimidated and surprised by the severity of the heat.

  With everyone still present, Neil Bahan summed up the discussion for the sake of Boldt and his detectives. “It goes like this, Sergeant. We have the initial plume reported as a flash. Not an explosion. That’s worrisome, because it excludes a hell of a lot of known accelerants. Add to that the eyewitness reports of the height of the plume, and the flame itself being a distinct purple in color, and we figure we’re looking at liquid accelerants. We could make some guesses, but we’re not going to. The prudent thing to do is send our samples off to the state crime lab and test for hydrocarbons. That will point us to the specific fuel used, which in turn may give John and Bobbie a retail or wholesale source to check out.” LaMoia and Gaynes nodded. Gaynes scribbled down a note. “As it is, we’ll put it out to every snitch we got. This guy brags about it-as they love to do-and we nip him. Meanwhile, we go about trying to make sense of the rest of the evidence.”

  “Which is?” Boldt questioned.

  Bahan eye-checked his buddies and said, “I would rather wait and see what the lab tells us, but the deal is this: We’ve got some popcorn in the foundation’s concrete, some spalling. Fire suppression washed a lot of this evidence away and may have affected the rest of it, but what we don’t have is slag or heavy metals-both of which we would expect to see with liquid accelerants. But added to that we have some blue concrete right beneath the center of the house-quite possibly the area of origin. That’s bad shit, blue concrete. That’s something we don’t want to find, because it means this thing went off somewhere above two thousand degrees. If that’s right, it lops off another whole shitload of known accelerants and, quite frankly, gets out of our area of expertise.”

  “ATF, maybe,” another of the fire inspectors suggested.

  Bahan agreed. “Yeah, maybe we bring in the Feds or send some of the stuff down to Chestnut Grove, their Sacramento lab. See what they have to say.”

  “So what you’re saying,” Boldt suggested, “is that the origin of the fire is unusual.”

  Two of the Marshal Fives laughed aloud.

  Bahan said, “You could say that, yes.”

  “And you’re suggesting that we stick by the ruling of suspicious origin.”

  “Most definitely. This sucker was torched, Sergeant.”

  “We’re checking out her ex-husband, any boyfriends, employer, insurance policies, n
eighbors,” Boldt informed the visitors. “We’ll turn up a suspect, and when we do, maybe we send one of you guys into his garage to have a look-see at his workbench?”

  “No shortage of volunteers for that assignment,” Bahan answered for the others. “This guy is good,” he explained. The others nodded.

  Boldt bristled at the idea of an arsonist being considered talented. “She was a mom. Did you know? Seven-year-old boy.”

  “He was in the fire?” one of the fire inspectors gasped, his face draining of color. It wasn’t difficult to spot the parents in this group.

  “No. Home with his father, thank God,” Boldt answered. He imagined his own son Miles in a fire like that. “Thank God,” he muttered again.

  Bahan said, “We turn it over to the lab and we see what we see. It’s really too early to make a decent appraisal. For the time being, it’s in the hands of the chemists.”

  “We’ll continue the questioning,” Boldt told them. “Maybe something shakes out.”

  The members of the Arson Task Force nodded, but Boldt’s own detective, John LaMoia, did not looked impressed. “John?” Boldt asked, wondering if he wanted to contribute.

  “Nothing,” LaMoia replied.

  It wasn’t nothing, and Boldt knew it. A feeling of impending dread accompanied him on his return to his office, where a blanket of telephone messages had collected like the falling leaves outside.

  “Lieutenant Boldt?” a deep male voice asked at the door, misquoting his rank.

  “Enough with the jokes,” Boldt complained, assuming LaMoia had put another rookie to work.

  It wasn’t another rookie he faced. It was one of the four Marshal Fives from the meeting. He didn’t remember the name. He was a tall, handsome man with wide shoulders and dark brown eyes. He wore a full beard. He had big teeth. Scandinavian, Boldt decided. The sergeant came out of his chair and corrected his rank. The two shook hands. The other’s right hand was hard and callused. He wore his visitor’s badge crooked, clipped on hastily. A pager hung at his belt, and his boots were heavy leather. His hair was cut short, his sleeves rolled up. He reintroduced himself as Steven Garman.

  “What district are you with?” Boldt asked.

  Garman answered, “Battalion Four: Ballard, Greenwood.”

  “I thought the meeting went well,” Boldt said.

  “Yeah, I suppose,” Garman replied anxiously.

  “Not for you?” Boldt attempted to clarify.

  “Listen, Sergeant,” the other man said, leaning on the word, “we’re overworked and underpaid. Sound familiar? Sometimes we connect the dots, sometimes we don’t.”

  Boldt wasn’t enjoying this. He wanted Garman to go away. “Paint by numbers,” Boldt said. “Those kind of dots.”

  “Exactly.”

  “So we don’t see the right picture.”

  “I knew you’d understand. We see a picture but not the right one.” Garman was a huge man. Boldt was uncomfortable with him standing.

  The sergeant borrowed a rolling chair from a nearby cubicle and pulled it up to his desk. He offered it to Garman, who viewed it suspiciously and said, “Maybe someplace a little quieter, a little more private.”

  Boldt allowed, “If this is an attempt to put me at ease, it isn’t working.”

  He had wanted to break the ice, but his visitor wasn’t amused. Garman looked around, searching for privacy.

  “Come on,” Boldt said. He led him into B, a small interrogation room next to A, the Box, the interrogation room of choice. Boldt closed the acoustically insulated door. They took seats at a bare Formica table rimmed with short brown cigarette burns. “Let’s talk about those dots,” Boldt said.

  “Everyone says you’re the go-to guy around here,” Garman said.

  Boldt countered modestly. “I’m the old man around here, if that’s what you mean.”

  “I’m told you’re willing to play hunches now and then.”

  “My own hunches, yeah,” Boldt agreed. Boldt was currently in the doghouse with his lieutenant for playing a hunch. He didn’t need another. He had taken on an investigation that lay outside his department’s jurisdiction-defined by the incorporated city’s boundaries. A thirty-five-year-old man had been found dead and decomposing in the middle of the national forest not far from Renton. That in itself might not have been too unusual, except that this particular man was clad in SCUBA gear, head to toe, flippers to mask. The nearest lake was seven miles away.

  Boldt had taken the job based on its unusual nature-though he was quick to point out to Lieutenant Shoswitz that he had not used one hour of SPD time on the investigation. Shoswitz’s argument was that by accepting the case Boldt had set a precedent. SPD was allowed to advise outside its jurisdiction, but Boldt had taken the case, assuming the position of lead detective, and this violated regulations.

  “I’m pretty careful about playing hunches,” Boldt said.

  That Boldt had solved the case in five phone calls was never discussed. Nor that, had Shoswitz added up the sergeant’s time-off-duty time-spent on the case, it would have amounted to less than one work day. Regulations were regulations.

  The solution was simple. A forest fire had raged several months earlier. Firefighters had fought the blaze on the ground, planes had dumped chemicals from the air, and helicopters had worked the spot fires. The victim had been diving in a mountain lake. Accidentally scooped up by a helicopter grabbing water to fight a spot fire, he had been dumped into the fire’s center from a hundred feet up. Case solved. Nonetheless, Shoswitz remained upset about Boldt’s violation of the regulations.

  “Unless I’m wrong, the first couple were just vacant structures,” Garman said. He didn’t strike Boldt as the kind of guy to be wrong. He exuded a quiet confidence once he got talking. “Listen, in this city, even a piece of ground the size of a postage stamp is worth ten grand, but not necessarily the structure on it.” He explained, “Property valued at ten grand or higher-that’s when Marshal Five is called in to investigate. Suspicious fire. Known arson. Any of those three. But truthfully, the way it works is that the IC-the incident commander-makes an early call on a fire and determines whether Marshal Five should investigate. We usually speak by phone. I’m apprised of the situation. If it’s cut and dried, some photos are shot, some sketches maybe, and the next day I look it all over. Ten times out of ten I agree with the call. It keeps us from investigating every fire there is.”

  He was working up to something and taking his sweet time about it. Boldt’s time also. Garman was an animal with his nose to the ground, carefully approaching the scent.

  Boldt felt like asking Garman why he had waited. Why hadn’t he brought up whatever it was at the meeting? Why be secretive and demand privacy and talk around it? Running out of patience, he said, “Maybe you should just tell me whatever it is.”

  “They fit some of this,” Garman replied. “Vacant structures, all of them, until now. Teardowns, over in Battalion Five, mostly. The land has all the value, the building nothing. We look at them-Marshal Five-because although they don’t fit the ten grand requirement, they obviously aren’t the result of a lightning strike. But ten times out of ten we have bigger fish to fry. Most of them are the work of JDs, kids out for kicks. We’re not going to catch them anyway. We shoot for a witness, but if we can’t scare one up they go in the back of the file cabinet with a heck of a lot of company. It wouldn’t be the same for you. I’m not talking dead bodies; I’m talking worthless shacks, garages, condemned buildings. Just kicks. A kid with a match and nothing to do.”

  “You’re making me uncomfortable, Mr. Garman. I’m viewing all this with a jaundiced eye.”

  “Six of them. Maybe as many as fourteen. Maybe more if I dig around. Battalion Five is not my turf, but we trade around, you know, and I’ve worked a few of them. I remember two that appeared to me to have burned especially hot: heavy alligatoring, some spalling, just like we were talking about.”

  “What exactly is spalling?” Boldt asked.

  “
The concrete gets so hot so fast that the little moisture that’s trapped inside it boils and explodes the surface. You’ve seen it on sidewalks in winter, maybe. Looks just the same. Like bad acne. Liquid accelerants, ten times out of ten. That’s okay in a shack because these kids typically use gasoline or some close relative-gas and diesel, diesel and acetone. Readily available stuff. But the two I’m talking about burned hotter than a big dog. Never seen gas do that. I wasn’t thinking in terms of a pro, because who’s going to bother with a little shack? But after we were talking just now, it occurred to me who might bother: Someone testing out his stuff. Let me tell ya, Sergeant. Every fire has a personality. I’m no expert when it comes to understanding everything about fire, even though that’s my job; no one knows everything. But as corny as it sounds, I do know that every fire tells its own story. Studied long enough, it reveals its secrets. To the ordinary eye it produces destruction and chaos, but to those of us who live and die with the beast, it speaks volumes. It will tell you when, where, and how the dragon was born and chronicles its growth to the raging inferno it becomes. Fire respects nothing. No one. But for everything it consumes, it leaves evidence, the telltale marks of who or what created it. It takes on the personality of its creator, just as offspring do their parents: some dull and uneventful; others creative and imaginative.

  “I walked the Enwright fire,” he continued. “I had met its little sister, its little brother, these stick burns I’m talking about. They’re all in the same family. To bring it up in the meeting, I embarrass my buddy; I make it look like he should have made more of those stick fires than he did. Monday morning quarterbacking. But it scares the fool out of me, the way those fires feel the same. And if that’s right, then they were warm-ups-pardon the pun. He wanted it just right for Enwright. Made sure he knew exactly what to expect: amount of fuel, speed of burn, degree of destruction.”