Beyond Recognition lbadm-4

by Ridley Pearson

  “You know everybody real well: guys, wives, families. Grand Forks is a big base. It’s a town, a small city really.”

  LaMoia said, “Those are missile bases, aren’t they?”

  Garman smirked at the question. “Look it up, Detective. It’ll give you something to do.”

  LaMoia bristled and shifted uncomfortably where he stood. He sought out a kitchen chair, brought it around to face Garman, and straddled it backward.

  The lines were drawn-and by Garman himself, Boldt noted. He would work with Daphne, respect Boldt at a distance, and spar with LaMoia. What bothered Boldt the most was that he had sussed out the exact way Boldt would have done it.

  “Your marriage?” Daphne asked.

  “Out of bounds, counselor,” Garman replied.

  “I’m not a lawyer.”

  Garman stared at her. “We never did establish your exact role in this, did we? As I recall, you kind of skirted the question.”

  LaMoia said, “Look it up. It’ll give you something to do.”

  That caused a brief crack in Garman’s armor.

  Boldt felt a little more optimistic. He said, “So you didn’t lose the ladder or loan it to a friend-it was stolen.”

  “I’ll answer for a fourth time if you want,” Garman replied. He pursed his lips, looked each of them directly in the eye and said, “You’ll find this out anyway. The ladder was the least of my concerns. It was my truck that was stolen. A white pickup. Damn nice one, too. Ford. Bucket seats. Electric windows. The ladder, some turnout gear, my clipboard. Cars … trucks … stolen every day in this city, right? I figured it was probably chopped and on its way by ship to Singapore or wherever they end up. Until the poems, the notes. Then I wondered if maybe I was some kind of target all along.” He looked directly at LaMoia. “Of course, maybe I stole it myself and stashed it somewhere to use later in these arsons. Great excuse, a stolen truck.”

  LaMoia had his hands full. Boldt was used to rapid-fire comebacks, but the detective was slow off the blocks. All he managed to say was, “Yeah, great excuse.”

  They did the dance for the next forty minutes, but nothing worthwhile surfaced. Only LaMoia’s questions were answered sarcastically. If Daphne repeated the question, Garman answered it. Boldt saw through the ruse. It meant that Garman feared LaMoia most of all-and he was correct in doing so. LaMoia didn’t do the dance, he just stepped on toes and crashed his way through. When he got on a roll, when he got hot, he could pin a suspect in a matter of a couple of questions. Garman had sensed this quickly and did his best to prevent LaMoia from getting a rhythm going. That particular session was won by Garman, but there would be others.

  He was the closest thing they had to a suspect, and Boldt was not about to let him go. He would cut him distance, give him some rope-hopefully enough to let him hang himself.

  The interrogation was, in fact, little more than a stall for time.

  Twenty-four-hour surveillance began thirty minutes before their departure.

  Steven Garman was suspect number one.

  35

  Ben’s world had gone down in flames. First the guy trying to kill him, then the discovery of the body … he couldn’t even think about it. Calling 911 and returning to watch his stepfather being arrested. It had a dreamlike quality, distant and yet present at the same time.

  And whereas he had forgotten so much of his mother, her reality clouded by his stepfather’s unyielding demands and punishments, she was suddenly a much greater part of him. He found her present in his thoughts, before him as a vision, a soothing, calming force at once transparent and yet palpably real, like an ocean current. Taking him somewhere new and different.

  The days immediately after the incident had been among the best in his life. Emily had given him his own room, his own towels; she had cooked his meals and even made him a sandwich for school lunch. He didn’t tell her that he didn’t go to school for those days-he was too terrified the blue truck might return, that the nightmare might start all over again. So he skipped school, climbed trees, and watched boats and Windsurfers out on Lake Washington, looking like moths on a window. He didn’t even have the five hundred bucks. It was at the house, hidden in his room, and he sure wasn’t going back there.

  They were good days, even though Emily wouldn’t let him help her with her clients, something Ben didn’t understand but didn’t protest too loudly. He wasn’t going to push things. At night she turned off her neon sign and locked her door, and together they either played cards or worked on a jigsaw puzzle. Emily didn’t own a television, something that stunned Ben when he had first learned of it, but he hadn’t missed it at all. Before bed she would read to him, which was a first. Aside from teachers at school, no one had ever read to Ben in his twelve years.

  Being caught by the police had scared him to death. Convinced that they knew about the five hundred dollars, he had refused to speak at first. But when Daphne Matthews had given him the choice of a juvenile detention center or going home with her to her houseboat, Ben had spoken up loud and clear. He had never seen a houseboat; he could just imagine the detention center. Speaking had broken the ice. It had been hard not to talk, given all that had happened. Daphne proved to be both a nice woman and someone easy to talk to-almost as if she knew what he was thinking before he said anything. She amazed him that way.

  Even so, he missed Emily with an ache in his heart unmatched since he discovered his mother’s ring in the crawl space.

  At that moment he sat on a couch in Daphne’s houseboat, the television tuned to a black-and-white rerun on Nickelodeon.

  For the past two days he had never been alone, except in the bathroom. When Daphne wasn’t there, Susan was. He considered running away, though the only place he could think to go was Emily’s, and it would be the first place they would look for him. Besides, Daphne had warned him that if he “misbehaved in any way whatsoever” it would hurt Emily. She hadn’t spelled it out, but it was pretty clear to him that Emily would be out of business and he would lose any chance of ever living with her again. That was unthinkable. Emily was all he had. No running away. He missed her something awful.

  Daphne picked him up every afternoon from “school,” a place surrounded by wire fence, for juveniles in detention. They went for snacks. They drove around. She had taken him to the Science Center, a place he’d never been. After dinner she took him to her houseboat and he watched television or read a book. The houseboat was small, but he liked it okay. The walls were thin. When she thought he was reading, he was actually listening to her on the phone. She spoke to someone named Owen, and he knew enough to know that things weren’t going great between them. Twice she had hung up and started crying. It had never occurred to him that police ever cried.

  Twice, he had stolen a look at Daphne’s papers, because she wrote at the little desk downstairs where Ben slept, and he had to know if it was about him or not. So he read everything he could find, including the thick file she carried back and forth between home and the office. To Ben it wasn’t much different from peering in car windows.

  He wasn’t sure exactly why, but she made him write one page in a diary every day. If he wrote in the diary, he didn’t have to sit down and talk to her at night-only to the other woman, Susan, during the day. To avoid the extra talking, he did the writing. She had told him he could write about anything-school, home, Emily’s, his dreams-or he could make up a story.

  The night before, he had dreamed about being part of an Egyptian archaeological dig, like on the National Geographic specials. He had to crawl on his belly inside the pyramid, crawl over rocks and dirt and mud. It reminded him of Indiana Jones. And when he got to the tomb, there was all this gold-gold rings of every size-and a mummy of the queen, all wrapped up in gauze. And when he unwrapped the mummy, it was his mother’s face. Frightened, he had run from the place, leaving all the gold behind. Losing his way. He had awakened right there on that fold-out couch.

  He put his pencil on the third page of the diary and began
to slowly scrawl out his dream.

  Last nite I dreamed I was in Egipt….

  36

  Boldt likened an investigation to an enormous rock or boulder on the summit of a mountain. Initially, the investigator’s job was to climb that mountain, gathering up whatever tools made themselves available-whatever evidence could be found. Reaching the rock, tools in hand, the investigator went about trying to leverage the rock, summoning whatever size team was necessary. Together, the team went about the job of displacing the rock, prying, pushing, shoving. The better organized the team, the better directed, the quicker the boulder gave way. Once displaced, the investigation was rolled toward the edge, given one final push, and gravity took over, at which point the task was to stay with it-all teammates pursuing it simultaneously-a mad, frantic race down hill in the midst of a landslide created by the beast itself. The job at hand by now: to keep the rock from exploding into bits at the bottom.

  Boldt was caught in that landslide.

  He didn’t recognize it at first, and this typically proved the most difficult task of all-understanding what phase of the investigation one was in-for inevitably some of the team were still uphill with the pry bars while the rock itself was hurling toward the bottom. The possible involvement of the psychic’s military man with the burned hand, the ATF lab’s suggestion of rocket fuel as the accelerant, and finally Garman’s purchase of a Werner ladder had sent the rock tumbling downhill. At that point it became Boldt’s job to stay with it, to shape the investigation into something manageable. That task was made more difficult by two subsequent occurrences.

  The first was Garman’s receipt of a fourth poem and piece of green plastic-this following his interrogation. Was he brazenly taunting the police, Boldt wondered-or was he, as he claimed, an innocent go-between?

  The second was a phone call received by Daphne from Emily Richland on that same day. She hurried into the bullpen, out of breath from having run downstairs from the ninth floor. Her voice was frantic, her words rushed as she shouted, “That was her! Emily! Nick, the guy with the burned hand, just made an appointment with her for five o’clock today. That’s only two hours from now. Can we handle it?”

  Boldt felt an immediate knot of tension, from his stomach to his pounding head. Two hours, he wondered. Surveillance, ERT, bomb squad-a repeat of the team assembled just over a week earlier. Branslonovich was barely in her grave. His memory of that spectral vision haunted him. “We’ll try,” he said.

  37

  At 4:49 P.M., a bald-headed man wearing khakis and ankle-high deck shoes came out through the front door of the purple house on 21st Avenue East. The detectives had nicknamed him the General. The General wore wire-rimmed glasses and a blue beret. He carried a small brown leather briefcase as he walked briskly to a nondescript station wagon and drove off. The briefcase had contained a lavaliere condenser microphone and a battery-powered wireless radio transmitter, presently taped to the bottom of Emily’s “reading” table. A wide-angle black-and-white fiber-optic camera was installed into the kitchen peephole, giving those in the operations van a look at Emily’s back and shoulders and a slightly distorted fish-eye view of the face of her client. The video’s transmitter was connected to a Direct TV dish mounted on the outside of the purple house.

  The operations van, the same steam-cleaning van used less than a week before, was parked a block down 21st.

  A FOR SALE sign had been placed on the lawn of the adjacent house. Above the sign was a small plaque announcing OPEN HOUSE, complete with six colorful balloons, and a floodlight lighting the sign. The lights to this house were all ablaze. The mustached man in the green sport jacket boasting the real estate logo wore pressed blue jeans and ostrich cowboy boots. LaMoia came and went from that house, greeting other undercover cops who arrived on schedule to view the house, all of whom kept one eye on the purple house next door and a flesh-colored earpiece embedded in their right ears. In the back room of this house, two members of the bomb squad and two ERT officers awaited orders.

  Two other members of the bomb squad ran the tow truck that was busy-albeit slowly-hoisting an illegally parked car up onto the flatbed. Their location, immediately outside of the driveway to the purple house, allowed them quick access to the light blue truck and white camper shell that was expected any minute.

  Boldt, Bobbie Gaynes, and Daphne occupied fuzzy padded seats that faced a large Mylar-covered picture window in a cream brown customized recreational van parked across the street from the open house. Gaynes had the body of a gymnast and the bright blue eyes of a child on Christmas morning. She wore a quilted white thermal undershirt and blue jeans and leather Redwing work boots with waffle soles. Boldt had his cellular phone in hand, the line open to a phone set that connected directly to the headset of the operations van dispatcher. At his feet were two portable radio systems, one that allowed them to communicate with, and to hear, the secured channel of radio traffic; the second, a live feed from the transmitter inside the purple house. A cellular phone in the seat next to Gaynes was wired to a battery-operated portable fax machine. On the floor lay two shotguns, a nightstick, a TASER, and two boxes of shotgun shells. Next to these were two flak vests marked POLICE in bright yellow letters. Boldt looked around, realizing they seemed equipped for a small war.

  On the second floor of the open house, in a storage room left dark, a police photographer operated a pair of 35-mm Nikons, each with a different speed film. Every movement would be recorded, every word.

  A bicyclist, a motorcycle rider, and two unmarked cars were spread between the surrounding streets, ready to follow the truck when it left the area. The drivers of these vehicles also were keeping an eye out for the camper’s arrival.

  At 4:57 P.M. the motorcycle rider’s voice came clearly over the radio.

  RIDER: Suspect’s vehicle, Washington tag 124 B76, just passed checkpoint Bravo, headed in a westerly direction. Copy?

  DISPATCH: Westbound. Copy.

  “Right on time,” Boldt said, checking his watch.

  Daphne, wearing her game face, was prepared to deliver a real-time psychological evaluation of the suspect.

  DISPATCH: 124 B76 is registered to one Nicholas Trenton Hall, a male Caucasian, twenty-six years of age. Residence listed as 134 232nd Street South, Parkland.

  “Here he comes,” said Gaynes, from where she had her eye to a crack left between a pair of brown curtains that kept the van’s two forward seats separate from the passenger area. Seeing the truck approaching, Boldt felt a stirring of vengeful anger. He recalled Branslonovich twirling in flames in the circle of trees, like an effigy burning. One man responsible for the death of so many.

  Daphne said, “Is he Air Force? Can we confirm that?”

  Boldt repeated this question into his phone. Dispatch replied that a “full query” was under way. He reported this to Daphne. She nodded, her sober face revealing no emotion.

  Not thirty seconds had passed before Boldt, holding the phone loosely to his ear, pressed it closer and relayed to Daphne, “He was Air Force for eight of the last eleven years, a civilian employee at Chief Joseph for the last three.”

  “The discharge-his employment change-coincides with the hand injury. Bet on it.”

  “Is he our guy?” Gaynes asked from the front, where she watched the slow approach of the truck.

  Boldt shrugged. He glanced out the window. LaMoia was on the porch of the open house, shaking hands and saying goodbye to Brimsley and Meyers, a pair of Narcotics detectives. Brimsley and Meyers were among the best shots on the force with handguns. Boldt had wanted them outside, on the playing field, at the time of the suspect’s arrival. If the surveillance went bad, he reasoned, case histories showed it would happen in the first two minutes. He wanted his best people out there. He knew Brimsley and Meyers well enough to judge them oversized; they were wearing police vests, he beneath his sport coat, she beneath a blue rain slicker. The two cops stopped on the path, turned, and waved goodbye, Brimsley shouting his thanks to the re
al estate agent, both officers facing the purple house slightly, ready for weapons fire.

  Nicholas Hall left his truck and followed the path past the huge globe, his face reflecting the colors in the neon sign. He pushed the button. The doorbell was heard over the surveillance radio.

  Boldt, tight as a knot, muttered, “Get him inside.”

  The suspect took notice of Brimsley and Meyers next door. He then glanced around cautiously, suspiciously. He looked right at the police van. “Freeze,” Boldt said. “No one breathes.” Hall’s attention on his surroundings continued even after Emily answered the door. His attention focused on the two men struggling to hoist the car up onto the tow truck. The bomb squad crew was not particularly adept at car towing.

  The fax machine began to whine. Boldt glanced hotly toward it as a poor copy of a black-and-white photograph of the suspect slowly wound out, an enlargement of a driver’s license photo. Nicholas Hall looked average in every way.

  Into his phone, Boldt whispered, “Find out about that right hand.”

  The hand. Even from a distance it was noticeable. Boldt snagged a pair of binoculars, glad to have the porch light. The hand. A single piece of red flesh with three fingernails growing out of the end. It looked as though the man had put his real hand into a pink ballerina slipper or a costume glove. But this glove would not come off. A moment of panic surged through Boldt at first sight of that hand: Could such a person climb and descend trees? Could he carve biblical references into a tree trunk? Boldt snatched up his phone and told the dispatcher to reach him on the radio if necessary. He ended the call on the cellular and dialed Lofgrin’s office, hoping the man had stayed late, as he often did.

  Gaynes handed Boldt the fax of Hall’s face. Boldt accepted the fax but put it quickly aside.

  At the front door, Hall continued to watch the two at the tow truck.