Beyond Recognition lbadm-4

by Ridley Pearson

“You need him to lead you to this stolen fuel-something like that,” Richert suggested. She wasn’t being antagonistic, but her questions were probing to the point that Boldt felt uncomfortable.

  Daphne drew everyone’s attention as she spoke. “A woman is going to die tonight if we don’t do something-and I’m not saying we should arrest him. We need to find him, fast. He may lead us to his cache of fuel or even attempt to rig a fire. Either way, we have a nice strong arrest in place.”

  Boldt knew her too well. That was not the typical Daphne line. He looked for the point of her statement and he said, “But we might lose another victim if we arrest him-”

  Daphne arched her eyebrows and completed for him. “And that’s not what we want.”

  The room’s resulting silence was punctuated by several of the phones ringing. Slowly the chaos took over again. Boldt said to her, “You have a plan, don’t you?”

  She nodded, straight-faced and serious. “Yes. But we’ll have to act immediately.” She dragged out a copy of the department’s personnel directory. Acting as a yearbook, it was divided into two general sections, active personnel and civilian employees, each of which was divided further by rank or classification. It was funded by the union as a means of making the department more familiar with itself. No personal phone numbers, addresses, or information of any sort was given, but internal phone extensions and squad assignments were listed, along with recreational interests and participation in the softball, volleyball, bowling, four-wheeling, and hunting clubs.

  Daphne opened the directory to page seven, marked by a Post-it. She produced a photograph of Steven Garman’s wife, Diana, and placed it alongside a head-and-shoulders photograph of a patrol-woman named Marianne Martinelli. The similarity between the two faces was impossible to miss, the only difference being Martinelli’s hair, which was cut a little longer at the time of the photo. Not looking up from the photo, Daphne called over to LaMoia, busy on the phone, “John? Are you still friends with that cosmetologist over at the Fifth Avenue Theater?”

  “The what?” he shouted, cupping the receiver.

  “The makeup artist,” she answered.

  “Geof? That queen? You bet.”

  Her voice strong with intent and confidence, she explained to Boldt, “The fact that he sent the note means he already has a victim in mind. Maybe we get lucky and we follow him right to that victim. But we both know that kind of surveillance fails more often than it succeeds. We’re able to stay with the suspect what, twenty to thirty percent of the time?”

  “About that.”

  “Which means the victim has a seventy-percent chance of going up in flames. Not terribly strong odds.”

  “Go on.”

  “We can pull him off the mark,” she said, tapping the police directory. As she spoke, the room went increasingly quiet, settling into an eerie hush. “That is, patrol officer Marianne Martinelli can. She’s a dead ringer for the mother. A haircut, a little makeup, a band of pale skin where her wedding ring once was, and he’ll drop the other mark in a New York minute once his mother comes through that car wash. We can take him by a nose ring and lead him right to the home of our choice. He lifts their addresses off the vehicle registration, right? That’s what we’re guessing. So we give him an address where we’re waiting for him. He shows up with his window-washing gear, prepared to pretend he’s got the wrong place, and we have him right where we want him, chemicals and all. Richert gets her evidence; we get our man.”

  “And Martinelli gets an ulcer,” Gaynes said.

  Boldt called out loudly, “Anybody here know Marianne Martinelli?” Every eye in the room fell immediately on John LaMoia, whose reputation with women-especially rookie women in their first year-was legendary.

  LaMoia looked like the cat caught with the mouse. He shrugged his shoulders and shook his head innocently, but then allowed in an embarrassed voice, “She and her husband were separated for a while. So we had a few dates. So what?”

  “Work the charm, John-boy,” Boldt ordered. “We need a volunteer.”

  50

  The events of the next ninety minutes ran like a video in fast-forward. At the peak of the chaos over twenty-one police officers were directly involved in Daphne’s plan to subvert the psychology of the suspect. Seven plainclothes officers were dispatched to get their cars washed. At 1:17 P.M., October 24, the radio room alerted Boldt that a possible suspect had been identified at the Lux-Wash on 85th St. N.W. in Greenwood. His description included a slight frame, 130 to 150 pounds, and a face hidden by a sweatshirt and sunglasses.

  On the way up to the surveillance, Boldt stopped at home to leave a note for Liz.

  As he entered the kitchen, he broke into tears. Everywhere he looked he saw Liz, everything he touched. He could recall their discussions, holidays, birthdays, lovemaking-somehow he couldn’t remember any of the bad times, only the good. It was not only for Liz that he wept but, selfishly, for himself as well, both out of self-pity and fear. He begged God for some kind of explanation and apologized for the years he had failed to pray, wondering if prayers could be heard when absent for so long. Did the line go dead like an unpaid telephone?

  How would he tell her that he knew? How much of his life was undone by this?

  He heard a car pull into the drive. He didn’t want to face her; he knew her secret, a secret she had chosen for her own reasons not to share with him. He wondered if he had any right to know or if she needed time to face this for herself first before sharing it, with him or anyone else. The time she had wanted at the cabin, alone with just one child, suddenly made much more sense to him. Perhaps she had wanted a closure with each of the kids, a time to reflect and resolve whatever internal conflicts were raging within her. He had no idea what knowledge of one’s own imminent death would inflict upon a person.

  He dried his eyes on his shirtsleeve and peered outside. It was Marina and the kids, being dropped off by Marina’s husband, not Liz. For a moment, his sentence was commuted. He stepped out into the harshness of sunlight and greeted Miles and Marina. He kissed Sarah. And when the tears flowed again, he walked directly to his car and, without a word, drove off, his little boy waving goodbye with troubled eyes.

  51

  “What do you think?” Daphne asked him. Boldt and Daphne stood in the far corner of a back parking lot behind an abandoned Super-Sav Market on 85th, four blocks from the Lux-Wash. The suspect remained under surveillance, the radio traffic running in a stream through Boldt’s earpiece. The first thing that struck Boldt was how old the Scotch tape looked, used to adhere a school portrait of Ben to the driver’s-side visor.

  “How did they do that?” he said, touching the tape. It was brittle to the touch. It looked as if it had endured a summer of scorching sunlight.

  “That’s it?” Daphne asked indignantly. “You look at this, and all you want to know is how we made the tape look so old?”

  She was referring to the rest of the car. On the floor of the passenger’s side of the front seat were some of Ben’s worksheets from school, filled in with his perfectly illegible scrawl and appropriately misspelled words. She had raided her own houseboat for those props. One school worksheet had a dusty imprint of a sneaker across it; next to it, on the floor, was a crushed milkshake cup from McDonald’s. On the dash was a Tonka toy dump truck upside down, and in the back seat a G.I. Joe action figure, one arm missing, and a good-sized plastic model of Han Solo’s airship from Star Wars-all Ben’s. On the floor of the back seat was a small fleece pullover and a pair of kid’s running shoes, beat-up and held together with silver tape. Resting on the back seat was one of Ben’s three backpacks that she had borrowed without asking. A silver-plated crucifix hung by a matching chain from the rearview mirror, in case a religious connection was necessary as a trigger.

  “It’s convincing,” Boldt agreed. “I wouldn’t have thought of the photo,” he admitted.

  “We need the direct connection to a child to be made, and yet we sure as hell can’t involve one.”
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  “It’s very convincing.”

  “The boy must be a trigger, Lou,” she said confidently. “The similarity to his mother, and the existence of a child. One of my mistakes was that I missed the role of the child.”

  “You sold me,” Boldt said. “Now the only thing we have to do,” he added, studying the car’s exterior, “is get this thing nice and dirty.”

  At 3:05 P.M., patrol officer Martinelli, dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt, driving a Ford Explorer, entered the inflatable structure leased by Lux-Wash, Incorporated. The mood inside SPD’s steam-cleaning van was tense but professional, the tiny space crowded by a video tech, a communications pro, and Boldt and Daphne, nearly in one another’s laps.

  Martinelli’s arrival was critically timed to place her car in the proper order so that the suspect-believed to be Jonathan Garman-would be the worker to clean her car’s interior. He was one of four such workers, used in rotation; it had required two other plainclothes detectives to determine the order. Jonathan Garman was next up, waiting down that line to do his job.

  Inside the van, the video monitor sparkled and sputtered, the image of Martinelli suddenly grainy and cloudy.

  “What’s up?” Boldt asked.

  “There’s a lot of metal in a car wash,” the tech answered. “The transmitter is hidden under the back seat, the antenna under the vehicle. No system is perfect. That’s why we have a camcorder in the car as well. That tape will be clean.”

  The screen continued to flash and spark; Martinelli’s radio channel filled with static. “I’m inside,” the detective said. On the screen, all motion was reduced to jerky freeze frames a second or two apart, as black horizontal bars refreshed the screen.

  “I’m not liking this,” Boldt said.

  “Neither am I, Sergeant,” the techie whined. “I’m working on it, okay?”

  Using her headset’s microphone, Daphne asked if Martinelli could hear her.

  “Good enough,” the woman replied.

  The woman’s physical resemblance to the photograph of Diana Garman was strikingly convincing, in part due to the efforts and talents of Geof Jeffries of the 5th Avenue Theater.

  When it was operating well, the monitor displayed a fish-eye view of the inside of the front seat of the car, from the driver’s door clear over to the passenger door.

  Dialogue from Martinelli’s microphone came through clearly as a male voice told her, “We’re not allowed to touch your personal stuff, ma’am. You’ll have to pick it up some if we’re gonna vacuum for ya. You can take your time.”

  Daphne instructed into Martinelli’s ear, “Leave it.” She wanted the triggers in place.

  “Do what you can,” Martinelli said.

  Surveillance, with a view of the far side of the car wash, reported that a worker was vacuuming the car. Garman’s participation was still a few steps away.

  On-screen, those in the van watched a pair of young black men vacuum the floors.

  Martinelli was reported heading toward the reception area.

  The car was in the system. Boldt never took his eyes off the monitor as he asked Daphne, “What’s your take?”

  “I feel good about it. What I wonder is whether Martinelli will hold up.”

  As she spoke, a man climbed into the front seat, rag in one hand, spray bottle of cleanser in the other. The video signal was worse. For several seconds at a time, the screen went entirely black, followed by a fuzzy freeze-frame of the worker’s shoulders or the back of the head as he furiously cleaned the inside front windows, dashboard, and rearview mirror.

  “Go!” Daphne told Martinelli, picturing the patrolwoman hurrying back to the car as if she had forgotten something.

  “Show us your face, pal,” Boldt encouraged the window washer.

  “Remember, you’re a bitch,” Daphne added, sitting forward on the stool. “You’re a bitchy mother. And you’re just about at wit’s end.”

  Martinelli yanked the earpiece from her ear, as directed, and walked toward Jonny Garman with a forced swagger to her hips, a stuck-up woman from the shoreline who had little time for the lower classes. Inside she was thinking that the next few minutes could propel her from first class patrol officer to a candidate for plainclothes detective work. She hadn’t even had time to call her husband and tell him. Where she had pulled off her wedding band was left a pale ring of white flesh that Daphne Matthews had declared perfect. She reminded herself that she was a divorced mother, bitter and overworked. Impatient. Perhaps the college acting classes would pay off, she thought. The highest grade she had gotten was a C. She hadn’t told Matthews that.

  “Young man,” she said loudly, raising her hand derisively and looking into those glasses from a distance. Intimidate. Provoke, Matthews had said. “Young man,” she repeated, stepping right up to Jonny Garman, her heart feeling as big as melon in her chest.

  The skin was not something he had been born with, but had been applied to a face ravaged by fire. The craftsmanship was not good; his nose looked like something made of clay by a first-year art student. That nose and his upper cheeks were all he allowed to be visible; strangely, Martinelli yearned to see the rest of him. She could picture the scar tissue around the hole of a mouth-plastic surgeons had the most trouble with the mouth; the transition, if there was one, between the plastic of his face and the skin of his neck. Did he have hair? she wondered, or were the few strands showing from a wig, as she suspected.

  He cowered, painfully shy. And then as he looked at her, as he caught sight of this woman approaching, his body seized as if jolted by an electrical shock. He stiffened and craned forward at the same time.

  He wore gloves, she noticed. Thin cowhide gloves, worn small so they held to his hands like a second skin.

  In as condescending a tone as she could muster she said, “My little angel has gone and spilled some pop all over the dashboard. It’s on the right, in front of the passenger seat. Be a good boy and clean it off for me.”

  She stepped closer to Garman. “You’re not going to make a problem for me, are you? I certainly hope not. It’s an easy enough thing to wipe a little pop off the dash.” She fumbled in her purse, demonstratively aiming it away from him so that he felt excluded.

  “Need a little lunch money, do we? Hmm?” She held up a single dollar bill in her bare left hand so there was no way he could miss the pale line where her ring had been. She stuffed the dollar into his unwilling hand. According to Matthews, it was this contact with him-standing there holding his hand, purposefully a little too long-that would make the connection. He would abhor any physical contact with her whatsoever. He would despise her, for the offer of money, for her condescending tone, and for the uninvited physical contact. “It’s not that cold, you know.” She let go his hand and lifted hers to her face. “All that wrapping. You’re all shuttered up like a house for winter.”

  She repeated, “The pop on the dash. Let’s try again: Did you hear me?”

  “Spilled pop on the dash,” he uttered, in a voice that sounded like coarse sandpaper on bare metal. She felt a chill pass through her. She didn’t want this man stalking her.

  She said, “That’s better. Thank you. I could have asked my angel to clean it up, I suppose. But then, that’s your job, isn’t it?” She walked away, working her hips again into a haughty and arrogant gait. She did not glance back; he was too strange. That voice had terrified her. She wanted some air; the warm, humid, soapy choke of the car wash was claustrophobic.

  Boldt and Daphne watched as Jonny Garman climbed into the Explorer hurriedly. For a long count of three he stared at Ben’s picture taped to the visor and then at the silver cross hanging from the mirror. He cleaned the glass, but at the same time he took in the toys, the fast-food trash, and the clothing. They watched as he dragged his rag across the dash, working his way toward the glove box and the vehicle’s registration inside. “Open it,” Daphne encouraged, as the car pulled into the pounding storm of the wash, as the water hit the windows in torrents. “Open
it,” she repeated, her voice slightly alarmed. Inside was the registration from which he would glean the address of the safe house-114 Lakewood Avenue South, a home claimed from drug dealers by the state tax commission.

  She felt a long shiver pass through her, a feeling of anticipation registering somewhere between good foreplay and total terror. Go for the glove box! she mentally encouraged. It was inconceivable to her that he might not.

  “We’ve got problems,” Boldt said, as the suspect climbed out of the front seat during the drying fans, and into the back.

  “Marianne?” Daphne said into the microphone, hoping the woman was inside the ladies’ room with the earpiece back in, as instructed.

  “Right here,” a nervous voice replied.

  “Phase two,” Daphne said. “And make it good!”

  Martinelli headed back into the waiting area and watched through the window as the Explorer moved along. Twice she caught sight of Garman inside the car, and both times his rag worked furiously against the glass. It was time. Her legs didn’t want to move. A man pushed into the waiting area: Ernie Waitts, a narco undercover cop. I’m okay, she told herself. We’re all over this guy. She pushed through the exit door and paid the man inside the cashier’s window with a twenty-dollar bill.

  As she approached the Explorer, she saw that the exterior was sparkling clean, from roof to wheels.

  She took long strides, for Garman had pushed the far door open and was backing out of the vehicle, still wiping as he went. She called out to him, “Young man! Young man!” as Daphne told her. “Did you get it cleaned up?”

  His body language stopped her cold, for he faced her with square shoulders, standing much taller than before. A different person. He has targeted me, she thought, knowing this instinctively. His stance was far more aggressive, confident, and inviting. She pointed out a water mark. Jonny Garman’s clay nostrils flared. Her bowels churned. As instructed she said, “Lakewood Avenue is no place for water marks.”