Beyond Recognition lbadm-4

by Ridley Pearson

  She did not look again at Jonny Garman; the woman whom she had become for this charade could care less. Instead, she swung open the passenger door and ran an inspecting finger over the dash, satisfying herself that the sticky mess was gone for good.

  A moment later she was safe behind the wheel. Safe, but for how long? she wondered, feeling like the guinea pig she was.

  Daphne sat transfixed. They would have to wait to study the tape recorded inside the car. But as far as she could tell, Garman had never gone for the glove box and the registration therein. The address. It seemed impossible to her that she had judged him incorrectly. She had failed. A woman-some earlier customer-was going to die that very evening. She mumbled, “I just can’t believe it.”

  Boldt, too, seemed in a daze. “Maybe he has access to DMV information,” Boldt proposed. “Run the tag and lift the address that way. We don’t know anything about this guy.”

  “No, we don’t,” Daphne agreed. But she did know, and so did he, she suspected.

  “Maybe he’s a computer hacker. Who knows how he gets these women’s addresses?”

  He wouldn’t look over at her; for Daphne, that said enough.

  “Jesus, Lou,” she muttered.

  Boldt said, “We go ahead as planned. Martinelli did a great job. We watch the place and we wait for him.” Radio traffic filled their ears. Boldt responded to none of it. “We watch and see what he does. We follow. We have a huge surveillance team in place. We’ll stay with him, Daffy. We can beat the damn odds. This guy is not heading home to read a book tonight. This much we know. This much we made sure of.”

  “I’m sorry,” she apologized in a hushed whisper. But not to him, as he believed. Her apology was to Jonny Garman’s targeted victim-the one for whom he had sent the poem. The one she feared was scheduled to die.

  52

  Ben waited with Susan in the houseboat for an hour before they both became restless. Daphne was late, and despite his pleas Susan would not leave him alone there. Since their visit to the park, he could not stop thinking of Emily. He’d had it with the entire Daphne/Susan program. He wanted out.

  Susan, attempting to sound composed, suggested they head down to the police department, where Ben knew he would sit around bored for hours. “She’ll call,” he said.

  “She has been in the same meeting for nearly an hour and a half. I can’t stay with you, Ben. You’ll have to wait for her there.”

  “I’ll wait here,” he suggested, for about the fifth time.

  “Don’t test me, young man. It’s downtown or the center for you.”

  “The center?” he objected. “You don’t mean I have to sleep there?” He hadn’t slept there yet, and he wasn’t going to let any pattern develop in that regard.

  “Your choice.” Susan stood. “Downtown or the center?”

  Ben was terrified at the thought of spending a night in the youth detention center.

  “Downtown,” he answered.

  Ben and Susan stepped through Homicide’s controlled door.

  The place was jumping, cops hurrying back and forth like they were in the middle of a fire drill, most of them carrying paperwork, all of them looking tired. Some with their guns showing, which Ben thought was cool.

  Susan kept stopping people and asking for Daphne or Boldt, and finally one of them listened long enough to point down a hall and say something about a lieutenant.

  Susan pointed to an office chair pushed up against the wall and told Ben to take a seat.

  “I want to come,” he protested.

  “Now!” she directed him, turning his shoulders and giving him a slight push.

  Ben headed to the chair.

  Susan headed down the hall.

  Ben was alone for the first time in ages.

  He couldn’t get his mind off Emily. If he just got up and walked through that door …

  If he stayed in that chair, Susan would put him in the youth center for the night. He felt convinced of this. Conversely, their threats to hurt Emily’s business rang hollow; they needed him as a witness.

  He carefully slipped his hand into his pocket to make sure he still had the five bucks Daphne had given him for emergencies.

  He slipped off the chair, glancing around surreptitiously. No one seemed to be taking any notice of him. Susan remained down the hall and out of sight, right where he wanted her. He walked casually toward the exit, through the continuing chaos, a kid looking for the bathroom.

  Of the ten or fifteen people in the immediate area, only two women looked over and caught his eye, and they both offered him forced smiles, the way librarians do. He continued walking toward the door, shoulders straight, his back arched-just the way Daphne had told him to carry himself-sure that someone would get in his way and prevent him from leaving.

  But no one said a thing.

  Ben walked out through the door and broke into a run for the elevators the moment he rounded the corner.

  Emily! he thought, his heart swelling to the size of Montana.

  53

  Daphne knew that from the moment Jonny Garman had been identified at the Lux-Wash, he would never spend another moment of his life completely alone. There would always be someone keeping him under surveillance or in the cell next to him. There would be attorneys and counselors and doctors and judges and juries, but he would never be alone.

  On the extremely unlikely chance that Garman was not working solo, that an accomplice other than Hall or his father existed, the police could not risk a face-to-face meeting with their decoy, Marianne Martinelli.

  Leading Daphne and Boldt’s frustrations was that the phone line at 114 Lakewood Avenue was dead, having been out of service since the house had been repossessed by the city. This became of importance as Martinelli’s walkie-talkie began to lose battery power. At 4:43 P.M., the reconnected telephone at 114 Lakewood Avenue rang for the first time. Martinelli answered, sounding jumpy.

  “Hello?” the patrolwoman answered tentatively.

  “Boldt and Matthews on a conference call,” Boldt announced.

  “Can you hear me, Marianne?”

  “Yes. Go ahead.”

  It was Boldt, not Matthews who replied. “The suspect is still at the car wash. We expect him to remain there until five P.M. After that, he’ll be under constant surveillance, and you’ll be notified of his movement as it pertains to your location.”

  “I copy that,” she said. “We’re sending you a UPS delivery,” Boldt reported. “UPS, Martinelli. You copy that?”

  “UPS. Okay.”

  “Some mace, a fire hood, and a bottle of oxygen.”

  “And a battery pack,” Martinelli reminded him.

  “Right,” confirmed Matthews.

  “If he does watch your place,” Boldt informed her, “we’ll want you to leave the house, leaving it completely dark, no lights at all.”

  “To let him know the boy isn’t in the house with me. Yes. I understand.”

  Silence.

  Boldt said, “On the off-chance he should follow you, you will need a destination, not just driving around. We’re thinking a movie or maybe food shopping.”

  “He could rig the house while I’m gone.”

  “We’re aware of what he could do,” Boldt informed her. “We’ll have the house well covered.”

  “You did real well,” Daphne told her, wondering internally why Garman had failed to look for the address in the glove box. Wondering about his other victim.

  The UPS truck pulled up in front of 114 Lakewood Avenue at 4:55 P.M., and John LaMoia, dressed in a brown uniform, walked up the steps and knocked on the door. He made Martinelli sign for the package. He whispered to her, “We’re all pulling for you, Marianne.”

  The two of them went through a charade then, for the possible benefit of anyone unknown watching. Martinelli reached inside the door and held up a backpack for LaMoia, as if she wanted to send it. LaMoia returned to the truck and brought her back a collapsible paper box used for express shipments that he
quickly built for her, taping it together. While he did this, she quickly filled out the label as well as the shipping air bill. The backpack went into the box, which was then sealed.

  Inside Ben’s backpack was the video tape recorded directly from the Explorer’s hidden camera, a copy that promised a good clean look at Garman’s activities while inside the vehicle. Tech Services eagerly awaited this tape for review.

  “You gonna be around, John?” Martinelli asked, suddenly appearing quite afraid.

  “Right here. You’re the most popular girl in town tonight. No sweat.”

  “He’s insane, isn’t he?” They both knew to whom she was referring. She said, “I touched his hand. I can’t describe it to you.”

  “I gotta go,” LaMoia said. “Hang in there. It’s a no-brainer. He shows up; we nab him. Nothing to it.” He grabbed the express package and was off.

  “Right,” she answered, and then thanked the brown back of the delivery man uniform walking away from her. But the cop in her knew differently. LaMoia was himself nervous; he had not spoken that warmly to her since their third date. Had someone coached him to be that way?

  She wanted it over with.

  Inside the house again, she ripped open the package. Included was a spare battery for her radio, which she replaced just in time for her to receive the surveillance team communication.

  Jonny Garman had just left the car wash.

  SURVEILLANCE 1: We got a problem. Suspect is leaving by bicycle, not a car! He’s heading east on Eighty-fifth. He’s wearing a blue sweatshirt, hood up, jeans, riding a gray mountain bike. Sunglasses. No helmet.

  BOLDT: A bicycle. East on Eighty-fifth. Copy. Stay with him, One.

  Daphne and Boldt were still inside the steam-cleaner van parked two blocks away. The dispatcher barked a series of orders, deploying various surveillance teams. But the mood was ugly; a bicycle would be nearly impossible to follow. Garman rode fast, passing cars on the right, crossing on red lights at the pedestrian crosswalks, all the tricks. Dispatch scrambled to keep up, barely able to do so. He rode hard and he rode long, south through the U-District and across Montlake Bridge. The road grew steep and difficult, and had he suspected surveillance he could have lost them. In fact, twice all visual contact was lost, only to have him ride past a surveillance point, legs flailing. At Madison, he turned west toward the city, wreaking havoc with the team that endeavored to keep up with him. The expectation was that he would continue south, and the shift in manpower required to follow spun the radios into a hum of confusion. With no apparent intention on his part, Jonny Garman was giving them hell.

  When Boldt called for a helicopter, Daphne realized they were in trouble. The choppers went out at several hundred dollars an hour, and rather than instill confidence in her, the result was quite the opposite: panic seized her chest. The team was desperate.

  The order for the chopper came too late. Again without warning, the suspect, heading south on Broadway, turned left at Columbia, entered a short cul-de-sac, and jumped the sidewalk that allowed him through a series of posts installed to stop vehicular traffic. He shot down the hill, crossed 12th Ave. E. and literally vanished.

  An unmarked car jumped the grassy knoll at James Way, skidding and spraying mud, but never regained visual contact.

  Jonny Garman had disappeared.

  A bead of cool sweat trickled down Daphne’s rib cage, and she itched it away. Boldt’s body odor gave away his own tension. “Shit,” he mumbled, as the radio reports confirmed the disappearance.

  “He was heading south, Lou. Lakewood is south,” she reminded him, naming the street where Martinelli waited as a possible target.

  “Then why take Madison? Why that move on Broadway?” Boldt answered rhetorically, “I’ll tell you why: He spotted us. He made us.”

  “I don’t think so,” Daphne said. “Not one surveillance report indicated any paranoid behavior on his part. He was riding a route, that’s all. To the truck? To his lab? Who knows? A route, is all. To a computer somewhere he can run Martinelli’s tags? A route, is all.”

  Boldt ordered the tunnel park kept under surveillance. He was frantic, not at all himself. Despair paled his skin and glassed his eyes. Two teams were added to the surveillance on Lakewood Avenue. “He burned us!” Boldt said. And then, catching the irony of the statement, he began to laugh. A sick, pathetic laugh.

  Daphne felt tempted to reach over and touch him, as much from her own need as his. He had tears in his eyes-again-and she thought he might break, but he recovered as he had a dozen times before, that same afternoon.

  She recovered less well, as it turned out, torn by her failure to predict Garman’s behavior and her fears over the impending fire she felt certain was to come. But the final straw was neither of these. It was the dispatcher calmly turning around in his chair-the van bumping along the Seattle streets-and saying to Daphne, “Matthews, a message for you from headquarters: They want you to know that someone named Ben has escaped. I didn’t get a last name, and I don’t know from where he escaped, but they said you would want to hear about it.”

  Daphne gasped, her body cold with fear. “Pull this thing over!” she shouted.

  54

  Ben waited across the street from the small purple house with its familiar neon sign, though each passing minute felt more like an hour. Home: There was no other way for him to describe it. There was a Chevrolet truck parked in the driveway, and Ben immediately slipped into his role of detailed scrutiny and analysis, noting the bumper sticker that declared the driver was a proud parent of an honor roll student, the steel toolbox mounted into the bed, probably indicating a construction worker or some other handyman.

  Fifteen minutes later the driver of the truck, a lady who looked old enough to have kids, left Emily’s, climbed behind the wheel, and drove the truck away.

  Ben started out walking but ended up running across the street, up the short driveway, and to the back door. He beat a three-knock summons onto the chipped paint, and when Emily answered, her face lit up, her arms swung open, and he threw himself into that warmth and love, hoping beyond reason that she might never let go.

  A few minutes later she was offering him tea, toasting a slice of sourdough bread, and preparing a string of jams and jellies for him to choose from. Pouring them both a cup of tea, she delivered the toast and sat down across from him. She watched him with tear-pooled eyes as he tore into the toast and slurped down the tea.

  “You ran away,” said the psychic.

  Ben felt a spike of heat flood his cheeks. He forced a shrug, as if it wasn’t anything to get excited about.

  “You ran away from the police,” she completed.

  “They were busy,” he said. “Daphne was supposed to meet me.” Emily’s face screwed down a little tighter.

  “What?” he finally asked her.

  “We had a deal, Ben, you and me.”

  “I know, I know, but-”

  “Not buts. We had a deal. The police are looking after you. They’re trying to do their job.”

  “They threatened you.”

  “It’s not that,” she objected. “The police have been on my case for years. Sometimes they love psychics, like when they need them; sometimes they want to run them out of town. Believe me, I’m plenty familiar with the police. I can handle them. It’s you I had the deal with, not them.”

  “I know.”

  “And you promised me.”

  “I missed you,” he said honestly, daring to look up at her, though afraid of her anger with him.

  Tears sprang from her eyes. She blinked them away. Black ink ran down her cheeks, carried by the tears. Her lips were wet and puckered, and they quivered as she tried to speak. But then she came out of her chair, and around the table toward him, and took his head between her hands and drew him into her for another of those wonderful hugs.

  And Ben knew he wasn’t going anywhere.

  55

  Lou Boldt was a tangled knot of emotions. He had gone from the high o
f a surveillance operation to the low of losing the suspect amid a light drizzle that turned the air the same color gray as the sky, and everything in it the same color gray as the rain, until the world was a blur of gray images that blended together so that buildings, streetlamps, vehicles, people on bicycles, formed a homogeneous mass, and Jonathan Garman vanished into it like something in a magic trick.

  The fact that the video tape shot at the car wash did not show Garman going for the glove box, did not support a subsequent surveillance operation, meant that when Shoswitz looked for a scapegoat he did not have to look very far. That Boldt had engaged the follow-up surveillance operation before studying that video was at least explainable-he had wanted to protect Martinelli at all costs. But with nothing more than a psychological profile that played well, Boldt had only his twelve-year-old witness to connect Jonathan Garman to any crime whatsoever-and he had lost both of them, Garman and the witness.

  Boldt found himself in the unenviable position of preparing to eat crow. They had a fire inspector in lockup who had confessed to the arsons. They had Nicholas Hall’s admission that he had sold hypergolic rocket fuel to an unidentified third party. Garman had, under questioning, also confessed to the additional crime of setting fire to his estranged wife’s house trailer, a fire that had burned his son to disfigurement, proving in the eyes of many that he was capable of just about anything.

  With Garman’s first confession firmly in hand, the upper brass and the mayor had put the Scholar’s reign of terror to bed, assuring the public the fires were over. This had been done without Boldt’s involvement, just as the subsequent surveillance of Jonathan Garman had been done without their involvement. Shoswitz, the middleman, pushed Boldt to a decision the sergeant did not want to make.

  The lieutenant’s office smelled of foot odor and old coffee. Boldt remained standing despite the lieutenant’s repeated offer of a seat. Shoswitz confirmed himself as a pacer, working up a sweat between the back corners of his office. “I don’t know what to believe,” he finally said, in a tone that Boldt interpreted as his rambling phase. “Believe it or not … I mean, you want to know what the real truth of the matter is … Your ass, my ass … if we want to go upstairs tomorrow morning and try to tell them the fucking Scholar is still out there playing his games, the truth of the matter is we need another fire. I’m not shitting you. No fire, no sell. I’m not kidding. We got the note … every note meant a fire … so if there’s no fire tonight they’re going to say Garman mailed it to himself before we arrested him-and don’t go fucking waving the postmark at me, because I know all about it, and my career, your career, is not going to hang on a fucking postmark.”