They had run driver’s license and vehicle registration checks on Garman, he recalled. Had LaMoia run credit checks and medical records? He couldn’t remember. But then he thought they must have, because they knew the exact date of Jonathan Garman’s admission for severe burns in the hospital at Grand Forks. And, if so, they had not discovered any record of medical insurance or they would have had an address to run down, even if only a mail drop.
Think, think! he told himself. And as the idea struck him, Boldt pulled an abrupt about-face, cut back across the street, and ran at a full sprint back toward the school campus.
Less than five minutes later, he burst through the door of the First Hill Medical Clinic, a welfare outpatient service only a block south of the university. It operated out of an old dry-cleaning shop, the rusted mechanized clothes hanger chain still suspended from the ceiling like recovered dinosaur vertebrae.
Bobbie Gaynes was standing at the counter, halfway through a serious pile of paperwork. She viewed a sheet and turned. Viewed and turned. She took no notice of Boldt until he stood panting only a few feet away. Then she glanced over at him and said, “Well, don’t just stand there, Sergeant, take a chunk of this.” She passed him two inches of paperwork. As if they had been discussing the case together, she said, “Shifts changed at six o’clock, so no one here now saw him come in today. But one of the girls recognized the description. Garman uses the clinic, though she says the name doesn’t sound right. She says the plastic surgery was a lousy job-it’s always infecting along his ears. They’re not so pretty, evidently; he wears the sweatshirt hood up to hide them. And they’re real painful. If he was in today, he’s in these piles. And if he’s in these piles they have some paperwork on him. Everyone has to register here. It’s kind of like an uninsured HMO.”
A female nurse called another patient’s name into the crowded room. A male nurse answered the phone and sat down at a computer terminal.
“You didn’t call in,” Boldt said. Leafing through the doctors’ reports, he asked, “What do I look for?”
“An injection of this.” She passed him a Post-It that bore the handwritten name of an antibiotic. “That word will be in this space here,” she said, indicating a box on one of the forms. “But doctors can’t write, so it’s hard to know what you’re looking at. How can guys who spend ten years in graduate school write like they never made it through sixth grade?”
“How could you go an hour without checking in?”
She indicated the pay phone. There was someone on it, and a line waiting. “This place has been jumping. I figured, Do the job at hand. I know it’s a long shot but-”
“No, Bobbie, it’s a stroke of genius.” He didn’t often hand out that kind of compliment, and it stopped her for a moment.
“When that gal said she knew the disfigured guy with the sweatshirt-well, it kind of felt like Christmas. I wanted to unwrap the present for you. That’s all.” Suddenly she barked, “Got it!” and tugged one of the forms from the pile. She shouted to the male nurse at the computer terminal. “Jonny Babcock! Everything you’ve got on him!” The man hesitated, having no idea who Bobbie was. Boldt and his detective both produced their shields nearly in the same movement.
Boldt announced them: “Police!”
The resulting commotion behind them sounded like a stampede. Boldt turned around in time to see four youths already out the door and sprinting down the sidewalk.
Typing the name into the terminal, the male nurse observed, “Well, that’s certainly an effective way to thin the waiting room. Thank you. I’ll have to remember that.” Looking back at his screen he said, “Babcock, Jonathan. No phone. Apartment Two-C, 1704 Washington Street South. You want me to print it for you?”
Not hearing an answer, the man turned around. The two police officers were already out the door.
60
Daphne parked a block short of the Santori house on Jackson, where she and Boldt had arrested Nicholas Hall.
She reached for her cellular phone to call for backup, an involuntary action born of the scar on her neck, but reconsidered, both for Ben’s sake and, more honestly, because she wanted to avoid making a fool of herself for the second time in the same day. Prudence dictated that she investigate further before calling it in.
Taking her weapon into her hand inside the purse, she hung the purse casually off her right shoulder. She would not go into the driveway because she had the wrong car; Martinelli had driven an Explorer. Instead, she would park where she was and walk, head down. It seemed to her entirely plausible that Garman had gleaned the address off Ben’s backpack. If so, the Scholar might be watching the house from a tree or preparing his accelerants in a makeshift lab somewhere. He might be carving a biblical reference into a tree trunk. But she would not look up into the overhead branches, would not risk giving herself away. She would go inside and hope to find Ben. After that, she wasn’t sure.
With her sweaty fingers gripping the handgun inside her purse and her heart racing painfully in her chest, she took one final deep breath and left her vehicle. She had things under control, she convinced herself. No reason to panic.
Daphne barely took notice of the light drizzle, of the damp chill in the air. Falling mist was more common than sunshine as winter approached: one day Indian summer, the next a cold drool. Up the hill was a small park. Tall trees, she thought, believing Garman would be found there. She regretted not calling Boldt, not calling for backup, but was again reminded of the fiasco of the failed surveillance.
She walked to the back of the house and climbed the stairs to the landing. A sheet of plastic covered the hole of broken glass where Nicholas Hall had forced his way inside. If she were being watched, she couldn’t stand at her own backdoor all day debating whether to enter or not. She tried the door. It was locked. She raised her hand as if using a key and punched through the plastic and let herself in. The door fell open and she stepped inside. It banged shut as she closed it.
Daphne’s finger hesitated at the light switch, wondering if it was possibly a trigger. She glanced around the worn kitchen, suddenly thinking of everything as a trigger-the furniture, the faucets, the toilets, the thermostat, the phone-as if any step she took might initiate an explosion or a fire. The place gave her the creeps. She wanted out of there.
She decided to place her faith in Bernie Lofgrin: The trigger was always in the plumbing, not the wiring. She counted to five and threw the light switch. Nothing happened.
She moved through the kitchen and into the living room, slowly and cautiously, step by precious step.
Would he have had time to set his charge? She doubted it. Watch the house for action tonight, wash the windows once Daphne left in the morning.
She switched on several lights and called out Ben’s name, moving room to room. A cold shiver passed through her. She could picture herself as Dorothy Enwright or Melissa Heifitz. Another victim.
Garman was watching the house-she could feel it.
61
Ben heard the back door of his own house slam shut and immediately lifted his head to the open window of the crude tree house. Jack Santori was still under arrest, as far as he knew, so who the hell …? The kitchen light came on and, a few seconds later, the living room light.
To avoid any chance of being seen, Ben had been crashed out in his sleeping bag on the tree house floor, basically waiting for tomorrow to come. He would return to Emily and present his plan: They should run away together. No more police. No more Jack Santori. A new beginning. He was too excited by the idea to sleep, so instead he just lay in the dark, listening to the neighborhood, biding his time. And then the back door. Ben recognized that his own curiosity was what had gotten him into all this trouble. It kind of took control of him. Possessed him. He fought the urge to find out who was in his house, reminding himself over and over again that when the sun rose the following morning he was free. All he had to do was cool his jets until then. Sit tight.
A light went on in his bedroom.
He needed a better look. He just had to know what was going on.
He slipped out of the bag but waited before leaving the tree house, because headlights from 31st and 32nd caught the tops of the trees that grew on the western edge of Frink Park, and Ben didn’t want to take any chance of his being seen. He still had control of that burning curiosity that boiled away inside him. He didn’t want to be too impetuous.
The whitewash of the headlights receded, and Ben crept out onto the main limb, determined to climb higher where he might see down into his own bedroom.
The noise of the city hummed around him, the droning whine of tires, the distant rolling thunder of jets landing and taking off, the moan of ferry horns out on the water. He started up the tree.
Some car doors shut not far away, but he couldn’t make out the direction. When a beam of white light spread through the treetops Ben paused briefly, waiting for them to reach him and pass.
That was when he saw the man perched in a nearby tree.
If he had been in better control, he might not have gasped the way he did, but he lacked any such control, and his release of air brought him to the man’s attention. The guy was right at the same height, maybe thirty feet off the ground. He was three trees away, braced comfortably in the first main crotch.
Ben recognized him immediately. He wore a sweatshirt pulled up on his head, though he had ditched the sunglasses since the time Ben had seen him at the airport.
Another boy Ben’s age might have panicked and frozen in that tree, but Ben had Jack Santori to thank for his ability to move, and move quickly. The headlights swept past. The darkness washed the man out of the tree, and Ben out of his.
Ben moved faster than his legs had ever moved before. He swung like a monkey, one limb to the next, down, down, down. Faster and then faster still. As his eyes readjusted from the headlights, he glanced left and saw the other guy was descending too. And making better time.
Ben moved quickly, but the guy in the sweatshirt was superhuman the way he could climb. He was already halfway down his tree, checking on Ben the entire way.
It wasn’t going to be a social call. He had that same look Jack Santori had on a bad night. He intended to get up close to Ben, the way Jack did. To hurt him. To stop him from telling anyone-which was exactly what Ben had in mind.
Down … down … down….
Ben understood in another flash of headlights that he wasn’t going to win this race. And losers paid, as Santori was fond of saying. The guy had only a couple of limbs to go; Ben had fifteen feet.
The decision was not so much conscious thought as an act of survival. Had he reasoned, he would have understood the drop was too great, even given the soft damp earth below. He would not have gone with his instincts but instead would have descended further before jumping. But something propelled him off that limb, threw him right off it, into an open-armed jump, that began with a scream and ended with the solid impact of both legs striking the ground.
He hit hard, but no bones broke; he knew this instantly. And had his glass eye not popped out with the contact before he fully crashed and rolled through the wet leaves, his nose smashed, he might never have thought of what came next. But he had played this game too many times not to think of it, had scared the frost out of a dozen of Jack Santori’s playmates. He played dead.
He held his breath, popped both eyes wide open, and made no attempt to wipe the trickle of blood that oozed from his nose. Holding his breath was the hardest, but also the most important to the performance. To fool the girls his chest could not move at all.
The man from the tree was already down by the time Ben hit, and he ran to get a look at the boy. He cut through the dense underbrush and reached Ben’s silent body just as Daphne’s voice cut through the woods, calling, “Ben? Ben?”
The man glanced hotly in the direction of the voice, bent over, and looked directly into Ben’s face, wincing as he saw the pulpy red flesh of the open hollow eye socket. He tested Ben with the toe of his running shoe, checking for life. The trick to playing dead was just that: Gross them out with the bad eye, and they never looked at much else.
The two locked eye-to-eye, Ben getting a perfectly clear look at the man, who saw a fallen boy, dead of a broken neck.
The faceless man with eyes like a Halloween pumpkin-carved and artificial-hurried off through the woods as the back door banged shut: Daphne giving up.
Ben waited, hearing the man work back through the woods and up toward the small park, waited as he heard the distinctive sound of a bike chain, the pedals backing up.
As much as Ben tried to convince himself to leave it alone, he couldn’t; his system was charged with a small victory, his curiosity pumping like a drug. He sat up, the image of the man a silhouette through the woods as he pedaled away.
Wiping his bloody nose on his sleeve, Ben hurried to the shed behind his house. His bike was there. He had to do it. He had to follow the guy.
He did it for Emily-he told himself-and their chance for a future. He did it to help Daphne. But the truth of the matter was far more simple: He did it to erase the guilt of his earlier crime of climbing into that truck, of taking the money. To be a hero. This was his chance; he knew it instinctively. He would not let the opportunity pass him by.
He jumped onto the bike and went speeding out his driveway, leaving his glass eye far behind and the weight of his past right there along with it.
62
The rooming house was one block off Yesler Way in a racially mixed neighborhood that had both soul-food kitchens and acupuncture clinics. It was a brown-shingled two-story structure that looked more like a cheap motel.
In blatant disregard of Shoswitz’s orders, Boldt called in the services of Danny Kotch from the department’s Tech Services squad.
Rule number one, in dealing with a torch or a bomb maker, was never but never kick the apartment. Only experts entered such a place, and they went in gently and carefully, often through an opening in a wall they made themselves, rather than a door. Under no circumstances would Boldt attempt to pick Jonny Garman while the man was in the apartment. The pick would be on the street, with Garman out in the open and totally surrounded. But as far as Boldt was concerned, the pick would come later, and for two reasons: Boldt would need additional manpower, and he wanted another chance to size up the suspect and follow him if possible-to connect him to hard evidence.
They drove separately, Gaynes parking two blocks west on Washington but with a clean view of the front of the rooming house, Boldt taking up a position on 18th Avenue South near a battered dumpster, with a slightly obstructed view of what he took to be the building’s back door.
Boldt hung up from Kotch, called Domino’s Pizza, and placed an order for a medium sausage and mushroom, giving Garman’s address-always the easiest way to test if a suspect was home. Kotch and the pizza arrived nearly at the same time, with Kotch first. As ordered, he parked at 19th and Jackson and walked to Boldt’s car. He wore blue jeans and an NPR sweatshirt advertising Morning Edition.
When the pizza man had come and gone, an incident Kotch watched with great interest through a small pair of binoculars, the Tech Services man detailed his plan. “So no one answered. He’s not home or, if he is, not interested. You want me in the back or you would have set this up different. Am I right?”
“The back. Definitely. If you hear my car start, you’re out of there.”
“It’s dark enough that I’m okay with that,” the man replied. “I go fishing fiber-optic under that back door. That’s all?”
“Booby traps, condition of the interior, anything stored you see. Labels if possible.”
“But it’s our torch, right? The Scholar? What we’re thinking is fire, correct?”
“Correct.”
“How many minutes?” he asked. “I can go twenty, twenty-two feet inside. A goddamned nickel tour, Sergeant. How much do you want?”
“If he’s in there, you’re gone. If not, then three to five minutes. Short
and sweet. Can it record?”
“You bet. Camera goes direct to a camcorder with an LCD display. Camera is black-and-white, but it’s good quality.”
“If his lab isn’t in there, and I don’t think it is, I’d take any clues you happen upon.”
The pizza man tried a second time, apparently having checked his delivery list in the car or used a car phone to call the store. They couldn’t see him at the door, but they heard him pounding. He walked around back carrying the pie, gave up, and drove away a few minutes later.
“That’s my cue,” Kotch said, slipping out of the car.
Boldt wondered what kind of trouble he was in for using the man. Perhaps a case of beer or a bottle of Scotch would buy Kotch’s silence. Perhaps Shoswitz would find out and a shouting match would ensue. But he had no choice. For his own safety, for the safety of others in the rooming house, Kotch and the fiber-optic camera were essential.
Boldt looked on as Kotch walked casually across the street, a small backpack slung over one shoulder. In running shoes and jeans, he looked no different from thousands of other Seattlites. There was not a hint of cop about him. This was another area in which they differed. Boldt, with his substantial size and close-cropped hair, couldn’t help but reflect his twenty-four years of public service.
Kotch reached the back of the building and hurried up the only fire stairs to the second-story landing that provided egress for each of the rooms. He dropped to one knee, rummaged through the backpack, and in a matter of only seconds was feeding the thin wire attached to the miniature camera under the small gap in the door.
Specialists like Kotch were unique not only in their formidable technical knowledge and expertise but for their ability to appear casual under the most stressful circumstances. From the street, Kotch appeared to be searching out a pair of misplaced keys in his backpack, while in fact he continued to feed additional camera footage into the rented room.
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