Lou Boldt followed in step, ready to learn something. Howie Casterstein had that look about him.
Boldt spoke loudly enough to be heard over the whine of a passing motorcycle. “If you value your shoes,” he warned, “I wouldn’t go in there.”
17
Daphne Matthews danced with the devil. It was the same devil, nothing new. And though all her training, all her experience in the field of psychology, told her that to share it with another living person might exorcise it, might help purge it from her memory bank, she had never allowed it to come to that. To speak of it was to risk the fear of bringing it to life; being haunted by it was altogether different—controllable, in a strange uncontrollable way. Subconscious versus conscious. Dream versus reality. At all costs, she would never allow it to come back to life. She could not afford it. And so it went unmentioned. And so it ate into her at times like this, wormed into her like a bug trapped inside her ear and turning toward darkness instead of light. She lived with this darkness. She had even come to believe she had tamed it, which wasn’t true and was probably the most dangerous lie that she told herself. Her conviction remained in living with it rather than confronting it. The hypocrisy of her position was not lost on her; she was not that far gone. But there were times like this when she realized she was close.
When the devil possessed her, all else was lost. Gaps in time. Sometimes minutes, sometimes half an hour or more: a form of short-term amnesia, where she sat in a trancelike state. One day of her life, eleven years earlier, and still it managed to overcome her at times, force her to relive each dreadful, terrifying minute.
The images came to her in black-and-white, which she had never figured out. Snapshots, but with blurred motion to them: the gloved hand—the smell of him!—the pain as she was shoved into the car’s trunk…. At times vividly clear, at times disjointed and hard for her to see. Like flipping through the pages of a photo album too quickly.
Perhaps it was the privacy of her knowledge that prevented her from sharing it. Perhaps it was that no one, not even Owen Adler, was that close to her. Or perhaps she didn’t want to give it up. This thought concerned her most of all. Why hold on to such a thing? Why protect the horror? What sickness accounted for such behavior?
She caught him out of the corner of her eye. She protected her feelings for him as well. No one knew. It was their secret. Theirs to share, but never with others. And who had such answers? Who could possibly understand? Her heart still beat furiously when he passed in the hall, when she heard a Scott Hamilton cut and was reminded of him. He wasn’t particularly good-looking—although to her he was; he didn’t hush a crowd when he entered a room. He was an observer. He blended in. He was a student: of people, of behavior, of music, science, the arts. He was better at math than anyone else, and yet no one knew this of him. He could name the key of a song within seconds. He could remember the page number of a particular line he had read, a caption, a photograph. His eyes saw things before the techies ever uncovered them. He noticed things that no one else noticed and wasn’t afraid to mention them, but never in a bragging way. “You’re wearing a new scent.” “You cut your hair.” “You look tired today. Anything wrong?” He could tell a story and hold her captivated, regardless of its importance. And yet, around the building, he moved fairly unnoticed. No one seemed to know much about him, despite his twenty-odd years there. They talked of him, religiously sometimes—absurdly so. But no one noticed.
People had noticed her all her life. It was just something she lived with.
“Interrupting?” he asked.
Considerate. Humble. Cautious. Apprehensive. All that knowledge chiseled into him, like a figure cut of granite, and yet none of it showing. He couldn’t dress himself no matter how hard he tried. Missed buttons. Stains. Five-o’clock shadow for two days at a time. Disheveled didn’t do him service. Marriage didn’t help. Scuffed shoes. Knotted shoelaces. Hair uncombed. No one could change him. They could share time with him, be a part of him, but not change him. She envied Liz her chance and felt angry at times at how she had passed up the opportunity because of her own ambitions. Lou Boldt needed someone to nourish him, to draw out the genius, to stimulate. Liz missed so much of this in him. If only things had been different….
“No,” she answered. “Never.”
“New flowers,” he said.
“Yes.”
“And what is that, a Wonder Bra?”
She blushed. It was, in fact.
“You’re the talk of the bull pen.”
“And what do you think?”
He sat without invitation. “You don’t need it. Throw it away.”
“Okay.”
“Just like that?” he asked, surprised.
“Yes.”
“What does Owen say?”
Owen hadn’t noticed, but this wasn’t something she would share—even with him. “It’s under consideration.”
“Lucky Owen,” he said.
“Lucky Liz,” she fired back.
“Oh, yeah, lucky Liz,” he replied in his best self-deprecating tone. The trouble was, he believed it.
“How long since you washed those khakis?” she asked, knowing she was perhaps the only person from whom he would tolerate such things.
“Too long?”
She nodded.
“Yes, dear,” he mocked. He glanced down at himself, like a child looking for the problem. He said, “What’s up?” She had asked for his time.
“You’re aware that Shoswitz is hanging you out to dry for this?” she inquired.
“So what’s new?”
“He uses your name in every press conference, spouts fire and brimstone about how this killer will be caught and brought to justice. How you’re the one to do it, to bring him in. God, he makes it sound like something from a spaghetti Western. Truthfully, I don’t like it one bit. It makes you a potential target.”
“Now, Daffy—”
“It does, I’m telling you. This is my field, not yours, not Shoswitz’s. You don’t taunt a person like that; you don’t offer up targets. Listen, if the Scholar’s attacking a particular kind of building, or if he offered to sell these women aluminum siding and they declined, that’s one thing. But if he’s focused on Garman, if this is about revenge, if that’s his mind-set, Shoswitz is wrong to build you into a gunslinging bounty hunter. These guys operate on hair triggers, Lou. He could switch targets like that.” She snapped her fingers.
“What’s done is done,” Boldt replied. “Shoswitz only takes credit, never blame. It’s what preserves his job, his position. It’s what turns me off of ever wanting to take a desk here. You have to know how to play the game, and frankly it doesn’t interest me.”
“Thank goodness,” she replied. “I’m going to speak with him,” she declared. “Tell him to stop it. Just so you know.” She knew he wouldn’t argue with her; he chose his battles carefully.
“Melissa Heifitz,” Boldt said. “Dixie confirmed it this morning. Dental records. They found five teeth in the ashes. Two of them are confirmed as Melissa’s. Twenty-nine years old. Widowed mother of one. Husband was a construction worker, cement. She was a bookkeeper for a professional building up on Eighty-fifth. Doctors and dentists. No connection that we can see to Dorothy Enwright. A nice looking woman,” he said, passing her the driver’s license photo. “Parents live in Lynnwood. A sister in Portland. One very normal life abruptly brought to an end.” She could hear the knot in his throat. He took every victim on as a member of his own family. It made him unique. Perhaps it explained his brilliance, but it made him vulnerable as well. He said, “You know they used to burn people at the stake.” He left it hanging there for her.
“Do you see it?” she asked him, the driver’s license photograph still in hand. “The coloring? Even the shape of her head?”
“What are we talking about?” Boldt inquired, sitting forward.
Daphne craned herself over her desk and fingered through a stack of manila file folders. She extricated one
and opened it. She passed Boldt a bad photocopy of a snapshot of Dorothy Enwright. “How about now?” she asked.
“Oh, shit,” said the man who rarely cursed.
“I think we can rule out the structure as the target. I think we can let Garman off the hook. There’s a specific look to his victims: dark hair cut short, thin face. He’s chosen death by fire—”
“Which is ridiculous,” Boldt interjected. “There are a dozen easier ways to kill someone.”
“Not ridiculous,” she corrected, “symbolic. The fire holds some kind of symbolism for him, or he wouldn’t go to all that trouble. Right? It’s important to him that they burn. Why? Because of the image of Hell? Because his mother intentionally burned him as a child? Because she’s unclean and he’s attempting to purify her?”
“You’re giving me the creeps here,” Boldt said, crossing his arms as if cold.
“I’m giving you motives, the psychological side of what fire may mean to him: religion, revenge, purification. They’re all relevant here.”
“Some guy tapping brunettes because he’s screwed up about his mother?”
“Or a girlfriend, or a teacher, or a baby-sitter, or a neighbor. He tries to have sex with a woman and he can’t perform; she laughs at him, teases him. I’m telling you, Lou—and I know you don’t want to hear this—sex and rejection probably play a part in this. His mother catches him playing with himself and takes an iron to him—”
“Enough.”
“We see that kind of thing,” she pressed.
“I don’t need this.”
“You do if you’re going to catch him,” she cautioned. “You have a premeditated killer burning down structures in a way that is confounding the specialists. He’s confident enough to send poems and drawings in advance of the kills. He has a specific look to his victims. He’s getting into their homes somehow and rigging their houses to blow so that they don’t have time to get out. You better know what makes him tick, or you’re operating on blind luck. The only way you’ll catch him is to run him down in a supermarket parking lot.”
“We isolate his fuel and we trace it back to a supplier. That’s how it’s done with arson,” he informed her.
“That’s fine for some guy torching warehouses for the insurance, but that’s not what we’ve got.”
“In part it is.”
“In part, yes. But the other part is your turf; he has victims. Listen to the victims, Lou. It’s what you’re so good at.”
“There’s nothing left here,” he gasped. “As sick as this sounds, I deal in bodies, in crime scenes. These fires steal both. It takes me out of my game plan.”
“Forget the fire,” she advised.
“What?”
“Leave the fire to Bahan and Fidler, to the Marshal Fives. You take the victims and whatever evidence you can dig up. Divide and conquer.”
“Is this what you called me for?” he asked angrily. “You want to tell me how to conduct the investigation? Doesn’t that strike you as just a little bit arrogant?”
She felt herself blush. They fought like this, but only on rare occasions. She said, clinically and pointedly, “I wanted to forewarn you that I intend to speak with Shoswitz. I wanted to tell you that I made an appointment with Emily Richland, and to check if you had any direct question you wanted asked of her.”
“Emily Richland,” Boldt muttered.
“I spoke to her by phone. She mentioned a man with a burned hand.” That caught his attention. “Possible military service with a badly deformed hand. A blue pickup truck.” She could feel his resistance. She snapped sarcastically, “Why don’t you like it? Because she actually helped us solve a case once?”
Emily Richland, who ran a ten-dollar-a-throw tarot card operation on the other side of Pill Hill, had helped lead police to the location of a kidnap suspect. At her request, the police had withheld her involvement from the press, which impressed Daphne because she figured such a stunt—if it could be called that—was done in part for the notoriety, publicity, and legitimacy it afforded her. At the time, Daphne had been recovering from injuries sustained in another case involving an illicit organ donor ring and had missed the kidnapping. She had never had personal contact with Emily Richland.
“You’re saying that because it’s Richland we should listen?” he asked.
“Is that so wrong? Test the source? What if she’s a part of it? I’m not saying she’s psychic, I’m saying we listen. A burned hand? Come on!”
“What of the other calls, the other self-proclaimed psychics? You going to interview them as well?”
“I might. Emily Richland proved valuable once before; that’s all I’m saying.” She caught herself huffing from anger. “Your call, Sergeant.”
Boldt conceded. “We investigate every lead.” He sat back. “You’re absolutely right. Maybe she has something.”
“Try to think of her as a snitch, not a psychic,” she suggested.
“She has visions?”
“Don’t look at it that way. Define it in terms that are acceptable to you.”
“A snitch,” he said, testing it.
“Leave it to me,” she recommended.
Lou Boldt nodded. “Good idea,” he said.
Emily Richland did not answer her phone, but the recorded message said she was open for readings. Daphne tried again the following day, at ten in the morning. Again the machine answered. That second time, she wrote down the address given in the recording. She rode the elevator down to Homicide and marched up to Boldt’s cubicle, aware of the mountain she was attempting to climb.
She said, “How much did we pay Richland last time?”
Boldt’s khakis were clean, she noted. His shirt was fresh and his shoes polished.
“Two, two-fifty I think it was.”
“I need authorization to offer her that same amount.”
Boldt appeared paralyzed. “You’re going out there,” he stated.
“Yes, I am. And if I have to pay her, I will.”
“Shoswitz will blow a gasket.”
“I’m not asking Shoswitz, I’m asking you.”
“You know what they say around the bull pen?” he inquired rhetorically, not allowing her to answer, even had she had a comeback, which she did not. “That I can’t refuse you anything.”
“Oh, but you do. They don’t know the details.”
“List her as a snitch in the requisition,” he instructed. It was a small compromise, easy for her to live with. It was as good as an approval. She had the finances necessary to pay Emily Richland. She felt ecstatic.
“And don’t look so smug,” he added.
“Is that an order?” she asked, directly reminding Boldt that she outranked him.
“I hope you’re enjoying yourself,” Boldt quipped.
“Oh, I am. I definitely am.”
18
Daphne knocked loudly on the door to the purple house. Hearing just how loudly and impatiently she knocked, she questioned whether or not she had the open mind necessary for the ruse she intended. A majority of psychics were nothing more than clever con artists. Dial a 900 number, and through the miracle of caller ID and on-line computerized credit information, the so-called psychic on the other end knew more about you—income, marital status, spending habits, the car you drove, the house you owned, the catalogs you shopped—than could possibly be used in a single session. Though she was loath to admit it to Boldt, she didn’t trust any of them, not even Emily Richland. There was no telling what connection Emily might have to the arsons. She lived in a low-rent neighborhood and made her living telling lies. She would have to prove herself one hell of a mind reader to convince Daphne otherwise.
Daphne’s mission was multilayered: to reverse roles, tell lies of her own, and subtly interview Emily Richland in an effort to test the woman’s authenticity; to attempt to trap the woman into admitting some connection—professional or personal—with the arsons or the arsonist; to offer to pay the woman for information, but only as a last resor
t.
The door opened.
The woman’s long dark hair was pulled back, stretching the skin of a freckled face that took ten or more years off her forty. Her eyes were a haunting blue under too much mascara. She wore a thrift-store black velvet gown that emphasized her breasts even though the rest of the dress appeared a size too large, and was cinched tightly around her narrow waist by a blue-and-white beaded Indian belt. A string of dime store pearls hung around her neck, and a pair of earrings featured black-and-white photographs of Elvis. Her smile was radiant and yet mysterious—surprisingly natural; her eyes, probing and curious.
“Welcome.”
“Do you have time?” Daphne feigned embarrassment, awkwardness.
“Please,” Emily said, gesturing inside. She wore peach nail polish with silver-blue glitter. She was wearing ballerina slippers with black ribbon bows and worn toes, as if she had been on point. “I’m Emily.” She made no more small talk. She led Daphne to an upholstered chair with a green chenille slipcover that faced a small unadorned table with a pack of thumb-worn tarot cards waiting in one corner and a giant stump of a candle that might take years to burn itself out. There were nudes painted on the wall.
Daphne saw the woman’s hand gently brush the edge of the table as she took her seat. It was a clever, practiced move. The lights dimmed and established themselves at the level of the candle that the woman lit next, using a yellow Bic lighter. The room then smelled faintly of incense, reminding Daphne of her radical years at college.
“You have a question that needs answering,” the woman stated. She studied her. “You’re having trouble with a man.”
Daphne felt her heart in her throat all of a sudden. How on earth could she know about the problems with Owen? Then she realized that on entering the neighborhood she had spun her engagement ring around so that Owen’s absurdly sized engagement diamond was hidden under her finger, not showing on top. The good ones can read a subtle change in skin tone, voice inflection, body language, she reminded herself. Daphne had studied paranormal phenomena in her undergraduate years. For any psychologist with an open mind, it was a fascinating area.
Boldt - 04 - Beyond Recognition Page 11
