Boldt - 04 - Beyond Recognition

by Ridley Pearson

  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.

  Boldt had been involved in other special ops that had used fiber-optic cameras. In the right hands, the devices could be maneuvered along the floor, room to room, giving a clear fish-eye look at inhabitants and contents. Given the fact that Kotch continued his work, Boldt assumed that not only was the apartment empty but that no booby traps or detonation devices had been spotted. Not seeing them did not mean they did not exist, however. As eager as Boldt was to sneak a look inside that apartment—warrant or not—he had no desire to die the way Dorothy Enwright had. The Scholar had proved himself a skilled technician. Boldt had no desire to test his abilities.

  Kotch packed up, descended the stairs, and walked entirely around the block before joining Boldt again in the car.

  He rewound the tape and narrated as it played. The two men huddled around the small three-inch-square screen that was part of the camcorder. The fish-eye image was framed in a large circle, fuzzy at its edges. Seen through this distorted monocular vision, the apartment took on a foreboding, dangerous look. “It’s one room. I spend a minute examining the door and frame for triggers or trip wires—nothing there. Bathroom is to our right here. I come back to it. Up here is the bed with a dark blanket, chest of drawers to the left, see? Looks like a coil-element hot plate up on top. Okay. I check the front door—again, no visible triggers or trips.” As he narrated, the lone eye snaked around the interior at floor level. Then all of a sudden the screen’s image was too jerky to discern. “I retract here and reset the snake to show us waist height. It’s a little harder to keep steady when the camera’s in the air like that.” When the image became clear again, the perspective was from waist height. “Into the bathroom, up on the counter: Crest, Schick, no shaving cream in sight. Back out to the room and that card table—here we go. Oops. Coming up…. As you can see, the place is pretty depressing. No TV. No radio. It’s kept neat. Your boy is fastidious. It’s tricky getting to see the top of the card table. Took me a few tries. You’ll notice: No sign whatsoever of any lab gear. No closet. There’s a hanging rod in the corner by the bathroom—one raincoat, is all. Not a lot of places to hide shit. I’d say if he’s mixing cocktails, it’s somewhere else.”

  “Receipts? Calendars? Matchbooks? Anything pointing to another location?”

  “None of that. Oh, here it is. The card table. Seven white envelopes. Eighteen pieces of blank card stock. A tin can full of pens and pencils. A roll of postage stamps—American flag.”

  “That matches!” Boldt exclaimed. American flag stamps had been affixed to all the Scholar’s notes. It was the stamps that sold Boldt; he knew they had the right place.

  “Two books total: a worn Bible on the floor by the bed, and another called Cruden’s Complete Concordance.”

  “A biblical concordance.” Boldt spit it out quickly. “The Bible citations in the trees. It’s definitely him—we’ve got him!”

  The fish-eye view did not hold on the table’s contents for long. Kotch lost the precarious balance he had and the camera fell to the floor. It snaked back out of the room, the show over.

  Boldt understood immediately that what he had just viewed was convincing enough to warrant a legal look inside the room. The video tape would never be admissible evidence, but it had showed him enough. He thought he might be able to secure a search warrant by telephone using the fibers as evidence. He and Gaynes would await Garman’s return and sit on him, probably clear through work the following day. Two or three days if necessary, with LaMoia and Matthews in rotation. Boldt felt convinced that eventually Garman would lead them to some evidence. His big problem was maintaining the patience required to wait the man out.

  His other problem was time, he thought, as he checked his watch. Eight o’clock and still no fire announced over the police radio. It broke with the Scholar’s established pattern—always a bad sign. Worse, it fit with what Daphne had been insisting all along: Jonny Garman had taken the bait, Martinelli now next on his list.

  “I want to review that tape back downtown,” Boldt told Kotch, who made for the car door. “A bigger monitor. See what we see.”

  “Sure thing.”

  “You got the time?” Boldt asked.

  “No problem.” He stopped, his hand on the door handle. “Listen, I heard Shoswitz is squeezing your stones over manpower, Sergeant. My involvement? No big deal. It never happened.”

  “I appreciate that,” Boldt replied. “I was wondering how to approach you.”

  “Never happened,” Kotch repeated. “See you downtown.”

  Boldt used the cellular to ring LaMoia because he wanted to keep it off the radios. He told them they had located Garman’s residence and there was no sign of a lab. “It could be in the basement; it could be ten miles away.” He warned the detective that Marianne Martinelli might be the target after all. He told him, “Heads up. And call me for backup at a moment’s notice. No heroics.”

  LaMoia mocked him, as the detective was fond of doing. LaMoia would do anything macho, just to get a story out of it. He loved to tell stories, especially those involving himself.

  “Is Matthews in position?” Boldt asked.

  “Matthews? I haven’t heard a peep.”

  Boldt had left a message on her voice mail, explaining Shoswitz’s imposed curbs and asking if she would help LaMoia with the Lakewood surveillance. It was unlike her to leave John in the lurch, especially since she had instigated the operation. Boldt mumbled, “We don’t know if she found the kid or not. That’s probably what’s going on.”

  “She’s touchy about this kid, you know? Have you picked up on that? A little close for my taste.”

  “She’s responsible for him, John. The kid blew us off. Walked right out of the unit.” She had her reputation to defend, he thought, suddenly more worried. It had not been a good day for her.

  Daphne Matthews did not take failure well.

  To call her was only to force her to admit she had still not found their witness. Boldt wanted none of that. He would give her another hour before inviting that wrath upon himself.

  He left Gaynes to watch the rooming house without him and headed downtown to get a better look at the video.

  He was halfway back to the Public Safety Building when a nearly hysterical Bernie Lofgrin called him with the latest on the ink used in the notes.

  The boulder that was the investigation was suddenly rolling downhill again, and this time, Boldt thought, Jonny Garman was directly in its path.

  63

  The man with the dead face rode fast. Ben was in his highest gear, riding as hard as he could and losing ground. It was like trying to chase a phantom.

  The police artist had called it a hockey mask, but that was no mask. It wasn’t skin either. Ben wasn’t sure what it was, but it was ugly. A monster was more like it. Way worse than a glass eye. A person could hardly feel sorry for himself after seeing something like that.

  They rode Yesler under the highway and turned into the International District. The guy knew how to time the lights
. If he hit a red, he went with the pedestrian lights, the white marching man in the box on the lamppost. If Ben could have ridden faster he might have hung back intentionally, but as it was, the distance between them only increased, and rather than worry about being seen, Ben’s concern was keeping up. The Face, as Ben thought of him, shot across Dearborn, connected up with Airport Way, and started pumping like he was in some kind of race, growing smaller and smaller in the distance.

  Ben felt all hope ride away with the guy.

  And then he heard the truck coming up fast from behind.

  It was a stunt he had wanted to do a hundred times but had never had the belly to try. And suddenly there was no question in his mind as to if he would try but whether or not he could pull it off.

  He pedaled hard, rising up off his seat, glancing once over his left shoulder, a slight smirk as he twisted his head fully around so his right eye could see back there. A good-sized truck, bigger than a pickup but smaller than a dump truck. Picking up speed after the last light. Gaining on Ben.

  His legs pushed hard; he needed to match that speed.

  Gaining … gaining …

  Another look, a huge swivel of the head: Only a few yards back, the engine louder than a locomotive, the gears singing. Ben inched the bike to his left, swerving, the truck looming closer.

  Closer still. Legs flailing then to match the speed. It had to be exact. He knew. He had heard stories. If you timed it wrong, the truck pulled you right off the seat or, worse, folded the bike underneath the twin rubber tires, bearing down like a steamroller.

  He had never tried because it took nerves and timing and depth perception. And like so many things—catching a ball, swinging a bat, even pattycake as a little kid—Ben had given up before he had tried, because others had told him he couldn’t.

  He reached out and took hold of the truck.

  The feeling was like the only time he’d been in a sailboat, when a gust of wind had caught them and tipped them so hard that everyone slid inside the boat. One minute Ben was riding. The next, he was launched down the road, a passenger in a sidecar.