Beyond Recognition

by Ridley Pearson

  The camper door made a noise as it opened. Ben felt his insides go watery. He could barely breathe, his throat was so dry. Where the driver had seemed a threat, this dark figure was the one to fear.

  As quickly as the door opened, it shut. Ben never felt any movement of the truck’s springs, any indication that the man had come inside. He waited and listened, blood pounding in his ears and chest. The tips of his fingers felt cold, and all at once a shiver passed through him. He felt on the verge of crying. He swallowed his fear and ventured to lift the bench a crack and peer out.

  Empty. He wanted to shout a thanks to God. Instead, he hoisted the bench, climbed out, and hurried to the smudged glass of the back door.

  The parking garage appeared empty. He didn’t trust this and looked back and forth, intent on spotting the other man lingering in the shadows or wedged between two parked cars, but he was nowhere to be seen. Ben twisted the doorknob and pushed, thinking that with his luck the door would prove to be …

  … locked!

  The second man had re-padlocked the door. A wave of nausea coursed through him. He banged the door against the clasp several times, paying no attention to the possibility of being heard or noticed. Where was good luck when he needed it?

  He dropped to his knees in an effort to study the clasp and lock, in order to see if there was any chance it had been hooked but not locked. As his knee touched the filthy carpeting, he felt an unexpected bulge below his kneecap and glanced down to see the corner of a plain white envelope protruding. He slipped the envelope out. It was thick and bulging, but lightweight. He couldn’t resist looking inside. He lifted the flap to see the squiggled edges of money. Dozens of bills. Fifties and twenties and some tens. Old bills. Worn money. Lots of it.

  To him, it seemed like a million dollars. Cash, right there in his hand. He would need money to get home. He had none on him. He reached in and fished out a twenty. And then another. With each bill the temptation grew. Who would know if he took the whole thing? So many times, as Emily slipped her ten-dollar payment into the cigar box she kept in the freezer, she had spoken the words to Ben: “Money is freedom.” They lived in him as a kind of mantra. Money meant independence. Money offered people the chance to be themselves. And here was this envelope of cash in his hand and no one around to see him. He could give the money to Emily; he could pay for his food; he could live with her.

  The presence of the money was overwhelming. There was no drug deal. He was not trapped in the back of a truck. He was free. He didn’t return the envelope to where he had found it. Never even considered it. He folded the envelope and shoved it into his front pants pocket. He had a chance at a new life. He felt giddy. Then, all at once, the confines of the camper shell got to him. The envelope seemed to be burning his leg. It suddenly felt heavy to him, as if anyone looking at him would see it. But not for a second did he think about putting it back. He moved quickly, as if he had done all this before. He checked the tiny closet. He didn’t find a broom or a mop, but instead an aluminum baseball bat. Hurriedly, he climbed atop the camper’s tabletop and probed skyward with the bat, pushing open the skylight. It took three tries to get the hook to catch, and even then it was not through an eyelet but only resting on top of one. Nonetheless, the skylight remained open, and Ben returned the bat to the closet. Once again he felt the pressure of time bearing down on him. He sensed that the trouble was not over but only in a lull. Despite this pressure he moved fluidly, accustomed to the anxiety of searching a car while the customer remained with Emily inside the purple house. His senses remained on full alert. His hands were sweaty, his skin hot.

  He climbed back on the table, trained his eye on the edge of the skylight, and knew he had to make it in one jump. There were no second tries. To miss would be to fall backward on the table; he would break something or knock himself out. He had one try in him.

  A voice inside reminded him that this required hand-eye coordination, this was something everyone agreed he had no talent for; the voice grew louder, warning him not to even try. But the drive for survival spoke louder, and he overcame this nagging voice and blatantly disregarded it. There was no choice. He simply had to make the jump. And he had to be successful.

  He squatted down, feeling the strength in his tree-climbing legs, aimed his single eye above him, having little judgment of the exact distance he had to travel, and jumped, fingers outstretched.

  The wood edge slapped his palms and he gripped down and hooked the lip and held himself dangling, suspended in midair. But he had rocked the truck, causing the hook to slip off the eyelet, and the skylight came down like a Chinese poultry knife onto his knuckles. Ben cried out, but he did not let go. Could not let go.

  He pulled, as he had so many times in a bad situation in a tree, as if lifting himself to the next branch. He did this twice but sank back down to his dangling position, his fingers aching under his weight. The third time he coordinated all his efforts simultaneously: He pulled himself up, banged the skylight partially open with his head, hooked one elbow, then the other, and pulled even higher, worming his torso up and through the skylight. Kicking his legs, as if swimming for the side of the pool, he wiggled up and out of the hole in the camper’s roof. He clambered over a rusted rack, where a tire and wheel were chained and locked, and slipped over the back to a narrow ladder fixed to the side of the shell. His feet touching pavement, he was off at a run, as if hearing footsteps immediately behind him.

  He wasn’t going on that elevator, no matter what. Instead, he entered the stairs and descended two at a time, his fingers skating down the banister, his legs feeling rubbery from the excitement. He leaped onto the landing, grabbed hold of the railing, and pulled himself up short, stopping like a car caught by a red light.

  Nick, the buzz-cut driver of the truck, the drug dealer, was standing on the stairs, wearing an expressionless face, his full attention riveted on Ben.

  Ben stood there, chest heaving, recalling that the slight bulge on the man’s right side was a handgun, and that he was in the military, which meant he was a crack shot, and that Ben had been inside his truck, and that he no doubt knew this and had been thinking, planning, what to do about it, and now his hand was forced and the time had come, and Ben had served himself up on a silver platter.

  He thought about the fold of money in his pocket, suddenly so heavy that he couldn’t move that leg. Surely the man saw the outline of the envelope there. Surely he knew. Caught!

  The man Ben feared so much smiled and said, “Slow down there, buddy. Good way to knock some teeth out.”

  Ben heard very little except something about getting his teeth knocked out. Nick climbed the stairs. Ben was directly in his path and so terrified that the man looked blurry, and his already untrustworthy legs felt on the verge of total failure. Their eyes met, and Ben felt a sick, hollow spot where his stomach should have been, and he felt a trickle of warm urine run down his left leg.

  “Excuse me,” the smiling man said, and Ben stepped aside for him. Nick walked past, turned on the landing, and headed on up the stairs.

  Ben sneaked onto a downtown hotel courtesy van, pretending to be with a pair of parents who didn’t notice what he was up to. The driver, who didn’t even count heads, seemed to care little about anything but getting the luggage in the back and moving on to the next curbside pickup. Any other day of his life, Ben might have considered this a major accomplishment. But not on that day. Instead, he spent the twenty-minute drive into the city debating exactly what he had seen take place: Nick had left with a duffel bag; he had returned without it. The dark, short, faceless man who had come out of the shadows had left an envelope of money and then locked the camper. An exchange. A drop. A drug deal.

  From downtown he rode a city bus over First Hill toward home, walking the last mile and a half. Exhausted, he headed directly to his room and locked the door, well ahead of his stepfather, but not taking any chances. A few minutes later he went downstairs to the kitchen phone. He felt more like a robot th
an himself. It was something that had to be done; that was all there was to it. He knew this in his heart, even if his mind was engaged in a continuous dialogue to the contrary. He dialed 911. A woman’s voice answered.

  Ben said calmly, “I want to report a drug deal. I saw a drug deal—” He caught a glimpse of himself in the glass of the cabinet on the wall. He could just picture himself explaining this to his stepfather. His butt hurt enough already. He slammed down the phone and sprinted back upstairs to his room.

  Down a drab and unremarkable hallway in the Public Safety Building, the Seattle Communications Center, equipped with Enhanced 911 communications software, identified and recorded not only Ben’s telephone number but the physical address of that phone number as well, all before the operator ever answered. Every moment of the call was recorded, every nuance of his slightly hysterical voice. The call would be logged both by computer and by hand, Ben’s voice reduced to a data stream, compressed, and stored temporarily on a hard disk that was backed up on magnetic tape every twelve hours, the tapes stored in a former cannery repossessed by the city for back taxes a decade earlier. The operator mistakenly classified Ben’s call as a juvenile prank, which meant that if another two offenses were attributed to the same phone number, an officer of the juvenile court would pay that home a visit.

  However, all so-called “dead” calls—calls not acted upon by dispatchers—were reviewed for free by a volunteer hot-line association whose main goal was to locate possible sexual and physical abuse victims where the caller lost his or her nerve to report.

  As Ben drifted off to a much-needed sleep that night, downtown the Seattle Communications Center was processing his call along with several dozen others received in the 6 P.M. to midnight shift. The billing name on the phone number—his stepfather’s—the physical address, and the phone number were all part of the system. The gears of a slow-moving but determined bureaucracy continued to grind.

  Ben hung up the phone and headed straight upstairs to his room, his heart still pounding as hard as if he had only then stopped running. He felt a little dizzy, a little sick to his stomach. It was at moments such as this that he missed his mother most of all. She would have helped him; he believed this with all his heart. He wasn’t sure what, if anything, to tell Emily; she was all he had. He shut his door and sat down heavily on the bed. At first he didn’t believe the empty feeling under his butt. An even deeper fear than what he’d been living with for the past few minutes wormed into his stomach. It didn’t seem possible. He reached back to the seat of his pants tentatively, afraid of the implication of what this emptiness meant to him.

  His wallet was gone.

  16

  Arson investigator Neil Bahan notified Boldt by cellular phone that the ATF chemist had arrived at the fire site. Boldt hung a U-turn at an intersection on Aurora and cut across Walling-ford on 45th, passing a movie theater marquee that advertised a Richard Dreyfuss film.

  He hadn’t been to a movie in over two years. Before the birth of Miles, he and Liz had seen three movies a week. He called his wife on her cellular phone, because the cabin didn’t have a phone, but got the message service recording of her voice. He told her he missed her and the kids, how he couldn’t wait for them to come home. He left out any mention of a second body, of the anxiety compressing his chest and restricting his breathing, of the nagging sensation that yet a third victim was being targeted at that very moment, and that he, the investigator, had only a couple of ladder impressions and some fibers to go on. Any mention of that and Liz might decide to call the bank and take a week’s vacation. He ached to see his kids.

  Dr. Howard Casterstein looked like one of the profs over at the U where Boldt occasionally guestlectured for a criminology series. He wore a white shirt and tie with an undershirt showing beneath. He had a military cut, making it difficult to judge his hair color, and the square shoulders of a man in shape. Boldt didn’t like him on first glance. He resented the federal involvement before he heard a word of explanation. He introduced himself on the edge of the property where the fire-gutted house remained under police watch. It was no longer smoldering, and only two patrolmen were to be seen.

  Casterstein had penetrating eyes and a firm handshake. He introduced himself as Howie and said immediately, “If the body you found was Melissa Heifitz—the owner, as we believe will prove to be the case—then the match violated an act of interstate commerce by torching the place. Heifitz made huckleberry jam and did catalog mailings out of her house; that qualifies as interstate commerce. It allows us in, no problemo. I’m here strictly as a chemist. I mean no invasion of your investigation whatsoever, Sergeant. Just so we’re clear on that. Let the desk jockeys fight it out over who’s running the show—not for this boy to hassle with.” He added, “One of your arson dicks, a guy named Bahan, contacted us concerning the Enwright evidence. Your lab up here wasn’t picking up hydrocarbons in the samples. We didn’t pick them up either, so when we got a whiff of this one on the wire last night my boss sends me up as a solo NRT man—National Response Team.” Boldt couldn’t get a word in edgewise. “The NRT is for Podunk towns that don’t have fire investigation units, or for massive hits like Oklahoma City. We can be on any fire, anywhere in the country, in twenty-four hours or less. That’s me. That’s my story. What can you tell me?”

  Boldt wasn’t sure where to start. “I’m Homicide,” he said.

  “I know who you are,” Casterstein said, perfecting the art of compliments. “Me and a couple of the boys attended that talk in Portland a few years ago. The thing about the victim. It was good work.”

  “Oh, yeah, ‘the thing about the victim,’” Boldt muttered, offended. Off to a bad start. He attempted to clarify. “You’re here as a chemist or a spy? At what point do you boys move in and take over?”

  Howard—call me Howie—Casterstein grinned artificially. “It’s not like that. Bahan wants our lab involved. We’ve got the neat toys,” he said. “That’s all it is, Sergeant, nothing more.”

  For now, Boldt was thinking. Trying for a new start, he said, “Well, we need all the help we can get. If Melissa Heifitz was in that fire, we’ve got two homicides and precious little evidence. Anything you can supply is greatly appreciated.” How did the Feds know the victim’s name before he, the investigating officer, did? He felt humiliated. “And if she’s single, we have a city of terrified women on our hands. The press is making this front-page.”

  “So we get to work,” he said, holding up a pair of shiny metal paint cans used to collect fire evidence. “This match of yours has us puzzled. And by God, Sergeant, that’s something we just won’t tolerate.” He turned toward the burned-out structure. “If you’d care to join me, I’d appreciate the company. These road trips suck.”

  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.