Beyond Recognition

by Ridley Pearson

  At the next intersection, he turned right, cut through traffic, and joined fifteen other kids at the bus stop, hoping for cover. He watched for the blue truck.

  “Hey, Ben”—he jumped at the sound of his name—“you want to come over after school?”

  Finn Hershey was a school friend with blond hair and a thin face. Like Ben and the others, he was soaking wet from the rain.

  “I don’t know,” Ben said, shifting his glance from left to right, bus to truck. He couldn’t think about such things; he had the truck to worry about. The yellow school bus appeared, its big nose topping the hill and dropping toward the waiting kids. At the same instant the blue truck appeared in the intersection, creeping along incredibly slowly as it passed. Thank God it didn’t turn, though for Ben it felt as if he locked eyes with the driver, who was bent low and clearly searching the bus stop. The bus chugged forward, seemingly more slowly than ever. Ben mentally encouraged it.

  “If it keeps raining we could hit my Sega. I got a new MK magazine. Some cool stuff in it.”

  Mortal Kombat. Ben was something of a pro. Finn was always trying to beat him at the video game, but he wasn’t very good. “Sure,” Ben said.

  “It would be cool.”

  “Sure.”

  “We could call your mom from sch—” Finn caught himself.

  “I don’t have a mom,” Ben reminded him.

  “I didn’t mean to say that.”

  “I know.”

  “We could leave a message. You know.”

  “Sure.”

  “What is it with you?”

  The bus arrived, its door swinging open, and the kids fought toward the door. The pickup truck rounded the far corner, heading for the bus stop. Ben shoved his way into the bottleneck, followed by Finn.

  “What is it with you?” Finn repeated.

  “Nothing.”

  Ben was never anxious to get on the bus. Today he was acting different. Fear had changed him, he realized. He clawed his way to a seat near the back of the bus and was forced to relinquish it when told to by a junior Ben had no desire to mess with. He found a seat farther forward.

  He looked back in time to see the pickup truck through the rain-blurred back window. Forced to wait behind the bus, the driver sat idle, craning close to the fogged windshield and rubbing it in an effort to see. A line of vehicles had formed behind it, waiting for the school bus to decommission its warning lights and move on.

  By the third bus stop, when Ben looked back, the truck was no longer in sight. He decided that it had either moved on or gone ahead. Whichever, it hardly mattered; by that point the driver knew the name and location of his school. He thought back to the airport, to that stupid moment of taking the money. For the hundredth time since that day he touched his back pocket, praying his wallet had reappeared.

  The bus stopped in front of the school. In the chaos of the rain and the rush for the front steps, Ben crouched and ducked into the foundation planting alongside the stairs. His head swooned as he caught sight of the blue pickup truck. Out there waiting. For him. Like a wild dog at a rabbit hole: patient and hungry. Ben knew the way it worked. The rabbit never stood a chance.

  22

  The pressure had built up behind Boldt’s eyes like water in a pipe. Based on the timing established by Emily Richland’s client, another woman was likely targeted to burn. She would be close to thirty years old, a divorced woman, mother of a boy younger than ten. Daphne had followed up as requested. He bore the responsibility to prevent this death from happening, and he had frightfully little evidence to pursue.

  Boldt gave a regular morning briefing to LaMoia, Gaynes, Bahan, Fidler, and two other homicide detectives loaned to Boldt from the other squad. ATF had offered agents but Boldt had politely refused, fearing that once he allowed the federal agents inside he might never get them back out the door.

  The ATF lab chemist, Casterstein, was an exception to that rule. When he requested a video conference with Boldt, the sergeant accepted, though not without trepidation. SPD lacked video-conferencing capability, requiring Boldt to pay a visit to the ATF offices in the Federal Building, which he feared might be little more than a ploy by ATF to hold him hostage while they convinced him of the importance of their joining the investigation. As an insurance package, he brought along the police lab’s Bernie Lofgrin and all four of his detectives, LaMoia, Gaynes, Fidler, and Bahan. If Casterstein wanted a conference, Boldt would give him one.

  The federal offices were newer, cleaner, and quieter than SPD’s, a source of irritation for any cop. ATF and the FBI had access to, or owned outright, state-of-the-art surveillance equipment, computer technology, weapons, and communications systems. Although they were always generous with the equipment, it nonetheless irked Boldt and the others to have to ask, which they did often. Using the video conference room was partly embarrassing for that reason, even though an ATF agent was involved. Boldt and his five ducklings moved through the ATF halls like kids on the way to the principal’s office. The room itself was nearly identical to their own fifth-floor conference room, except for the projection television screen at one end and the video camera mounted on the wall alongside and aimed back at those sitting at the table.

  Boldt and the others took seats, several with notepads open in front of them. The lights in the room seemed brighter to Boldt. Two gray devices in the middle of the large oval table, which looked like large square ashtrays, were actually conferencing microphones. At ten o’clock sharp the screen sparkled, and the face of Howard Casterstein appeared, greatly oversized.

  Boldt wished that Daphne had joined them, though she wasn’t to be found. Her ninth-floor office was locked, her voice mail on, and no one seemed to know where she was, although rumor had it that she was off working with local forensic psychiatrists on a profile of the arsonist.

  Casterstein’s face was slightly washed out by the light. To Boldt’s surprise and delight, the ATF agent who had showed them to the room had not tried to sit in on the conference. That impressed Boldt a great deal.

  Boldt introduced the face on the wall to his squad, at which point Casterstein, polite to a fault, began the discussion. “We’ve been looking at the fire debris, hoping to support a cause and origin. I thought you might want to see some of this, which is why I suggested the video room. I suppose my first comments are directed to”—he looked down at a piece of paper where he had scrawled the names of those in attendance—“Sid Fidler and Neil Bahan. In reading your reports of interviews with the neighbors, and from the pilot reports you cited, the first item of significance to those of us in the lab is the purple flame associated with these fires. That, along with the spalling and bluish color of the concrete, suggests a flammable liquid accelerant or propellant. The lack of hydrocarbons in your testing has been confirmed here in Sacramento. This boy was not burning dinosaurs, which is highly unusual for a residential structural arson. Of special interest to us were the Vibram soles of Sergeant Boldt’s hiking boots, which most of you probably know dissolved after walking the site. We looked at ions, at pH. We expected to come up with chlorine, but we weren’t able to support that. In fact, the more common tests turned up little of interest. We thought we might be looking at thermite mixtures, but they should leave a slag, and we have no evidence to support such a by-product.”

  At this point Bernie Lofgrin nodded and took down some notes. He asked, “Metals?”

  Casterstein answered. “Mr. Lofgrin is asking about residual metals found on-site because magnesium and a number of other metals burn exceptionally hot and are often associated with high-temperature fires such as the two that killed Enwright and Heifitz. Unfortunately the answer is no. We have found no trace of such metals in the debris or in our samples.” To Lofgrin he said, “We used the EDAX—x-ray fluorescence analysis—along with chemical spot tests and are showing some inorganics that were probably used in building this device, though the actual accelerant initially proved elusive.”

  “Initially?” Boldt asked
, sensing a breakthrough that Casterstein wasn’t revealing. He might have complained about Casterstein’s college professor approach, but he knew Lofgrin to be much the same and had come to accept that labbies gave elaborate explanations but only once. It was up to the investigating officer to inform others, from the ranking superior to the jury. The detailed explanations were a way for these forensic scientists to move on to other analyses without a dozen follow-up inquiries. For this reason, Boldt took meticulous notes.

  “We have some interesting clues in these burns,” Casterstein suggested. “Of primary concern is that at least Enwright was viewed walking around inside before the fire. Sergeant Boldt raised the appropriate question: Why did Enwright not get out of the house?”

  Bobbie Gaynes answered. “We’re assuming she fell through the floor, into the hole created by the fire, and, injured in the fall, was consumed in the basement.”

  “A justifiable theory,” Casterstein said diplomatically, “but not supported by evidence. To explain such a fall, I’m afraid we would be looking at an explosion, something that instantly took the floor out from beneath her.”

  Boldt couldn’t take this kind of talk without his imagination running wild. He could picture Dorothy Enwright breaking through the flaming floor and falling to her eventual death in the fiery confines of the basement. The helplessness of such a moment overwhelmed him, and briefly he neither heard nor saw Casterstein but, instead, felt himself inside Dorothy Enwright, weightless and falling, the flames licking up from below. Casterstein’s voice brought him back.

  “We have no reports of any such explosion, only fire. A devastatingly fast, enormously hot fire—a spike of purple flame jettisoning into the air. This is not timber burning. This is not the explosion of a gas barbecue stored in the basement for winter. This is an unknown accelerant, somehow ignited, most likely by timer, or less likely, radio-controlled from a distance, that spread so quickly through the house that the resident never had time to react. What I find of particular interest, and what I wanted to show you today, is this.” Casterstein put on a pair of latex gloves. He held up a black blob, and whoever was operating the camera zoomed in on it. “Found by you, Mr. Bahan, according to our documentation.”

  Those at the conference table looked over at Neil Bahan. His thin brown hair and big build reminded Boldt of the kids in school who never joined in, always standing on the edges and watching. Boldt was reminded then of Daphne’s warning that a fire inspector is dangerously close in mindset to an arsonist—two sides of the same fence. He paid particular attention to both Bahan and Fidler for this reason: If they were investigating fires they themselves had set, Boldt might never find the truth.

  Bahan said, “I found it up the street from the Heifitz place, by where my car was parked, actually. It was still warm to the touch, so I included it as evidence. But I put a note on it, because it seemed awfully far away—a hundred yards or more.”

  “We think it significant,” Casterstein said, spinning it in his fingers. It was a hard piece of plastic the size of a large golf ball. “We’ve x-rayed it, and there is apparently a piece of a wire melted into it, leading us to believe it to be—”

  “The detonation device,” Bernie Lofgrin said quickly.

  “Precisely. Or part thereof. Yes,” Casterstein agreed. “Further tests are needed, of course, and may take a month or two—”

  “A month?” Boldt shouted. “We haven’t got a month! We have a—an informer,” he explained, stopping himself from using psychic, “who may have information indicating another fire is planned within the week.”

  Neither Casterstein, Lofgrin, nor Gaynes were aware of that development, and they all sat stunned. Casterstein finally muttered, “I see. Well, something like this takes time.” He held up the melted plastic. “Our principal concern is the identification of the accelerant. If we can give you the accelerant and you can trace its components to their sources, you just may be able to end-run this guy. Detonators are a dime a dozen, and though sometimes, when in better shape, they offer latent prints, we’re not going to see that in this case.”

  Lofgrin said, “Why don’t we handle the possible detonator up here? Spread out the manpower and consult you guys on what we find?”

  “That works for me,” Casterstein agreed. “We’ll send this and some other evidence back up to you.”

  Bobbie Gaynes said, “I’m still confused as to why both women were unable to get out of their houses in time. These fires were late afternoon, early evening. It’s not as if they were asleep.”

  All eyes turned to the wall.

  “We can’t answer that at this time. It might be explained by the fire going off so fast, so hot, that it sucked the oxygen out of the structure and suffocated the resident instantly—kind of like being kicked in the chest.”

  “But if that were the case,” Fidler suggested, “we would have seen some of the windows imploded—glass inside the structure. We have nothing to support that.”

  “Agreed,” Casterstein said, glowing on the wall, still spinning the black plastic ball between his fingers. “If there had been accelerant in every room,” he suggested, “if the device was of multiple origin with simultaneous detonation, the choices for egress would be limited.”

  “Trapped like a rat. That’s what you’re saying,” LaMoia said, speaking for the first time. “He rigged the whole fucking place to blow at the same time.” He glanced at the others and then said to the wall, “In which case there should be more than enough evidence for you guys to tell us that.” LaMoia had never been fond of the Feds, and Boldt nearly kicked him under the table. The detective went on. “Lemme ask you this, Doc. What is it you boys aren’t telling us? What is it you’re leaving out? I’m feeling a gaping hole here, and the wind blowing through it stinks kinda bad.”

  A silence hung over the conference room. The speaker spit static. When Casterstein moved, the image blurred slightly. It did so as he looked off-camera and then back at those in the room. He said softly, “We’re seeing what we term a mixed profile. We need to see through that, to separate out the elements. It takes time. They aren’t the common hydrocarbons that we would expect. So we start over and try again. We fail, and we try again.”

  “Like us,” Boldt said. Casterstein was describing an investigation perfectly.

  “We’re both detectives in our own way,” Casterstein said.

  “Bottom line?” LaMoia demanded harshly. “What’s the bottom line here, Doc? We got people this guy’s planning to barbecue here shortly. I, for one, would like to see something we can take away from this powwow, lovely as it’s been to visit the Federal Building. A black golf ball? That’s not exactly the treasure I had in mind.”

  Casterstein remained unruffled. He allowed a slight smile, as if he had expected a LaMoia in the group. “I appreciate your honesty, Detective. I asked Sergeant Boldt here,” he emphasized, “because I wanted to show him this piece of evidence. I also wanted to show him this.” Casterstein nodded to someone off-camera at his end. The screen went blue. Casterstein’s voice said, “Stand by. What you’re about to see is a test conducted by the Fort Worth Fire Department.”

  The image was of a large deserted supermarket in an open sea of empty blacktop. Where the windows should have been were sheets of plywood. Grass grew up through gaping cracks in the pavement. Surrounding the structure were twenty or more fire vehicles, all parked at a good distance. Crews stood on the ground with hoses, but there was little water on the ground, no evidence of a fire having been fought. A digital clock counted down in the lower right-hand corner.

  Casterstein said, “Pay particular attention to the speed of the burn and the color. I think you’ll find it interesting.”

  The clock counted down to zero, at which point Gaynes and LaMoia, closest to the screen, actually jumped, leaning back in their chairs and away from the bright purple flash that rose into the sky like the flame from a wick. The roof of the building melted away, creating a hole in the doughnut. Everything see
med to burn at once. It lasted for three minutes and forty-two seconds, at which point the crews moved in and began to hose water onto the structure. The only water able to reach the center, shot from ladder trucks, exploded into flames as it arrived at the burning core. Those firefighters shut off their hoses, and the ladder engines were pulled back some distance from the inferno. Boldt had never seen a fire so ferocious.

  The video stopped; Casterstein’s image reappeared, fuzzy at first and then clear. “They fought the fire for another twenty minutes, but it’s that initial burn that is of interest. I don’t know if you noticed, but this burn went off at temperatures that caused water to separate into its elements, hydrogen and oxygen, literally exploding the attempts to suppress it. Never seen anything like it. The fire was an attempt to discover the accelerant used in a series of arsons that swept the country from ’89 to ’94. Our Washington office had a hand in it, which is how I have a copy of the tape.”

  Boldt could picture a person inside such a structure. He shuddered from head to toe and wondered if Bahan, next to him, saw him shake. All of a sudden the lack of human remains discovered on-site made sense to him; it explained the inability of Enwright and Heifitz to flee their homes. The pressing urgency of preventing another fire welled up from within him, and he immediately felt filled with self-doubt. Perhaps he should have moved on to lieutenant, he thought. Perhaps the work required younger minds, more agile thinking. Had he grown staid and incapable? Could he do his job effectively while worrying that his wife was having another affair? He had too much on his plate, too little time. Time. The word haunted him. Not another fire, not for anything.

  “The recommendation coming out of Washington—and I have to agree with it—is that, should there be a third fire, we let it burn. No fire suppression, certainly no overhaul.” An uncharacteristically long silence hung over the room.

  “What the hell did we just look at?” Boldt inquired, uncharacteristically brash. He glanced over at LaMoia, feeling respect for the detective; only LaMoia had dared to push Casterstein. Only LaMoia had sensed something lingering under the surface. Boldt couldn’t help but wonder if he’d lost his touch.