Beyond Recognition

by Ridley Pearson

  At that same moment he caught a flicker of a shadow to the left of the inferno and tentatively identified it as an object—a human form—moving away from the fire and indirectly toward him, off to his left. The image was there and then gone, the light of the fire so intense, so bright, that one glance induced temporary blindness—like a camera’s flash—and the resulting collage of shifting, slanting shadows turned the landscape into an unrecognizable, eerie tangle of sharp black forms, as if he were suddenly at the bottom of a pile of brush trying to look out.

  He had played team sports in high school and junior college, and his resulting instincts moved him to his left in a line calculated to intercept the path of the human form he had spotted. A few strides into it he dropped all conscious thought, electing instead to turn himself over once again to the power and force that guided his life. He ran like the wind, free of his own misgivings, thoughts and calculations. As if to confirm the correctness of this attitude, he picked up sight of the moving form once again, heading right at him. He felt his hand reach down and locate his weapon without any such thought in his head. Then his hand released the stock and found the TASER stun gun instead—a weapon similar in appearance to a large handgun but one that delivered twenty thousand volts of electricity instead of bullets. The TASER had to be fired within fifty feet of the target—twenty to thirty was preferable for accuracy—as two small wires carried the charge to the inductor needles on the projected electrode. Once hit, a subject was knocked unconscious for a period of four to fifteen minutes by the jolt of electricity. He would take him alive; he would bring home a prisoner, not a dead trophy.

  There was no sense of time, except that measured by the change in tone and color of the shadows thrown by the fire. The same hand that held the TASER found the small button on his radio transmitter. Robbie said breathlessly, “Position Three. Suspect sighted. Foot pursuit. Identify before weapons fire.” Whatever the real time, it all happened fast. In a mix of moving shadow, shifting light, and the running human form dodging through it toward an imaginary point directly ahead, Cole felt a part of the forest, comfortable and unafraid.

  The suspect was closing fast from his right.

  Cole planted his feet, skidding to a stop in the sloppy ground, dropped to one knee, leveled the TASER, aimed into the blackness of space directly ahead, and squeezed the firing trigger. He saw the twin shiny wires glimmer in the brightness of the fire as the electrode raced into space. The suspect, at a full run, having not seen Robbie, bumped into and grabbed hold of a low branch, knocking it out of his way and, as luck would have it, absorbing the electrode into the branch which otherwise would have struck him. The suspect appeared completely unaware of Robbie’s presence, never breaking stride. The ERT man dropped the TASER and reached for his weapon as he came to his feet and continued the chase from behind. The sudden appearance of round white holes in the darkness—flashlight beams—alerted him to his change of angle and the reality that he could not fire the handgun, except in warning, since his teammates were now directly ahead. Robbie, a fast runner, initially gained on the suspect as with his right hand he found the dangling earpiece and returned it to his ear. Then, all at once, the suspect was gone. He had ducked behind a tree in hiding, somewhere up ahead. Robbie instinctively dove to the forest floor, anticipating weapons fire. He tripped the radio transmitter and said quietly, “Operative Three. Kill the flashlights. Go to infrared but do not fire. Repeat, do not fire. Copy?”

  “Copy, Three,” said the commander. Robbie heard the instructions repeated.

  The ERT weapons were equipped with heat-responsive sighting devices that alerted the shooter to a warm body fix. The infrared devices allowed for nighttime “blind” precision targeting, their only drawback being that they could not distinguish between wildlife and human forms, and occasionally a deer or large dog was shot in lieu of a suspect. What Robbie intended, and what the commander had just ordered, was that the sighting devices be swept through the forest in an attempt to locate a warm-blooded body in the hope of identifying the suspect. If Cole Robbie saw any red pinpoints of light strike his person, he would alert the ERT to a “bad hit.” The lights in the forest went dark; the flashlights were turned off in succession. Between Robbie and the dispersed line of operatives some fifty yards away—and closing—the suspect was hiding.

  All senses alert, Cole Robbie rose to his knees and then to his feet and began to creep ahead, one quiet footfall at a time. He realized in that instant that he was dominated by his senses, that he had lost his magical connection with the power of being, of guidance, upon which his confidence relied, the source of all good in his life. He didn’t want to be thinking, listening, watching; he felt trapped in himself.

  The suspect came from above, completely unexpectedly, falling out of the darkness and onto Robbie painfully and with determination. A pair of hands found Robbie’s head. One firmly gripped his chin; the other pressed tightly against the back of the cop’s neck. Cole Robbie lay on the ground, face first, still reeling from the impact, unable to gather his senses. He knew this grip and what was coming. The intention was to break his neck with a single jerk, a spine-twisting snap, and leave him lying here. Robbie could defeat the move with a simple anticipation of which direction the suspect would choose. But there was no time for such thought. God help me, he thought, and forced his chin left, just as the suspect made an identical move with his hands.

  People would say that Robbie instinctively felt the guy’s fingers against his face and his brain registered that the fingers were on the right side of the face, and therefore the guy was left-handed and would attempt a twist to the left; when combined with Robbie’s choice, the attempt was in part defeated. They would say that all his training and all his experience had combined to save a cop’s life. For the devastating crack the suspect heard, before abandoning the cop for paralyzed or dead, was not Cole Robbie’s neck but his jaw. Robbie would drink from a straw for the next eight weeks, but he would live; he would walk; he would run with his daughter and make love with his wife. And he would know for the rest of his days that his moment of decision had nothing to do with training or experience but was born of those final words he voiced internally before the deed was done.

  The suspect cut through the woods, heading back toward the very fire he had himself set, perhaps aware that heat-seeking devices were useless when aimed in the direction of such an inferno, perhaps only lucky to have made such a choice. Cole Robbie watched him run. On that night, it was the last anyone saw of the man.

  Boldt was of good stock. After firing those shots, he immediately regretted doing so, because he didn’t want to be in the position of needing anyone’s help. It was the spreading fire that had put the fear in his heart; he wasn’t outwardly afraid of many things, but fire was one of them. He rolled and came to his knees. All he needed for motivation was the sound of those approaching sirens, fire and police. He struggled to his feet, tested out various limbs, and pronounced himself sound. He would be badly bruised, and he would need a hot bath, but he wasn’t going to be admitted to any emergency room. He would accept responsibility for the warning shots, explaining that at the time he was down and unable to move. The truth nearly always worked best.

  The fire crews contained what remained of the fire. Strangely, what had begun as a white hot inferno had quickly petered out into one burning tree and some smoldering underbrush. When no detonator and no can or jar that might have contained the accelerant was found at the scene, speculation ran rampant among those in the know. Many theories surfaced; but with no physical proof, excepting some broken glass fragments found much later, the fire that consumed and killed detective Constance Branslonovich was listed as “arson assault by mysterious causes.”

  The Seattle press had for some years worked in concert with law enforcement. It was a relationship for which the city government was grateful. The press could kill you if they so chose. The Night of the Burning Tree, as it came to be called among law enforcement officers, pro
ved an exception to the rule. The purple cone of fire had been seen from five miles away and was said to have stretched nearly three hundred feet in the air. An eyewitness put the top of the flames above the Space Needle, but this was gross exaggeration and journalists elected to ignore it. Whereas the fire in the park and the death of an animal control officer (Branslonovich’s identity was temporarily withheld by mutual agreement) were reported at the top of the eleven o’clock news and on the morning edition’s front page, the subsequent detailed search of Boldt’s residence went unreported, based almost entirely on the fact that the press agreed to keep secret the residential addresses of law enforcement officers for reasons of security. The bomb squad, the scientific identification unit, and the Marshal Five arson task force, including Steven Garman, gathered at the Boldt home at 11:45 P.M., thirty minutes after the last of the fire trucks had departed Woodland Park. The bomb squad and their dogs led the first wave, searching doors, windows, switches, and flooring for triggers. The Marshall Fives followed next. Nothing indicating attempted arson was discovered.

  At 1:00 A.M., Bernie Lofgrin’s identification unit went to work, beginning with the lawn and perimeter grounds. Plaster casts were made of the ladder impressions, although Lofgrin agreed with Boldt’s assessment that the impressions “appeared consistent” with impressions at the two prior burn sites, an analysis later confirmed by the lab comparison tests.

  By the time Boldt entered his own house there were nine other people inside, including an electrical engineer who was using a sophisticated voltage tester to, as he put it, “measure line resistance,” and a carpenter who was drilling holes into various walls so that a fiberoptic camera could be inserted and the inside of the walls examined. This study revealed that the house had adequate insulation, as well as a piece of newspaper dated 1922, and a Stanley screwdriver that was probably equally as old. At the end of three hours of intense scrutiny, the head of the bomb squad and Lofgrin pulled Boldt aside and pronounced his home “clean,” which after that invasion it was anything but. A more thorough examination of the outside wall where the ladder had been placed was scheduled for daylight, and Boldt was ordered to sleep elsewhere, though nothing suspicious had been found.

  Garman, who joined the huddle, said, “Your wife’s arrival at the house probably put the guy off his mission.” Boldt was not comfortable with Garman’s presence in the first place. The sergeant grunted a response that no one understood.

  Lofgrin said, typically technical, “That would explain the discovery of the impressions and help to explain the absence of any accelerant.”

  “It doesn’t explain what happened in the woods,” Boldt pointed out.

  Arson detective Neil Bahan said, “Ah, but it might! We don’t know that whoever that was, let’s call him the arsonist, was there to watch or wait. He may have, for instance, been awaiting a chance at a return visit. To finish the job.” Boldt wanted everyone out of there, even if he couldn’t stay. He wanted some peace and quiet. Branslonovich was dead; Robbie was in an emergency room getting his jaw wired. There was no proof that Boldt’s house had been rigged. He was being asked to believe that the arsonist had been hanging around the forest waiting for a good time to return. He didn’t like any of it.

  Shoswitz asked to see him in his office first thing in the morning. Boldt feared he might lose the case—a case he had not wanted from the beginning but was, by that time, too personally involved in to want to surrender it to someone else. Thirty minutes later the last of them was out the front door. Boldt locked up tight and called Liz at Willie and Susan’s and woke them all. He spoke to his wife for nearly half an hour, explaining everything as best he could. He felt both embarrassed and ashamed that he had brought this onto his family. She told him that, with the kids asleep, she was there for the night.

  Boldt said, “I think the cabin is a good idea for you.”

  “For all three of us, you mean.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re scaring me.”

  “Sorry.” He had all sorts of pat answers ready. Stuff like this happened to cops. They had been lucky all these years to have seen so little of it. He felt tempted to share with her the sight of Branslonovich exploding—for that was the only way to describe what had happened—not so much to frighten her but because he needed to tell someone, needed to vent some of the anger and fear that the violent death had instilled in him. He still saw her spinning around like a dancer—yellow, blue, then white. He still heard that cry.

  “You there?” she asked.

  “Yeah. Here.”

  “You want to come over? Sleep with me? They gave me the guest room.”

  His wife asking him to sleep with her, to hold her, to comfort her. He wanted nothing more. He said so.

  “But you’re staying,” she said.

  “I couldn’t sleep if I tried. I’ll go downtown, try to sort some of this out.” He wanted a look at the most recent poem sent to Garman.

  “I’d rather just lose the house, you know. I wish—and I mean this!—I wish he’d gotten the house, that he’d taken the house and left us alone.”

  Boldt was silent for a long time.

  “I know that silence. You’re saying he doesn’t want the house, he wants you.” She gasped. “Oh, God.”

  “I didn’t say anything.”

  “He wants you. Is that it?”

  “We don’t know what he wants. We don’t know who he is. We don’t know much.”

  “Someone you put away before?”

  “Doubtful.”

  “I hate this. Jesus God. What do we do?” she cried into the phone.

  “Can you get a leave?”

  “I’m owed weeks.”

  “Do you mind?”

  “Being driven out of my own home? Of course I mind,” she snapped. He waited her out. “No, love, I don’t mind. No, of course not. But I wish you’d join us.”

  “The Sheriff’s Department will watch the road. The cabin too, probably.”

  “Oh, God. I can’t believe this is happening.”

  “Could Susan go with you?”

  “I can ask. She might. I love you,” she blurted out. “God, how I love you!”

  “No music so sweet,” he whispered into the phone.

  “Always and forever,” she added.

  “We’ll get through this,” Boldt said, “and we’ll reevaluate and we’ll make sense of the last few months.”

  “We need to talk,” she said, and to him it rang as something of a confession, and his heart wanted to tear from his chest.

  “Yeah,” he agreed. If tears made noise, she would have heard them.

  “You amaze me.” Her voice trailed off. “Have I told you lately how much you amaze me? What an incredible man you are?”

  “A little overweight,” he said, and she laughed, barking into the phone.

  “Not to me,” she said.

  “I love you, Elizabeth.”

  “Sleep if you can.”

  They hung up.

  Boldt ignored orders and took a long hot bath in the old clawfoot that had come with the place, running the faucet twice to reheat the water. When he got out, he pulled the drain plug. Ten minutes later, the tub was only half empty. He searched the house for a plunger but couldn’t find one. Not one damn plunger in the entire house!

  The kitchen sink still filled with dishes hadn’t drained either, but Boldt didn’t notice it. He was already out the door and on his way downtown, off to prepare for that dreaded meeting with Shoswitz.

  31

  The death of a fellow police officer was like a death in the family. For the Seattle Police Department, death incurred while on duty happened so rarely that in his twenty-four years on the force, Boldt had only attended three such funerals. Staged as pageants more than funerals, they gripped the city’s collective consciousness. Flags were lowered, streets were closed, and, on a marbled hillside high above the rat race, weapons were aimed into the gray sky and fired in bone-chilling unison.

  B
y sunrise the morning after the botched attempt to net the arsonist, all the crews had left both the park and Boldt’s home. Only a ribbon of yellow and black police tape remained at both sites. A single cruiser with two patrolmen cruised between the two crime scenes. Identification technicians were scheduled to return to both at first light.

  Boldt beat them to it. Perhaps it was the look that Shoswitz had given him in the operations van just before the exercise began. Perhaps it was Branslonovich’s spectral dance among the towering trees. Perhaps it was his arrival at Branslonovich’s torching, only seconds too late. Whatever the reason, Boldt felt directly responsible for her death. The image of her twisting body, arms outstretched in a crucifix, remained seared into his consciousness, plaguing him. Eyes open or shut, it didn’t matter, the image remained. His to live with. Or try to.

  Chief among his frustrations was that the only apparent witness, an ERT officer by the name of Robbie, had a jaw so badly broken he could not speak. His one scribbled message was that he had not gotten a clean look at the suspect.

  Boldt’s fascination remained with the crime scene in the park. He ducked under the police tape, unseen. Overhead, the stark limbs of the deciduous trees captured the orange-ruby glow of a spectacular sunrise, bleeding a rosy daylight onto the forest floor. The conifers and cedars towered overhead majestically. Boldt walked among the fallen limbs and the wintering weeds and shrubs, avoiding the downtrodden path created hours earlier by a dozen anxious firemen and patrol officers responding to the scene. He cut his own path, the symbolism not lost on him. Although there would be a pulling together of SPD because of Branslonovich’s death, Boldt was certain to find himself isolated, cut free by Shoswitz, and the subject of several briefings and reviews. If he were determined “solely responsible” for “recklessness” in the hasty fielding of the operation, it was conceivable he would be suspended without pay or even asked to retire. More than anything else, those last few hours planted firmly into Boldt’s mind the reality of his advancing years of service. He was at that time the most senior homicide cop, considered old guard and, in a department looking to reinvent itself in the wake of national disgrace in other inner-city police departments, an endangered species.