Beyond Recognition
Page 23
The burned section of trees stuck out like a charred cancer. Boldt steered his way toward it, eyes alert in the shimmering light for any stray piece of evidence particular to a human presence. The arsonist had been in that area, and despite the trampling caused by the emergency crews, Boldt held to the possibility, the probability, that evidence had unintentionally been left behind, as was nearly always the case.
Circling the area several times, he found nothing of significance on the outskirts of the burn, but his imagination began to place the killer hiding there. He worked his way in toward the center, like growth rings on a cut stump. He chose two trees at the relative center of the burned area, a circle of roughly twelve feet of cleared ground blanketed in a white ash, only two tall trees remaining intact, their bark badly burned, rising a distance of ten to twenty feet. Searching the area, Boldt realized the brilliance of the deed: The arsonist had burned any and all evidence of his being there along with Branslonovich, a complete and thorough job. Another example, the detective thought, of the kind of fore-thinking mind responsible. He didn’t appreciate having a worthy adversary; he would have preferred an ignorant, emotional, mistake-ridden sociopath who inadvertently left evidence at every crime scene.
Keeping the arsonist’s intentions and motivations in mind—a point of view critical to an investigation—Boldt shifted left and right, side to side, in an attempt to provide himself with any kind of a view of his own home. But all he saw was Phinney Way, all he heard was the traffic on Greenwood. He glanced up.
That one simple movement set off a flood of thought and emotion. With it, Boldt confirmed to his own satisfaction that the arsonist had been up in the tree. Branslonovich had appeared on the ground below him, and he had bombed her. The bottom limbs of both tall trees were black with soot. Boldt studied both trees carefully. The branches of the one nearer him began lower to the ground and were clustered in a way that seemed the easier climb of the two. Boldt chose that tree and began to climb. The limbs offered a natural ladder. He struggled with his balance and his big frame, realizing that even climbing a tree was a physical effort for him. With each branch, as he pulled himself higher, the view improved. His hands and clothes were black with the soot of the fire. Ten feet … twelve feet … fifteen feet.... He could not yet see the second story of his house. He pulled himself up yet another notch, and another—flirting with acrophobia, light-headed, slightly nauseated. Higher and higher he climbed, his attention on the view, not the ground. There. Nearly a quarter mile away, he spotted the roof of his own house. The sighting charged him with energy. He shifted focus, looking for the next limb to climb, and came face-to-face with letters and numbers freshly carved into the bark.
d A n 3 : 27
He held tight, staring at it for several minutes, his heart racing in his chest. From that higher perspective Boldt’s house was entirely in view. A surge of adrenaline coursed through him. The arsonist had sat right here, in this very spot.
By the time he reached the bottom of the tree, Boldt already had his cellular phone in hand. He called LaMoia and said without introduction, “Meet me at Enwright’s and bring some running shoes.”
“Running shoes?” the vain detective protested.
“Yeah,” Boldt answered dryly. “You can’t climb trees in ostrich cowboy boots.”
32
“Three different biblical quotations,” Daphne said from the end of the fifth-floor conference table. Reading from a copy of the Bible, she said, “Daniel three, twenty-seven, carved in a tree with a good view of the Boldt home:
And the princes, governors, and captains, and the King’s counsellors, being gathered together, saw these men, upon whose bodies the fire had no power, nor was a hair of their head singed, neither were their coats changed, nor the smell of fire had passed on them.”
She continued, “This is clearly aimed at us—police, firemen, governors and captains—and is much different from the others, both of which are aimed at retribution. At Dorothy Enwright’s it was Ezekiel twenty-four, twelve:
She hath wearied herself with lies, and her great scum went not forth out of her; her scum shall be in the fire.”
“This guy has fried his circuits,” LaMoia said, annoying her.
“The anger is directed at a woman. That helps us.”
“You, maybe,” LaMoia said. “Doesn’t help me any.”
Boldt and LaMoia both had pine sap smeared on their clothing, their hands, and their faces. Locating the carved quotations had been time consuming, but easier than Boldt had expected; they had isolated the highest ground near the two victims’ homes and had looked for the tallest trees and, of those, the easiest to climb. Between them, they had climbed a total of eight trees, two with a view of Enwright’s and six with a view of Heifitz’s. LaMoia had found both quotes.
“What’s of interest to me—to us—is not only the quotes but the confirmation that this individual watched his fires or, at the very least, had a view of them. He’s a fire lover. That’s consistent with what we’d expect.”
“Or he triggered them from up there,” LaMoia suggested. “Quarter of a mile with some altitude,” he reminded. “Even a bunch of the shitty hobby-type radio control devices would work at that distance.”
“And he was carrying some kind of explosive accelerant on his person,” Boldt contributed. “To be used just the way he used it on Branslonovich, I assume.”
“Or as a distraction,” LaMoia suggested. “A diversion, if necessary.”
“So he’s a planner,” Daphne said, “which we already knew. He’s voyeuristic, which works with what we know of arsonists. But what comes as a surprise are these biblical references. The earlier use of poetry suggested an intellectual, college educated, well read; the use of biblical references is typical of a different psychology, a more pathologically disturbed individual.”
“The God squad,” LaMoia said, well aware of Daphne’s aversion to such terms. “A fruitcake. A nuthatch. I knew it all along. I said so all along, didn’t I, Sarge?” He smiled thinly at the psychologist, mocking her. Despite their friendship, LaMoia and Daphne continually butted heads on matters of the criminal’s psychology.
“Where’s it leave us?” Boldt asked, ignoring LaMoia’s outburst and hoping the pair of them would leave it alone. The discovery of the quotations, the physical carving of the bark, had humanized the killer for Boldt. Along with the ladder impressions, he had Liz’s image of a thin man dressed in jeans and a dark sweatshirt. With the killer increasingly defined, so was the urgency within Boldt.
“The third poem, the one received yesterday,” Daphne said, “was Nietzsche. This one was accompanied not by melted plastic but melted metal.” To Boldt, she said, carefully and tactfully, “If you hadn’t made your discovery last night, perhaps we wouldn’t know the significance of the substitution of metal for plastic. And if Bernie Lofgrin’s identification crew wasn’t so consumed with working up evidence, they might have time to check the metal for us, but I know what they’ll find anyway, so it really doesn’t matter. Remember as a kid,” she asked them both, “the pieces you moved on a Monopoly board? The hat—”
“The car!” LaMoia exclaimed.
“Metal,” Daphne answered. “Aluminum? Pewter? Doesn’t matter. The message is simple: The metal pieces were the players.” To Boldt she said, “You’re a player in the investigation. The arsonist sought a means to differentiate between one of his victims in a house and a player—namely, you,” she said, meeting his eyes. “Shoswitz spread your name all over every press conference.”
“Damn!” LaMoia gasped.
She had warned Boldt that he might be targeted, but neither of them brought it up.
She said, “What’s of significance here is not only that he had the wherewithal to target the man running the investigation but the determination to see it through to fruition. Your family was in your house,” she reminded him. “Would he have gone through with it if he’d had the chance?” She loved such theory. “He torched the two
women only after they were alone, without their children, which is also why we assume he watches the houses prior to detonation. He doesn’t want to kill any kids. That’s significant. That’s something I can run with. He has a conscience, Lou, which, quite frankly, makes him all the more dangerous. No nuthatch.” She said this derisively to LaMoia. “Worse, the decision to take out the lead investigator indicates to me a man with a bigger plan, someone who needs more time, is willing to take a chance to buy himself more time. Why?” she asked rhetorically. “To complete some larger goal? Kill more women? Burn more houses? Who knows? But more. Something more.”
Boldt felt restless. He got up and paced the room. A monster, he thought, no matter what she called him.
“You get like this,” LaMoia said to her, “and you give me the weebees. You freak me right-the-fuck out. You’re guessing, right? Because it doesn’t come off like that. It’s weird, the way you get.”
“Educated guessing,” Boldt clarified for her. He didn’t want to tell her that he too felt an added urgency. Was it that the cornered animal strikes out? He wasn’t sure. But it bubbled down inside him like something bad he’d eaten.
“My advice,” she said, “is that we get cranking on every damn aspect of this case we can. We pull manpower, whatever it takes.”
“I’ve been putting in sixteen-hour days,” LaMoia complained. “I’ve got a shitload of stuff to go over. I’ve got sap in my hair and pine needles down my pants. Don’t tell me to get cranking. I thought you were going to produce some witness, this kid of yours. What about it?”
“Easy,” Boldt chided. “For two people with such mutual respect, you sure have a weird way of showing it.”
Daphne bristled at the detective. “I’ll get the witness,” she declared harshly. “There were other considerations at stake.”
“I’m sure there were,” LaMoia snapped.
“Children, children,” Boldt soothed.
Daphne slid back her chair and grabbed her paperwork. “I’ll get the witness,” she repeated to LaMoia. She stormed out of the conference and shut the door.
“Proud of yourself?” Boldt asked his detective, who looked smug.
“Damn right,” LaMoia answered. “When she gets pissed off her nipples get hard. You ever noticed that?”
“Cool it, John. That’s enough.” Boldt hated playing schoolteacher. He decided to call LaMoia on his claims. “What’s all this ‘stuff you say you have for me? Anything useful?”
“Sarge, it’s me! Useful? What do you think?”
“I think you’re full of shit half the time,” Boldt said angrily.
“Yeah. True enough. But what about the other half?” He held up his detective’s notebook.
Boldt broke down and grinned. LaMoia had a way with him. “Go on,” the sergeant encouraged, “I’m waiting.”
“First thing is these ladder receipts. We’re actually getting somewhere with this scanner stuff. It’s taken a little time to get the bugs out, but yesterday—before all the shit hit the fan—we finished the scanning and dumped the data into an indexing engine, and we culled over eighty hits: eighty actual transactions of a Werner ladder being bought, complete with credit card or checking account number.”
It felt like old news to Boldt, though he didn’t say so. He had sat in that tree in the very spot the killer had sat, his wife had talked briefly to the man; he didn’t want to hear about tracing back receipts for ladders, and yet he understood the importance of such evidence. They needed names, addresses. If LaMoia produced them, as he claimed he could, Boldt was interested. Until then, he felt like telling his detective to keep it to himself. But he understood well the need to voice one’s accomplishments, no matter how small. Any detective was left defeated more often than not. Any win was worth a little applause. “That’s great,” Boldt said, attempting to sound enthusiastic.
“Tomorrow or the next day I should have the names that belong to those account numbers. We run the list by our military friends, we use the computer to compare it against the fire department’s employee roster, present and past, and maybe we get a break. Stranger things have happened.” He waited for Boldt to say something and, when he didn’t, asked, “You okay, Sarge?”
“Fine.”
“This thing shook you up. I can see it. No problemo. It would anybody. You want to blow this off for the time being?”
Boldt told him to go ahead.
“Yeah, okay. Fine. Cars is next,” he said, changing papers. “I don’t have shit. Nothing worth your time. Some hassles getting access to the vehicles. The Mazda belonging to Heifitz was impounded—based on what, I have no idea. Enwright’s Ford, on the other hand, found its way over to her ex-husband’s place. You ask me, that borders on grand theft auto, but what the fuck. He’s going to let me take a look at the wheels, so what do we care? Stay tuned.”
“That’s it?”
“Best for last,” LaMoia explained. “This possible Air Force connection—Matthews and her snitch saying this guy was Air Force. I greased an ATF guy with a pair of Sonics tickets. Preseason. No great loss. Decent guy at that. Says this isn’t the first time they’ve investigated rocket fuel.”
“Texas,” Boldt said.
“Yeah, right, that video. Sure. But an arson in St. Louis as well. Another in the Raleigh–Durham area. One in Miami. Turns out a person can cook up some rocket fuel with a little bit of knowledge and a lot of balls. But the thing is, the homemade shit leaves crap behind—metals, shit like that. They can see it’s homemade. What’s bugging Casterstein, my friend says, is that if it’s rocket fuel, it’s clean stuff, and if it’s clean then it’s military quality. Well, you can be fucking sure that if it’s military, it’s Air Force, so I started kinda nibbling around at the edges, you understand, trying to get a fix on how a person scores Air Force quality rocket fuel. And the ATF guy is as baffled as I am. And I believe him, Sarge. I mention McChord,” he said, referring to a base south of Tacoma, “and I don’t get much of a rise out of him. But he says to me that if it’s rocket fuel it’s ICBM stuff, because the space shuttle fuel is produced privately in Utah, and their lab has the book on that shit. They can recognize it post facto.” He lowered his voice intentionally. “But McChord is a major airlift center, Sarge. Shit coming and going constantly. And I get to thinking, What if some of what they’re shipping is rocket fuel? I don’t know to whom, I don’t know why, but it’s possible, isn’t it? The Japs have a space program; maybe they’re buying our shit to lift their rockets. Maybe it’s bound for Korea for defense. Something hush-hush. But shit, it’s worth looking into, don’t you think? You know those military ordnance guys. They’ll freak out if they think someone has lifted some of their hooch. All we gotta do is tickle them a little bit.”
“Do it,” Boldt said, thinking back to Daphne’s comment and the need to pursue absolutely every speck of evidence, every lead.
LaMoia had a devilish look. He said, “Or I can cut to the chase without involving the fruit salad boys. I kiss a few butts and see what I can get for us. Press some flesh. You’d be surprised what a bottle of Stoli and a night of lap-dancing can get you. Most of these MPs guarding the bases are just kids in uniforms. I flash my badge, they think I’m straight off the tube. You get these kids lip-walking drunk with some topless nineteen-year-old coed doing the Watusi in nothing but a thong, about an inch over their woodies, and they don’t remember nothing about confidential.” He said sarcastically, “I hate this work, Sergeant, you know that. But as long as I’m helping out, I’m there for the betterment of this investigation.”
“Just exploratory,” Boldt suggested. “A factfinding mission.”
“If the facts play out,” LaMoia said, “then we obtain the necessary paperwork and we go through the front gate, nice and proper.” Similar techniques were used in every investigation. It saved the investigator from the paperwork of pursuing any dead leads.
LaMoia sat uncharacteristically quiet for a moment.
“What?” Boldt asked.
“Who said anything about that?”
“Just if you need it,” LaMoia offered.
Boldt saw that LaMoia meant it. A rare moment of outward compassion from the king of one-liners. Boldt thanked him and asked what they had on the movements of Enwright and Heifitz on the days of their murders.
LaMoia informed him they had credit card records and bank statements. He would check them out as well.
Boldt studied the detective. He looked exhausted and haggard. Boldt returned the concern: “What about you, John. Are you holding up?”
LaMoia didn’t answer directly. His voice cracking with emotion, he said, “Just so you know, Sarge. If anything should happen to you, I will personally whack this guy. This is a promise that I swear on. So help me God, I’ll kill him dead.”
Boldt had no words. He reached out and briefly took the other’s hand in his own. LaMoia had tears in his eyes. It was the first time Boldt had seen him cry.
33
Boldt had not stopped thinking about the runaway boy who had called in the homicide. He had been distracted, first by Bear’s discovery of the Monopoly piece, then by the arsonist’s targeting of his home, but each time he climbed into his car and drove the streets, he thought of the boy.
He was reminded of him again when Dixie’s preliminary report on the crime scene arrived on Boldt’s desk. A body discovered in a crawl space was not an everyday occurrence. The papers had run the story; a radio show had somehow gotten hold of the boy’s 911 call and played it. There was an outcry from a domestic abuse group that too many women disappeared and too few of the disappearances were investigated thoroughly. The group, jumping to conclusions ahead of the medical examiner’s report, pointed to the fact that the woman victim had been found in the crawl space of her own home.