Beyond Recognition

by Ridley Pearson

  It came out that the police had received another poem earlier in the day, accompanied by a melted green piece of plastic, and “had done nothing about it.”

  There were animated discussions on the talk shows of the “need for new leadership.” Federal agencies had made some well-placed leaks about their desire to run the show and take SPD out. Boldt resented this most of all, because he knew that on the officer level SPD and the agencies were cooperating just fine. It was only at the administrative level that the power plays were under way.

  LaMoia, unable to bear it any longer, switched the radio back to Boldt’s favorite, KPLU, and they listened to the horn of Wynton Marsalis.

  I-5 traffic was unbearably slow in both directions. Even with police lights and sirens, they crawled along.

  When Boldt’s pager and telephone rang within seconds of each other, he knew there was trouble. Perhaps Shoswitz intended to pull him from the investigation, now that Boldt felt within a few miles of its resolution. Garman’s role had nagged at him from the beginning: his being the target of the notes and, later, his Air Force service with its direct connection to missile bases. Their one interrogation had gone poorly, and even now, as they drove to bring him down for another round of questioning, no hard evidence existed against him.

  Perhaps the call and page were from Liz, who had told her husband in no uncertain terms that she intended to return to Seattle on that very day, Tuesday. Perhaps Marina was unavailable and he was expected to be father for the day, while his wife did God-knows-what with God-knows-whom. He bristled with anger, even before he connected the call by flipping open the cellular phone. “Boldt,” he said sternly, drawing LaMoia’s attention.

  “Are you near a radio?” It was Daphne.

  “In the car.”

  “Well fasten your seat belt and tune into KOMO AM.”

  “We were just there.”

  “Then you heard Garman?” she said heatedly.

  “What about Garman?” Boldt asked, at which point LaMoia was nearly leaning onto Boldt trying to hear. Boldt elbowed him away.

  “You ready for this?” she asked rhetorically. “Steven Garman, Marshal Five fire inspector, is currently in the process of confessing publicly to being the Scholar, our killer.”

  Boldt nearly drove the car into a sideswipe. LaMoia snagged the wheel and saved them in a brilliantly timed reaction.

  Boldt told his detective, “Garman just confessed.” With LaMoia still steering the car, Boldt punched the radio and located the station. It was Garman, all right. And he was well along in describing every last detail of his crimes.

  It was fifteen minutes later before they pulled up in front of Garman’s residence, and the man was still live on the radio, by that point answering a string of questions offered up by the jock that seemed more an attempt to stall the man. Two local television remotes had beaten Boldt to the scene, and both stations went live with the arrival of the police.

  “He’s locked in his apartment,” a reporter shouted at Boldt, sticking a microphone into his face. “What’s the position of the Seattle Police?”

  Boldt wanted to issue a “no comment,” always the safest decision. But he feared a backlash if he came off as soft or undecided. “We’re here to arrest Mr. Garman on a variety of charges stemming from a string of fatal arsons within King County.”

  A helicopter roared onto the scene and landed incredibly quickly in a vacant lot. Boldt recognized Special Agent Sanders hurrying through the swirling dust and debris.

  LaMoia pushed away the reporter’s microphone, leaned into Boldt, and said, “We better be first to take him.”

  They ran up the steps, Sanders shouting from behind. Boldt nodded to his detective, who tried the door, called out a warning, and then reared back and kicked the door twice. It remained locked but broke away from the splintered doorjamb and banged open.

  Steven Garman sat peacefully in a recliner, telephone in hand. He spoke into the receiver. “Looks like my ride has arrived.”

  LaMoia began calling out the Miranda above the roar and chaos and shouts coming up the steps behind them.

  Lou Boldt, charged with anger and rage, nonetheless walked calmly up to Garman, took the phone out of his hand, and cradled the receiver. Under no conditions could he reveal his emotions to the suspect, give himself away. Garman had proven himself cool to the point of cold; Boldt needed all his wits about him.

  Meeting Boldt’s eyes, Garman said venomously, “If you had caught me sooner, fewer would have died. You have to live with that, Sergeant, not me.”

  Boldt answered, “I may have to live with it, but you’re going to die with it. Given the options, I’d say I got the better deal.”

  “You think so?” answered Steven Garman. “We’ll see.”

  Within the hour, the Chief of Police held a packed press conference declaring that Garman was in custody and had been among a very small list of suspects all along. He informed his audience that Garman had been interviewed not long before his arrest and that he, the Chief, attributed the man’s breakdown and confession in part to that interview. All this was done without ever consulting Boldt, though the sergeant’s name was used liberally throughout the briefing.

  There was a celebration on the fifth floor, typically reserved for only the most difficult cases—the red balls, the black holes; there were a dozen nicknames. Supermarket carrot cake, fresh milk, a collection of espressos and lattes from SBC rather than from the vendor in the lobby.

  Boldt did his best to hide his exhaustion and appear cheerful for the sake of the troops, but when he spotted LaMoia and Matthews at different moments during the levity, their eyes showed the same reservations that he felt inside. Garman had invoked the Miranda, turned immediately to silence, and called in one of the city’s most notorious defense attorneys. There would be no interrogation. They had the radio confession on tape, but when listened to it was vague and lacked the kind of detail that would make prosecution a no-brainer.

  Bernie Lofgrin and his small team of identification technicians missed the festivities because they were combing Garman’s home for evidence. They willingly shared that job with an elite team of ATF forensic experts flown up from the Chestnut Grove lab in Sacramento and headed by Dr. Howard Casterstein.

  A uniformed officer caught up to Boldt, who was standing off by himself, deep in thought. The officer seemed reluctant to interrupt but finally did so, informing Boldt of a phone call.

  The call was from Lofgrin. Boldt took it in his office cubicle.

  “I’ve got bad news, and then I’ve got bad news,” Lofgrin began. “Which do you want first?”

  “It’s clean,” Boldt said, guessing.

  “I’m supposed to tell you that,” Lofgrin complained. “If we’re looking for this guy’s lab, we had better start looking somewhere else. Casterstein agrees. This place is not what we’re looking for. No hypergolics, no Werner ladder, no blue and silver fibers.”

  “Is that possible?” Boldt asked, looking up to see Daphne standing nearby. A group of photos in her hand raised Boldt’s curiosity, but he couldn’t get a good look at them. She caught his eyes and motioned down the hall toward the conference room; she wanted to see him alone. He nodded and she walked off. Boldt watched her backside a little too long for a married man.

  “My job is to comb the place, not deal in probability. What I’m telling you is that this guy does not look good from this end. We are not going to deliver the smoking gun. Okay? And quite frankly, Lou, I don’t like it. It’s too clean. Okay? God, we’d expect some kind of connective tissue: tree bark, a penknife, window washing gear.”

  “He’s an investigator,” Boldt reminded. “If the lab is off-site, he’s smart enough to change clothes and shoes—take precautions not to track evidence home with him. He confessed—if you can call it that. Maybe because he knew we couldn’t find enough to make it stick. Maybe it’s a game for him.”

  “Yeah? Well if it is, he’s winning. That’s all I’ve got to say. Caster
stein knows his shit, Lou, and he’s walking around shaking his head, like a kid drawing a blank at an Easter egg hunt. If you were here, you’d see what I mean, and you wouldn’t like it, believe me. We’re pissing up a rope here, Lou. I’m thinking the best link, the most likely connection, is still this ink. Okay? Connect a pen in the house to the threats he sent. Maybe we can do that. We’re rounding up his pens.”

  “I’d take it, Bernie, don’t get me wrong. Gladly. But it’s not what I’m looking for. It’s not exactly a home run.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Leads to his lab, that’s what I need. Find me something pointing to the location of his shop. You do that, I can go home and go to sleep.”

  “In that case, I’d start drinking coffee, I was you. It’s the fibers, the blue and silver fibers you need to follow. Like you said, he’s an investigator. He knows what the fuck he’s doing. I wouldn’t go counting on much from here.” He added quickly, “Save me some cake, if there is any, would you? And not a corner piece—something good. You guys have all the fun.”

  Boldt hung up the phone thinking about his wife. Amid all the eighteen-hour tours, Liz had come to town for the day and had, as far as Boldt knew, returned to the cabin, having never contacted her husband. He tried her cellular, got her voice mail, and told her, “The coast is clear, love. We’re back in the house. I miss you all terribly. Hurry home.”

  The bulk of the investigation, that rock coming down the hill, had hit bottom and run out of momentum. Lab crews would be busy for several weeks analyzing what little evidence came out of Hall’s and Garman’s residences. Amid a continued media blitz by city politicians proclaiming the city safe and the guilty parties behind bars, Boldt would watch the investigation be dismantled before his eyes and despite his objections. He had been here before; he felt wrapped in the black cape of depression.

  He walked slowly down the long hall to the conference room, attempting to collect his thoughts.

  She sat at the table alone under the unforgiving glare of fluorescent light. Her hair was pulled back. She looked tired. She directed him to the city map, into which she had stabbed several pushpins. “Dorothy Enwright, Melissa Heifitz, Veronica De-Latario—red, yellow, and green. All in the same general area of town. Why?”

  Boldt studied the map and the location of the pushpins. The simplest things could avoid them, rarely did they fully escape. “That’s the area of service for his battalion. He’d have a firm working knowledge of the area.”

  Her lips pursed, and when she spoke her voice was as harsh as the lighting. “Listen, it’s true that psychopaths often restrict their movements to an area a mile or two in radius from their residences, but Steven Garman is so far outside the profile of a psychopath that there’s no reason to make the slightest of comparisons. Admittedly, I haven’t had time to work with him, but I’ve listened to that so-called confession more times than the rest of you, and I’ve got to tell you, there’s a clever mind at work here. You listen carefully, most of it is fluff. He’s not confessing to anything. And does an intelligent, well-liked man like Garman start killing women in his own back yard? I don’t think so, Lou. Maybe across town, maybe in Portland or Spokane, or someplace far, far from home, but down the street?”

  “Down the street, he can target them,” he suggested.

  She protested, “So you know how the Scholar targets them, is that it?”

  “You know I don’t.”

  “Well, neither do I, and I’m willing to bet you that neither does Steven Garman.” She stared at him through a long silence. “He’s too big and heavy for your boy up the ladder, isn’t he?” she asked rhetorically. “Same as with Hall. We listen to the evidence, right? Isn’t that right, Lou?”

  “Shoswitz will cut the team down to nothing. Four of us if I’m lucky: LaMoia, Bahan, Fidler—”

  “When do we face we have the wrong man?”

  “Facing it and discussing it openly are two different issues,” he answered. “Shoswitz will not want to hear it. Period. The brass is crowing all over the airwaves that we caught the big one that got away. We change the story and some heads will roll.”

  “I understand that,” she said. “But we can’t go along with it. Even if we do it quietly, we push ahead. There’s going to be another fire, Lou,” she said, voicing his secret fear.

  “You had any vacation lately?” he asked, changing the subject, hoping to erase the image of another fire from his thoughts.

  “No.”

  “Where would you go if you did? What kind of places does Owen like?”

  “Owen doesn’t take vacations.”

  “I’m thinking about Mexico a lot. Warm. Sunny. Cheap.”

  “I think I’d ask to borrow your cabin,” she said dreamily. “Take a pile of books, a couple of bags of fresh veggies, some really great wine, some CDs. You got a bathtub up there?”

  “Of course.”

  “Candles. Some bath oil. Spoil myself, you know? Indulge.”

  “Suntan lotion,” he proposed. “A Walkman with all of Oscar Peterson. Barefoot on the beach. Long naps.”

  “The kids?”

  “Of course. You bet! Spend time just watching them, just sitting there watching them, you know?”

  “Shoswitz suggesting a vacation?” she asked.

  Boldt nodded. “Feels like he’s ready to shove it down my throat. He mentioned you and John, too.”

  “He doesn’t miss much. He never strikes you that way, but his antenna is always up.”

  “It would appear so.”

  “Let’s say he’s still out there,” she said. “You arrested his source when you arrested Hall. Forget Garman for a moment. At this point the Scholar is like a junkie, he’s addicted to the power of these arsons. Earlier, there was, more than likely, a justification at work in his mind. Rationalizing his deeds. But somewhere in the course of events there was a transference to where the deed justified itself because it made him feel so good. So all-powerful. The Bible quotes indicate he believes in a Divine Law, and he believes he is the bearer of that flag. But you put a kink in all that. You dried up the source. You put fear into him. His response was to take a big risk by breaking into Chief Joseph and taking the hypergolics for himself. This tells us that he’s a planner. He watched Nicholas Hall; he knew what warehouses to hit. We don’t know for how long, but he’s known the location of those accelerants. He was content to pay for them because it put Hall at risk, not himself; as long as Hall did his job right, the supply was endless. You changed all that.

  “Success in such endeavors,” she continued, “breeds a lackadaisical attitude, a complacency. He believed he could go on doing this forever. He felt confident that you would not identify or locate him. But now we have Garman as well—and Garman is trying to cover for him. Why? It’s likely the Scholar has stolen more accelerant, quite possibly an enormous amount. Why? Some kind of grand finale? Will he just go back to killing these women, content with his stolen fuel? Or will he move away, only to start again in a year or two?”

  “You tell me,” Boldt suggested.

  “He’s fooled me from the start, Lou. I don’t trust my own judgments. I’ve been wrong about him time and time again. The point is, neither of us believes Garman set those fires. We’ll never convince anyone else until we know why he confessed.”

  “Protecting someone,” Boldt said, repeating what she had suggested.

  “Unless it’s himself he’s protecting,” she said, confusing him. “Unless he’s two people inside there: the fire inspector and the arsonist. And the fire inspector finally turned in the arsonist.” She produced a photograph. “Here’s the stumbling block: his ex-wife.” She moved her hand out of the way, and Boldt saw a woman’s happy face smiling back at him in the photograph.

  “Peas in a pod,” she said, producing one of the recent family photographs of Dorothy Enwright. The similarities between Enwright and the ex-wife were astounding. Boldt looked back and forth between them. “Uncanny.”

 
“The problem with fires is they burn the victim, they burn the boxes of photographs, the framed pictures by the bed. We end up with pictures fifteen years out of date. And the thing about women is, we change our look. We move with the fashions. Men? Forget it. But we’re the victims of these fires—you and me, Lou—because we’ve been working with photos that didn’t show us the current look of these women. Here’s the photo of Melissa Heifitz we have,” she said, producing another shot. “Henna-red hair down past her shoulders. But come to find out, the henna was out of a bottle; she went gray in the late eighties and dyed it dark, just like these two. Cut it shorter and left it straight.” She used a felt-tip pen to change the look of Heifitz’s hair, and all at once the similarity was there as well.

  “Damn!” Boldt said. Another piece of his puzzle.

  “It’s what triggers him, Lou: that particular look.”

  “So it might be Garman after all?” Boldt questioned uncomfortably. He didn’t want to believe this. “He’s protecting himself from himself? You actually buy that?”

  “Not for a minute,” said the psychologist who had offered him the theory. “Though one could make the argument fairly strongly.”

  “You’re toying with me,” he complained.

  “Absolutely.” She smiled, though it did nothing to disguise her fatigue. The smile melted from her face as if rinsed off. “There’s a third element, a third participant. Someone we don’t even know exists—didn’t know until now,” she corrected herself. “Garman may be a good liar, but he’s no killer. We may not have the evidence necessary to prove it, but we both know it’s true.”