Beyond Recognition (20 page)

“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 seemed 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.

Casterstein pursed his lips and leaned into the camera, going slightly out of focus again. “I don't know yet what we're looking at in these fires of yours,” he said flatly, his voice suddenly dry. “But I can tell you what they set off in that test fire. I can tell you what they're thinking back East. I can tell you what they're looking for, now that they've culled the test site and run the necessary analysis.” He allowed it to hang there for a moment, suspended on a telephone line somewhere between Sacramento and Seattle, a ball of spoken information surrounded on both sides by static. He brushed his hair back like a pitcher debating a signal sent by the catcher. Then he took a deep breath and spoke two words that flooded Boldt with heat and caused his eyes to sting. “Rocket fuel,” he said. “The accelerant in the Fort Worth test was liquid rocket fuel.”

The grounds of Owen Adler's residence intimidated Boldt despite the fact that he had been there three years earlier. One measured Owen Adler's kind of wealth by the size and range of his private jet. It was a Gulfstream 3 with the wings of a 4 for extra fuel. He was on the Seattle A-list. His marriage to Daphne Matthews was to be performed by Robert Fulghum in a private ceremony on the grounds of the estate, overlooking Shilshole Marina and Puget Sound. The marriage had been postponed twice, although only their closest friends knew this—no invitations had ever been sent. Daphne claimed it was because, in putting his food empire back together, Adler had encountered repeated scheduling problems, but for Boldt there were other signs. Daphne had allowed the tenant of her houseboat to leave without penalty; she had made no attempt to rent it again. She was back to volunteering at the Shelter, a church basement for teenage runaways, a commitment she had dropped during the infatuation days with Owen Adler. For his part, Adler had twice been photographed in the company of other women for the society pages. Boldt had not asked any questions. Any man who could lift a multimillion dollar company out of ashes the way Adler had deserved some kind of medal. There was no doubting the man's power to overcome financial obstacles. On the other hand, Boldt thought, Daphne Matthews might be a kind of challenge he had never faced.

The picturesque marina, so pretty at night with its white lights, black reflecting water, and regimented lines of white boats, their masts as delicate as frost on a window, was nestled inside a stone seawall, far below the hillside compound.

Using the front door's intercom, Daphne asked him to go around the house and wait for her out on the patio. When he circled the sprawling mansion, he saw that both pool and patio lights were on. It felt more like Italy than Seattle. He and Liz had not been back to Italy since Miles was born, another of those lifestyle changes that at moments like this registered in him as regret.

Daphne had it all. This would be hers soon. He wondered what that felt like.

The French doors opened and she ducked through chintz drapes wearing a pink robe and a towel wrapped around her head. “Sorry,” she apologized. “I was … I wanted a swim. A shower first. I was just getting out—”

“Then it's me who's sorry for interrupting.”

“Corky's asleep,” she said, referring to Adler's adopted teenage daughter. “I didn't want to wake her.”

“No.”

“Does this make you uncomfortable?” she asked, clearly referring to the robe and the fact that there probably wasn't much in the way of clothing underneath it.

“Are you living here?” Boldt asked. He wasn't sure why this came out of his mouth, wasn't sure why it was suddenly so important to him.

“I could change, if you want. The clothes,” she clarified. She looked away, back in the direction of downtown and the Space Needle and the city skyline. “He's in South America this week. Peru, I think, tonight. Another deal. I didn't want Corky to be with a nanny. Not as long as I'm around. It doesn't seem fair to her.”

“He travels a lot.”

“Yes, he does.” Regret. Maybe some resentment that Boldt would voice such a thing. The way two people relate changes with each different situation, he realized, wishing it didn't have to. He wanted to always share an intimate closeness with this woman, that liberating closeness where anything goes. But it was not the same any longer, and he resisted the change. He blamed Owen Adler. Her secret life was now shared with this other man; Boldt was the outsider.

She sat down in a Brown and Jordan chair and crossed her legs, and a knee and then a thigh popped out of the robe. Boldt looked off into the cleanness of the pool. Interwoven lines of serpentine light ribbed the pool walls. A plane flew over the bay, its wing lights flashing.

“Rocket fuel.”

Her head snapped up. A line of shower water ran from her wet hair down her neck, chased the line of her collarbone, and leaked down into the robe between her breasts.

“That was my reaction as well,” he said.

“Emily Richland mentioned the Air Force.” Her eyes were wide, her cheeks flushed.

Boldt said, “There's more. Bernie says the ladder impressions put his—or her—weight at one-forty tops. That's light.”

“A juvenile?” she asked. “The second poem was Plato:
Suddenly a flash of understanding, a spark that leaps across to the soul
. Big stuff for a juvenile.”

“Messed-up kid, ugly divorce. It's possible, I suppose.” He added, “You're the judge of that.”

“I'm thinking mid to late twenties, college educated. He could be thin, even gaunt; I could buy that.” She leaned forward. The bathrobe fell away from her chest. He looked away, back toward the pool and its dancing waves of light. He didn't want to stare. Daphne had always been dangerous for him. It was inescapable.

“LaMoia is trying to track down the Werner ladder sales. Something about computerized cash register receipts. He's optimistic we'll get something.”

“John? Since when doesn't he think highly of his own abilities?” She said sternly, “I know you're thankful to have LaMoia. Believe me, I love him dearly. But we all should be grateful that there's only one of him. He stretches the envelope enough, thank you very much.”

“Bernie can't swear by those impressions. It's a best-guess situation. If he's wrong, he's wrong; there's no backup guesstimate. The ground was soaked by the fire fighting, which made conducting any kind of field test impossible.” He mused aloud, “Funny, isn't it, how the act of suppressing the fire goes a long way to destroying the evidence that might be found.”

“
Ironic
would be my word of choice.”

“Twenty-five and a college grad?” He attempted to keep the disappointment out of his voice.

“That bothers you?” she inquired. “All I'm saying is that's the collective wisdom based on national averages. In talking with others, that's the best I can do: twenty-five to thirty, college educated, sexually inadequate. He hates his mother, girlfriend, whatever. Maybe all of the above. He is judge and executioner. He's intelligent, quiet and lives alone. He's working at a job under his abilities.”

“You've been busy!” Boldt said. He was never comfortable with these profiles, but he did his best to trust them—they had proven accurate too many times.