Beyond Recognition (21 page)

“He probably carries a library card and rides city transportation. If we put this information from the ladder into the mix, then he's slight of build.”

“Library card? City transport?” he asked.

“Comes out of his income, which is limited if any. These guys like their labs. They like to tinker with their stuff. He works a job that requires no thought. He thinks about his kills, about his bombs, all day long. He may not sleep much, or eat much for that matter, and that fits with what you're saying about his being slight. He leaves work and goes to his lab.”

“His apartment?”

“Unlikely. No. Someplace away from it all. Someplace he won't be bothered. A garage. An abandoned building.”

“None of those in this city,” Boldt snapped sarcastically.

“I know it's not what you want to hear.”

“Fidler gave me a report on Garman. Steven Garman, the Marshal Five, the fire inspector—”

“I know who Garman is,” she reminded him, a little hot under the collar. “The one receiving the threats is always the first one to look at.”

“Have you looked?” he pressed.

“We talked about Garman, that's all. What is it with you?”

He met and held her eyes. He found her beauty intoxicating. He had often wished she could make it go away. “I don't know that I'm up to this,” he confessed.

“Don't be ridiculous.”

“I teeter on the edge. My self confidence goes out the window, and there I am, teetering.”

“It's called anxiety. It's healthy.” She studied him thoughtfully and asked rhetorically, “You didn't come here because of Bernie Lofgrin or rocket fuel or Steven Garman, did you?”

“Sure I did.”

“Talk to me, Lou.”

“Another woman is going to burn.”

“Not necessarily.”

“Sure she is. And I'm at the helm, and I don't particularly want the wheel.”

“Understandable. But you've got it.”

“Thanks loads.”

“You want to turn it over to Bobbie?” she asked, eyes penetrating. “John? Whom would you pick to run something this size? Pfoutz? Lublanski? Tell me.”

“Garman lives alone. He went through what he characterized to Fidler as an ugly marriage. He's been with SFD for twelve years. Highly regarded but keeps to himself. No beers with the boys. At constant war with his superiors.”

“Don't do this, Lou. Let's talk about you,” she encouraged.

“He's a stickler for details. Meticulous. Demanding. No one can remember his having even dated a woman—or a man either, for that matter.” He knew he had her then, for the color of her eyes changed and her brow tightened.

She said, “We can talk about Garman later,” but in a tone that suggested she didn't mean it.

“I wouldn't mind if you could find a way to chat him up,” he informed her. “Open him up.”

“You can pass the case to someone else,” she told him. “Shoswitz will grumble and piss all over you, but in the end he'll relent if he thinks you aren't up to it. You want me to tell him I think you need a breather? I can do that.”

“He's a big son-of-a-bitch, Garman is. Certainly no one-forty. But by his own admission, Bernie could be wrong about that, and he is, after all, at the center of the case: a Marshal Five inspector, the guy receiving the threats.”

“You know there are any number of cases from any number of wars where a soldier fights with heart and soul, wins medals, fights to the death, invincible. Then he gets married on leave, and sometime later has a kid, and that's the end of that phase of his military career. There's a line he won't cross any longer. It's dangerous for him
and others
for him to be out there.”

Her comment hit Boldt in the center of his chest. He didn't want to hinder the investigation—this went to the core of his concern. He wanted to keep pushing back at her with comments about Garman, but he heard himself say, “If we lose another, I don't know what I'll do.”

“You'll go to work in the morning,” she said calmly. “Same as you always do, as you've always done. It's what we do.” Again, she studied him carefully. “It was the mother and sister, wasn't it? You humanize the victims, where others intentionally do the opposite. Why? Because it motivates you,” she stated. “Because it reminds you what these victims were
before
the incident—whatever the incident. It's the not knowing,” she said definitely. “If you had more, you'd be a dog after a bone, but there isn't more, there isn't enough, and for the time being you feel aimless. How does he meet them? How does he rig their houses? How does he ensure they're alone? I can't say I know what it's like in your shoes, because I don't. No one does, or damn few, at any rate. But there's no one better, Lou. You never see this, but the rest of us do. No one. And if another woman dies, she dies. And another? Maybe so. You have to live with that. I can't even imagine the strength that requires. The rest of us—we have you as a buffer. Even Shoswitz uses you this way. But don't think for a moment that John or Bobbie or any of the others could do any better. They would do it differently, I can't argue that. Better? No. You work your squad for their strengths. You run it like a team. You're admired for that behind your back. There are other ways to do it, God knows, but none better. You get up in the morning and you go to work. Some days it sucks; some days it's almost tolerable. Those are the ones we come to cherish. You want me to raise a flag, I will. I'd do
anything
for you.”

He felt light-headed. He didn't like her saying that, not wearing a pink robe with a lot of leg showing. He didn't need a pep talk or want one. He needed freedom from the pressure inside his head; nothing anyone said was going to cure it. What would cure it was the foreman of a jury standing and reading off a litany of guilty charges. And that was at the end of a road so long that at times he needed to look for off-ramps. He begged for air.

“Thanks,” he said, because it seemed only fair.

“I'll figure a way to get to see Garman so he won't think anything of it. I'll chat him up,” she promised. “Try for some sleep,” she suggested.

He nodded. He was sorry he had come.

“And I won't say anything. Not to anyone.”

He wanted inside that robe. Comfort. Escape. He lusted after this woman who was not his wife but was also no stranger. He wanted to stay, to get close to her.

Boldt thought about Liz, and his suspicions of her having an affair, and wondered about his intentions of wanting to find her in the wrong. Was he looking for an easy way out of a complicated situation? Were the kids more than he could take? Did he dare have such thoughts, even in the privacy and secrecy of his own conscience? Was he worried about Daphne actually loving Adler for real, of losing her for good? Or was he, as he wanted to believe, so in love with his children, his wife, his life that it seemed too good to be true—and, if too good to be true, then certainly something had to come along to challenge it, even destroy it if left unchecked. An affair. A serial arsonist. Something.

Nothing surprised him any longer.

Ben kept watch for the pickup truck. He had not seen it today but he sensed it was out there. He feared it. He had little doubt that his wallet had fallen out while hiding in the camper, and his wallet contained not only four dollars but his school picture and an ID card that had come with the wallet, carefully filled out with address and phone number. The guilt over having taken the money occupied his every thought. He figured he had two choices: give it back or run away. Emily wouldn't take it; she called it dirty. And the thought of giving up that much money was repulsive. Running away remained at the top of the list.

His current plan was to go home with Jimmy for the afternoon. Avoiding his own house—the address in the wallet—was of utmost importance. Jimmy was big for his age, with narrow-set eyes and big pudgy hands. He wasn't the coolest of Ben's friends, but he never teased Ben about his glass eye the way some of the kids did. Jimmy was okay. Ben realized they would probably play video games or watch a movie—what would normally have been a great way to avoid homework and going home to his empty house—but as the school day came to a close, Ben wished he had never agreed to go. He was terrified to leave the building.

He had an urge to visit Emily, as he so often did on his way home from school, but the possibility remained that the driver of the pickup truck, Nick, had connected Ben to Emily, which meant he might be watching her place just as he might be watching Ben's place. With few options, going home with Jimmy seemed the smart thing to do: He would ride a different school bus to a different part of town. Meanwhile, he debated how he might go about running away, how far the money might take him, where he might go. He also debated buying his very own Nintendo.

Ben wore a sweatshirt with the hood up on the way to the school bus. Jimmy was big enough to use as a screen, and Ben followed him to the bus, head down, trying to force himself not to look up and give anybody a chance to see his face. His stepfather would be home about seven or eight, sometimes later. By then it would be dark, easier to move around without being seen. Ben was slowly formulating a plan. Survival was everything. He was no stranger to the game.

To confront a possible murderer face-to-face was the moment Daphne Matthews lived for. As departmental psychologist, she tolerated that aspect of her job which required her to listen to grown-up men with badges whine like little boys; she put up with the sexist environment of a cop shop that would never change. The boys could paint over their discrimination with regulations and the occasional slap on the wrist, but they would never be rid of it: Men who wore uniforms and oiled their guns on a regular basis saw women as a reservoir of soft flesh and a means to a hot meal and children. She helped out the alcoholic patrolman, the suicidal detective, the wife abuser, all as a means to an end: to interview killers, to see herself through herself, to explore the darker realm.

She walked a little lighter, stood a little taller, grinning nonstop as she hurried down the 1500 block in Ballard, home to SFD's Battalion 4 and its Marshal Five, Steven Garman. The firehouse was a beautiful brick structure built fifty years earlier, outclassing everything in the block. Ballard was Seattle's neighborhood of Norwegian ancestry, its southern boundary Salmon Bay and the Ship Canal, whose piers and marinas housed much of the city's smaller commercial fishing fleet, the mom-and-pop vessels owned and operated by generations of Ballardites. For some, Ballard was the target of ethnic jokes, about smelling like fish and talking with accents; to others, an object of respect, one of the only neighborhoods in the city to have maintained its heritage and identity through the Californication of the mid and late eighties.

As Daphne climbed the stone staircase to the firehouse's second floor, she focused on establishing her own identity while preparing herself for whatever, whoever, Steven Garman turned out to be. She would begin with no preconceived notions of innocence or guilt, no judgment. She accepted that he was the recipient of the poetic threats, both of which had been accompanied by an as yet unidentified piece of melted green plastic. She intended to establish a rapport, whatever this required of her: professional psychologist, sexual flirt, disinterested bureaucrat, attentive listener. Such interviews required her to be an actress, and she loved the challenge. She could use her beauty to lull a man into an unwitting cooperation; women were a far tougher sell.

The firehouse had undergone little if any renovation. Daphne was struck by the depressing atmosphere, well aware of the role environment plays in psychology. There were photographs on the walls, black-and-whites of blazing out-of-control fires and a color copy of the mayor's official photograph. The requisite gunmetal-gray file cabinets, ubiquitous in all government offices, were full to overflowing, and the hallway smelled of a combination of chewing gum, hot dust, and industrial cleaner, as if something electric were burning somewhere out of sight—an odor appropriate for the office of a fire inspector.

Daphne knocked lightly on Garman's door and entered.

Garman was ensconced in a large leather chair in an immaculately kept office. He was a big, handsome man with soft brown eyes and a bushy mustache, younger than she had expected. There was a picture of Einstein on the wall, and another of Picasso. These seemed out of place to Daphne; a blue-collar fireman up on his Impressionism? What were his tastes in poetry? she wondered. There was a color shot of the space shuttle
Challenger
at the moment of its explosion, the entrails of white fumes caught in a tight corkscrew spiral, shuttle debris frozen forever in a sky of blue. Daphne remembered exactly where she had been on that day. Garman caught Daphne staring.

“I worked on that one,” Garman explained. “The debris reconstruction.” Maintaining strict eye contact, he said, “Like working on a jigsaw puzzle with cranes.”

“You were Air Force?”

“Does it show?” he asked, coming out of his chair and introducing himself with a handshake.

Maybe it did show, she thought, as she looked more closely. Maybe it helped explain the hard handshake and the riveting grip of those eyes. She wanted to like him right away, which only fueled her suspicion of him.