Beyond Recognition (51 page)

Boldt said to the gathering, “Special Ops will establish clandestine video surveillance on the two Lux-Wash operations within our turf.” He pointed to the young uniform. “You have the addresses,” he stated, passing along the sheet containing the information. “Run this down to Special Ops, fill them in. We need a minimum of two teams. I want audio and video, real time and taped. If this guy so much as clears his throat, I want to know about it. Have them contact me when they're ready.”

The kid took off at a run. Boldt remembered having that kind of enthusiasm for the job. To LaMoia he said, “Contact Bellingham and ask if we can post this car wash. If not, they cover it for us. But we want that thing under a microscope as soon as possible. Today, not tomorrow, not day after tomorrow.”

“Got it,” LaMoia answered. He spun in his chair, scooted across the small space, and grabbed for a phone. He wasn't going to leave the room, wasn't going to take a chance he might miss something. Boldt knew then that the man would make a hell of a squad sergeant. He experienced a sense of relief, and this both surprised him and told him something about himself.

The phones in the room rang regularly. Each time one purred, Boldt hoped it was Elizabeth but then realized he had not forwarded his calls to the briefing room. He ordered one of the uniforms to take care of this for him. The guy seemed thrilled to be given a job.

“Meanwhile,” he said loudly, in order to win the attention of those at the table and beyond, “just to cover our bases, we need employment records for the other five luxury car washes.”

“He's at one of the Lux-Washes,” Daphne interrupted, contradicting him.

Boldt overrode her. “All five. The name of every owner, every employee, from the present back six months. No tears,” he added, meaning he would take no excuses for failure.

The deputy prosecuting attorney spoke up for the first time. Samantha Richert was in her early fifties, pale, grayish-blond hair thinning, a not unattractive face on a not unattractive body, but the kind of appearance that got lost quickly in a crowd. She wore black leggings under a gray suit. Richert was herself gray in every way; she had succumbed to the skies a decade or two earlier. She had spent fifteen years as a public defender but had switched sides seven years ago after an inmate beat her up badly in a failed attempt to rape her. She had gray eyes and wore a white gold wedding band that she had taken to wearing some months earlier, though to Boldt's knowledge she was unmarried and wasn't even dating.

Richert said, “What evidence do we have against this man?” She looked at Shoswitz, Boldt, and then across the room at Daphne. “I smell a lynching party here. Not these towels, I hope. By your own admission,” she said, looking at Gaynes, “over a thousand of these towels have been given away for free.”

“He's a suspect is all,” Boldt explained. “All we have to do is justify surveillance.”

“Agreed, and you're fine there, but we're going to need some positive linkage. If we're going to walk this guy all the way to death row, we're going to need some serious evidence along the way.”

“We'll get it,” Boldt answered.

Shoswitz watched the events transpiring as would a spectator at a tennis match, his eyes darting left, right, left. Boldt could feel the man's eagerness to enter the debate and knew that, typical of Shoswitz, he would not wade into the water but jump, causing something of a splash. The lieutenant, like everyone else in that room, was clearly feeling the pressure.

“You need him to lead you to this stolen fuel—something like that,” Richert suggested. She wasn't being antagonistic, but her questions were probing to the point that Boldt felt uncomfortable.

Daphne drew everyone's attention as she spoke. “A woman is going to die tonight if we don't do something—and I'm
not
saying we should arrest him. We need to find him,
fast
. He may lead us to his cache of fuel or even attempt to rig a fire. Either way, we have a nice strong arrest in place.”

Boldt knew her too well. That was not the typical Daphne line. He looked for the point of her statement and he said, “But we might lose another victim if we arrest him—”

Daphne arched her eyebrows and completed for him. “And that's not what we want.”

The room's resulting silence was punctuated by several of the phones ringing. Slowly the chaos took over again. Boldt said to her, “You have a plan, don't you?”

She nodded, straight-faced and serious. “Yes. But we'll have to act immediately.” She dragged out a copy of the department's personnel directory. Acting as a yearbook, it was divided into two general sections, active personnel and civilian employees, each of which was divided further by rank or classification. It was funded by the union as a means of making the department more familiar with itself. No personal phone numbers, addresses, or information of any sort was given, but internal phone extensions and squad assignments were listed, along with recreational interests and participation in the softball, volleyball, bowling, four-wheeling, and hunting clubs.

Daphne opened the directory to page seven, marked by a Post-it. She produced a photograph of Steven Garman's wife, Diana, and placed it alongside a head-and-shoulders photograph of a patrol-woman named Marianne Martinelli. The similarity between the two faces was impossible to miss, the only difference being Martinelli's hair, which was cut a little longer at the time of the photo. Not looking up from the photo, Daphne called over to LaMoia, busy on the phone, “John? Are you still friends with that cosmetologist over at the Fifth Avenue Theater?”

“The what?” he shouted, cupping the receiver.

“The makeup artist,” she answered.

“Geof ? That queen? You bet.”

Her voice strong with intent and confidence, she explained to Boldt, “The fact that he sent the note means he already has a victim in mind. Maybe we get lucky and we follow him right to that victim. But we both know that kind of surveillance fails more often than it succeeds. We're able to stay with the suspect what, twenty to thirty percent of the time?”

“About that.”

“Which means the victim has a seventy-percent chance of going up in flames. Not terribly strong odds.”

“Go on.”

“We can pull him off the mark,” she said, tapping the police directory. As she spoke, the room went increasingly quiet, settling into an eerie hush. “That is, patrol officer Marianne Martinelli can. She's a dead ringer for the mother. A haircut, a little makeup, a band of pale skin where her wedding ring once was, and he'll drop the other mark in a New York minute once his mother comes through that car wash. We can take him by a nose ring and lead him right to the home of our choice. He lifts their addresses off the vehicle registration, right? That's what we're guessing. So we give him an address where we're waiting for him. He shows up with his window-washing gear, prepared to pretend he's got the wrong place, and we have him right where we want him, chemicals and all. Richert gets her evidence; we get our man.”

“And Martinelli gets an ulcer,” Gaynes said.

Boldt called out loudly, “Anybody here know Marianne Martinelli?” Every eye in the room fell immediately on John LaMoia, whose reputation with women—especially rookie women in their first year—was legendary.

LaMoia looked like the cat caught with the mouse. He shrugged his shoulders and shook his head innocently, but then allowed in an embarrassed voice, “She and her husband were separated for a while. So we had a few dates. So what?”

“Work the charm, John-boy,” Boldt ordered. “We need a volunteer.”

The events of the next ninety minutes ran like a video in fast-forward. At the peak of the chaos over twenty-one police officers were directly involved in Daphne's plan to subvert the psychology of the suspect. Seven plainclothes officers were dispatched to get their cars washed. At 1:17
P.M.
, October 24, the radio room alerted Boldt that a possible suspect had been identified at the Lux-Wash on 85th St. N.W. in Greenwood. His description included a slight frame, 130 to 150 pounds, and a face hidden by a sweatshirt and sunglasses.

On the way up to the surveillance, Boldt stopped at home to leave a note for Liz.

As he entered the kitchen, he broke into tears. Everywhere he looked he saw Liz, everything he touched. He could recall their discussions, holidays, birthdays, lovemaking—somehow he couldn't remember any of the bad times, only the good. It was not only for Liz that he wept but, selfishly, for himself as well, both out of self-pity and fear. He begged God for some kind of explanation and apologized for the years he had failed to pray, wondering if prayers could be heard when absent for so long. Did the line go dead like an unpaid telephone?

How would he tell her that he knew? How much of his life was undone by this?

He heard a car pull into the drive. He didn't want to face her; he knew her secret, a secret she had chosen for her own reasons not to share with him. He wondered if he had any right to know or if she needed time to face this for herself first before sharing it, with him or anyone else. The time she had wanted at the cabin, alone with just one child, suddenly made much more sense to him. Perhaps she had wanted a closure with each of the kids, a time to reflect and resolve whatever internal conflicts were raging within her. He had no idea what knowledge of one's own imminent death would inflict upon a person.

He dried his eyes on his shirtsleeve and peered outside. It was Marina and the kids, being dropped off by Marina's husband, not Liz. For a moment, his sentence was commuted. He stepped out into the harshness of sunlight and greeted Miles and Marina. He kissed Sarah. And when the tears flowed again, he walked directly to his car and, without a word, drove off, his little boy waving goodbye with troubled eyes.

“What do you think?” Daphne asked him. Boldt and Daphne stood in the far corner of a back parking lot behind an abandoned Super-Sav Market on 85th, four blocks from the Lux-Wash. The suspect remained under surveillance, the radio traffic running in a stream through Boldt's earpiece. The first thing that struck Boldt was how old the Scotch tape looked, used to adhere a school portrait of Ben to the driver's-side visor.

“How did they do that?” he said, touching the tape. It was brittle to the touch. It looked as if it had endured a summer of scorching sunlight.

“That's it?” Daphne asked indignantly. “You look at this, and all you want to know is how we made the tape look so old?”

She was referring to the rest of the car. On the floor of the passenger's side of the front seat were some of Ben's worksheets from school, filled in with his perfectly illegible scrawl and appropriately misspelled words. She had raided her own houseboat for those props. One school worksheet had a dusty imprint of a sneaker across it; next to it, on the floor, was a crushed milkshake cup from McDonald's. On the dash was a Tonka toy dump truck upside down, and in the back seat a G.I. Joe action figure, one arm missing, and a good-sized plastic model of Han Solo's airship from
Star Wars
—all Ben's. On the floor of the back seat was a small fleece pullover and a pair of kid's running shoes, beat-up and held together with silver tape. Resting on the back seat was one of Ben's three backpacks that she had borrowed without asking. A silver-plated crucifix hung by a matching chain from the rearview mirror, in case a religious connection was necessary as a trigger.

“It's convincing,” Boldt agreed. “I wouldn't have thought of the photo,” he admitted.

“We need the direct connection to a child to be made, and yet we sure as hell can't involve one.”

“It's very convincing.”

“The boy must be a trigger, Lou,” she said confidently. “The similarity to his mother, and the existence of a child. One of my mistakes was that I missed the role of the child.”

“You sold me,” Boldt said. “Now the only thing we have to do,” he added, studying the car's exterior, “is get this thing nice and dirty.”

At 3:05
P.M.
, patrol officer Martinelli, dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt, driving a Ford Explorer, entered the inflatable structure leased by Lux-Wash, Incorporated. The mood inside SPD's steam-cleaning van was tense but professional, the tiny space crowded by a video tech, a communications pro, and Boldt and Daphne, nearly in one another's laps.

Martinelli's arrival was critically timed to place her car in the proper order so that the suspect—believed to be Jonathan Garman—would be the worker to clean her car's interior. He was one of four such workers, used in rotation; it had required two other plainclothes detectives to determine the order. Jonathan Garman was next up, waiting down that line to do his job.

Inside the van, the video monitor sparkled and sputtered, the image of Martinelli suddenly grainy and cloudy.

“What's up?” Boldt asked.

“There's a lot of metal in a car wash,” the tech answered. “The transmitter is hidden under the back seat, the antenna under the vehicle. No system is perfect. That's why we have a camcorder in the car as well. That tape will be clean.”

The screen continued to flash and spark; Martinelli's radio channel filled with static. “I'm inside,” the detective said. On the screen, all motion was reduced to jerky freeze frames a second or two apart, as black horizontal bars refreshed the screen.