Beyond Recognition (31 page)

“But you're staying,” she said.

“I couldn't sleep if I tried. I'll go downtown, try to sort some of this out.” He wanted a look at the most recent poem sent to Garman.

“I'd rather just lose the house, you know. I wish—and I mean this!—I wish he'd gotten the house, that he'd taken the house and left us alone.”

Boldt was silent for a long time.

“I know that silence. You're saying he doesn't want the house, he wants
you
.” She gasped. “Oh, God.”

“I didn't say anything.”

“He wants you. Is that it?”

“We don't know what he wants. We don't know who he is. We don't know much.”

“Someone you put away before?”

“Doubtful.”

“I hate this. Jesus God. What do we do?” she cried into the phone.

“Can you get a leave?”

“I'm owed
weeks
.”

“Do you mind?”

“Being driven out of my own home? Of course I mind,” she snapped. He waited her out. “No, love, I don't mind. No, of course not. But I wish you'd join us.”

“The Sheriff's Department will watch the road. The cabin too, probably.”

“Oh, God. I can't believe this is happening.”

“Could Susan go with you?”

“I can ask. She might. I love you,” she blurted out. “God, how I love you!”

“No music so sweet,” he whispered into the phone.

“Always and forever,” she added.

“We'll get through this,” Boldt said, “and we'll reevaluate and we'll make sense of the last few months.”

“We need to talk,” she said, and to him it rang as something of a confession, and his heart wanted to tear from his chest.

“Yeah,” he agreed. If tears made noise, she would have heard them.

“You amaze me.” Her voice trailed off. “Have I told you lately how much you amaze me? What an incredible man you are?”

“A little overweight,” he said, and she laughed, barking into the phone.

“Not to me,” she said.

“I love you, Elizabeth.”

“Sleep if you can.”

They hung up.

Boldt ignored orders and took a long hot bath in the old clawfoot that had come with the place, running the faucet twice to reheat the water. When he got out, he pulled the drain plug. Ten minutes later, the tub was only half empty. He searched the house for a plunger but couldn't find one. Not one damn plunger in the entire house!

The kitchen sink still filled with dishes hadn't drained either, but Boldt didn't notice it. He was already out the door and on his way downtown, off to prepare for that dreaded meeting with Shoswitz.

The death of a fellow police officer was like a death in the family. For the Seattle Police Department, death incurred while on duty happened so rarely that in his twenty-four years on the force, Boldt had only attended three such funerals. Staged as pageants more than funerals, they gripped the city's collective consciousness. Flags were lowered, streets were closed, and, on a marbled hillside high above the rat race, weapons were aimed into the gray sky and fired in bone-chilling unison.

By sunrise the morning after the botched attempt to net the arsonist, all the crews had left both the park and Boldt's home. Only a ribbon of yellow and black police tape remained at both sites. A single cruiser with two patrolmen cruised between the two crime scenes. Identification technicians were scheduled to return to both at first light.

Boldt beat them to it. Perhaps it was the look that Shoswitz had given him in the operations van just before the exercise began. Perhaps it was Branslonovich's spectral dance among the towering trees. Perhaps it was his arrival at Branslonovich's torching, only seconds too late. Whatever the reason, Boldt felt directly responsible for her death. The image of her twisting body, arms outstretched in a crucifix, remained seared into his consciousness, plaguing him. Eyes open or shut, it didn't matter, the image remained. His to live with. Or try to.

Chief among his frustrations was that the only apparent witness, an ERT officer by the name of Robbie, had a jaw so badly broken he could not speak. His one scribbled message was that he had not gotten a clean look at the suspect.

Boldt's fascination remained with the crime scene in the park. He ducked under the police tape, unseen. Overhead, the stark limbs of the deciduous trees captured the orange-ruby glow of a spectacular sunrise, bleeding a rosy daylight onto the forest floor. The conifers and cedars towered overhead majestically. Boldt walked among the fallen limbs and the wintering weeds and shrubs, avoiding the downtrodden path created hours earlier by a dozen anxious firemen and patrol officers responding to the scene. He cut his own path, the symbolism not lost on him. Although there would be a pulling together of SPD because of Branslonovich's death, Boldt was certain to find himself isolated, cut free by Shoswitz, and the subject of several briefings and reviews. If he were determined “solely responsible” for “recklessness” in the hasty fielding of the operation, it was conceivable he would be suspended without pay or even asked to retire. More than anything else, those last few hours planted firmly into Boldt's mind the reality of his advancing years of service. He was at that time the most senior homicide cop, considered old guard and, in a department looking to reinvent itself in the wake of national disgrace in other inner-city police departments, an endangered species.

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.”

“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.”