Beyond Recognition (35 page)

Daphne picked him up every afternoon from “school,” a place surrounded by wire fence, for juveniles in detention. They went for snacks. They drove around. She had taken him to the Science Center, a place he'd never been. After dinner she took him to her houseboat and he watched television or read a book. The houseboat was small, but he liked it okay. The walls were thin. When she thought he was reading, he was actually listening to her on the phone. She spoke to someone named Owen, and he knew enough to know that things weren't going great between them. Twice she had hung up and started crying. It had never occurred to him that police ever cried.

Twice, he had stolen a look at Daphne's papers, because she wrote at the little desk downstairs where Ben slept, and he had to know if it was about him or not. So he read everything he could find, including the thick file she carried back and forth between home and the office. To Ben it wasn't much different from peering in car windows.

He wasn't sure exactly why, but she made him write one page in a diary every day. If he wrote in the diary, he didn't have to sit down and talk to her at night—only to the other woman, Susan, during the day. To avoid the extra talking, he did the writing. She had told him he could write about anything—school, home, Emily's, his dreams—or he could make up a story.

The night before, he had dreamed about being part of an Egyptian archaeological dig, like on the National Geographic specials. He had to crawl on his belly inside the pyramid, crawl over rocks and dirt and mud. It reminded him of Indiana Jones. And when he got to the tomb, there was all this gold—gold rings of every size—and a mummy of the queen, all wrapped up in gauze. And when he unwrapped the mummy, it was his mother's face. Frightened, he had run from the place, leaving all the gold behind. Losing his way. He had awakened right there on that fold-out couch.

He put his pencil on the third page of the diary and began to slowly scrawl out his dream.

Last nite I dreamed I was in Egipt....

Boldt likened an investigation to an enormous rock or boulder on the summit of a mountain. Initially, the investigator's job was to climb that mountain, gathering up whatever tools made themselves available—whatever evidence could be found. Reaching the rock, tools in hand, the investigator went about trying to leverage the rock, summoning whatever size team was necessary. Together, the team went about the job of displacing the rock, prying, pushing, shoving. The better organized the team, the better directed, the quicker the boulder gave way. Once displaced, the investigation was rolled toward the edge, given one final push, and gravity took over, at which point the task was to stay with it—all teammates pursuing it simultaneously—a mad, frantic race down hill in the midst of a landslide created by the beast itself. The job at hand by now: to keep the rock from exploding into bits at the bottom.

Boldt was caught in that landslide.

He didn't recognize it at first, and this typically proved the most difficult task of all—understanding what phase of the investigation one was in—for inevitably some of the team were still uphill with the pry bars while the rock itself was hurling toward the bottom. The possible involvement of the psychic's military man with the burned hand, the ATF lab's suggestion of rocket fuel as the accelerant, and finally Garman's purchase of a Werner ladder had sent the rock tumbling downhill. At that point it became Boldt's job to stay with it, to shape the investigation into something manageable. That task was made more difficult by two subsequent occurrences.

The first was Garman's receipt of a fourth poem and piece of green plastic—this
following
his interrogation. Was he brazenly taunting the police, Boldt wondered—or was he, as he claimed, an innocent go-between?

The second was a phone call received by Daphne from Emily Richland on that same day. She hurried into the bullpen, out of breath from having run downstairs from the ninth floor. Her voice was frantic, her words rushed as she shouted, “That was
her!
Emily! Nick, the guy with the burned hand, just made an appointment with her for five o'clock today. That's only two hours from now. Can we handle it?”

Boldt felt an immediate knot of tension, from his stomach to his pounding head. Two hours, he wondered. Surveillance, ERT, bomb squad—a repeat of the team assembled just over a week earlier. Branslonovich was barely in her grave. His memory of that spectral vision haunted him. “We'll try,” he said.

At 4:49
P.M.
, a bald-headed man wearing khakis and ankle-high deck shoes came out through the front door of the purple house on 21st Avenue East. The detectives had nicknamed him the General. The General wore wire-rimmed glasses and a blue beret. He carried a small brown leather briefcase as he walked briskly to a nondescript station wagon and drove off. The briefcase had contained a lavaliere condenser microphone and a battery-powered wireless radio transmitter, presently taped to the bottom of Emily's “reading” table. A wide-angle black-and-white fiber-optic camera was installed into the kitchen peephole, giving those in the operations van a look at Emily's back and shoulders and a slightly distorted fish-eye view of the face of her client. The video's transmitter was connected to a Direct TV dish mounted on the outside of the purple house.

The operations van, the same steam-cleaning van used less than a week before, was parked a block down 21st.

A
FOR SALE
sign had been placed on the lawn of the adjacent house. Above the sign was a small plaque announcing
OPEN HOUSE,
complete with six colorful balloons, and a floodlight lighting the sign. The lights to this house were all ablaze. The mustached man in the green sport jacket boasting the real estate logo wore pressed blue jeans and ostrich cowboy boots. LaMoia came and went from that house, greeting other undercover cops who arrived on schedule to view the house, all of whom kept one eye on the purple house next door and a flesh-colored earpiece embedded in their right ears. In the back room of this house, two members of the bomb squad and two ERT officers awaited orders.

Two other members of the bomb squad ran the tow truck that was busy—albeit slowly—hoisting an illegally parked car up onto the flatbed. Their location, immediately outside of the driveway to the purple house, allowed them quick access to the light blue truck and white camper shell that was expected any minute.

Boldt, Bobbie Gaynes, and Daphne occupied fuzzy padded seats that faced a large Mylar-covered picture window in a cream brown customized recreational van parked across the street from the open house. Gaynes had the body of a gymnast and the bright blue eyes of a child on Christmas morning. She wore a quilted white thermal undershirt and blue jeans and leather Redwing work boots with waffle soles. Boldt had his cellular phone in hand, the line open to a phone set that connected directly to the headset of the operations van dispatcher. At his feet were two portable radio systems, one that allowed them to communicate with, and to hear, the secured channel of radio traffic; the second, a live feed from the transmitter inside the purple house. A cellular phone in the seat next to Gaynes was wired to a battery-operated portable fax machine. On the floor lay two shotguns, a nightstick, a TASER, and two boxes of shotgun shells. Next to these were two flak vests marked
POLICE
in bright yellow letters. Boldt looked around, realizing they seemed equipped for a small war.

On the second floor of the open house, in a storage room left dark, a police photographer operated a pair of 35-mm Nikons, each with a different speed film. Every movement would be recorded, every word.

A bicyclist, a motorcycle rider, and two unmarked cars were spread between the surrounding streets, ready to follow the truck when it left the area. The drivers of these vehicles also were keeping an eye out for the camper's arrival.

At 4:57
P.M.
the motorcycle rider's voice came clearly over the radio.

R
IDER
:
Suspect's vehicle, Washington tag 124 B76, just passed checkpoint Bravo, headed in a westerly direction. Copy?

D
ISPATCH:
Westbound. Copy
.

“Right on time,” Boldt said, checking his watch.

Daphne, wearing her game face, was prepared to deliver a real-time psychological evaluation of the suspect.

D
ISPATCH:
124 B76 is registered to one Nicholas Trenton Hall, a male Caucasian, twenty-six years of age. Residence listed as 134 232nd Street South, Parkland
.

“Here he comes,” said Gaynes, from where she had her eye to a crack left between a pair of brown curtains that kept the van's two forward seats separate from the passenger area. Seeing the truck approaching, Boldt felt a stirring of vengeful anger. He recalled Branslonovich twirling in flames in the circle of trees, like an effigy burning. One man responsible for the death of so many.

Daphne said, “Is he Air Force? Can we confirm that?”

Boldt repeated this question into his phone. Dispatch replied that a “full query” was under way. He reported this to Daphne. She nodded, her sober face revealing no emotion.

Not thirty seconds had passed before Boldt, holding the phone loosely to his ear, pressed it closer and relayed to Daphne, “He was Air Force for eight of the last eleven years, a civilian employee at Chief Joseph for the last three.”

“The discharge—his employment change—coincides with the hand injury. Bet on it.”

“Is he our guy?” Gaynes asked from the front, where she watched the slow approach of the truck.

Boldt shrugged. He glanced out the window. LaMoia was on the porch of the open house, shaking hands and saying goodbye to Brimsley and Meyers, a pair of Narcotics detectives. Brimsley and Meyers were among the best shots on the force with handguns. Boldt had wanted them outside, on the playing field, at the time of the suspect's arrival. If the surveillance went bad, he reasoned, case histories showed it would happen in the first two minutes. He wanted his best people out there. He knew Brimsley and Meyers well enough to judge them oversized; they were wearing police vests, he beneath his sport coat, she beneath a blue rain slicker. The two cops stopped on the path, turned, and waved goodbye, Brimsley shouting his thanks to the real estate agent, both officers facing the purple house slightly, ready for weapons fire.

Nicholas Hall left his truck and followed the path past the huge globe, his face reflecting the colors in the neon sign. He pushed the button. The doorbell was heard over the surveillance radio.

Boldt, tight as a knot, muttered, “Get him inside.”

The suspect took notice of Brimsley and Meyers next door. He then glanced around cautiously, suspiciously. He looked right at the police van. “Freeze,” Boldt said. “No one breathes.” Hall's attention on his surroundings continued even after Emily answered the door. His attention focused on the two men struggling to hoist the car up onto the tow truck. The bomb squad crew was not particularly adept at car towing.

The fax machine began to whine. Boldt glanced hotly toward it as a poor copy of a black-and-white photograph of the suspect slowly wound out, an enlargement of a driver's license photo. Nicholas Hall looked average in every way.

Into his phone, Boldt whispered, “Find out about that right hand.”

The hand. Even from a distance it was noticeable. Boldt snagged a pair of binoculars, glad to have the porch light. The hand. A single piece of red flesh with three fingernails growing out of the end. It looked as though the man had put his real hand into a pink ballerina slipper or a costume glove. But this glove would not come off. A moment of panic surged through Boldt at first sight of that hand: Could such a person climb and descend trees? Could he carve biblical references into a tree trunk? Boldt snatched up his phone and told the dispatcher to reach him on the radio if necessary. He ended the call on the cellular and dialed Lofgrin's office, hoping the man had stayed late, as he often did.

Gaynes handed Boldt the fax of Hall's face. Boldt accepted the fax but put it quickly aside.

At the front door, Hall continued to watch the two at the tow truck.

“Welcome,” the three in the van faintly heard Emily say as she greeted Hall. The microphone was some fifteen feet and a room behind her, yet it still grabbed some sound. “Come in,” she encouraged.

“You seen 'em tow cars around here before?” he asked her. “That something they do here up in the city?”

“All the time,” she lied.

“Ticket them, sure. But tow them?”

“They make more money towing them. What do you think it's about, parking spaces?” she asked cynically. “Besides, what do you care?” she asked. “You're okay in my drive.”

“One cool woman,” Daphne said under her breath.

“I'll say,” Gaynes agreed.

One of Lofgrin's assistants answered Boldt's call. The boss had gone home. Boldt asked for his home phone. The assistant gave him the number for a car phone, adding, “He just left a few minutes ago.”

Boldt reached Lofgrin, who was in slow traffic on the floating bridge. The sergeant asked him, “Those tree carvings?”

“Yeah?”

“The guy was right-handed or left-handed?”