Beyond Recognition (4 page)

“A gal's got to earn a living,” she said, coming out of the chair and stroking the wrinkles out of her clothes. She patted Ben on the head affectionately. “Your reading's getting better,” she said. “You might work out after all,” she teased. “I might keep you yet.”

Ben waited for the car to pull up and the engine to go quiet. Then he slipped out back, prepared to do his job.

“Would you like a cup of coffee?”

The young kid turned red in the face and corrected himself. “Tea?”

“No, thanks.” Lou Boldt, embarrassed by the offer, felt sorry for the young patrolman. He had been put up to this by someone—probably John LaMoia, who was constantly working the rookies—breaking them in, he called it. Boldt, senior homicide sergeant, was often singled out as the target of such errand running. There was no obligation for a rookie to play the role of a personal servant. Boldt's tolerance level for LaMoia's rites of initiation was far above that of Lieutenant Phil Shoswitz, whose nervous disposition and bug eyes resembled a miniature pinscher. If you knew what was good for you, you left Shoswitz in his glassed-in office.

Boldt could think of several ways to turn this stunt back around on LaMoia, but it would mean using this rookie as the go-between, and that seemed manipulative and unfair. “I'm fine,” Boldt told the kid. “Thanks anyway.”

He remembered what it was like to be in uniform and on the fifth floor for the first time: the pounding heart, the prickling skin. Homicide was viewed by most rookies as the top—the pinnacle of a career. Boldt thought back to those feelings and wondered how such myths were started. It was true that homicide dealt with life and death, as opposed to traffic tickets or jaywalkers, but that came with a price of insomnia, guilt, and frustration. Homicide was no cakewalk.

The forty-two-year-old man sitting in the chair today—graying hair cut close to his scalp, his rounding face reflecting the thirty pounds he couldn't shake, the fingers of his thick hands gnarled from broken knuckles of decades past—was a far cry from the fit, bright-eyed, enthusiastic rookie who had once been tricked into using the chief's private toilet, a liberty that had cost him two months of walking a beat in the International District.

He could no longer see the Space Needle from the Public Safety Building's fifth floor. Real estate development in the eighties had taken care of that. It had also choked the roads and interstates, crowded the ferries, and sent real estate appraisals soaring right along with the crime rate. Other than that, newcomers were welcome in Seattle, as far as Boldt was concerned.

He was feeling tired. Miles, his three-year-old son, and Sarah, his eight-month-old beauty named after Sarah Vaughan, had taken turns complaining through the night, leaving both him and Liz exhausted and in foul moods. When Liz got tired, Boldt steered clear, if possible, but a morning encounter in the kitchen—which had something to do with the yolk of a soft-boiled egg not being right—had erupted into a tirade about how Boldt was allowing himself to be absorbed by the job again, an unfair charge in his opinion, given that he had beaten her home four of the last five nights. Commercial banking was definitely more time-consuming than police work. He had said something like that to her, which did not score big points, except on the Richter scale. At the moment he was suffering through a dull headache.

He carried that headache with him to the medical examiner's office in the basement of Harborview Medical Center, where Dr. Ronald Dixon awaited him.

Harborview, perennially under construction, sat atop Pill Hill with a sweeping view of Elliott Bay and the Port Authority's towering cranes, feeding and unloading the container ships. Parking anywhere near Harborview was impossible. Boldt took one of two open spots reserved for the ME and placed his
OFFICIAL POLICE BUSINESS
card on the dash. The September air was in the high 60s. Boldt squinted under the glare of sunshine. A college coed wearing a bikini top sped through the Alder-Broadway intersection on a pair of inline skates. A few of the construction workers stopped to take notice. She wore blue jean shorts with holes in them. To Boldt, she looked too young to be in college.

Dixie's round face looked Asian in certain expressions, his eyes wide-set, his nose flattened by a college intramural football game. There was a look of intelligence in his eyes. One sensed a formidable presence, a busy mind, just looking at the man. He came out from behind his desk and sat at a small conference table, using a jeweler's screwdriver to clean his impeccably clean nails. He grimaced a smile at Boldt and indicated a plastic evidence bag left on the table.

On the wall was a framed poster for a performance of Shakespeare's
Two Gentlemen of Verona
by the Seattle Repertory Theater and a black-and-white time exposure showing lightning strikes hitting the Space Needle at night. Boldt always found himself mesmerized by that photo, by the power of nature. There was also a pair of pen-and-inks of western subjects—horses and cabins—that reminded Boldt of Zane Grey.

Boldt examined the contents of the bag, a blackened bone three inches by three inches. Dixie said, “From that fire the other night.” Several days had passed since the Dorothy Enwright arson. Until that moment, Boldt had not known which of his squad's cases were involved. He took a deep breath and reminded himself that he had a lot to learn about fires.

“Is this all?” the sergeant asked.

“All that's worth anything,” Dixie replied, working the screwdriver under his thumbnail. “It's fairly common in burns for the spine and pelvis to go last. That's a piece of the pelvic bone. Pelvis gives us sex. Spine gives us age. Do you see the calcification on the inside edge?” he asked. Boldt pointed. “Right. That indicates some aging. This wasn't a teenager. Probably wasn't even in her twenties.”

“Her?” Boldt inquired, his own spine tingling. He had yet to see any paperwork confirming Witt's mention of an eyewitness.

“What we can tell you is that it was most probably a female. Beyond that, I'm afraid ....” His voice trailed off. “We sifted the site thoroughly. So did Marshal Five and the other inspectors who helped him out. I would have expected to see more than this,” he admitted, sensing correctly that it was to have been Boldt's next question. “Fingers, toes, ankles, wrists, they can go pretty quickly.” He made it sound like a grocery list. Boldt held a vision of a woman burning to death. He trusted that eyewitness, paperwork or not. “But the femur, the spine, the pelvis … depending on how she fell, they take awhile to cook, even longer to reduce to ash.”

“Time or heat?” Boldt asked.

“The rate of destruction is a product of both.”

“This was hot,” Boldt informed him. As suggested, he had spoken with air traffic control. The initial spike of flame had stretched eleven hundred feet into the night sky. No house fire had ever caused such a phenomenon. It was the kind of record setting of which Boldt wanted no part.

“We're hoping for some bone frags to come out of the lab work. We sent off a garbage can of ash and debris. Some metals hold up pretty well in fire. We might get something there. Quite honestly, it's unusual to come away with only that.” He indicated the contents of the plastic evidence bag. “Highly unusual, one might even say. If an assistant had performed the site work for us, I'd send him or her back to try again. But I did this one myself, Lou. There just wasn't anything to work with.” He paused. “You okay?”

“I wouldn't want to die like that.”

“No.” Dixie added, “You wouldn't like the autopsy either. Toasters and floaters, the two worst bodies in the business.”

“So I'm working a homicide,” Boldt confirmed.

“‘Circumstances of discovery raise a suspicion that this was a violent death.' That's how I'll write it up. Are there circumstances of disappearance? That's your bailiwick.”

“There are,” Boldt confirmed. “One Dorothy Elaine Enwright went missing the night of the fire. An eyewitness saw a woman fitting Enwright's description in the house just prior to the fire.”

“Well, there you are,” Dixie said.

“There I am,” Boldt replied.

The medical examiner's determination of a body present in the rubble threw the investigation into high gear and even higher profile. Local news agencies clamored for information. Boldt assigned two of his squad's detectives to the investigation, John LaMoia and Bobbie Gaynes, to be joined by two probationary firemen, Sidney Fidler and Neil Bahan, loaned to the Seattle Police Department as arson investigators. Boldt would act as case supervisor, reporting, as always, directly to Phil Shoswitz.

A coordinating meeting, arranged for the SPD fifth floor conference room, came off on time, as scheduled on Monday at 10
A.M.
, six days after the Enwright fire. It included Boldt's team and four members of the King County Arson Task Force, an alliance formed of Marshal Five fire inspectors representing various fire districts within the county.

Boldt had never been fond of meetings involving more than three people; to him, they seemed exercises in tongue wagging. But this meeting went differently. The four fire inspectors worked well with their brethren assigned to police duty, Fidler and Bahan. Boldt, LaMoia, and Gaynes participated primarily as onlookers while the technical details of the fire were discussed. A burn pattern on wood known as “alligatoring” had steered the inspectors toward the center of the structure, where destruction was so severe there was literally no evidence to be gathered. The area of origin—an essential starting point for any arson investigation—was therefore impossible to pinpoint.

The longer the meeting went, the more anxious Boldt became. Reading between the spoken words, he experienced a sinking feeling that the fire's intense heat had destroyed any and all indication of its origin. Worse, all six experts seemed both intimidated and surprised by the severity of the heat.

With everyone still present, Neil Bahan summed up the discussion for the sake of Boldt and his detectives. “It goes like this, Sergeant. We have the initial plume reported as a flash.
Not
an explosion. That's worrisome, because it excludes a hell of a lot of known accelerants. Add to that the eyewitness reports of the height of the plume, and the flame itself being a distinct purple in color, and we figure we're looking at liquid accelerants. We could make some guesses, but we're not going to. The prudent thing to do is send our samples off to the state crime lab and test for hydrocarbons. That will point us to the specific fuel used, which in turn may give John and Bobbie a retail or wholesale source to check out.” LaMoia and Gaynes nodded. Gaynes scribbled down a note. “As it is, we'll put it out to every snitch we got. This guy brags about it—as they love to do—and we nip him. Meanwhile, we go about trying to make sense of the rest of the evidence.”

“Which is?” Boldt questioned.

Bahan eye-checked his buddies and said, “I would rather wait and see what the lab tells us, but the deal is this: We've got some popcorn in the foundation's concrete, some spalling. Fire suppression washed a lot of this evidence away and may have affected the rest of it, but what we
don't
have is slag or heavy metals—both of which we would expect to see with liquid accelerants. But added to that we have some blue concrete right beneath the center of the house—quite possibly the area of origin. That's bad shit, blue concrete. That's something we
don't
want to find, because it means this thing went off somewhere above two thousand degrees. If that's right, it lops off another whole shitload of known accelerants and, quite frankly, gets out of our area of expertise.”

“ATF, maybe,” another of the fire inspectors suggested.

Bahan agreed. “Yeah, maybe we bring in the Feds or send some of the stuff down to Chestnut Grove, their Sacramento lab. See what they have to say.”

“So what you're saying,” Boldt suggested, “is that the origin of the fire is unusual.”

Two of the Marshal Fives laughed aloud.

Bahan said, “You could say that, yes.”

“And you're suggesting that we stick by the ruling of suspicious origin.”

“Most definitely. This sucker was torched, Sergeant.”

“We're checking out her ex-husband, any boyfriends, employer, insurance policies, neighbors,” Boldt informed the visitors. “We'll turn up a suspect, and when we do, maybe we send one of you guys into his garage to have a look-see at his workbench?”

“No shortage of volunteers for that assignment,” Bahan answered for the others. “This guy is good,” he explained. The others nodded.

Boldt bristled at the idea of an arsonist being considered talented. “She was a mom. Did you know? Seven-year-old boy.”

“He was in the fire?” one of the fire inspectors gasped, his face draining of color. It wasn't difficult to spot the parents in this group.

“No. Home with his father, thank God,” Boldt answered. He imagined his own son Miles in a fire like that. “Thank God,” he muttered again.

Bahan said, “We turn it over to the lab and we see what we see. It's really too early to make a decent appraisal. For the time being, it's in the hands of the chemists.”

“We'll continue the questioning,” Boldt told them. “Maybe something shakes out.”