Beyond Recognition (44 page)

It was more than a house, it was his family's history museum. The idea of losing it terrified him. It made him want to drive to the cabin and see Liz and the kids.

He prayed to God that the arsonist be caught.

The first man to reach the roof ridge of the house wore a fireman's turnouts complete with hat and mask and carried a hands-free walkie-talkie that communicated with Lofgrin on the ground. Lofgrin and Boldt and the others—Bahan and Fidler among them—stood behind a fire line established on the sidewalk. The six adjacent houses had been evacuated and two patrol cars blocked the street from vehicle traffic. Four ERT officers had sequestered themselves in two of the evacuated houses, alert for signs of interest from the arsonist.

The roof man told Lofgrin, “Four stacks.”

Lofgrin looked over at Boldt and said, “I gotta warn you: we're gonna find hypergolics. Why else go up the tree and watch the place, right? He was waiting for the show.”

“I'm a nervous wreck,” Boldt admitted.

“Think how Rick feels,” he said, pointing to the roof man. “That fuel goes and he's got about twenty seconds to get off that roof before he's three thousand feet up. “If he doesn't jump, his ass is ash. No time for the ladder. No time for the walkie-talkie. He knows that,” Lofgrin added, answering Boldt's curious expression. “You ever seen a guy take a running jump from a two-story building?” He answered himself. “Me neither. And I don't intend to tonight, just for the record.” Into the walkie-talkie he said, “You go easy up there, damn it. Use the scope.”

The roof man was equipped with a fiber-optic camera about the size of a pencil eraser on a flexible aluminum cable about the diameter of a shoelace. His job was to lower the cable into each stack and report what he saw. Boldt looked on as the man gingerly crossed the roof between vent stacks. He knelt awkwardly and fumbled with some equipment.

“He's nervous,” Lofgrin observed. “Good. I'd rather that than cocky.”

The roofman's voice, made scratchy by the radio, reported, “Going down.”

“Nice and easy,” Lofgrin ordered.

Boldt looked up as the man fed the cable with his right hand, his left holding a Sony Watchman video monitor. “Two feet … three feet …” he reported.

Lofgrin told Boldt, “The cable is marked in inches, feet, and yards.”

“Four feet … five feet …”

“You know what I think?” Lofgrin asked rhetorically. “That's a front stack. Front of the house. Unlikely he would rig that one. Too visible, right? If I'm him, I rig the back stacks and seal the front stacks. Less time on the front roof that way.”

His radio squawked. “Seven feet … eight feet …”

Into the walkie-talkie Lofgrin said, “Let's try one of the back stacks, Rick. You copy that?”

“I copy,” the roofman reported.

“Back of the house is where the action is,” Lofgrin informed Boldt. “Count on it.”

Overhead a news chopper aimed a blinding light down on the top of Boldt's roof, its cone sweeping back and forth, and isolated the man in the turnouts.

Lofgrin said, “Well, one thing's for sure: You'll never be invited to a neighborhood function again.”

The spotlight left the roof, scanned the yard, and lighted on Boldt and Lofgrin. A considerable amount of wind was generated by the blades, and the noise was deafening. Lofgrin waved it off, but it continued to hover above them. The roofman lost his balance because of the generated downdraft; he slipped on the shake roof but managed to reach out a hand and catch himself. Boldt glanced over to the parked patrol cars. Shoswitz was shouting into his radio handset while looking up at the helicopter. Boldt didn't need to read lips to see how angry the man was. Thirty seconds later the helicopter gained altitude and the associated noise lessened, but the spotlight continued to jump between the roofman and Boldt and Lofgrin's position on the sidewalk.

“I'm at the northernmost stack on the back side,” announced the roofman through Lofgrin's radio.

“The kitchen,” Boldt explained.

Lofgrin said, “Go easy, Rick. This may be a live one.”

“Copy that,” answered the roofman.

Boldt could not see Rick working, and this bothered him. He heard him announce that he was feeding the camera into the stack, and Boldt could picture the tiny camera sliding down the black plastic vent; he could imagine the man keeping an eye on the Watchman while the fiber-optic camera with its tiny light disappeared down the tube.

“One foot …” the voice announced.

“Slowly,” Lofgrin cautioned. Boldt sensed in him an added worry, a heightened concern.

“Howdy hey,” the roofman said into the radio. “I'm showing a translucent membrane at the eighteen-inch mark.”

“Hold it!” Lofgrin spat into the radio. He turned around and waved one of his assistants over. She had a handsome face, was somewhere in her early thirties, and was clad in turnouts too big for her. She carried a gray plastic toolbox in her right hand, heavy, by the look of it. Lofgrin told her, “The kitchen. Use the back door. Take it exceptionally slowly, as we talked about. It will be in the vertical somewhere. Give me a distance readout from the bottom of the vertical. Got it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Okay,” Lofgrin said. “Go ahead.”

“Young,” Boldt said, as she hurried away from them, the toolbox dragging on her.

“They all look young anymore. She's got a four-year-old. Husband works for Boeing. Maybe the biggest overachiever I've got. She begged me for this assignment. Despite the risk, despite the obvious danger, despite the fact that the bomb boys were jockeying for this work, she wanted to run one of the cameras. She's the one who did the ventilation work over in the New Federal Building—you remember that camera work? Worked the thing up three stories and into the men's room. Remember that? It was a narcotics sting. Busted a seventy-thousand-dollar cash gift to a dealer from Vancouver. That was Goldilocks. You want fiber optics up somebody's butt hole without them the wiser, she's the one.”

“Why send her inside?”

“We need to check the stack from below. Rick can't head down through that membrane, so now we go from the bottom up. That should give us some idea how to neutralize.”

“Meaning what?” Boldt questioned.

“I see two options here. One is he trapped part A and part B in two different stacks. A thin membrane on the bottom, all the other stacks sealed off. Someone goes and uses a plunger, the membranes go simultaneously and the place goes up. The second option I see is both parts in the same stack. One atop the other, a membrane between. The advantage is you only have to break that bottom membrane. The point is, we don't know what he's done, so we sure as hell can't go popping membranes.” He explained, “We're prepared to siphon off liquid, or vacuum up a powder, but there's a remote chance he's done this a third way. Casterstein found evidence of a possible detonator. We know the guy was up a tree watching the place. What if that detonator is a pressure switch?”

“What if it is?” Boldt asked.

“In the case of these single mothers—Enwright and Heifitz—he watches until he's certain the kids are gone. From his tree he activates the pressure switch—he could retrofit any remote-control toy to do the trick. Not a big deal. He can deactivate if necessary, should the kids return. And there's the kicker: Deactivated, the drains don't work well but the place doesn't blow. Activated, the first time she flushes a toilet—
boom
! Running a little sink water probably wouldn't do it. A toilet, five gallons all at once—
boom
! A plunger, same thing. If both parts of the hypergolic are in the same stack and we go messing around, we could make one hell of a Roman candle. Know what I mean?”

The next few minutes progressed painstakingly slowly. The woman technician maintained a running description of every wrench turn, every joint loosening. Finally, she announced, “Okay, I see an opening to a riser up ahead. I'm twenty inches to the right.”

“Good. Let's follow it. But be careful, for God's sake. That membrane may be transparent.”

“Copy.”

Wincing, Lofgrin began nervously stroking the stubble on his chin, as if rubbing himself clean. The change in behavior made Boldt restless. The lab man pulled off his Coke-bottle glasses and cleaned them on his shirttail. Once the glasses were in place, he took to scratching the top of his head. “She's in the vent stack … heading up the vent stack.... If she breaks whatever barrier he has in place—” He didn't complete the sentence; there was no need. Their eyes met—Lofgrin's the size of golf balls behind the glasses—and Boldt understood that all the confidence in their techniques would not save this woman's life, did not guarantee this woman's life, and that Bernie Lofgrin was directly responsible. Lofgrin, dropping his eyes to the walkie-talkie, said in a coarse voice, “She's a good kid. A damn good kid. Hell of a worker. You hope for her kind. You don't often get them.” Into the radio, he spoke in a voice suddenly stronger, for he would not allow her to hear any uncertainty. “What's the scenery like?”

The woman's voice sounded strained as she reported. “Thirty-one inches. Condensation on the pipe walls has increased noticeably.”

Lofgrin said to Boldt, “We're close.” Into the walkie-talkie, he said, “Let's use half-inch increments.”

“Copy.”

Boldt felt overly warm. He could picture the small camera creeping up the inside of the pipe.

Lofgrin said to him, “This is a little like aiming a pin at a balloon but not wanting it to pop.”

“I understand,” Boldt replied.

“Serious condensation,” the woman reported. “It's fogging the lens. Blurring it.”

“Shit,” Lofgrin hissed, and glanced once at Boldt with wild eyes. The sergeant saw beads of perspiration covering the man's brow.

“My image is cloudy,” the technician reported. “I'm not liking this.”

Lofgrin directed her, “Let's retract, clean it off, and try again.” He added, “Make note of your distance.”

“Thirty-three and one half inches,” she reported.

“Copy,” Lofgrin said.

“Retracting.”

Lofgrin nodded, as if she could see him. He wiped his brow. To Boldt he said, “That's why we use our people instead of bomb squad: She may have been up against the membrane right then. It may have been the membrane blurring the lens, not water, not condensation. She
knows
that. A different guy, someone who doesn't know this gear intimately—” He left it hanging there, left Boldt with an image of the walls of his house sucked in and white-hot light flooding from the windows.

“The lens is occluded,” the woman reported. “I'm cleaning it and trying an application of defogger.”

“Condensation,” Lofgrin explained to Boldt. “So she was right. Score one for us.”

A minute or two passed. Boldt glanced at Bahan and Fidler, who had joined them.

“Well?” Boldt asked.

Bahan answered, “The pressure switch makes sense to me. It allows the victim to actually light off the fire.”

Fidler said, “It leaves it a little bit random—a little more exciting.”

“Opinions?” Boldt asked.

Bahan said, “We circulated the artist's sketch to every firehouse in the city. Maybe we get lucky.”

There was no one standing within fifty yards; a line of uniformed patrol officers was holding back a sea of onlookers, including a group of reporters. Fear is like fire, Boldt thought: It infects randomly, and with great haste.

“All set,” the woman said by radio. “We'll give it another try.”

She reported when she made the turn into the vertical stack, and again at twenty, and then at thirty inches. She counted off in quarter-inch increments from thirty and one-half. Boldt tensed with each report. Lofgrin inquired about condensation and she answered. “Looking better this time. I've got a good image.... Stopping at thirty-three and a half.”

“Image?”

“Going to thirty-three and three-quarters … thirty-four. Okay.... Okay ....” Her voice sounded strained over the radio. “I'm picking up a slightly reflective black image. Okay.... Okay.... This is a foreign object. Repeat”—she was nearly shouting into the radio—“a foreign object obstructing the passage. Black plastic.” Boldt felt heat prickle his scalp. She said, “I'm going a little closer: thirty-four and a half. Copy?”

“Thirty-four and a half,” Lofgrin acknowledged.

“Maybe send a bomb boy in to look at this. I've got a rubber O-ring holding it in place. It appears to be a detonator.”

“I fuckin' knew it!” Lofgrin exclaimed to Boldt. “They don't pay me the big bucks for nothing.”

The joke was not lost on Boldt; the pay was horrible. “What's next?” he asked.

“We send in the bomb man to have a look, and then we attempt to neutralize. We're looking at about eighteen feet of four-inch vent stack packed with hypergolics, Lou. We're talking Apollo Eleven here. If we fuck this up—” He didn't finish the sentence. “We should evacuate a few more houses. I did not expect this kind of volume.”