Beyond Recognition (46 page)

“My job is to comb the place, not deal in probability. What I'm telling you is that this guy does not look good from this end. We are not going to deliver the smoking gun. Okay? And quite frankly, Lou, I don't like it. It's
too
clean. Okay? God, we'd expect some kind of connective tissue: tree bark, a penknife, window washing gear.”

“He's an investigator,” Boldt reminded. “If the lab is off-site, he's smart enough to change clothes and shoes—take precautions not to track evidence home with him. He confessed—if you can call it that. Maybe because he knew we couldn't find enough to make it stick. Maybe it's a game for him.”

“Yeah? Well if it is, he's winning. That's all I've got to say. Casterstein knows his shit, Lou, and he's walking around shaking his head, like a kid drawing a blank at an Easter egg hunt. If you were here, you'd see what I mean, and you wouldn't like it, believe me. We're pissing up a rope here, Lou. I'm thinking the best link, the most likely connection, is still this ink. Okay? Connect a pen in the house to the threats he sent. Maybe we can do that. We're rounding up his pens.”

“I'd take it, Bernie, don't get me wrong. Gladly. But it's not what I'm looking for. It's not exactly a home run.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Leads to his lab, that's what I need. Find me something pointing to the location of his shop. You do that, I can go home and go to sleep.”

“In that case, I'd start drinking coffee, I was you. It's the fibers, the blue and silver fibers you need to follow. Like you said, he's an investigator. He knows what the fuck he's doing. I wouldn't go counting on much from here.” He added quickly, “Save me some cake, if there is any, would you? And not a corner piece—something good. You guys have all the fun.”

Boldt hung up the phone thinking about his wife. Amid all the eighteen-hour tours, Liz had come to town for the day and had, as far as Boldt knew, returned to the cabin, having never contacted her husband. He tried her cellular, got her voice mail, and told her, “The coast is clear, love. We're back in the house. I miss you all terribly. Hurry home.”

The bulk of the investigation, that rock coming down the hill, had hit bottom and run out of momentum. Lab crews would be busy for several weeks analyzing what little evidence came out of Hall's and Garman's residences. Amid a continued media blitz by city politicians proclaiming the city safe and the guilty parties behind bars, Boldt would watch the investigation be dismantled before his eyes and despite his objections. He had been here before; he felt wrapped in the black cape of depression.

He walked slowly down the long hall to the conference room, attempting to collect his thoughts.

She sat at the table alone under the unforgiving glare of fluorescent light. Her hair was pulled back. She looked tired. She directed him to the city map, into which she had stabbed several pushpins. “Dorothy Enwright, Melissa Heifitz, Veronica De-Latario—red, yellow, and green. All in the same general area of town. Why?”

Boldt studied the map and the location of the pushpins. The simplest things could avoid them, rarely did they fully escape. “That's the area of service for his battalion. He'd have a firm working knowledge of the area.”

Her lips pursed, and when she spoke her voice was as harsh as the lighting. “Listen, it's true that psychopaths often restrict their movements to an area a mile or two in radius from their residences, but Steven Garman is so far outside the profile of a psychopath that there's no reason to make the slightest of comparisons. Admittedly, I haven't had time to work with him, but I've listened to that so-called confession more times than the rest of you, and I've got to tell you, there's a clever mind at work here. You listen carefully, most of it is fluff. He's not confessing to anything. And does an intelligent, well-liked man like Garman start killing women in his own back yard? I don't think so, Lou. Maybe across town, maybe in Portland or Spokane, or someplace far, far from home, but down the street?”

“Down the street, he can target them,” he suggested.

She protested, “So you know how the Scholar targets them, is that it?”

“You know I don't.”

“Well, neither do I, and I'm willing to bet you that neither does Steven Garman.” She stared at him through a long silence. “He's too big and heavy for your boy up the ladder, isn't he?” she asked rhetorically. “Same as with Hall. We listen to the evidence, right? Isn't that right, Lou?”

“Shoswitz will cut the team down to nothing. Four of us if I'm lucky: LaMoia, Bahan, Fidler—”

“When do we face we have the wrong man?”

“Facing it and discussing it openly are two different issues,” he answered. “Shoswitz will not want to hear it. Period. The brass is crowing all over the airwaves that we caught the big one that got away. We change the story and some heads will roll.”

“I understand that,” she said. “But we can't go along with it. Even if we do it quietly, we push ahead. There's going to be another fire, Lou,” she said, voicing his secret fear.

“You had any vacation lately?” he asked, changing the subject, hoping to erase the image of another fire from his thoughts.

“No.”

“Where would you go if you did? What kind of places does Owen like?”

“Owen doesn't take vacations.”

“I'm thinking about Mexico a lot. Warm. Sunny. Cheap.”

“I think I'd ask to borrow your cabin,” she said dreamily. “Take a pile of books, a couple of bags of fresh veggies, some really great wine, some CDs. You got a bathtub up there?”

“Of course.”

“Candles. Some bath oil. Spoil myself, you know? Indulge.”

“Suntan lotion,” he proposed. “A Walkman with all of Oscar Peterson. Barefoot on the beach. Long naps.”

“The kids?”

“Of course. You bet! Spend time just watching them, just sitting there watching them, you know?”

“Shoswitz suggesting a vacation?” she asked.

Boldt nodded. “Feels like he's ready to shove it down my throat. He mentioned you and John, too.”

“He doesn't miss much. He never strikes you that way, but his antenna is always up.”

“It would appear so.”

“Let's say he's still out there,” she said. “You arrested his source when you arrested Hall. Forget Garman for a moment. At this point the Scholar is like a junkie, he's addicted to the power of these arsons. Earlier, there was, more than likely, a justification at work in his mind. Rationalizing his deeds. But somewhere in the course of events there was a transference to where the deed justified itself because it made him feel so good. So all-powerful. The Bible quotes indicate he believes in a Divine Law, and he believes he is the bearer of that flag. But you put a kink in all that. You dried up the source. You put fear into him. His response was to take a big risk by breaking into Chief Joseph and taking the hypergolics for himself. This tells us that he's a planner. He watched Nicholas Hall; he knew what warehouses to hit. We don't know for how long, but he's known the location of those accelerants. He was content to pay for them because it put Hall at risk, not himself; as long as Hall did his job right, the supply was endless. You changed all that.

“Success in such endeavors,” she continued, “breeds a lackadaisical attitude, a complacency. He believed he could go on doing this forever. He felt confident that you would not identify or locate him. But now we have Garman as well—and Garman is trying to cover for him. Why? It's likely the Scholar has stolen more accelerant, quite possibly an enormous amount. Why? Some kind of grand finale? Will he just go back to killing these women, content with his stolen fuel? Or will he move away, only to start again in a year or two?”

“You tell me,” Boldt suggested.

“He's fooled me from the start, Lou. I don't trust my own judgments. I've been wrong about him time and time again. The point is, neither of us believes Garman set those fires. We'll never convince anyone else until we know why he confessed.”

“Protecting someone,” Boldt said, repeating what she had suggested.

“Unless it's himself he's protecting,” she said, confusing him. “Unless he's two people inside there: the fire inspector and the arsonist. And the fire inspector finally turned in the arsonist.” She produced a photograph. “Here's the stumbling block: his ex-wife.” She moved her hand out of the way, and Boldt saw a woman's happy face smiling back at him in the photograph.

“Peas in a pod,” she said, producing one of the recent family photographs of Dorothy Enwright. The similarities between Enwright and the ex-wife were astounding. Boldt looked back and forth between them. “Uncanny.”

“The problem with fires is they burn the victim, they burn the boxes of photographs, the framed pictures by the bed. We end up with pictures fifteen years out of date. And the thing about women is, we change our look. We move with the fashions. Men? Forget it. But we're the victims of these fires—you and me, Lou—because we've been working with photos that didn't show us the current look of these women. Here's the photo of Melissa Heifitz
we
have,” she said, producing another shot. “Henna-red hair down past her shoulders. But come to find out, the henna was out of a bottle; she went gray in the late eighties and dyed it dark, just like these two. Cut it shorter and left it straight.” She used a felt-tip pen to change the look of Heifitz's hair, and all at once the similarity was there as well.

“Damn!” Boldt said. Another piece of his puzzle.

“It's what triggers him, Lou: that particular look.”

“So it might be Garman after all?” Boldt questioned uncomfortably. He didn't want to believe this. “He's protecting himself
from
himself? You actually buy that?”

“Not for a minute,” said the psychologist who had offered him the theory. “Though one could make the argument fairly strongly.”

“You're toying with me,” he complained.

“Absolutely.” She smiled, though it did nothing to disguise her fatigue. The smile melted from her face as if rinsed off. “There's a third element, a third participant. Someone we don't even know exists—didn't know until now,” she corrected herself. “Garman may be a good liar, but he's no killer. We may not have the evidence necessary to prove it, but we both know it's true.”

“A third element,” Boldt muttered, reaching unsteadily for a chair and sitting himself down.

When she looked at him, she wanted to cry. His pale innocence as he struggled with his homework. The simplicity of movement, unaware of her presence. He had lived so long in a home where he was unwanted that he didn't notice others around him.

In this, as in so many things with Ben, Daphne was wrong. The plain truth was that she had not lived around boys enough to read one correctly. He looked up at her and said, “Why do I have to do this shit?”

“Watch the language!” she scolded.

“Stuff,” he substituted.

“It's homework, Ben. We all had to do it.”

“So what? That makes it right? I don't think so.”

“What's five times twenty-five?” she asked. His face went blank and she explained, “Some guy offers you twenty-five bucks an hour for five hours—”

“I'll take it!” he answered quickly.

“How about five bucks an hour for twenty-five hours?” she fired back.

Confused, Ben scribbled out numbers on a piece of paper. “It's a hundred and twenty-five bucks.”

“And how many work days is twenty-five hours if you work eight hours a day?”

“So you need math,” he conceded, without doing the numbers.

“Some people will tell you that the difference between not having an education and having one is whether you want to work with your body or with your mind. Whether you want to make a little money or a lot of money. But it goes way beyond that. It's the
way
you enjoy things. The more you know, the more you get out of it.”

“Einstein flunked math,” he reminded her.

“And PhDs can be the most boring people on earth,” she agreed. “I'm not saying it's some kind of cure-all. It just gives you a head start, that's all. You like computers? You like special effects in movies? A computer is no good if you don't know how to run it.”

“What about yours?”

“My what?” she asked.

“Your laptop. Will you teach me how to run it?”

She was caught. Stuck. She was protective of her laptop, always keeping it with her, locking it down with password protection when she left it behind at the office for a few hours; she felt it was something personal, not for others. And yet she couldn't deny the boy. “Sure,” she said reluctantly, wondering how she had boxed herself in that way.

“Really?” His face brightened in a way she had not yet witnessed, like a kid on Christmas morning.

She nodded. “I'll need to get some games for it. I only have solitaire.”