Beyond Recognition (60 page)

When Ben came to again, Jonny was through soldering. Ben endeavored to keep his eyes off the man, because every time he looked at him he felt queasy. The area was occupied nearly entirely by a large pickup truck, with just enough room left over for a pair of oil drums marked USAF, lots of black plastic pipe, and a green metal trunk unlocked but not open. Jonny sat on the trunk, working off the truck's tailgate. There was a car jack and a pair of beach chairs stacked along the wall and a couple of cardboard boxes that were taped shut. There were boxes from Radio Shack that had once contained radio-controlled four-wheel-drive cars.

There were only two pictures in the place, a postcard of Jesus and a slightly larger image of a woman being burned at the stake.

Ben thought about God. He believed in him. He prayed to him. He made all sorts of promises about how he would live his life, how he would obey Emily or whoever ended up taking care of him; he would even spend the night at the detention center, if that were asked of him. He promised not to run away. To listen. To learn respect. The prayers gushed out of him.

In his mind's eye, he saw Daphne's red car driving past. He wanted so badly to believe it had been her car. Although he didn't know exactly how long he had been held captive, he guessed at least ten minutes, maybe more. His hope of being rescued waned, and he returned to his prayers.

The man who called himself Jonny spoke to the wall but intended it for Ben. “You and I aren't so different.” A half minute later he added, “I ain't never had no little brother.”

Ben hung his head to the floor. He didn't want the man to see he was crying.

Boldt climbed the chain link fence quickly, tearing his coat sleeve and slicing his right forearm on the sharp spikes at the top, but he was up and over more easily than he had expected. He landed at a run, pursuing Daphne as if she were the suspect.

She had crossed over an extremely rare threshold for her: operating from her emotions rather than her intellect. It was one of the most dangerous transitions a cop can make, and Boldt had no choice but to stop her before she got herself, or the boy, or all three of them into what Boldt thought of as the “red zone”—that place from which there was no out other than confrontation or violence.

She hesitated at the pay phone, as if it might answer some questions for her, sensed Boldt's approach, and took off around the side of the office building.

Boldt took his weapon in both hands, training it down to his side, an automatic response born of some sixth sense that had responded to an internal alarm. He didn't believe in such responses, but he trusted them when they happened.

Daphne was athletic, a daily runner, and she was fast. If she had chosen to outrun Boldt it would have been no contest, but her focus was on locating Ben, and she moved slowly alongside the building, checking the shadows. Boldt bumped her from behind and whispered, “Move, move!” as he herded her to the end of the building, his attention spread in too many directions: behind him, along the storage units, along the wall of the building. He urged her on with his left shoulder, stopped her, peered around the corner of the building, and then indicated her on ahead. She glared at him but allowed him to guide her. He drove them into a recessed brick corner that felt protected and hissed, “Stupid move.”

“He's here, goddammit. You may not believe that but—”

“We'll find him,” he said, to reassure her. “If he's here, we'll find him. He's a
kid
. A curious kid, at that. Precocious. Our job is to keep him—and us—out of trouble. Not
make
trouble.” He scanned the area as he spoke, rarely meeting her eyes. It didn't escape him that he was suddenly playing the psychologist and she the renegade cop. “We'll check the rows, but we'll do it organized, not running around on our own. If we work together, side-to-side, we can net him. Listen, it's like a giant supermarket, these rows. We'll miss him if we don't do it in an organized way.” She looked a little dazed. “You hearing me?”

She nodded faintly.

“We both want him to be okay,” he reminded her. He was hoping that by pinning her here he might buy time for the arrival of the backup, but to utilize them would either mean returning to the radio in his car or spending time on the cellular phone relaying messages—and Daphne's patience was running low. He could sense her about to make another break. He felt rushed, hurried; he knew that was when he made mistakes. He had to get her involved, engaged in a plan, focused. If she went running through the facility she might get them all killed. He decided to hit her with the truth. “May I remind you,” he said, still scanning the immediate area, “that Garman has an undetermined amount of this rocket fuel? Just consider that for a moment.” He stared at her.

“Point taken.”

“An undetermined amount.”

“I get it,
Sergeant
. Let's get on with it.”

“Okay,” Boldt said, forming a plan, wishing for the backup. “Right up against this first row. Weapons at the ready. We walk quietly—super quietly—slowly. Patiently. We hold position at the end of the first row. Round the corner, cover the side. Round the next corner and make eye contact. We hold to the wall and meet in the center. We cross to the next row and start it all over. If we need cover, we press ourselves into the recesses at the garage doors. We walk quietly because we're listening—for voices, for movement, a radio. We're interested in light and sound. Those are our signals.” He paused, hoping some of it might sink in. “If this is his lab, his storage area—and we have every reason to believe it is—it's a second home to this creep. It's familiar turf for him.” He released the gun with one hand and tapped his forehead. “Keep that right in here: his turf. Expect the unexpected. We watch for things like trip wires, sensors maybe, who knows? He has surprised us too many times to count. He prides himself on it. No surprises. Expect anything. Everything.”

He had talked long enough to calm her. Or perhaps his words had sunk in. Her eyes trained on his, she thanked him and followed it with an apology. Then she said desperately, “I just want to find him.”

He nodded. There were a dozen things he wanted to tell her—about Liz, about the change in his thoughts on field work, about feeling as if he were tempting fate. But the look on her face wouldn't allow him to back out of his plans, and he realized that she loved little Ben Santori.

If that were Miles in there....
The words rang inside his head like bells.

“Okay?” she asked.

“Okay,” he answered. But it didn't feel okay. As they crossed the blacktop toward the first row of units, an increasing sense of foreboding filled him. Daphne's intuition was right; Ben was in trouble.

They moved methodically through the rows of storage units, and much to Boldt's surprise Daphne stayed in lockstep, following Boldt's plan to the letter. The sound of traffic on I-5 was oppressive, interrupted only by the drumming in Boldt's ears. He rolled his shoes across the blacktop to avoid being heard, keeping himself alert for the unexpected.

Beyond the third set of blue units, all doubts concerning Garman's whereabouts were suspended. A wash of pale light illuminated the fronts of the units that Boldt and Daphne faced; the source of that light, the unit immediately to Boldt's right. At the far end of the row of units, Daphne's face appeared. Boldt signaled her. Together, they moved toward each other, ducking from one doorway to the next, moving toward the center of the row. Less than a minute later, they stood on opposite sides of the garage door that was leaking light, ten feet apart. Boldt's heart pounded heavily in his chest and clouded his hearing as he tried to discern the sounds coming from within. It sounded like a fan. Like a cat hissing, or water just beginning to boil. But it was none of these, he realized; it was a gas lantern and the voice of Jonny Garman, coming from a throat burned in a fire in North Dakota, a voice trying to make itself heard.

When Boldt signaled Daphne to withdraw from their positions by Garman's storage unit, her first temptation was to disobey—allow him to take a few steps back and then throw open the garage door and face whatever Garman had to offer. But intelligence, training, and discipline won out, leaving her feeling a victim of her profession.

Step by step they pulled away from the unit, back to the far corners, and finally retreated until they caught sight of each other once again in the second aisle. Boldt motioned toward the office, where they met outside a few minutes later.

“We're going to assume it's Garman”—Boldt led off at a fraction of a whisper—”and work from there. If Gaynes or LaMoia spot a suspect, we'll reconsider, but buying this as coincidence is too great a stretch for me. Garman came here to prepare—”

“For Martinelli,” Daphne informed him, mouthing her words more than speaking them. She explained to him her discovery of the backpack with the Santori address and how, in her opinion, the bait of a woman so close in appearance to his mother had overridden the other arson he had planned. She admitted reluctantly, “I have no idea how Ben became involved.” And those were the last words she could manage, her emotions winning out.

“If Ben isn't in hiding—”

“—then he's inside that storage unit,” she completed for him. “Garman won't harm a child—especially not a young boy. He won't even use him as a hostage, Lou. He won't risk the boy's life.”

“We don't know that.”

“Yes, we do,” she contradicted. “We know the great lengths he went to in order to avoid harming the offspring of his victims. He stayed in those trees to make sure the young boys were out of the house. He knows Ben's face, Lou, it's the face he saw on the sun visor. That will have an effect on him; he will empathize with Ben. He will think he's doing him a favor by burning up his mother, which is exactly what he has planned. He will not harm him in any way. If anything,” she suggested, “Ben's presence
reduces
the chance that Garman will resist arrest.”

“No, no, no,” Boldt objected, sensing where she intended to take that line of argument. “We are not confronting the suspect.”

“Of course we are!” she protested. “What we are
not
going to do is turn this thing into a circus. He's an introvert, a paranoid, a man afraid of society because of society's reaction to his disfigurement. He's angry. He blames his father. You surround a person like that with flashing lights, bullhorns and armed men in uniforms and he'll lose it. Reality will blur for him. Who knows what he'll do?”

“Daffy—”

“We confront him, Lou. You and I. We stand outside that door, our weapons put away, and we talk to him. We reinforce that he doesn't want the boy hurt and that he doesn't want to contend with an army of trigger-happy cops. We make, and we keep, a promise to bring him in quietly. He's not a headline hunter, Lou, not this one. This is a family matter—between him and his father, him and his mother. We can resolve this right here, you and I.”

“And if you're wrong, the place we're standing will look like ground zero by tomorrow morning.”

“I'm not wrong,” she stated bluntly. “Work with me here, Lou. There's a right way and a wrong way to a Jonny Garman. You know that's right; you know I know what I'm talking about. You bring the circus, and he'll join it. You bring a show, and he'll outdo your show. We offer him a way out, and he'll take it.”

Boldt shook his head no. She wanted to take him by the shoulders and shake him. He looked exhausted. She convinced herself he wasn't thinking clearly. He said, “We wait him out. It's the long route to discovery, admittedly, but it's the safe way. We may wait only to find out that it's not Garman, but we will not corner him in a place where he may be storing that kind of firepower.”

She was ready to interrupt, vehemently, but she held her tongue, sensing his own difficulties. Perhaps he wanted to do exactly what she had just described. Perhaps it was better to allow him to talk his way through it and reach the same conclusion.

“If he comes out on his bicycle, without a backpack, say, we pick him. If he comes out with the boy, we watch but we don't pick. If his father's truck is in the storage area—and I'm betting it is—we've got big problems, because he's going to leave here sometime before tomorrow morning, ready to do a little window washing and set up the Santori house, believing it to be Martinelli's. Once he's in that truck, he's too dangerous—”

“You see,” she objected, “we should do it now.” She heard him explaining their situation and knew he was right, but the objection came out anyway.

“No, the point is
not
to do it now,” Boldt countered, “but to find a way to separate Garman from his truck, if that's what it comes to. We're going to need a way to distance him from his materials. Once we accomplish that, we pick him and it's over.” He added, “And it isn't a matter of simply waiting for him to do his thing at Santori's, because he'll have the accelerant with him, on his person. We cannot move on him until he's away from that fuel—with or without Ben involved.”

It was no place to argue, standing in shadow less than a hundred yards from the assumed location of their suspect. Nonetheless, she heard herself say, “You won't get him away from that truck.”