Ridley Pearson - Beyond Recognition

There wasn’t much more to see. He stepped back, studying the camper shell. He mentioned the Good Sam Club to her, because maybe it would tell her something about the kind of person he was. He noticed the camper had a rooftop skylight that was partially open, and he could picture himself slipping down inside and finding out everything there was to know about the guy. He wanted to know everything there was to know. He wanted to give Emily something worthwhile. One of the lower limbs of the cedar tree went out just above the camper shell, and he debated climbing out on this limb and trying to see down into the shell, but the skylight didn’t look like it was open far enough, and everything was too dark.

He circled the vehicle once more and then crept quietly into the kitchen, taking up his favorite spot at a peephole that Emily had put into the wall just for this purpose. She liked to leave the room every now and then and spy on her customers to see what they did when she was gone; she claimed this could tell her a lot about a person. Ben placed his one good eye to the wall, blinked repeatedly, watched, and listened, his heart racing, his skin tingling.

The guy was built solid, with wide shoulders, thick arms, hard features, and pinpoint eyes. His hair was buzz-cut down to nothing, blond maybe, and his jaw was square as if sawed off at the chin. Ben looked first to the man’s face and then at his right hand, which was ugly and hard not to look at. His last three fingers were fused together with pink, shiny skin so they looked like a small flipper. Ben, because of his glass eye, knew what it was like to be a freak, and rather than wince at the sight of this hand, he felt empathy toward the man. That hand would be a tough thing to live with.

“Are you sure?” Emily asked her customer.

“Yes, ma’am. Just October second. That’s all. Wednesday, the second. Just whether or not that’s a good day for me-you know, as far as the astrology stuff goes.”

“Just that one day.”

“That’s all. Whether or not it’s a good day for me to do some business.”

“I’ll need to do a chart and then make a reading. It’s not something I can do just like that.”

He said, “I understand. A girl I know is into the stars. How long?”

“Four or five days. You’ll have to come back.”

“That’s okay. I can get up to the city, no problem.”

“I charge fifty dollars for a chart. But once it’s done,” she added quickly, “it’s just ten dollars a reading from then on-if you wanted more readings.”

“I might.” He added, “The money’s all right. The fifty bucks.”

Ben thought the man looked nervous, and he wondered if it had to do with that hand, if this guy always felt uncomfortable, always thought people were staring at it. Ben knew that feeling. He had worn dark glasses for the first year after the operation, but the glasses had attracted more attention than the fake eye. He wondered what was so important about October second. He learned things hanging around Emily. Watching her work. People wanted someone to tell them what to do, and when to do it. They would gladly shell out ten or twenty dollars just to hear it. Emily said her customers were sheep desperate for a shepherd. She drummed a single message into him constantly: Believe in yourself.

“Fifty for the chart, ten for the reading,” Emily clarified, ever the businesswoman.

“That’s okay.”

“Good. I need your birth date, time of day, and the location-”

“Time of day?” he asked, interrupting.

“It’s important, yes.”

“I don’t know what time of day I was born. Who knows that?”

“Could you call your mother?”

“No!” he said sharply. He seemed to grow larger. “There’s no one.”

Ben felt a chill run from his toes to his scalp. The words swirled in his head. They might have been his words if he hadn’t had Emily. No one . They had more than a disfigurement in common.

“I have my birth certificate,” the man said. “Is it on there?”

“Very likely.”

“Then I can get it for you. No problem. Can I call you or something?”

“That would work.”

Suddenly irritable, he said, “Shouldn’t a person like you know these things?”

“You think I don’t know about you?” she asked.

He squinted back at her, like Jack when he was drunk and trying to concentrate.

“You’re a military man,” she informed him. He looked shocked. Ben swelled with pride. “Air Force. You live by yourself. You’re considerate of others, the type of man to help someone out who needs a hand. Money is a little tight right now, but things are looking up. There’s a deal on the horizon ….”

His eyes were the size of saucers, though he tried to contain his shock. He rubbed his hands together briskly, although the flipper stayed out of it, as if the knuckles didn’t bend. He glanced up at Emily and said, “Okay, so I’m impressed. So what?” He waited briefly and asked, “How could you know any of that?”

“It’s my gift,” she said.

Pride surged through Ben, warming him. He’d done a good job out at the truck. Emily needed him. They were a team.

Homicides were about victims. The way a victim had lived often told more about his or her death than the way a victim died.

Boldt was scheduled to meet with Dorothy Enwright’s mother and sister. It was an interview that he would have rather pawned off onto a detective, but he did not. He wanted to know what kind of life the dead woman had lived, her friends, her enemies. Something, somewhere in Dorothy Enwright’s past, had ensured her untimely death. She had most likely been robbed, caught in some act, or loved the wrong person. It was Boldt’s job-his duty-to identify that individual and bring him or her to the courts with enough incriminating evidence to win a conviction. A deputy prosecuting attorney would accept nothing less.

Lou Boldt would accept nothing less. From the moment that Dixie had confirmed the existence of a bone in the rubble-a body-Boldt’s central focus was to see a person or persons brought to justice, to force Enwright’s murderer to capitulate and repay society for the victim’s undeserved and unwarranted death.

Arson investigator Sidney Fidler showed up at Boldt’s office cubicle just in time to delay the sergeant’s departure for the interview with Enwright’s relatives. Boldt felt like thanking him.

Fidler was anxiously thin and prematurely bald. He wore clothes that didn’t match, and he always looked half asleep, though he had one of the finest minds of anyone Boldt had worked with in years. It was too bad that Fidler was a fireman on rotation to SPD rather than a permanent member of Boldt’s homicide squad. In terms of ability, there weren’t many Sidney Fidlers out there. Single and a loner, he looked and acted about sixty. He was somewhere in his early thirties.

“I thought I might interpret this lab report for you, Sergeant.” Despite his diminutive size, he had a deep, rich voice. He looked Boldt directly in the eye. “And to bring you up to date on some of the particulars.” He didn’t wait for Boldt’s reply but continued on, confidently, passing Boldt the report. “It’s a preliminary report in the form of a memo, to give us an idea of what we’ll receive.” Boldt adjusted himself in his seat. Such memos were courtesy of the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab, typically offered only on cases where the information was so hot as to ensure it would leak. The memos gave investigating officers a head start on the findings and were themselves rarely leaked to the press. But the existence of a memo told Boldt that the lab findings were significant enough to expect a leak. Not good news.