Ridley Pearson - Beyond Recognition

“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.”

“No,” Boldt agreed-too quickly, she thought, sensing she had been tricked. “That’s your job. You know him so well,” he suggested, “you figure it out.” He added, “And don’t move from this spot. I’m going to check on the bicycle and see about the backup.”

Her loyalty to Lou Boldt, her love for him, was far too great. She would not willfully corrupt the investigation. She nodded, though with great disappointment written on her face.

“Promise me, Daffy. Nothing stupid.”

“We’ll wait,” she agreed reluctantly. “But you won’t get him out of that truck. We’d be smarter to do this now.” Her eyes pleaded with him. Listen to me , they said.

But Boldt walked off into the darkness.

By the time the inspiration came to her, she had settled down onto the blacktop, knees into her chest, hidden in shadow. Boldt walked right past her, and she could feel him thinking that she had gone ahead without him.

“Right here,” she whispered.

He pulled her up by the hand and led her around to the far side of the office, where they could talk a little more normally.

“Bike is still there,” he announced gravely. “We have two north,” he said, pointing, “and one south-five of us on the ground. I put Richardson up high,” he said, indicating the interstate, a good distance away, “with a set of glasses. He’s got a clean line of sight on the storage unit. He’ll page me if there’s any activity.”

“He’s there for the night,” she speculated.

“Yes,” Boldt agreed. “Until morning.” He wanted to encourage her. “The car wash, the baiting worked. You saved a life last night.”

“And put another at risk,” she said, meaning Ben.

“If we shoot out a tire,” he said, speculating, “or somehow cause a flat, he’d be forced out of the truck. But if we blow it, or if the truck goes off the road or into traffic, we could cause a disaster. If he picks up on what we’re up to, who knows what he might do? Surrender? I don’t see that.”

“Not once he’s out there,” she said, indicating beyond the fence. “The time to do this is now, Lou.” She wanted one last try at him, for she believed herself right; if coaxed properly, Garman would give it up. “The wild card is his father,” she explained. “We bring Steven Garman down here and him in front of that storage unit. The son is doing this to prove something to his father. They both hate the mother. Jonny Garman never for a moment sided with his mother. If we believe the husband, and we have no reason not to, she had sex with strangers on a regular basis, sometimes in the presence of her son, possibly even in the company of her son. Jonny Garman is trying to one-up his father, show he can do what the father failed to do-kill the mother. Burn her to death. If we get Steven Garman down here, Jonny will walk right out of that storage unit.”

“The father is an arrested felon,” Boldt reminded her. “And no one but the bomb squad is going anywhere near that storage unit until Jonny Garman is a mile away from here. This isn’t productive,” he said. “We’re supposed to be focusing on how the hell to get him out of that truck.”