Ridley Pearson - Beyond Recognition

The wood edge slapped his palms and he gripped down and hooked the lip and held himself dangling, suspended in midair. But he had rocked the truck, causing the hook to slip off the eyelet, and the skylight came down like a Chinese poultry knife onto his knuckles. Ben cried out, but he did not let go. Could not let go.

He pulled, as he had so many times in a bad situation in a tree, as if lifting himself to the next branch. He did this twice but sank back down to his dangling position, his fingers aching under his weight. The third time he coordinated all his efforts simultaneously: He pulled himself up, banged the skylight partially open with his head, hooked one elbow, then the other, and pulled even higher, worming his torso up and through the skylight. Kicking his legs, as if swimming for the side of the pool, he wiggled up and out of the hole in the camper’s roof. He clambered over a rusted rack, where a tire and wheel were chained and locked, and slipped over the back to a narrow ladder fixed to the side of the shell. His feet touching pavement, he was off at a run, as if hearing footsteps immediately behind him.

He wasn’t going on that elevator, no matter what. Instead, he entered the stairs and descended two at a time, his fingers skating down the banister, his legs feeling rubbery from the excitement. He leaped onto the landing, grabbed hold of the railing, and pulled himself up short, stopping like a car caught by a red light.

Nick, the buzz-cut driver of the truck, the drug dealer, was standing on the stairs, wearing an expressionless face, his full attention riveted on Ben.

Ben stood there, chest heaving, recalling that the slight bulge on the man’s right side was a handgun, and that he was in the military, which meant he was a crack shot, and that Ben had been inside his truck, and that he no doubt knew this and had been thinking, planning, what to do about it, and now his hand was forced and the time had come, and Ben had served himself up on a silver platter.

He thought about the fold of money in his pocket, suddenly so heavy that he couldn’t move that leg. Surely the man saw the outline of the envelope there. Surely he knew. Caught!

The man Ben feared so much smiled and said, “Slow down there, buddy. Good way to knock some teeth out.”

Ben heard very little except something about getting his teeth knocked out. Nick climbed the stairs. Ben was directly in his path and so terrified that the man looked blurry, and his already untrustworthy legs felt on the verge of total failure. Their eyes met, and Ben felt a sick, hollow spot where his stomach should have been, and he felt a trickle of warm urine run down his left leg.

“Excuse me,” the smiling man said, and Ben stepped aside for him. Nick walked past, turned on the landing, and headed on up the stairs.

Ben sneaked onto a downtown hotel courtesy van, pretending to be with a pair of parents who didn’t notice what he was up to. The driver, who didn’t even count heads, seemed to care little about anything but getting the luggage in the back and moving on to the next curbside pickup. Any other day of his life, Ben might have considered this a major accomplishment. But not on that day. Instead, he spent the twenty-minute drive into the city debating exactly what he had seen take place: Nick had left with a duffel bag; he had returned without it. The dark, short, faceless man who had come out of the shadows had left an envelope of money and then locked the camper. An exchange. A drop. A drug deal.

From downtown he rode a city bus over First Hill toward home, walking the last mile and a half. Exhausted, he headed directly to his room and locked the door, well ahead of his stepfather, but not taking any chances. A few minutes later he went downstairs to the kitchen phone. He felt more like a robot than himself. It was something that had to be done; that was all there was to it. He knew this in his heart, even if his mind was engaged in a continuous dialogue to the contrary. He dialed 911. A woman’s voice answered.

Ben said calmly, “I want to report a drug deal. I saw a drug deal-” He caught a glimpse of himself in the glass of the cabinet on the wall. He could just picture himself explaining this to his stepfather. His butt hurt enough already. He slammed down the phone and sprinted back upstairs to his room.

Down a drab and unremarkable hallway in the Public Safety Building, the Seattle Communications Center, equipped with Enhanced 911 communications software, identified and recorded not only Ben’s telephone number but the physical address of that phone number as well, all before the operator ever answered. Every moment of the call was recorded, every nuance of his slightly hysterical voice. The call would be logged both by computer and by hand, Ben’s voice reduced to a data stream, compressed, and stored temporarily on a hard disk that was backed up on magnetic tape every twelve hours, the tapes stored in a former cannery repossessed by the city for back taxes a decade earlier. The operator mistakenly classified Ben’s call as a juvenile prank, which meant that if another two offenses were attributed to the same phone number, an officer of the juvenile court would pay that home a visit.

However, all so-called “dead” calls-calls not acted upon by dispatchers-were reviewed for free by a volunteer hot-line association whose main goal was to locate possible sexual and physical abuse victims where the caller lost his or her nerve to report.

As Ben drifted off to a much-needed sleep that night, downtown the Seattle Communications Center was processing his call along with several dozen others received in the 6 P.M. to midnight shift. The billing name on the phone number-his stepfather’s-the physical address, and the phone number were all part of the system. The gears of a slow-moving but determined bureaucracy continued to grind.

Ben hung up the phone and headed straight upstairs to his room, his heart still pounding as hard as if he had only then stopped running. He felt a little dizzy, a little sick to his stomach. It was at moments such as this that he missed his mother most of all. She would have helped him; he believed this with all his heart. He wasn’t sure what, if anything, to tell Emily; she was all he had. He shut his door and sat down heavily on the bed. At first he didn’t believe the empty feeling under his butt. An even deeper fear than what he’d been living with for the past few minutes wormed into his stomach. It didn’t seem possible. He reached back to the seat of his pants tentatively, afraid of the implication of what this emptiness meant to him.

His wallet was gone.

Arson investigator Neil Bahan notified Boldt by cellular phone that the ATF chemist had arrived at the fire site. Boldt hung a U-turn at an intersection on Aurora and cut across Walling-ford on 45th, passing a movie theater marquee that advertised a Richard Dreyfuss film.

He hadn’t been to a movie in over two years. Before the birth of Miles, he and Liz had seen three movies a week. He called his wife on her cellular phone, because the cabin didn’t have a phone, but got the message service recording of her voice. He told her he missed her and the kids, how he couldn’t wait for them to come home. He left out any mention of a second body, of the anxiety compressing his chest and restricting his breathing, of the nagging sensation that yet a third victim was being targeted at that very moment, and that he, the investigator, had only a couple of ladder impressions and some fibers to go on. Any mention of that and Liz might decide to call the bank and take a week’s vacation. He ached to see his kids.

Dr. Howard Casterstein looked like one of the profs over at the U where Boldt occasionally guestlectured for a criminology series. He wore a white shirt and tie with an undershirt showing beneath. He had a military cut, making it difficult to judge his hair color, and the square shoulders of a man in shape. Boldt didn’t like him on first glance. He resented the federal involvement before he heard a word of explanation. He introduced himself on the edge of the property where the fire-gutted house remained under police watch. It was no longer smoldering, and only two patrolmen were to be seen.