Ridley Pearson - Beyond Recognition

“Lucky Owen,” he said.

“Lucky Liz,” she fired back.

“Oh, yeah, lucky Liz,” he replied in his best self-deprecating tone. The trouble was, he believed it.

“How long since you washed those khakis?” she asked, knowing she was perhaps the only person from whom he would tolerate such things.

“Too long?”

She nodded.

“Yes, dear,” he mocked. He glanced down at himself, like a child looking for the problem. He said, “What’s up?” She had asked for his time.

“You’re aware that Shoswitz is hanging you out to dry for this?” she inquired.

“So what’s new?”

“He uses your name in every press conference, spouts fire and brimstone about how this killer will be caught and brought to justice. How you’re the one to do it, to bring him in. God, he makes it sound like something from a spaghetti Western. Truthfully, I don’t like it one bit. It makes you a potential target.”

“Now, Daffy-”

“It does , I’m telling you. This is my field, not yours, not Shoswitz’s. You don’t taunt a person like that; you don’t offer up targets. Listen, if the Scholar’s attacking a particular kind of building, or if he offered to sell these women aluminum siding and they declined, that’s one thing. But if he’s focused on Garman, if this is about revenge, if that’s his mind-set, Shoswitz is wrong to build you into a gunslinging bounty hunter. These guys operate on hair triggers, Lou. He could switch targets like that .” She snapped her fingers.

“What’s done is done,” Boldt replied. “Shoswitz only takes credit, never blame. It’s what preserves his job, his position. It’s what turns me off of ever wanting to take a desk here. You have to know how to play the game, and frankly it doesn’t interest me.”

“Thank goodness,” she replied. “I’m going to speak with him,” she declared. “Tell him to stop it. Just so you know.” She knew he wouldn’t argue with her; he chose his battles carefully.

“Melissa Heifitz,” Boldt said. “Dixie confirmed it this morning. Dental records. They found five teeth in the ashes. Two of them are confirmed as Melissa’s. Twenty-nine years old. Widowed mother of one. Husband was a construction worker, cement. She was a bookkeeper for a professional building up on Eighty-fifth. Doctors and dentists. No connection that we can see to Dorothy Enwright. A nice looking woman,” he said, passing her the driver’s license photo. “Parents live in Lynnwood. A sister in Portland. One very normal life abruptly brought to an end.” She could hear the knot in his throat. He took every victim on as a member of his own family. It made him unique. Perhaps it explained his brilliance, but it made him vulnerable as well. He said, “You know they used to burn people at the stake.” He left it hanging there for her.

“Do you see it?” she asked him, the driver’s license photograph still in hand. “The coloring? Even the shape of her head?”

“What are we talking about?” Boldt inquired, sitting forward.

Daphne craned herself over her desk and fingered through a stack of manila file folders. She extricated one and opened it. She passed Boldt a bad photocopy of a snapshot of Dorothy Enwright. “How about now?” she asked.

“Oh, shit,” said the man who rarely cursed.

“I think we can rule out the structure as the target. I think we can let Garman off the hook. There’s a specific look to his victims: dark hair cut short, thin face. He’s chosen death by fire-”

“Which is ridiculous,” Boldt interjected. “There are a dozen easier ways to kill someone.”

“Not ridiculous,” she corrected, “symbolic. The fire holds some kind of symbolism for him, or he wouldn’t go to all that trouble. Right? It’s important to him that they burn. Why? Because of the image of Hell? Because his mother intentionally burned him as a child? Because she’s unclean and he’s attempting to purify her?”

“You’re giving me the creeps here,” Boldt said, crossing his arms as if cold.

“I’m giving you motives, the psychological side of what fire may mean to him: religion, revenge, purification. They’re all relevant here.”

“Some guy tapping brunettes because he’s screwed up about his mother?”

“Or a girlfriend, or a teacher, or a baby-sitter, or a neighbor. He tries to have sex with a woman and he can’t perform; she laughs at him, teases him. I’m telling you, Lou-and I know you don’t want to hear this-sex and rejection probably play a part in this. His mother catches him playing with himself and takes an iron to him-”

“Enough.”

“We see that kind of thing,” she pressed.

“I don’t need this.”

“You do if you’re going to catch him,” she cautioned. “You have a premeditated killer burning down structures in a way that is confounding the specialists. He’s confident enough to send poems and drawings in advance of the kills. He has a specific look to his victims. He’s getting into their homes somehow and rigging their houses to blow so that they don’t have time to get out. You better know what makes him tick, or you’re operating on blind luck. The only way you’ll catch him is to run him down in a supermarket parking lot.”

“We isolate his fuel and we trace it back to a supplier. That’s how it’s done with arson,” he informed her.

“That’s fine for some guy torching warehouses for the insurance, but that’s not what we’ve got.”

“In part it is.”

“In part, yes. But the other part is your turf; he has victims. Listen to the victims, Lou. It’s what you’re so good at.”

“There’s nothing left here,” he gasped. “As sick as this sounds, I deal in bodies, in crime scenes. These fires steal both. It takes me out of my game plan.”

“Forget the fire,” she advised.

“What?”

“Leave the fire to Bahan and Fidler, to the Marshal Fives. You take the victims and whatever evidence you can dig up. Divide and conquer.”

“Is this what you called me for?” he asked angrily. “You want to tell me how to conduct the investigation? Doesn’t that strike you as just a little bit arrogant?”

She felt herself blush. They fought like this, but only on rare occasions. She said, clinically and pointedly, “I wanted to forewarn you that I intend to speak with Shoswitz. I wanted to tell you that I made an appointment with Emily Richland, and to check if you had any direct question you wanted asked of her.”

“Emily Richland,” Boldt muttered.

“I spoke to her by phone. She mentioned a man with a burned hand.” That caught his attention. “Possible military service with a badly deformed hand. A blue pickup truck.” She could feel his resistance. She snapped sarcastically, “Why don’t you like it? Because she actually helped us solve a case once?”

Emily Richland, who ran a ten-dollar-a-throw tarot card operation on the other side of Pill Hill, had helped lead police to the location of a kidnap suspect. At her request, the police had withheld her involvement from the press, which impressed Daphne because she figured such a stunt-if it could be called that-was done in part for the notoriety, publicity, and legitimacy it afforded her. At the time, Daphne had been recovering from injuries sustained in another case involving an illicit organ donor ring and had missed the kidnapping. She had never had personal contact with Emily Richland.

“You’re saying that because it’s Richland we should listen?” he asked.

“Is that so wrong? Test the source? What if she’s a part of it? I’m not saying she’s psychic, I’m saying we listen. A burned hand? Come on!”

“What of the other calls, the other self-proclaimed psychics? You going to interview them as well?”