Ridley Pearson - Beyond Recognition

Nothing surprised him any longer.

Ben kept watch for the pickup truck. He had not seen it today but he sensed it was out there. He feared it. He had little doubt that his wallet had fallen out while hiding in the camper, and his wallet contained not only four dollars but his school picture and an ID card that had come with the wallet, carefully filled out with address and phone number. The guilt over having taken the money occupied his every thought. He figured he had two choices: give it back or run away. Emily wouldn’t take it; she called it dirty. And the thought of giving up that much money was repulsive. Running away remained at the top of the list.

His current plan was to go home with Jimmy for the afternoon. Avoiding his own house-the address in the wallet-was of utmost importance. Jimmy was big for his age, with narrow-set eyes and big pudgy hands. He wasn’t the coolest of Ben’s friends, but he never teased Ben about his glass eye the way some of the kids did. Jimmy was okay. Ben realized they would probably play video games or watch a movie-what would normally have been a great way to avoid homework and going home to his empty house-but as the school day came to a close, Ben wished he had never agreed to go. He was terrified to leave the building.

He had an urge to visit Emily, as he so often did on his way home from school, but the possibility remained that the driver of the pickup truck, Nick, had connected Ben to Emily, which meant he might be watching her place just as he might be watching Ben’s place. With few options, going home with Jimmy seemed the smart thing to do: He would ride a different school bus to a different part of town. Meanwhile, he debated how he might go about running away, how far the money might take him, where he might go. He also debated buying his very own Nintendo.

Ben wore a sweatshirt with the hood up on the way to the school bus. Jimmy was big enough to use as a screen, and Ben followed him to the bus, head down, trying to force himself not to look up and give anybody a chance to see his face. His stepfather would be home about seven or eight, sometimes later. By then it would be dark, easier to move around without being seen. Ben was slowly formulating a plan. Survival was everything. He was no stranger to the game.

To confront a possible murderer face-to-face was the moment Daphne Matthews lived for. As departmental psychologist, she tolerated that aspect of her job which required her to listen to grown-up men with badges whine like little boys; she put up with the sexist environment of a cop shop that would never change. The boys could paint over their discrimination with regulations and the occasional slap on the wrist, but they would never be rid of it: Men who wore uniforms and oiled their guns on a regular basis saw women as a reservoir of soft flesh and a means to a hot meal and children. She helped out the alcoholic patrolman, the suicidal detective, the wife abuser, all as a means to an end: to interview killers, to see herself through herself, to explore the darker realm.

She walked a little lighter, stood a little taller, grinning nonstop as she hurried down the 1500 block in Ballard, home to SFD’s Battalion 4 and its Marshal Five, Steven Garman. The firehouse was a beautiful brick structure built fifty years earlier, outclassing everything in the block. Ballard was Seattle’s neighborhood of Norwegian ancestry, its southern boundary Salmon Bay and the Ship Canal, whose piers and marinas housed much of the city’s smaller commercial fishing fleet, the mom-and-pop vessels owned and operated by generations of Ballardites. For some, Ballard was the target of ethnic jokes, about smelling like fish and talking with accents; to others, an object of respect, one of the only neighborhoods in the city to have maintained its heritage and identity through the Californication of the mid and late eighties.

As Daphne climbed the stone staircase to the firehouse’s second floor, she focused on establishing her own identity while preparing herself for whatever, whoever, Steven Garman turned out to be. She would begin with no preconceived notions of innocence or guilt, no judgment. She accepted that he was the recipient of the poetic threats, both of which had been accompanied by an as yet unidentified piece of melted green plastic. She intended to establish a rapport, whatever this required of her: professional psychologist, sexual flirt, disinterested bureaucrat, attentive listener. Such interviews required her to be an actress, and she loved the challenge. She could use her beauty to lull a man into an unwitting cooperation; women were a far tougher sell.

The firehouse had undergone little if any renovation. Daphne was struck by the depressing atmosphere, well aware of the role environment plays in psychology. There were photographs on the walls, black-and-whites of blazing out-of-control fires and a color copy of the mayor’s official photograph. The requisite gunmetal-gray file cabinets, ubiquitous in all government offices, were full to overflowing, and the hallway smelled of a combination of chewing gum, hot dust, and industrial cleaner, as if something electric were burning somewhere out of sight-an odor appropriate for the office of a fire inspector.

Daphne knocked lightly on Garman’s door and entered.

Garman was ensconced in a large leather chair in an immaculately kept office. He was a big, handsome man with soft brown eyes and a bushy mustache, younger than she had expected. There was a picture of Einstein on the wall, and another of Picasso. These seemed out of place to Daphne; a blue-collar fireman up on his Impressionism? What were his tastes in poetry? she wondered. There was a color shot of the space shuttle Challenger at the moment of its explosion, the entrails of white fumes caught in a tight corkscrew spiral, shuttle debris frozen forever in a sky of blue. Daphne remembered exactly where she had been on that day. Garman caught Daphne staring.

“I worked on that one,” Garman explained. “The debris reconstruction.” Maintaining strict eye contact, he said, “Like working on a jigsaw puzzle with cranes.”

“You were Air Force?”

“Does it show?” he asked, coming out of his chair and introducing himself with a handshake.

Maybe it did show, she thought, as she looked more closely. Maybe it helped explain the hard handshake and the riveting grip of those eyes. She wanted to like him right away, which only fueled her suspicion of him.

“Aircraft carriers, land-based, or what?” she asked.

“Bases,” Garman answered, motioning Daphne into a chair.

The desktop held a couple of faded snapshots of Garman with a very young boy. Wheat fields. Blue sky and lots of it. Kansas? she wondered.

At the forefront of her thoughts were Emily Richland’s mention of a military man and Boldt’s information that the accelerant might be rocket fuel. Steven Garman, ex-Air Force, had to be considered carefully.

She said, “Sergeant Boldt wanted to thank you for not opening the most recent note.”

“Listen, I wish I could tell you why he’s sending this stuff to me. I really don’t want any part of it.”

“He?” Daphne asked. “What makes you think so?”

“A girl? No way, no how. I’ve been around fire most of my life, arson investigation for the past seven years, and I gotta tell you that in all that time I’ve never had a female suspect. Not once. Some women trying to be firefighters, sure, we’ve gone through that. Maybe a few teenage girls as accomplices to their boyfriends. But primary suspect? No, ma’am. This is a man lighting these fires. I’d bet my badge on it.” He added, “Are you on Boldt’s squad?”

“I’m part of the in-house task force,” she answered. She felt compelled to skirt the truth. Garman might freeze up if he discovered she was a psychologist.