Ridley Pearson - Beyond Recognition

Boldt waited another few seconds and said, “One of the victims bought a New Age toilet plunger on the day she died. The other, some Drano.”

“A plunger!” Lofgrin shouted excitedly. “A plunger?” he repeated. “Hang on. Hang on!” Then he said, “Just hang on a second,” as if Boldt was prepared to interrupt. Boldt overheard Lofgrin calling out to his wife. Carol came on the line and asked about Liz and the kids, stalling while her husband busied himself. She sounded good. Carol was given to fits of depression but had been stabilized by some recently developed drug, and the word from Bernie was that she was “back to normal,” though Boldt and others of his friends had come to distrust Bernie’s assessment; in the last two years, Carol had been involved in two bad traffic accidents later deemed attempted suicides, these during periods when Lofgrin had been convincing others that she was stable. Bernie Lofgrin carried his own cross, same as anyone else-more than most, Boldt decided. Perhaps the man’s work was his best escape. Perhaps it explained why he was so damn good at it, so dedicated.

Lofgrin’s strained voice thanked his wife, interrupting her, and said, “Page two-fifty-seven. Do-It-Yourself: The Visual Dictionary . You got a copy?”

It was a rhetorical question. Lofgrin had given Boldt two copies: one for home, one for the office. He’d done the same for several of the other detectives in Robbery/Homicide. Boldt told him, “No. I’m in my second week at this damn hotel.” His copy was in a small bookshelf that had been in his bedroom but had been moved to the front hall when the crib-currently occupied by Sarah-had entered their lives.

“Page two-fifty-seven shows a cutaway illustration of a house, revealing the plumbing. Everything from the water meter to a P trap. Left of the page is a stack vent. Right of the page, a waste stack. Drains from the toilet, a sink, a tub, another tub, are all connected by a common pipe labeled ‘branch.’ On either end of the branch is a vertical riser that passes through roof flashing to the outside air. The diagram shows two such risers.

“Draining water or waste creates a vacuum in the pipe,” Lofgrin continued. “The waste pipes need to be vented in order to allow draining. Think of a drinking straw with your finger over the top end. As long as you keep your finger tight-no venting-the straw holds whatever fluid is in it. But if you vent the straw by lifting your finger, the fluid drains out. Same in a house. Only the drains have stinky stuff in them, so the vents go out the roof, so you don’t smell them. Two of them, Lou. You get it?”

“You lost me,” Boldt admitted.

“It’s ingenious because it ensures the person living there is home at the time of the combustion. Two vent stacks: two parts to the hypergolics. Right?”

“What the hell, Bernie? The hypergolics are in the vent stacks?”

“I imagine so, yes. Seal the vent stacks with a thin membrane: wax paper? cling wrap? I don’t know. Place the two parts of the hypergolics above those seals. It might not take much-maybe just draining a full bathtub or running the clothes washer-and those seals break and run down the vent stacks. The two elements of the hypergolics make contact in the branch pipe. You’re looking for a way to burn the whole house, to destroy as much evidence as possible, and the plumbing gives it to you; it runs through the wall one floor to the next, one wall to the next. You open the bathtub drain or flush a toilet and suddenly every plumbing drain, every fixture in the house is a rocket nozzle. The porcelain melts, Lou: That was the clue I missed. Damn! That should have jumped out at me. Porcelain does not melt easily; it would have to be near the source of the burn. I let that confuse me. Every single piece of porcelain in the house was involved in the actual burn. You’ve got the answer, Lou. You figured it out!”

“A plunger?”

Lofgrin exclaimed, “He can set the explosives without ever entering the house. Do it all from the roof.”

“He wasn’t even in the house,” Boldt mumbled. The method of planting the explosives had stumped him all along. He felt giddy. High.

“His cover. Sure. Wash a few windows, climb up on the roof, fill the vent stacks with the hypergolics. A matter of minutes is all. He takes off.” It only took Lofgrin a second to make the connection that Boldt also made. “Jesus, Lou. Your house.”

“I know.”

“Your vents could be set. We could have proof here.” He sounded thrilled. Boldt felt terrified.

“We need to evacuate the neighbors,” Lofgrin said.

Boldt told the man, “Consider it done.”

“Give me forty minutes,” Lofgrin requested. “I’m gonna need a big crew.”

Boldt wandered the sidewalk in front of his home in a daze, wanting to go inside and take everything with him in case Bernie Lofgrin’s attempt to defuse his house failed. A home became a kind of kid’s shoe box, a collection of odds and ends, books, music, furniture. Boldt owned over ten thousand LPs and about two thousand CDs. Every inch of wall space in the house not previously occupied contained music. Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of the LPs were priceless.

Each room through which he mentally wandered brought a tighter knot in his throat. His son had grown from an infant to a little boy in this house. Sarah had been conceived within these walls. His marriage had fully recovered here, resuscitated from the gagging spasm of its past.

If he could have gone inside, he would have taken the bronzed baby shoes belonging to his son. A photo album of their marriage pictures, another of Liz giving birth to Miles, and a video of Sarah’s entrance into the world. A Charlie Parker first pressing, and a pair of ticket stubs to Dizzy Gillespie and Sarah Vaughan. An eagle feather found in the Olympics, and a lock of Liz’s hair cut before the birth of their son. A blue bowling shirt that read, MONK over the breast pocket and THE BOWLING BEARS on the back; he had only bowled on Berenson’s team once, but the shirt was a keeper.

It was more than a house, it was his family’s history museum. The idea of losing it terrified him. It made him want to drive to the cabin and see Liz and the kids.

He prayed to God that the arsonist be caught.

The first man to reach the roof ridge of the house wore a fireman’s turnouts complete with hat and mask and carried a hands-free walkie-talkie that communicated with Lofgrin on the ground. Lofgrin and Boldt and the others-Bahan and Fidler among them-stood behind a fire line established on the sidewalk. The six adjacent houses had been evacuated and two patrol cars blocked the street from vehicle traffic. Four ERT officers had sequestered themselves in two of the evacuated houses, alert for signs of interest from the arsonist.

The roof man told Lofgrin, “Four stacks.”

Lofgrin looked over at Boldt and said, “I gotta warn you: we’re gonna find hypergolics. Why else go up the tree and watch the place, right? He was waiting for the show.”

“I’m a nervous wreck,” Boldt admitted.

“Think how Rick feels,” he said, pointing to the roof man. “That fuel goes and he’s got about twenty seconds to get off that roof before he’s three thousand feet up. “If he doesn’t jump, his ass is ash. No time for the ladder. No time for the walkie-talkie. He knows that,” Lofgrin added, answering Boldt’s curious expression. “You ever seen a guy take a running jump from a two-story building?” He answered himself. “Me neither. And I don’t intend to tonight, just for the record.” Into the walkie-talkie he said, “You go easy up there, damn it. Use the scope.”

The roof man was equipped with a fiber-optic camera about the size of a pencil eraser on a flexible aluminum cable about the diameter of a shoelace. His job was to lower the cable into each stack and report what he saw. Boldt looked on as the man gingerly crossed the roof between vent stacks. He knelt awkwardly and fumbled with some equipment.