Ridley Pearson - Beyond Recognition

Lofgrin said to him, “This is a little like aiming a pin at a balloon but not wanting it to pop.”

“I understand,” Boldt replied.

“Serious condensation,” the woman reported. “It’s fogging the lens. Blurring it.”

“Shit,” Lofgrin hissed, and glanced once at Boldt with wild eyes. The sergeant saw beads of perspiration covering the man’s brow.

“My image is cloudy,” the technician reported. “I’m not liking this.”

Lofgrin directed her, “Let’s retract, clean it off, and try again.” He added, “Make note of your distance.”

“Thirty-three and one half inches,” she reported.

“Copy,” Lofgrin said.

“Retracting.”

Lofgrin nodded, as if she could see him. He wiped his brow. To Boldt he said, “That’s why we use our people instead of bomb squad: She may have been up against the membrane right then. It may have been the membrane blurring the lens, not water, not condensation. She knows that. A different guy, someone who doesn’t know this gear intimately-” He left it hanging there, left Boldt with an image of the walls of his house sucked in and white-hot light flooding from the windows.

“The lens is occluded,” the woman reported. “I’m cleaning it and trying an application of defogger.”

“Condensation,” Lofgrin explained to Boldt. “So she was right. Score one for us.”

A minute or two passed. Boldt glanced at Bahan and Fidler, who had joined them.

“Well?” Boldt asked.

Bahan answered, “The pressure switch makes sense to me. It allows the victim to actually light off the fire.”

Fidler said, “It leaves it a little bit random-a little more exciting.”

“Opinions?” Boldt asked.

Bahan said, “We circulated the artist’s sketch to every firehouse in the city. Maybe we get lucky.”

There was no one standing within fifty yards; a line of uniformed patrol officers was holding back a sea of onlookers, including a group of reporters. Fear is like fire, Boldt thought: It infects randomly, and with great haste.

“All set,” the woman said by radio. “We’ll give it another try.”

She reported when she made the turn into the vertical stack, and again at twenty, and then at thirty inches. She counted off in quarter-inch increments from thirty and one-half. Boldt tensed with each report. Lofgrin inquired about condensation and she answered. “Looking better this time. I’ve got a good image…. Stopping at thirty-three and a half.”

“Image?”

“Going to thirty-three and three-quarters … thirty-four. Okay…. Okay ….” Her voice sounded strained over the radio. “I’m picking up a slightly reflective black image. Okay…. Okay…. This is a foreign object. Repeat”-she was nearly shouting into the radio-“a foreign object obstructing the passage. Black plastic.” Boldt felt heat prickle his scalp. She said, “I’m going a little closer: thirty-four and a half. Copy?”

“Thirty-four and a half,” Lofgrin acknowledged.

“Maybe send a bomb boy in to look at this. I’ve got a rubber O-ring holding it in place. It appears to be a detonator.”

“I fuckin’ knew it!” Lofgrin exclaimed to Boldt. “They don’t pay me the big bucks for nothing.”

The joke was not lost on Boldt; the pay was horrible. “What’s next?” he asked.

“We send in the bomb man to have a look, and then we attempt to neutralize. We’re looking at about eighteen feet of four-inch vent stack packed with hypergolics, Lou. We’re talking Apollo Eleven here. If we fuck this up-” He didn’t finish the sentence. “We should evacuate a few more houses. I did not expect this kind of volume.”

Boldt’s knees felt weak. He whispered, “My family was in there. Liz, the kids!”

Thirty minutes passed incredibly slowly. The bomb man confirmed the existence of a detonator. A wet-vac vacuum canister was sent to the roof. Tension filled the air as the top membrane was intentionally punctured and the vent stack’s contents carefully removed.

One of Lofgrin’s assistants approached him and spoke to him in private, out of earshot from Boldt. Lofgrin returned to Boldt’s side and announced proudly, “Silver and blue cotton.”

“What?”

“We lifted some fibers from the windows we know he washed. You remember those fibers we found alongside the ladder impressions at Enwright? Muddy. We didn’t get a very good look at color, they didn’t wash well, but PLM-Polarized Light Microscopy-told us they were a synth/cotton blend. I ruled out window washing at the time because cotton sucks for windows, it leaves itself all over the glass. Newsprint is good, oddly enough, but not cotton. But this guy was washing windows-Liz saw that. And a synth/cotton blend is better than pure cotton, at least. But a silver and blue washrag or towel? Mean anything to you?”

“Silver and blue. The Seahawks,” Boldt replied. Seattle’s failing football team.

“Bingo,” said Lofgrin. “And to my knowledge we don’t sell Terrible Towels to our fans the way they do in a place like Pittsburgh, right? Do we?”

“I don’t follow the Seahawks,” Boldt confessed, thinking: Charles Mingus, Scott Hamilton, Lionel Hampton, Oscar Peterson, but not the Seahawks.

“What I’m saying is, This is unique evidence, Lou.”

“Silver and blue towels,” Boldt answered, his heart racing a little faster, his eyes trained intently on the operation being conducted on the roof of his house.

“That’s right.” Lofgrin said, “Department stores? A uniform? How the fuck do I know? That’s your job.”

Boldt said nothing, images of his house going up in flames occupying his thoughts. Towels were the farthest things from his mind.

“We have fiber samples now, Sergeant. We can compare these to any evidence you might provide us. Understood?”

“We’ll search Nicholas Hall’s trailer and vehicle again, this time for blue and silver towels or uniforms or T-shirts,” Boldt said, still watching the house.

“Those fibers can put this boy away, Lou. Are you hearing me?”

That comment, the way Lofgrin whispered it in a menacing tone, broke Boldt’s attention away from his house. He looked down into those bulbous eyes, magnified to the point of grotesque. “Blue and silver fibers,” Boldt repeated. “I’m with you, Bernie.”

“Found on at least two crime scenes. Just so we understand each other.” Nothing infuriated Lofgrin more than providing a detective with key evidence, only to have it overlooked. Boldt knew this, and because of that exchange, because of Lofgrin’s delivery, he took the information to heart: Lofgrin believed in those fibers.

“I’m at eight feet, six inches,” the man operating the vacuum reported.

Lofgrin called him off. A decision was made to drill through Boldt’s kitchen wall and drain the Part B chemical from below. As this decision was being relayed, the night sky lit up with a thin column of purple flame that raced up through the clouds and disappeared. It was less than four miles away, in Ballard. Within minutes it was a five alarm fire. Lofgrin’s attention remained on the delicate job before him. The distant sound resembled that of a jet taking off. That purple column lasted perhaps ten seconds. Sirens screamed in the distance.

Lofgrin said, “We’re okay here, Lou. You go see if your boy’s up a tree with a carving knife.”

Boldt didn’t want to leave his own home, but he did. The crime scene work lasted until three in the morning, at which point he drove to his own home and found it standing.

Another woman was believed dead, another life lost. There was word that all three networks were sending New York crews to shoot the fire remains.

An exhausted Shoswitz reported that despite the cooperation at the field level, the FBI, military CID, ATF, and upper brass of SPD were fighting for control of the investigation. His final comment was, “It’s coming apart on us, Lou. Talk about blowing up! Too many cooks, and this thing will die in bureaucratic backstabbing and name calling. We’re looking at one giant cluster fuck. And it’s you and me bending over, pal.”