Ridley Pearson - Beyond Recognition

“Success in such endeavors,” she continued, “breeds a lackadaisical attitude, a complacency. He believed he could go on doing this forever. He felt confident that you would not identify or locate him. But now we have Garman as well-and Garman is trying to cover for him. Why? It’s likely the Scholar has stolen more accelerant, quite possibly an enormous amount. Why? Some kind of grand finale? Will he just go back to killing these women, content with his stolen fuel? Or will he move away, only to start again in a year or two?”

“You tell me,” Boldt suggested.

“He’s fooled me from the start, Lou. I don’t trust my own judgments. I’ve been wrong about him time and time again. The point is, neither of us believes Garman set those fires. We’ll never convince anyone else until we know why he confessed.”

“Protecting someone,” Boldt said, repeating what she had suggested.

“Unless it’s himself he’s protecting,” she said, confusing him. “Unless he’s two people inside there: the fire inspector and the arsonist. And the fire inspector finally turned in the arsonist.” She produced a photograph. “Here’s the stumbling block: his ex-wife.” She moved her hand out of the way, and Boldt saw a woman’s happy face smiling back at him in the photograph.

“Peas in a pod,” she said, producing one of the recent family photographs of Dorothy Enwright. The similarities between Enwright and the ex-wife were astounding. Boldt looked back and forth between them. “Uncanny.”

“The problem with fires is they burn the victim, they burn the boxes of photographs, the framed pictures by the bed. We end up with pictures fifteen years out of date. And the thing about women is, we change our look. We move with the fashions. Men? Forget it. But we’re the victims of these fires-you and me, Lou-because we’ve been working with photos that didn’t show us the current look of these women. Here’s the photo of Melissa Heifitz we have,” she said, producing another shot. “Henna-red hair down past her shoulders. But come to find out, the henna was out of a bottle; she went gray in the late eighties and dyed it dark, just like these two. Cut it shorter and left it straight.” She used a felt-tip pen to change the look of Heifitz’s hair, and all at once the similarity was there as well.

“Damn!” Boldt said. Another piece of his puzzle.

“It’s what triggers him, Lou: that particular look.”

“So it might be Garman after all?” Boldt questioned uncomfortably. He didn’t want to believe this. “He’s protecting himself from himself? You actually buy that?”

“Not for a minute,” said the psychologist who had offered him the theory. “Though one could make the argument fairly strongly.”

“You’re toying with me,” he complained.

“Absolutely.” She smiled, though it did nothing to disguise her fatigue. The smile melted from her face as if rinsed off. “There’s a third element, a third participant. Someone we don’t even know exists-didn’t know until now,” she corrected herself. “Garman may be a good liar, but he’s no killer. We may not have the evidence necessary to prove it, but we both know it’s true.”

“A third element,” Boldt muttered, reaching unsteadily for a chair and sitting himself down.

When she looked at him, she wanted to cry. His pale innocence as he struggled with his homework. The simplicity of movement, unaware of her presence. He had lived so long in a home where he was unwanted that he didn’t notice others around him.

In this, as in so many things with Ben, Daphne was wrong. The plain truth was that she had not lived around boys enough to read one correctly. He looked up at her and said, “Why do I have to do this shit?”

“Watch the language!” she scolded.

“Stuff,” he substituted.

“It’s homework, Ben. We all had to do it.”

“So what? That makes it right? I don’t think so.”

“What’s five times twenty-five?” she asked. His face went blank and she explained, “Some guy offers you twenty-five bucks an hour for five hours-”

“I’ll take it!” he answered quickly.

“How about five bucks an hour for twenty-five hours?” she fired back.

Confused, Ben scribbled out numbers on a piece of paper. “It’s a hundred and twenty-five bucks.”

“And how many work days is twenty-five hours if you work eight hours a day?”

“So you need math,” he conceded, without doing the numbers.

“Some people will tell you that the difference between not having an education and having one is whether you want to work with your body or with your mind. Whether you want to make a little money or a lot of money. But it goes way beyond that. It’s the way you enjoy things. The more you know, the more you get out of it.”

“Einstein flunked math,” he reminded her.

“And PhDs can be the most boring people on earth,” she agreed. “I’m not saying it’s some kind of cure-all. It just gives you a head start, that’s all. You like computers? You like special effects in movies? A computer is no good if you don’t know how to run it.”

“What about yours?”

“My what?” she asked.

“Your laptop. Will you teach me how to run it?”

She was caught. Stuck. She was protective of her laptop, always keeping it with her, locking it down with password protection when she left it behind at the office for a few hours; she felt it was something personal, not for others. And yet she couldn’t deny the boy. “Sure,” she said reluctantly, wondering how she had boxed herself in that way.

“Really?” His face brightened in a way she had not yet witnessed, like a kid on Christmas morning.

She nodded. “I’ll need to get some games for it. I only have solitaire.”

“How about a database?” he asked her, stunning her. “Does it have a database?”

It had one as part of a suite of applications, though Daphne used it only as an address book.

She thought if the definition of love was that you would lay down your life for the other, then she loved Ben. For she would never allow another person, or anything at all, to harm him again. She would wrap her wing around him, pull him close, and protect him from the coldness of the world. He had seen his share and didn’t need to see any more.

“Does it have graphs?” he asked.

“I think the spreadsheet does, yes.”

“We’re doing graphs,” he said, tapping his homework.

He scratched at the paper with his eraser. How she wished she could erase those past few years of his life, clean the slate! She had the professional tools within her reach to begin the process, but Ben would have to want it.

“If I show you the laptop,” she tested, “will you tell me about Jack and your mother?”

“Like a trade?” he asked. “Are you trying to bribe me?”

“Absolutely,” she confessed. “I don’t know very much about you, Ben. It bothers me. It’s what makes close friends out of people: sharing. You know?”

“Will you tell me about this guy Owen?” he asked, sounding a little jealous.

“How-?” She cut herself off. He had overheard some of her phone conversations. Her crying? He probably knew more about her than she did him. Which one of them was the psychologist? she wondered. “Will you go trick-or-treating with me tonight?” He had not wanted anything to do with Halloween.

He set his pencil down and, facing her with a deadly serious face, asked, “If I agree, does this mean we have a relationship?”

Daphne bit back her grin and, when she felt herself losing it, turned her face away, so he couldn’t see. “Yes,” she said, and smiled widely, all the way over to the laptop.