Beyond Recognition

12

Behind his Coke-bottle glasses, Bernie Lofgrin’s eyes looked like hardboiled eggs cut in half. Lofgrin stood five feet five inches off the ground. He was balding and overweight. He wore baggy khakis and a button-down blue oxford with no tie. There weren’t many stars in any city government department, including the police, but Lofgrin stood out despite his diminutive size. As senior identification technician, Lofgrin had two decades of experience and a nose for evidence collection and analysis. Rookies observing him at a crime scene for the first time would say he possessed a sixth sense. But it had nothing to do with paranormal ability; it was a trained eye. Lofgrin knew his stuff.

He and Boldt and Dixie shared a love for their work. Perhaps, Boldt thought, this was what made them such close friends and allies. A common interest in bebop jazz brought them together, but it was dedication to the job that fixed the bond. When Lofgrin was definite about an opinion, Boldt ran with it and placed his faith in it, no matter how tempted to do the opposite.

There were only a few people on the department who would travel across town on a Saturday morning to sit around a kitchen table and talk shop. Bernie Lofgrin was one of them. Boldt fixed him a pot of coffee, put on a Scott Hamilton album, and cut open a cantaloupe. He cleaned out the seeds and cut off the rind and served them on a plate. Lofgrin dug right in. He spoke with his mouth full. “I came to get those shoes of yours.”

“Have you been up all night?” Boldt asked.

“I went in at five and worked these impressions, and not because I love you. Your obsequious captain put me up to it. The shit is flying now that there’s a second victim. The media is blaming a serial arsonist. The match has been dubbed the Scholar.” He grimaced. Lofgrin, a civilian employee of SPD, was constantly put off by politics. He said, “You know how many ladders are sold in and around this city in any given year?”

“No idea,” Boldt replied, thinking: Too many.

“Me neither.” The little man laughed, and when he did he squinted his eyes closed and shook his head as might a man about to sneeze. There was only one Bernie Lofgrin.

Boldt bit into a slice of melon and waited for him to get to the point. Lofgrin had a way of taking his time.

“You wouldn’t have noticed it, neither did I, but the width between the pads on the ladder’s feet is significant. And we got good impressions of those pads, which serve as good strong fingerprints for us. Retail extension ladders, the kind you buy in hardware stores and discount houses, come in a variety of widths. Some manufacturers use twenty-four inches, some twenty-five or twenty-five and a half, depending on the tensile strength of the materials used-commonly aluminum or an aluminum alloy. All retail extension ladders are required by OSHA to have small pads, or feet, that grip the ground-level surface and help keep the base of the ladder from slipping. Each company goes with a slightly different grip pattern for those bottom pads, like tire treads in tire companies. What we’re looking at is a Werner ladder. And that’s significant, because it’s not your weekend chores ladder, your honey-do around-the-house kind of ladder. Werner manufactures wooden, aluminum, and fiberglass lines. The imprints you found are from the high end of their fiberglass line, considered a professional line: electricians, painters, that sort of work.”

“Firemen?” Boldt asked.

“Not fiberglass, no. It’s flammable. Aluminum is the ladder of choice for firefighting, steel alloy for the hook-and-ladders.”

“And do we have a particular model we’re looking at?” Boldt asked. He knew Bernie well enough to know that he wouldn’t come with his gun half loaded; the man was just taking his time giving Boldt the good news.

“It’s a Werner twenty-four-foot fiberglass extension ladder,” Lofgrin said proudly. “Manufactured between July ’93 and August ’94. Sold, probably, into ’95. They changed the tread pattern and grip material in September ’94.”

“Do we have any idea how many Werner twenty-four footers were sold in this area?”

“Not a hard figure to get,” Lofgrin answered. “That’s your job.” He added, “It wasn’t many. It’s the top of their line, and in ’94-’95 they only had one wholesaler in western Washington.”

“Good stuff, Bernie,” Boldt said.

Training his bulging eyes onto the sergeant and slipping a curve of melon into his hungry mouth, Lofgrin said, “What, you think that’s all I’ve got?” Feigning a wounded air, he crossed his arms and leaned back in his chair. “O ye of little faith.”

He passed Boldt a black-and-white Polaroid of the cast impressions made at the fire site.

“Impressions are their own science,” he explained, elevating his own importance, as he did whenever possible, “and it’s anything but exact, I’m sorry to say. But, that said, we can make certain educated assumptions, given soil-compression ratios and water content. It takes a specific weight to effect a specific depth of impression.”

“Are you telling me you can guess the weight of the person who climbed the ladder?”

“Estimate,” Lofgrin corrected sternly. “You guess, I estimate. Let’s get that right, Lou. We measure, we test, we simulate, we analyze, we scrutinize. Guess? What do you think they pay me for?”

Boldt held his tongue.

“Soil compression is difficult to re-create, to measure, and I’ve only had a few hours, don’t forget. But give me a few days and I’ll have a minimum and maximum weight for your ladder climber, and with that we can estimate his height. For the cloth fibers-and that’s what they are, by the way-give me the better part of a week.”

“Can you memo me the Werner ladder info?” Boldt asked. “I want to get LaMoia on it.”

Lofgrin passed Boldt a handwritten note containing the details. “Consider it done,” he said. “And don’t call me, I’ll call you.”

Boldt reacted physically to the information, a knot forming in the center of his chest. He retrieved his damaged shoes, already ensconced in aluminum foil.

Lofgrin took the last piece of melon, stood, and left. “Thanks for the coffee,” he said.

Boldt followed the man with his eyes, out the door, down the drive, still chewing the fruit. Court cases relied so much on physical evidence that Bernie Lofgrin was arguably the most influential person on the force. A civilian with an attitude and a good ear for bebop trumpet.

Boldt held the memo in his hand: hard evidence at last.