Beyond Recognition

36

Boldt likened an investigation to an enormous rock or boulder on the summit of a mountain. Initially, the investigator’s job was to climb that mountain, gathering up whatever tools made themselves available-whatever evidence could be found. Reaching the rock, tools in hand, the investigator went about trying to leverage the rock, summoning whatever size team was necessary. Together, the team went about the job of displacing the rock, prying, pushing, shoving. The better organized the team, the better directed, the quicker the boulder gave way. Once displaced, the investigation was rolled toward the edge, given one final push, and gravity took over, at which point the task was to stay with it-all teammates pursuing it simultaneously-a mad, frantic race down hill in the midst of a landslide created by the beast itself. The job at hand by now: to keep the rock from exploding into bits at the bottom.

Boldt was caught in that landslide.

He didn’t recognize it at first, and this typically proved the most difficult task of all-understanding what phase of the investigation one was in-for inevitably some of the team were still uphill with the pry bars while the rock itself was hurling toward the bottom. The possible involvement of the psychic’s military man with the burned hand, the ATF lab’s suggestion of rocket fuel as the accelerant, and finally Garman’s purchase of a Werner ladder had sent the rock tumbling downhill. At that point it became Boldt’s job to stay with it, to shape the investigation into something manageable. That task was made more difficult by two subsequent occurrences.

The first was Garman’s receipt of a fourth poem and piece of green plastic-this following his interrogation. Was he brazenly taunting the police, Boldt wondered-or was he, as he claimed, an innocent go-between?

The second was a phone call received by Daphne from Emily Richland on that same day. She hurried into the bullpen, out of breath from having run downstairs from the ninth floor. Her voice was frantic, her words rushed as she shouted, “That was her! Emily! Nick, the guy with the burned hand, just made an appointment with her for five o’clock today. That’s only two hours from now. Can we handle it?”

Boldt felt an immediate knot of tension, from his stomach to his pounding head. Two hours, he wondered. Surveillance, ERT, bomb squad-a repeat of the team assembled just over a week earlier. Branslonovich was barely in her grave. His memory of that spectral vision haunted him. “We’ll try,” he said.