Beyond Recognition

43

Boldt thought of himself less as a public enforcer, more as a paid puzzle solver. Forensic evidence, testimony of witnesses, medical examiner reports, unforeseen events-all added up to a giant puzzle that the lead detective was supposed to solve. In the case of an ongoing serial homicide investigation, failure to solve the puzzle resulted in more deaths, the loss of innocent lives. It proved to be potent motivation. It robbed one of a private life, deprived one of sleep, gnawed at one’s self-confidence. Boldt disliked himself and felt himself a failure-he couldn’t even blame Liz for her affair, if it was real; he’d been consumed with work for months.

When he reached his hotel after questioning Ben and the clerk handed him a brown paper bag-and it wasn’t his laundry coming back-the sergeant experienced a pang of dread. His first thought was that it was a bomb. He carried it to his room carefully and spent five long minutes inspecting it. Perspiration breaking out on his brow, he dared to uncurl the top of the bag slowly and open it equally slowly. Inside was a note from LaMoia and a half dozen items purchased from a hardware store-items purchased by Melissa Heifitz on the same day as her fire.

Boldt clicked the TV on to CNN and went about examining the contents of the bag: a compressed air canister called E-Z Flush, rubber gloves, a sponge head to a mop.

The items from Enwright were in the dresser’s bottom drawer. He took these out and compared. Common to both groups were sponges and gloves. A bottle of Drano in the Enwright group, E-Z Flush in the other; a bottle of compressed gas to be used as a plunger to clear the stubborn drain. Boldt spun the device around in his hands. On the can’s back panel was a simple illustration of a sink and another of a bathtub. In his mind’s eye he recalled his own bathtub having trouble draining, and a moment later he placed it as on the night of his family’s evacuation.

Clogged drains! he realized. A common link between Enwright, Heifitz, and even himself!

He called Bernie Lofgrin at home. The lab man answered cheerfully. Boldt did not introduce himself, for Lofgrin knew his voice. He said, “What are the chances that the hypergolics, that the ignition system, is somehow related to plumbing, to the house plumbing? To clogged drains?”

After a long silence, Lofgrin said, “I’m thinking.” He mumbled, “Plumbing?” But Boldt did not interrupt. “Clogged drains?”

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.

“He’s nervous,” Lofgrin observed. “Good. I’d rather that than cocky.”

The roofman’s voice, made scratchy by the radio, reported, “Going down.”

“Nice and easy,” Lofgrin ordered.

Boldt looked up as the man fed the cable with his right hand, his left holding a Sony Watchman video monitor. “Two feet … three feet …” he reported.

Lofgrin told Boldt, “The cable is marked in inches, feet, and yards.”

“Four feet … five feet …”

“You know what I think?” Lofgrin asked rhetorically. “That’s a front stack. Front of the house. Unlikely he would rig that one. Too visible, right? If I’m him, I rig the back stacks and seal the front stacks. Less time on the front roof that way.”

His radio squawked. “Seven feet … eight feet …”

Into the walkie-talkie Lofgrin said, “Let’s try one of the back stacks, Rick. You copy that?”

“I copy,” the roofman reported.

“Back of the house is where the action is,” Lofgrin informed Boldt. “Count on it.”

Overhead a news chopper aimed a blinding light down on the top of Boldt’s roof, its cone sweeping back and forth, and isolated the man in the turnouts.

Lofgrin said, “Well, one thing’s for sure: You’ll never be invited to a neighborhood function again.”

The spotlight left the roof, scanned the yard, and lighted on Boldt and Lofgrin. A considerable amount of wind was generated by the blades, and the noise was deafening. Lofgrin waved it off, but it continued to hover above them. The roofman lost his balance because of the generated downdraft; he slipped on the shake roof but managed to reach out a hand and catch himself. Boldt glanced over to the parked patrol cars. Shoswitz was shouting into his radio handset while looking up at the helicopter. Boldt didn’t need to read lips to see how angry the man was. Thirty seconds later the helicopter gained altitude and the associated noise lessened, but the spotlight continued to jump between the roofman and Boldt and Lofgrin’s position on the sidewalk.

“I’m at the northernmost stack on the back side,” announced the roofman through Lofgrin’s radio.

“The kitchen,” Boldt explained.

Lofgrin said, “Go easy, Rick. This may be a live one.”

“Copy that,” answered the roofman.

Boldt could not see Rick working, and this bothered him. He heard him announce that he was feeding the camera into the stack, and Boldt could picture the tiny camera sliding down the black plastic vent; he could imagine the man keeping an eye on the Watchman while the fiber-optic camera with its tiny light disappeared down the tube.

“One foot …” the voice announced.

“Slowly,” Lofgrin cautioned. Boldt sensed in him an added worry, a heightened concern.

“Howdy hey,” the roofman said into the radio. “I’m showing a translucent membrane at the eighteen-inch mark.”

“Hold it!” Lofgrin spat into the radio. He turned around and waved one of his assistants over. She had a handsome face, was somewhere in her early thirties, and was clad in turnouts too big for her. She carried a gray plastic toolbox in her right hand, heavy, by the look of it. Lofgrin told her, “The kitchen. Use the back door. Take it exceptionally slowly, as we talked about. It will be in the vertical somewhere. Give me a distance readout from the bottom of the vertical. Got it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Okay,” Lofgrin said. “Go ahead.”

“Young,” Boldt said, as she hurried away from them, the toolbox dragging on her.

“They all look young anymore. She’s got a four-year-old. Husband works for Boeing. Maybe the biggest overachiever I’ve got. She begged me for this assignment. Despite the risk, despite the obvious danger, despite the fact that the bomb boys were jockeying for this work, she wanted to run one of the cameras. She’s the one who did the ventilation work over in the New Federal Building-you remember that camera work? Worked the thing up three stories and into the men’s room. Remember that? It was a narcotics sting. Busted a seventy-thousand-dollar cash gift to a dealer from Vancouver. That was Goldilocks. You want fiber optics up somebody’s butt hole without them the wiser, she’s the one.”

“Why send her inside?”

“We need to check the stack from below. Rick can’t head down through that membrane, so now we go from the bottom up. That should give us some idea how to neutralize.”

“Meaning what?” Boldt questioned.

“I see two options here. One is he trapped part A and part B in two different stacks. A thin membrane on the bottom, all the other stacks sealed off. Someone goes and uses a plunger, the membranes go simultaneously and the place goes up. The second option I see is both parts in the same stack. One atop the other, a membrane between. The advantage is you only have to break that bottom membrane. The point is, we don’t know what he’s done, so we sure as hell can’t go popping membranes.” He explained, “We’re prepared to siphon off liquid, or vacuum up a powder, but there’s a remote chance he’s done this a third way. Casterstein found evidence of a possible detonator. We know the guy was up a tree watching the place. What if that detonator is a pressure switch?”

“What if it is?” Boldt asked.

“In the case of these single mothers-Enwright and Heifitz-he watches until he’s certain the kids are gone. From his tree he activates the pressure switch-he could retrofit any remote-control toy to do the trick. Not a big deal. He can deactivate if necessary, should the kids return. And there’s the kicker: Deactivated, the drains don’t work well but the place doesn’t blow. Activated, the first time she flushes a toilet-boom! Running a little sink water probably wouldn’t do it. A toilet, five gallons all at once-boom! A plunger, same thing. If both parts of the hypergolic are in the same stack and we go messing around, we could make one hell of a Roman candle. Know what I mean?”

The next few minutes progressed painstakingly slowly. The woman technician maintained a running description of every wrench turn, every joint loosening. Finally, she announced, “Okay, I see an opening to a riser up ahead. I’m twenty inches to the right.”

“Good. Let’s follow it. But be careful, for God’s sake. That membrane may be transparent.”

“Copy.”

Wincing, Lofgrin began nervously stroking the stubble on his chin, as if rubbing himself clean. The change in behavior made Boldt restless. The lab man pulled off his Coke-bottle glasses and cleaned them on his shirttail. Once the glasses were in place, he took to scratching the top of his head. “She’s in the vent stack … heading up the vent stack…. If she breaks whatever barrier he has in place-” He didn’t complete the sentence; there was no need. Their eyes met-Lofgrin’s the size of golf balls behind the glasses-and Boldt understood that all the confidence in their techniques would not save this woman’s life, did not guarantee this woman’s life, and that Bernie Lofgrin was directly responsible. Lofgrin, dropping his eyes to the walkie-talkie, said in a coarse voice, “She’s a good kid. A damn good kid. Hell of a worker. You hope for her kind. You don’t often get them.” Into the radio, he spoke in a voice suddenly stronger, for he would not allow her to hear any uncertainty. “What’s the scenery like?”

The woman’s voice sounded strained as she reported. “Thirty-one inches. Condensation on the pipe walls has increased noticeably.”

Lofgrin said to Boldt, “We’re close.” Into the walkie-talkie, he said, “Let’s use half-inch increments.”

“Copy.”

Boldt felt overly warm. He could picture the small camera creeping up the inside of the pipe.

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.”

Boldt did not remember drifting off to sleep but was awakened at his desk at 7 A.M. by an alert and excited John LaMoia. Boldt’s neck was stiff and his head dull. LaMoia waited a moment to make sure he had his sergeant’s full attention. “You remember Garman telling us his truck was stolen, his Werner ladder in the back?” He continued, “The truck was for real. He owned it, all right. But he’s got a little explaining to do. He never reported it stolen to us, Sarge. More incredible, he never claimed the insurance.”

Boldt focused on this a moment, allowed his head to clear. “Let’s pick him up,” he ordered.

LaMoia nodded and beamed. “It’s a beautiful morning, isn’t it, Sarge?”

It was pouring rain outside.