Beyond Recognition

57

“Believe it or not, we’re getting somewhere with this ink,” Bernie Lofgrin informed Boldt, stopping him in the hallway. Boldt was on his way to the communications room to initiate the dismantling of the surveillance of 114 Lakewood, where Marianne Martinelli waited as a possible target. He intended to leave LaMoia on that surveillance and move Gaynes to the tunnel park where Daphne had found the quotations, his two best chances at picking up Garman’s trail again. He would take the graveyard shift from LaMoia and allow the park to go unwatched from two to six in the morning. Even with this skeleton crew, he believed it possible to keep the surveillance up and running. He wasn’t sure what else to do.

Lofgrin’s glasses were smudged, obscuring his magnified eyes. Physically, he looked bone-tired, yet he remained animated and enthusiastic. Boldt envied him this.

“It’s not a Bic, a Parker, a Paper Mate, a Cross, or any of a dozen other mass-produced pens commonly available. That’s good news, believe me. What we do is graph the ink’s chemical components-”

“Look, Bernie. I appreciate it, I really do, but Phil has pulled the plug, okay? No more cross-departmental stuff unless it pertains to suspects in custody.”

Lofgrin appeared crushed. “So what does he know from what we’re talking about?” He whispered, “Fuck Shoswitz. I’m a civilian. You think they’re gonna fire me? Do you? No fucking way.” He stepped even closer. His breath was sour. Boldt was in no mood for a forensics class. “So we say we’re doing this to confirm Steven Garman as the Scholar. Who’s to know? Listen, the Bureau has all this shit on file, chromatographs of every goddamn ink manufactured: ballpoint pens, felt tips, typewriter ribbons, computer printer cartridges, you name it. We’re downloading a bunch of the graphs now, for comparison purposes.” Boldt stiffened; he didn’t want a Lofgrin lecture. “We’re going to ID this ink, Lou-and I’m telling you, it’s significant. Every single one of those notes is written in the same ink. You bring me this guy with a pen in his pocket, and I can tie him to these poems.”

“We lost him, Bernie.”

“A bicycle. I heard. Yeah.”

“No. I mean we lost him. If he shows up at the car wash tomorrow, which he very well may, Shoswitz will call for an interrogation. He’ll want a statement from young Garman about his father’s prior arson history, I know he will. And that will be that. This guy’s too careful. We won’t get squat from him if we go at it that way.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Lofgrin confided, his enthusiasm shaken. “Well, then,” he said, reconsidering, “Toni and I will just have to work right on through, won’t we?” He checked his watch. “You going home?”

“Can’t do it,” Boldt said. He wanted to go home, yet he didn’t want to confront Liz. He wanted to comfort her, but he wanted her to tell him about the illness, not the other way around. He wasn’t sure what he wanted.

The evening’s twilight was quickly fading. It would be dark soon, which would make surveillance efforts at both sites all the more difficult. Daphne had jumped out of the van forty minutes earlier, and Boldt hadn’t heard from her since. If he could talk her into helping, he had a team of four-down from twenty-odd only a few hours earlier. But four people could probably hold it together overnight.

He hurried on toward the communications room to make the necessary arrangements. He willed his pager not to sound, for he feared if it did it would mean another fire, another victim. And though that might prove him right about the Scholar still being at large, it was a price he was unwilling to pay.

At that point in time, failure seemed the best solution of all.