“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.
13
Ben awakened in Emily’s cedar tree to the sound of a car pulling into her driveway below. Collecting his bearings, he realized he was lucky not to have rolled off the platform, for he was precariously close to the edge, lying face down, one arm dangling off into space. As he sat up, he winced with pain and recalled the whipping that sleep had kept him from thinking about. He wondered if it was time to give Emily the evidence against his stepfather that she requested, time to do something, but he shuddered with the thought, terrified of what would become of him if the guy ever found out.
He heard the car door open below him and looked down to see not a car but a blue truck with a white camper shell, and his heart raced in his chest as the man with the buzz-cut hair climbed out and headed for Emily’s front door. Ben remembered the man with the fused fingers. She had said his name was Nick and had called him a criminal; her powers of observation had filled in a dozen details about him.
The camper’s skylight window was open.
Ben moved around the trunk of the tree and lowered himself to the next branch, telling himself he was just climbing down, but feeling his curiosity getting the better of him. Two sides of his thought process entered into competition, as if both arms, fully outstretched, were being tugged on at the same time, threatening to pull his joints apart. He didn’t want to descend and go wait in the kitchen, eye trained to the peephole; he wanted a look inside that camper shell.
The excitement grew inside him as he worked his way down through the branches. It was not an excitement inspired by a chance to see Emily; it was not the thrill of being in a tree-it was that open skylight immediately below him, for, as he paused and looked down through it and into the camper, he saw a dark steel tube that just had to be the barrel of a gun.
His decision was made.
Ben moved through the tree fluidly, lowering himself from limb to limb nearly as effortlessly as a monkey. He was completely at ease in a tree, regardless of height. He trusted the live branches and avoided the dead. If he went well out on a limb, he made sure to keep a strong hold on the limb overhead and to balance his weight between the two as evenly as possible. He made just such a move, inching his way out over the camper shell, the truck parked immediately below, hands overhead, fingers laced, dividing his weight between hands and feet. The farther out he went, the more the branch bowed under him, bending down and pointing toward the camper like an invitation. If he could have rolled a ball down the limb it would have bounced off the roof of the camper. He was incredibly close.
He fixed his full attention on his position and the decreasing support offered by the limbs over and under him. He needed to walk another three feet to reach the edge of the camper shell-two or three steps-and it began to feel like walking the plank. The limb below him sagged drastically. He hoisted himself into a pull-up and distributed as much weight as possible to the overhead limb, but it too was sagging. He glanced down, realizing he faced a fall of ten or twelve feet over gravel if the limbs snapped. It wouldn’t kill him, but it wouldn’t be fun. He could easily break something. Worse, he could draw attention to himself and his intentions, and that could get Emily in trouble as well.