“No, it’s not that,” he informed her.
“Then what?”
“Regrets. Concerns.” He heard his voice betray him. Betrayal fed on itself, he thought, like those insects that eat their mates.
Her eyes came open wider. Her hips rolled in the water as she leaned toward him. She floated there, motionless. She cradled the baby tighter to her. “Honey?”
He had an urge to make love to her. Possess her. He knew it was for all the wrong reasons. “Maybe we should talk at some point,” he said, though he sounded defeated and he knew she picked up on it.
“I’m all yours,” she said.
I wonder, Lou Boldt thought. He nodded, though insincerely. She took the baths to clean herself up, to keep him from knowing. A cleansing. Purify her from whoever else had been with her. He ached, wondering what drove such thoughts.
“Go to work, Sergeant,” she ordered. “I’m not going to get mad about it.”
“I’ll call in,” he said. “Check it out.”
“I’ll wait up,” she told him, acknowledging with more certainty than he wished that the page was going to take him from their home. She was right, of course, it nearly always did. The pager was the giant stage hook, designed, it seemed, to steal him from his home life. To disrupt. He had come to hate it. “Or I’ll try to, depending how late you are.” She chuckled. The baby lost her mother’s nipple, and Liz helped her to find it again.
“You two are beautiful,” he said, still living with the urge to have her sexually. He felt his throat choke and turned toward the phone to prevent her from seeing the betrayal of tears that filled his eyes.
Out of the frying pan and into the fire, Boldt thought, the wind blowing through his close-cropped hair-what was left of it; her silhouette caught by a streetlamp that lit the running path that surrounded Green Lake. Daphne Matthews was a little too fit, a little too pretty; she never quite looked the part.
The lake was several acres of black water surrounded by the running path, a perimeter road lined on the east with cafes and a quality restaurant or two. Lush wooded hills, densely populated with neighborhoods of two- and three-story clapboard houses built in the city’s first big boom-the timber era-seventy years earlier, rose on three sides, containing the lake in a jeweled bowl of window lights. Green Lake was picturesque and charming, like something from a New England village postcard. South of the lake were recreation fields for softball and soccer, lit at night by steel towers projecting a harsh, stark light visible at a great distance. At 8 P.M. the lake’s running path still saw a great deal of use, men and women running or walking alone for the most part, as contrasted with the pairs of couples and friends and associates that exercised in the early morning and at lunchtime.
Daphne wore jeans and a stone-washed blue silk jacket over a crisp white shirt buttoned to her neck. He joined her and they started walking, holding to the right side of the path, allowing the breathless joggers to pass. The lake was convenient to both their houses. She had recommended they meet there, as they had so many times before.
“Emily Richland uses a shill who checks the cars of her clients. Information about the cars is passed to her, and she can make some damn good educated guesses as to who is sitting in front of her.”
“Am I supposed to be surprised?” he asked, his mind elsewhere.
“The guy with the burned hand came to her place looking to check a couple of dates: October second, two days before Heifitz; and then again on Saturday. Lou, I think it’s the arsonist.” Before he could speak, she said, “His right hand-the last three fingers are fused in a kind of paddle. Badly burned. He’s military. Air Force, maybe. I think she’s holding out on me. I think she has more.”
Boldt’s mind raced away from him, removing his concern about Liz’s affair and focusing solely on the suspect. He realized that he buried himself in work for a reason. “His car?”
“A truck.” She gave Boldt the description that Emily had given her.
“Air Force,” Boldt mumbled.
“She thinks this guy is involved in drug deals, not arson. And maybe that’s right, maybe he’s dealing in drug lab chemicals, maybe that’s how he got the burned hand, maybe it has nothing whatsoever to do with arson, but I think it’s one hell of a lead.”
“A psychic,” Boldt said. “Do you know how Shoswitz is going to react to this?”
“A fraud,” she reminded him. “If we get her accomplice, the one who actually saw this guy’s truck, Jesus, I think we’ve got a hell of a witness. The two of them? Are you kidding me? One of them studied the truck, the other spoke to the man. He was nervous, real concerned about October second.”
“Or maybe he’s just a middleman,” Boldt was thinking aloud. “Maybe he’s selling some chemicals to our boy. Maybe he even thinks they’re for a drug lab. We won’t know until we get there.”
“I paid her two hundred. I think another two and we’ll get more. I think if we sat on the place we’d ID her accomplice. She needs the spy. The scam doesn’t work without the spy. Furthermore,” she added, pulling on his elbow to keep him from interfering with an approaching runner, “she thinks he’ll return.”
Boldt stopped walking. Daphne went on a step or two. He said, “Return?”
“He’s already been there twice,” she said proudly.
“Military? Maybe Garman was military, maybe Air Force. Maybe they served together. Maybe that’s the connection.”
“A woman was involved,” she said, reminding him of the connection between the two victims. “A divorced woman.”
Boldt walked to catch up to her. The two started walking again. “Heifitz was widowed,” he reminded.
“She was separated,” Daphne corrected. “As good as divorced, I’m told, when her former husband up and died on her. Went down on the records as widowed.” She walked a few more steps and then said emphatically, “Divorced single moms, Lou. That’s what we’re looking at. Count on it.”
He was a cop who based his investigations on the information a victim could reveal. He caught himself walking faster, out of excitement. Thoughts sparked in his head; he could barely contain them. “We can link the victims!” he nearly shouted.
“Why do you think I paged you? Link? I don’t know. But we’ve got some obvious common denominators.”
“Divorced single mothers,” Boldt repeated. “Both of them,” he stated. He could barely contain his excitement. He felt like screaming. The victim! he thought. The victim can tell more about a homicide than a pile of crime-scene evidence.
“That’s it,” she confirmed. “Age of the kids?”
“Didn’t check.”
“We need to.” Searching for a way the two women might have been targeted by the killer, Boldt listed, “Group therapy-you know, coping-with-divorce classes-church groups, what else?”
“Book clubs,” she suggested.
“Cooking classes, gyms.”
“Plumbers, electricians-”
“Ladders!” he barked, stopping again. His excitement bubbled out of him. He could see it become contagious in her. “We’re close! Plumbers, electricians …”
“Roofers, masons, chimney sweeps …”
“A house painter!” he exclaimed. “The cotton fibers at the base of the ladder.”
“What?”
He spoke so rapidly that his words blurred. “We found cotton fibers alongside the ladder … at the base of the ladder. Bernie’s working on them. What do you want to bet they come up positive for petroleum products?”
“Slow down,” she said. “I mean, slow your walking. You’re practically running.”
“Both of them divorced,” Boldt repeated for the third time.
“Dating services,” she offered. “It’s hell out there as a single mom.”
“Both divorced,” Boldt said gleefully. He stopped her, grabbing her by the shoulders, overwhelmed with a feeling of accomplishment. “You’re a genius!”