“Then it’s me who’s sorry for interrupting.”
“Corky’s asleep,” she said, referring to Adler’s adopted teenage daughter. “I didn’t want to wake her.”
“No.”
“Does this make you uncomfortable?” she asked, clearly referring to the robe and the fact that there probably wasn’t much in the way of clothing underneath it.
“Are you living here?” Boldt asked. He wasn’t sure why this came out of his mouth, wasn’t sure why it was suddenly so important to him.
“I could change, if you want. The clothes,” she clarified. She looked away, back in the direction of downtown and the Space Needle and the city skyline. “He’s in South America this week. Peru, I think, tonight. Another deal. I didn’t want Corky to be with a nanny. Not as long as I’m around. It doesn’t seem fair to her.”
“He travels a lot.”
“Yes, he does.” Regret. Maybe some resentment that Boldt would voice such a thing. The way two people relate changes with each different situation, he realized, wishing it didn’t have to. He wanted to always share an intimate closeness with this woman, that liberating closeness where anything goes. But it was not the same any longer, and he resisted the change. He blamed Owen Adler. Her secret life was now shared with this other man; Boldt was the outsider.
She sat down in a Brown and Jordan chair and crossed her legs, and a knee and then a thigh popped out of the robe. Boldt looked off into the cleanness of the pool. Interwoven lines of serpentine light ribbed the pool walls. A plane flew over the bay, its wing lights flashing.
“Rocket fuel.”
Her head snapped up. A line of shower water ran from her wet hair down her neck, chased the line of her collarbone, and leaked down into the robe between her breasts.
“That was my reaction as well,” he said.
“Emily Richland mentioned the Air Force.” Her eyes were wide, her cheeks flushed.
Boldt said, “There’s more. Bernie says the ladder impressions put his-or her-weight at one-forty tops. That’s light.”
“A juvenile?” she asked. “The second poem was Plato: Suddenly a flash of understanding, a spark that leaps across to the soul. Big stuff for a juvenile.”
“Messed-up kid, ugly divorce. It’s possible, I suppose.” He added, “You’re the judge of that.”
“I’m thinking mid to late twenties, college educated. He could be thin, even gaunt; I could buy that.” She leaned forward. The bathrobe fell away from her chest. He looked away, back toward the pool and its dancing waves of light. He didn’t want to stare. Daphne had always been dangerous for him. It was inescapable.
“LaMoia is trying to track down the Werner ladder sales. Something about computerized cash register receipts. He’s optimistic we’ll get something.”
“John? Since when doesn’t he think highly of his own abilities?” She said sternly, “I know you’re thankful to have LaMoia. Believe me, I love him dearly. But we all should be grateful that there’s only one of him. He stretches the envelope enough, thank you very much.”
“Bernie can’t swear by those impressions. It’s a best-guess situation. If he’s wrong, he’s wrong; there’s no backup guesstimate. The ground was soaked by the fire fighting, which made conducting any kind of field test impossible.” He mused aloud, “Funny, isn’t it, how the act of suppressing the fire goes a long way to destroying the evidence that might be found.”
“Ironic would be my word of choice.”
“Twenty-five and a college grad?” He attempted to keep the disappointment out of his voice.
“That bothers you?” she inquired. “All I’m saying is that’s the collective wisdom based on national averages. In talking with others, that’s the best I can do: twenty-five to thirty, college educated, sexually inadequate. He hates his mother, girlfriend, whatever. Maybe all of the above. He is judge and executioner. He’s intelligent, quiet and lives alone. He’s working at a job under his abilities.”
“You’ve been busy!” Boldt said. He was never comfortable with these profiles, but he did his best to trust them-they had proven accurate too many times.
“He probably carries a library card and rides city transportation. If we put this information from the ladder into the mix, then he’s slight of build.”
“Library card? City transport?” he asked.
“Comes out of his income, which is limited if any. These guys like their labs. They like to tinker with their stuff. He works a job that requires no thought. He thinks about his kills, about his bombs, all day long. He may not sleep much, or eat much for that matter, and that fits with what you’re saying about his being slight. He leaves work and goes to his lab.”
“His apartment?”
“Unlikely. No. Someplace away from it all. Someplace he won’t be bothered. A garage. An abandoned building.”
“None of those in this city,” Boldt snapped sarcastically.
“I know it’s not what you want to hear.”
“Fidler gave me a report on Garman. Steven Garman, the Marshal Five, the fire inspector-”
“I know who Garman is,” she reminded him, a little hot under the collar. “The one receiving the threats is always the first one to look at.”
“Have you looked?” he pressed.
“We talked about Garman, that’s all. What is it with you?”
He met and held her eyes. He found her beauty intoxicating. He had often wished she could make it go away. “I don’t know that I’m up to this,” he confessed.
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“I teeter on the edge. My self confidence goes out the window, and there I am, teetering.”
“It’s called anxiety. It’s healthy.” She studied him thoughtfully and asked rhetorically, “You didn’t come here because of Bernie Lofgrin or rocket fuel or Steven Garman, did you?”
“Sure I did.”
“Talk to me, Lou.”
“Another woman is going to burn.”
“Not necessarily.”
“Sure she is. And I’m at the helm, and I don’t particularly want the wheel.”
“Understandable. But you’ve got it.”
“Thanks loads.”
“You want to turn it over to Bobbie?” she asked, eyes penetrating. “John? Whom would you pick to run something this size? Pfoutz? Lublanski? Tell me.”
“Garman lives alone. He went through what he characterized to Fidler as an ugly marriage. He’s been with SFD for twelve years. Highly regarded but keeps to himself. No beers with the boys. At constant war with his superiors.”
“Don’t do this, Lou. Let’s talk about you,” she encouraged.
“He’s a stickler for details. Meticulous. Demanding. No one can remember his having even dated a woman-or a man either, for that matter.” He knew he had her then, for the color of her eyes changed and her brow tightened.
She said, “We can talk about Garman later,” but in a tone that suggested she didn’t mean it.
“I wouldn’t mind if you could find a way to chat him up,” he informed her. “Open him up.”
“You can pass the case to someone else,” she told him. “Shoswitz will grumble and piss all over you, but in the end he’ll relent if he thinks you aren’t up to it. You want me to tell him I think you need a breather? I can do that.”
“He’s a big son-of-a-bitch, Garman is. Certainly no one-forty. But by his own admission, Bernie could be wrong about that, and he is, after all, at the center of the case: a Marshal Five inspector, the guy receiving the threats.”
“You know there are any number of cases from any number of wars where a soldier fights with heart and soul, wins medals, fights to the death, invincible. Then he gets married on leave, and sometime later has a kid, and that’s the end of that phase of his military career. There’s a line he won’t cross any longer. It’s dangerous for him and others for him to be out there.”
Her comment hit Boldt in the center of his chest. He didn’t want to hinder the investigation-this went to the core of his concern. He wanted to keep pushing back at her with comments about Garman, but he heard himself say, “If we lose another, I don’t know what I’ll do.”