Boldt nodded. He felt the tears coming again. “All alone anyway,” he mumbled, heading to the door, thinking of Liz and the life they’d lost. Shoswitz said something about the khakis, but Boldt didn’t hear. His ears were ringing, and his right hand had tensed into a solid fist.
56
“Where is he?” Daphne demanded.
Ben’s eye was trained to the peephole in Emily’s kitchen wall, but he couldn’t see the front door, where Emily had just gone to answer the doorbell.
He recognized Daphne’s voice. His heart sank and he felt desperate. Why was it that, no matter what he did, he disappointed someone?
“Ben? He’s not here,” Emily said defiantly. “You’re supposed to have him!”
“I didn’t hear that,” Daphne said. “Let’s try again, and before we do let me remind you that to shelter him is to harbor a witness. Think carefully. Have you seen Benjamin today?”
“Get out.”
Daphne informed her, “I have enough probable cause to search this property, and that is exactly what I intend to do.”
That was enough for Ben. He had stepped toward the back door before he remembered Daphne nabbing him there once before.
He used the bathroom window. It was on the side of the house away from the driveway, facing the neighbors.
He hit the ground with his feet running, thinking ahead. They were sure to check his house as well-unless they had already. He could get the sleeping bag from his room and head up to the tree fort. He could spend the night there and come back to Emily’s in the morning.
It was raining out, but he barely felt it. He felt as if he ran faster than he had ever run. He splashed along sidewalks, down alleys, and through familiar back yards. He ran as if his life depended on it. He ran for his freedom.
Nothing so sweet.
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.
58
Daphne pulled up a chair in the small Tech Services room. Its walls were hidden by metal shelves containing tape recorders and video machines. The room smelled sour like sweat and burned coffee. She plugged in the car wash surveillance tape and hit PLAY.
Ben had not been at Emily’s, was not at the houseboat; Emily had threatened to file a complaint. Daphne couldn’t believe how quickly the investigation had deteriorated. She felt responsible, having convinced herself that a close look-alike to Garman’s mother would distract him. She felt as if all her training and education had failed her. She had been so convinced. She had to see the tape to believe it. She found the taped image considerably clearer than the live transmissions.
Jonny Garman entered the vehicle, took one long look at the photo of Ben, glanced around the front seat and into the back, assessing how dirty it was, and then set about squirting the inside of the windows with his spray bottle and wiping the glass clean with that towel. He conserved his movement within the vehicle, stretching to reach the far window, and performed his duties efficiently and quickly. He cleaned the inside of the windshield, both side windows, the rearview mirror, and the dashboard-in that order. To her surprise, he spent added time working on the sticky stain Martinelli had asked him to clean.
At the gap in the machinery that came ahead of the dryer, Garman climbed out of the front seat and into the back, where he attacked the rear window and both small side windows. He leaned over, nearly vanishing from sight, and then surfaced with an ashtray in his hand, the unseen contents of which he dumped in a plastic trash bag tied to his belt. As the car reached the end of the line, he shuffled out backward and closed the door.
He never looked in the glove box.
She rewound and replayed the tape for a second viewing, resorting to advancing the tape one frame at a time, hoping this might reveal an action overlooked in real time. But there was no such action on the tape. Garman did his job and climbed out of the car. The only brief moment he disappeared was when he was in the back seat, not the front-and that did her no good whatsoever. It seemed impossible.
Over the years she had come to develop certain instincts about her work, her patients. She could sense when a suspect was lying, could feel the truth. She knew when to push and when to pull back, when to work psychological games on an individual and when to talk straight. Jonny Garman would have taken the bait; she felt it to her core. The tape proved her wrong.