“It would sure help me to know what it was.”
“What about a fireman?” Boldt asked, stating what he believed an obvious question.
“Certainly near the top of our list,” Daphne answered. “A disenchanted fireman. Someone turned down by the department. Discharged. Denied a promotion.” She clarified this. “It works for the sending of the note, but not for killing Dorothy Enwright. Why kill an innocent woman if you’re venting anger? You’d kill a fireman or fire inspector, wouldn’t you?”
Boldt nodded but didn’t speak. He heard it in her voice, her words: This was bigger than Dorothy Enwright, bigger than anyone had foreseen.
“We need the connection,” Daphne said. “The spark, if you will. The motive. It may be something as eclectic as the architecture of the house. It may tie in directly to Dorothy Enwright or Steven Garman.”
Boldt experienced it as a dryness in his throat, a knife blade in his stomach. He didn’t want to ask the question of the psychologist because he feared her answer. Nonetheless, it had to be asked. “It isn’t over, is it?”
She met his eyes; hers were filled with sympathy. “The note tells us that: He has half the deed done, who has made a beginning.” She asked rhetorically, “So what comes next?”
6
Nothing much changed. If Ben had one complaint in life, this was it. He felt powerless to change things himself, and, left to grownups, things remained too much the same. School was school; home was home. He felt pressure from Emily to give the social workers the evidence they needed, but he wasn’t about to give in, so in the end he blamed himself for his situation, and it hurt.
He had Monday Night Football to thank for keeping Jack Santori away. His stepfather wouldn’t come home from work but, instead, would head directly to the bar for the game. He wouldn’t come home from the bar until late, because he placed bets on football and he drank heavily, win or lose. Sometime around midnight he would stumble in downstairs, bang around, and find his way to bed-if he was lucky-or more likely end up passed out on the couch with TV fuzz hissing back at him. By that same time, Ben would be safe, locked behind his bedroom door, having spent the late afternoon and evening with Emily.
There had probably been a time when he had been afraid of the dark, though it had long since passed. He had other things he feared more. Jack had a way, with his eyes and voice, of terrifying Ben so that his legs suddenly went to Jell-O and his thoughts became tangled and confused. There were times when for no reason at all he would press Ben to the floor and, holding a pillow against Ben’s back, would beat him, hammering away with his drunken, reckless fists so that the bruises ended up buried deep inside Ben’s flesh, not on the surface where they might show. Ben’s pee stung for days in a row and his poo was tar black. “You’re going to do as I say, right?” Jack would ask, as he carried out this punishment. And if Ben was stupid enough to answer, stupid enough to open his mouth, the punishment continued until Jack grew physically tired or lost interest. For Ben to cry aloud was unthinkable.
Ben liked Seattle in September. Less people than in the summer, fewer cars on the streets. Ben had heard it called a transition neighborhood: blacks, mostly; very few whites. Ben knew which streets to avoid, which hangouts to circumvent. Most of this he had learned the hard way, although being shoved around by a bunch of zit-faced bullies was nothing compared to things at home. Fear was like water: it sought its own level. For Ben, it took some kind of threat to make him afraid, discounting the effect of Jack calling upstairs, “You going to do as I say or not?” That was an entirely different kind of fear. One of these days, the guy would go too far. Emily kept warning of that.
The neon sign in Emily’s window was lighted-YOUR FUTURE, YOUR PAST: AT LAST! — which meant she was home and open for business. She got a lot of customers in the evening. Her business was both repeats and drop-ins.
There was a car parked out front, so Ben didn’t disturb her. He recognized the car as Denise’s, an Emily regular. He went quietly around back and tried the kitchen door and, finding it locked, sat down in the cool September evening and waited. The city hummed. Somewhere out there was his mom. He wondered for the thousandth time why she had left without taking him with her. Fear. He had Jack Santori to thank for that.
After a few minutes he got lonely and bored and decided to climb the cedar tree. From the hastily erected platform high in the tree, he could see the traffic over on Martin Luther King. He saw the blinking lights of planes crisscrossing the sky. The downtown skyscrapers rose dramatically, creating a city skyline he knew by heart. He could point to and identify the various buildings like an astronomer with constellations.
When the car below him started up and pulled out of the drive, he realized he had been daydreaming. He hurried down through a pattern of limbs he knew by heart: down, down, down. Monkey man, Emily called him.
She greeted him as if she hadn’t seen him in months, when in fact it had only been a couple of days. She gave him a huge hug, told him how good it was to see him, and immediately insisted that he eat something. She was warming up some lasagna in the microwave when the doorbell sounded.
“You go ahead and eat,” she said. “You don’t need to help me tonight.”
“I want to,” he protested, jumping up and pulling open the drawer that contained their wireless radio system.
She didn’t stop him. He tested the system by speaking softly into the walkie-talkie. She nodded at him that it was working. She checked her appearance in a mirror, pinched her cheeks, and headed out to answer the door. Ben slipped out the back.
The vehicle parked in Emily’s short driveway was a beat-up blue pickup truck with a dented and chipped white camper shell. It had a cracked windshield and a broken outside mirror on the passenger side. Ben went around to the driver’s window, because from here he couldn’t be seen from the front door, allowing him to hide if the customer unexpectedly came outside. On the back bumper was a Good Sam Club cartoon of a stupid-looking guy with a halo over his head. Through the driver’s window he saw a pair of sunglasses on the dash, and a cardboard cutout of a nude woman hanging by a thread from the rearview mirror. A man, he decided. Light from the street penetrated the cab, but it wasn’t as if it were daytime; he couldn’t see much of the floor-and there was a lot of stuff down there, probably trash. The ashtray was filled with butts. “He smokes,” he said into the walkie-talkie. “Parking sticker on the windshield for Chief Joseph Air Force Base.” He strained to see the dash. “Nice music system, considering the condition of the truck. He’s into music.” How badly Ben wanted to open the door or, even more tempting, check to see if the camper shell was unlocked, but Emily had her rules. He was breaking no laws by simply observing. To enter the vehicle was a different story.
There wasn’t much more to see. He stepped back, studying the camper shell. He mentioned the Good Sam Club to her, because maybe it would tell her something about the kind of person he was. He noticed the camper had a rooftop skylight that was partially open, and he could picture himself slipping down inside and finding out everything there was to know about the guy. He wanted to know everything there was to know. He wanted to give Emily something worthwhile. One of the lower limbs of the cedar tree went out just above the camper shell, and he debated climbing out on this limb and trying to see down into the shell, but the skylight didn’t look like it was open far enough, and everything was too dark.
He circled the vehicle once more and then crept quietly into the kitchen, taking up his favorite spot at a peephole that Emily had put into the wall just for this purpose. She liked to leave the room every now and then and spy on her customers to see what they did when she was gone; she claimed this could tell her a lot about a person. Ben placed his one good eye to the wall, blinked repeatedly, watched, and listened, his heart racing, his skin tingling.