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  Beyond Recognition

  ( Lou Boldt and Daphne Mathews - 4 )

  Ridley Pearson

  Ridley Pearson

  Beyond Recognition

  The world, an entity out of everything, was created by neither gods nor men, but was, is, and will be eternally living fire, regularly becoming ignited and regularly becoming extinguished.

  — Heraclitus, The Cosmic Fragments, no. 20 (c. 480 B.C.)

  1

  The fire began at sunset.

  It filled the house like a hot putrid breath, alive. It ran like a liquid through the place, stopping at nothing, feeding on everything in its path, irreverent and unforgiving. It raced like a phantom, room to room, eating the drapes, the rugs, the towels, sheets, and linens, the clothes, the shoes, and blankets in the closets, removing any and all evidence of things human. It invaded the various rooms like an unchecked virus raiding neighboring cells, contaminating, infecting, consuming. It devoured the wood of the doorjambs, swarmed the walls, fed off the paint, and blistered the ceiling. Lightbulbs vaporized, sounding like a string of Black Cat firecrackers. This was no simple fire.

  It vaporized the small furniture, chairs, tables, dressers, all dissolving in its wake. It refinished and then devoured the desk she had bought at a weekend flea market, a desk she had stripped of its ugly green paint and lovingly resurfaced with a trans parent plastic coating guaranteed by the manufacturer to last thirty years.

  Longer than she lasted.

  For Dorothy Enwright, it was more like a camera’s flash popping in the dark. It began long before any clothes or rooms were claimed. It began as a strange growling sound deep within the walls. At first she imagined an earthquake. This was dispelled by the quick and surprisingly chilling spark on the far side of her eyelids. To her it began not as heat but as a flash of bone-numbing cold.

  It burned off her hair, the skin on her face-and she went over backward, her throat seared, unable to scream. In a series of popping sounds, her bones exploded, brittle and fast, like pine needles dumped on a fire.

  The toilets and sinks melted, a sudden flow of bubbling porcelain, running like lava.

  Dorothy Enwright was dead within the first twenty seconds of the burn. But before she died she visited hell, a place that Dorothy Enwright did not belong. She had no business there, this woman. No business, given that a member of the fire department had received a threat eleven hours earlier, and the person receiving that threat had failed to act upon it.

  By the time the fire hoses were through, little existed for Seattle’s Marshal Five fire inspector to discover or collect as evidence. Little existed of the truth. The truth, like the home of Dorothy Enwright and Dorothy herself, had gone up in smoke, destroyed beyond recognition.

  2

  The Boldts’ home phone rang at six-forty in the evening, September tenth, a Tuesday. Elizabeth, who would be forty in March, passed her husband the receiver and released a huge sigh to make a point of her disgust at the way his police work interfered with their lives.

  Boldt croaked out a hello. He felt bone tired. He didn’t want Liz thrown into a mood.

  They had seen their precious Sarah to sleep only moments before and had stretched out on their bed to take a fifteen-minute break. Miles was occupied by a set of blocks in the corner.

  The bedding smelled of Liz, and he wished that the phone hadn’t rung because he hated to see her angry. She had every right to be angry because she’d been complaining about the phone being on her side of the bed for the past four years, and Boldt had never done a thing about it. He didn’t understand exactly why he hadn’t done anything about it; she mentioned it all the time, and replacing the phone cord with something longer wasn’t the most technically challenging job in the world. He reached over to touch her shoulder in apology, but caught himself and returned his hand to his side. No sense in making things worse.

  Cupping the phone, he explained to her: “A fire.” Boldt was homicide, so it had to be a serious fire.

  She sighed again, which meant she didn’t care much about the content of the phone call, only its duration.

  “Keep your voice down,” Liz cautioned wisely. Sarah was a light sleeper, and the crib was only a few feet away, against the bedroom wall where Boldt’s dresser had once been.

  The baby’s crying began immediately, as if on Liz’s cue. Boldt thought it was her mother’s voice that triggered it, not his, but he wasn’t about to argue the point.

  Boldt took down the address and hung up.

  Liz walked over to the crib and Boldt admired her. She kept herself trim and fit. The second time around, that had been a challenge. She looked ten years younger than other mothers the same age. As the cradled baby came eagerly to her mother’s breast, Lou Boldt felt his throat tighten with loving envy. There were unexpected moments in his life that would remain with him forever, seared into his consciousness like photographs, and this was one of them. He nearly forgot about the phone call.

  Liz talked quietly to the baby. She glanced over at her husband. “I’m sorry I snapped at you,” she said.

  “I’ll move the phone,” Boldt promised her.

  “Sometime this decade would be nice,” she said. They grinned at each other, and their smiles widened, and Lou Boldt thought himself lucky to share his life with her, and he told her so, and she blushed. She lay back on the bed with the child at her breast. Miles was into creating the second story of his block fort. Maybe he’d grow up to be an architect, Boldt thought. Anything but a cop.

  Lou Boldt smelled the fire before he ever reached it. Its ghost, spilled out like entrails, blanketed most of Wallingford, settling down onto Lake Union as a thin, wispy fog. It didn’t smell of death, more like wet charcoal. But if, as a sergeant of Crimes Against Persons, Boldt was being called to a fire, it was because a person or persons had perished and Marshal Five had already made a call of suspicious origin. Someone had torched a building. Someone else was dead.

  There were a lot of fires in Seattle in any given year. Not so many homicides, not by national standards. The two seldom mixed, and when they did it was always-always, he emphasized to himself silently-one or more firefighters. The Pang fire had been the most recent and the worst: four firemen dead in an arson fire. Four years in the past, it was still vivid in the collective mind of the city. Boldt had worked that case as well. He didn’t want another one.

  He had been off-duty at the time of the call. Rightfully speaking, the investigation belonged to a detective other than himself. Yet there he was, a little overweight, a little gray at the temples, feeling a little anxious, speeding the department-issue beat-up Chevy toward the address he had scribbled on a sheet of notepaper torn from a pad given to him as a Christmas stocking present. Duty bound is what he was. As the department’s “most veteran” homicide cop-a pleasant way of saying he was a little too old for the job-Boldt was assigned more than his fair share of the tough cases. In his line of work, success was its own penalty.

  Many times he had considered the thought that Lieutenant Phil Shoswitz assigned him those more difficult cases in an effort to persuade him to apply for, and accept, a lieutenant’s desk. But Boldt was not easily moved from his position. He preferred people to paperwork.

  Fire scenes instilled fear in him, even from a respectable distance. It wasn’t the flashing lights; he was long since accustomed to those. It wasn’t the tangle of the hoses, or the wet, glistening pavement, or the supernatural look of the behemoth firemen in their turnout gear, helmeted and masked. It was the damp musk smell, the smudged filth that accompanied any fire, and Boldt’s own active imagination that too easily invented a claustrophobic room entirely engulfed in flames and he, a fireman, smack in the middle of it, aimi
ng a fire hose in revenge: the burning ceiling giving out, the floor breaking away underneath, a wall coming down. To die in fire had to be the worst.

  Battalion Chief Witt, clad in his turnouts, met Boldt as the sergeant approached one of the pumpers, where the crew was busy packing up the rig. Witt had a florid face and bloodshot eyes. He reminded Boldt of an Irish drinker, the kind of guy to come across in a Boston pub. He shook hands firmly. “Marshal Five’s in there,” he said, indicating what remained of the house-precious little.

  The September air was a pleasant temperature, even without the heat still radiating from the site. Boldt wore a khaki windbreaker, a cotton sweater, and khaki pants. He carried his hands in his pockets, but not to keep them warm. His posture reflected a tension, a tightness; the cables in his neck showed as his jaw muscles flexed into hard nuts.

  “He called it in to our arson boys,” Boldt informed him. “Must have been mention of a body, because they called me.”

  “No body found so far,” Witt explained. “A neighbor says he saw her in there, though. Saw her just a couple minutes before the flash.” He repeated, “Flash, not explosion,” as if this should hold significance for the sergeant. Boldt experienced a sinking feeling. He had a lot to learn, and all catch-up at that.

  “Your department,” Boldt said honestly. “Or Marshal Five’s. My concern is the body.”

  “If we ever find her.”

  “Will we?” Boldt had to shout above the sound of the trucks’ mechanicals, the bark of the radios, and the shouting between firefighters still on the site. “Find her?” he finished.

  Witt answered obliquely. “ME’s on the way.”

  Dr. Ronald Dixon, one of Boldt’s closest friends and a fellow jazz enthusiast, was King County’s chief medical examiner. Boldt welcomed his participation.

  Boldt asked, “What’s that mean? Is there a body or not?”

  “This baby was one hot sucker, Sergeant. What started in there and what ended up in there are two different things, ya know? Two different animals.” Witt, too, shouted to be heard. “If she’s in there, there’s not much left. That’s what I’m saying. Hot,” he repeated ominously. “Like nothing I ever seen. Like nothing I want to see again, ya know? A real showy son-of-a-bitch, this one was.”

  “Marshal Five called it?” Boldt asked, seeking to verify that the cause of the fire had been ruled of suspicious origin. Witt’s eyes darted to and from the site. He seemed to be keeping something to himself. It troubled Boldt.

  “I’m assuming so,” the chief answered. “Else why would you be here? Am I right?” He added, “Listen, Sergeant, we put the wet stuff on the red stuff. Marshal Five handles the rest.”

  “Something bothering you?” Boldt asked bluntly.

  “It flashed; it didn’t blow-that’s if you trust the witness. It burned real hot. Only thing close is Blackstock or Pang. We shoot for a four- to six-minute response time. We were six, maybe eight on this baby. Not bad, not our best. But she was ripping long before we got here. Ripping mean, is what I’m saying. Ripping hot, right up through the center of the structure; a weird burn is what it was. You check air traffic control, Sergeant. That’s what you do. My guess is six, seven hundred, maybe a thousand feet in the first thirty seconds. Something on that order. Something big. Bigger than stink. You’ve been in this as long as I have and that shit scares you, that’s all. It scares you.” He walked off, leaving Boldt with water seeping in through the soles of his shoes and the taste of charcoal in his mouth and nostrils.

  It was the taste that confirmed it. A taste that wouldn’t go away completely for two or three days-he knew as much the moment it rolled over his tongue. As foul a taste as a person could experience.

  A dead body. No question about it.

  3

  “Get out of here. Go upstairs, or watch TV or something.”

  Ben had never seen the man with this particular girl before, but she wasn’t much different from any of the others-a waitress, maybe, or just a girl from the bar: big boobs and tight jeans-not much different.

  The guy, who called himself Ben’s father but wasn’t, drew closer. “You listening to me, kid?” Definitely the bar. He smelled of it: cigarettes and beer. He blinked a pair of glassy eyes, unable to focus. Pot too, probably, Ben thought. He smoked a lot of the stuff. Weekends he started smoking pot with his first cup of coffee, around noon.

  The man’s name was Jack Santori, and Ben owned that same last name, but not by birth. He hated the man, though hate was too soft a word.

  “You told me to clean up the kitchen,” Ben protested, reminding Jack of the earlier order. He felt confused and angry. Bone tired. He wished he were eighteen instead of twelve; he wished he could walk right out the door and never come back-the same way his mother had. He missed his mother something fierce. “I washed the sheets,” he said, hoping to pick up some credit. He had been told to wash the sheets before starting in on the kitchen, and that’s just what he had done, so maybe the bastard would cut him some slack.

  “Upstairs,” Jack ordered, walking unsteadily toward the fridge and rummaging on the shelves for a pair of beers. He asked the girl, “Brew?” and as she nodded her boobs jiggled. She cast a sympathetic look in Ben’s direction, but it wouldn’t help because she was new around here. She didn’t know Jack. If she lasted more than one or two nights it would be a record. Ben knew what went on down there at night; Jack was rough with them. Same way he was rough with Ben. Best thing about seeing him this drunk was he’d sleep until noon. Best thing about the girl being with him was he probably wouldn’t hit Ben in front of her. Jack tried to make out like they were friends. The man had lying down to a science.

  He had married Ben’s mother when Ben was five and she was out of money. She cut hair for a living, but she had been fired. She had explained it all to Ben; she had apologized. “Jack’s a pretty nice guy, and he can provide for us.” She was proved wrong on both counts, but she was gone now, so what did it matter? Ben was stuck with the guy.

  “Upstairs. Now!” Jack shouted. The girl stiffened with that tone of voice, and her boobs stuck straight out. Ben had heard that same slurred anger too often to fear it, and besides, he knew the guy wouldn’t hit him in front of her. Not the first night.

  Ben turned off the water, dried his hands, and glanced at the girl. Her shirt wasn’t buttoned right. Her hair was tousled. Her lipstick was smeared, deforming her mouth. It repulsed him. He knew what they did down there in that room. He washed the sheets, after all. Every now and then he saw one of the girls walking around naked in the morning-the only good thing about them coming over. But that meant he saw the bruises too, and he knew only too well where they came from. Jack liked to pretend how he was so tough. He didn’t know that Ben occasionally heard him crying down there when he was all alone. Sobbing like a baby. If Ben hadn’t feared him so much, he might have found room to pity him.

  Jack and his blond bar girl went at it most of that night, Ben unable to sleep for all the noise. He was just drifting off when the headboard started slapping the wall again like someone beating a drum, and the girl with her moaning, and everything got faster until the headboard sounded like it was going to beat a hole in the wall. She cried out like he was killing her, and then it stopped, and Ben wondered if maybe he had killed her. He seemed capable of it. There wasn’t much that Ben would put past Jack.

  When morning finally showed its mercy by allowing the sun to rise, Ben got dressed and got the hell out of there before the trouble began. Trouble came with pain in that house. It was to be avoided at all costs.

  The southeast neighborhood where he lived was mostly black and poor. The houses were old and beat up, the cars parked outside them, not much different. He and his mom had lived better before Jack came along, though Ben didn’t remember much about those days anymore. He’d never met his real father.

  The roadside gutters were littered with soggy trash, and there was a smell like garbage because the stray dogs got into the black plastic bags every
trash day, which was Wednesday. Most of the houses showed chipped paint and carried moss-covered roofs half-rotten from the long wet winters. Occasionally a building was condemned, its residents evicted. It seemed to happen pretty much at random. He wasn’t sure where those people went, didn’t know what would happen if Jack’s house was condemned. He couldn’t think about it. He didn’t like to think beyond tomorrow or the day after. Next week seemed an eternity away.

  He climbed up the hill, the growling sound of a jet overhead, a hum of traffic from Martin Luther King Boulevard. The gangs were about the only thing Ben feared. They shot each other over stupid stuff. Ben kept to himself and walked fast. Once a kid had tried to recruit him to be a drug runner, and it was only through clever thinking that Ben had avoided the job without getting beat up for refusing. He had pulled out his glass eye, his left eye, and, holding it in the palm of his hand, had explained that with only one good eye he couldn’t see who was coming from his left, so he made an easy target. A real gross-out, the eye trick worked every time.

  The glass eye was the result of a birth defect-Peter’s anomaly-and though Ben wished he had two eyes like everyone else, the trick of popping out his glass eye came in handy every now and then. Like with girls. They screamed and ran the other way, which was just fine with him. Who needed girls?

  Except Emily. She didn’t count as a girl, even if she was one, technically speaking. She lived at 115A 21st Avenue East, a small purple house with dark blue trim. There was a six-foot-high metal globe of the world on her lawn, along with a plastic pink flamingo and a miniature Negro painted whiteface and holding a sign that read FORTUNES $10-TAROT-ASTROLOGY. There was a blue neon sign in the window that read YOUR FUTURE, YOUR PAST-AT LAST! There were white stars and pale blue moons painted on the purple siding. There was a flagstone path that Ben followed to the front door. He knocked twice rather than ring the bell. There was no car parked in the drive, so he assumed she didn’t have a customer.