“Better,” answered Joe Dartelli. All right was still a little ways off.
IF YOU LOVED
CHAIN OF EVIDENCE
, BE SURE TO CATCH
BEYOND RECOGNITION
, ALSO BY RIDLEY PEARSON.
AN EXCERPT FOLLOWS.
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 transparent 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 where 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.
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 here. 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, setting 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, aiming 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.
Thanks to:
Brian DeFiore, editor; Al Zuckerman, literary agent and editor.
Sheriff Walt Femling, Hailey, Idaho; Gary Mazone, Vernon Police; Asst. Chief Ward, Hartford Police Department.
Mary Peterson, Nancy Luff, manuscript preparation.
Special mention to: Jeramie Dreyfuss, Emily, Ben and Harry—for being there.
The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer: My Life at Rose Red
(writing as Joyce Reardon)
Peter and the Starcatchers
(co-written with Dave Barry)
Cut and Run
The Body of David Hayes*
The Art of Deception*
Parallel Lies
Middle of Nowhere*
The First Victim*
The Pied Piper*
Beyond Recognition*
Chain of Evidence
No Witnesses*
The Angel Maker*
Hard Fall
Probable Cause
Undercurrents*
Hidden Charges
Blood of the Albatross
Never Look Back
*features Lou Boldt / Daphne Matthews
W
RITING AS
W
ENDELL
M
C
C
ALL
Dead Aim
Aim for the Heart
Concerto in Dead Flat
S
HORT
S
TORIES
“All Over but the Dying” in
Diagnosis Terminal,
edited by F. Paul Wilson
“Close Shave” in
Murder Is My Racquet,
edited by Otto Penzler
C
OLLECTIONS
The Putt at the End of the World
, a serial novel
T
ELEVISION
The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer
(Movie, ABC TV, May 2003)
Investigative Reports: Inside AA
(A&E Network, June 2000)
Ridley Pearson
is a
New York Times
bestselling author of crime fiction (
Probable Cause, Middle of Nowhere
); suspense/horror (
The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer
); and children’s chapter books (coauthor of
Peter and the Starcatchers
). His forty-plus novels include
Undercurrents, Chain of Evidence
, and
The Body of David Hayes.
In 1991 he became the first American to be awarded the Raymond Chandler/Fulbright Fellowship in detective fiction at Oxford University. Ridley, his wife, Marcelle, and their two daughters currently divide their time between the Midwest and the Northern Rockies.