Beyond Recognition

Subconscious versus conscious. Dream versus reality. At all costs, she would never allow it to come back to life. She could not afford it. And so it went unmentioned. And so it ate into her at times like this, wormed into her like a bug trapped inside her ear and turning toward darkness instead of light. She lived with this darkness. She had even come to believe she had tamed it, which wasn’t true and was probably the most dangerous lie that she told herself. Her conviction remained in living with it rather than confronting it. The hypocrisy of her position was not lost on her; she was not that far gone. But there were times like this when she realized she was close.

When the devil possessed her, all else was lost. Gaps in time. Sometimes minutes, sometimes half an hour or more: a form of short-term amnesia, where she sat in a trancelike state. One day of her life, eleven years earlier, and still it managed to overcome her at times, force her to relive each dreadful, terrifying minute.

The images came to her in black-and-white, which she had never figured out. Snapshots, but with blurred motion to them: the gloved hand-the smell of him! — the pain as she was shoved into the car’s trunk…. At times vividly clear, at times disjointed and hard for her to see. Like flipping through the pages of a photo album too quickly.

Perhaps it was the privacy of her knowledge that prevented her from sharing it. Perhaps it was that no one, not even Owen Adler, was that close to her. Or perhaps she didn’t want to give it up. This thought concerned her most of all. Why hold on to such a thing? Why protect the horror? What sickness accounted for such behavior?

She caught him out of the corner of her eye. She protected her feelings for him as well. No one knew. It was their secret. Theirs to share, but never with others. And who had such answers? Who could possibly understand? Her heart still beat furiously when he passed in the hall, when she heard a Scott Hamilton cut and was reminded of him. He wasn’t particularly good-looking-although to her he was; he didn’t hush a crowd when he entered a room. He was an observer. He blended in. He was a student: of people, of behavior, of music, science, the arts. He was better at math than anyone else, and yet no one knew this of him. He could name the key of a song within seconds. He could remember the page number of a particular line he had read, a caption, a photograph. His eyes saw things before the techies ever uncovered them. He noticed things that no one else noticed and wasn’t afraid to mention them, but never in a bragging way. “You’re wearing a new scent.” “You cut your hair.” “You look tired today. Anything wrong?” He could tell a story and hold her captivated, regardless of its importance. And yet, around the building, he moved fairly unnoticed. No one seemed to know much about him, despite his twenty-odd years there. They talked of him, religiously sometimes-absurdly so. But no one noticed.

People had noticed her all her life. It was just something she lived with.

“Interrupting?” he asked.

Considerate. Humble. Cautious. Apprehensive. All that knowledge chiseled into him, like a figure cut of granite, and yet none of it showing. He couldn’t dress himself no matter how hard he tried. Missed buttons. Stains. Five-o’clock shadow for two days at a time. Disheveled didn’t do him service. Marriage didn’t help. Scuffed shoes. Knotted shoelaces. Hair uncombed. No one could change him. They could share time with him, be a part of him, but not change him. She envied Liz her chance and felt angry at times at how she had passed up the opportunity because of her own ambitions. Lou Boldt needed someone to nourish him, to draw out the genius, to stimulate. Liz missed so much of this in him. If only things had been different….

“No,” she answered. “Never.”

“New flowers,” he said.

“Yes.”

“And what is that, a Wonder Bra?”

She blushed. It was, in fact.

“You’re the talk of the bull pen.”

“And what do you think?”

He sat without invitation. “You don’t need it. Throw it away.”

“Okay.”

“Just like that?” he asked, surprised.

“Yes.”

“What does Owen say?”

Owen hadn’t noticed, but this wasn’t something she would share-even with him. “It’s under consideration.”

“Lucky Owen,” he said.

“Lucky Liz,” she fired back.

“Oh, yeah, lucky Liz,” he replied in his best self-deprecating tone. The trouble was, he believed it.

“How long since you washed those khakis?” she asked, knowing she was perhaps the only person from whom he would tolerate such things.

“Too long?”

She nodded.

“Yes, dear,” he mocked. He glanced down at himself, like a child looking for the problem. He said, “What’s up?” She had asked for his time.

“You’re aware that Shoswitz is hanging you out to dry for this?” she inquired.

“So what’s new?”

“He uses your name in every press conference, spouts fire and brimstone about how this killer will be caught and brought to justice. How you’re the one to do it, to bring him in. God, he makes it sound like something from a spaghetti Western. Truthfully, I don’t like it one bit. It makes you a potential target.”

“Now, Daffy-”

“It does, I’m telling you. This is my field, not yours, not Shoswitz’s. You don’t taunt a person like that; you don’t offer up targets. Listen, if the Scholar’s attacking a particular kind of building, or if he offered to sell these women aluminum siding and they declined, that’s one thing. But if he’s focused on Garman, if this is about revenge, if that’s his mind-set, Shoswitz is wrong to build you into a gunslinging bounty hunter. These guys operate on hair triggers, Lou. He could switch targets like that.” She snapped her fingers.

“What’s done is done,” Boldt replied. “Shoswitz only takes credit, never blame. It’s what preserves his job, his position. It’s what turns me off of ever wanting to take a desk here. You have to know how to play the game, and frankly it doesn’t interest me.”

“Thank goodness,” she replied. “I’m going to speak with him,” she declared. “Tell him to stop it. Just so you know.” She knew he wouldn’t argue with her; he chose his battles carefully.

“Melissa Heifitz,” Boldt said. “Dixie confirmed it this morning. Dental records. They found five teeth in the ashes. Two of them are confirmed as Melissa’s. Twenty-nine years old. Widowed mother of one. Husband was a construction worker, cement. She was a bookkeeper for a professional building up on Eighty-fifth. Doctors and dentists. No connection that we can see to Dorothy Enwright. A nice looking woman,” he said, passing her the driver’s license photo. “Parents live in Lynnwood. A sister in Portland. One very normal life abruptly brought to an end.” She could hear the knot in his throat. He took every victim on as a member of his own family. It made him unique. Perhaps it explained his brilliance, but it made him vulnerable as well. He said, “You know they used to burn people at the stake.” He left it hanging there for her.

“Do you see it?” she asked him, the driver’s license photograph still in hand. “The coloring? Even the shape of her head?”

“What are we talking about?” Boldt inquired, sitting forward.

Daphne craned herself over her desk and fingered through a stack of manila file folders. She extricated one and opened it. She passed Boldt a bad photocopy of a snapshot of Dorothy Enwright. “How about now?” she asked.

“Oh, shit,” said the man who rarely cursed.

“I think we can rule out the structure as the target. I think we can let Garman off the hook. There’s a specific look to his victims: dark hair cut short, thin face. He’s chosen death by fire-”

“Which is ridiculous,” Boldt interjected. “There are a dozen easier ways to kill someone.”

“Not ridiculous,” she corrected, “symbolic. The fire holds some kind of symbolism for him, or he wouldn’t go to all that trouble. Right? It’s important to him that they burn. Why? Because of the image of Hell? Because his mother intentionally burned him as a child? Because she’s unclean and he’s attempting to purify her?”

“You’re giving me the creeps here,” Boldt said, crossing his arms as if cold.