Enwright’s it was Ezekiel twenty-four, twelve:
“This guy has fried his circuits,” LaMoia said, annoying her.
“The anger is directed at a woman. That helps us.”
“You, maybe,” LaMoia said. “Doesn’t help me any.”
Boldt and LaMoia both had pine sap smeared on their clothing, their hands, and their faces. Locating the carved quotations had been time consuming, but easier than Boldt had expected; they had isolated the highest ground near the two victims’ homes and had looked for the tallest trees and, of those, the easiest to climb. Between them, they had climbed a total of eight trees, two with a view of Enwright’s and six with a view of Heifitz’s. LaMoia had found both quotes.
“What’s of interest to me-to us-is not only the quotes but the confirmation that this individual watched his fires or, at the very least, had a view of them. He’s a fire lover. That’s consistent with what we’d expect.”
“Or he triggered them from up there,” LaMoia suggested. “Quarter of a mile with some altitude,” he reminded. “Even a bunch of the shitty hobby-type radio control devices would work at that distance.”
“And he was carrying some kind of explosive accelerant on his person,” Boldt contributed. “To be used just the way he used it on Branslonovich, I assume.”
“Or as a distraction,” LaMoia suggested. “A diversion, if necessary.”
“So he’s a planner,” Daphne said, “which we already knew. He’s voyeuristic, which works with what we know of arsonists. But what comes as a surprise are these biblical references. The earlier use of poetry suggested an intellectual, college educated, well read; the use of biblical references is typical of a different psychology, a more pathologically disturbed individual.”
“The God squad,” LaMoia said, well aware of Daphne’s aversion to such terms. “A fruitcake. A nuthatch. I knew it all along. I said so all along, didn’t I, Sarge?” He smiled thinly at the psychologist, mocking her. Despite their friendship, LaMoia and Daphne continually butted heads on matters of the criminal’s psychology.
“Where’s it leave us?” Boldt asked, ignoring LaMoia’s outburst and hoping the pair of them would leave it alone. The discovery of the quotations, the physical carving of the bark, had humanized the killer for Boldt. Along with the ladder impressions, he had Liz’s image of a thin man dressed in jeans and a dark sweatshirt. With the killer increasingly defined, so was the urgency within Boldt.
“The third poem, the one received yesterday,” Daphne said, “was Nietzsche. This one was accompanied not by melted plastic but melted metal.” To Boldt, she said, carefully and tactfully, “If you hadn’t made your discovery last night, perhaps we wouldn’t know the significance of the substitution of metal for plastic. And if Bernie Lofgrin’s identification crew wasn’t so consumed with working up evidence, they might have time to check the metal for us, but I know what they’ll find anyway, so it really doesn’t matter. Remember as a kid,” she asked them both, “the pieces you moved on a Monopoly board? The hat-”
“The car!” LaMoia exclaimed.
“Metal,” Daphne answered. “Aluminum? Pewter? Doesn’t matter. The message is simple: The metal pieces were the players.” To Boldt she said, “You’re a
“Damn!” LaMoia gasped.
She had warned Boldt that he might be targeted, but neither of them brought it up.
She said, “What’s of significance here is not only that he had the wherewithal to target the man running the investigation but the determination to see it through to fruition. Your family was in your house,” she reminded him. “Would he have gone through with it if he’d had the chance?” She loved such theory. “He torched the two women only after they were alone, without their children, which is also why we assume he watches the houses prior to detonation. He doesn’t want to kill any kids. That’s significant. That’s something I can run with. He has a conscience, Lou, which, quite frankly, makes him all the more dangerous. No nuthatch.” She said this derisively to LaMoia. “Worse, the decision to take out the lead investigator indicates to me a man with a bigger plan, someone who needs more time, is willing to take a chance to buy himself more time. Why?” she asked rhetorically. “To complete some larger goal? Kill more women? Burn more houses? Who knows? But more. Something more.”
Boldt felt restless. He got up and paced the room. A monster, he thought, no matter what she called him.
“You get like this,” LaMoia said to her, “and you give me the weebees. You freak me right-the-fuck out. You’re guessing, right? Because it doesn’t come off like that. It’s weird, the way you get.”
“Educated guessing,” Boldt clarified for her. He didn’t want to tell her that he too felt an added urgency. Was it that the cornered animal strikes out? He wasn’t sure. But it bubbled down inside him like something bad he’d eaten.
“My advice,” she said, “is that we get cranking on every damn aspect of this case we can. We pull manpower, whatever it takes.”
“I’ve been putting in sixteen-hour days,” LaMoia complained. “I’ve got a shitload of stuff to go over. I’ve got sap in my hair and pine needles down my pants. Don’t tell me to get cranking. I thought you were going to produce some witness, this kid of yours. What about it?”
“Easy,” Boldt chided. “For two people with such mutual respect, you sure have a weird way of showing it.”
Daphne bristled at the detective. “I’ll get the witness,” she declared harshly. “There were other considerations at stake.”
“I’m sure there were,” LaMoia snapped.
“Children, children,” Boldt soothed.
Daphne slid back her chair and grabbed her paperwork. “I’ll get the witness,” she repeated to LaMoia. She stormed out of the conference and shut the door.
“Proud of yourself?” Boldt asked his detective, who looked smug.
“Damn right,” LaMoia answered. “When she gets pissed off her nipples get hard. You ever noticed that?”
“Cool it, John. That’s enough.” Boldt hated playing schoolteacher. He decided to call LaMoia on his claims. “What’s all this ‘stuff you say you have for me? Anything useful?”
“Sarge, it’s
“I think you’re full of shit half the time,” Boldt said angrily.
“Yeah. True enough. But what about the other half?” He held up his detective’s notebook.
Boldt broke down and grinned. LaMoia had a way with him. “Go on,” the sergeant encouraged, “I’m waiting.”
“First thing is these ladder receipts. We’re actually getting somewhere with this scanner stuff. It’s taken a little time to get the bugs out, but yesterday-before all the shit hit the fan-we finished the scanning and dumped the data into an indexing engine, and we culled over eighty hits: eighty actual transactions of a Werner ladder being bought, complete with credit card or checking account number.”
It felt like old news to Boldt, though he didn’t say so. He had sat in that tree in the very spot the killer had sat, his wife had talked briefly to the man; he didn’t want to hear about tracing back receipts for ladders, and yet he understood the importance of such evidence. They needed names, addresses. If LaMoia produced them, as he claimed he could, Boldt was interested. Until then, he felt like telling his detective to keep it to himself. But he understood well the need to voice one’s accomplishments, no matter how small. Any detective was left defeated more often than not. Any win was worth a little applause. “That’s great,” Boldt said, attempting to sound enthusiastic.
“Tomorrow or the next day I should have the names that belong to those account numbers. We run the list by our military friends, we use the computer to compare it against the fire department’s employee roster, present and past, and maybe we get a break. Stranger things have happened.” He waited for Boldt to say something and, when he didn’t, asked, “You okay, Sarge?”
“Fine.”
“This thing shook you up. I can see it.
