“He’s coming toward you.”
“Yeah.”
“But there’s more light.”
“Headlights. A car’s headlights,” he said, for he could see the image inside his head: it was in black-and- white, not color, and it happened quickly, and no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t slow it down. “He’s wearing a mask, I think. Plastic. A white plastic mask. Shiny, you know? Like a hockey goalie, maybe.”
“He wore a disguise,” Boldt said in a voice of disappointment. “Damn.”
The artist said, “A mask inside the pulled-up hood. Glasses over the mask. Hell of a disguise.”
The artist held up the sketch for him. It was just the guy’s head and shoulders, the parking garage a blur behind him. He had the sweatshirt up over most of his face, wore big dark glasses and had plastic-looking skin. The hat topped off the image. It was creepy to Ben how close that drawing came to real life.
“That’s him,” Ben whispered. He didn’t want to talk too loudly. The picture seemed real enough that the guy might hear.
43
Boldt thought of himself less as a public enforcer, more as a paid puzzle solver. Forensic evidence, testimony of witnesses, medical examiner reports, unforeseen events-all added up to a giant puzzle that the lead detective was supposed to solve. In the case of an ongoing serial homicide investigation, failure to solve the puzzle resulted in more deaths, the loss of innocent lives. It proved to be potent motivation. It robbed one of a private life, deprived one of sleep, gnawed at one’s self-confidence. Boldt disliked himself and felt himself a failure-he couldn’t even blame Liz for her affair, if it was real; he’d been consumed with work for months.
When he reached his hotel after questioning Ben and the clerk handed him a brown paper bag-and it wasn’t his laundry coming back-the sergeant experienced a pang of dread. His first thought was that it was a bomb. He carried it to his room carefully and spent five long minutes inspecting it. Perspiration breaking out on his brow, he dared to uncurl the top of the bag slowly and open it equally slowly. Inside was a note from LaMoia and a half dozen items purchased from a hardware store-items purchased by Melissa Heifitz on the same day as her fire.
Boldt clicked the TV on to CNN and went about examining the contents of the bag: a compressed air canister called E-Z Flush, rubber gloves, a sponge head to a mop.
The items from Enwright were in the dresser’s bottom drawer. He took these out and compared. Common to both groups were sponges and gloves. A bottle of Drano in the Enwright group, E-Z Flush in the other; a bottle of compressed gas to be used as a plunger to clear the stubborn drain. Boldt spun the device around in his hands. On the can’s back panel was a simple illustration of a sink and another of a bathtub. In his mind’s eye he recalled his own bathtub having trouble draining, and a moment later he placed it as on the night of his family’s evacuation.
Clogged drains! he realized. A common link between Enwright, Heifitz, and even himself!
He called Bernie Lofgrin at home. The lab man answered cheerfully. Boldt did not introduce himself, for Lofgrin knew his voice. He said, “What are the chances that the hypergolics, that the ignition system, is somehow related to plumbing, to the house plumbing? To clogged drains?”
After a long silence, Lofgrin said, “I’m thinking.” He mumbled, “Plumbing?” But Boldt did not interrupt. “Clogged drains?”
Boldt waited another few seconds and said, “One of the victims bought a New Age toilet plunger on the day she died. The other, some Drano.”
“A plunger!” Lofgrin shouted excitedly. “A plunger?” he repeated. “Hang on. Hang on!” Then he said, “Just hang on a second,” as if Boldt was prepared to interrupt. Boldt overheard Lofgrin calling out to his wife. Carol came on the line and asked about Liz and the kids, stalling while her husband busied himself. She sounded good. Carol was given to fits of depression but had been stabilized by some recently developed drug, and the word from Bernie was that she was “back to normal,” though Boldt and others of his friends had come to distrust Bernie’s assessment; in the last two years, Carol had been involved in two bad traffic accidents later deemed attempted suicides, these during periods when Lofgrin had been convincing others that she was stable. Bernie Lofgrin carried his own cross, same as anyone else-more than most, Boldt decided. Perhaps the man’s work was his best escape. Perhaps it explained why he was so damn good at it, so dedicated.
Lofgrin’s strained voice thanked his wife, interrupting her, and said, “Page two-fifty-seven.
It was a rhetorical question. Lofgrin had given Boldt two copies: one for home, one for the office. He’d done the same for several of the other detectives in Robbery/Homicide. Boldt told him, “No. I’m in my second week at this damn hotel.” His copy was in a small bookshelf that had been in his bedroom but had been moved to the front hall when the crib-currently occupied by Sarah-had entered their lives.
“Page two-fifty-seven shows a cutaway illustration of a house, revealing the plumbing. Everything from the water meter to a P trap. Left of the page is a stack vent. Right of the page, a waste stack. Drains from the toilet, a sink, a tub, another tub, are all connected by a common pipe labeled ‘branch.’ On either end of the branch is a vertical riser that passes through roof flashing to the outside air. The diagram shows two such risers.
“Draining water or waste creates a vacuum in the pipe,” Lofgrin continued. “The waste pipes need to be vented in order to allow draining. Think of a drinking straw with your finger over the top end. As long as you keep your finger tight-no venting-the straw holds whatever fluid is in it. But if you vent the straw by lifting your finger, the fluid drains out. Same in a house. Only the drains have stinky stuff in them, so the vents go out the roof, so you don’t smell them. Two of them, Lou. You get it?”
“You lost me,” Boldt admitted.
“It’s ingenious because it ensures the person living there is home at the time of the combustion. Two vent stacks: two parts to the hypergolics. Right?”
“What the hell, Bernie? The hypergolics are in the vent stacks?”
“I imagine so, yes. Seal the vent stacks with a thin membrane: wax paper? cling wrap? I don’t know. Place the two parts of the hypergolics above those seals. It might not take much-maybe just draining a full bathtub or running the clothes washer-and those seals break and run down the vent stacks. The two elements of the hypergolics make contact in the branch pipe. You’re looking for a way to burn the whole house, to destroy as much evidence as possible, and the plumbing gives it to you; it runs through the wall one floor to the next, one wall to the next. You open the bathtub drain or flush a toilet and suddenly every plumbing drain, every fixture in the house is a rocket nozzle.
“A plunger?”
Lofgrin exclaimed, “He can set the explosives without ever entering the house. Do it all from the roof.”
“He wasn’t even in the house,” Boldt mumbled. The method of planting the explosives had stumped him all along. He felt giddy. High.
“His cover. Sure. Wash a few windows, climb up on the roof, fill the vent stacks with the hypergolics. A matter of minutes is all. He takes off.” It only took Lofgrin a second to make the connection that Boldt also made. “Jesus, Lou. Your house.”
“I know.”
“Your vents could be set. We could have
“We need to evacuate the neighbors,” Lofgrin said.
Boldt told the man, “Consider it done.”
“Give me forty minutes,” Lofgrin requested. “I’m gonna need a big crew.”
Boldt wandered the sidewalk in front of his home in a daze, wanting to go inside and take everything with him in case Bernie Lofgrin’s attempt to defuse his house failed. A home became a kind of kid’s shoe box, a collection
