of odds and ends, books, music, furniture. Boldt owned over ten thousand LPs and about two thousand CDs. Every inch of wall space in the house not previously occupied contained music. Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of the LPs were priceless.
Each room through which he mentally wandered brought a tighter knot in his throat. His son had grown from an infant to a little boy in this house. Sarah had been conceived within these walls. His marriage had fully recovered here, resuscitated from the gagging spasm of its past.
If he could have gone inside, he would have taken the bronzed baby shoes belonging to his son. A photo album of their marriage pictures, another of Liz giving birth to Miles, and a video of Sarah’s entrance into the world. A Charlie Parker first pressing, and a pair of ticket stubs to Dizzy Gillespie and Sarah Vaughan. An eagle feather found in the Olympics, and a lock of Liz’s hair cut before the birth of their son. A blue bowling shirt that read, MONK over the breast pocket and THE BOWLING BEARS on the back; he had only bowled on Berenson’s team once, but the shirt was a keeper.
It was more than a house, it was his family’s history museum. The idea of losing it terrified him. It made him want to drive to the cabin and see Liz and the kids.
He prayed to God that the arsonist be caught.
The first man to reach the roof ridge of the house wore a fireman’s turnouts complete with hat and mask and carried a hands-free walkie-talkie that communicated with Lofgrin on the ground. Lofgrin and Boldt and the others- Bahan and Fidler among them-stood behind a fire line established on the sidewalk. The six adjacent houses had been evacuated and two patrol cars blocked the street from vehicle traffic. Four ERT officers had sequestered themselves in two of the evacuated houses, alert for signs of interest from the arsonist.
The roof man told Lofgrin, “Four stacks.”
Lofgrin looked over at Boldt and said, “I gotta warn you: we’re gonna find hypergolics. Why else go up the tree and watch the place, right? He was waiting for the show.”
“I’m a nervous wreck,” Boldt admitted.
“Think how Rick feels,” he said, pointing to the roof man. “That fuel goes and he’s got about twenty seconds to get off that roof before he’s three thousand feet up. “If he doesn’t jump, his ass is ash. No time for the ladder. No time for the walkie-talkie. He knows that,” Lofgrin added, answering Boldt’s curious expression. “You ever seen a guy take a running jump from a two-story building?” He answered himself. “Me neither. And I don’t intend to tonight, just for the record.” Into the walkie-talkie he said, “You go easy up there, damn it. Use the scope.”
The roof man was equipped with a fiber-optic camera about the size of a pencil eraser on a flexible aluminum cable about the diameter of a shoelace. His job was to lower the cable into each stack and report what he saw. Boldt looked on as the man gingerly crossed the roof between vent stacks. He knelt awkwardly and fumbled with some equipment.
“He’s nervous,” Lofgrin observed. “Good. I’d rather that than cocky.”
The roofman’s voice, made scratchy by the radio, reported, “Going down.”
“Nice and easy,” Lofgrin ordered.
Boldt looked up as the man fed the cable with his right hand, his left holding a Sony Watchman video monitor. “Two feet … three feet …” he reported.
Lofgrin told Boldt, “The cable is marked in inches, feet, and yards.”
“Four feet … five feet …”
“You know what I think?” Lofgrin asked rhetorically. “That’s a front stack. Front of the house. Unlikely he would rig that one. Too visible, right? If I’m him, I rig the back stacks and seal the front stacks. Less time on the front roof that way.”
His radio squawked. “Seven feet … eight feet …”
Into the walkie-talkie Lofgrin said, “Let’s try one of the back stacks, Rick. You copy that?”
“I copy,” the roofman reported.
“Back of the house is where the action is,” Lofgrin informed Boldt. “Count on it.”
Overhead a news chopper aimed a blinding light down on the top of Boldt’s roof, its cone sweeping back and forth, and isolated the man in the turnouts.
Lofgrin said, “Well, one thing’s for sure: You’ll never be invited to a neighborhood function again.”
The spotlight left the roof, scanned the yard, and lighted on Boldt and Lofgrin. A considerable amount of wind was generated by the blades, and the noise was deafening. Lofgrin waved it off, but it continued to hover above them. The roofman lost his balance because of the generated downdraft; he slipped on the shake roof but managed to reach out a hand and catch himself. Boldt glanced over to the parked patrol cars. Shoswitz was shouting into his radio handset while looking up at the helicopter. Boldt didn’t need to read lips to see how angry the man was. Thirty seconds later the helicopter gained altitude and the associated noise lessened, but the spotlight continued to jump between the roofman and Boldt and Lofgrin’s position on the sidewalk.
“I’m at the northernmost stack on the back side,” announced the roofman through Lofgrin’s radio.
“The kitchen,” Boldt explained.
Lofgrin said, “Go easy, Rick. This may be a live one.”
“Copy that,” answered the roofman.
Boldt could not see Rick working, and this bothered him. He heard him announce that he was feeding the camera into the stack, and Boldt could picture the tiny camera sliding down the black plastic vent; he could imagine the man keeping an eye on the Watchman while the fiber-optic camera with its tiny light disappeared down the tube.
“One foot …” the voice announced.
“Slowly,” Lofgrin cautioned. Boldt sensed in him an added worry, a heightened concern.
“Howdy hey,” the roofman said into the radio. “I’m showing a translucent membrane at the eighteen-inch mark.”
“Hold it!” Lofgrin spat into the radio. He turned around and waved one of his assistants over. She had a handsome face, was somewhere in her early thirties, and was clad in turnouts too big for her. She carried a gray plastic toolbox in her right hand, heavy, by the look of it. Lofgrin told her, “The kitchen. Use the back door. Take it exceptionally slowly, as we talked about. It will be in the vertical somewhere. Give me a distance readout from the bottom of the vertical. Got it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Okay,” Lofgrin said. “Go ahead.”
“Young,” Boldt said, as she hurried away from them, the toolbox dragging on her.
“They all look young anymore. She’s got a four-year-old. Husband works for Boeing. Maybe the biggest overachiever I’ve got. She begged me for this assignment. Despite the risk, despite the obvious danger, despite the fact that the bomb boys were jockeying for this work, she wanted to run one of the cameras. She’s the one who did the ventilation work over in the New Federal Building-you remember that camera work? Worked the thing up three stories and into the men’s room. Remember that? It was a narcotics sting. Busted a seventy-thousand-dollar cash gift to a dealer from Vancouver. That was Goldilocks. You want fiber optics up somebody’s butt hole without them the wiser, she’s the one.”
“Why send her inside?”
“We need to check the stack from below. Rick can’t head down through that membrane, so now we go from the bottom up. That should give us some idea how to neutralize.”
“Meaning what?” Boldt questioned.
“I see two options here. One is he trapped part A and part B in two different stacks. A thin membrane on the bottom, all the other stacks sealed off. Someone goes and uses a plunger, the membranes go simultaneously and the place goes up. The second option I see is both parts in the same stack. One atop the other, a membrane between. The advantage is you only have to break that bottom membrane. The point is, we don’t know what he’s done, so we sure as hell can’t go popping membranes.” He explained, “We’re prepared to siphon off liquid, or vacuum up a powder, but there’s a remote chance he’s done this a third way. Casterstein found evidence of a possible detonator. We know the guy was up a tree watching the place. What if that detonator is a pressure switch?”
“What if it is?” Boldt asked.
“In the case of these single mothers-Enwright and Heifitz-he watches until he’s certain the kids are gone.
