ERT was somewhere inside the park setting up a back line to net the escaping arsonist. Suddenly the entire effort seemed so futile to Boldt, so absurd. It was based on the assumption that Boldt’s house had been rigged with accelerant, as yet an unproven fact. He reviewed the logic, aware he might need it later to defend the decision to the brass. But the more he examined the thinking, the more he liked it. If the uniforms were presently being deployed, the sirens and the lab truck were only minutes from screeching to a stop in front of Boldt’s house-an act certain to dislodge the waiting arsonist, accepting the theory that the arsonist was indeed watching. Although he could make sense of it in his head, he wasn’t too confident how it would sound to a review board. He had convinced Shoswitz easily enough, but he and Shoswitz had a long history together, a working relationship, and the lieutenant had grudgingly come to trust his sergeant’s decision-making process. It didn’t mean that others would understand it. Not at all.
His current thought process was more clear to him: Thinking like a cop, attempting to retrace Branslonovich’s steps. He stopped and looked around, realizing what a dark night it was. He glanced back at his own house, seeing it differently for the first time-as a target. The arsonist would want a good view, and that seemed most clearly offered from up the hill, which explained the location of the parked animal control truck. Branslonovich had quickly discerned the importance of the elevation of the hill. If the arsonist didn’t care about seeing anything more than the flames, a position in the park would suffice. Boldt chugged up the hill, winded immediately, shoulders hunched, wondering how he had allowed himself to fall into such bad shape and vowing to do something about it. Sometime.
The arsonist would need a lookout, someplace either secretive-inside an empty house, perhaps-or right out in the open but with a convincing excuse to be there: electric lineman, telephone or cable repairman. Boldt quickly glanced up and scanned the area; he didn’t want to spend too much time with his head up, for fear of being seen and giving away his intentions. A pang of dread swept through him. If Branslonovich had gone around scanning the poles and roofs and windows, she might have given herself away. Perhaps, he thought, she was clever enough to have done so while calling out, “Here, kitty. Here, kitty.” Branslonovich had her share of smarts. Or had she, too, been drawn toward the park?
He climbed the hill a little faster. He had a bad feeling about this. He felt like calling out, Here, Branslonovich. Here, Branslonovich. The higher up the hill he climbed, the more houses he passed, the more inviting the park seemed. Just across Greenwood, dark, full of places to hide. Branslonovich might have felt this same thing: Why bother with the houses, or any exposure, when the park offered such sanctuary? Furthermore, went his reasoning, an animal control officer had every excuse to roam a wooded area. Boldt walked faster. Branslonovich was in the park. He knew this as a fact, however unexplainable, just as he knew his house was rigged to burn.
He dodged traffic, cutting across Greenwood, suddenly more hurried. He pushed himself faster and faster.
He entered the park at a run.
He heard her before he saw the sweep of her flashlight breaking through the stand of tree trunks. She was moving through the park, perhaps thirty or more yards ahead of him. Her flashlight was aimed high into the overhead limbs. He couldn’t actually identify her as Branslonovich, not at that distance, but he knew. She was on the arsonist like a bloodhound; Boldt could feel this as well.
“Hey! Are you the dogcatcher?” Boldt shouted, attempting to maintain a modicum of professionalism by maintaining her undercover status. “You looking for a Doberman?” She didn’t seem to hear him, his voice absorbed by the woods. He took a deep breath to shout loudly, but before that same breath escaped his lips, the ground immediately to her right erupted in a billowing column of purple flame. She had tripped a wire, perhaps, or stepped directly on a detonator.
The figure ahead of him ignited instantaneously in a bluish yellow flame, as did a nearby tree trunk. She spun once, arms held out, crying for help, a searing, painful cry. And then she seemed to explode. Yellow-blue pieces disembodied from the spinning creature, arching through the black night air like fireworks. As what was left of the body slumped forward and collapsed, the bark on the tree trunk exploded-sap combusting like fuel-punctuating the quiet night with what sounded like cannon fire. The concussion of the erupting flames lifted Boldt off his feet and deposited him onto his back, ten feet behind where he had been standing. He felt deaf, blinded, and as if his back had been broken in several places. Branslonovich issued one last bone-chilling cry; how this was physically possible escaped Lou Boldt as he lay on a damp bed of decomposing leaves, immobilized by the fall, his ears filled with the haunting wail of the detective’s final moment on earth.
In the distance, sirens.
Lou Boldt managed to get his hand on his weapon, thinking to himself that in all his career he had only fired it on three other occasions. He aimed straight up toward where the stars should have been and let off three consecutive rounds. With any luck at all, someone would hear it and find him, before the whole forest burned, and he along with it.
Cole Robbie saw her spin in a complete circle, an all-consuming plume of blinding light, as pieces of her shot out like sparks from the fireplace, streaming through the air like shooting stars. The cacophony in his earpiece distracted him, for the commander had clearly been wearing his night-vision goggles at the time, and the string of cursing that ensued poured over the airwaves. Robbie heard three live rounds, yanked the earphone from his ear, and broke into a run, thinking, Someone else is out there.
At that same moment he caught a flicker of a shadow to the left of the inferno and tentatively identified it as an object-a human form-moving away from the fire and indirectly toward him, off to his left. The image was there and then gone, the light of the fire so intense, so bright, that one glance induced temporary blindness-like a camera’s flash-and the resulting collage of shifting, slanting shadows turned the landscape into an unrecognizable, eerie tangle of sharp black forms, as if he were suddenly at the bottom of a pile of brush trying to look out.
He had played team sports in high school and junior college, and his resulting instincts moved him to his left in a line calculated to intercept the path of the human form he had spotted. A few strides into it he dropped all conscious thought, electing instead to turn himself over once again to the power and force that guided his life. He ran like the wind, free of his own misgivings, thoughts and calculations. As if to confirm the correctness of this attitude, he picked up sight of the moving form once again, heading right at him. He felt his hand reach down and locate his weapon without any such thought in his head. Then his hand released the stock and found the TASER stun gun instead-a weapon similar in appearance to a large handgun but one that delivered twenty thousand volts of electricity instead of bullets. The TASER had to be fired within fifty feet of the target-twenty to thirty was preferable for accuracy-as two small wires carried the charge to the inductor needles on the projected electrode. Once hit, a subject was knocked unconscious for a period of four to fifteen minutes by the jolt of electricity. He would take him alive; he would bring home a prisoner, not a dead trophy.
There was no sense of time, except that measured by the change in tone and color of the shadows thrown by the fire. The same hand that held the TASER found the small button on his radio transmitter. Robbie said breathlessly, “Position Three. Suspect sighted. Foot pursuit. Identify before weapons fire.” Whatever the real time, it all happened fast. In a mix of moving shadow, shifting light, and the running human form dodging through it toward an imaginary point directly ahead, Cole felt a part of the forest, comfortable and unafraid.