Beyond Recognition by Ridley Pearson Page B

He cleaned out the seeds and cut off the rind and served them on a plate. Lofgrin dug right in. He spoke with his mouth full. “I came to get those shoes of yours.”
    â€œHave you been up all night?” Boldt asked.
    â€œI went in at five and worked these impressions, and not because I love you. Your obsequious captain put me up to it. The shit is flying now that there’s a second victim. The media is blaming a serial arsonist. The match has been dubbed the Scholar.” He grimaced. Lofgrin, a civilian employee of SPD, was constantly put off by politics. He said, “You know how many ladders are sold in and around this city in any given year?”
    â€œNo idea,” Boldt replied, thinking: Too many.
    â€œMe neither.” The little man laughed, and when he did he squinted his eyes closed and shook his head as might a man about to sneeze. There was only one Bernie Lofgrin.
    Boldt bit into a slice of melon and waited for him to get to the point. Lofgrin had a way of taking his time.
    â€œYou wouldn’t have noticed it, neither did I, but the width between the pads on the ladder’s feet is significant. And we got good impressions of those pads, which serve as good strong fingerprints for us. Retail extension ladders, the kind you buy in hardware stores and discount houses, come in a variety of widths. Some manufacturers use twenty-four inches, some twenty-five or twenty-five and a half, depending on the tensile strength of the materials used—commonly aluminum or an aluminum alloy. All retail extension ladders are required by OSHA to have small pads, or feet, that grip the ground-level surface and help keep the base of the ladder from slipping. Each company goes with a slightly different grip pattern for those bottom pads, like tire treads in tire companies. What we’re looking at is a Werner ladder. And that’s significant, because it’s not your weekend chores ladder, your honey-do around-the-house kind of ladder. Werner manufactures wooden, aluminum, and fiberglass lines. The imprints you found are from the high end of their fiberglass line, considered a professional line: electricians, painters, that sort of work.”
    â€œFiremen?” Boldt asked.
    â€œNot fiberglass, no. It’s flammable. Aluminum is the ladder of choice for firefighting, steel alloy for the hook-and-ladders.”
    â€œAnd do we have a particular model we’re looking at?” Boldt asked. He knew Bernie well enough to know that he wouldn’t come with his gun half loaded; the man was just taking his time giving Boldt the good news.
    â€œIt’s a Werner twenty-four-foot fiberglass extension ladder,” Lofgrin said proudly. “Manufactured between July ’93 and August ’94. Sold, probably, into ’95. They changed the tread pattern and grip material in September ’94.”
    â€œDo we have any idea how many Werner twenty-four footers were sold in this area?”
    â€œNot a hard figure to get,” Lofgrin answered. “That’s your job.” He added, “It wasn’t many. It’s the top of their line, and in ’94–’95 they only had one wholesaler in western Washington.”
    â€œGood stuff, Bernie,” Boldt said.
    Training his bulging eyes onto the sergeant and slipping a curve of melon into his hungry mouth, Lofgrin said, “What, you think that’s all I’ve got?” Feigning a wounded air, he crossed his arms and leaned back in his chair. “O ye of little faith.”
    He passed Boldt a black-and-white Polaroid of the cast impressions made at the fire site.
    â€œImpressions are their own science,” he explained, elevating his own importance, as he did whenever possible, “and it’s anything but exact, I’m sorry to say. But, that said, we can make certain educated assumptions, given soil-compression ratios and water content. It takes a specific weight to effect a specific depth of