Blaze

“Too bad,” Blaze said. His throat felt as if as if someone had just fed him a spoonful of dust.

“Yeah, yeah, life sucks and then y’die.” He applied the brakes. They screamed like souls in pain. “You have to hit the ground runnin; sorry, but she stalls out in first.”

“Sure,” Blaze said. Now that the moment had come and gone, he felt sick to his stomach. And afraid. He wished he had never seen the driver.

“Say hi to your buddy when you see ‘im,” the driver said, and downshifted another gear as the overloaded truck swerved onto what Blaze assumed was Marah Road.

Blaze opened the door and jumped out onto the frozen shoulder, slamming the door behind him. The driver honked his horn once, and then the truck roared over the hill in a cloud of stinking exhaust. Soon it was just a sound, dwindling away.

Blaze started up Route 1 with his hands jammed in his pockets. He was in the exurban sprawl south of Portland, and in a mile or two he came to a big shopping center with stores and a cinema complex. There was a laundrymat there called The Giant Kleen Kloze U-Wash-It. There was a mailbox in front of the laundrymat, and there he mailed his ransom note.

There was a newspaper dispenser inside. He went in to get one.

“Look, Ma,” a little kid said to his mother, who was unloading kleen kloze from a coin-op dryer. “That guy’s got a hole in his head.”

“Hush,” the kid’s mother said.

Blaze smiled at the boy, who immediately hid behind his mother’s leg. From this place of safety he peered out and up.

Blaze got his paper and went out with it. A hotel fire had pushed the kidnap story to the bottom of page one, but the sketch of him was still there. SEARCH FOR KIDNAPPERS GOES ON, the headline said. He stuffed the newspaper in his back pocket. It was a bummer. While cutting across the parking lot to the road, he spotted an old Mustang with the keys in it. Without giving it much thought, Blaze got in and drove it away.

Chapter 16

CLAYTON BLAISDELL, JR., became the prime suspect in the kidnapping at 4:30 PM on that same gray January afternoon, about an hour and a half after he dropped his letter into the mailbox in front of the Giant Kleen Kloze U-Wash-It. There was “a break in the case,” as law enforcement officials like to say. But even before the phone call that came to the FBI number listed in that day’s story about the snatch, ID had become only a matter of time.

The police had a wealth of information. There was the description given by Morton Walsh (whose ass would be canned by his Boston employers as soon as the furor died down). There were a number of blue threads plucked from the top of the chainlink fence surrounding the Oakwood visitors’ parking lot, identified as being from D-Boy jeans, a discount brand. There were photos and casts of boot-treads with distinctive wear-patterns. There was a blood sample, type AB, Rh-negative. There were photos and casts of the feet of an extendable ladder, now identified as a Craftwork Lightweight Supreme. There were photographs of boot-prints inside the house, featuring those same distinctive wear-patterns. And there was a dying declaration by Norma Gerard, identifying the police artist’s sketch as a reasonable likeness of the man who had assaulted her.

Before lapsing into a coma, she had added one detail that Walsh had left out: the man had a massive dent in his forehead, as if he had once been hit there with a brick or a length of pipe.

Very little of this information had been given to the press.

Other than the dent in the forehead, investigators were particularly interested in two facts. First, D-Boy jeans were sold at only a few dozen outlets in northern New England. Second, and even better, Craftwork Ladders was a small Vermont company that wholesaled only to independent hardware stores. No Ames, no Mammoth Mart, no Kmart. A small army of officers began visiting these independent dealers. They had not reached Apex Hardware (“The Helpful Place!”) on the day Blaze mailed his letter, but it was now only a matter of hours before they did.

At the Gerard home, traceback equipment had been installed. Joseph Gerard IV’s father had been carefully coached on how to handle the inevitable call when it came. Joe’s mother was upstairs, stuffed with tranks.

None of the law enforcement officials were under any orders to take the kidnapper or kidnappers alive. Forensic experts estimated that one of the men they were after (maybe the only man) stood at least six feet, four inches tall and weighed in the two-fifty range. The fractured skull of Norma Gerard offered testimony, if any were needed, of his strength and brutality.

Then, at 4:30 PM on that gray day, SAC Albert Sterling got a call from Nancy Moldow.

As soon as Sterling and his partner, Bruce Granger, stepped into the Baby Shoppe, Nancy Moldow said: “There’s something wrong with your picture. The man you want has a big hole in the middle of his forehead.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Sterling said. “We’re holding that back.”