A flush of shadows, p.24
A Flush of Shadows, page 24
He took them to the living room, where he poked a smoldering log into life, added another one, and drew aside as both agents crowded closer.
Gorman was softer-looking than Pulaski, and younger. His face was pudgy, pink from the cold, and he took in the room and Charlie with darting glances that didn't seem to linger long enough for anything to register. He was blond, with thick dark eyebrows that looked pasted on.
"Anytime," Charlie said, settling into his morris chair. He motioned toward chairs, the sofa. Ashcan, the cowardly gray cat, had gone rigor mortis-stiff when they entered the room, had blended invisibly into the covering of an overstuffed chair. Now, when Pulaski approached, Ashcan moaned and fled. Pulaski pretended not to notice, but his lean face tightened and became sharper, as if he suspected Charlie had set him up for a fright. He took off his topcoat and tossed it on the couch, sat down, and stretched out his legs toward the fire. Gorman, still standing on the hearth, shrugged out of his coat and held it. They used the same tailor, Charlie decided, and the tailor had stock in charcoal worsted. Even the ties were the same inoffensive blue-gray.
Deliberately, Pulaski said, "We're conducting an official investigation of the arson fire at the Fircrest Nursing Home during the night of March tenth. Where were you that night?"
Charlie shook his head. "Wrong approach. See, first you tell me why you're here asking questions, why ATF is involved and not the locals, and then we'll see if I can give you answers."
The other one was mute, Charlie thought then. Actually, he thought dumb, then changed it, because no one in his right mind would suggest the ATF could do anything dumb at the moment, not with tanks and heavy artillery out in force in Waco. Gorman was watching him closely, not moving, not speaking. Charlie decided to ignore him. Instead, he watched Pulaski wrestle with an interior dialogue.
At last, Pulaski said, "I'm going to give it to you straight, Charlie. We looked you up; we know your record, your background, your years as an arson investigator, then homicide, everything that's public knowledge, and more. There are mixed feelings in the agency about you, your reasons for quitting on fires, where they say you were very good. Problem is, we got a tip three days ago, a woman from the nursing home who called to report that she saw a man toss something in a car trunk that night, minutes before the fire broke out. A white car. She got three of the numbers, and the computer came up with a match for your license. That's why we're here. Where were you that night?"
"My license and how many others have those numbers?" Charlie murmured. "She called you in Washington? Not Werner Kolb over at Fircrest?"
Pulaski glanced at Gorman before he answered. "Yeah, she called us."
"That's some savvy lady," Charlie said. "Course, you guys have made it big in the news department; that might explain her knowing about you. Got her on ice?"
Pulaski set his mouth in a firm line. "I'm asking the questions, Charlie. What about Wednesday night?"
"Here."
"With your wife, I suppose."
"I think I had a dancing girl in that night. You're sure the caller was a woman?"
This time when Pulaski glanced at Gorman, Charlie was watching to catch the signal, too. A slight shake of his head, easy to miss, easy to spot now that he was looking for it.
"Loosen up, Charlie," Pulaski said. "This is a preliminary, that's all. Someone calls in a tip, we check it out. You know that."
Charlie shook his head. "Uh-huh. Like the FBI checking out a tip on a local shooting. Give me a break, Pulaski. You got a whispery voice on the phone with a phony tip, you did a background check, and three days later here you are. You don't have the caller; you don't even know if it was a man or woman. What are the other dates you're interested in?" He was satisfied when Gorman's eyes widened, then narrowed.
"We haven't mentioned any other dates," Pulaski said altogether too fast.
Charlie stood up. "You'd better move a bit away from the fire," he said to Gorman. "Your britches will scorch there."
Gorman took a step away from the hearth. "They said you were quick," he said, breaking his long silence. His voice was thin and high. "You figured we're looking into serial arson fires?"
"I figured," Charlie admitted.
Gorman nodded, then, keeping his gaze on Charlie, he said, "Give him the dates."
Pulaski rattled off five dates, the first one a year ago in February. "Can you prove where you were on any of those nights?" he demanded when he'd finished.
"If all those fires started between three and four in the morning, probably not. Can you?"
"No one said when they started," Gorman said quickly.
Charlie was glad then that Pulaski was doing most of the talking; Gorman's voice was already an irritant. He shrugged and glanced at his watch, checked it against the mantel clock, and nodded. "Gentlemen, it's been interesting. Now I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to get the hell out of here. Chores to do, you know how it goes."
Pulaski got to his feet, crossed the room to pick up his coat, and put it on. "It isn't just arson fire; it's also murder. Four people have died, others injured, some of them seriously, including two firemen, millions in damages…."
"Will you consent to a polygraph test?" Gorman asked.
Charlie gave him a look of disgust. "No." He said to Pulaski, "You picked him too green. Toss him back out in Wyoming to ripen on brush fires a year or two." This time, Gorman's face flushed, and there was a gleam for a moment in Pulaski's eyes. "Come on, out the way you came in, or you leave your shoes here." He walked before them to the kitchen, out to the porch, and watched Pulaski put his shoes on, tie them. They left without another word; he watched until they rounded the side of the house, and then he went to the living room, where he continued to watch until they appeared in the driveway, got in a black Chevy, and drove off. Pulaski drove.
By then, Ashcan had come out from hiding, and Candy was in the living room sniffing around, first the hearth, then the chair where Pulaski had sat, the couch. Charlie watched the orange cat as she stood on her hind legs to smell the couch cushion.
Slowly, deliberately, Charlie opened his fists and flexed his fingers. Those sons of bitches, he thought, believed their cock-and-bull story.
Constance sometimes pretended that the community of Fircrest had built the recreation center just for her. It was not a big establishment as such things went, but it had a good pool, and a good gymnasium, where she conducted self-defense classes for women three times a week and twice a week worked out with several women who were almost as good as she was in aikido. Very satisfactory, she thought that morning outside the low, sprawling building. She felt extraordinarily good, as she usually did after a workout, and there were crocuses pushing up through a crust of snow at the edge of the sidewalk. The air was cold and the sky threatening, but the crocuses knew their business, knew when it was time to melt their way through whatever lay above them.
She pulled her scarf closer to her wet head and hurried to the car. She was starved, and Charlie would be hungry after wrestling with those trees all morning. She hoped he had spent the morning getting them out of her orchard. If he hadn't, she thought, grinning at the idea, she would nag until he did. He could be so stubborn. Oxtail soup, she thought then. She had some in the freezer. She was humming by the time she completed the ten-minute trip home. Snow lingered in the fields across from the house, under the evergreens in front, in sheltered nooks and crannies, but the air smelled of crocuses and spring.
All three cats met her at the door. Candy complained hoarsely, Brutus stalked about looking furious, and Ashcan looked as if he feared she might kick him. "Don't do that," she scolded. She had never kicked a cat in her life and by now he should know he was safe. She hung up her jacket and took her scarf to the kitchen to dry, walking through cats as if they weren't there; she stopped inside the kitchen door. Newspapers were scattered across the table and Charlie was scowling at them.
"You're looking for a garage sale," she said. Then she saw a headline: NURSING HOME FIRE. And he was as furious as Brutus, she realized. His eyes had that strange, flat agate look, and his jaw was tight, his back rigid. "What happened?"
"Sit down," he said, "and I'll tell you."
She forgot her hunger and sat at the table with him and did not interrupt as he told her about his visitors. Then she said, "Cy Gorman. Wait a minute." She went up to her office on the second floor. Charlie began to refold the newspapers. He was finished and had them back in the recycle bin by the time she returned.
"A forensic psychiatrist," she said, moving past him to get the soup from the freezer.
"Might have known," Charlie muttered. "A goddamn shrink. He looked like one, acted like one. No offense," he added darkly.
"None taken, since I'm not a goddamn shrink," Constance said. She was a psychologist, retired more or less, just as he was retired more or less. They were the busiest retired people she had ever heard of. She put a bowl of frozen soup in the microwave. She had made the soup on the woodstove, which even then had the house a touch too warm, but for thawing and reheating, it was microwave every time. She returned to the table and sat down again. "What are you going to do?"
"Nothing. They think they've got a case, let them prove it."
"Have you talked to Werner Kolb yet?"
He shook his head. "They've already got to Werner, told him to dummy up," he said.
"Probably, and if he stalls you, you'll know it for a fact and I'll get Marion to set up something." Charlie gave her a look and she shrugged. Marion had been in her class last year. "Did you see the expression on Werner's face when she put that football player down at the exhibition? He'll talk to you."
"To you maybe," Charlie said, and he knew he was simply being contrary, but he seemed powerless to stop himself. Talk to her, talk to him, same thing. He remembered the exhibition Constance and their daughter Jessica had put on; he would never forget that.
The microwave dinged, and Constance got up to stir the soup; she returned it to the oven, then brought out place-mats and bowls, a loaf of bread and butter. Charlie started a pot of coffee. Of course, he wasn't going to do nothing, he thought savagely, but damned if he knew where to start. Arson fires that went back more than a year. They had the manpower, the equipment, the necessary information. Same method each time? A letter of warning, or a gloat after the fact? A calling card left at the scene? It wasn't merely that they had all started around the same time of night, either; arsonists often started their fires between midnight and dawn. But something tied them all together, and they knew what it was. And if they had looked up his record, talked to people, they knew he wouldn't take this without fighting back.
"I think they are stymied and see this as an excuse to get you to work on their case for them," Constance said.
He wished to hell she wouldn't do that, apparently follow his line of thought, and even complete it. "Is it soup yet?" he asked coldly.
It was, and they sat down to eat and didn't talk now. Constance finished first. "Good soup," she murmured. Then she said, "If you have the dates, we can find out where the fires were from the computer database."
Charlie pulled his notebook out and opened it to the last entry, the dates Pulaski had rushed through. Constance studied them and then stiffened.
"Charlie, where is that letter you got last winter? You know, the threatening letter?"
He put down his spoon and left the table. He knew exactly where it was, in the file labeled "Threats." Not the same date, he thought, hoped, when he pulled out the folder and extracted the last item he had filed there. The letter was postmarked in New York City on February 11 of last year, the first date he had jotted down was February 10. He returned to the kitchen and put the envelope on the table between them. They both knew the contents: words cut out of a newspaper, pasted on a sheet of lined paper. There had been no fingerprints on the letter, and only smudges on the envelope. The letter said: "You will feel my pain."
Constance did not touch the letter; she looked at the postmark and then at Charlie. "I'm scared," she said softly.
He got up and went to stand behind her chair, put his arms around her. "Take it easy, honey," he said, and kissed the top of her head. Her hair was still moist and fragrant. "We don't know that it's connected. Some nut out there wanted to get my goat, that's all. How many letters like that do you suppose I have in that file? Dozens, starting way back."
She did not relax. "If someone's been planning this for over a year," she said, "time's on his side. We don't have a clue about what else he might come up with."
"Then we'd better get moving," Charlie said, and kissed her head again. "Enough of this lollygagging about. I'll go start on the computer."
She cleared the table, put the dishes in the dishwasher, and finally opened the envelope and read the message again. "You will feel my pain." It was connected. She knew it was. That had been step one. The tip to the ATF offices step two. Four people had been killed in the fires, many others injured. Suddenly, the house felt cold.
"Good heavens," Constance said when Charlie appeared later holding a printout with dozens of entries.
"Right," he said. "A fireman's job is never done." He had a map under his arm that he now spread on the table, and they began to locate the sites. At first, Charlie penciled them in with small x's, but after a moment Constance left to get a jar of dried beans; then they continued, placing a bean on the name of each town and city in the northeastern part of the country that had reported fires on the dates Pulaski had provided. Buffalo, a two-bean city; Poughkeepsie; New York City, too many to fit on the map; Middletown; Pittsfield… . After several minutes, Charlie straightened and grunted. Slowly, he began to remove the beans. He left four.
"September fourth, 'ninety-two," he said in a low voice. There were nine entries. After locating them all, he put a bean on Utica. "December seventeenth." Seven entries. He put a bean on Norwich, New York, and drew back to regard the map.
Six beans, six fires, and the most distant one—Danbury, Connecticut—was less than a hundred miles away. The beans might have marked a deformed wheel, with Fircrest in the center.
"I don't blame Pulaski and his crew," he said. "I'd have come here, too."
Constance made a note of the towns and then gathered up the beans silently. They would have to verify them, she knew, but no doubt the list was right: If you're making a noose, you make it tight enough not to slip off.
That afternoon, they drove over to the Fircrest Nursing Home. It was a three-story gray-stone building, built in 1889, a school originally, a prison for a short time, a government building during World War II, vacant for many years after that, and refurbished as a nursing home seventeen years earlier. The stench of recent fire was in the air. He hated that smell more than anything else he could think of.
Dense shrubbery would have screened a car from view here on both the first and second floor, he decided, driving slowly past the front of the building. From the third floor, only the top part would have been visible, no license plate, no trunk opening. On the side of the building he had already passed was a paved parking area, and beyond that were high evergreen trees. He drove around the other corner. Both sides of the building had columnar evergreens five feet from the stone, a screen for the inhabitants, allowing them to open windows, get some air, and still have privacy, but also blocking their view of the street. He continued to creep along the street to a drive that went in behind the building, no doubt a continuation of the other one that went to the parking lot Here a tall street lamp would have cast enough light, he thought, but again the shrubs and the angle indicated that no one from inside could have seen a license plate.
"You're not going in, are you?" Constance asked in her most neutral voice.
"Nope," he said. "Just wanted to see. When I get a lawyer, we'll come back and take pictures, prove a point."
She gave him a sharp look. "Have you figured out why anyone would try to burn down a stone building?"
He whistled softly and entered the driveway. He stopped the car at the center of the rear of the building and they both gazed at it. The back part had been expanded at some point, and the expansion had been made of wood, which was charred, and in some places burned completely away as high as the roof. The burn pattern formed steep, jagged peaks, like the stock market at its craziest. From here, they could see that the interior had been gutted.
Before Charlie shifted gears to start driving again, he saw in his rearview mirror an ancient blue Ford pull into the driveway. He turned off his motor and waited. The car pulled in close and Werner Kolb got out, came to his window. In his bulky jacket, he looked like a moving barrel.
"Charlie, Constance, how you folks doing? Thought I saw your car heading this way."
"It got away from you, didn't it?" Charlie said, nodding toward the building. "How the devil did it get up there so fast? Somebody take a blowtorch to it?"
"Pret near, I guess. We figure it was gas in a sprayer, a paint sprayer, or the kind you use for trees, something like that."
"Someone's living dangerously," Charlie muttered, thinking of gasoline under pressure. "The others like this?"
"Same pattern, far's they can tell. I'm not supposed to be talking to you."
"Figured that."
"Well, I told them they were barking up the wrong tree, but that's not what they wanted to hear. Told them how you come over to the station couple times a year, talk to the boys, give them pointers, all that, and they said that could be part of the pattern, keeping your hand in, irresistible urges or something. Told them if anyone's crazy around here, it ain't you."
"Where were the others?" Charlie asked.
Werner told him; it was the same list Constance had already written. "Gotta go," Werner said. "Marion's always complaining it takes me longer to go out and buy a jug of milk than it takes the cows to make it. See you around, Charlie." He started to move away, stopped, and drew an envelope from his pocket. "Oh, 'most forgot. You might want to look this over." He handed it to Charlie, waved to Constance, and turned to leave.
