A Safe Place for Dying (21 page)

Authors: Jack Fredrickson

BOOK: A Safe Place for Dying

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The next morning, when the sun at last came out, I strung up my undies and called the roofer and gave him the go-ahead. I still didn't have a permit, but that only sweetened my rage. I needed a roof, but after two weeks of waiting for Gateville, I needed the gutemptying release of outright conflict even more.

I made sure to be working outside, two days later, when the roofing crew arrived. It took just seventeen minutes for Elvis to storm over. His skin had worsened.

I told him I was having the roof patched, not replaced. He demanded entry. I told him to get a warrant. He told me he didn't need one. I blocked the door. And so it went, on and off, for three days, while from above, the roofers tossed bits of my old roof from the top of the turret. They were ridiculous, those outdoor arguments in the hot August sun, but good for his complexion. By the time the roofers were done, his skin had noticeably improved. And I had gotten a few solid hours where my stomach wasn't queasy, worrying about Gateville.

Till finally took one of my calls toward the end of August.

“I take it you found D.X.12 residue by my shed?”

“We're still analyzing.”

“Have you tried to find out who might have put it there?”

He chuckled softly into the phone.

I asked other questions. He was polite. Yes, he'd sent out the computer pictures of Michael Jaynes. No, he'd not gotten any responses yet. Yes, it was conceivable there were other suspects, but Chernek and I remained the primes. No, he had no one else specifically in mind. Yes, the best course was to evacuate Crystal Waters. No, he couldn't enforce that. And no, he couldn't comment on the Chernek investigation; it wasn't his case.

“Bullshit to all of that,” I said.

“Absolutely,” he said.

And the last days of August dribbled away slowly, like water down a clogged drain.

Until early in the morning of August 30.

Twenty-three

They were battering down my front door, BAM BAM, BAM BAM, fast and loud in a one-two tattoo. I rolled off the cot, onto the floor, came awake. BAM BAM, BAM BAM, the pounding was closer now, as if men in heavy boots had gotten inside and were charging up the stairs, but it was the turret echoing, the metal stairs reverberating in sympathetic vibration with the timbered door.

The sky was black outside the slit windows. I rubbed at my eyes. The big red digital letters on my clock said it was three in the morning. Down below, the pounding went on: BAM BAM, BAM BAM. I grabbed my jeans and yesterday's knit shirt from the chair, pulled on my Nikes, and ran down the stairs.

“Stop it!” I yelled through the door. I swung it open and switched on the outside light.

Two fresh-faced young suits stood under the light, looking like choirboys hawking chocolates to send their youth group to Salt Lake City to sing in the nationals. Except it was three in the morning. And they were holding A.T.F. photo I.D.'s.

“He's here, sir,” the blonder of the two said into a cell phone. He
listened, nodded, and clicked the phone off with his thumb. “Please come with us, Mr. Elstrom.”

I took half a step back from the glare of the outside light. They both stepped forward.

“Am I being arrested?”

“Agent-in-Charge Till instructed us to bring you to Crystal Waters.”

The air went out of my lungs. “What happened?”

“Please come with us, sir,” Blonder said.

They walked me to the Crown Victoria. The other agent, the one with darker hair, opened the back door for me, and I got in. They sat in front. As Agent Blonder twisted the key, I started pressing with questions. Without turning around, Agent Other cut me off, saying their instructions were merely to drive me to Crystal Waters. Agent Till would speak to me there. We sped out of the dark of Rivertown in silence.

I didn't have to wait the whole ride. I saw it in the sky above the ridge from two miles away: a bright red glow pushing at the black of the night like blood spilling into ink. I thought of yelling at the agents to tell me what was going on. But I didn't. I knew. And as we got to the top of the ridge, I saw.

Flames punched high into the sky from inside the walls of Gateville, looking from the top of the ridge like a bonfire for giants. A hundred flashing red and blue lights, some still, some moving, ringed the inferno, down Chanticleer and out onto the highway. Fire trucks, ambulances, and police cars.

The inside of the Crown Victoria went white as headlamps came racing up from behind. A siren screamed. Blonder jerked the wheel and skidded onto the gravel shoulder as the fire truck raced past us. A hundred yards ahead, a Maple Hills police officer, lit up like prey in the glare of the fire engine's headlights, yanked a wooden barricade out of the way a fraction of a second before the truck flew through.

Blonder checked his rearview mirror before pulling cautiously back onto the road. Holding his I.D. out the window, he coasted down to the police officer and stopped. The cop examined it in the glare of his flashlight and waved us through. Blonder drove the rest of the way down the hill hugging the shoulder, and pulled off the road two hundred yards short of the marble pillars. He shut off the engine.

Fire seemed to engulf the entire western half of Gateville. Flames shot up fifty, one hundred feet, spiking jagged yellows and oranges high into the air. I looked for the greatest concentration of flames, the highest density of flashing red and blue lights.

It was right where Amanda's house was.

I pawed the door, fumbling for the handle. It was locked, from the front seat.

“Let me out,” I yelled.

Blonder started to say something, but a diesel fire truck pulled up next to us, blocking out his voice. I slapped at the window button. It was shut off, too.

“Let me out,” I shouted. I pressed my face against the glass, straining to see past the police cars and ambulances parked on the highway, past the uniformed police officers, white-shirted E.M.T.'s, and others in civilian clothes standing frozen on the blocked-off highway, watching the sky burn inside the wall.

The fire truck pulled away.

“That's my wife's house,” I yelled.

Blonder turned. “No, sir, that's the house across the street from your ex-wife's.” He opened the driver's door and got out. Other shifted on the front seat so he could watch both me and the conflagration outside. They weren't going to let me out.

Blonder crossed the highway and walked up to a Maple Hills policeman standing by the gate. Another Maple Hills officer sidled up to join them, his right hand resting lightly on the pistol holstered by his side. Blonder said something to the first policeman;
the officer touched the tunic radio clipped to his epaulet and spoke into it. A minute later, the officer motioned for Blonder to go in.

Just then, a sudden gust of fire shot up, and for an instant, the very top of the dark gray roofline of Amanda's house stood bright in silhouette against the orange sky, a few hundred feet from the center of the fire. I took a breath, relieved. The air coming in from Agent Other's open window in front was acrid and stank of a chemical fire.

I leaned forward on the backseat and tried to sound calm. “Can't you tell me any thing?” I asked Other.

Other didn't take his eyes off the fire across the highway. “Agent Till called for us to pick you up and bring you here.”

“How about we get out and stand by the car?”

He grunted a no. I gave up and watched the flames poke at the sky. For thirty minutes, they raged higher and higher, showing no signs of diminishing. Then Agent Blonder came out of the entrance, crossed the street, and opened my car door.

“Agent Till would like to speak with you now, sir.”

I went with Blonder across the closed highway to the gate. The Maple Hills officer stood aside, and we went in.

To the right, both sides of Chanticleer Circle were lined, bumper to bumper, with fire trucks, ambulances, Maple Hills police cars, and two dark Crown Victorias. We moved down the center of the street, past the lot where the Farraday house had been, to the curve.

To the left, a dozen firemen in yellow slickers wrestled big tan hoses like giant pythons, aiming streams of water into the flaming pile. The roof and the walls were gone, but I remembered the house. It had been one of the largest in Gateville, a redbrick, gray-roofed Victorian, with at least five bedrooms, a four-car garage, and a solarium off to one side. Now it was a mound of burning wood and smoking bricks.

People from the surrounding houses stood on their lawns, watching the firemen and the police. One pointed at me.

Farther around the curve, Amanda's house loomed in the glare of the fire, pulsing red from the flashing lights sweeping across its arched windows and massive walnut front doors.

Agent Till, wearing khakis and a beige button-down shirt, stood with Stanley Novak on Amanda's driveway. They were talking to a dark-haired young man in a Crystal Waters security uniform. Though the August night was hot, superheated by the fire, Stanley wore a flannel shirt. He looked cold.

Till spotted Blonder and me and motioned for us to come up. Stanley's eyes never left the face of the young security guard. Till turned back to the guard. “Tell me again,” he said.

The young guard rocked on his feet, side to side. “There was no warning. One minute everything's quiet as a graveyard, the next second there's a fireball in the sky, followed by a huge boom.”

“You're certain nobody ran out just before the explosion?” Till asked.

“Not through the main gate,” the guard said. “And we've got four men on perimeter, watching the walls. They didn't see anybody, either.”

Till turned to look at the fire across the street. “Damn it.”

“At least no one was hurt,” Stanley said.

The guard turned to look at him, his eyes wide. “The family was home, Mr. Novak.”

Till spun around. “You said the house was dark.”

“I meant they were asleep,” the guard said.

Stanley's pale face froze in the flash of the red lights. “No. Check the sheet. They went to Door County for the week, left us a phone number for their place up there.”

The young guard shook his head. “They came back, Mr. Novak. The father, the mother, and the two little girls.”

“Impossible,” Stanley said. “I made my last round at eight. They weren't home.”

“They got back a couple hours after you left. One of the girls
had the flu, so they came home early.” The young man's mouth trembled, and he looked away.

Stanley stared at the guard and then made a horrible churdling noise from deep in his throat. He pushed past me to run to two paramedics standing next to an idling ambulance.

“Did you get them out?” he screamed, grabbing one E.M.T. by the shoulders. “Did you get them out?”

The medical technician jerked his arms up and grabbed Stanley's wrists, yelling back that there was no chance of survivors. Stanley struggled, unhearing, trying to wrest himself free of the man's grip. Suddenly, he sagged and fell to his knees. “Shit, shit, shit,” he sobbed. “Shit, shit, shit.”

I ran over to him and put my hand under his elbow. “Come on, Stanley.” I tried to pull him up. He was dead weight.

Till and Blonder came over and, together, we half-carried, halfdragged Stanley away, down Chanticleer toward the guardhouse. He fought us, incoherent, alternately mumbling, then yelling for someone to go into the rubble. At the guardhouse, the guard at the console helped us get Stanley to his desk chair in the back office. Till and I sat down in the metal side chairs across from the desk. Blonder stood in the doorway, right behind me.

Stanley slumped in his chair and looked, unseeing, across the desk.

“Stanley? What did you mean about the family being not supposed to be home?” Till asked.

Stanley's face tightened. He turned and reached for a clipboard hanging on the cinder-block wall behind him, moving his arm like it weighed a hundred pounds. “We have this sheet,” he said in a slow, dull voice. He took the clipboard down and dropped it onto the black plastic desktop. “The Members tell us when they'll be gone, so we can keep extra watch â¦” His voice faltered.

“They were dead at the first blast, Stanley,” I said. “The paramedics couldn't have done a thing.”

Stanley looked out the window, towards the inferno at the west end of Chanticleer Circle. His face was slack, devoid of expression. “Bastards,” he said.

I looked at Till, wondering if they had somehow learned that more than one person was involved. Till's face was a blank.

“Let's give him some time, Elstrom,” Till said, standing up. I followed him out of Stanley's office. He led me to a quiet space by one of the pillars. Blonder came along, five feet back.

Till turned around. In the glare of the entry lights, I wondered how old he really was. Whatever his age, by the depth of the lines etched in his face, the years had been hard. I didn't want to imagine what it must be like, trying to sleep with a head full of crazies carrying bombs and guns. It took far less than that to send me up to the roof of the turret in the middle of the night.

“Where were you last night, Elstrom?”

“Asleep. Ask your boys.”

Till looked past me at Blonder. “You think he was asleep?”

“Come on, Till.”

“I don't know, sir,” Blonder responded. “Mr. Elstrom spends a lot of time on his roof in the middle of the night, and we can't really see him up there. He could have been awake.”

“Watching the sky, waiting, Elstrom?”

“Jesus, Till.”

“But he'd been inside all night?” Till asked, still looking at Blonder.

“There's only the front door. We had that covered,” Blonder said.

I stepped in front of Blonder so Till would have to look at me. “What are you saying?”

Till looked at me. “Like I told you before, motive and means. You've got both. You're broke. You have a real attitude about this place. And you were left alone in your ex-wife's house for almost a month before getting tossed out. You had plenty of time to plant a few bombs.”

“We've done this before, Till. It's just as weak the second time around.”

He shrugged.

“That's why you brought me here?”

“It's not just my gut that likes you, Elstrom. My head does, too.”

Blonder's breath tickled the hairs on the back of my neck. He'd moved closer, ready to snap handcuffs on me. I moved a step to the side.

“You're grasping, Till. You can't find Jaynes, you can't make a case against Chernek, you won't look for anybody else, so you're aiming at me.”