Torch Song (2 page)

“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.

“Hey, Werner,” Charlie said as he ambled away, “I owe you. Next time you have a benefit, I'll come twice.”

Werner chuckled and kept walking.

A sprayer. Charlie thought of Pulaski in his barn, examining his sprayer, sniffing it, maybe photographing it. Constance put her hand on his thigh as he started to drive and after a moment he covered her hand with his. He wondered if she knew how bad this could get. When she squeezed his leg, he knew she did.

When they got home, Candy met them, demanding explanations in a raucous voice, her tail upright and quivering in indignation. Ashcan begged to be forgiven. Charlie eyed him moodily; that cat never had been able to shake his Catholic upbringing. In the kitchen, they found Brutus asleep on top of the warming oven of the wood cookstove. They ignored him; what it would take to break him of that habit would be having his tail catch on fire.

“The classic question now is, Do you have any enemies?” Constance said. She went to the freezer to contemplate packages and packages.

Charlie snorted. “Does a vulture have bad breath?”

She closed the door empty-handed. “I think three to six months would be long enough to consider, don't you?”

He waited. He had taken the papers from the envelope Werner had handed him.

“I mean before the first fire, of course,” she went on, gazing past him absently. “But I simply can't think of anything you did in that period that would bring a response like this.” She tapped her lips with her finger. “Maybe six months is too short.”

“Go for the last thirty years,” he said, and started to scan the six fire reports with the details that never made it to the daily papers. Now he simply looked them over; later he would read them thoroughly. February 10, 1992, Danbury, Connecticut: a movie theater. March 28, 1992, Middletown, New York: a strip mall, one shopkeeper killed. July 9, 1992, Pittsfield, Massachusetts: two warehouses destroyed, one watchman killed, one transient. September 4, 1992, Utica, New York: a paint factory burned down, a vice president killed. December 17, 1992, Norwich, New York: a high school damaged. March 10, 1993, Fircrest, New York: a nursing home. He tossed the reports on the table. “I'm going out to finish that damn wood,” he said.

She nodded. He could always think better if his body was in motion, or at the very least his hands. Now he would fool around with his trees and think. She read the reports and then began to pace the kitchen, the living room, and finally upstairs.

When Charlie came in, it was getting dark, and although the temperature had been dropping steadily, he was sweating. He sniffed: lamb, green beans, tomatoes, lots of garlic and onions. “Aye, and it's a good woman you are, Constance,” he said.

“God knows I try,” she said demurely. He swacked her bottom as she walked by him.

“What's all that?” he said, pointing to many papers on the table—faxes, from the looks of them.

“Shower, change, relax. I'm about to have a glass of wine, and when you come back all dewy fresh and fragrant, you can have some, too.” This time when he reached out to give her another pat, she caught his wrist, and he knew she could have put him down in the middle of the floor if she had wanted. Instead, she drew his arm around her waist and kissed him. She stepped back and shook her head; her nose wrinkled. “Just as I thought. You are in great need of a shower.”

Laughing, he went upstairs to shower.

“Now,” she said later, showing him the faxes while he sipped his wine. “I kept thinking of all the work you did last year, all white-collar crimes. Those men will never go to trial. They'll deal with their companies, pay fifty cents on the dollar, and retire.”

He nodded. He had come to the same conclusion.

“And I tried to think of all the people you've made angry around here over the years. A very long list,” she added gravely, “but not enough for anyone to retaliate this way. You have a knack at winning poker and you might make some of your buddies sore, but this sore? I don't think so.”

He nodded, keeping his expression as serious as hers, enjoying this.

“So I called Loretta Halliday,” she went on, startling him. “I got a list of people who were released from New York State or federal prisons for the three months before the first fire. Another long list, I'm afraid.”

Charlie stared at her, awed. He had planned to get that list, but it had not occurred to him to call and just ask for it. Loretta Halliday had been on the state corrections board for as long as he could remember, and she was a dragon. “What in God's name do you have on Loretta?” he asked. “I might want to use it someday.”

“Now, Charlie. I simply told her you received a threatening letter and refused to take it seriously, but that I did. Since she thinks men are such idiots, that seemed a logical approach. She was very cooperative.”