Fire Season (16 page)

“Orr knew a lot of tricks,” Wells said, “but he wasn't motivated by money. He just liked to watch it burn. He liked to hurt people, too.”

“Are you suggesting we're dealing with someone like this Orr fellow?” Gault said.

“You'd better hope not,” Mancini said.

Coffin felt a bit woozy. The ladies' room was starting to feel very small with all of those people in it. A cool sheen of sweat had formed on his forehead.

There was a soft knock at the door, and Lola pulled it open.

Arlene, Coffin's secretary, stood in the hallway. “Oh, look,” she said. “A party.”

“Arlene,” Coffin said, after a second. “Were you looking for someone?”

“I'm looking to see a man about a horse,” Arlene said. “There's a fellow with a very large drill in the upstairs ladies' room. Call me old-fashioned, but I didn't feel comfortable going in there.”

They all filed out of the ladies' room, waited for Arlene, and then filed back in. When Lola had shut the door and leaned her back against it, Gault cleared her throat. “All right, tell me, gentlemen, who are we looking for?”

“White male,” Wells said. “Early twenties. Probably unemployed. Probably doesn't have a girlfriend—”

“Or boyfriend,” Mancini said.

“Most likely not in the market for a boyfriend, if he fits the profile,” Wells said, “and so far he does. Pyros almost always identify as straight, although in the old days they were generally typed as latent homosexuals.”

“Who wasn't?” Kendrick said.

Wells looked up from his notes for a second, then went on. “He certainly fits in terms of the types of fires he's setting and the order he's setting them in,” Wells said. “There's clear escalation. Although the church is a weird touch.”

“How so?” Kendrick said. “If you're going to set fires, you might as well set fire to a church as anything else, no?”

“But why St. Mary's?” Coffin said. “Why the Episcopal church? He didn't burn down the Unitarian Meeting House—there you'd have an obvious antigay hate crime. And he didn't burn down St. Peter's, so it's not about lapsed Catholic rage. Why would anybody hate Episcopalians? It's like he's trying to make it
look
random.”

“Which could be cover for a commercial arson,” Wells said.

Mancini rolled his eyes. “Could this get any more circular?”

“A hate crime against the whole town,” Gault said. “That's what it seems like to me.” She sighed. “I used to love sitting in that church on Sunday, looking out at the harbor.”

Coffin nodded. “He's certainly trying to get our attention.” He paused for a second. “There's another thing that separates him from this Orr guy.”

Mancini rolled his eyes. “Really, Coffin? You're an expert on John Orr now?”

“He's right,” Wells said. “There's a big difference, for now at least.”

Mancini held out his hands, palms up.
Well?

“Our guy hasn't set fire to an occupied structure,” Wells said.

“Yet,” said Coffin.

“Yet?” Gault said. “
Yet?
Is that supposed to be the
good
news?”

Coffin's heart skipped a beat, then another. He wondered for a second if he was going to have a heart attack—not a good thing in Provincetown, the closest emergency room was an hour away by car. He took a deep breath and his heart started beating normally again. “The good news is that we may have him on videotape,” he said. “We've been shooting video of the onlookers—if he fits the profile, he might be in the crowd. Since Sergeant Winters saw him from the back last night, we might be able to pick him out based on his height and build.”

“So then all you need is an ID and you've got your guy,” Mancini said, waving both hands in the air—
hallelujah!
“Easy, right?”

Lola raised her chin a bit. “Two problems with that,” she said. “First, our guy was wearing a hooded sweathshirt last night. Hood up. I didn't get a look at his face. He's a white guy—I saw his hands—a little less than medium height, maybe a little heavier than medium build.”

“Like half the Cape,” Coffin said.

“I couldn't pick him out of a lineup at this point,” Lola said. “And what I've seen of the video is pretty low resolution.”

“Lighting is always such a problem,” Kendrick said.

Coffin nodded. “We'll take a good look at the video this morning and see if anybody in the crowd matches up.”

“And the second problem?” Gault said.

“There are plenty of people in town who might not want to be videotaped by the cops for reasons that have nothing to do with arson.”

“Seriously, Coffin?” Mancini said. “You're gonna hit a cop with a brick because you've got an unpaid parking ticket?”

“Maybe you've got warrants that'll get you sent back to Framingham or Walpole. Maybe you're on parole and you've got a gun or a bag of weed in your pocket.”

“Okay, Coffin,” Mancini said, “you've got a lot of maybes. I get it. But just to humor me—get an ID on the fucking sweatshirt guy, okay?”

Kendrick raised an index finger. “About your headless body—or bodyless head, or whatever it is.”

“That second thing,” Coffin said.

“What are the odds it's connected to the fires?”

Coffin thought for a minute. “For now I'm operating on the theory that they're not connected. But obviously we don't know anything for sure.”

Kendrick looked at his watch—a big Casio G-Shock. “Well,” he said, “this was fun. I'm starved—anybody want to get a bite?”

“Careful what you wish for in this town,” Mancini said.

“That's right,” Gault said. “Watch out!” She bared her teeth and growled.

“She's a little defensive,” Coffin said. “You can't blame her, really.”

*   *   *

“Are you okay, Frank?” Lola said, once they were back in his office. “You were starting to look pretty green back there.”

“Did I mention I'm a little bit claustrophobic?” Coffin said.

Lola shook her head. “It's been a tough twenty-four hours. For you and me both.”

“I wish this guy would set fires in the daytime,” Coffin said. “This up-all-night stuff is killing me.”

A figure swam into view on the other side of the frosted glass panel in Coffin's office door. The glass still had the former police chief's name painted on the outside:

PRESTON BOYLE

CHIEF OF POLICE

The door opened and Mancini stuck his head in. “Got a minute, Coffin?”

“For you? Anytime.”

Mancini stepped into the office, closed the door, and flopped into one of the leather guest chairs. For the time being, the banging out in the hallway had stopped—instead there was the sound of energetic drilling, coming from somewhere under the floor.

“Jesus Christ,” Mancini said, rubbing his temples. “What is it with this fucking town?”

“It's all the gay,” Coffin said. “It makes people crazy.”

Lola stifled a laugh.

“Very funny, Coffin,” Mancini said.

“How's Mrs. Mancini?”

“Current, or ex?”

Coffin shrugged. “You pick.”

“Ex is pissed off. Current is expensive. Are we done now? Can we talk about your head?”

“It's not
my
head,” Coffin said. “It's Willoughby's head.”

“It's your head,” Mancini said. “Until we get the DNA results back from Branstool's woodshop, anyway. Which could take a while.”

Coffin closed his eyes. “How long?”

“Since the last round of budget cuts they're down to two DNA technicians. They're saying the backlog is six months to two years.”

“Wonderful,” Coffin said.

“I'll try to get them to expedite, but you know how it is.”

“You realize we're sort of busy out here.”

Mancini held up a hand, like a traffic cop stopping traffic. “Talk to the hand, Coffin. Look, based on my experience of this place I'm gonna go way out on a limb here and guess that Branstool was mixed up in some kind of creepy love triangle. Somebody got jealous and the rest is history.”

“How many people do you think it would take to hold you still while I cut off your head with a table saw?” Coffin said.

“So they drugged him. Or held a gun on him.”

“Any chance it was a robbery?” Lola said.

“The house was immaculate. No indication of robbery—but I'll go back out in daylight and take another look. You never know.”

Coffin's phone bleeped. It was Arlene.

“Doris Santos on line one, Frank,” she said. “Says it's urgent. I told her you were in a meeting, but she sounds pretty upset.”

“I'll take it. Thanks, Arlene.” Coffin held up the phone, looked at Mancini. “Was there anything else?”

“Nah,” Mancini said. “I was thinking about asking the two of you to please try not to get beat up, drowned, stabbed, shot, or hit in the head with a brick for a change, because of the considerable expense to the taxpayer. But then I thought, since when do they listen to me?” Mancini pushed himself out of the leather chair, nodded at Lola, and stepped out into the hallway just as a furious barrage of drilling broke out.

Coffin punched line one. “Hi, Doris,” he said. “Sorry, I know we had plans—”

“Oh, Frankie, thank God. You've got to come talk to him. He's gone crazy.”

“Crazy how?” Coffin said. “Are you safe—you and the kids?”

“Oh, God, Tony wouldn't hurt us. Not ever, Frankie. No, but he's acting really weird. Thank Christ the kids are in school.”

Coffin looked at Lola, slowly rotated an index finger beside his temple. “Weird like what?”

Doris took a ragged breath. Coffin guessed she was crying. “Well, he's talking about getting rid of all the screens.”

“Screens? You mean window screens—for bugs?”

“No, the other kind. TV screens—computer screens. He thinks that's how the aliens keep tabs on him—through all the screens.”

Coffin closed his eyes. “Okay, that doesn't sound good. I'll be there in about a half hour, Doris. Try to keep him calm.”

“Easier said than done, Frankie,” Doris said. “You'll see.”

 

Chapter 15

Tony lived in a big refurbished '70s ranch house in Eastham, a town that most visitors to the Outer Cape experienced as a congested commercial strip of gas stations, clam shacks, and motels with cheesy nautical names like the Captain's Quarters or the Blue Dolphin, strung like beads on a thrift-store necklace along Route 6, between Orleans and Wellfleet. Coffin liked Eastham because it wasn't trying to
be
anything—not upscale Republican cute, like Chatham, not artsy-woodsy like Truro, and certainly not whatever Provincetown was trying to be.
Something with sequins
, Coffin thought.
Something that makes money.

Tony lived just off Herring Brook Road, at the top of a bluff. His house overlooked the gray chop of Cape Cod Bay to the west, and Great Pond—a blue-green jewel in the woods—to the southeast.

“Wow,” Lola said, stepping out of the Crown Vic. “Nice spot.”

It
was
a nice spot, Coffin thought—it had a sense of openness that Provincetown lacked, with its cramped neighborhoods and narrow sidewalks. He'd thought more than once about selling his mother's place and moving out to Truro, maybe (artsy-woodsy!), which at least had a bit of space between the houses.

Coffin unfolded his long frame from the passenger seat, put on his hat. “You haven't been out here before?”

“Nope,” Lola said. “I guess I was out of town for the housewarming.”

The sound of a woman yelling came faintly from inside, followed by the sound of a glass door sliding open. Tony appeared on the side deck, wearing only green camouflage boxer shorts and hiking boots, and staggering under the weight of an enormous flat-screen TV. Doris followed him outside, hands held out in a gesture of supplication.

“Tony, for God's sake,” she cried. “Not the new Samsung!”

Tony lurched to the railing, pressed the huge TV high overhead, and flung it over the edge with all the strength in his flab-upholstered, two hundred and forty pound frame. The bluff was steep—the house with its panoramic water view perched maybe sixty feet above Bowline Lane, a narrow strip of packed sand that wound through the scruffy mix of pine, juniper, and scrub oak on its way to the bay-side beach. It was strangely exhilarating, Coffin thought, when the glistening black TV sailed over a stand of scrub pines like some failed stealth bomber, bounced off the rocky cliff and struck the road edge-first, exploding into a thousand shards of plastic.

“Oh my fucking God,” Doris wailed. “The kids are going to
freak!
” She collapsed into a heaving puddle on the deck and started to weep.

Tony paused for a moment, looking down at Coffin and Lola. “Hi, guys,” he said. “What's the occasion?” He galumphed back into the house in his big boots, then returned a moment later with a large computer monitor, which also went over the side.

“Tony!” Coffin said. “Why don't you take a break and come talk to us.”

Tony wiped his hands on his boxer shorts. “Oh, sure, Frankie,” he said. “Be right down.”

A few seconds later, Tony opened the front door and stepped out onto the lawn. He was sweating—the hair on his big belly was damp—but otherwise he seemed perfectly calm. “So what's up?” he said. He glanced over his shoulder, into the house. “Kind of busy here. Not a lot of time to chitchat, if you know what I mean.”

“Can I ask you a question?” Coffin said.

“Fire away.”

“Why did you just throw a four-thousand-dollar TV off your deck?”