Fire Season Page 11

  “Yep.”

  “So they brought him in here and did it with the radial arm.”

  “Looks that way.”

  Willoughby whistled a low note. “Holy shit,” he said. “These are some bad boys we’re talkin’ about.”

  For a moment neither of them said anything. The flashlight quivered slightly in Willoughby’s hand. “You think he was still alive,” he said, “when they, uh—”

  “I think so,” Coffin said.

  Willoughby nodded. “I guess you wouldn’t get spurting blood on the ceiling if he was already dead. Although that could be mostly tissue up there. Probably the Crime Scene Services boys can tell us.”

  Coffin was sweating. His head felt light, inflated—like a balloon that might float away. He looked at Willoughby. “I need some air. Better get hold of your dispatcher, have her give Mancini a call.”

  “Mancini,” Willoughby said. He was still staring at the radial arm saw.

  “Come on,” Coffin said. “Let’s go find the breaker box and then see if we can’t dig up Branstool’s car keys.”

  “Son of a bitch,” Willoughby said. “This is my homicide, isn’t it?”

  “Yep. Unless all that blood came out of something other than a person.”

  “Son of a bitch,” Willoughby said. “Son. Of. A. Bitch.”

  Chapter 13

  It took ten minutes to find the breaker box—it was in the furnace room, which was behind the laundry room, which was off the exercise room, which was equipped with a treadmill, Nautilus machines, and a big flat-screen TV. Coffin had retrieved two pairs of latex gloves from the box in the Crown Vic: one for him, one for Willoughby.

  The breaker box’s metal door was standing open: Coffin flipped the main switch and the house seemed to come to life—the furnace kicked on, the chest freezer and basement fridge hummed into action.

  “Why do you think they shut off the juice?” Willoughby said.

  “Don’t know,” Coffin said. “They did it after they killed Branstool, though.”

  Willoughby snapped his gloved fingers; they made a soft, rubbery pop. “Right—the saw. Weird.”

  “They flipped a breaker where we found his head, too, but not the main—just one circuit.”

  “Go figure,” Willoughby said. “Just fuckin’ with the cops, maybe.”

  “Could be,” Coffin said. “Could be they wanted to disable the alarm system or any surveillance cameras that might be around. Just a guess.”

  They found the car keys dangling from the beak of a meticulously painted, life-sized wooden Canada goose that crouched on a stand in the foyer. Coffin wondered how he’d missed them earlier—he’d passed through the foyer three times in the dark. Funny what you saw and didn’t see when the only light was a flashlight’s narrow beam.

  When Coffin and Willoughby emerged from Branstool’s house for the second time, they found Tony’s blue Chevy pickup truck idling in the driveway. Tony sat in the passenger seat, smoking a cigarette. Doris, Tony’s wife, waited beside the truck, arms crossed over her breasts. She had always seemed unhappy to Coffin: a small, sour, cylindrical woman who managed to walk without any apparent movement of her hips. Coffin had wondered more than once how she put up with Tony’s goofiness—she was a woman with no apparent sense of humor. And now this, he thought.

  “Oh, Frankie,” she said. “Thank God. Thank freaking God you found him, and not some criminal.”

  “Criminal? I’d be more worried about the cops picking him up,” Coffin said. “How’s he doing?”

  Doris lowered her voice. “Not good, Frankie. I don’t know what to do here. I mean, he’s crazy, right? Completely crazy. He thinks he was abducted, Frankie. By aliens.”

  “Uh-oh.”

  “I know, right? I mean, what do you say to a man who says he was abducted by aliens, Frankie? I feel like I’m married to a stranger all of a sudden.”

  The St. Mary’s fire wasn’t visible from Branstool’s driveway, but Coffin could see its deep orange glow reflected on the cloud cover. He imagined the flames rising a hundred feet into the sky, and for a moment wanted very much to go back and watch St. Mary’s burn. The gathering fog smelled like smoke.

  “Well,” he said, “I guess the first thing I’d do would be to have him see a doctor—try to rule out anything physical. You know—seizure, stroke, early Alzheimer’s. Then get a referral.”

  “To a shrink, you mean?”

  Coffin nodded.

  Doris looked down at the ground. “Well, I guess that makes sense.” She paused. “Frankie?”

  “Doris, I’ve got to get back to work here.”

  “Frankie, can you talk to him? He loves you. You’re his oldest friend.”

  “Doris—”

  “Frankie, please? He’s not going to go see some doctor, you know that.”

  Coffin pursed is lips. “Yeah,” he said. “You’re probably right. But talking to me isn’t going to help him, either.”

  “Just try, Frankie.”

  “Okay.” Coffin took a deep breath, let it out. “I’ve got to finish up out here. Then I’m going home and get some sleep. How’s tomorrow? I’ll come out for breakfast.”

  “You’re a good man, Frankie,” Doris said, climbing into Tony’s truck. “No matter what people say.”

  * * *

  To Coffin’s considerable relief, the trunks and interiors of both cars were empty. No decapitated bodies, not so much as a lost shoe or stray button to indicate that the cars had been involved in any way. Still, Coffin knew, the state police would impound the Ferrari as evidence.

  Outside, the paling sky smelled like wood ash. The glow over Provincetown had dimmed: It was possible that the firefighters had gotten the upper hand, Coffin thought, though it seemed more likely that the church had simply burned to the ground and now the fire was running out of fuel. The firefighters would be watching the neighboring structures now, keeping an eye on the drift of burning embers in the wind. More than anything, Coffin wanted to go home and sleep for a day, or a week, or however long it would take until all the fires finally stopped burning.

  * * *

  When Coffin pulled up outside his house it was almost 5:00 A.M. Thick fog had settled over Coffin’s neighborhood—you could hardly make out the gravestones in the cemetery a hundred yards away. It was still mostly dark, though the few birds brave enough to stick around for the New England fall were waking up, making their small sounds from the red cedars that separated Coffin’s house from Mrs. Prothero’s place next door.

  Coffin climbed out of the Crown Vic, stepped into his scruffy, postage-stamp yard, and stopped in his tracks. Someone was sitting on his screen porch. The cat funk of marijuana smoke hung in the air.

  “Isn’t it a little early in the day for that?” Coffin said.

  “Early, late—it’s all in how you look at it,” his uncle Rudy said.

  Coffin stepped onto the screen porch. His uncle was parked in one of the decomposing wicker chairs. Loverboy was swinging slowly back and forth in the porch glider. Its chains creaked ominously.

  “Why is it,” Coffin said, “that you always show up at the worst possible times, but when I want you I can never find you?”

  “Kind of like a cop,” Loverboy said.

  “You should always fuck with people’s expectations,” Rudy said. “It’s how you build a mythology, Frankie.” He took a long hit from the joint he was holding, then pinched it out between his thumb and forefinger and pocketed the roach. “I figured I’d save you the trouble of looking for me. Figured you’d have some questions.”

  Coffin leaned his back against the wall. He was utterly exhausted—if he sat down, he wouldn’t be able to get back up. He felt a tight little ache behind his eyes; his ears were ringing faintly. “Okay,” Coffin said. “Tell me about Branstool. Who did him?”

  “That’s the thing,” Rudy said. “I don’t know. When I said I’d take care of him, I didn’t mean I was gonna have him whacked. That was just a crazy coincidence.”
>
  “Unbelievable,” Loverboy said, shaking his lion-sized head.

  “Okay,” Coffin said. “Let’s go with that for now. So what did you mean?”

  “You dig into any life, Frankie, you’re gonna find some dirt. Sometimes it’s hidden, sometimes it’s real close to the surface. Branstool’s was lying around in plain view, pretty much.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well, when you suspect somebody’s making money illegally, where do you look first?”

  “Bank records.”

  Rudy nodded. “Bingo.”

  “How’d you get his bank records?”

  Rudy waved a hand. “It’s a long story. Boring. You look tired—let’s just cut to the chase. Loverboy?”

  The big Tongan stopped swinging for a moment. “He had an interesting deposit history. Eight thousand here, nine thousand there. Sometimes once or twice a month, sometimes more than that. Never quite ten thousand, though. It was a dead giveaway.”

  “Over ten K, the bank has to report it,” Rudy said.

  “Of course,” Coffin said. “So where was the money coming from?”

  “More than one place, probably,” Rudy said. “Did you know there’s a big-time audit underway at Valley View?”

  Coffin shook his head. “He was skimming? What a weasel.”

  “Mostly laundering,” Loverboy said. “There were no cash deposits to his account. It was all checks from the nursing home for ‘expenses.’”

  “So what will the nursing home auditors find?”

  “They’ll find a history of lots and lots of cash deposits to some side account—some little slush fund started by Branstool. It’ll be called something like the ‘bingo account,’ or the ‘cash donations’ account. And lots of checks in that eight or nine K range written by Branstool to Branstool. So the books would always balance, more or less, and the main accounts would be untouched. Not a bad system, but it assumes nobody’s paying attention.”

  “Who was paying attention?” Coffin said.

  “I’ve been watching that little weasel for years,” Rudy said, pointing a thumb at his chest. “In the business world, Frankie, nothing’s more valuable than information.”

  “So you tipped the auditors?”

  Rudy stood. “You should see Loverboy in a suit. He’s very daunting.”

  “Oh my God,” Coffin said. “You’ve been posing as state auditors?”

  “You’re not asking the big question,” Rudy said. “You’re getting a little slow in your old age.”

  Coffin yawned, closed his eyes. “Okay, the big question: Whose money was Branstool laundering?”

  Rudy pushed open the screen door, and the two men stepped off the porch. Coffin half expected the house to rise a few inches, freed from their weight.

  “Next time you’re out at his place,” Rudy said, scratching his beard stubble, “take a good look at the ducks.”

  “The ducks? What about the ducks?”

  “Vaya con queso, Frankie,” Rudy said, waving to Coffin with his back turned.

  “Rudy!” Coffin yelled, but the two big men had already disappeared into the fog.

  Chapter 14

  He reached into the crib and picked up the baby, its mottled fur cold and wet to the touch. Everything smelled like smoke. The big stuffed animals bared their savage teeth.

  “It’s okay,” Coffin said. “I’ve got you. It’s okay.”

  The baby stared at him with its dark, liquid eyes. He thought of his father, drowned in the ocean, seaweed in his hair. What would his father say about the seal baby, he wondered?

  “I’ve got you,” Coffin said. “I’ve got you.”

  Flames licked the curtains, flowed up the walls. Coffin wrapped the slick, squirming seal baby in a blanket, ran with it down the hallway. Sparks and smoke were everywhere—he could hardly breathe …

  “Frank.”

  The stairs were a cauldron of fire. He had to get out—had to save the seal baby. He retreated into the bedroom, opened the window. The smoke was choking him. He was drowning in smoke …

  “Frank!”

  Something poked him in the ribs.

  “Frank, wake up!”

  “What?” Coffin said. His eyelids felt as though they’d been glued together. “Wake up? Why?”

  Jamie was jabbing him with her finger. “You stopped breathing. It freaks me out when you do that. Turn over on your side, okay?”

  “Sorry,” Coffin said, rolling onto his side. “Sorry.”

  Jamie grunted and went back to sleep. Coffin looked at the clock—7:23—closed his eyes, opened them again. He was exhausted, but wide-awake.

  “Shit,” he said.

  “Hmph,” Jamie said, pulling the covers up around her chin.

  Coffin got out of bed, pulled on a T-shirt and pair of sweatpants, and went downstairs to the kitchen. He put a filter in the coffeemaker, half-filled the carafe at the sink, dumped the water into the reservoir, then spooned four scoops of ground decaf into the filter—Jamie wasn’t drinking regular coffee now, on her OB-GYN’s advice.

  It was raining outside—a gray drizzle, occasionally driven by an easterly gust of wind. He turned on the radio, hunted around for NPR. Sometimes it came in, sometimes it didn’t, depending on which way the wind was blowing, Coffin thought, or sunspot activity, or variations in the Earth’s magnetic field. The whole FM band was static except for WOMR, the local all-volunteer station. They were replaying an old episode of Ptown 02657, a homemade radio drama: a gay character and a transsexual character were having a breathless conversation about a lesbian character who’d given her straight married lover chlamydia.

  Coffin switched the radio off, poured a cup of decaf, added half-and-half and sugar. He sipped it, made a face. “Decaf,” he said to the rain on the window, to the starlings pecking in the yard. “Why bother?” The phone bleeped. He picked it up.

  “Frank?” It was Arlene, his secretary. “Listen, Dr. Gault wanted me to ask you to come in ASAP. You and she have an eight thirty meeting with Mancini and a federal agent—guy from ATF.”

  “Miles Kendrick? Boston office?”

  “Yep, that’s the gent.”

  “Great,” Coffin said. “See you in a half hour.”

  * * *

  On his way to Town Hall, Coffin stopped at the Yankee Mart for a cup of real coffee. The girl working the cash register was a slender Belarusian named Ioana: she’d been a brunette when she first arrived in Provincetown, but lately she’d been dying her hair a tawny, reddish blond. She was small-breasted, her features slightly Asian. The Mongols had made it as far as Poland, Coffin knew—had they passed through Belarus on their way?

  “Did you find everything you were looking for?” she said.

  Her accent was wonderful, Coffin thought—the dark vowels, all that lingering on the terminal g’s. She was probably twenty.

  “Yes,” Coffin said, holding up his paperboard cup of convenience-store coffee. “The coffee machine is well marked.”

  “Another satisfied customer,” Ioana said. “This is what I live for.”

  “No doubt your corporate masters have taken note.”

  “One can only hope. How is Yelena?”

  “Fine, I think. I didn’t know you were friends.”

  “It’s the Eastern European mafia,” Ioana said. “Haven’t you heard? We’re taking over this dump.”

  Taking gover, Coffin thought. “Be my guest,” he said. “It’s all yours.”

  * * *

  At Town Hall a half-dozen painters were working on scaffolds in the main stairway. Drop cloths covered the floor, and a heavy metal song roared from a boom box—Metallica or Megadeath, Coffin thought, but he’d never been able to tell them apart. Coffin’s head began to throb: the smell of latex paint was thick, the music was loud, he hadn’t gotten nearly enough sleep. He trotted up the stairs with his coffee cup and ducked into his office, shutting the door behind him.

  Lola was waiting in one of his leather guest chairs. She was in uniform, l
egs crossed, hat balanced on her knee.

  “Holy crap,” she said. “Look what the cat dragged in.”

  “That bad?” Coffin said. He sat in his desk chair, a fancy executive model, and put his feet up on the desk.

  “I probably don’t look so good myself,” Lola said.

  Coffin peered at her. “You look fine,” he said. “Why, what happened?”

  Lola’s cheeks reddened. “It’s embarrassing,” she said. “I screwed up. But I got a look at our firebug. Sort of.”

  She told Coffin about the man in the gray hoodie—how’d he’d drifted away from the crowd of onlookers the minute she’d gone to retrieve the camcorder, how she’d followed him into Atkins Lane.

  “He stopped running too soon,” she said. “I would have heard his footsteps if he’d kept running all the way out to Bradford. So I knew he’d ducked into one of the yards. The first one on the left was real dark—it’s got a tall hedge on the Commercial Street side, and the streetlight’s funky, so the whole thing was in deep shadow. I figured he might be back there, but I couldn’t see anything, and I didn’t have a flashlight. Couldn’t call for backup, either.”

  “Doesn’t sound like you screwed up,” Coffin said. “You were dealing with some limiting factors.”

  “Yeah, like my brain. You know how when you’re trying real hard to see in the dark, the rest of your brain kind of shuts down?”

  “Yeah, when I get lost in the car I have to turn the radio off. Can’t navigate and listen to music at the same time.”

  Lola nodded. “Same thing. So I’m trying like a son of a bitch to see what’s behind this little saltbox house, and I forget about the shed. I’m just not thinking about it, because I can’t see behind the house. And that’s where he was hiding—behind the shed.”

  “Okay. So?”

  “He’s quick. And stealthy.” Lola touched the spot behind her ear.

  “What’d he hit you with?”

  “A brick, I think.”

  “You okay?”

  “Yeah. There was a pretty good lump. But I iced it down last night and it’s not too bad now.”

  “You’re going to see a doctor, right?”

  “I’m fine. The EMT said it was no big deal. Didn’t even need stitches.”