Fire Season Read online

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

  “Yes, dear. Whatever you say.”

  “Ha,” Coffin said. “If only.”

  * * *

  Monica Gault’s office was crowded. Gault sat behind her desk, while Mancini and Miles Kendrick, the ATF agent, sat in the two leather guest chairs. Other chairs had been brought in: orange plastic with slim metal legs, like the one in Coffin’s old office in the basement. Coffin sat in one of these; so did Pete Wells. Lola and the state police detective in the brown suit, Pilchard, stood against the wall. Outside, in the hallway, workmen were banging on pipes with hammers. It was hard to hear what anyone was saying.

  “Fun town you’ve got here,” Kendrick said, voice raised. He was around Coffin’s height, but in better shape. His hair was cropped close, silver gray. He had a narrow face with pale eyes, a large chin, and a long upper lip.

  “You should catch the drag show sometime,” Coffin said. “Talk about fun.”

  “I’m sorry, what?” Kendrick said, cupping a hand at his ear.

  “Coffin’s a little defensive,” Mancini said. “You can’t blame him, really.”

  “What?” Gault said, leaning forward. “I didn’t hear any of that, I’m afraid.”

  Kendrick consulted his notebook. “So…” he began, pausing for an especially energetic burst of hammering from the hallway. “You’ve had multiple fires, including three recent structure fires, correct?”

  “Correct,” said Mancini.

  “All of the recent fires appear to be arson, correct?”

  “That’s my judgment, yes,” said Pete Wells, practically shouting over the din. “They appear to be the work of an amateur thrill arsonist.”

  Gault put her hands over her ears. “Good Christ—I can’t stand it!” she said. “Gentlemen, I propose we find a quieter space in which to discuss this.”

  “My old office in the basement is probably okay,” Coffin said.

  “I’d rather hold a meeting in purgatory.” Gault stood. “Come on, gents, I know just the place.”

  Gault led them down the back stairs to the main floor, where there was no pounding. They followed her into the police department’s squad room: Gault shut the door behind them with a sigh.

  “Oh, hell’s bells,” she said. Heavy metal music from the front stairway vibrated the squadroom’s south wall. For a moment Gault seemed nonplussed.

  “How about the men’s room?” Mancini said. “It’s on the other side of the hallway—should be quieter.”

  “Not on your life,” Gault said. “The ladies’, on the other hand, will do just fine.” She strode from the squadroom, crossed the hall, opened the door of the ladies’ room, and disappeared inside.

  Coffin looked at Kendrick. Kendrick looked at Mancini. The three of them looked at Wells. They all shrugged.

  “Works for me,” Coffin said.

  “Good times,” Wells said.

  “I love this town,” Kendrick said.

  “What a freak show,” Mancini said. And then they all went inside.

  * * *

  The ladies’ room had last been refurbished in the 1950s. It was done in kelp green tile, floor to ceiling, with a long, pale green counter and two pink porcelain sinks. There were two stalls, and a large metal sanitary napkin dispenser. It was blissfully quiet, but crowded: Gault propped her backside against the counter; Coffin, Mancini, Wells, and Kendrick stood with their backs against the wall; Lola leaned against the door; and Pilchard sat in one of the stalls, the only space left.

  “All right, gentlemen,” Gault said, her voice echoing slightly in the tiled room. “Where were we?”

  “God, the acoustics in here are fabulous,” Kendrick said, smiling broadly. “All that natural reverb! Couldn’t you just burst into song?”

  Mancini glowered. “Only in Provincetown,” he said.

  “This is a first for me, I can tell you that,” Pilchard said, from his seat in the stall.

  “Is it that different from the men’s room?” Gault said, eyebrows raised.

  “It’s not that different,” Lola said. For a moment everyone looked at her.

  “Pinch me,” Kendrick said finally. “I must be dreaming.”

  “Could we get back to business?” Mancini said, looking at his Rolex. “There’s a decapitated nursing home director that also requires my attention.”

  Kendrick sighed. “Killjoy,” he said. “Fine. How about DNA? Any left at the sites?”

  “Not that we’ve found,” Wells said.

  “Thank God,” Gault said, crossing her arms over her chest.

  “Ah, well,” Kendrick said. “And what about commercial motives?”

  “Only one of the fires has a potential commercial motive,” Coffin said. “We’re working on that.”

  Mancini made finger quotes. “Working on that,” he said. “Right.”

  “The fires so far appear to have been set by the same individual,” Coffin said. “Could be the guy that Sergeant Winters had an encounter with last night. It’s possible he may have set multiple fires to cover up a commercial arson, but it seems unlikely at this point.”

  Kendrick gazed at Coffin, pale eyes hooded. Sizing me up, Coffin thought.

  “How so?” Kendrick said.

  Wells tilted his head a bit. “The fires appear to be amateur work, like I said. Very simple execution. No timing devices. What seems like randomly selected targets. The fact that the firebug may be showing up in the crowds of onlookers also points to a thrill arsonist. A smart professional wouldn’t stick around.”

  “A smart professional wouldn’t,” Mancini said. “Nobody’s suggesting this guy is particularly smart.”

  Coffin cleared his throat, ran a finger around the inside of his collar. He was in uniform, and his tie was strangling him. “He’s smarter than we are, so far.”

  “You’ve heard of John Orr?” Kendrick said.

  “Of course,” Wells said.

  “Help me out,” Mancini said.

  “John Orr was a fire captain and arson investigator in Glendale, California,” Kendrick said. “He was convicted of arson after setting something like two thousand fires through the 1980s and early ’90s in the Los Angeles area, including a fire in a busy hardware store that killed four people. Right before we arrested him he was spotted in the crowd watching a warehouse fire he’d started.”

  “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, th
en 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?” Cof
fin 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.