how close Bauer had come to telling her what she wanted to know, and he knew that there might well come a point when he would.
It was really up to Loney, and the judge in Delaware.
I meet Pete at the coroner’s office at seven.
He’s waiting for me in the lobby, and from there I can see that Nancy Adams’s office is dark. Since we’re there to meet with her, that strikes me as somewhat surprising.
“Nancy’s out to dinner,” Pete says. “She’ll be back at seven-thirty.”
“So why are we here at seven?”
“So we can talk.”
“Good,” I say. “You start.”
He shakes his head. “No, let’s start by you telling me what you think.”
“Okay. I think that there had to be a reason Butler was sent in now to implicate Noah, rather than six years ago. The only thing I can think of is that whoever did set the fire was trying to hide something. And if all of a sudden they needed to hide something, it meant that somebody was out there looking.” Pete isn’t saying anything, so I add, “Jump in whenever you want.”
“Go on.”
“Two people have told me that they were interviewed by the police recently. They didn’t say the FBI, though that’s the kind of thing people remember and mention. The interviews were not in the discovery documents, because Dylan made his case from the FBI investigation.”
Still nothing from Pete, so I go on. ”You are in charge of the department’s investigation of the fire, and have been since the beginning. That’s why I called you.”
“Not bad,” Pete says. “You are not nearly as dumb as you look. You may not believe this, but there are people in the department who like me. They’ve known how this case has bothered me, and in their downtime, they sometimes work the case.”
“You assign things to them?” I ask.
He shakes his head. “No. Most times I’m probably not even aware that they’re doing it. It’s only if they find out anything that could be significant that they come to me with it. And that rarely happens, believe me.”
“But somebody was on to something this time,” I say.
“I think so, although I don’t know what it was. But I do know who it was.”
“Kyle Holmes,” I say. He was the young officer who was killed along with his partner when they responded to that domestic dispute. Those killings took place three weeks before Noah’s arrest.
Pete nods. “Kyle Holmes. Maybe there was more to his death than we thought.”
Pete goes on to tell me that Kyle had mentioned to him that he was looking at the case from a new angle, but didn’t say what that was. He was young and eager, and had a tendency to jump to conclusions, so Pete had told him to update him when he had something concrete to report. The next day he was shot and killed, and Pete of course had no reason to connect it to the fire investigation.
“So for the last week I’ve been trying to find out what he was doing,” Pete says. “He usually took notes when he was out on a case, but there were none found on his body. No one thought anything of it at the time, but now it seems that maybe the killer took them.”
“What have you learned?” I ask.
“Let’s wait for Nancy.”
Nancy Adams will be worth waiting for. She is absolutely beautiful, with long jet-black hair, a magnetic smile, and legs that would reach the floor no matter how low that floor happened to be. Lookswise, she’s in Laurie’s class, which is an honors class all the way.
Whenever I see her I’m reminded of that old quiz show,
There’s one other thing I want to talk to Pete about, while he is in a relatively helpful mood. “I need a big favor,” I say.
“That’s a real news event.”
“I need a list of missing persons reports, starting a week before the fire up through a month afterward.”
“Just for Paterson?” he asks.
“No, I need to cast a slightly wider net than that.”
“New York, New Jersey?”
“I was thinking the United States. Continental would be fine.”
“You’re insane,” he says.
“Okay, I’ll make it easier for you. Do you get notified when a person reported missing is subsequently found?”
“We’re supposed to, but I’m sure it doesn’t always happen.”
“Anybody that was found, you can leave them off the list,” I say.
“What’s this about?”
“The people that were unidentified in the fire. I want to find out if any of them could have been the target,” I say. “I admit I’m grasping at straws here.”
“I’d like to help, but there’s very little I can do,” he says, surprising me once again with his cooperative attitude.
“Why?”
“Because there are thousands of localities; I can’t contact every one. You need to attack this nationally.”
“I will,” I say. “But for now, whatever you can do would be great.”
He nods. “I’ll do what I can.”
“You can give the information to me as it comes in; then I can get my people started on it.”
“Thanks a lot.” He sneers. “You have people now?”
“I’ve got plenty of people. If you work really hard, one day you could be one of them.”
Nancy shows up precisely at seven-thirty and we go into her office. I haven’t seen her in a while, so we make small talk for a few minutes, until Pete grunts his displeasure.
“Tell Andy about your talk with Kyle Holmes,” Pete says.
She nods. “Kyle came to see me, a few days before he died. He wanted to talk about the Hamilton Village case, so I had the file in front of me. Not that I needed it; there are some things you don’t forget.”
“Were you here at that time?” Nancy had moved here from Boston a while back, but I don’t remember if it was before or after the fire.
“It was one of my first cases when I took over the office,” she says. “Not a great way to start.”
“What did Kyle want?” I ask.
“First a little background, though I’m sure this is in the discovery documents,” she said. “The fire was unbelievably intense, and it caused the second and third floors to cave inward. So the bodies were incinerated, not cremated but not too far off either. And because the building caved in on itself, the remains, such as they were, were mixed together. It was a horrible, horrible scene, by any standards.”
I don’t say anything; the information she’s providing was in the discovery documents in excruciating detail. Reading them once was painful, and I was obligated to go over them a bunch of times.
She continues. “I’m embarrassed to say that there was very little science involved. We could independently identify very few of the bodies; it was really guesswork based on secondary evidence, like testimony of people who claimed they knew who was in there.”
“But some of the bones were intact,” I say.
She nods. “Yes, but keep in mind we never had DNA samples of these people to start with, so even if we were able to extract some from the remains, there was nothing to compare it to.”
“Okay, I understand the situation you faced.”
“Good, because I never tried to hide it. It’s in all my reports. And those reports are what Kyle came to talk to me about.”
“Something specific?” I ask.
“Yes. He was interested in one of the victims. Roger Briggs.”
I’m familiar with the name; he was the grandson of Jesse Briggs, whom Laurie and I interviewed. The child’s
