“Yes. Part of the mortgage.”
“Then you'll get it fixed. Better than it was,” Lucas said. “A new kitchen. If it's only smoke, you can save a lot of your stuff, but as soon as the fire guys let you, you've got to get in, and get your photo stuff out.”
She came back at him: “Why can't you stop those guys? They're crazy.” And to Jesse: “We should never have gotten involved with them. We should never have gone to the cops. Now our house… Oh, jeez, our house…”
“Tell me what happened,” Lucas said.
“We were watching television, and there was a crash in the kitchen-” Jesse began.
Kathy interrupted: “One minute before that I was in the kitchen getting Cheez-Its.
I would have been exploded and burned up.”
Jesse, continuing: “-and we heard this window crash, this glass, and boom, there was fire all over the kitchen and I was screaming-” “I ran and got the fire extinguisher from the closet-” Kathy said.
Jesse: “I called nine-one-one and got the fire department to come-” “I squirted the fire extinguisher but there was fire all over, I could smell the gasoline and it wouldn't go out, the whole kitchen was full of fire and we had to run,” Kathy said. She was looking anxiously at the house.
Jesse: “The fire department took forever to get here…”
“Six minutes from when the call came in,” the fireman said. “Fire was out in seven.”
Lucas found the fireman in charge in the backyard. He was talking with another fireman, pointing up at the roof, broke off when Lucas came up. Lucas flashed his ID: “These folks were part of an investigation we did at the BCA.”
“The Klines-they told us,” the fireman said.
“Yeah. They say it was a bomb, came in through the window. What do you think?” Lucas asked.
“Our arson guy''' look it over when he gets here, but it could have been. There was a big flash all over the kitchen, all at once. You can still smell the propellant if you get close. Gas and oil.”
“A Molotov cocktail?”
“Something on that order,” the fireman said. “Maybe like a gallon cider jug.”
“Be pretty heavy to throw,” Lucas said.
The fireman nodded. “You ever in the Army?”
“No.”
“Well, in the Army they've got this thing in Basic Training where you try to throw a dummy grenade through a window from twenty or thirty feet. Most guys can't do it, even with three chances. You got grenades bouncing all over the place,” the fireman said. “Most guys couldn't throw a bottle any better. I'd say somebody ran up to the window, and dunked it, like a basketball.” He hesitated, then added, “If it was an outsider who did it.”
“The alternative would be…?”
The fireman shrugged. “The owner wants a vacant lot. This is a nice piece of property, and it might even be worth more if the house wasn't here. The house isn't so hot.
You take the insurance, you sell the lot… you move to Minnetonka.”
Lucas looked back at the house. He could see Kathy Barth on the front lawn, arms wrapped tight around herself.
“Uh-uh.” He shook his head. “She was worried about their pictures being burned, Jesse's school stuff, her wedding dress.”
“Well, that's something,” the fireman agreed. “You don't see people burning up that kind of thing, not unless it's a revenge trip. They don't burn up their own stuff that much.”
The second fireman chipped in: “There was a lot of damage right over the kitchen sink. There are dishes in the sink, and we haven't gone through it yet, but I betcha that bottle landed in the sink, and a lot of the gas wound up in the sink, instead of shooting all over the place. That helped confine it; the arson guys'll know better.”
“So who's your arson guy?”
Lucas took down the name of the head arson investigator, and thanked them for their time. Back in the front yard, he asked Kathy, “You got a credit card?”
“Why?”
“Gonna have to stay in a motel tonight,” Lucas said. “Probably for a few nights.”
She nodded. “Yeah. Okay.”
“Got some cash, got an ATM card?”
She nodded again. “We're okay. We're just… we just…”
“We're just really scared,” Jesse finished.
Lucas called the Radisson in downtown St. Paul, got them a room. Told them not to tell anyone else where they were staying. A fireman said he would take them inside to get what they could out of the house. A neighbor volunteered space in her garage, where they temporarily could store whatever they could get out of the house.
The fireman suggested a couple of cleaning companies that could clean up the part of the house that wasn't damaged. “If you guys hadn't been home, if it'd taken another five minutes before somebody reported it, if you hadn't used that fire extinguisher to slow it down, you'd be looking at a hole in the ground. You get it cleaned up, you could be living in it again in a week,” he said. “I see it all the time.”
Lucas called Jenkins and Shrake. They were at the White Bear Yacht Club, having a few drinks after a round of golf, part of what they said was an investigation into gambling on golf courses. “Get your asses out of the country club, and get onto the Klines. Jack those fuckers up. My gut feeling is that they're not involved, but I want you to prove it,” Lucas told Jenkins.
“Can't prove a negative,” Jenkins said.
“Not before this,” Lucas said. “You guys are gonna do it, though, or we're gonna do a gay prostitution sting, and your ass will be on the corner.”
“We get to wear nylons?” Jenkins asked. He didn't threaten well.
Lucas's voice went dark: “I'm not fuckin' around here, man. We had an attempted kidnapping, we got a dead dog, now we got a firebomb.”
“We'll jack them up, no shit,” Jenkins promised. “We're on the case.”
“Flowers is coming up. He'll get in touch.”
Off the phone, Lucas started walking around the neighborhood, checking the houses on each side of the Barths' house, then across the alley in back, and so on, up and down both streets and the houses on the alley. Four houses up from the Barths, and across the alley, he found an elderly man named Stevens.
“I was cooking some Weight Watchers in the microwave, and I saw a car go through the alley,” Stevens said. He was tall, and too thin, balding, with a dark scab at the crest of his head, as if he'd walked into something. They were in the kitchen, and he pointed a trembling hand at the window over the sink, the same arrangement as in the Barths'. “Then, maybe, ten minutes later I was just finished eating, and I took the dish to the trash, and saw more lights in the alley. I didn't see the car, but I think it was the same one. They both had blue headlights.”
“Blue?”
“Not blue-blue, but bluish. Like on German cars. You know, when you look in your rearview mirror on the interstate, and you see a whole bunch of yellow lights, and then, mixed in, some that look blue?”
“Yeah. I've got blue lights myself,” Lucas said.
“Like that,” Stevens said. “Anyway I'd just sat back down again, and I heard the sirens.”
“That was right after you saw the blue headlights.”
“I got up to take the dish to the trash during a commercial,” Stevens said. “Saw the lights, came in, sat back down. The sirens came before there was another commercial.”
“You didn't see what kind of a car it was? The time you actually saw it?”
“Nope. Just getting dark,” Stevens said. “But it was a dark-colored car, black, dark blue, dark green, and I think a sedan. Not a coupe.”
“Not a van.”
“No, no. Not a van. A regular, generic car. Maybe bigger than most. Not a lot bigger, a little bigger. Not an SUV A car.”
“You see many cars back in the alley?” Lucas asked.
“Between five and six o'clock, there are always some, with the garages off the alley.
But not with blue lights. None with blue lights. That's probably why I noticed it.”
