Scorcher

palms down her hips. Carver again sensed something tightly wired in her. “Paul has long been under treatment for mild schizophrenia, Mr. Carver. Do you know anything about the affliction?”

“Very little.”

“Those suffering from it have a distorted sense of reality, and sometimes delusions of persecution. At times, in the advanced stages, they even hear voices, sometimes giving them destructive, bizarre instructions.”

“Did Paul hear voices?”

“Only his father’s,” Nadine said.

Elana ignored her. Adam Kave worked his jaw muscles. He’d wear down his molars in no time like that.

“Paul’s been in and out of therapy for years,” Elana went on. “Schizophrenia is still something of a medical mystery, though there’s a theory now that it’s a physical aberration in the brain, a chemical imbalance. The disease often appears in a victim in his or her teens, then gets progressively worse as the person grows older.”

“Was Paul getting worse?”

“No,” Adam said, “his medication seemed to be controlling the symptoms.”

“Would you describe him as paranoid?” Carver asked, remembering what Desoto had told him about the cousin hurling change in a clerk’s face for no reason.

“At times, mildly,” Nadine said. “But he never would have killed anyone.”

“For God’s sake,” Adam said, “none of us is a psychiatrist! Let’s leave the diagnosis to Dr. Elsing.”

“Dr. Elsing?”

“The psychiatrist who treats Paul,” Elana said. “His office is in Fort Lauderdale. Paul had improved lately, though. He hasn’t seen Dr. Elsing in over six months.”

“Before the murders and before he ran away,” Carver said, “did Paul say anything that might lead you to believe he was tilting toward violence?”

“The police asked us that,” Adam said. “Paul’s behavior was better than it had been in years, actually. He’s had his minor skirmishes, but he’s never been really violent.”

Until he set three people on fire. One of them my son. Carver felt his hate for Paul Kave grow to a revulsion he had difficulty hiding.

“The past several years, he’d become enthused about scuba diving,” Adam continued. “And of course he liked to work in his lab in the carriage house.”

“Lab? Carriage house?”

“The garage, actually,” Adam said. “It has a room over it where the chauffeur used to live. We haven’t had live-in servants for years. Paul uses the place-used it-for his chemical lab.”

“What did he do in his lab?”

“Experiments,” Nadine said. “He’d gotten away from actual chemistry in the past several years. He was interested in oceanography, and he used his equipment to study sea life.”

Carver thought about the deadly, flammable naphtha compound. He turned his mind away from a vision of fire and death, screams he couldn’t bring himself to imagine when awake yet couldn’t exorcise from his dreams. What he was doing here was worth it. He wanted Paul Kave! And Mc shy;Gregor was right; this was the way to get Paul.

“Are there any other family members I haven’t met?” he asked.

“Joel,” Nadine told him.

“Not yet,” Elana said tightly. She was wiping her hands on the robe again, extending her wrinkled, lean fingers rigidly. Her brown-spotted arms and backs of her hands were the clues to her age. Still, she was innately lovely, as if it were her birthright. There were women like that, though Carver had only known a few. What had she been thirty years ago?

“I’m not feeling quite right,” she said.

Adam Kave was on his feet instantly. Time to tend to his treasure. “Why don’t you go to your room and lie down, Elana?”

She nodded. Her face was suddenly very pale. Her pained, parting glance took in Carver. Without speaking, she turned and hurried out the door.

“My wife’s ill,” Adam said. He said it in a way that discouraged any further inquiry by Carver. “In the past year she’s become more and more reclusive. And now Paul. .”

Nadine slip-slapped to the window in her sandals, turned and padded close to Carver. Challenge time again. “And as you can gather,” she said, “my mother’s less than enthusiastic about me marrying Joel. Not that it will stop us.”

Carver decided not to try to stop them either.

“Joel Dewitt,” Adam explained. “He’s a car dealer in Fort Lauderdale who’s just asked Nadine to marry him.” Kave didn’t seem to have any strong pro or con opinion about the upcoming nuptials. Maybe he was one of those wise ones who didn’t worry about what they couldn’t change.

“Why doesn’t your mother like Dewitt?” Carver asked Nadine.

“You’d have to ask her, but it wouldn’t do you any good. Elana has never come out with a direct answer to that question. Because she doesn’t have one.”

“So there’s Dewitt,” Carver said, as if making mental notes. “Not yet a family member, but almost.”

“And there’s Emmett,” Nadine said.

“We don’t usually talk of Emmett in this house, Mr. Carver. He’s my older brother. I wish he weren’t. We haven’t gotten along for years.”

“But Paul and Emmett got along,” Nadine said, “when Paul was younger. I don’t think they’ve seen each other for a while. Emmett lives in Kissimmee.” Kissimmee was a small town in central Florida, less than two hundred miles from the Fort Lauderdale area, but only a matter of a few hours or so on Florida’s Turnpike, where it seemed everyone drove over seventy.

“Paul have any close friends he might contact?” Carver asked.

“None, I’m afraid,” Adam said glumly. “The boy’s always played the loner.”

“I’d like to see Paul’s lab,” Carver said, standing up out of the soft leather sofa and leaning on his cane.

“I’ll go out to the lab with you,” Adam said, standing also. “There are some things I’d like to tell you privately.”

He started for a door at the far end of the room, walking fast. Was he doing that deliberately?

Carver limped after him, twisting his body to glance back and catch Nadine’s reaction to being shut out of the conversation.

But Nadine was already striding from the room, her thighs and buttocks working powerfully beneath the silky white slacks.

Carver followed Adam Kave out past a veranda and a large, screened swimming pool, along a path lined with junglelike foliage and the perfumed scent of blossoms, toward a garage the size of an average house.

The rolling surf sighed louder as they made their way in the direction of the sea. A gull screamed and a private helicopter thrashed its way across the blue sky above the sun-touched ocean. In the shade of the palm fronds, Carver felt sheltered and temporarily at peace.

He wondered what it would be like to grow up in a place like this. His own childhood had been lower middle class, with a father probably not much more sensitive to his youth and yearnings than Adam seemed to have been toward Paul’s. What had it been like here for Paul? It would help Carver to get a feel for that, to learn how to think like Paul-if such a thing was possible.

“This is a rough time for us,” Adam Kave said in his gravelly voice. “I can’t tell you how much we appreciate your kindness and help, Mr. Carver. Are you a religious man?”

“No, there’s too much of that in Florida.”

“Well, I go to church regularly, and somehow God seems to supply what’s needed in crises like this.”

Carver didn’t answer as he followed Kave along the winding stone path toward bright sunlight and blue sky and ocean.

For an uneasy moment he felt like the serpent in the Garden of Eden. Putting another one over on Adam.