Scorcher

“Does that mean you’re not going to tell me?”

“No, amigo, you’d find out anyway. You’re as persistent as heat rash. We don’t have any reliable witnesses, either at the burning at Pompano Beach or in the restaurant here in Fort Lauderdale. The restaurant is Casey’s, over on Northeast Thirteenth Street, off Route One. It’s a tiny place that specializes in chicken wings, mostly carry-out orders. Laura decided to stop there because your daughter was complaining about being hungry. They had their meal and left, and in the parking lot Laura realized she’d forgotten her purse inside. She sent Chipper back for it. Five minutes later he hadn’t returned, so she went back to the restaurant and. . found him.”

“What kind of flammable substance was used?”

“The lab’s trying to analyze it now. It’s not like gasoline or alcohol; this sticks and burns, like flaming glue.”

“Like napalm,” Carver said. He’d been in Vietnam briefly and remembered the scarred civilians who’d suffered through napalm attacks; the grotesque, disfiguring burns. “Flaming glue” was a good description of napalm, and the stuff could be used in flamethrowers, even homemade flamethrowers. It burned hot, it burned long, and it burned through things.

“My guess is, whatever was used was concocted by the maniac who killed your son,” Desoto said. “But genuine, industrial-manufactured napalm might mean a military connection, something we’ll check out.”

“There were witnesses in the Pompano Beach killing, weren’t there?”

“In a way. Two. But they saw very little. They heard more. They swear the killer was arguing over returning something he’d bought there, but they don’t know what.”

“A hell of a motive for a killing,” Carver said.

“That depends. The police psychiatrist thinks the murderer might be a schizophrenic with paranoid delusions.”

“I’m not surprised. I don’t want to hear any psychobabble. It’s out of vogue for good reason.”

“I’ll tell you, I had a cousin like that, Carver. Really thought people were out to get him personally, and saw great danger in it. I saw him fly into a rage and hurl coins into a clerk’s face because he got too many pennies in his change. If he’d had a flamethrower, he’d have used it.”

“But who walks around carrying a flamethrower?”

“Someone who gets mad, stays mad, and goes back to the source of that anger. He’d give the victim one last chance, according to the psychiatrist, and if the victim wouldn’t give him what he wanted, the killer would feel perfectly justified in taking almost any action.”

“You’re telling me Chipper might have been killed because some mental case wanted revenge for being shortchanged and my son was in the way.”

“Or something like that. You know the trivial motives for murder, Carver. We’ve both seen people killed for sport. Thing is, this killer might have feared Chipper as a witness.”

It was possible, Carver knew. Maybe probable. Only someone unbalanced would kill in such a bizarre manner. So why shouldn’t the motive seem bizarre to everyone but the killer? But it could be a mistake early in a case to put too much stock in what a police psychiatrist theorized. Psychiatrists were mistaken much of the time when they had their subjects sitting in front of them and cooperating.

“Shrinks are more interested in speculation than in justice,” Carver said. “They don’t seem concerned with right and wrong.”

“Or else they know how hard it is sometimes to distinguish one from the other.”

“You checking pyromaniac cases on file?” Carver asked.

“We are, but I’m told this doesn’t necessarily relate to fascination with flame. More a vengeance thing, a desire to make the antagonist suffer. Maybe a metaphor for hell, eh?”

“A religious crank?” Florida had a surfeit of those.

“Could be,” Desoto said. “Legwork’s being done.” He reached across the table and patted Carver’s wrist. “I’m on this, amigo, even if it’s out of my precise jurisdiction.”

“I know you are,” Carver said. He got his hard walnut cane from where it was leaning against the wall, set its rubber-encased tip firmly on the floor, and stood up. He managed this smoothly. Carver’s left knee had taken a holdup man’s bullet that had shattered bone and cartilage. That was what had knocked him off the Orlando police force and given him a knee frozen at a thirty-degree angle for life. He’d undergone physical therapy, and he still swam every day. That, and dragging his lower body around, had lent his upper body a strength that sometimes surprised him.

“Where are you going?” Desoto asked.

“To see Laura. Then I’m going to buy a bottle and take it home with me.”

“To be with Edwina?”

“I’m driving up to my cottage.”

“You should go to Edwina,” Desoto said solemnly.

“No. She’ll understand. I have to be alone for a while. That’s the way I feel.”

“Like after you were shot, eh?”

“No, nothing like that.”

“Oh? Like how, then?”

“I’m going to find the bastard,” Carver said. “I’m going to kill him.”

“That won’t work, amigo. Won’t help you. It can’t.”

But Desoto didn’t know about the thing that lived beneath Carver’s calm surface, the beast that goaded as it grew stronger. It made everything else irrelevant. It was huge. It filled the hollowness of grief with purpose. There was no room in Carver for anything other than his hunger for revenge. “I can make it work.”

“And afterward?”

“Afterward shit,” Carver said.

He limped from the restaurant, dragging his images and his horror and his quest out into the brutal heat.

Desoto followed him to the door and called after him, “You oughta reconsider this, don’t you think?”

But Carver hadn’t really considered it in the first place. He was just going to do it.

Chapter 3

Laura was staying at the Carib Terrace, a small but well-kept motel on Pompano Beach just north of Fort Lauderdale. Carver found her in an upper room that was luxuriously furnished, with a kitchenette, and an angled glass wall that afforded a wide view of the beach and the glimmering ocean beyond. On the counter by the sink were a half-empty coffee cup and a glazed doughnut with one bite out of it-the remains of Laura’s abortive attempt at breakfast.

She looked better now, Carver thought, as he settled into a soft chair near the glass doors that led to a balcony. More her old self, a pixie with boundless strength and energy. Though she was subdued, the fierce vitality he remembered in her was reawakening. She had more color in her cheeks and more light in her eyes, and she’d made a pass at arranging her short black hair. The hairdo was flattened in back; she’d been lying down. She was still lean, with traces of the natural athlete’s lithe movements; the middle-aged set of her face hadn’t entirely caught up with her body. Time was taking her by degrees, toying with her.

She sat down on the edge of the bed, opposite Carver, her knees pressed together beneath her dark skirt. He wondered if she’d viewed Chipper’s body at the morgue. He hoped not. His identification, along with the dental-work findings, should be sufficient to establish positive I.D.

She said, “Yesterday I was worried about him growing out of his clothes, and today he’s dead.”

Carver didn’t know what to say to that; he cleared his throat and used the tip of his cane to make quarter- sized depressions in the deep-pile carpet. Then he looked out at the beach. A speedboat towing a water-skier circled in too close to shore, angering a few swimmers who’d ventured beyond the breakers. One of them waved a fist at the boat, which swung wide and made another pass. The drone of its outboard motor, like that of an angry insect, found its way into the room.