41
New volunteers swelled the DiMaggios to sixty-two members, Zerilli cutting off enlistments when he ran out of Louisville Sluggers. Barely trained fire academy recruits reinforced Rosie’s embattled battalion, which had now lost five men to injury and death. Fire extinguishers and firearms flew off the shelves at Drago Guns and Hardware on North Main. Scores of women and children fled Mount Hope and moved in with relatives, their men staying behind to sit up all night with revolvers or shotguns. The paper announced a relief fund for families burned out of their homes, the publisher chipping in the first thousand bucks. And the governor offered Rhode Island National Guardsmen to patrol Mount Hope’s streets, then recanted when he remembered they were in Iraq.
Hell Night follow-ups kept us all hopping for days. It was good there was so much work. I didn’t have time to slow down and think about all the ways the old neighborhood was getting smaller.
It was Friday before I had time to consider what to do next. I was still sitting at my desk thinking about it when Deep Purple interrupted with the opening licks of “Smoke on the Water.” I checked caller ID and decided to pick up anyway.
“You!
fucking!
bastard!”
“Good morning, Dorcas.”
“Who’s the Asian bitch you were pawing at Casserta’s the other night?”
“You know, I’m glad you called. How’s Rewrite doing? Are you remembering her heartworm pills? She should have one the first of every month.”
“You always cared more about that fucking dog than you cared about me!”
“Well, she
“You son of a bitch!”
“It’s been nice chatting with you, Dorcas, but I have to go back to work.” I clicked off before she could accuse me of screwing the dog.
As soon as I shut my loving ex off in mid-rant, Deep Purple started in again: Dah dah DAH, dah dah da-DAH, dah dah DAH, dah dah.
Note to self: Change ring tone to something without
“We should talk.”
“Got something for me?”
“Nothing hard,” McCracken said, “but Hell Night doesn’t make sense. A pyro sets fires so he can watch them burn. Why five fires on four streets at the same time? No way to savor them all.”
I pulled a fresh bottle of Maalox from my drawer, cracked it open, and took a swig.
“Maybe it’s not the fires that get him off,” I said. “Maybe it’s reading about them in the paper, seeing his handiwork on the TV news.”
“Yeah, maybe. Or maybe it was a way of maximizing the damage. The fire department isn’t equipped to handle that many fires all at once. We got too many maybes. Why don’t you drop by so we can put our heads together?”
“Be there in half an hour.”
I walked across town and stepped into McCracken’s outer office just in time to see his secretary bend over to stuff a folder in a file cabinet.
“He’s expecting you,” she said, holding the pose to give me a good look at a lacy red thong under a black micro-skirt. “You can go right in.”
Hell of a straight line, but I didn’t touch it. I’d seen her ex-boxer boyfriend remodel too many faces.
McCracken squeezed my hand like he was trying to grind my metacarpal bones into powder.
“Heard anything from Polecki?” I said.
“Just after I called you. The triple-decker and the two single-families were definitely torched. Coffeemakers and gasoline used on all three. They’re still working on the duplex and the apartment building, but we can be pretty sure what they’re going to find.”
“Word is the toddler they pulled out of the apartment building isn’t going to make it,” I said. “Another kid who won’t get to grow up in Mount Hope. That makes eleven dead now, not to mention fifteen more with burns and injuries.”
“Yeah,” he said. “And nearly five million in fire insurance claims, three million against my company alone. Thank God I’m not in the life insurance business.”
His desk was the size of a parking space. He unrolled a map that covered most of it, a topographical view of Mount Hope showing all the streets and structures. We spent the next few minutes identifying the fourteen buildings that had been torched. McCracken colored them in chronologically with a yellow marker, starting with the first fire in December and ending with Hell Night.
Initially, the fires appeared scattered: the first on Cypress, the next four blocks south on Doyle, the third over on Hope at the eastern edge of the neighborhood. But as the last half dozen boxes filled with yellow, a pattern emerged. All of the fires had been set within a misshapen rectangle bordered by Larch on the north, Hope on the east, Doyle on the south, and on the west by Camp, known in colonial times as Horse Pasture Lane. Nothing outside the southeast quadrant of the neighborhood, the part that butts up against Brown University and the pricey East Side.
“I noticed the same thing Tuesday when I drove around checking out the Hell Night damage,” I said. “Could have parked the car and strolled past all fourteen torched buildings in ten minutes.”
“Clear out all the old buildings between Doyle and Larch,” McCracken said, “and you’d have yourself a prime piece of development property.”
“You would. But that would require one hell of a conspiracy.”
“Because the properties belong to five different realty companies.”
“Yeah, and the DeLuccas own their place on Larch, which makes six owners.”
“What about the other four Hell Night targets?”
“Don’t know yet,” I said. “I’ll check the property records this afternoon, but that’s probably going to give us still more owners.”
“Probably will,” he said. “Hard to see anything in it. Still, the pattern is peculiar.”
“It could be random. A few years ago, I thought I’d found a cancer cluster over by McCoy Stadium. A dozen dead and dying in just four square blocks. A team from the CDC came up from Atlanta to look at it and decided there was nothing strange going on. When you’ve got a lot of something, like fires in Mount Hope or cancer in Pawtucket or stars in the sky, it’s never spread evenly. You always get clusters.”
“Still, it’s something to think about,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said, “it is.”
42
On the walk back across the Providence River, I called Veronica and suggested she join me for my usual gourmet fare at the diner. I was watching Chef Charlie burn the life out of my cheeseburger when she showed up with Mason. That irritated me a little. A squeeze and smooch from Veronica, and I almost got over it.
“I’m glad you called,” she said, climbing onto the stool next to mine. “Something I meant to tell you this morning. You remember Lucy?”
“Your sister?”
“Yeah. She’s driving down from Boston this afternoon to spend the weekend with me. I won’t be seeing you for a couple of days, so it’s good we can grab a quiet lunch together.”
I looked around. Two loudmouthed women were having an expletive-laced discussion about the cheating ways of someone named Herb. Charlie hummed a little off-key ZZ Top to drown out my burger as it screamed for mercy. Some guy a couple of stools down was snoring like a champ. The diner wasn’t exactly a romantic spot, and sitting between Veronica and Mason didn’t feel much like quality time.
“You’ve got a sister?” Mason said.
“I do.”
