Into the Inferno - Earl Emerson [140]
“I can’t deny there was some strange stuff happening in Chattanooga.” He laughed.
“And who called the fire investigators and told them I set up the explosion? And last night, my house? Somebody you know?”
“Mrs. DiMaggio insisted on doing that herself. She used to be in summer stock. Loves playing a part. Practically begged me for it.”
I was sparring. Wasting time. Holding out for a miracle.
Any minute now he would shoot us, wrap us in a big plastic tarp, and drag our bodies downstairs to dispose of.
We might stall him for five minutes, but in the end he was going to shoot us.
Running wouldn’t work—he would easily line me up in his sights before I reached the end of the corridor. And Stephanie didn’t have a chance standing along the far wall of DiMaggio’s office under the Paul Klee. For her, running was not even an option.
I’d been facing my own demise all week, and now that it was here, panic gripped me in a way it hadn’t during the past seven days. I laughed aloud. I was destined to turn into a vegetable tomorrow, and here I was panicking over the thought of getting shot. I guess I was really panicking over the thought of Stephanie getting shot. My life was already over—Donovan would be doing me a favor—but Stephanie was being robbed of the next fifty years. I had an ugly vision of Morgan and my daughters waiting in the hotel room for days before contacting the authorities.
“As long as this is all settled and you’re not going to change your mind,” I said, “maybe you could clear up a few things.”
“Like what?” You could tell he didn’t mind the stalling—the more delay the better. He was still trying to work himself up to this.
“I don’t understand why you dragged Max Caputo into this,” I said.
“Who? Caputo?”
“Remember the trailer on Edgewick Road?”
“Oh, him. I followed the fire engine the day before. After you packed him off to the hospital, I did some reconnoitering and decided his property was ideal for what we had in mind.”
“You mean for wiping out the whole department.”
“Well, yeah. Anybody who might have been exposed in the truck accident.”
“So you killed Max and filled the place up with ammonium nitrate?”
“I didn’t kill him.”
“Who did?”
“I’m assuming it was the explosion. I left him in a closet.”
“I don’t understand any of this,” Stephanie said. “Why were you shipping D number fifty-six without precautions? Especially after that first accident in Tennessee. Why take another chance?”
“The odds were one in a million that anything would happen. Maybe one in ten million.”
“That clearly wasn’t true,” I said. “You’d already had an accident right here in the plant. Another one in Tennessee. Who knows what else that you won’t tell me about? It’s got to be easier to take precautions than it is to run around murdering people.”
“We took precautions.”
“Putting it in Bibles?”
“That and having our own driver handling it. The mistake was hers. Your sister’s the one who screwed up.”
“Like hell she did,” Stephanie said. “You even tell her what was in there? Did you bother to tell her how lethal it was? She didn’t know anything about it. I’ve got her journal. She never mentioned it.”
“You’re still shipping it in Bibles, aren’t you?” I said.
“It was a fluke. That accident. It’ll never happen again.”
“You’re a piece of work, you know that?” I shifted in the doorway, more to see what he would do than to make an escape.
“You’re the ones who don’t get it. This is what always astonishes me about people in your position. If you could see this from my point of view, you’d realize if it was you with the gun you’d do the same thing I’m doing. It’s just how it is.”
“You’re really so blind you think that?”
“Abso-fucking-lutely.”
“Jesus Christ. You need a psychiatrist.”
“Why did you kill Achara?” Stephanie asked.
Donovan tensed and then relaxed, as if once again deciding it didn’t matter what we knew. I had the feeling he was happy to brag about it, to tell someone, anyone. It must