Into the Inferno - Earl Emerson [94]
“Let Dr. Perkins see her. He’ll get to the bottom of it.”
“Where is he?” I asked.
“In the watch office interviewing some of the volunteers. He says in most major mass delusion cases there are precursor episodes that weren’t as severe. He’s trying to uncover those now. He wanted to know if that explosion the other day had been a delusion, but I told him I thought it was real.”
“You thought it was real? Karrie, listen to yourself. If it had been any more real, they’d be burying us in thimbles. You’re hobnobbing with a quack.”
I stomped toward the watch office, Karrie riding my heels.
An imposing man with a shaved head met me in the watch office. “Dr. Perkins?” I said.
“And who may I have the pleasure of—”
“Get your hairy ass out of this station before I throw you through a wall.”
A moment later Karrie and the good doctor were on the sidewalk out front; he was already explaining away my actions in terms of his theory: “. . . understandable reaction to having the delusion exposed and—”
“Wow,” Ian Hjorth said as I slammed the door behind them. Mouths agape, the volunteers Perkins had been interviewing stared at me.
“Put Karrie on disability leave. I don’t want her falling off a rig on a response.” I pulled out the three-by-five card I’d been carrying. “Here. These are the symptoms. Make sure she gets a copy. In fact, make copies and pass them around. Who knows who else might need it.”
“Yes sir, Lieutenant.”
I found the two county fire investigators, Shad and Stevenson, outside the empty chief’s office. Judging by their faces, they’d been hugely entertained by our melodrama.
As if he owned the place, Shad, the short one with scrub-brush eyebrows, entered Newcastle’s office and plunked down in the swivel chair with a familiarity that offended me. Shad wasn’t fit to carry Newcastle’s jockstrap to the laundry. Stevenson hunkered on the corner of the desk, while I leaned against the file cabinet.
Shad said, “Buncha things. First, tell us again what made you suspicious when you got to the trailer yesterday.”
“I found Caputo’s dog dying in the blackberries. After that the empty ammonium nitrate sacks and oil drums.”
“Yeah,” Stevenson said. “How come nobody else found that stuff? Just you.”
“I was the only one with the time to look.”
“Trouble with what you’re telling us is, we can’t find any of it,” said Shad.
“You didn’t find much of the trailer, either.”
“We know explosions tend to diffuse materials over a large geographical area,” Shad said. “But we want to look into an alternate explanation for why we can’t find this stuff.”
“What would that be?”
“That those items never existed.”
“Sure. Maybe the trailer didn’t exist, either. Maybe Max Caputo never existed. Maybe there was no fire. Maybe that head we found in the tree fell from outer space. In that case, you boys might as well go home. Aloha.”
“The head belonged to Maxwell Devlin Caputo, born in North Bend in 1970. They found one of his legs, well, the bones from one of his legs, and a cap with his scalp in it. Pretty grisly stuff. His record was not exactly clean, but he was no master criminal, either. He had some drug convictions after he got out of the army. Other than poaching arrests and somebody accusing him of stealing a tractor and some riding lawn mowers from a store here in town, that was pretty much it.”
“I can understand the sacks disintegrating,” I said, “but those drums probably went half a mile. You’ll find them.”
“Yeah,” Stevenson said.
“Yeah,” Shad said.
For a moment or two I didn’t realize what they were getting at, and then it occurred to me this was their version of the third degree. Sarcasm. They sat back and stared, waiting for me to crack, both of them. I stared back. I was going to be a vegetable in three days. It was hard to think of anything they could threaten me with that came anywhere close. It was even harder to figure out why they were going after me.
“All that evidence,