Into the Inferno - Earl Emerson [95]
“It is unfortunate. The whole thing is.”
“Oh, hey, that’s right. You’re the guy our chief was talking about. You’re on some sort of final countdown. Got a week to live or something?”
“That’s right.”
The two of them looked at each other. “We’re in the process of narrowing our list of suspects. We’re pretty sure it wasn’t Caputo.”
“And?”
“We think it might have been you.”
“What?”
“We think you might have set the fire.”
“I was on the goddamn rig. I was one of the responding firefighters. I’m the one who figured out it was going to blow. If I hadn’t been there, a whole bunch of people would be dead right now.”
Shad said, “One: We can find no record of Caputo buying any fertilizer or fuel oil. We spoke to everyone else who responded to his accident the day before, and they said it wasn’t in the trailer then. Two: We found his other dog in a ditch outside the property. He’d been poisoned with enough phencyclidine to drop a cow. We’re assuming that’s also what happened with the dog we can’t find.”
“What’s phencyclidine?”
“PCP, angel dust, crystal,” said Stevenson.
Shad added, “Also known as hog. Or rocket fuel. Everybody says Caputo loved those dogs.”
“I agree. Max loved those dogs. So go find somebody who didn’t like the dogs.”
“We heard you didn’t like Max or his dogs,” Shad said.
“You heard what?”
“We heard you didn’t like Max Caputo.”
“You had trouble with him in the past, didn’t you?” Stevenson said. “Didn’t his dogs bite one of your people?”
“I never even thought about him.”
Shad said, “We got a phone call said you were depressed about your physical health. Said you were thinking about killing yourself and you were planning to take some people with you.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“You are sick, though. Aren’t you?”
“Well, yes.”
“Is it terminal?”
“It’s not good.”
“You thought about suicide?”
“No,” I lied. “Hell, no. Who called you?”
“Can’t tell you,” Stevenson said, but Shad gave it away with his eyes.
“You don’t know, do you?”
“Maybe it was anonymous,” Stevenson said. “Maybe it wasn’t.”
“You got an anonymous call from some crackpot, and now you’re jumping all over me? Why don’t you go after the caller?”
“Pay phone,” Stevenson said. “You know any women in Tacoma?”
“Not any who could make the call.”
“You sure? You see, the trouble is we know about firefighters. Lots of times they start fires. We also know about terminally ill patients. Lots of times they want to die. It all fits. You’re depressed. You want to die. You know how to set a fire.”
Stevenson might have done a better job of staring me down if he hadn’t had those Clara Bow lips and those baby-butt cheeks with the pink circles in the center. “We figure you planned on wiping out the whole fire department,” Stevenson said. “Even taking your kids with you. Then at the last minute you got the touchy-feelies and decided to let them live.”
I got up and walked to the door. “They actually pay you guys for this?”
“You trying to get rid of us by walking out?” Shad asked, kicking the swivel chair across the room behind him in a display of toughness.
“Take it easy with the furniture. It was Harold Newcastle’s.”
“You’re not walking out of here.”
“Unless you’re planning to arrest me, I am.”
That would come back to haunt me.
41. THE LPG DISASTER
It was nearly nine-thirty when I walked through the door of the officers’ room at the rear of the station. Stephanie looked up. “Line two.”
“We’ve been paging you,” Arden’s wife added.
“You hear from Donovan and Carpenter?”
Stephanie shook her head. “Maybe this is them.”
I picked up the receiver. “Lieutenant Swope.”
“Hey, Lieut. This is Carl Steding at the Chattanooga Times Free Press. I had a chat with Scott Donovan. Apparently he spoke to you yesterday?”
“Yeah.”
“He claims you folks are in the middle of some sort of plague related to an alarm you went on.”
“If you’re calling out of idle curiosity, I really don’t have time. If you know anything about those three firefighters who went down three years ago or the Southeast