Daddy's Gone a Hunting

47

Tim Fleming was the supervising fire marshal to whom Frank Ramsey and Nathan Klein reported. Over the past five days since the explosion at the Connelly complex, they had been submitting daily detailed updates to him regarding the investigation. On Tuesday morning, both refreshed by a good night’s sleep, they were in his office at Fort Totten.

Fleming, a solidly built man in his late fifties with iron-gray hair and a poker face, had thoroughly examined the reports and went straight to the salient facts of the case. His well-modulated voice was deep and resonant. “This Connelly guy and his plant manager let a wrecked van sit in their parking lot for five years? Be interesting to see if their drunken driver really did hit only a tree and not some poor guy on a bicycle.”

“The exterior of the van was thoroughly checked for any sign of blood or human tissue,” Klein reassured his boss. “He did hit a tree. It was an elm and from what they can tell, it was already dead.”

“So the drunk driver saved the homeowner from maybe having the tree crash on his house in a storm,” Fleming observed. “What a nice guy.”

Ramsey and Klein smiled. Their boss was known for that kind of comment. But immediately Fleming was all business again. “Jamie Gordon’s notebook was found in the van, but that doesn’t mean that she brought it there herself.”

“No, it doesn’t.”

“And the vagrant who was squatting there doesn’t have a record?”

“None that we can find. The fingerprints in the van didn’t match up to anybody with a criminal history.”

“Okay. We’ll call a press conference for noon to give out the new information that a vagrant may have been on the premises at the time of the explosion. I understand that the descriptions of the homeless people listed in the notebook are already being circulated to all the precincts in the city.”

Klein and Ramsey nodded.

“The cops know the local street people. I wouldn’t be surprised if they don’t round up a few of them for us pretty fast. The commissioner has decided that we’ll pass out copies of that family picture to the media. But will continue to say nothing to the press about Jamie Gordon’s notebook. The guys at the crime lab know that her name is not even to be whispered.”

“Absolutely,” Ramsey confirmed.

“Telling the media about the vagrant will give them enough to chew on,” Fleming said. “They’ve all but convicted the Connelly daughter who was injured as having set the explosion with her buddy, the Schmidt guy.”

He stood up, indicating that the meeting was over. “Twelve o’clock sharp,” he said, then added, “You guys are doing a good job, which, incidentally, does not surprise me.”

Three hours later the media conference became hot breaking news when the information about a vagrant possibly being present at the time of the explosion was announced. Copies of the picture of the young couple and baby were handed out. After nearly a week of speculation that Kate Connelly and Gus Schmidt were arsonists, the new angle was fresh meat for reporters to keep the story on the front pages.

By two o’clock, the picture taken more than forty years ago in a modest ranch-style home on Staten Island was all over the Internet.

Frank Ramsey was more optimistic than Nathan Klein that the picture would be tied to the vagrant. “My bet is that it got thrown in the garbage when somebody’s house was cleaned out,” Nathan predicted. “I mean, when a friend of my wife, Sarah, Kat LeBlanc, recently lost her grandmother, there were drawers full of old pictures. Most of them were snapshots, some eighty and ninety years old, of her grandmother’s cousins, people Kat couldn’t even identify. Sarah asked her if she was going to bring all that stuff home and drag it up to the attic so that her kids could have the job of throwing it out in thirty or forty years.”

“What did her friend do?” Frank asked, remembering that his own mother still had boxes of pictures of long-departed relatives.

“Kat kept some of the ones that had her grandmother in them. Then she picked out a few more where she could tell who the people were, and tore up the rest.”

“I still say the picture in the van is going to give us a lead,” Frank told him, “and I’m itching to pay Lottie Schmidt another visit. The report from the New York IRS should be in sometime today. If Gus Schmidt did pay taxes on a winning lottery ticket, then, as my father used to say, ‘I’ll eat my hat.’ ”

“Your hat is safe,” Klein assured him. “I’ll give the tax guys another call and tell them that, this time, ‘urgent’ means urgent.”