Scorcher

Chapter 2

“I told you, you didn’t have to,” Desoto said to Carver. “Sometimes it’s like you hate yourself.”

They were at Wolfie’s on East Sunrise in Fort Lauderdale, where Desoto liked to eat whenever he was in the vicinity. It was a hall-like place with lazy ceiling fans, a hundred tables, and an excellent reputation it deserved. There were about a dozen other diners, seated along the walls. Desoto was helping himself to sweet rolls from the wicker basket on the table. Carver wasn’t eating.

“I guess I did have to,” Carver said, trying not to think about the blackened thing he’d seen curled on the table at the morgue. But Desoto was right; it had been stupid of Carver to insist on viewing the body and putting himself through the horror. Masochistic. There was little enough left of Chipper to identify other than by dental work. Carver knew how that was done postmortem; he tried not to think about that, either.

“I feel helpless,” Desoto said. “I don’t like seeing this dumped on you, amigo, and there’s nothing I can do to change what happened.”

“And no way I can change it,” Carver said. He ran his hand down his face. His eyes felt dry, his cheeks stiff, as if he’d been crying and had passed beyond tears. Or had screamed himself beyond emotion. He caught sight of his reflection in a wall mirror: average-sized guy, in his forties, gleaming bald on top but with a thick mass of curly gray hair over his ears and in back. Sun-bleached eyebrows; blue eyes like a cat’s against a tan, almost swarthy complexion. Nose long and straight, lips full and stubborn. Features not handsome, but strong, maybe cruel, because of the boyhood scar that gave a slight twist to the right corner of his mouth. No hint in the reflection of what had happened to the inner man. No sign that a universe had shifted.

“Laura seems to be coping okay,” Desoto said, spreading butter on a roll. Some of it melted and dripped golden onto his plate.

“She’s in shock.”

“She’s also going to be joined in a few hours by Sam Devine.” Devine was the lawyer Laura was living with in Saint Louis. “Maybe you should see her first.” Desoto, wise in the ways of women, even women numbed by grief.

“I want to see her,” Carver said. He’d spoken to Laura only briefly after Chipper’s death, outside Fort Lauderdale police headquarters, and he’d been stunned by how much smaller and older his one-time vital, dark-haired bride had become. She was still beautiful, but in a different way, as a middle-aged woman. Maturity and grace had supplanted the healthy, almost feverish quality that had first attracted Carver. He wondered if grief over Chipper had diminished and aged her overnight, or if it had been the usual gradual process become suddenly visible.

“How do you feel about Laura?” Desoto asked.

“Right now, I feel sorry for her.”

“I’d talk with her, comfort her, amigo, then I’d leave her with this Sam Devine.”

“She’ll return to Saint Louis with him anyway,” Carver said, “when she has Chipper shipped back there for burial.”

“Muumph,” Desoto said, around a mouthful of sweet roll. A towering teenage waitress wandered by, noticed the basket on the table needed replenishing, and returned within a few seconds with more rolls. Their aroma was deliriously pungent, but right now it made Carver slightly nauseated. The lanky waitress, who had a name tag lettered Tanya pinned to her uniform blouse, poured more coffee for Desoto and then loped away. Tall Tanya.

“What do you have on this guy who burns people?” Carver asked.

“I was worried you might ask.”

“Why?”

“You seem as calm as Laura, only in a different way.”

“Maybe I’m in shock, too.”

“No. Something else. Something that makes me afraid for you.”

“Does that mean you’re not going to tell me?”

“No, amigo, you’d find out anyway. You’re as persistent as heat rash. We don’t have any reliable witnesses, either at the burning at Pompano Beach or in the restaurant here in Fort Lauderdale. The restaurant is Casey’s, over on Northeast Thirteenth Street, off Route One. It’s a tiny place that specializes in chicken wings, mostly carry-out orders. Laura decided to stop there because your daughter was complaining about being hungry. They had their meal and left, and in the parking lot Laura realized she’d forgotten her purse inside. She sent Chipper back for it. Five minutes later he hadn’t returned, so she went back to the restaurant and. . found him.”

“What kind of flammable substance was used?”

“The lab’s trying to analyze it now. It’s not like gasoline or alcohol; this sticks and burns, like flaming glue.”

“Like napalm,” Carver said. He’d been in Vietnam briefly and remembered the scarred civilians who’d suffered through napalm attacks; the grotesque, disfiguring burns. “Flaming glue” was a good description of napalm, and the stuff could be used in flamethrowers, even homemade flamethrowers. It burned hot, it burned long, and it burned through things.

“My guess is, whatever was used was concocted by the maniac who killed your son,” Desoto said. “But genuine, industrial-manufactured napalm might mean a military connection, something we’ll check out.”

“There were witnesses in the Pompano Beach killing, weren’t there?”

“In a way. Two. But they saw very little. They heard more. They swear the killer was arguing over returning something he’d bought there, but they don’t know what.”

“A hell of a motive for a killing,” Carver said.

“That depends. The police psychiatrist thinks the murderer might be a schizophrenic with paranoid delusions.”

“I’m not surprised. I don’t want to hear any psychobabble. It’s out of vogue for good reason.”

“I’ll tell you, I had a cousin like that, Carver. Really thought people were out to get him personally, and saw great danger in it. I saw him fly into a rage and hurl coins into a clerk’s face because he got too many pennies in his change. If he’d had a flamethrower, he’d have used it.”

“But who walks around carrying a flamethrower?”

“Someone who gets mad, stays mad, and goes back to the source of that anger. He’d give the victim one last chance, according to the psychiatrist, and if the victim wouldn’t give him what he wanted, the killer would feel perfectly justified in taking almost any action.”

“You’re telling me Chipper might have been killed because some mental case wanted revenge for being shortchanged and my son was in the way.”

“Or something like that. You know the trivial motives for murder, Carver. We’ve both seen people killed for sport. Thing is, this killer might have feared Chipper as a witness.”

It was possible, Carver knew. Maybe probable. Only someone unbalanced would kill in such a bizarre manner. So why shouldn’t the motive seem bizarre to everyone but the killer? But it could be a mistake early in a case to put too much stock in what a police psychiatrist theorized. Psychiatrists were mistaken much of the time when they had their subjects sitting in front of them and cooperating.

“Shrinks are more interested in speculation than in justice,” Carver said. “They don’t seem concerned with right and wrong.”

“Or else they know how hard it is sometimes to distinguish one from the other.”

“You checking pyromaniac cases on file?” Carver asked.

“We are, but I’m told this doesn’t necessarily relate to fascination with flame. More a vengeance thing, a desire to make the antagonist suffer. Maybe a metaphor for hell, eh?”

“A religious crank?” Florida had a surfeit of those.

“Could be,” Desoto said. “Legwork’s being done.” He reached across the table and patted Carver’s wrist. “I’m on this, amigo, even if it’s out of my precise jurisdiction.”

“I know you are,” Carver said. He got his hard walnut cane from where it was leaning against the wall, set its rubber-encased tip firmly on the floor, and stood up. He managed this smoothly. Carver’s left knee had taken a holdup man’s bullet that had shattered bone and cartilage. That was what had knocked him off the Orlando police force and given him a knee frozen at a thirty-degree angle for life. He’d undergone physical therapy, and he still swam every day. That, and dragging his lower body around, had lent his upper body a strength that sometimes surprised him.

“Where are you going?” Desoto asked.

“To see Laura. Then I’m going to buy a bottle and take it home with me.”

“To be with Edwina?”

“I’m driving up to my cottage.”

“You should go to Edwina,” Desoto said solemnly.

“No. She’ll understand. I have to be alone for a while. That’s the way I feel.”

“Like after you were shot, eh?”

“No, nothing like that.”

“Oh? Like how, then?”

“I’m going to find the bastard,” Carver said. “I’m going to kill him.”

“That won’t work, amigo. Won’t help you. It can’t.”

But Desoto didn’t know about the thing that lived beneath Carver’s calm surface, the beast that goaded as it grew stronger. It made everything else irrelevant. It was huge. It filled the hollowness of grief with purpose. There was no room in Carver for anything other than his hunger for revenge. “I can make it work.”

“And afterward?”

“Afterward shit,” Carver said.

He limped from the restaurant, dragging his images and his horror and his quest out into the brutal heat.

Desoto followed him to the door and called after him, “You oughta reconsider this, don’t you think?”

But Carver hadn’t really considered it in the first place. He was just going to do it.