Red Dragon (42 page)

Throat seared with smoke. BONG BONG. Door here. Under the knob. Don’t drop it. Click the lock. Snatch it open. Air. Down the ramp. Air. Collapsed in the grass. Up again on hands and knees, crawling.

She came up on her knees to clap, picked up the house echo and crawled away from it, breathing deep until she could stand, walk, run until she hit something, run again.

Locating Francis Dolarhyde’s house was not so easy. The address listed at Gateway was a post-office box in St. Charles.

Even the St. Charles sheriff’s department had to check a service map at the power-company office to be sure.

The sheriff’s department welcomed St. Louis SWAT to the other side of the river, and the caravan moved quietly up State Highway 94. A deputy beside Graham in the lead car showed the way. Crawford leaned between them from the backseat and sucked at something in his teeth. They met light traffic at the north end of St. Charles, a pickup full of children, a Greyhound bus, a tow truck.

They saw the glow as they cleared the northern city limits.

“That’s
it
!” the deputy said. “That’s where it is!”

Graham put his foot down. The glow brightened and swelled as they roared up the highway.

Crawford snapped his fingers for the microphone.

“All units, that’s his house burning. Watch it now. He may be coming out. Sheriff, let us have a roadblock here, if you will.”

A thick column of sparks and smoke leaned southeast over the fields, hanging over them now.

“Here,” the deputy said, “turn in on this gravel.”

They saw the woman then, silhouetted black against the fire, saw her as she heard them and raised her arms to them.

And then the great fire blasted upward, outward, burning beams and window frames describing slow high arcs into the night sky, the blazing van rocked over on its side, orange tracery of the burning trees suddenly blown out and dark. The ground shuddered as the explosion whump rocked the police cars.

The woman was facedown in the road. Crawford and Graham and the deputies out, running to her as fire rained in the road, some running past her with their weapons drawn.

Crawford took Reba from a deputy batting sparks from her hair.

He held her arms, face close to hers, red in the fire-light.

“Francis Dolarhyde,” he said. He shook her gently. “Francis Dolarhyde, where is he?”

“He’s in there,” she said, raising her stained hand toward the heat, letting it fall. “He’s dead in there.”

“You
know
that?” Crawford peered into her sightless eyes.

“I was with him.”

“Tell me, please.”

“He shot himself in the face. I put my hand in it. He set fire to the house. He shot himself. I put my hand in it. He was on the floor. I put my hand in it can I sit down?”

“Yes,” Crawford said. He got into the back of a police car with her. He put his arms around her and let her cry into his jowl.

Graham stood in the road and watched the flames until his face was red and sore.

The winds aloft whipped smoke across the moon.

The wind in the morning was warm and wet. It blew wisps of cloud over the blackened chimneys where Dolarhyde’s house had stood. Thin smoke blew flat across the fields.

A few raindrops struck coals and exploded in tiny puffs of steam and ashes.

A fire truck stood by, its light revolving.

S. F. Aynesworth, FBI section chief, Explosives, stood with Graham upwind of the ruins, pouring coffee from a thermos.

Aynesworth winced as the local fire marshal reached into the ashes with a rake.

“Thank God it’s still too hot for him in there,” he said out of the side of his mouth. He had been carefully cordial to the local authorities. To Graham, he spoke his mind. “I got to wade it, hell. This place’ll look like a fucking turkey farm soon as all the special deputies and constables finish their pancakes and take a crap. They’ll be right on down to help.”

Until Aynesworth’s beloved bomb van arrived from Washington, he had to make do with what he could bring on the plane. He pulled a faded Marine Corps duffel bag out of the trunk of a patrol car and unpacked his Nomex underwear and asbestos boots and coveralls.

“What did it look like when it went up, Will?”

“A flash of intense light that died down. Then it looked darker at the base. A lot of stuff was going up, window frames, flat pieces of the roof, and chunks flying sideways, tumbling in the fields. There was a shock wave, and the wind after. It blew out and sucked back in again. It looked like it almost blew the fire out.”

“The fire was going good when it blew?”

“Yeah, it was through the roof and out the windows upstairs and down. The trees were burning.”

Aynesworth recruited two local firemen to stand by with a hose, and a third dressed in asbestos stood by with a winch line in case something fell on him.

He cleared the basement steps, now open to the sky, and went down into the tangle of black timbers. He could stay only a few minutes at a time. He made eight trips.

All he got for his effort was one flat piece of torn metal, but it seemed to make him happy.

Red-faced and wet with sweat, he stripped off his asbestos clothing and sat on the running board of the fire truck with a fireman’s raincoat over his shoulders.

He laid the flat piece of metal on the ground and blew away a film of ash.

“Dynamite,” he told Graham. “Look here, see the fern pattern in the metal? This stuff’s the right gauge for a trunk or a footlocker. That’s probably it. Dynamite in a footlocker. It didn’t go off in the basement, though. Looks like the ground floor to me. See where the tree’s cut there where that marble tabletop hit it? Blown out sideways. The dynamite was in something that kept the fire off of it for a while.”

“How about remains?”

“There may not be a lot, but there’s always something. We’ve got a lot of sifting to do. We’ll find him. I’ll give him to you in a small sack.”

 

 

 

A sedative had finally put Reba McClane to sleep at De-Paul Hospital shortly after dawn. She wanted the policewoman to sit close beside her bed. Several times through the morning she woke and reached out for the officer’s hand.

When she asked for breakfast, Graham brought it in.

Which way to go? Sometimes it was easier for them if you were impersonal. With Reba McClane, he didn’t think so.

He told her who he was.

“Do you know him?” she asked the policewoman.

Graham passed the officer his credentials. She didn’t need them.

“I know he’s a federal officer, Miss McClane.”

She told him everything, finally. All about her time with Francis Dolarhyde. Her throat was sore, and she stopped frequently to suck cracked ice.

He asked her the unpleasant questions and she took him through it, once waving him out the door while the policewoman held the basin to catch her breakfast.

She was pale and her face was scrubbed and shiny when he came back into the room.

He asked the last of it and closed his notebook.

“I won’t put you through this again,” he said, “but I’d like to come back by. Just to say hi and see how you’re doing.”

“How could you help it?—a charmer like me.”

For the first time he saw tears and realized where it ate her.

“Would you excuse us for a minute, officer?” Graham said. He took Reba’s hand.

“Look here. There was plenty wrong with Dolarhyde, but there’s nothing wrong with you. You said he was kind and thoughtful to you. I believe it. That’s what you brought out in him. At the end, he couldn’t kill you and he couldn’t watch you die. People who study this kind of thing say he was trying to stop. Why? Because you helped him. That probably saved some lives. You didn’t draw a freak. You drew a man with a freak on his back. Nothing wrong with you, kid. If you let yourself believe there is, you’re a sap. I’m coming back to see you in a day or so. I have to look at cops all the time, and I need relief—try to do something about your hair there.”

She shook her head and waved him toward the door. Maybe she grinned a little, he couldn’t be sure.

 

 

 

Graham called Molly from the St. Louis FBI office. Willy’s grandfather answered the telephone.

“It’s Will Graham, Mama,” he said. “Hello, Mr. Graham.”

Willy’s grandparents always called him “Mr. Graham.”

“Mama said he killed himself. She was looking at Donahue and they broke in with it. Damn lucky thing. Saved you fellows a lot of trouble catching him. Saves us taxpayers footing any more bills for this thing too. Was he really white?”

“Yes sir. Blond. Looked Scandinavian.”

Willy’s grandparents were Scandinavian.

“May I speak to Molly, please?”

“Are you going back down to Florida now?”

“Soon. Is Molly there?”

“Mama, he wants to speak to Molly. She’s in the bathroom, Mr. Graham. My grandboy’s eating breakfast again. Been out riding in that good air. You ought to see that little booger eat. I bet he’s gained ten pounds. Here she is.”

“Hello.”

“Hi, hotshot.”

“Good news, huh?”

“Looks like it.”

“I was out in the garden. Mamamma came out and told me when she saw it on TV. When did you find out?”

“Late last night.”

“Why didn’t you call me?”

“Mamamma was probably asleep.”

“No, she was watching Johnny Carson. I can’t tell you, Will. I’m so glad you didn’t have to catch him.”

“I’ll be here a little longer.”

“Four or five days?”

“I’m not sure. Maybe not that long. I want to see you, kid.”

“I want to see you too, when you get through with everything you need to do.”

“Today’s Wednesday. By Friday I ought to—”

“Will, Mamamma has all Willy’s uncles and aunts coming down from Seattle next week, and—”

“Fuck Mamamma. What is this ‘Mamamma’ anyway?”

“When Willy was real little, he couldn’t say—”

“Come home with me.”

“Will,
I’ve
waited for
you.
They never get to see Willy and a few more days—”

“Come yourself. Leave Willy there, and your ex-mother-in-law can stick him on a plane next week. Tell you what—let’s stop in New Orleans. There’s a place called—”

“I don’t think so. I’ve been working—just part-time—at this western store in town, and I have to give them a little notice.”

“What’s wrong, Molly?”

“Nothing. Nothing’s wrong. . . . I got so sad, Will. You know I came up here after Willy’s father died.” She always said “Willy’s father” as though it were an office. She never used his name. “And we were all together—I got myself together, I got calm. I’ve gotten myself together now too, and I—”

“Small difference: I’m not dead.”

“Don’t be that way.”

“What way? Don’t be what way?”

“You’re mad.”

Graham closed his eyes for a moment.

“Hello.”

“I’m not mad, Molly. You do what you want to. I’ll call you when things wind up here.”

“You could come up here.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Why not? There’s plenty of room. Mamamma would—”

“Molly, they don’t like me and you know why. Every time they look at me, I remind them.”

“That’s not fair and it’s not true either.”

Graham was very tired.

“Okay. They’re full of shit and they make me sick—try that one.”

“Don’t say that.”

“They want the boy. Maybe they like you all right, probably they do, if they ever think about it. But they want the boy and they’ll take you. They don’t want me and I couldn’t care less.
I
want
you.
In Florida. Willy too, when he gets tired of his pony.”

“You’ll feel better when you get some sleep.”

“I doubt it. Look, I’ll call you when I know something here.”

“Sure.” She hung up.

“
Ape
shit,” Graham said. “
Ape
shit.”

Crawford stuck his head in the door. “Did I hear you say ‘ape shit’?”

“You did.”

“Well, cheer up. Aynesworth called in from the site. He has something for you. He said we ought to come on out, he’s got some static from the locals.”

Aynesworth was pouring ashes carefully into new paint cans when Graham and Crawford got to the black ruin where Dolarhyde’s house had stood.

He was covered with soot and a large blister puffed under his ear. Special Agent Janowitz from Explosives was working down in the cellar.

A tall sack of a man fidgeted beside a dusty Oldsmobile in the drive. He intercepted Crawford and Graham as they crossed the yard.

“Are you Crawford?”

“That’s right.”

“I’m Robert L. Dulaney. I’m the coroner and this is my jurisdiction.” He showed them his card. It said “Vote for Robert L. Dulaney.”

Crawford waited.

“Your man here has some evidence that should have been turned over to me. He’s kept me waiting for nearly an hour.”

“Sorry for the inconvenience, Mr. Dulaney. He was following my instructions. Why don’t you have a seat in your car and I’ll clear this up.”

Dulaney started after them.

Crawford turned around. “You’ll excuse us, Mr. Dulaney. Have a seat in your car.”

Section Chief Aynesworth was grinning, his teeth white in his sooty face. He had been sieving ashes all morning.

“As section chief, it gives me great pleasure—”

“To pull your prong, we all know that,” Janowitz said, climbing from the black tangle of the cellar.

“Silence in the ranks, Indian Janowitz. Fetch the items of interest.” He tossed Janowitz a set of car keys.