Robert B. Parker's Slow Burn (10 page)

R
ob Featherstone was a Spark. He’d been a Spark for maybe twenty years, running the fire museum and handing out coffee when he wasn’t playing with his model trains. He was a tall bald guy, with what hair he had left dyed jet black on his freckled head. “My back,” he’d say. “If I hadn’t screwed up my back, I’d been a Boston firefighter. All I ever wanted since I was a kid in Brockton.”

Featherstone had cornered Kevin at the Scandinavian, right as he was about to hang it up for the night. Two more fires, this time set by Johnny and Big Ray. Kevin had followed the fires, gone back for a cup of black coffee before getting home. He had an early day of work at the Home Depot.

“He’s freakin’ nuts,” Featherstone said. “Crazy as a
shithouse rat. I don’t want to say nothin’ bad about him. I just want you to know who you’re dealing with.”

“Who?”

“Who the hell you think?” he said. “Fucking Johnny Donovan. You’re a young guy. Impressionable. What are you, twenty-one? Hadn’t you taken the fire exam?”

“Twice.”

“Yeah,” Featherstone said. “And maybe next time
you’ll pass, you know? You don’t want Johnny Donovan anywhere
around you. He’s bad, bad news. Tried to join up
with us five years ago and we wouldn’t have him.
The way he rides around in that red Chevy, misrepresenting
himself as a real-life jake. I mean, come on. He’s
like a crazy uncle I once had who thought he
was Napoleon. Wore military outfits and the whole deal before
they sent him off to Bridgewater.”

“Don’t worry about me.”

“He’s got the crazy eyes, Kevin,” he said. “I’ve seen it. And that fucking guy Ray. I know he’s a cop, but the department up there has no use for him. They been wanting to shit-can him for four years. He knows he doesn’t have much time. It just pains me, seeing you sitting there with those two. Bad news.”

“Okay.” Kevin got up to leave. “Thanks.”

Featherstone held up a hand. “Wait,” he said. “There’s more. I want to ask you something.”

Kevin waited.

“Has either one of those two talked to you about all these fires?”

Kevin took a breath. He started to sweat. But kept it cool, breaking off a piece of donut and shrugging. “Not really. Why?”

“Something happened the other night,” Featherstone said. “At that triple-decker fire. Something that got me thinking.”

Kevin studied the man’s face and the ink-black hair sticking out from the side of his head. “I don’t know,” Featherstone said. “As soon as that fire started, there was another one. On Dot Ave. At an old warehouse. You know?”

“I heard something about it.”

“Two set off back to back,” Featherstone said. “Just got me thinking, is all.”

“Thinking about what?”

Featherstone leaned back in the booth. He shrugged and rubbed the top of his bald head before leaning in and saying, “I saw Johnny’s red car at that warehouse the night before. I didn’t think much of it. Isn’t he in security or some shit?”

“Yeah,” Kevin said. “He’s got a lot of contracts to watch old buildings. It’s what he does.”

“Just doesn’t set right with me, is all,” Featherstone said. “Him being crazy and then seeing his car. I just wanted to warn you before I tip the boys.”

“The boys?”

“Arson,” Featherstone said. “They should talk to him. Even if he didn’t have nothing to do with it, he’d know something about the building.”

Kevin felt his breath catch in his throat. He stopped chewing his donut.

“Just stay clear, buddy boy,” Featherstone said, sliding out. “Don’t get the shit splattered on you.”

Kevin nodded and smiled. Featherstone left the pastry shop, a low buzzing of fluorescent lights overhead. He looked to the cash register to make sure the woman working there was in back. He picked up the phone and called Johnny Donovan. It was nearly two a.m.

He picked up on the first ring.

“What?”

“We got some trouble.”

T
he cops came for me the next morning. Thankfully, I’d just changed into a fresh T-shirt and jeans, replacing a butterfly bandage on my right eye. Feeling fine and somewhat dandy, I walked down my steps onto Marlborough and spotted Frank Belson leaning against a black unmarked unit. The rear door was wide open. Belson absently puffed on a cigar and waved me inside.

“And if I refuse?”

“You won’t get to meet the new boss,” Frank said. “And I’d really hate to miss that.”

I shook my head and crawled into the backseat. Belson slammed the door, put out his cigar, and got behind the wheel. We drove off in the opposite direction of the Public Garden before he took Berkeley over to Storrow. It was past rush hour and the road had yet to become clogged. Belson followed the
Esplanade as a middle-aged woman in the passenger seat turned around to me and said, “Just what the fuck do you think you’re doing, getting into a wrestling match at the farmers’ market?”

“Tea Party Museum was too far of a walk.”

“You can’t pull crap like that anymore,” she said. “Tourists took video of you with their cell phones. You’re gonna be very popular on YouTube.”

“Spenser, this is Captain Glass,” Belson said. “She doesn’t like me smoking in the car, either.”

“And I don’t give any free passes to aging thugs who drink beer with cops.”

I met Belson’s eye in the rearview mirror and raised my eyebrows. “Sometimes Frank and I drink cheap bourbon.”

Glass had shoulder-length brown hair and green, unsmiling Irish eyes. Her skin was the color of milk, which contrasted with her black silk blouse. She wore a small gold cross on a lightweight gold chain around her neck and just a trace of red lipstick.

“You were easy to spot,” Glass said. “But so was the other man.”

“The other man who we understand attacked you,” Belson said. “Right?”

“That’s right, Officer,” I said. “He came out of nowhere.”

“However it happened,” Glass said, “several vendors want to press charges against you and the other man.”

“Send the bill to Jackie DeMarco,” I said.

Belson turned off at Mass Ave and doubled back down Commonwealth. I took it as a good sign we weren’t headed south to police headquarters. The direction meant this was a meet and
greet and not an arrest. Had it been night, I might have thanked my lucky stars.

“I should feel honored they sent Homicide to pick me up,” I said. “However, the last time I saw the big guy, he was still breathing.”

“His name is Davey Stefanakos,” Belson said. “He’s got a rap sheet that looks like the
Encyclopedia Britannica
. Before he got into the life, he was in the Army and did a lot of that mixed martial arts crap.”

I touched the bandage over my eye and let out a long, painful breath. “Didn’t feel like crap to me.”

“Get over it,” Belson said. “You think you can retain the belt forever? Someone’s coming up. Someone’s always coming up these fucking streets.”

“You’ll have to deal with that crap on your own,” Glass said. “We want to talk to you about a guy named Rob Featherstone.”

“Sure,” I said. “Remind me again. Who’s Rob Featherstone?”

“The guy from the Sparks museum you talked to last week,” Belson said. “And a poor unfortunate bastard. Somebody dumped his body off the Tobin Bridge last night. Some college kids farting around on sailboats fished him out of the water.”

“Was he already dead?”

“Somebody was real pissed off,” Belson said. “Shot twice in the back of the head. Twice in the back.”

“Ouch.”

“We understand you spoke with him in connection to Holy Innocents?” Glass said. “You’re working for a Boston firefighter off the books.”

“I can’t divulge my client list,” I said.

“Zip it up, Spenser,” Belson said. “We’re on the same team. Featherstone loved firefighting so much, he’d get up in the middle of the night and chase sirens.”

“And what do you do?”

“I get paid for it,” Belson said. “Featherstone did it for free. In my book, that makes you a little screwy.”

“He seemed like a nice guy,” I said. “What else can you say about a person who hands out coffee and donuts to men on the job?”

“Just what did he tell you?” Glass said. “Did he know anything about the church fire?”

“No,” I said. “Mainly I looked at Arthur Fiedler’s helmet collection.”

“Yes or no, Spenser,” Belson said. He stopped at a traffic light. “Yes or no.”

“He talked about what he saw,” I said. “But nothing he said was of any help to me. Or anything that might’ve gotten him killed.”

“His wife said he’d become obsessed with all these summer fires,” Glass said. “He nearly lost his day job hopping from place to place. He told her he’d figured out what was going on and was damn well going to do something about it.”

“And who’d he suspect?”

“Well, that’s the problem,” Belson said. The car lurched forward on Commonwealth as we made our slow, steady way toward the Public Garden. “Never told her. Found his car down in the Seaport. Cleaned of all prints. Some blood on the window glass, which we’re pretty sure is his.”

“Friends?”

“Not many,” Glass said. “We’re working on it.”

“Maybe it’s a coincidence?” I said.

“Belson,” Glass said. “I thought you told me this guy was smart.”

“Lucky,” Belson said. “I told you he was often lucky, Captain.”

W
here’s Galway?” I said.

“In the back room playing poker with the other hounds.” Teddy Cahill looked up from the bar and shrugged. “What the fuck happened to you?”

I touched the bandage on my eye. “I disturbed some local wildlife.”

“Looks more like it disturbed you,” Cahill said.

I took a seat next to him. It was just after six at Florian Hall, the fire union headquarters down in Dorchester. The union had an impressive array of banquet rooms, offices, and, most important, a bar. Cahill walked behind the bar, popped the top of a Sam Adams, and slid it over to me. We were the only ones in the large space.

“I always admired you guys.”

“Yeah, yeah,” he said.

“You know a guy named Rob Featherstone?”

“Sure,” he said. “Works over at the fire museum. He’s a Spark.”

“Was a Spark,” I said. “He’s dead.”

“No shit.” Cahill cut his eyes over at me. “He wasn’t the bastard who got dumped off the bridge?”

I nodded and drank some Sam Adams. The union knew how to calibrate their cooler. The beer was ice cold. In a separate room, a rock band was warming up for a wedding. The walls vibrated pictures of long-dead union members and guys standing among the ruins of many buildings. “A police lieutenant named Belson just braced me, thinking he might be tied to the arson case.”

“Yeah, I know Frank,” Cahill said. “He should’ve called.”

“Check your messages,” I said. “I’m sure he will.”

“I thought it was a suicide,” Cahill said. “Heard the guy jumped.”

“He had an incentive,” I said. “There were four bullet holes in him.”

“Christ.”

“Had he talked to you about the church fire?”

Cahill stubbed out the cigarette and scratched his cheek. “Nope,” he said. “Not a word. Or anybody else from the Sparks, for that matter. Rob Featherstone. Really? I think he collected model trains or some shit.”

The band launched into the first few bars of Foreigner’s “Hot Blooded.” They got to the part where the fever reached a hundred and three and stopped to make some adjustments.

“Could he have contacted someone else in Arson?” I said. “Maybe as a confidential source?”

“Sure,” Cahill said. “It’s possible. But I doubt it. We tend to talk amongst ourselves on stuff like that. And if a guy like Featherstone had known something, he wouldn’t have kept it a secret. Those Sparks really bleed for the department. They come out at all hours looking out for us. I mean, this is a thankless job sometimes. Just like being a cop. Someone gives you a pat on the back and it’s appreciated.”

“Sometimes comely young women hand me a shot of rye on the street,” I said. “Gumshoe boosters.”

Cahill grunted under the walrus mustache.

“I interviewed Featherstone last week,” I said. “He didn’t offer anything. He said he got there maybe two minutes before the engines. He talked a lot about Dougherty, Bonnelli, and Mulligan. But Belson says Featherstone told his wife he knew who’d been setting all the fires the last few months. Maybe Holy Innocents.”

“And?”

“And he never told her or told the police,” I said.

“Of course not,” he said.

“Yep.”

“Son of a bitch.”

Cahill hadn’t touched his beer since I walked in. He opened a pack of cigarettes and pulled out a fresh one. It had been a while since I’d been around so much smoke. I figured the union didn’t think the smoke would offend the firefighters. I drank some more beer. The band turned it up to eleven, rocking out to Eddie Money, “Baby Hold On.”

“Jesus,” Cahill said. “What is this, the summer of fucking ’78?”

“You remember that far back?”

“Only when I drink.”

“Busy week?”

“Eight more suspicious fires,” Cahill said. He streamed smoke out of the side of his mouth. “It’s what keeps me young.”

“I’ll check with the museum and let you know what I find out.”

Cahill nodded. He looked up at the collection of booze bottles on the shelf and the dusty framed photographs of firefighters then and now. A ceramic figurine of a little boy dressed in fireman’s garb stood tall by the whiskeys. He was holding a cute little ax.

“You want to be straight about what happened to your freakin’ eye?”

“I was following a guy named Tyler King and some of his friends threw up a roadblock,” I said. “We made a real mess out of some
fruits de mer
.”

“I got a nice file on Tyler King.”

“We just had a chat yesterday.”

Cahill shook his head. “But he’s not your guy,” he said. “All these fires ain’t his work, Spenser. We eliminated him a long time ago.”

“‘All these fires’?” I said. “Hmm. Are you coming around to the idea of one guy?”

Cahill blew out a long stream of smoke. He shook his head. “Tyler King is a pro,” he said. “He does what he does for money and that’s it. All these fucking fires. This is something else. It’s the goddamnedest thing I’ve ever seen.”

“Everything started at Holy Innocents?”

Cahill touched his mustache. I drank some beer in the silence. After the second sip, he stared at me and just nodded. “Okay. Okay.”

“How?”

“Some of the new ones look like what we found at Holy Innocents.”

“Which was what?”

“Stuff,” he said. “Similar stuff.”

“Hold on,” I said. “Don’t get too technical with me.”

Cahill shrugged and reached for his beer. He drank a sip. Hot damn. We were making some progress.

He reached for some Bushmills and poured out two shots. “Commissioner would shit a golden brick if I told you this. Nobody wants the public to panic over some nutso. But by my last estimate, we’ve had at least eighty.”

“Yikes.”

“From now on I want to know what you know,” he said. “And I won’t hold back, either. Me and you are working together.”

“In cahoots?”

“Unofficial or official, I don’t give a shit,” Cahill said. “But this fucking guy is burning up this town. Three of our people are dead, and I know that won’t be the last of it. This guy is getting his rocks off.”

“How do you know it’s a guy?”

“’Cause he sends us letters,” Cahill said. “Don’t you let that get out. Son of a bitch calls himself Mr. Firebug. Sent all that shit over to ATF and didn’t get squat.”

“Mr. Firebug,” I said. “Very gender-specific.”

Cahill raised his eyes at me, put down the cigarette, and stroked his mustache. “Don’t hold back nothing.”

He slid the shot of Bushmills closer. We both reached for the shots and drank them together.