Scorcher (26 page)

“The accelerant—what was used to start the fires and keep them burning. Why this mixture of naphtha and chemicals, when plain old gasoline or kerosene would have been just as deadly? And if the object was to cause maximum suffering, there must be other, less traceable ways to make flammable liquid gelatinous, ways using common, over-the-counter products. I think an amateur chemist like Paul would have known them. Why a homemade flamethrower in the first place? It’d be easy and effective enough simply to throw a can or jar of flammable liquid on a victim, then follow it with a lighted match. And would Paul be careless enough to use his car for the murders, and later leave evidence of his involvement to be found in the trunk? A schizophrenic operating under delusions of persecution isn’t necessarily illogical in every way. Especially one as intelligent as Paul. And his symptoms were under control; he was rational enough to request his medicine, and Nadine took it to him.”

Adam removed his squarish, silver-rimmed glasses from his shirt pocket, polished them absently with his tie, then slipped them back in the pocket instead of placing them on the bridge of his nose. As if he’d decided not to look closely at Carver after all. “You’re right,” he said, “Paul isn’t stupid or careless, whatever his frame of mind.”

“You don’t have to be either of those things to be set up.”

Adam rubbed his wide jaw and squinted dubiously at Carver. He had a straw to clutch. And how he wanted to believe! But he knew the potential pain of false hope. He was reluctant to embrace what couldn’t be proved, and Carver didn’t blame him. This affair had already produced enough agony. What had Jerry Gepman said at his door in Chattanooga?
Some families, tragedy just haunts them. Won’t let up.

“The murders were more elaborate than was necessary,” Carver said.

“Do you seriously think someone burned those people to death just so Paul would be blamed?” Adam asked. More of a challenge than a question.
Prove it,
the blood-rimmed dark eyes pleaded, while the curbstone jaw remained unyielding.

“I don’t know. Who’d have reason to do this to him?”

Adam thought for a moment, then shrugged. “No one, I’m sure. Oh, he inspired some petty grudges with his occasional temper tantrums, but not to the degree anyone would want to do
this.
It would take an insane person to commit murder so Paul could be blamed. No, no, it doesn’t make sense strategically at all. Even to someone with a sick mind.”

A sick mind, Carver thought, remembering his conversation with McGregor. “Maybe there’s a strategy at work neither of us understands,” he said.

“Whether there is or not,” Adam said, “I want you to stay out of the matter. I can’t and won’t accept what you’ve done. I’m going to do everything possible to see to it you never practice your sorry profession in Florida again. Or anywhere else where I can stop you. You’ve got my solemn promise.”

“I don’t suppose you could understand how it feels to lose your only son to a maniac with a makeshift flamethrower,” Carver said. But he wondered. Nick Fanning had said Adam loved his son; it was proving true.

“It’s
my
son I’m thinking about. And my daughter. I want you to stop following her.”

“Huh? Nadine thinks I’m watching her?”

“Mel Bingham saw you spying on her at the tennis club and told her about it.”

“How much do you actually know about Bingham?”

“Enough to believe him.”

“What about Nick Fanning? How long’s he been with your company?”

“What significance does any of this have?” Adam asked.

“Maybe none, maybe a lot.”

“It doesn’t matter to you,” Adam said. “You’re off the case. And I’ll see that it was your last.”

There was nothing more to say. At least nothing to which Adam would respond. He was staring down cold-eyed at Carver, waiting for him to leave. He seemed to have recovered most of his sobriety and was plainly glad the unpleasant conversation was ended.

Carver levered himself to a standing position with the cane, then turned and started for the door.

“You should have listened to your former wife,” Adam said. “She had your best interest at heart.”

Without moving his legs or the cane, Carver twisted his torso and glared back at Adam. Then he limped from the room.

Outside, in the shade of the portico, he was about to lower himself into the Olds when a soft voice called his name.

He looked up to see Elana Kave beneath the palm trees near the house. She was wearing a silky gray flowing robe and was barefoot. She glided lightly through brilliant sun and into shadow to stand beside Carver. He couldn’t hear her feet on the driveway. The top was down on the Olds; he took the strain off his good leg and finished lowering his body in behind the steering wheel. He closed the door slowly, with only a muted double-click, and stared at Elana. She looked haggard and very sad. It deepened her fragile beauty into something soul-wrenching. There was a burning in her eyes smaller but brighter than the sun.

“Paul’s innocent,” she said quietly. “I know it.”

“How do you know?” Carver asked. He found it difficult to look directly at her, sensing that he was seeing the uncanny flare of life preceding imminent death. She was suffering in soul and flesh, and he felt guilty and soiled at being a part of it.

“I’m his mother,” she said simply. “I’m—” She stopped herself from saying more, as if the words once uttered would deflate the will that kept her alive.

“What is it?” Carver asked gently. “What?”

“I can’t tell you. I’m sorry, but I can’t.”

He felt sweat bead on his forehead though it was cool there in the shadows.

She sensed the sudden compassion in him and smiled eerily. Maybe winning him over at least temporarily was all she’d wanted. It suggested hope, and she existed on hope and not much more. She turned and floated back across the patch of bright sunlight and into the shadows of the palm trees. Then she disappeared around the corner of the house without glancing back.

He sat transfixed, staring at the empty space she’d occupied.

Then birds started nattering again and crickets resumed chirping. The sea continued sighing on the beach. A gull screamed in the endless blue distance beyond the house. The world back to normal.

His encounter with Elana had been so brief and unsettling, Carver drove away wondering if it had been something he’d imagined in the heat.

“How did Adam Kave find out about you?” Edwina asked that night in their dark bedroom in Del Moray. Carver lay beside her and stared at the blue-black rectangle of the window, watching the curtains swaying in the ocean breeze. The scent of the sea was in the room. “Laura told him.”

Edwina didn’t ask the questions she might have. She could live not knowing the answers.

She said, “I don’t like Laura.”

“Laura did what she thought she had to. Can’t blame her for that.”

“That’s not what I blame her for. Anyway, she was wrong in going to Adam Kave.”

“She was,” Carver agreed.

“You have this sick streak of moderation where Laura’s concerned. I’d have thought you’d be mad enough to choke her.”

“I was, for a while.”

“Uh-huh. Then you got all philosophical.” She stared off to the side in the dimness. The ocean was loud in its timeless assault on the beach. “Goddamned ex-wives!”

“You’re one, and you’re kinda nice.”

“Are you planning to sit back now and wait for the ax to drop on your neck?” Edwina asked.

“No. I’ll finish what I began.”

“Good. That’s what life’s about, finishing what we start.”

“Sometimes.”

The bedsprings groaned. She rolled onto her side, close to him, and rested a cool hand on his chest. “Begin something now and finish it,” she suggested.

He did.

T
HE NEXT NIGHT,
C
ARVER
found a different vantage point to watch the garage exit of Dewitt’s apartment building.

He sat sipping bitter black coffee from McDonald’s and listening to soft music on the Olds’s radio. Sade was sighing her bluesy, velvet version of love. The car’s canvas top was up, but he had both front windows cranked down so a breeze pressed through the interior. It was 11:00 P.M. It had rained that afternoon, and though the temperature was still in the eighties the air smelled fresh, carrying the scent of the untended flower bed bordering the low stone wall around the apartment grounds. In the swimming pool a lone teen-age girl frolicked like a carefree mermaid, splashing and submerging, then surfacing to tread water with her head and shoulders above the rippling surface. Now and then she’d shake her long hair and hurl drops of water glistening in the pale and shimmering artificial light bouncing off the pool. Carver hoped someone had cleaned the water and added chemicals, or the mermaid might contract anything from athlete’s foot to trench mouth.

Nadine and Dewitt had eaten supper at a steakhouse downtown, then stopped for a while at something called Roll-the-Dice Corner Lounge. There was a mural of a huge pair of dice showing snake eyes painted on the front brick wall near the entrance. The place seemed to be one huge speaker cabinet from which hard rock music pulsed. It made Carver’s head hurt even where he was parked halfway down the block.

Dewitt had finally driven Nadine back to where her car was parked at his dealership, and she’d followed him in her sleek red Datsun to his apartment. There was no indication that either of them had been drinking; they both drove straight and true.

They’d been inside the apartment since just after ten, maybe trying to recover their hearing. The lights were still burning, lessening the likelihood that any of what Lloyd Van Meter called Girl and Boy Stuff was going on.

Occasionally Carver chanced leaving his parking space to drive to the McDonald’s two blocks away, either to relieve his bladder or to get another cup of coffee to help keep him alert. The two things seemed to be related.

He was on his third cup, and the inside of his mouth tasted flat and stale. The coffee itself was beginning to taste flat and stale. It made his teeth ache.

The garage’s wide door twitched and then started to roll up, tugged by an automatic opener. Pale fluorescent light spilled out onto Low Citrus Drive. Carver placed his foam cup of coffee in a plastic holder he had stuck with adhesive on the dashboard. He waited to see what would emerge from the garage.

It was a gray Cadillac, with the darkly tinted windows that seemed almost mandatory for luxury cars in Florida. Carver had learned a lot about the building and its tenants, and he knew the car belonged to the gem dealer on the second floor.

He relaxed and watched the overhead door glide down as the Caddy made a smooth left turn and drove past him. The last glimmer of light disappeared from the pavement in front of the door. The street was dark and quiet again. He reached for his coffee.

At eleven-thirty the garage door rose again. Carver glanced up and saw that the lights were still on in Dewitt’s apartment, but he wedged his half-full coffee cup in the plastic holder and sat ready.

Dewitt’s dark blue Jaguar four-door sedan pulled slowly from the garage and picked up speed as it rolled toward the corner. In the wash of illumination from the streetlight, Carver could see only one figure in the car’s front seat.

The right side of the seat!

Then he remembered the Jag was imported from England, and the steering wheel was on the right. Dewitt was alone. The smooth snarl of the car’s turbo-charged engine drifted back to him as Dewitt played the accelerator.

Nadine was in the apartment by herself. Maybe she and Dewitt had had an argument. Maybe Dewitt was driving to pick up Paul and bring him back to see Nadine. Maybe Dewitt was going out for ice. Carver cautioned himself; it was easy to make much of nothing.

He settled back again to wait. The breeze picked up, bringing more fragrance of flowers, mingled with the noxious residue of the departed Jag’s exhaust fumes.

Fifteen minutes later the gleaming gray Cadillac came back and disappeared down the shallow ramp into the garage, like an exotic craft returning to its mother ship.

The garage door stayed open. Nadine’s red Datsun darted out and screeched into a sharp left turn, following the course of the Jaguar.

Carver sloshed warm coffee onto his hand as he jammed the cup into the plastic holder. He started the Olds, crammed the shift lever into Drive, and fell in behind the Datsun, hanging well back.

Nadine knew she’d been watched, and even if she’d talked with Adam and gotten the impression Carver was off the case, she might be warier than usual. Paul possessed an I.Q. of over 140, but Nadine might be ahead of him. It was difficult to know; youth had a way of overriding intelligence.

Through the Datsun’s rear louvers Carver saw that Nadine was alone. On the left side of the car this time. He smiled. No momentary surprises.

Keeping several cars between them, Carver followed her out of town. The Datsun had a dim left taillight and was easy to track from a distance. Nadine turned north on Highway 95.

He thought she might be going home, but she soared past the Hillsboro turnoff, holding a steady seventy-five. The Olds, with its prehistoric powerful V-8 engine, kept pace easily a quarter of a mile back.

There was very little traffic on the wide highway. The car’s tires whined on still-warm pavement. Carver relaxed and rested an arm on the metal window frame, feeling the cool wind pound at his bare, crooked elbow. The rush of air whirled in the Olds, ballooning the canvas top and howling out the unzipped back window. The speedometer needle might as well have been painted on seventy-five. The Olds slipped into that automotive high-speed trance that only big cars can achieve.

Nadine drove for about an hour, then cut west at Palm Beach Gardens and got on Florida’s Turnpike. An uneasy feeling started at the nape of Carver’s neck and spread coldly. This wasn’t Nadine’s normal behavior. She was on her way somewhere out of the ordinary tonight, in a hurry even for her, and that could spell Paul Kave. Paul Kave, the kid the odds and the law said suffered from a compulsion to burn people to death.