St. Albans Fire (13 page)

“Why’re you in this building?” Joe asked.

“Dumb luck.” Silva smiled, adding, “Plus a little string-pulling. The Essex County prosecutor’s office actually has some five hundred people in it, including about a hundred and eighty investigators and a hundred and fifty lawyers. We have task forces like this one for homicide, child abuse, narcotics, rape, gangs, and internal affairs. That makes us the third largest law enforcement outfit in the county, behind the Newark PD and the sheriff, but by statute we’re on top of the heap. Which is why, the farther away from headquarters I can get, the better.”

“Politics?” Joe asked.

Silva laughed. “And how. Saying politics in Essex County is like saying snow in Vermont, I guess. It’s everywhere, and it gets into everything. One reason I wanted my squad out here in the boonies was to keep my people as free of it as I could.”

“How many do you have?” Joe asked.

Silva had by now returned behind his desk. He tilted his chair and linked his fingers behind his neck. “There are two attorneys, one lieutenant, and five investigators.”

“That’s all?” Willy blurted out. “Newark’s like the arson capital of the Northeast or something.”

Ben Silva smiled. “True. At its peak, just a few years ago, we had up to four hundred car arsons a year. There was one location off the McCarter Highway, where one off-ramp led to a short street named Riverside Avenue, which then hooked right back up to the highway. Arsons were so common there, cars were sometimes backed up waiting for service. The state finally closed the off-ramp. And that,” he added, “is just cars. We also have a ton of structure fires, since old-fashioned urban renewal is making a comeback. Either people who want to sell property torch the old factories and warehouses and abandoned buildings that sit on them, or they burn them to save money on demolition.”

“How do you handle it all?” Joe asked.

“We don’t,” Silva said almost cheerily. “We cherry-pick the worst ones and, if we have time, deal with some of the others. Otherwise, we train as many cops and firefighters as we can to keep their eyes open and apply the skills we teach them. That having been said, we don’t do too badly—the nation’s arson solve rate is fifteen percent at best. Ours is anywhere from twenty-five to forty, depending.”

Silva suddenly leaped to his feet again. “Lil. Glad you could join us. This is Willy Kunkle and Joe Gunther of the Vermont Bureau of Investigation. Lieutenant Lillian Farber, my second-in-command and the operational head of the squad.”

Silva dragged another chair over from the corner and offered it to the newcomer, a slim, middle-aged woman with a no-nonsense set to her face.

Silva resumed speaking as he sat back down. “I was just giving them an overview of the operation.”

“You want jobs?” she asked, smiling slightly. “I’ll swap you. I’d take Vermont any day.”

“That mean you’re not going to say we’re far from home?” Willy asked.

Lil Farber laughed outright. “Phil told me what you said. He thinks you’re a shit bird.”

Willy joined her laughing—much to Silva’s visible relief, Joe noted. He was a little surprised himself, if for another reason. Willy wasn’t usually the bantering sort, especially on first meeting.

“I suppose now I have to watch out for payback,” Willy said.

“In spades.” Farber pointed at his useless left arm, now squashed between his body and the arm of the chair he was occupying. “What’s the story there?”

Silva looked appalled at the bluntness, but Willy merely smiled. “Proof positive that anyone can be a cop in Vermont.”

“Rifle round,” Joe said briefly.

She nodded. “Tough break.” She then looked at her boss. “So what’s up?”

Silva in turn glanced at Gunther. “To be honest, I’m not sure. You two are after a torch you think has a Newark address?”

“Right,” Joe answered, extracting a sheet of paper from his inner pocket. “We don’t have a name, but after we ran his MO through the ATF database, they said you folks had filed a similar profile not long ago. This is what we have—what he used, how he used it.”

Farber took it from him. As she read, Silva commented, “Must be a big case to send two of you all this way, especially on something this thin.”

Joe heard Willy grunt his own skepticism softly as he answered, “It’s a homicide. A seventeen-year-old kid.”

“Sixty cows?” Lil Farber exclaimed, still reading. “That must’ve smelled good.”

“We’re looking at everything we can,” Joe continued, “checking motives and backgrounds, but it was clear from the start that we had a pro on our hands, along with the strong likelihood that he was hired. When this Newark connection came up, I thought an alternate way to get to whoever’s pulling the strings might be through the man he paid.”

Silva nodded agreeably. “Sounds reasonable enough.”

Farber handed the report back to Gunther. “The potassium chlorate and the potato chips sound like our guy. Also the way he pulled the fire downstairs from the hayloft with glue lines.”

“We figure he did that because he didn’t want overexposure to the cows,” Joe told her.

“Could be,” she admitted. “I wouldn’t know. I’m Newark-born-and-bred. I just eat cows. With our fire—a warehouse—it was convenience. He had more combustibles available on an upper floor.”

“Same with us,” Willy said, again surprising Joe.

“Well, there you have it, then,” she answered, “another similarity.”

“But you don’t have a name, either?” Joe asked.

She shook her head. “Nope. That’s one reason we posted the MO. You don’t have a description, maybe, or a car sighting?”

“We have sightings of a fedora,” Willy said, “and a dark sedan that looks like it came from the city.”

Both Farber and Silva stared at him.

“I know, I know,” he said. “Lame.”

“But not that lame,” Gunther added. “I got an e-mail as I was leaving the office with a little more. I had all the area motels and gas stations checked for the time periods of each of our three arsons. One of the motels reported a guy in the hat checking in under the name S. Corleone.”

Ben Silva laughed. “Sonny Corleone? A comedian.”

“The rest of the registration,” Joe continued, “was equally bogus, but the clerk picked up on the
Godfather
reference, too, and after Mr. Corleone had tucked himself in, the clerk went out to copy down the car license.” Joe extracted a slip of paper from his pocket and handed it to Lil Farber. “We traced it to a rental place at the Newark airport.”

Willy was clearly irritated at hearing this only now. “Fat lot of good that’ll be. Busiest rental desk in the Northeast, probably. Which was exactly the point.”

Joe was genuinely embarrassed by his oversight. This information had been so last second, he’d truly just shoved it into his pocket and forgotten about it. “I don’t doubt it,” he agreed soothingly.

But Farber wasn’t playing. “I wouldn’t say that,” she said. “Not necessarily. We have pretty good relations with these outfits, since a lot of the car arsons involve rentals as getaway vehicles. We can give it a try, at least.”

Ben Silva stood up again, making Joe wonder if perpetual motion was the man’s primary form of exercise. “Great,” he said, rubbing his hands like a pleased host. “Lil will be your official liaison during your stay. Anything you want, ask her. It goes without saying that we’d appreciate your doing all police work in her presence or with her knowledge, since you’re out of your jurisdiction.” He looked a little embarrassed by his own words. “Don’t want you boys to get into any jams in the big city.”

Willy gave him a predictably baleful look. “Right—goes without saying.”

Joe grabbed his elbow and steered him toward the door, saying cheerfully, “Got it, Ben. Appreciate the help. We’ll mind our manners. You want updates as we go?”

Silva seemed grateful for the fast exit. “Lil will keep me up to date, but come by any time.”

LIL FARBER WAS DRIVING, WITH JOE
up front and Willy in the center of the back seat, sitting slightly hunched forward. They were in Farber’s unmarked SUV, heading toward downtown Newark.

“How long you been a cop?” Joe asked conversationally, looking out the window at what he believed was one of the most unremarkable urban centers he’d ever visited. It didn’t always look bad or blighted, necessarily, barring the occasional weed-choked, empty city block. Mostly, it seemed like a jumble of spare parts borrowed from other communities—a little suburbia here, a little small-town America there, some anonymous big-city bits elsewhere. There was no particular rhyme or reason to it, and no overriding sense of identity. The only common thread Joe could see—in this section of town, at least—was the occasional glimpse of the New York skyline down several of the eastern-pointing streets—hovering enormously on the horizon like a supertanker bearing down, albeit far enough off to be only startling.

“Twenty-two years,” she answered. “I came into the prosecutor’s office straight out of college.” She laughed and glanced at him to raise her eyebrows. “Did it for the money, if you can believe that. It was the best job offer I had going.”

“Jesus,” Willy commented. “What else were you looking at? Panhandler?”

“I can’t complain,” she said, ignoring him. “It’s interesting work, and I have a business on the side. A lot of us do. I’m part owner of a restaurant.”

“There it is,” Willy exclaimed suddenly, his pointing finger appearing between the two of them. “I told you.”

Joe looked ahead and saw looming into view an enormous rusty metal bottle perched on stilts atop an abandoned building.

“Hoffman bottling plant originally,” Farber explained. “Then the Pabst brewery, before it went out of business. People never paid much attention that the beer bottle started out as a soda bottle.”

“Close as Newark comes to a landmark,” Willy repeated. “Like the Eiffel Tower.”

Farber glanced over her shoulder quickly. “You’re quite the asshole, aren’t you?”

“One of our best,” Joe agreed.

“I’m taking you on a small side trip,” Farber explained, driving between two cemeteries, one Jewish, the other Catholic. “The Newark most people know is actually several municipalities, of which Newark’s just one. They all fit together like puzzle pieces. There’s Irvington, Orange—where we just came from—Belleville, Bloomfield, Glen Ridge, Nutley, and a few others. They all have their own governments, police and fire departments. New Jersey is one of the most heavily bureaucratic states around, and it’s bloated with patronage and corruption. One reason that bottle stands out like it does is because everybody’s too busy lining their own pockets to care much about civic pride.

“We have a beautiful old courthouse that looks like a palace,” she continued, “built in 1907 for two million bucks. Not a hundred years later, it’s been under renovation for six years, and supposedly the scaffolding cost more to put up than the original building. Tell me someone isn’t making a profit on that one.”

She indicated one of the empty lots that Joe had noticed earlier, and which had been increasing in number as they headed south. “You’ll see those all over Newark. The really big ones were once either factories or public housing buildings, the smaller ones were usually properties that burned down during the ’67 riots, back in the days of ‘Burn, baby, burn.’”

“Forty years ago?” Joe asked, surprised.

“That’s when the city started dying big-time,” Willy added.

“Actually,” their host continued, “it was dying way before then. The riots were just the last spasms. Whatever a town could do wrong, this one did, decade after decade, including taking all its poor and stuffing them like black powder into the biggest collection of public housing projects in the country. Talk about a time bomb. After the riots, of course, they tore them all down. No halfway measures here.”

The neighborhood they were in now had disintegrated into a variation of what Joe had seen in New York’s poorer sections a couple of years earlier. The streets were dirty, cars were abandoned everywhere, building after building was gutted and empty, windows gaping.

Farber waved her hand as if introducing a stage act. “So here’s the latest version: Welcome to Irvington—our current time bomb. With the projects gone, Newark decided the next best move was to throw out its poor. Irvington became the trash barrel. We had a surveillance we were running in Irvington Park a while back. It was broad daylight, middle of the week, but we couldn’t get the job done because we were constantly distracted by all the crime going on around us, some of which was too bad to ignore.”

With theatrical timing, they saw a man bolt from a doorway and run down the sidewalk, pursued by another brandishing a knife. Farber barely gave them a look. The duo vanished into a side alley. Joe glanced back at Willy, who silently shook his head.

“In 1975,” she went on without a pause, “some magazine rated fifty cities in twenty-four categories. Three guesses on who came in dead last by a mile.” She suddenly held up her hand. “Hear that?”

They heard two faint, very distant pops.

“Gunshots. There’re about two killings a week in Irvington.”

She turned a corner and began driving east. “We’ll go check out those car rental records now.”

Willy sat back in his seat and smiled. “Happy you got that out of your system?”

She looked into the rearview mirror at him. “What?”

“City mouse, country mouse?”

She laughed. “All right, so what city do you come from, as if I couldn’t guess?”

“I used to drop by here when I was with the NYPD. It was like visiting a zoo.”

“No argument from me,” she said, still amused at being found out. “So how did you end up in cow country?”

The smile faded from his face, as Joe suspected it might. “Long story,” was all he said.

To her credit, Farber merely quipped, “Then here’s to a happy ending,” before dropping the matter.

The central office of the car rental company was near the intersection of Broad and Market Streets, which Farber told them was Newark’s original settlement site in 1666 and remained the heart of the city to this day.

Joe, however, was once more struck by the whole place’s time-warped aura. To his eye, almost all that was necessary to make this a living snapshot of the 1940s was to replace every vehicle with its sixty year-old equivalent.