While Galileo Preys (3 page)

“You don’t?” He sounded surprised. “How do you think I knew you’d call?”

“What do you mean?”

“The homeless man. As soon as I learned about him, how the killer used him as bait, I knew this case was going to stick to you like a bad dream.
I
almost called
you.
”

“The homeless man? Why would he…?”

“Because of your parents, Esme.”

Oh.

Esme shrank down in her seat to a little girl.

Her parents.

Who’d lived on and off welfare all their life. Who falsified addresses to get their daughter into the best public schools. Who pushed her every day to rise above their situation and, when she did, when she got that scholarship letter to George Washington University, when she said goodbye to them and went off to start her freshman year…

There was a shelter in the south side, Coleman House. Lead paint on the walls but walls were better than the open air in December in Boston. Eighteen-year-old Esme came home from her first semester in D.C. full of stories but home was no longer there. Coleman House was there, yes, but her parents had
gone. All they had left her was two blue ink words—her mother’s careful cursive—on a piece of yellow paper.

BE FREE, it said. BE FREE.

She spent the entire two weeks searching the city for her mom and dad but they didn’t want to be found, and when you didn’t want to be found in the cross-streets of Boston, you might as well have been vapor.

She almost didn’t go back to school, but her friends urged her. They insisted it’s what her parents would have wanted. Still, every break she returned to Coleman House, and the Congress Ave. YMCA, and searched every shelter and underpass in the whole city for her family. Until the day she got into Quantico, when she decided to never go back.

Rafe didn’t know.

Almost all of her friends didn’t know.

Tom knew only because he knew everything.

“The man’s name was Merle Inman,” said Tom. “He grew up in Macon, moved to Atlanta in his twenties to be an architect, fell into drugs…every story’s the same story. He was forty-two years old. We’re going to release his information tomorrow, but, well, there it is.”

Esme realized she was crying, and wiped her cheeks. “Thanks.”

“The guy who did this—he’s something else. Using people as clay pigeons. Fancies himself a gamesman. Thinks he can beat the house. Nobody beats the house. Not my house.”

“Go get that fucker,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am.”

After she hung up, she remembered her musings about whether or not the killer had left a note. But it just didn’t seem as important to her anymore. Maybe what she’d really needed was to talk with Tom. Mentor, profiler, friend, therapist. That she couldn’t have connected the relevance of the case herself—forget about God, it was the human mind that worked in mysterious ways.

Esme prepared a bath. Rafe wouldn’t be home for another hour. Sophie was fast asleep in her bed, perhaps dreaming of the man made out of balloons. That had been a recurring dream of hers for a few days now. The man made out of balloons. All different colors. And tomorrow morning she’d saddle up to the table and declare, “I dreamt about the balloon man again.” Apparently it was a happy dream.

Her daughter was having happy dreams. Esme lowered herself into the hot, hot bathwater. Life was good, wasn’t it? She thought again about Amy Lieb. This was the high drama in her life now. Hundreds of miles away, Tom Piper was searching for a madman. She hoped he caught him. She hoped Rafe returned home soon. She clicked on her bath stereo (Joy Division this time, “Love Will Tear Us Apart”), shut her eyes, and allowed her mind to finally, finally, exhale.

O
n February 11, someone lit the Amarillo aquarium on fire.

In the days that followed the conflagration, security tapes confirmed police suspicions of arson. FBI investigators went frame by frame over footage of the night janitor, a new hire named Emmett Poole, mopping up the third floor, twenty minutes before the fire began on that floor.

It was Tom Piper who figured it out.

“That’s lighter fluid,” he said. He pointed at the freeze-frame of the mop bucket, then at the broad-shouldered back of Emmett Poole. Upon further review, they couldn’t find any footage of the janitor’s face, none at all. Employees described him as nondescript. He’d only been on the job about a week. He’d answered an ad in the paper. His references had checked out. The authorities gathered to raid the address he’d listed. But it was a church. Emmett Poole, like the aquarium he’d ignited, had gone up in a puff of ash.

Tom Piper and his task force weren’t in Amarillo, though, because of the arson.

He was there because of what had happened shortly thereafter.

Station 13 had responded to the blaze at 9:55 p.m. Most of the crew had been watching the Democratic debate between Jefferson Traynor and Bob Kellerman. Up in his home state of Ohio, Kellerman was a volunteer fireman, so the boys in the firehouse (thorough Texas Republicans one and all) were rooting for one of their own. They watched the debate up in the bunk room on a soot-smeared fifty-two-inch LCD they’d rescued back in September from the toasty remains of a Best Buy. Then the call went out, and the TV went off, and the men grumbled into their gear.

On the way to the aquarium, Lou Hopper declared, “Kellerman kicked his ass.” Lou Hopper was the shift’s resident pontificator. Every workplace in America sported (at least) one. The self-educated expert. The know-it-all. The bar in
Cheers
had Cliff Clavin. Station 13 had Lou Hopper. He even had a gray mustache like Clavin, although not a wisp of hair on top. He claimed it had been singed off in a fire; somehow the flames had slipped their hot tongues underneath his helmet and licked off his hair.

Three other firefighters crowded the back of the engine with Lou. The chief sat up front with Bobby Vega, who always drove the truck.

It didn’t take them long to reach the aquarium from their home base off of Third Avenue. Amarillo was a city of daylight and most businesses closed shop by six
o’clock, so the chief didn’t bother to activate the engine’s blaring siren. The few still on the road at 10:00 p.m. either knew enough to get out of the way or deserved to get run over. The three boys in the back, though—they had a tradition to uphold: feline-faced Roscoe Coffey popped a well-worn cassette into a boom box (acquired in 1989 from the toasty remains of a Conn’s—which the aforementioned doomed Best Buy had replaced) and pressed Play. As they neared the aquarium, a crown of streaming smoke rising from its brick skull, Johnny Cash and his mariachi horns warbled to life.

“I fell into a burning ring of fire…”

Never let it be said Station 13 lacked a dark, dark sense of humor.

Bobby Vega navigated the engine up North Hughes toward the aquarium. His family had settled in Amarillo when he was three years old. Everyone had assumed they were originally from Mexico, so that’s what they’d claimed. Coming from Mexico meant fewer questions than coming from Colombia. They had left Colombia in the middle of a drought and the year after they came to Amarillo, the city suffered its longest dry spell in one hundred years. Even today, water conservation remained a major concern; the fire department had been chastised on more than one occasion for their “extravagant use of water.”

The same moronic bigwigs who had chastised the fire department for their extravagant use of water later funded a three-story aquarium in the heart of a parched city. Bobby’s parents, who still attributed Amarillo’s
meteorological bad luck to their arrival, read the news and laughed. Bobby didn’t laugh. He never found the government’s foolish behavior all that charming. Fools endangered. Fools led to an alarm at the firehouse and his brave friends risking their lives.

Bobby Vega was an angry young man, true, but driving the rig helped him vent. There was something about controlling that wide wheel and guiding his brothers to their destination which sated his fury. The usual tightness in his jaw went away. He kept the engine on a straight line toward the aquarium and enjoyed these few minutes of solace, not even minding that asinine country song on the tape deck.

“I fell down, down, down, but the flames went higher…”

For Tom Piper and his task force, reviewing the events leading up to the second massacre, much of the information about Station 13 and its actions on February 11 was circumstantial at best (and anecdotal at worst). They had no definitive proof the six men took North Hughes to the aquarium, or even that Johnny Cash had accompanied them on their trip. All Tom Piper had to go on was what he later learned about the men’s habits. He assumed what they did that night on the way to that fire was what they did every night they went out on a job. He interviewed Station 13’s other firefighters, many of whom had served at one time or another with the boys on the night shift. He interviewed their families. He put together a composite.

It was like figuring out the universe from a handful of photographs.

Amarillo had one firehouse. Some decades back, a forgotten politician had labeled it Station 13, because Amarillo was in the Thirteenth Congressional District and the constituents should be reminded. Lucky #13. At their first charity football game vs. the local police force, way back in the early ’80s, when the firefighters had marched out onto the field at Amarillo High, rather than having individual numbers stenciled on the backs of their jerseys they had each borne the same two red digits: one and three. The crowd ate it up.

The chief had been on that inaugural team. 1982 had been his rookie year, so the vets kept him on the bench for most of the game. He knew it wasn’t a comment on his playing ability; after all, every grown man in West Texas knew how to throw a football. He just didn’t have the seniority, and in public service (even on the football field), seniority trumped everything. The chief accepted that.

They finally put him in for the last quarter. He took his position as a tailback (he lacked the size for anything else) and readied for the snap. The play called for him and the fullback (#13) to fake left while the QB (#13) readied a forward pass to the wide receiver (#13), who would charge right, hopefully receive the pass, rush forty-six yards for the touchdown, and bring the game out of its 21-21 deadlock. The cops, impatient at being on the defense, blitzed the line. So instead of charging right, the firefighters’ wide receiver got trampled.

The chief saw panic in the QB’s eyes. Hell, the
crowd
saw panic in the QB’s eyes. If he didn’t get rid
of the ball in the next five seconds, he’d meet a fate worse than his receiver. So the chief, as he interpreted it, had two options: use his small body to run interference and get pummeled or attempt a charge through the mass of blue uglies and pray for a pass reception.

The chief charged. His minimal size helped him shuttle through a needle’s eye of a hole. He rushed past the line of scrimmage and glanced back. Had the QB noticed? Would the ball come his way?

Yes.

In his last moments before getting walloped, the QB tossed off the ball. It didn’t spiral so much as wobble…but it was wobbling in the right direction. The chief outstretched his arms. He was wide open. The defense was all up field. Thousands watched from the stands. The chief’s young wife, Marcy, watched from the stands. If he completed this play, he’d become legend. If he dropped the ball, or tripped, or if half a dozen other common errors occurred in the next ten seconds, he’d be jeered forevermore.

The chief ruminated every day about the game. He ruminated about it now, as they passed Amarillo High on the left. The aquarium was within view, but the chief glanced over at the high school stadium. That’s where he really wanted to be. That’s where he’d caught that wobbling pigskin and sprinted forty-six yards to score the winning touchdown. Him. The little rookie.

The chief loved firefighting and had numerous accolades and recommendations but when he died, he knew what would appear in the first paragraph of his obituary.

“That’s why everyone called him Catch,” Jed Danvers told Tom Piper. Danvers had been a rookie, too, during that game (for the other side). Now he was lieutenant governor of the state. Jed and Tom were sipping coffee on the fifth floor of Baptist St. Anthony’s on Wallace Boulevard, not far from the crime scene. For security reasons, they’d made sure to get Catch a room here all by himself. Two Texas Rangers were posted outside his door.

Catch’s head was double-wrapped in gauze. His eyes were shut. Tubes were glued every which way to his arms and face. He still hadn’t awakened, and thus was unaware he was the sole survivor and only witness to what had happened.

Station 13 had arrived in front of the glass-and-brick structure at 10:09 p.m. Plumes of gray-white smoke tunneled from the roof into the sky, but so far the fire appeared contained. The aquarium didn’t have many windows—like most museums (and casinos), the architectural objective was one of timelessness, and this meant blocking the outside world. However, there were a few narrow panels along the stairwell. The panels appeared intact.

Daniel McIvey and his son Brian were the first out of the engine, followed by Roscoe Coffey and, lastly, Lou Hopper. Daniel and Brian looked like a project in time-lapse photography; same moppy red hair, same ruddy fat cheeks, only the father was a little taller, a little heavier, had a few more lines on his brow. Like twins they spoke in shorthand.

“Do you want to…?” asked Daniel.

“Yeah,” Brian replied. “I’ll get the thing. I’ll meet you where you’ll be.”

Brian hustled together two Halligan pickaxes out of the truck while Daniel met up with the chief, who was interrogating the aquarium’s security guard.

“…was just doing my job!” wept the guard. Big man named Cole. Six foot six. 300 pounds. Bawled. “I smelled the smoke and checked the monitors and that’s when I called you! I swear!”

The chief nodded, feigning sympathy, and then asked the most important question of all: “Is there anyone left in the building?”

“The night janitor…name’s Emmett Poole…I didn’t abandon him! But I think he’s still on the third floor…”

Daniel and Brian were the designated rescue team. Brian handed his father one of the Halligans and they rushed into the building. They knew the layout of the aquarium. They went here every summer. Family outing. Daniel and his wife Margie. Brian and his wife Emilia. Brian and Emilia’s twins.

Roscoe and Lou grabbed a pair of extinguishers and ran in after them. Soon they were in the lead, and heading up the stairwell. Roscoe illuminated their path with a flashlight. By the time they reached the second floor, the yellow emergency lighting kicked in. By the time they reached the third floor and smelled the smoke, they knew they’d arrived.

Brian touched the door.

“We got a cooker,” he said.

Roscoe and Lou readied their extinguishers. All four
men were swathed in fire retardant bunker gear, but still—fire was fire. Prometheus stole it out of heaven and it’s been pissed ever since.

Outside, Bobby Vega sat by the radio. If the chief gave the word, he’d call the boys left at the station to get the ladder truck. They always always always left at least two men at the station. Reinforcements were the saviors in any war. The two boys back at Station 13 had changed the station on the fifty-two-inch LCD from the boring debate and were now watching something more relevant: a WWE title bout. Not that they were lounging; relaxation wouldn’t be an option until their brothers returned from the battlefield.

Cole, the aquarium’s gigantic night watchman, leaned against the fire truck and wiped wet salt from his eyes. He’d taken this job as a low-stress alternative. His life coach told him his chi couldn’t deal with anxiety. His life coach told him fish were supposed to bring good luck. The next day, Cole saw the job opening at the aquarium.

He steadied his breath with a yoga exercise. What had he done so wrong in a past life that his karma would be so toxic? Had he been a serial killer? Cole blew his nose on his sleeve.

Back inside the aquarium, Roscoe and Lou were foaming the third floor, to little effect. Although the fire appeared localized to knee level and lower, residual smoke clogged all visibility.

“Mr. Poole!” called Daniel.

“Mr. Poole!” called Brian.

The third floor was arranged like a glassy labyrinth.
The four firefighters crouched their way through the maze. They had no idea where the point of ignition was and they saw no sign of Emmett Poole. Lou offered his usual uninformed hypothesis.

Then one of the exhibits exploded.

Its water (and exotic fish) spilt onto the conflagration. Instead of being extinguished, though, the fire tracked the water back to its source and filled the exhibit orange-green.

This was a chemical fire. Class B.

“Shit,” said Roscoe.

The four men quickly backed out of the third floor. They needed different equipment. Roscoe radioed the chief with their status. No response. The old man was probably dealing with the cops, the press, who knows what. Roscoe took the lead and the firefighters hustled down the stairwell to the lobby.

Daniel and Brian thought about their previous trip to the aquarium. The twins adored the seahorses. What floor had the seahorses been on? Please. Not the third.

Lou Hopper thought about his knees. He needed to lose weight. Running up and down these stairs was taking its toll.

Roscoe thought about nothing at all. He operated purely on instinct and muscle memory. Otherwise he probably would have been concerned that the chief
still
hadn’t replied on the radio.

The four men ran out of the lobby into the open air and went down like ducks in a gallery. Roscoe, Lou, Daniel, Brian. Pop—pop—pop—pop. The bullets easily pierced their helmets, muscles, and, yes, cartilage.