tu stretch, she punched numbers on the phone again. “Come on, Oliver. Wake up.”
“Maybe he’s not home.”
“Where would he be?” she asked, then looked over at him and rolled her eyes. “All right, point taken,” she said, hanging up and sighing. “Even priests, or soon-to-be priests, have their own lives.”
“So why are you so hell-bent to talk to him tonight?”
“Because earlier today I blew him off.” She looked suddenly guilty. “He tried to talk to me at Mom’s house. There was obviously something troubling him, I could read it in his eyes, but before he could tell me what was on his mind, Robert came into the room and Oliver clammed up.” She frowned, tiny lines appearing between her eyebrows. “To tell you the truth, I was glad. Didn’t want to get hung up in some kind of heavy conversation. Wanted to escape.” She glanced out the window to the night beyond. “But now…” Her lips pursed into a thoughtful frown. “…Now I think he might have had something important to tell me, something he was desperate for me to know.” She leaned one hip against the edge of the counter. “Oliver had just come in from outside, from that conversation where my brothers were whispering about the family birth order and whatever it was being Dad’s fault.” She walked to the table and picked up the drawings. “It felt so clandestine that I have the feeling that whatever it was must be tied into what’s going on with Dani and the fires, maybe even Mary Beth’s murder.” She tapped on the number six on the half-finished star drawing. “Swear to God, Oliver knows something and he was trying to tell me about it today.”
“If you’re so sure, then let’s find out.”
“You and me?”
“Yep.” He climbed to his feet, then really looked at her. “You’re about dead on your feet.”
“Yeah, yeah, so you said.” She swatted the air impatiently. “I couldn’t sleep if I tried. Could you?”
He shook his head.
“Didn’t think so. Since my pickup is with the cops, we’ll have to use yours. I’ll drive.”
He sent her an over-my-dead-body glare. “I’ll drive.”
“Fine. Let’s go.”
Paterno couldn’t sleep.
The damned case was getting to him.
No two ways about it.
He stripped down to his boxers and T-shirt, found a glass in his kitchen and scooped up a handful of ice from an opened bag he kept in the freezer. With practiced hands he unscrewed the top of a bottle of rye whiskey he kept on the counter, then listened to the familiar crackle as the liquor hit the ice cubes. Swirling his drink, he refused to pay any attention to the few rinsed dishes sitting in the sink. Instead, he walked into his living room where the television was turned to two channels, ESPN on the main screen, CNN in the inset in the lower right-hand corner.
Jesus, it was hot. His air conditioner was on the fritz and his second-story apartment was sweltering. He opened the slider door to his deck but felt little relief.
Traffic was slow and quiet, the street below empty. He took a sip of his drink and felt the smooth liquor slide down his throat as he noticed a moth fluttering near the deck light. He slammed the screen shut and stared into the night.
So what was it he was missing?
Turning to his desk, he sipped his drink and stared down at his notes, arranged in disorderly piles. The drawings, yeah, he made nothing of them except that he had an inkling the points of the star had to do with the Flannery brothers…What else? The missing one was the missing brother, right? The broken lines…Maybe that was because Robert was in the middle of a divorce…No, it was because the person who died wasn’t part of the formation, just linked by marriage…Or was it? Shannon was in the center…her brothers circling around her…Oh, crap, did that make any sense? No. If it was a birth-order thing, wouldn’t the numbers run chronologically, age-wise? But the way he saw it, number five, without a point, was positioned next to the broken point of number two, with six in the middle. Any way you cut it, two shouldn’t be next to five. It should be surrounded by one and three…if his theory was correct. But then, who said a killer was sane?
Maybe he was way off base with the birth-order thing. Maybe there was another reason that the number six was significant and assigned to Shannon…or the kid? Maybe that was it. It was Dani Settler’s birth certificate, not Shannon’s. Maybe he’d made a big leap, following a gut instinct when there was nothing to base it on.
He had to step back.
Start over.
Forget any reference to “birth order” by the father.
His gaze moved to the next pile. Notes on the Stealth Torcher…No one killed in all those fires except for one woman. It was almost as if the arsonist picked buildings he knew were abandoned.
Paterno took another swallow and let a piece of ice flow into his mouth. He crushed the cube and thought, then thumbed through the three pages of notes on the Torcher…One woman died: Dolores Galvez.
Why did that name ring bells? There was something…But what?
He sat at the desk, and pulled out a box of notes he’d copied from the original investigation. The pages were yellowed and smelled musty from three years of storage and as he flipped through the reports he thought of all those fires, so close to Santa Lucia. At that time not only Patrick, Shannon’s father, was a firefighter, but so were his sons. All of his sons. Paterno double-checked. Aaron, Robert, Shea, Oliver and Neville. And two other familiar names as well: Ryan and Liam Carlyle. First cousins. “Incestuous little group,” Paterno told himself. He didn’t like them as a whole, including the deceased. Ryan Carlyle had been a piece of work and his cousins weren’t much better. Though she didn’t deserve the fate she’d been handed, Mary Beth had been a bossy fishwife. Her sister, Margaret, was a pious prig while Kevin, one of her brothers, was a real odd duck, a loner who kept to himself and though he had degrees up the wazoo, worked as a clerk for the Federal government. Liam, the eldest, the one closest to Ryan, also kept to himself. He’d been married and divorced a couple of times and after quitting the Santa Lucia Fire Department had landed himself a job doing arson investigation with an insurance company in Santa Rosa.
And Teddy, Ryan’s younger brother, was dead, killed in a fiery single car crash with Ryan at the wheel when he was thirteen.