“Why?”
“From what I gather, he used to bend the rules. Had a problem with booze and made some bad calls. Funny thing is, this happens just about the time the whole department starts to disintegrate. The old man’s forced out and his sons start leaving like rats off a sinking ship.” Paterno held up a finger. “Shea takes a position with the police department.” Another finger joined the first. “Aaron, he gets the boot for ‘insubordination,’ whatever that means, Neville quits on the spot and a few weeks later disappears and Oliver finds God.” Fingers three and four joined the first two. “Four brothers and the old man, out, just like that.”
He drank a long, hot swallow, his eyes squinting at the map. “And that’s just the Flannerys. Then there’s the Carlyles. Ryan ends up burnt to a crisp and the evidence points to murder. Afterward, Liam quits the SLFD to take a job with an insurance company. Gives up all his benefits and starts over at a helluva lot less pay. I might even understand it if he was a family man and wanted a more nine-to-five life with a safer job, but he’s got no kids and was divorced from wife number two at that time.” Paterno fished through his notes, until he found those on the Carlyles. “Since that forest fire, Liam moved on to wife number three, but that’s already rocky. They’re split.”
He frowned to himself. “So that’s what happens to the fire department. They’re practically decimated, have to recruit new blood.”
His eyes lingered on the notes about the Carlyles, another group of loners. “The other brother, Kevin, with an IQ in the stratosphere, is content with a government job, has never been married and is possibly gay, though he’s never officially come out of the closet. The sister, Margaret, is a religious fanatic who goes to mass every damned day and then there was Mary Beth. Dead. Another victim.”
“Maybe Liam got tired of putting his life on the line. After all, his cousin died in a fire.”
“But not while trying to put out the blaze, not in the line of duty,” Paterno pointed out. “Besides, most of the firefighters I know love the job, they’re dedicated, it’s in their blood.” He looked up at Rossi. “They don’t quit.”
Paterno didn’t like the way the whole thing played out. Standing and stretching, he walked over to his map and scowled. There were just so many things that didn’t fit. “You know, Rossi, I still don’t get why the DA tried to pin the case on Shannon Flannery. I wasn’t here at the time, but I’ve looked over the file. The case was thin as melting ice.”
Rossi shook his head. “I was new to the force at the time, had just moved from San Jose. The DA, Berringer, was looking for a win, the department was having public relations problems and the Stealth Torcher business was making the whole community nervous. Of course the press couldn’t leave it alone, and there was a lot of pressure to solve the case and put it away. Make the public feel safe again.
“Berringer, he really wanted to put it to rest and I think he believed that somehow Shannon Flannery had done the job. He was obsessed with it, had a real hard-on to break her. She didn’t have an alibi, but had a big-time motive: Carlyle beat her. Bad enough that she lost a baby. She’d had a restraining order against him, which he broke and, even though he had a girlfriend, he was fighting the divorce. His whole life was in the toilet. She was going to go after him for battery, but before that case could come to court, he was killed and Berringer was hell-bent to prosecute.”
“Still, not enough to press charges.”
“Then there was an anonymous tip that Shannon’s car had been seen out by the old logging road that night, not far from the murder and the fire. An elderly woman had concurred. There was the suggestion that Shannon couldn’t have pulled this off herself, that she either hired someone to help her or her brothers did it. Their only alibis were each other and she maintained her innocence to the end. I think Berringer thought she would crack, confess, and they would plea bargain, but it never happened, and the anonymous caller never called back. Another witness, a woman who thought she’d seen the car out there, turned out to be legally blind, couldn’t tell a white van from a yellow station wagon in broad daylight. Not too credible on the stand.
“Yep, it was a thin case, should never have gone to trial and cost Berringer his career.”
Paterno had heard the scuttlebutt, of course, once he’d started digging but it helped to have Rossi lay it all out again. Made things clearer. What it came down to was that Berringer was an idiot.
His phone rang and he braced himself. Reporters had been calling all morning and no matter how many times he referred them to the department’s public relations officer, they didn’t give up. Then again, it could be the lab, or someone with information on a case, a fellow officer. He drained his coffee, crushed the cup, tossed it into his wastebasket and grabbed the receiver. “Paterno.”
“Shane Carter,” the guy said.
Paterno recognized the voice of the sheriff from Oregon. “How are ya?”
“Been better. Look, I thought I’d give you a heads up. The FBI will be calling as well.”
“Great.” Just what Paterno needed. The Feds. Most of them knew their shit, were okay, but the guy from the local field office was a prick. No two ways about it. “What do you have?”
“It turns out that Blanche Johnson had two ex-husbands, one’s dead, the other we haven’t located yet. A few boyfriends, scattered around the Northwest, some we’re still trying to track down. No other family aside from a couple of kids, both boys. The older one ran away when he was a teenager, the other, we think, she gave up as a small child, maybe a baby, possibly a toddler, when she was in Idaho. We’re running that down now but it’s taking a little time as the adoption records were sealed back then. That kid would be about in his middle thirties now.”
“Keep me posted,” Paterno said as he hung up. He couldn’t see how Blanche Johnson having a couple of kids could come into play, but he filed the information away. The way this case was going, who knew.
He glanced at the map again. To all of the pushpins. “I think you’re right, Rossi, our guy has got to be nearby and if the kid is alive, she’s not far, either.” He pointed to
several places on the map. “He’s got to be able to move around here quickly. In and out, no one sees anything suspicious and he can get away, back to wherever he lives without drawing attention to himself. Comes and goes as he wants, at all hours.”
He stepped back from the map, trying to get a fuller view, hoping that he’d see something revealing, a pattern, like if he strung a string to each of the red pins on the map he’d see the beginnings of a five-sided star emerge, or that someone lived in the very center of all the fires or some other obvious clue. But no.
Nothing struck him.
No bolt of lightning.
But it would. He was getting closer. He could feel it. He looked down at his notes and frowned, staring at all the little stars he’d drawn. “Hey, Rossi,” he said, “why don’t you draw a star for me.”
“What?” The younger detective looked at him as if he’d lost it.
“Humor me,” Paterno said, staring at the drawings by the killer. “Draw me a star…in fact, make it two.”
Travis poured himself a cup of coffee and sat at the table where the drawings that Paterno had left still lay. His hair was still wet. What the hell did they mean?