Joe wanted to call Amy, have her run a search through the paper’s computer archives for the old fires. I discouraged him from that by saying I didn’t think the computer database went back that far, but in reality I just didn’t feel comfortable calling her for a favor. We hadn’t spoken since she’d stormed out of my apartment the previous night, and I wasn’t inclined to ask for her help right now, especially when we could handle it ourselves.
“So what’s the alternative?” Joe asked.
I sighed. “I guess we’ll do what a couple of tough-guy PIs like us should never have to do.”
“What’s that?”
“Go to the library.”
Trust a librarian to do in twenty seconds what an investigator might take hours to accomplish. I’d hardly begun to explain what we were interested in before the librarian, a tall, gray-haired woman, was clicking away on her computer.
“We’ve got something called the Cleveland News Index,” she said. “You can actually access this from the Internet; you didn’t need to come all the way down here.”
“Oh,” I said, feeling like a moron.
“The news index has citation information from the local newspaper as well as three local newsmagazines. It goes back more than twenty years. Now you said you were looking for information on arson fires on Clark Avenue?”
“At least one was on Clark,” I said. “But there were two others in the same summer.”
“I’ll just do a keyword search for ‘arson’ and ‘Clark Avenue’ and see what we get.”
I told her the year the fires had happened, and she ran the search. A few seconds later she smiled and turned the monitor to face us. There were fifty records, and the screen showed us the titles of the articles and the dates and sources. I scanned through the first page and shook my head. She clicked the mouse and sent us to the second page of results. This time I saw what I wanted: Pawnshop destroyed in arson fire. I asked her to print that record, and then I kept reading. Six entries below that was another of interest: Third west side fire in two weeks raising neighborhood concern and police interest.
The librarian printed both records, then took us to a microfilm machine. She found the appropriate canisters of film in their storage area, brought them out, and loaded the machine.
“You want me to print copies of the stories for you, or would you prefer just to read them on the viewer?” she asked.
“Print them, please.”
She did, then handed us three pages, and returned to her desk. Joe and I stood in the center of the room and read through the articles together. The first was brief, detailing the timing of the fire on Clark Avenue and saying that while no one had been injured, the pawnshop was a total loss. The next article was much more interesting. It connected the fire on Clark to earlier fires—one on Fulton Road and another on Detroit. Three fires in three weeks, the article said, all to properties owned by one man, Terry Solich. The reporter said Solich had declined an interview request and also mentioned that Solich had previously been charged with possession of stolen goods, although the case was dropped.
“You ever heard of this guy?” Joe asked.
I shook my head and started to respond, then stopped when my eyes caught on another name, further down in the story: While fire investigators are sure the blazes are the result of arson, neither they nor police would reveal whether there were any suspects. Det. Matthew Conrad of the Cleveland Police Department said he has worked closely with fire investigator Andrew Maribelli on the case.
“Conrad’s dead,” Joe said.
“You sure?”
“I was at the funeral.”
“Damn. Do you know the fire investigator?”
He shook his head. “Nope. But I think it’s time we made his acquaintance.”
We called the fire department switchboard first, because nearly two decades had passed, and it was entirely possible Maribelli no longer worked with the department. We were in luck, though—at least at first. Maribelli was still with the department. He just wasn’t interested in talking with us.
“I got to be honest,” he told me when my phone call had been routed through to him, “I don’t feel too comfortable talking to you guys when there’s an active police investigation.”
“The fires happened almost twenty years ago,” I said. “How active can the investigation be?”
“Police department requested my old files about six hours ago. So it feels pretty damn active to me. Now what’s your interest, exactly?”
“Who requested them?” I said, ignoring his question to ask another of my own. “Was it a detective named Cal Richards?”
“Nope. It was an officer named . . .” There was a pause while he thought about it or looked for his notes. “Larry Rabold.”
“Larry Rabold requested your old file,” I said, and Joe’s eyebrows lifted when he heard. “And you still had it? After seventeen years?”
“I keep my notes on any major case that we don’t close. And we never closed that one. I told this Officer Rabold what I could remember about things, and then I dug out my old notes and made copies for him.”
“No arrests were made in the case?”
“Listen, like I said, I’m not going to talk to you guys when I don’t know who the hell you are and the cops are suddenly looking into this thing again. I’m not trying to be a bastard about it, but I’m also not going to change my mind.”
“No problem.”
I hung up and looked at Joe. “He doesn’t want to have anything to do with us. Reason is that he believes there’s a renewed police interest. Rabold interviewed him and asked for copies of the old case file this morning.”
Joe slipped his sunglasses on and nodded. “When I did my background check on Rabold today, I got his shift information. He’s supposed to be off-duty today, but he’s out working on a seventeen-year-old arson case? Hardworking sons of bitches, him and Padgett.”
“If it’s his day off, he might be at home. Maybe we could drop by, see if he’s around.”
I said it casually, as if I were suggesting we stop off for a beer on the way home.
Joe frowned, considering it. “We’d be tipping our hand a little early, maybe. Showing our interest.”
“I’m betting Jerome Huggins informed these guys of our interest hours ago.”
He hesitated only briefly. “All right. I guess it’s time to ante up, anyhow. No matter what his response is, it should tell us something.”
Larry Rabold’s home was on the stretch of West Boulevard that ran between Clifton and Edgewater Park—a historic neighborhood, and damn high rent. The house was a large Victorian, and through the yard you could see the bright blue sky and swath of water from the lake. A wraparound porch offered nice views, and as we walked up the sidewalk toward the house, I could see a boat with a bright multicolored sail out on the water.
“How many cops you know have a porch with a lake view?” I said as we turned up the driveway.
“Counting this guy, the total is one,” Joe said. “Although I’m beginning to hesitate to call him a cop.”
A two-car garage was set behind Rabold’s house, and a black Honda Civic was parked outside it, another vehicle partially visible through the open garage door. We walked up a cobblestone path lined with a nice flowerbed. The front door had a fancy brass fitting in its center, with a protruding key. Joe reached out and turned the key, and a bell rang somewhere in the house. The key probably cost fifty bucks more than a button. Class.
“Hell of a place,” I said, thinking about the big price tag and the small mortgage and the wife that worked as a library aide.
Joe didn’t say anything. No one came to the door. He reached out and turned the brass key again, the bell grinding away as he did it. This time, when the bell died off, another sound replaced it. A high, shrill wail. It went on and on. Joe looked at me, brow furrowed, eyes concerned.
“What the hell is that?”
The wail picked up in pitch, a sustained cry of anguish. I stepped forward and twisted the knob. Locked.
“He’s got a kid,” Joe said. “Maybe she’s throwing a tantrum or something.”
Even as he said it, the sound changed, the wail becoming a soft shriek, then disappearing into a series of rapid, choked sobs. An electric chill rode down my backbone at the sound, all my muscles going rigid. There is someplace deep in the brain that recognizes the emotion behind a human noise, spreads it to the listener, and the emotion I was now feeling was terror.
“What the hell’s going on?” Joe said for a second time, but I was walking away from him, moving around the side of the house. There’d been a car in the driveway, and whoever drove it in probably hadn’t walked all the way around to the front door. There’d be a side entrance.
There was one, just a few steps away from the Honda. The knob turned this time, and the door opened. I stepped inside with Joe behind me, found myself standing in a narrow room with a coatrack on one wall and a few pairs of shoes on the floor. The room smelled of fresh bread and incense or candles, something with a vanilla scent.
“Hello?” I called. “Is everyone all right?”
That was when everything that had been restrained in the wailing noise broke loose, and it became a scream. The sort of scream that dances through nightmares and horror movies and hopefully never touches your real life.
I ran toward the doorway, my hand creeping back toward my spine before I remembered that I was unarmed. The narrow coatroom emptied into a fancy kitchen with a granite-topped island and brand-new appliances. As I shoved around the island and moved toward the screaming, I noticed a block of knives on the counter and paused long enough to grab one. It was a simple kitchen knife with about a six-inch blade, but I felt better with it in hand. Whatever had provoked that scream couldn’t be good.
Out of the kitchen and into the living room, with Joe behind me. The scream reached a hysterical level, a pitch that made me want to cover my ears and run in the opposite direction. Maybe that was the idea. I stood in the middle of the living room with Joe and looked around. The scream was here with us, but I couldn’t see anyone. It seemed to be coming from the couch, but the couch was empty.
I stepped over to the big blue couch, grabbed one end with my free hand, and tugged it away from the wall.
A young blond girl, maybe fifteen, was cowering behind the couch. She was wearing shorts and a T-shirt, her knees pulled up to her chest, protecting her. Her face was paler than the cream-colored wall behind her head, and her eyes were like nothing I’d ever seen before, not even in my days as a narcotics detective when I’d been face-to-face with people in the throes of drug-induced convulsions and fits. Her eyes held nothing but terror, and I was so frozen by them that I didn’t even realize she was fixated on the knife in my hand until Joe took it away from me and threw it across the room.
“Stop,” he said to the girl.
I don’t know how he did it with just one softly spoken word, but she stopped. The girl went silent and stared at us, her chest heaving, and only then did I notice the blood on her shoes.
It was fresh, still sticky, but only on the ends of her shoes, as if she’d dipped her toes into it, like someone testing the temperature of water in a swimming pool. Joe saw it, too.
“Where is he?” he asked, understanding something that I hadn’t begun to consider yet.
She didn’t speak—couldn’t speak, probably—but she lifted a shaking hand and extended her index finger, pointed it at the floor.
“Basement,” Joe said, and stepped away. I went with him.
There was an open door at the other side of the living room, beside a staircase that led up to the second level. Once we were closer, we could see carpeted steps leading down. I noticed a few tacky crimson smears on the carpet. She’d come up this way.
Joe went down first. I followed, wishing he hadn’t taken the knife from me. My heart was thumping, my hands clenched into fists, my muscles tense. We reached the bottom of the steps and came out in a finished basement room with another couch and television, a bookshelf on the wall. Everything looked normal. Joe was still looking in that direction when I turned right and went around the wall.
There was a pool table there, and a dead man beneath it. The body was slumped on the floor, the legs exposed and the torso shoved under the table. Blood was pooled around the body, more of it on the wall behind the pool table, along with bits of flesh and tissue, splattered remnants of a large-caliber gunshot blast.
I opened my mouth to say something to Joe, but he was already beside me, inhaling a long, sharp breath between his teeth.
“The girl,” I said. “Get back upstairs. Get an ambulance down here, a doctor or therapist or someone to help her.”
He turned and went up the stairs, his footsteps loud, the wall beside me trembling as he hurried back up to the living room.
I moved forward.
The blood was still wet in the center of the pool, sticky at the edges. It had puddled against the man’s legs, and a coppery smell was heavy near the body. I dropped to one knee beside his legs, and as I did, the smell came up stronger, overwhelming me, and I gagged. I leaned forward, lifting a hand to my mouth as I choked, thick bile rising in my throat. I fought it down, closed my eyes, and covered my mouth and nose. I was not a homicide detective, and while I’d seen bodies before, I hadn’t seen so many that my brain and my body were trained not to react. I took a few seconds with my eyes closed, concentrating on a slow, shallow breaths, and then I felt ready. I opened my eyes and leaned under the pool table.
It was Larry Rabold. Three-quarters of his face was visible, but the upper left corner, beginning above his cheekbone and extending to his eye and temple, was gone. Blown away. A bloody mess of pulp left in its place, no skin or bone visible.
He’d been shot once in the face, a close-range shot with a high-caliber gun. I’d seen small-caliber gunshot wounds before, and this was not one of them. The close range was obvious both from the extent of damage and from a speckling of tiny hemorrhages on his cheek and jawline. That’s called stippling or tattooing, and it’s the result of burned powder and fragments driven into the skin. You don’t get those marks when the gun is held far away from the victim.
When I could finally bring myself to look away from his face, I realized he’d been shot twice more. There were large holes torn through his torso, one in the chest just above the heart, another in the stomach. Blood still leaked out of the chest wound, and a part of his insides, some thin black organ, ran through the mess. I felt the rise of vomit again, but then I realized the black strand I was looking at wasn’t part of his body, at all. It was a wire.
I leaned forward, the desire to understand what I was looking at overriding the nausea, and then I noticed that half of Rabold’s shirt had been pulled free from his pants. He’d had it tucked in, but the right side was free.
There was a ballpoint pen in my pocket. I took it out and reached out to Rabold’s body, gingerly slipped the tip of the pen between his shirt collar and his neck, and pulled it back. The collar slid away from his neck only an inch or so, but it was enough. Clipped to the inside of Rabold’s collar was a seed microphone—an extremely tiny, extremely sensitive microphone that is used for covert recording. Son of a bitch.
I moved the pen away and let Rabold’s collar fall back in place, then rocked onto my heels and thought about it. A seed microphone like that could be outfitted with a wireless transmitter that sends the conversations to an off-site recorder, but those units were sophisticated, rare, and damn expensive. Far more common was a setup where the microphone ran back to a tiny digital recorder, some of them as small as a nine-volt battery, concealed somewhere on the body.
Sticking the pen out once again, I slid it beneath the free end of Rabold’s shirt and lifted. The bottom of his shirt rose a few inches, and I cocked my head, straining to see. There, against Rabold’s pale, fat belly, was the end of the microphone cord, leading to . . . nothing. At the end of the wire a bit of bare copper was exposed. The wire had been cut, and whatever recorder it had led to was missing.
The proximity to the corpse got to me then, in a sudden, overwhelming wave. I slid back out from under the pool table and stood up. I made it three steps toward the stairs before my vision blurred and it seemed my heartbeat was suddenly coming from my temples. I put my left hand out and found the wall, leaned up against it, and bit down hard on my lip. The burst of pain cleared my head.
I kept one hand on the wall while I went up the stairs, my knees unsteady until I was near the top. When I came out into the living room, Joe was sitting on the floor beside the couch. The blond girl was still curled up, breathing in ragged gaps. I couldn’t see her face, just the jerking rise and fall of her chest. Joe’s hand rested gently on her knee. Her own hand was wrapped around his wrist, painted fingernails biting into his flesh.
I stood and stared at Joe. His eyes were distant. Cop eyes. Cop mode, now. I needed to get back into it, myself.
“You make the call?” I said.
He nodded, said, “Is it . . . ,” but didn’t finish the question, because he didn’t want to say Rabold’s name. Not with the girl who was probably Rabold’s daughter a few feet away.
“Yeah,” I said.
I couldn’t look at the girl anymore. I walked away from them, to the front of the room, and peered out the window, waiting for the police. I stayed on my feet. Somehow, it felt stronger than sitting. I needed to feel strong, right then.