Irene had boots. She also had military-grade cold weather gear, including an enormous parka that hung down to my knees. I put that thing on and instantly started sweating, but Irene insisted. She dressed me like we were going to Antarctica in the bad season. By the time I got out the back door, I had a stocking cap, earmuffs, a hood, thermals, ski pants, boots that came up to my knees, fat mittens, and two extra-long scarfs. Lefty looked like he was going to a beach compared to me.
“Can you walk?” asked Lefty.
“Maybe,” I said between layers of scarf.
“Quiet,” said Irene as she opened the door and a gust of icy wind blew in, glazing the kitchen in white. “We’ve lost enough guests. This one is not getting frost bite.”
“It’s six blocks.” Lefty stalked out into the howling storm.
“Lost?” I asked.
“You’ll be fine,” said Irene.
“I didn’t get the rules.”
“They’re more like guidelines.” Irene pushed me out the door and I wished I’d taken the ski goggles she offered. My eyes smarted and watered with the wind in my face. Lefty waved at me from the other end of the yard next to a building that I could barely make out.
I waddled toward him, hoping I didn’t get blown over. I’d be like the little brother in A Christmas Story, unable to get up and wailing like a two-year-old. A couple of gusts did push me off what was supposed to be a path. It had been shoveled at some point, but the wind had drifted the snow back over. I was looking down trying to get through a drift when something dark came at me. I screamed and fell over. Actually, it was more like rolled over as I was shaped like a beach ball. A screaming beach ball.
Then Lefty was there, trying to hoist me up but ended up kind of rolling me to a weird little truck that reminded me of those mini cars people bought kids, only super-sized for adults with a snowplow bolted to the front and four odd-looking track things instead of wheels. They looked like they’d been taken off a tank and miniaturized, then splayed out, giving the impression of a waterbug standing on a pond.
Lefty stuffed me in the cab, literally using his foot while holding onto the roll bar to force my rotund form inside. I filled up most of the space and I wasn’t sure he would fit. Lefty wasn’t a small guy, but he managed to wedge himself in, smiling happily despite the mini icicles hanging from his brows. “Ready!” he yelled.
It wasn’t a question and I got the impression if I said no, I would’ve been ignored. Lefty slammed the lever on the dash into drive and hit the gas. I was thrown back as we hurled onto the street, cutting off a snowplow and almost sideswiping a parked minivan.
“Woohoo!” Lefty yelled. “How do you like them apples?”
Again, not a question, and I couldn’t answer. I was screaming because we left the road and went into somebody’s yard and took out their mailbox.
“I’ll pay for that!” He was still smiling when we crossed the road between two moving cars and hit the snowbank in the yard opposite. The second car slid and did a 360, hitting the snow bank a second after we got over it.
“Stop!” I yelled. “They might be stuck!”
“That’s Monty Lurman. He’s a trooper.”
“What does that mean?”
Instead of answering, Lefty went for another snowbank. We hit it full tilt, spun sideways and rolled over, bouncing sideways. The world was white and upside-down, then right side up. Lather, rinse, repeat. We must’ve rolled three times before landing right side up in another yard at a severe tilt. Lefty gunned the engine, but my side’s track spun uselessly and his side just turned us in a useless circle.
“High-centered!” yelled Lefty. “Get out!”
I couldn’t get out at that angle, but I didn’t have to. A man appeared at my side yelling, “Son of a bitch, Lefty. You’re insane.”
“You know you want one!” yelled Lefty.
“Hell, yeah!” he yelled. “Having fun?”
“No!” I yelled. “Help me!”
The men laughed and two teenagers joined us. They pushed the Gator off what I would later find out was a Barbie Princess Playhouse and then we were out of the yard, sliding into the street and I was screaming again. Lefty hit every snow drift and snowbank like he was magnetically attracted to them. My throat was burning and I was longing for my Dad’s driving. He might’ve been needlessly aggressive and we had taken out a mailbox or two, but we never rolled. My standards had been significantly lowered.
“There it is!” yelled Lefty. “We made good time!”
“We made a mess!”
He laughed and cranked the wheel to the left so hard, I flew out like a cork out of a champagne bottle, tumbling ass over teakettle until I hit a parked car and threw up. I laid there in a new and special mixture of snow, sleet, and not a few hailstones, and I prayed. Not that Lefty would come and find me. I prayed he wouldn’t. The world was spinning. The vomit wasn’t projected so much out of me but into my scarves so my face and neck were coated. I was okay with it as long as Lefty didn’t come back.
My prayers were not answered.
“Whoa,” he said. “You can really roll. Impressive.”
Not a compliment I ever wanted to hear, but he acted like I’d really accomplished something, patting me on the back and saying, “I hope somebody recorded that. We’d get so many views.”
“Swell,” I said.
He shoved me upright and dragged me toward the Gator.
“No! I’m not getting back in that thing.” I pulled sideways and we both went down in the icy parking lot. It took serious effort to get back on our feet. That parking lot was sheer ice under six inches of snow.
“I’ll have to plow this again,” said Lefty as he shoved me forward.
I hit the wall next to a door that had St. Sebastian Sentinel printed on it in black. The door was frozen shut, but Lefty found a snow shovel from somewhere to hack away at the ice until he got it to budge.
“Success.” He forced the door open eight inches and tried to kick me inside. Literally. He kicked me. The good news was that I barely felt it, but still it was kind of embarrassing and it didn’t work. I didn’t get halfway in. I was closer to eight feet wide than eight inches.
“What the hell are you doing?” yelled someone and a man got in my face.
“Help!”
He grabbed me and between him nearly pulling my arm out of socket and Lefty kicking my giant butt, I tumbled into a reception room with a cracked linoleum floor and battered metal furniture. I lurched into a desk, thrusting it three feet into a wall, knocking off a bunch of framed headlines.
“Lefty! Only you would come out in the biggest storm we’ve had in twenty-five years,” said the man.
“That was rockstar.” Lefty whipped off his balaclava and shook out his mane of white hair. “I rolled it.”
“How many times?”
“Three, I think. Could’ve been four.”
“Nice.”
“You want to take a spin?”
“I would, but Mallory would kill me.”
“I hear that,” said Lefty. “Irene isn’t thrilled, but she’ll be singing another tune when everyone’s calling us to get to the pharmacy tomorrow.”
“I’ll take your word for it.” The man turned to me and frowned. “Who in the world is brave enough to get in that Gator with you?”
The world was still off kilter and I couldn’t answer. There was just now one of him. A skinny man, wearing two flannel shirts and a greying ponytail.
“She had to get to you,” said Lefty. “She’s investigating a murder.”
The skinny man got rigid. “We had a murder?” He snatched up the phone he had clipped to his braided leather belt and keyed in a code.
“Old murder,” I croaked. My throat was killing me.
He stopped. “How old?”
“1965.”
“Well, you weren’t kidding when you said old.” He walked over and stuck out his hand. “Tank Tancredi.”
I gave him my fat mittened hand. “Mercy Watts.”
“Really?” Tank leaned in to get a closer look at the only part of me that was visible, my eyes, but he wrinkled up his long nose and pulled back. “Did you…”
“Barf? Oh, yeah.”
“For God’s sake, Lefty,” said Tank. “The girl’s covered in vomit.”
Lefty had peeled off his layers and was standing by the door in a pair of red long johns and woolly socks. “What’s that?”
Tank unwound my scarves and grimaced. “Egg sandwich?”
“With Miracle Whip,” I said.
“How about some peppermint tea?”
“Yes, please.”
Tank turned on Lefty. “You’ve got Tommy Watts’ kid covered in barf. Help her while I get the tea going.”
Lefty came over curious but unapologetic as he helped me out of my coat and ski pants. “Well, I got you here.”
“I can’t deny that,” I said, accepting a box of tissues and wiping off my chin and neck.
“So who’s Tommy Watts?”
Tank leaned in through a doorway. “Only the most famous detective in Missouri history. Come in. It’s warmer.”
We went into the main newsroom, a decent-sized office with beige walls and the same battered metal furniture. There were four desks and a small office with Tank’s name and editor printed on the door.
“I sent everyone home,” said Tank. “Maybe I shouldn’t have, since you came out in a blizzard.”
I sat down on a sturdy sofa in Tank’s office and said, “I didn’t know what I was getting into.”
“You had fun,” said Lefty.
“Fun is subjective,” said Tank and he handed me a box of wet wipes. “I have these for Taco Tuesdays.”
“Now it’s egg sandwich Thursdays,” I said.
Tank’s phone rang and he glanced at the screen. “It’s Irene. Call your wife.”
Lefty sighed. “Did Brooke Boothe call her?”
“Did you take out her mailbox again?”
“No.”
Tank waited with the expression of a veteran newsman who knew not to rush things.
“Alright. I hit Caden’s Barbie Princess Playhouse. I’ll fix it. I can fix anything.”
“We hit a little girl’s playhouse?” I asked. “You’re a menace.”
“Caden’s a boy, but yeah.”
I crossed my arms. “That’s unforgivable. We could’ve just driven straight like normal people.”
“I don’t have a Gator to be normal,” said Lefty. “Where’s the fun in that?”
“I barfed and little Caden hates you.”
He screwed up his mouth and got out his phone, saying, “It’s me. I’ll fix it.”
Lefty went out into the newsroom and started defending himself against what sounded like an onslaught of recriminations.
“Well, that’ll take a while,” said Tank. “What can I do you for?”
“I need to see your back issues from 1965. Please tell me you keep them.”
“Back then it was all microfiche, but yeah, I got ‘em.”
Microfiche. I’d heard of it, but the only time I’d seen it was on The X-Files. It looked like a huge pain in the ass.
“You don’t look happy,” said Tank.
“I’ve never used microfiche.”
He gave me a mug of peppermint tea and said, “I get it. You’re a Google girl. Probably don’t remember a time before email.”
“Ridiculous, huh?”
“Not really. I showed my kid a rotary phone once and he couldn’t figure out how to dial it. He was ten and in the gifted class.”
“I’m not alone.”
“Not at all,” said Tank. “What murder are we talking about?”
“Sister Margaret Mullanphy in December 1965.”
He nodded. “I heard about that.”
“Still a topic of conversation?”
“Only because of the school.”
“Did they name a school after her?” I asked.
“Not a bad idea, but no, they didn’t.”
“What are we talking about?”
Tank put down his own cup and said, “Hold on.” He left and came back a few minutes later with a stack of newspapers.
“No microfiche?” I asked.
“These are recent. Last few months.” He leaned on his desk and held the papers protectively to his chest.
“Are you planning on showing me those or what?”
“First, I want you to know this is a genuine newspaper, not a rag like the National Enquirer or The Globe.”
“I assumed that,” I said.
“How much do you know about St. Seb?” he asked.
“Almost zero.”
He frowned. “You found Janet Lee Fine and you didn’t look into the town? Your father didn’t?”
“My dad had nothing to do with that situation and as far as I can tell the town had nothing to do with it either.”
“She was brought here.”
“Yes, she was.”
“Who do you think killed her?” he asked. “There must be a pretty good reason that you ended in our dry lake bed.”
There was no way I was going to tell him how that happened. It defied explanation and I’d done my best to forget it ever happened.
“Mercy?”
“It’s unsolved and I have no earthly idea who did it,” I said. “I’m here about Sister Maggie.”
“Oh, I know and that’s interesting.”
“Is it?”
“In St. Seb, interesting things happen,” he said. “I like interesting.”
“What’s your point?” I asked.
He had a point and I wasn’t crazy about it. St. Seb was known for a lot of things, being charming, proximity to the Katy Trail and the wineries on the other side of the river. It was also known for having a high number of odd occurrences. Miss Elizabeth wasn’t the only ghost in town. The gas station had a ghoul that liked to overflow gas tanks and turn on people’s wipers. Regular sightings of a body hanging from a tree in the small park across from the hospital were so common that nobody got excited about it. A steamboat called the Arabian Queen had been sighted gliding down the river every June tenth for 150 years. That was the day its boiler blew, killing everyone onboard. It wasn’t unusual to have a see-through cop directing traffic on Fifth Street or have every single alarm clock in town go off at four o’clock in the morning for no apparent reason.
“I could go on,” said Tank.
“I’d rather you didn’t.”
“You know about Miss Elizabeth?”
“She’s been mentioned,” I said.
“Did Irene tell you the rules?” he asked.
“Not yet.”
“Get the rules. You want the rules.”
I sipped my tea. Why did I decide to come here? This was not a good idea.
“So about the school?”
“Do you want to know?” he asked.
I didn’t, but it was necessary. Ten years ago the local Catholic Church bought a plot of land on the edge of town, intending to build a new high school. They started building eight years ago. The building site had a tremendous amount of problems, everything from a termite infestation to steel headers bending with no weight on them. The school council tried to keep it quiet, but that wasn’t possible and Tank did report the odd occurrences, reluctantly. The stories were tame by national news standards and he didn’t sensationalize it. I appreciated that, since pretty much everything about me got sensationalized. But there was no way to explain why a two-year building project went through twelve construction companies and took seven years.
“It’s done now?” I asked.
“It’s done. The school opened in August.” He handed me another paper. “Possible Vandals at St. Seb Catholic” was the headline.
“Not vandals?” I asked.
There had been vandalism. The principal would open the doors and every locker would be open and the contents strewn everywhere. The water fountains went on during lunch and caused a flood. Toilets overflowed. Doors locked and unlocked. The school nurse’s office kept getting switched with the football coach’s and when that happened the amount of supplies doubled. One time a sofa showed up, brand new, and a brand new set of Grey’s Anatomy books were on the bookshelf. The football coach lost his desk and his cushy reclining chair turned into a stool.
Students reported feeling a presence, particularly when they were upset. Sometimes their backs were rubbed or they felt like someone hugged them. A boy, who was a known bully, had ice water thrown in his face twice when he’d cornered a kid from the Science Olympiad. A group of girls were in the bathroom when the words ‘You are what comes out of your mouth’ appeared on the mirror in red lipstick. The school chapel smelled like honeysuckle and it wasn’t unusual to get a tap on the shoulder when you weren’t paying attention to the morning prayer.
I want to go home.
“Why are you telling me this?” I asked. “If it’s to freak me out, then mission accomplished.”
Tank crossed his arms. “The plot of land the school council bought belonged to the Snider family and they made a pretty penny off that sale. People weren’t happy about it.”
“So?” I asked slowly.
“That’s where your nun’s body was found. People around here thought those woods were sort of sacred.”
“And haunted?”
“Obviously, but not in a bad way.”
“There’s a good way to be haunted?” I asked.
“The woods were exceptionally lovely. Flowers like you’ve never seen. Birds, squirrels. The wildlife loved it.”
“Did you go there?”
“Sure. It’s kind of a thing in high school to go there at midnight to see if you can spot her.”
“Maggie?”
“Yeah.”
“And did you?”
Tank laughed. “No. Kids claimed to have seen her, but I think it’s BS. The most I ever experienced was calmness.”
“Is that really something to get excited about?” I asked.
“I’m not a calm person. Never have been. The first time I felt it, I literally didn’t know what it was.”
I looked through Tank’s papers again and found that, although Sister Maggie’s name was mentioned, there was nearly nothing about the nun herself or her murder.
“So what do you know about Maggie’s death?” I asked.
A look of consternation came over Tank’s narrow features. “Not much honestly. I was looking into it at the time the first construction company up and quit.”
“You were? What happened?”
“I haven’t thought about that…since it happened.”
I waited. You have to let people go to certain places in their own time and Tank did go. Slowly, because he felt guilty. The first construction company left in a hurry, citing vandalism, and it certainly looked like it. The cops had investigated thoroughly. Sugar in gas tanks. Wires cut. Tires slashed. The site manager would come into the project trailer and switch on the lights and every bulb would blow. His laptop with all the project plans and timetable burst into flames. There was a picture of a smoking laptop on Tank’s front page.
The cops never found a single fingerprint. Surveillance cameras covered the area completely and they didn’t show anything. They didn’t glitch or go out at a critical time. Nothing happened. Nothing visible anyway. A vehicle would be driven up and parked at the end of a shift. A camera would be trained on the area for the next twelve hours and the next morning there was sugar in the tank.
“That’s it?” I asked, looking at the paper covering that incident. “What were you supposed to do? That stuff’s hardly your fault. You covered it.”
“Not that,” said Tank. “People were getting pretty worked up with everything that was happening. They were questioning why the chief and Stratton couldn’t find anything.”
“They thought it was Maggie?”
“Of course. This is St. Seb. Once you see a Confederate regiment marching through the hospital, you suspend your disbelief pretty quick.”
“That’s weird,” I said, “but what’s it got to do with Maggie?”
“Nothing. People were talking about what to do. You know, should we abandon the site and build somewhere else. But nobody was going to take that land off the church’s hands after everything that was happening and they couldn’t afford to buy another parcel. So I started wondering about the nun. What happened and how it happened. Nobody talked about that. My mother would not speak about it and I found that to be prevalent in all the locals who were here at the time. Even people who moved away wouldn’t talk.”
“Did someone threaten them?”
“Not that I could tell. I’d say it was a shared horror about the incident that kept them quiet.”
“Fear that it was someone local?” I asked.
Tank shrugged. “No one ever said that, but I think it must be. Whenever I mentioned the murder, that priest, the one in St. Louis, was quickly named as the killer. Almost like a talisman against the fear.”
“Were you threatened?”
“I didn’t think so at the time, but looking back, maybe.”
Tank told me about how he investigated the murder. He started with the locals that he knew and was stonewalled by everyone. Next, he went to the cops and they wouldn’t give him the files, citing the same stuff Stratton told me without the flooding story. Then Tank started calling out-of-towners and combing through his microfiche.
He handed me a paper. Not his. The headline read “Arson at the St. Seb Sentinel investigated.”
“Someone set you on fire?” I asked, looking around.
“Yep. There’d been a couple of fires around town at the time and at the school job site. Somebody kicked down our delivery door and threw in some Molotov cocktails. If Merv Whitman hadn’t been out walking his Rottweiler, we’d have burned to the ground.”
I had a feeling. It was so strong I was glad I was sitting and the peppermint tea didn’t hurt either. “When did that happen? What time?”
“Two in the morning. Merv has insomnia something fierce, lucky for me.”
“Cops never found who did it?”
“Nope. I didn’t have surveillance cameras. Never thought I needed to. We cover traffic accidents, weddings, and the fair. I’m not running the New York Times here.”
“And that’s the incident?” I asked.
“That was the first incident,” said Tank. “Because of the other fires, everyone, including the cops, thought this was some kids messing around. Nobody got hurt. The sites seemed to be picked because they were empty. A gazebo in the park. Places like that.”
“You didn’t connect it to you personally?”
“God, no, but I installed cameras everywhere and got the destroyed area rebuilt.”
The feeling was getting stronger. Something was so not right.
“I bet that distracted you from the high school story and Maggie’s murder,” I said.
Tank grimaced. “You know your stuff. Yes, it did. I had shit to do. Insurance to deal with. My own contractors, the lazy bastards, and to top it off my electrical work wasn’t up to code and had to be completely redone.”
“How long?”
“Nearly a year to get back to normal. In the meantime, two more contractors at the high school project quit, but I wasn’t paying attention until we were back to full speed.”
“Then you got back to Maggie?” I asked.
He looked away. “I did. Started following up on the out-of-towners first. Nothing exciting. I was kind of worn out and the community was over the whole thing by then and had decided it was the church’s fault for buying that land.”
“And?”
“My house burned down.”
There are a lot of things that cause incredible stress in life. Divorce, moving, losing a job, but I’m going to say having your house burn down with your two dogs inside beats those hands down. Tank and his family had gone to Disney in Florida, leaving their dogs at home for the first time ever. They usually put them in the kennel, but Tank got tired of paying the high price and the dogs hated it. They lost weight and their fur would start falling out, so he decided to leave them at home and have a neighbor’s kid look after them. Emma did a great job, by all accounts, and her mother happened to be with her on that last day, checking on the plants. The dogs were walked, fed, watered, and locked in for the night.
Sometime after they left, the air-conditioner malfunctioned. Because it had been installed too close to the exterior wall, the house caught fire. The Tancredis lost everything.
“It wasn’t arson?” I asked.
“Ruled an accident.”
“But…”
“But you came in here asking questions and I’m thinking about why I stopped looking at the murder and the school.”
“You never went back to it?”
“No. I don’t think I even thought about it until the school opened this fall and everything started happening,” he said, his voice tight with guilt. “My kids were traumatized. My wife would barely speak to me for six months. She couldn’t see a dog without crying. We had to rebuild and buy new land because the family didn’t want to go back. It was a mess.”
“Stuff kept happening at the school though?” I asked.
“It did, but I gave the job to Milo. He’s a solid guy and he covered it appropriately.”
“No interest in Maggie I take it.”
“Milo isn’t a deep thinker, a just-the-facts kind of reporter and the other things that happen in St. Seb, he ignores it.”
“Does he believe it?”
“I couldn’t say. We’ve never discussed it.”
“You never discussed Confederates in the hospital?” I asked.
Tank’s face cleared slightly and he chuckled. “What’s to discuss? Things happen in St. Seb.”
“But that’s why you question how I happened to find Janet Lee Fine’s body?”
“It is.” He smiled. “Care to go on the record?”
“I can’t,” I said. “It’s not my story to tell.”
“You have me intrigued.”
“And you’ll be staying that way.”
Tank snapped his fingers dramatically. “I figured. Are you ready for the joy of microfiche?”
“First, tell me what you know. You were researching the murder when your house conveniently burned down,” I said.
“Honestly, I don’t remember much. I don’t even know what I did with my notes. That period was so miserable. I almost got divorced.”
“Anything will help.”
“She was found in the woods by some locals.” He took his ponytail out and ran his fingers through his hair. It hurt him to remember that time period. “The names are on the tip of my tongue.”
“Were they suspects?” I asked.
“I doubt it.”
Lefty knocked and walked in, looking like he’d taken a severe tongue-lashing. “So that was a nightmare. I have agreed to build Caden a princess treehouse and a pirate stronghold.” He looked back and forth between us. “What happened in here?”
Tank swallowed. “I was telling her about the fire.”
“Which one?”
“The one here and my house.”
“Ah, crap,” said Lefty. “What’s that got to do with the price of tea in China?”
“Maybe nothing,” I said.
“I should’ve known something was up. I thought it was an accident,” said Tank.
“Maybe it was.”
“The house?” asked Lefty. “It was, wasn’t it?”
I took a long drink of tea, grateful for the calming effect on my stomach. “I think it may have something to do with an investigation Tank was doing at the time. Sister Margaret Mullanphy’s murder.”
“The nun? That was a priest in St. Louis.”
“That’s not a sure thing,” I said.
“You’re looking into that murder?” asked Lefty. “Why? Because of the school?”
I gave him the bare bones. A family friend asked me to and that there was zero evidence that the priest did it, other than he ended up going off the Eades Bridge.
Lefty made himself a tea and poured a little whiskey in from a small flask he had hidden in his coat pocket. “Well, if you think that priest didn’t do it, then you should look at Bertram Stott.”
“He’s new in town,” said Tank.
“And a convicted murderer,” said Lefty. “Google him.”
I did google him. No microfiche necessary. Bertram Stott was convicted of murder in 1975. He stalked a woman in Tennessee and murdered her. He served twenty-three years and was released for good behavior. He managed to avoid the death penalty because stalking wasn’t so much a crime then and his lawyers were able to shift blame to the victim, saying she incited him to lust and caused him to strangle her with her teasing ways. The prosecutor wasn’t allowed to bring in evidence that Stott had harassed other women mainly because he was a clean-cut kid of only twenty-six with no other arrests. Since his release in 1998, he’d been clean as far as I could tell.
“See,” said Lefty.
“There’s no connection,” said Tank. “He didn’t live here. He’s from Tennessee.”
“I heard he was connected and that’s why he moved here when he retired.”
Tank got on his computer and started typing in a way that reminded me of Uncle Morty. “Well, he did strangle that woman. Where’d you hear that rumor, Lefty?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Some ladies in church back when he joined the congregation.”
“That guy goes to church?” I asked.
“He shows up occasionally. Keeps himself to himself though. We’re used to him now.”
“So he hasn’t done anything weird?”
Lefty sipped his spiked tea and thought for a minute. “Well, he’s odd and creepy, I suppose. But he hasn’t bothered anyone that I know of. The ladies kept a pretty close eye on him for a long time, but he’s not such a fast mover now.”
“What happened?” asked Tank.
“Congestive heart failure. He was in the hospital for a while and now he lives at Shady Glen, the retirement home, uses a wheelchair, so I guess they don’t think he’s much of a threat anymore.”
“When did that happen?” I asked.
“Oh, I don’t know. Last year, I guess. He’s not a spring chicken but young for Shady Glen.”
“He’d have been seventeen or eighteen back in ’65,” said Tank. “That seems a little young for murdering nuns.”
“Hold on.” I texted Uncle Morty about Bertram and he sent me, “On it.”
“What was that about?” asked Tank.
“I know a guy.”
“A guy that can give you everything on Stott?”
“Maybe.”
Tank went quiet and I got the feeling he was cooking up a plan, but I wasn’t worried. The newspaperman was on my side. He’d help me, even if it was only to assuage his guilt for letting his investigation drop, not that I blamed him. If something happened to Skanky and I thought it was my fault, I don’t think I’d care about anything for a long, long time.
“You want to go over to Shady Glen now?” asked Lefty hopefully.
“I saw that whiskey,” I said. “I barely made it here when you were sober.”
“I’m sober. It was barely a drop.”
“Still, I think I’ll hit the microfiche, if I may,” I said.
Tank stared at his computer screen and didn’t respond. I walked around his desk and took a peek. It looked like a fire investigation report. “I never put it together. I had two fires a year apart and I never put it together.”
“No reason you should,” I said.
“Wasn’t the fire here kids?” asked Lefty.
“That’s what we thought,” said Tank.
“There you go.”
He shook his head and tapped the paper on the desk. “I just checked the numbers. There were four fires before the fire here and one after. That’s it.”
“So what?” asked Lefty. “The kids wised up or they got bored.”
Tank flicked a glance at me and I bit my lip before asking, “Were they all Molotov cocktails?”
“Yep.”
“What were the other targets?” I asked.
We had the gazebo, an abandoned shed next to a house that was being torn down, a dumpster fire, and some decrepit playground equipment at the park that the Jaycees had been raising money to replace. I vaguely remembered the equipment and the gazebo he was talking about. They were both by the lake where I found Janet Lee Fine.
The only incident after the Sentinel fire was a pile of sport equipment at the public high school that had been left out, tackling dummies and tires for foot work.
Tank sat back and folded his hands over his stomach. He watched me and waited.
“I’m getting that this is important, but so what?” asked Lefty. “It’s good they didn’t torch the Burger King or the high school itself, right?”
“It sounds like the cops thought it was the same person,” I said.
“Definitely,” said Tank. “Same beer bottles, gas, rags. Always happened about two in the morning.”
“And places where there weren’t any cameras.”
“So it was all the same,” said Lefty.
“Except here,” I said. “Here our guy kicked in the door and threw the device in. More than one?”
Tank nodded. “They estimated three.”
“Very different,” I said. “I’d say the other fires were distractions. Your fire was the point. The cops should’ve figured that out.”
“Maybe they did. I didn’t get much out of them, except the whole kids idea and then it stopped. We had the sports equipment and poof, it was over.”
“Until your house went up.”
“But that was wiring,” said Lefty. “Nothing like the other ones.”
Tank looked at me again. “I’ll find my notes from back then. I’ll give you access to my microfiche and anything else you want.”
I sighed. “In exchange for what?”
“I want the exclusive and I want it to be a five-part story with total access.”
“You were going to let me have the microfiche anyway.”
He smiled. “That was when it was just a fifty-something-year-old murder. Now it’s my arsons. You need my microfiche. Your guy can’t get the stories any other way.”
“I don’t know why my life has to be hard,” I said.
“It won’t be hard from my end,” said Tank. “I’ll make it as easy as possible.”
I rolled my eyes. “Really? I’ve heard versions of that before.”
“Look. My wife has been quietly pissed at me for six years. I would very much like to know that it’s not my fault our dogs are dead.”
I stuck out my hand. “You had me at dogs. Deal.”