The Fluorine Murder(5)

I looked forward to accompanying Matt on the interviews at the lab and resolved to keep an open mind. I was ready to return to my brunch companions at Rose's dining room table, now fully stocked with chocolates and mints, as if the pastries hadn't qualified as dessert.

The sooner we got going, the sooner I could help find the true culprits and clear my colleagues.

I sat down and picked up a dark truffle. "When do we start?" I asked Matt.

"First we're all going to the movies," he said.

****

"I should have known you'd never take us to see George Clooney," Rose said.

The four of us sat in front of a low-end television/VCR combination in a conference room at the Revere police station. It made sense for Matt to invite Rose and Frank to the view the latest crime scene video, and not just because they were our best friends: no two people in the city knew as many of its citizens as they did. Not only did they run the largest mortuary in town with their older son, Robert, but they had their fingers on the legal pulse through his lawyer wife, Karla, and on anything newsworthy through John, the reporter with a police scanner. Whatever was left over came to them through their high school teacher daughter, Mary Catherine. They were up on all stages in life and death in Revere.

"Maybe Clooney is on this tape," Matt said, to a chorus of disbelieving chuckles.

The video was home grown. One of the neighbors across the street from the nursing home had rushed out with his video camera when he smelled smoke.

"We used to just take pictures of weddings and things. Now people record any kind of disaster," Rose said.

I caught Matt's eye and we smiled at each other: Did Rose realize she'd put weddings in the disaster category?

"And we're throwing everything up on YouTube," Frank said, tsk-tsking.

"Was the cameraman the one who called in the fire?" I asked.

Matt shook his head. "We don't know who called it in. The voice on the dispatcher's tape sounded like a robot. We're assuming it was one of the would-be firefighters, or the arsonist, or the murderer."

"All of whom may be the same person," Frank said.

Matt gave a resigned nod and pushed PLAY on the remote.

Even on a very low-definition government-issue television set, the footage on the fire was startling. Bright red and orange flames shot out from the wooden structure of the old nursing home. There was no audio, but I was sure I could hear crackling and popping. It had been a mild night, without the usual ocean breeze. I wondered if the arsonist had chosen the evening deliberately, to have more control of the fire, or if the choice was governed by some other factor. Many offenders, I knew, committed crimes on dates that had meaning for them, or followed a mental rhythm that no one else was privy to.

My amateur profiling would get us nowhere. I focused on the scene before me. I wrote down a few phrases and thoughts, noting the uniformed nursing home attendants pushing people in wheelchairs, the crumbling window and doorframes, and a gathering crowd, some of whom pitched in to help move people away from the flaming building. The firefighters arrived pretty quickly and took control of the crowd and the soaring, mesmerizing flames. It was hard to tell the gender of the hatchet-carrying, masked, helmeted professionals who ran toward the conflagration.

We all sat back and exhaled deeply as figures in neon yellow-green stripes worked the scene. We'd been at the edges of our seats and, apparently, holding our breaths as if we'd been there at the site of the crackling blaze.

"What are we looking for?" I asked Matt.

"Anything that looks odd. The RFD has already interviewed everyone they could that night. They always look for people who are at more than one scene, or just happen to be at a fire some distance from their own neighborhood. Just treat this like a regular crime scene. We never know what new pairs of eyes will catch after the fact."

After only a few years with a homicide detective, I noted, I hardly blinked at the phrase "regular crime scene."

Within the first few minutes of viewing, Rose and Frank ID'd at least six people, including a retired postal worker who'd just lost his wife to cancer, a brother and sister who served Communion   at St. Anthony's, and the weekend clerk in the flower shop a block from their mortuary. The trick was to get them to limit their IDs to a line or two and not give us family history going back two generations, as they did for deli owners Carol and George Zollo, before we could stop them.

Something occurred to me after the first viewing, but I couldn't pin it down. "Can you play the beginning again?" I asked Matt.

He rewound the tape and this time I watched only one part of the screen, focusing on the upper right, where I knew the niggling bit was. I was frustrated as the flames overloaded the camera, resulting in poor definition of the building parts and objects on the ground. Nothing was as good as the human eye as far as being able to adjust to different intensities of light in real time.