Incendiary Designs

by Michael Allen Dymmoch

  “You understand these rights as I’ve explained them?” the voice asked.

  “Yeah.” Smith’s voice was weak and breathy.

  The masked interviewer asked a series of questions, beginning with, “Why did you agree to talk with us?”

  “I’m checkin’ out. Don’t want to go to hell.”

  “Do you mean you believe you’re going to die?”

  “What I said.” There was a long pause while the disembodied hand played with the trach tube, then a long Q-and-A regarding the Waukegan arson. “We got five hundred bucks for torchin’ the place. Killed ourselfs for five fuckin’ hundred bucks…”

  The voice led him through questions intended to positively identify the Waukegan businessman who’d paid the brothers to torch his building and asked, “Why are you telling us this?”

  “Don’t want that SOB to walk on this. Want ’im to fry in hell.” He repeated the man’s name “so there ain’t no doubt.”

  “You got anything else you’d like to tell us about while you’re at it?”

  There was a long pause before he said, “Yeah. I…I helped off that cop down south. The broad. Helped beat her.”

  The masked man said, “Jesus!”

  “We didn’t plan it!”

  Smith had to pause to breathe hard, whether from exertion or emotion wasn’t clear. When he didn’t’ go on after that, the interviewer asked, “Who was we, Smith?”

  “John’n me, an’ Ron’n Mackie, an’ the bitch, an’ Wiley. Wiley put us up to it.”

  “What’s Wiley’s full name?”

  “Brian. Brian Fahey.”

  “What are the others’ last names?”

  Smith had to think about that for a minute, or else he was running out of steam. The video mike picked up the rasping of his breathing in the meantime, and a muffled, unintelligible murmur of conversation between the interrogator and the cameraman. Then Smith said, “Ron Hughes, John Mackie. I don’t know the bitch’s name. The church bitch. Brotha John’s whore. Fuckin’ nutcase.”

  Twenty-Eight

  The heat took Chicago by surprise. Except for a tour in Nam, Thinnes had lived in the area all his life and he knew that a mild spring didn’t mean a decent summer. April had seemed comfortable, May warmer than usual. June started at eighty degrees and went up. By the first official day of summer, the Sun-Times’s “Top of the News” caption said it all: “Temps Go Through the Roof.”

  By 2:00 P.M. the next day, it was ninety-three degrees, and Thinnes was on the ropes in a bout with the sandman. In spite of the AC, the squad room was warm, but he wasn’t complaining. There were places all over the city with power outages. The others in the room, the sergeant, Len Swann, and Oster looked about as wide awake as Thinnes felt. The heat was taking its toll on Oster, too. His shirt was damp with sweat under the armpits and across the back. His face was as red as if he’d been drinking.

  Thinnes stifled a yawn, then stood up and stretched. He sat back down, and as he tried to decide whether to go looking for something cold and caffeinated, Art Fuego came in. They hadn’t seen him since the day Hughes copped the plea at Twenty-sixth and Cal. Fuego was in shirtsleeves, with his collar open. He was carrying a briefcase. He stopped halfway between the door and the coffee setup, then shook his head once and walked over to Thinnes’s desk. Thinnes leaned back and hooked an empty chair toward him with his foot. “Take the load off.” Fuego sat. “What brings you up our way?”

  Fuego put his briefcase on the desk and opened it. “Funny you should ask.” He lifted out a stack of case files and dropped it on the desk.

  Thinnes looked through them. Five were aggravated arsons, one aggravated arson-felony murder—all by unknown offenders. “What’ve we got here?”

  Fuego pulled three more files out of his case and handed them to Thinnes: fires of unknown origin—arson suspected. Well, why not? Fuego was an arson cop. Thinnes dropped them on the other pile and said, “So?”

  “I think our old buddy Wiley Fahey is back in town,” Fuego said, “I think he might be able to shed some light on these.” He tapped the top file. “And these are in addition to the three I told you about in March.”

  Oster, who’d been listening in, pulled out a handkerchief and wiped his face and neck. “It’s not bad enough we got the summer from hell with this weather,” he said, “we gotta have a loony-toon runnin’ around settin’ fires. All we need is for the media to get hold of it that we got a cop-killing serial arsonist out there. We got chaos.”

  Thinnes let that go and said to Fuego, “I thought you said Fahey used a simple method of setting fires that anybody could copy. Apart from the fact that we don’t have him in custody, what about these cases makes you think it’s him?”

  “It’s more than just the incendiary device that’s the same. Call it a hunch. The details are all identical—time of day, method of entry,…It’s uncanny. In two of these unknown origin cases, the buildings belonged to the same guy—a sixty-two-year-old retired brick mason named Ronzani. Ordinarily, I’d have him in here fast enough to make his head spin, but he was the victim in the felony murder. Looked like careless use of smoking materials, only according to his housekeeper, since he lost a lung to cancer, he didn’t smoke.”

  “Then it’s got to be Wiley or someone he hung with,” Thinnes said. “Maybe in Stateville. Or before he went in.”

  “I’ll get started lookin’ into that,” Oster volunteered.

  “And we’d better follow the money,” Thinnes said.

  “Ronzani’s will leaves everything to his sister, who’s got to be nearly as old as he is. Was. So even if we find her, I don’t see her as much of a suspect.”

  “What about kids?” Oster said. “Disinherited? That’d be a motive.”

  Fuego sighed. “Lawyer said he didn’t have any. Sister might not either. The guy didn’t know, didn’t even know how to contact the sister. His client hadn’t seen her since they left Italy—at the end of World War Two.”

  “Maybe there’s some other relative the lawyer doesn’t know about who wasn’t happy about being disinherited?”

  Fuego shrugged. “We’ll find out. The will hasn’t been probated, but we’ll see if it’s challenged when it is.”

  “And you gotta have a list of offenders with the same MO as Wiley,” Oster said. “Just in case it wasn’t him.”

  “Yeah, but most of them have alibis or are in County or Joliet.”

  “Who’d know enough about it to do it?” Thinnes said.

  Fuego said, “Firemen.”

  “You mean like in Backdraft?” Oster said.

  “Nah. Anybody who could control all the variables like they did in the movie would probably be smart enough to make his fires look like natural causes.”

  “Yeah, you’re right,” Oster said. “What about heating contractors, demolitions experts, chemists, engineers…”

  “How about stunt men?” Thinnes said.

  “What?”

  “The guys who set up explosions for the movies?”

  “Yeah,” Fuego said. “Them, too. What made you think of them?”

  “I don’t know. They always have great fires in the movies but you don’t often hear of anybody getting hurt making them.”

  “Wait a minute,” Oster said. “How come you’re in here telling us all this?”

  “I need help following up on it.”

  Oster pointed to the stack of files. “What’s wrong with the dicks assigned to those cases working them?”

  “I can’t seem to interest any of them in my Wiley theory. He’s been out of sight so long everybody thinks he’s died or left the state.” Fuego looked at Thinnes. “You said you didn’t like the way we closed the Banks investigation…”

  Thinnes couldn’t resist saying, “Maybe you ought to see if O.J. was in town when these fires occurred.”

  “Don’t you start with that,” Oster growled.

  Fuego said, “All these open cases are making my boss nervous. He wants ’em closed.”
/>   “So what are we supposed to do? We don’t have enough work with all the heat deaths?”

  Fuego shrugged. “I’ve done the usual follow-up, and except for putting out a flash on Wiley, I’m out of ideas. I thought you guys might think of something. Maybe how to find Ronzani’s sister?”

  Thinnes said, “Try immigration?”

  “No luck.”

  “Christ, Fuego,” Oster said, “she could be anywhere…maybe went back to Italy, maybe dead.”

  “No, a neighbor I talked to said Ronzani’d heard from her once after he got here. She sent her folks a postcard after she got to New York, said she was moving to Chicago. Ronzani came here looking for her—never found her. The family never heard from her after that.”

  “We’re talking fifty years ago! Who’s to say she ever made it here? Or she could’a been murdered, or run over by a truck.”

  “Or married someone her family didn’t approve of,” Thinnes said. “In which case, there’d be a marriage certificate somewhere.”

  “Yeah,” Oster said. “And since all the records are computerized, it’d just be a matter of seconds to check on that.”

  They all laughed.

  “Italians are usually Catholics, aren’t they?” Thinnes said. “At least, the new immigrants. What about calling all the Catholic churches and asking them to check their marriage records for 1945 to ’49?”

  Oster turned to Fuego. “There you go.”

  Fuego shrugged. “I got to be in court all afternoon.”

  Thinnes said, “Carl, why don’t you?”

  “Don’t we have enough—?”

  “Hey, if you’d rather drive around in the heat and look at stiffs…”

  Oster scowled and reached for the stack of files. “Gimme those.”

  Fuego grinned.

  At that moment, the sergeant came up with a slip of paper in his hand—another death investigation, Thinnes was ready to bet. “You guys free?” he asked.

  Thinnes reached for the paper. “I got it.”

  The sergeant handed it to him. “Sixty-nine-year-old white male, probable heat death. Just make sure there was nothing funny about it before we transport ’im.” He looked at Oster. “What’re you doing?”

  “He’s busy,” Thinnes said.

  The sergeant looked annoyed. He took two more papers from his front pocket and held them out to Thinnes. “In that case, you can check these, too, while you’re at it.”

  “Okay.” Thinnes took his jacket off his chair back as the sergeant walked away. “Carl, if you have time, you might also call Fahey’s sister and run some of those arson victims’ names past her—see if Wiley ever had a beef with any of them.”

  “Yeah. Okay.”

  “And check on the Conflagration Church—see if God’s spoken to any of them lately.”

  “All right, already!”

  Twenty-Nine

  All three of the victims Thinnes had been sent out to deal with had been murdered by the heat. One was already on his way to the morgue when Thinnes got to the scene. The other two were waiting on a detective’s okay to transport. The beat cops had secured all three scenes, interviewed neighbors, and gotten the names of next of kin. They were getting really good at it. But then, they’d had enough practice.

  Thinnes was on his way back to the Area when his radio crackled. He responded; the dispatcher announced, “Another dead body. Beat coppers think this might be the real thing.” The real thing. Murder. The dispatcher gave him the address. Thinnes said, “Ten-four,” and signaled a turn.

  The heat slammed into him as he opened his door at the scene. It was already cordoned off—yellow police-line tape stretched across a rutted brick alley. The building to the north was boarded up; to the south, locked and shuttered. There was only one car. The copper sitting in it got out as Thinnes approached. He was in his late thirties or early forties—Thinnes’s age, Irish, no safety vest, carrying a .357, not a 9mm. A veteran. He looked and smelled as if he’d just puked. Jerking his head toward the alley, he greeted Thinnes with, “Worst I’ve ever seen.” He ducked under the tape.

  Thinnes followed. “Yeah, it’s been a hell of a summer.”

  The copper pointed to the end of the alley and said, “No. I mean this.”

  “What is it?”

  “Dead body.” He stopped and looked at Thinnes. “You got to see it.” He shook himself.

  They kept walking, approaching what looked like a brick factory built in the days before cheap electricity. It had large banks of windows, divided into one-by panes and covered with chain-link grids. In a better neighborhood, the place would have been under conversion into yuppie condominiums. In this one, it was empty. The door gaped. Long before they reached it, the scent of summer hit them—the unmistakable stench of ripe cadaver.

  “What’s the story?” Thinnes asked.

  “Electricity was out for two days on this street. The owner of the building got a complaint from a neighbor about the smell. Neighbor figured a dog or maybe even a bum wandered in and died. Came over to check.” The copper stopped in front of the door. “You mind if I don’t go back in there?”

  “That bad?” Thinnes said. He shrugged. “Long as nothing’s gonna jump me if I go in without backup.”

  “Way past jumpin’.”

  “You call for a crime-scene team?”

  “Yeah. Said it’d be an hour at least. DB’s in no hurry.”

  Thinnes couldn’t put it off any longer. “Okay.” He forced himself to breathe despite the overpowering smell and stepped sideways through the door so he wouldn’t have to touch it. The building looked about 60-by-120 feet with a 12-foot ceiling hung with banks of fluorescent tube lights. Afternoon sun glowed in through the grimy windows, hot and thick as molten plastic, slanting black shadows from the rows of columns holding up the roof. The concrete floor was webbed with cracks and stained, littered with small trash—McDonald’s ketchups squashed like roadkill; crumpled cigarette packs and butts; a cardboard box split at the corners and spread-eagled. The far end of the room looked like a wall of stainless steel interrupted by doors—walk-in coolers. The intervening space was filled with flies.

  Thinnes pulled on gloves as he crossed to the door that was open, a left-handed door. Used, balled up, duct tape lay on the floor next to the door with a roll of the tape and bits of gray adhesive stuck to the door’s edges and to the wall around the door.

  Inside the cooler, he could hear the buzzing of a thousand insects. Light from behind him dimly lit the cooler’s interior. Careful to avoid touching the adhesive, he gripped the edge of the door at a point where there was little probability of disturbing latent prints. He could feel the rotted gasket. He swung the door wide. The buzz got louder. The stench rolled out like invisible smoke. Hanging shapes materialized that for a fraction of a second looked like sleeping, man-sized bats. He took a step backward. Vicks and cigars weren’t going to do it. Gas masks required.

  Something was moving. His skin crawled. Keeping in mind that the beat cop had said it was safe, he leaned through the doorway and looked to the right for a light switch. Found it. Flipped it. The dim fluorescent, overhead, transformed the scene from shadow to really scary. It wasn’t the worst he’d ever seen, but it was certainly the weirdest.

  Inside, the cooler was ten-by-twelve feet, with a seven-foot ceiling that bristled with hooks. In the light, the giant bats were hanging animal carcasses, dressed—he guessed. He couldn’t be sure because the carcasses were coated completely with insects and larvae. Other smaller objects, also hard to make out beneath the crawlies, hung among the carcasses.

  The dead body—he could see why the cop had hesitated to describe it beyond that—was in the middle of the floor. Decomposition gasses had bloated it to a huge, shapeless mass covered in a living, squirming blanket of flies and maggots. Under the wildlife, he could just make out denim, and athletic shoes, and a matted tuft of brown hair. It was obvious that the drain that serviced the cooler had been blocked by the remains. And flui
d from the decomposition had collected between the treads of the diamond-point floor panels, creating the perfect environment for growing larvae. So the deceased seemed to be afloat on a shiny, milky, seething sea of worms.

  Thirty

  “Definitely unique,” Thinnes told the beat cop as he pulled his gloves off inside out and balled them up.

  The copper was leaning on Thinnes’s car in the only shade this side of the street—under a half-yellowed elm tree. Dutch elm disease. Sweat dampened his hair and face and darkened circles under his arms and down his back. Thinnes opened the car, and the heat that had built up inside blasted him. He tossed his gloves in the trash box behind his seat, then rolled down the window and fished out his cell phone. He rang HQ and asked whether a crime scene team had been dispatched “Not yet,” he was told.

  “Is Bendix on today?”

  “Yeah, why?”

  “This is a really unusual case,” Thinnes said. “We need your most experienced team.” He called animal control next—let them deal with the Conservation cops. When he hung up, he hawked and spit into the gutter, but he could still taste the smell of death.

  Bendix had ditched his jacket and tie but was still drenched with sweat. He ambled toward the cooler, puffing his cigar, fighting the flies and god-awful stench with a toxic cloud of his own. When he got to the doorway, he stopped and took the cigar out of his mouth.

  “Holy Mother of God!” He stood with his mouth open for a full fifteen seconds, disregarding the flies. It seemed like thirty seconds more before he could bring himself to talk again. He turned to Thinness and said, “What a fuckin’ waste of good venison.”

  They’d figured out from the feet that the larger hanging carcasses were dead deer. Poached, probably.