Reed cleared his throat. “Ah, no. I don’t think so.”
“Don’t hold back on my account.”
“No, it’s that…”
“What?” she demanded, almost belligerently. His memoir about the hunt for Coben and her ultimate rescue had served as the template for at least two movies over the past fifteen years. The public would eagerly devour this juicy new chapter.
“I think maybe these monsters don’t need any more ink devoted to them,” Reed said after another moment. “At least certainly not by me.”
Their eyes met and held. There was no denying that Francis Coben had enjoyed his fame, strutting for the cameras during his trial, smiling and waving like he was a celebrity charming the paparazzi. His crimes were his alone, but his legend had required help.
“So I say we give Kevin Powell the floor and let him tell his tale,” Reed said, taking a deep breath as he broke the spell. He reached for his water. “If he has some secrets he’s harboring about that night—if indeed he has any regrets at all—time may well have brought them to the surface.”
* * *
Southampton Street, Ellery noted with some irony, was another one of the city’s ubiquitous one-way roads. “This must be the place,” she said dubiously as she parked the truck outside the address Powell had given them. The run-down brick building looked like a relic from the Truman administration, with its stained concrete base and the narrow rectangular windows in cheap metal frames. Silver lettering stretched across the front of the building, proclaiming it to be the City of Boston Fire Department Headquarters. It sat surrounded by contemporary structures—squat brick buildings that had some of their windows boarded up, as well as a gas station, a McDonald’s that was doing a brisk afternoon business, and a car wash, which was not.
Inside, the young man at the front desk did not make eye contact but told them Powell was expecting them at his office on the top floor, room 508. There, they were met with another gatekeeper, this one a female secretary who was approximately as old as the building itself, and she announced their arrival. “Come in, come in!” Powell stood to welcome them, greeting each in turn with a firm handshake. Ellery knew from the stories that he had to be nearly sixty by now, but he was still a powerfully built man, taller and bulkier than Reed. Powell had rolled up the ends of his white shirt to the elbows, as though the cuffs were too narrow to contain his muscular forearms. His dark hair was slicked back and thinning, and his face lined around the edges, puffy and less defined, like a cartoonist’s sketch, but Ellery could still see the imprint of the young, handsome firefighter who had dominated the news cycle a quarter century ago. “Please, have a seat,” he said, indicating two basic office chairs in front of his desk. “Sorry about the mess. I spend my days buried in paperwork.” As if to make his point, he shoved a stack of folders to the side of his desk.
“Thank you for taking the time to see us,” Reed said.
Powell waved them off with one beefy hand. “Please. It’s my honor. Russ called and said I didn’t have to take your calls, but I told him—like I’m going to turn down the chance to meet the guy who nailed Coben?” He gave a low whistle. “What a squirrelly little bastard he was, eh?”
“It was really the combined effort of many people that led to his capture,” Reed demurred.
“Like hell it was! I read your book. No one else was even suspicious of that freak before you started following him.”
Ellery saw Reed shift slightly in his chair, clearly uncomfortable, but Powell either didn’t notice or didn’t care. He turned to her instead.
“And you! You’re the one who got away! Impressive fortitude, surviving everything that sicko threw at you. How many girls were there before you? Ten? Fifteen?”
Ellery didn’t answer. Powell’s tone was admiring, his smile and body language open and friendly, but there was an underlying steel in his words. He was reminding her that she had been the girl in the closet. Helpless and afraid.
“I can get you an autographed copy if you like,” Reed cut in smoothly. “Of the book.”
“Yeah? That would be terrific of you. My wife, Marlena, she’d get a kick out of it. A real true crime fanatic, that one. Can’t get enough of that Investigation Discovery stuff, you know?”
“You must have had some stories of your own for her,” Reed said, leaning back in his seat, prepared to be regaled. Ellery tried to match his posture.
Powell went silent a moment, apparently gathering his words carefully, as if sensing a trap. “Sure, sure. I’ve had some success here and there. There was a warehouse fire in East Boston about seven years ago—the place went off like the Fourth of July in the middle of the night—and it turned out to have all different kinds of inventory inside, from furniture to DVD players to automobile parts. We had the torch man on camera—not his face, but proof he was at the scene right before the whole thing blew—so it was obviously an arson job. But the video showed that he was carrying no chemicals on him. We come to find out, one of the companies shipped the accelerant in separately. It was already on the premises when the guy showed up. All he needed was a Bic lighter.” Powell finished this story with a satisfied smirk. “The owner’s doing fifteen years at Danbury.”
“What about the Gallagher Furniture fire?” Ellery asked with a trace of impatience, and Reed glanced at her sharply. She flushed as she remembered the plan and forced her features into what she hoped was an obsequious smile. “I mean, that’s got to count as one of your successes, right?”
Powell frowned. “In one way, yes. I was able to get Myra Gallagher out in time, and by God’s own miracle, she survived. But that little boy died, and so it’s hard to think of that night as a complete success.”
“But you caught the guy,” Reed protested as he sat forward. “Luis Carnevale. The whole state was looking for him, and you’re the one who got him.” He paused significantly. “I know what that’s like.”
Powell gave him a shrewd, assessing look. “Yes,” he said. “You would know. All those girls, the ones with their hands cut off? You didn’t save them.”
“You’re right. I didn’t. I did the only thing I could, which was to keep Francis Coben from killing anyone else. And that’s what you did, right? You got him off the streets. Now his niece is making a big stink and the parole board might let him free again. How do you feel about that?”
Powell reached to the side for his desk drawer and pulled out a bottle of pink antacid. “This,” he said as he held it up. “This is what I think of it.” He uncapped the lid and took a long swig from the bottle, and Ellery had to restrain herself from making a disgusted face. When he was done, he looked from Reed to Ellery and then back again. “Your work with the Bureau—did you do profiles on arsonists?”
“I’ve read a few,” Reed said. “But that wasn’t my particular area.”
Powell nodded as though he’d expected as much. “You two ever been to a fire? Not like a beach or backyard bonfire. I’m talking about a five-alarm deal where there’s ash in your mouth and the smoke can be seen for miles.”
Reed and Ellery shook their heads. “No, sir,” Reed said. “Nothing like that.”
“It’s like walking into the mouth of hell. The roar of a fire like that, it sounds like a 747 taking off. The flames are like a living, breathing thing, because that’s what fire does—it feeds on oxygen to get bigger, stronger, until it can incinerate everything in its path. And you. Your job is to go right into the belly of the beast. Look it right in the eye and make it think you’re not afraid. Your skin gets tight. Your body hair singes. You can barely see anything that’s going on, and at any minute, a wall or the ceiling might cave in and crush you right where you stand.
“Then, if you’re lucky, it’s over. You’re left with a black shell. A stinking husk of a building that’s now covered in six inches of dark water, everywhere in ruins, and you’ve got to figure out how the fire got started and who’s to blame. I’ve got to tell you—sometimes, too often, they get away with it. Knowi
ng a fire is arson and proving it are two very different things. It’s true, what they tell you on TV, that so much of the evidence goes up in the flames—or is washed away in the fight. The man who was setting fires around Boston back then, we nicknamed him the Marlboro Man. Did you know that?”
“No,” Ellery said. “I didn’t read anything like that in the news stories.”
“We kept it to ourselves,” Powell said. “A private joke. Only it wasn’t so funny, see, because the Marlboro Man was using those cigarettes to set the fires. He’d douse the place in gasoline, tie a cigarette to a pack of matches, and light it up. The cigarette acted like the wick, giving him time to get out before the place caught fire.”
“The Gallagher fire,” Reed cut in. “Did you find a Marlboro cigarette at the scene?”
Powell hesitated. “No, not that one. But we didn’t find it every time. Sometimes the flames just ate everything.”
“But you were there at the scene so early,” Ellery said.
“In my car, yeah. I didn’t have the truck. I didn’t even have my gear. I just saw the place burning and pulled over. There was a woman screaming inside, so I didn’t even stop to call it in. I just grabbed my car jack and used it to break down the front window and go in after her. It wasn’t until five minutes later when the first unit rolled in. It was dry, in the middle of summer, and the place was packed with wooden furniture. It went up like a tinderbox.”
“When did you notice Luis Carnevale?” Reed asked.
“Not right away. I was with the medics at first, getting oxygen and having my arm wrapped up from the burn.” He gestured at his left bicep. “They wanted to take me to the hospital straight off, but I couldn’t leave until the fire was out. The cops had the crowd backed up down the block and I was standing on the other side of the barricade. At first, I was watching the fire just like everyone else. But then something made me turn around, and I saw him standing there with his hand down the front of his pants. His pupils were all huge and dark, his mouth hanging open. Then I noticed that the edges of his mouth were actually turned up. This asshole was smiling! So I started trying to get closer to him and see what his deal was. That’s when I got a whiff of the gasoline. It was already in the air—you could smell it from the fire—but on him, it was real strong, like he’d been bathing in it. I asked him to come talk to me a second, and he bolted. Lucky for me he had kind of a bum ankle and didn’t run very fast. I caught him about thirty yards down the street.”
“I see why you were suspicious,” Reed said. “His behavior made him look very guilty.”
“Because he was guilty,” Powell replied. He stared long and hard at Reed. “McGreevy told me you had some doubts. I said to him that you should come on over here, because I have something that will make true believers out of you.”
Reed raised his eyebrows. “We’d love to hear it.”
“You really want to be convinced?” Powell said as he got up and fiddled with the blinds on his window. “Go down to the prison and talk to Carnevale. He’s a sick, twisted little bastard with no respect for human life. Most arson is done for profit. The next biggest chunk is committed by angry young men who don’t feel in control of their own lives. Maybe their mommy didn’t hug them enough. Maybe they didn’t get a date to the prom. Maybe they’ve been kicked around their whole lives and so now they’re going to make people pay. They get a thrill out of destroying property that other people value, at watching the firefighters scurry around because of a fire they caused.”
Powell had darkened the room and he switched on his laptop, which he plugged into a projector. As he trained it on the wall, Ellery let her gaze linger on the other decorations he had hanging about the office—pictures of firefighters in uniform, several framed commendations, and what looked like an old map of Boston with the famous fire of 1872 marked across a third of the city.
“Luis Carnevale was the third kind of arsonist,” Powell said as he called up a picture of the man’s mug shot from 1988. “He set fires because he just couldn’t help himself.” Ellery had seen this same photo of Carnevale in all the old news reports, although it looked washed out when projected against the institutional blue-gray wall. Carnevale appeared scruffy and shadowed, with a couple of days’ worth of stubble on his face and a healthy shiner around his right eye. He was heavy-lidded and resigned, looking beyond the camera lens to the fate that awaited him. “At the time of his arrest, Carnevale was living in the basement of his cousin’s house, not working. He did handyman-type jobs around the neighborhood sometimes to bring in a few dollars, but mostly he sat around smoking and watching TV.”
“Smoking?” Ellery asked, remembering the cigarettes that had been used as the incendiary device.
Powell rewarded her with a thin smile, as though pleased with her for keeping up. “Marlboros,” he said as he clicked through to the next slide. “This here is the number of major fires in the Boston area from 1975 through 2012. You see how overall, the number’s going down, except for that spike in ’87 and ’88? Yeah. That’s one arsonist single-handedly reversing the trajectory. And here, in 1989, is when Carnevale was arrested and convicted. Notice the drop.”
He was right. On paper, it looked like the task force had found the right man. She glanced at Reed, but his expression was difficult to interpret in the low light.
“But here,” Powell continued, “here is the real pièce de résistance.” He looked to Reed. “Are you familiar with geographical profiling?”
“Yes,” Reed allowed. “It’s based on data showing that offenders are most likely to commit crimes that are in nearby familiar neighborhoods to them, but not in their exact neighborhood itself.”
“Right—don’t shit where you eat. Pardon my French.” He turned to the projection on the wall, which showed a map of Boston. “See that blue dot right there? That’s Carnevale’s place, his cousin’s house. Here are the fires that the task force investigated, starting with the ones in late 1986.” He clicked a button and a handful of tiny flames showed up on the wall, well away from Carnevale’s place of residence. “Then here are the ones from 1987.” Powell clicked again, and this time, two dozen more tiny fires, each representing a much larger one, appeared on the map. Ellery blinked as Reed shifted in his seat, and she knew he must see what she did: there was a literal ring of fire around the blue dot at Carnevale’s house.
“And 1988?” Reed asked.
Silently, Powell advanced the frame, and the map shifted again. Ellery saw that the tiny fires continued the same ring pattern, but encroached closer on Carnevale’s residence. “He was getting more comfortable, more complacent,” Powell observed. “It had been two years and no one had caught him yet, so he figured no one ever would. This one here? It’s the Gallagher Furniture fire—just four blocks from where Carnevale was shacked up at his cousin’s.”
“The pattern is striking,” Reed agreed.
“I figured you would recognize it. I told Russ—just let me explain to them, and they’ll understand. We nailed the right SOB back then. I’m one hundred percent sure of it.” He then called up a series of pictures that seemed to be crowd shots from one of the fires. “A Herald photographer took these right before I noticed Carnevale standing there. That’s him with a front-row seat. What you won’t see—no matter how many times you look at these—is any sign of that so-called witness.”
“The Blaze?” Ellery asked. “We’re under the impression he existed.”
“Sure, he existed.” Powell called up another image, this one showing the mugshot of a heavyset black man of indeterminate age. He had a graying beard and bleary, unfocused eyes. He also had a patch of discolored skin on the left side of his face that, if you squinted just right, looked something like a flame. “Earl Stanfield. Indigent alcoholic. There was never any evidence that he was at the scene of the Gallagher fire, let alone that he saw the arsonist.”
“Did you bother to find him and ask?” Ellery said.
Powell’s jaw tightened. “Finding Earl wasn’t
my job. The detectives on the task force said they searched the whole damn city and came up empty. Hell, your friend McGreevy took on the search himself. I think if the FBI couldn’t find him, then it’s pretty damn clear he didn’t want to be found.”
“Or someone didn’t want him to be found,” Reed said mildly.
Before Powell could reply, Ellery leaped into the conversation. “It was a fortunate thing, you driving by just after the fire started,” she said. “How were you on Emerson that night?”
Powell turned off the projector and flipped the overhead light back on. “The grace of God,” he said, shaking his head as though he still couldn’t quite believe it himself. “He put me just where I needed to be.”
“But isn’t Dorchester south from Lucky Sevens?” Ellery pressed him. “Emerson is one-way headed east.”
Powell froze for a fraction of a second, his hands going still, but it was long enough to shift the atmosphere of the room. He had been regaling them with an oft-told tale, its fabric warm and familiar, with every conversational beat well worn and anticipated. He had his slides prepared, that’s how mapped-out the visit had been. But Ellery had knocked him out of his comfortable, lofty role as the inside man with all the information. Here, for once, was a question without a pretty picture to answer it.
To his credit, Powell recovered quickly, his mouth twitching back into a smile. “Must’ve taken the wrong turn,” he said. “I was all charged up from the conversation with my buddies, talking about how we wanted to nail the bastard. I wasn’t thinking straight. Or, I guess you could say the Lord works in mysterious ways.”
No Mercy--A Mystery Page 10
