The Murals

by William Bayer

  After she calmed down, she muttered something to the effect that our coming out to New Mexico had been a fool’s errand.

  ‘I should have warned you,’ she said, ‘admitted I didn’t know anything, not even the symptomology. Looking at your model, I’m even more confused. What did Ted think these paintings meant? What did they mean to the girls? Why was he so secretive? Why were the three of them so conspiratorial? What was the purpose? The treatment plan?’ Liz spread her arms. ‘Truth is, I have no fucking idea!’

  ‘Well, holy shit!’ Hannah said, as we rumbled down the road and off the mesa. ‘Where does this leave us? Back to zero. We never got around to asking if there was a deal with the Cobbs.’

  ‘Still, we learned something.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘How much we still don’t know.’

  Hannah glanced at me. ‘She may have had a point, asking why you’re so invested in this.’

  ‘I thought we were equally invested.’

  ‘We are! So why, Jase? Why do these murals painted a quarter of a century ago by a pair of troubled adolescents speak so powerfully to us? I think we owe it to ourselves to get to the bottom of that.’

  Unsettling questions, which unsettled our relationship. We weren’t so cuddly on the flight back east. We didn’t speak much on the plane. It was only in the taxi, driving from Calista Airport to the Capehart, that Hannah said something that struck me.

  ‘I think we may have learned more on this jaunt than I thought.’

  ‘What’s that?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s always “the girls,” “the two of them,” “what were they doing up there together?” We’ve assumed all along that Courtney was the lead artist, and Penny was her assistant. But what if it was the other way around? Or, more interesting, what if the two of them played equal roles.’

  ‘You mean like a folie à deux?’

  ‘Yeah, a folie à deux.’

  Joan Nguyen

  To explain why I became so obsessed with what everyone was calling ‘the summer fires,’ let me speak about my feelings toward Calista. Despite my initial negative reaction to the city, I found it was a pretty cool place. But there’s also something moody about it, an overlay of grit, injustice and gloom that I find haunting and which I can neither explain nor escape.

  Perhaps it’s the pervasive corruption, particularly in the CPD, which I deal with as junior member of the Times-Dispatch investigative team. Also the endless litany of irrational crimes reported daily to our newsroom. Someone holds up a liquor store; he’s doing it because he wants money. But a white cop who shoots a ten-year-old black boy dead because he claims he thought the kid’s cap pistol was a weapon – race seems the only explanation. Jase touched on this kind of irrationality when he described the notorious crimes that had been committed on Locust Street, crimes that caused print and TV reporters to refer to Locust as ‘Street of Horror.’

  My first year in town, there’d been panic over a sniper who was taking pot-shots at supermarket shoppers wheeling grocery carts to their cars. Three people were killed in these attacks. The sniping started, the city went into panic mode, then three weeks later it suddenly stopped. To this day the case remains unsolved.

  Then there was the triple killing in upscale Danzig Heights – the result of a love triangle. And the tornado that seemed to come out of nowhere, swept through the rundown neighborhood called Gunktown, ripped the roofs off a row of houses, then dispersed over the lake as suddenly as it had arrived. Calista has some of the most elegant suburbs in the Midwest, yet large portions of the city are derelict, providing Jase with numerous places to explore for his Leavings series. And then came the summer fires. No wonder people (myself included) starting walking around in T-shirts inscribed with the hopeful slogan: Calista Strong.

  The fires started breaking out in late May, at least one major blaze per night. Some were ordinary: kids playing with matches, a stove left on, a bad electrical connection. But others were more serious and of mysterious origin – cats and dogs doused with gasoline and then set aflame, homeless people set on fire, fires breaking out in the upper floors of office buildings, a mosque burned to the ground, a synagogue burned, two upscale homes deliberately torched.

  These were signs that a crazy firebug was at work, or perhaps more than one. Firemen were on edge. I heard sirens every night as the fire trucks screamed their way to conflagrations. The city was on edge. Who was doing this? What was the purpose? Was he or she a serial arsonist? The worst fire of all, because the smoke was so toxic, was the chemical blaze on Watomi Lake – long the dump for putrid and, as it turned out, highly flammable run-offs from the Wheaton district industrial complex – that decimated an entire neighborhood of working-class homes built along the lake shore.

  I badly wanted this story. I felt it could be huge. Thanks to my fireman informant, Tony Delgado, I learned something that no other reporter on the Times-Dispatch seemed to know – that an ace arson specialist named Nick Gallagher had been brought in from the state capital to investigate the Calista summer fires.

  Early one morning I received a text from Tony: Meet same place 6 p.m. I texted back: CU there.

  I drove to the same far corner of the Haggerty Mall parking lot. Tony must have been watching for me, because he pulled up a few seconds later.

  He ran down his window. He looked excited. ‘Last night Gallagher’s peeps arrested a fireman,’ he said. ‘Guy name of Norm Hicks. They’re saying he’s firebug zero.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘He rigged out a drone to drop Molotov cocktails. The union got him a lawyer, but I’m hearing he’s the guy.’

  ‘Why call him “firebug zero”?’

  ‘When there’s a disease going around, like Ebola, “patient zero” is what they call the first one catches the infection.’

  ‘You’re telling me there’s contagion?’

  He nodded. ‘Firebug zero starts fires, then other people get infected by the bug. People jump on the bandwagon. Yeah, they got Hicks, but that’s far from the end of it.’

  ‘This is great info.’

  ‘Check it out. Anyone asks where you heard it, don’t mention my name. You and me – we never met.’

  ‘Never!’ I assured him.

  I told him I’d left a ton of messages on Gallagher’s voicemail, but he didn’t bother to return my calls.

  ‘Tell him you know about firebug zero. I bet he gets back to you then.’

  Before I could thank him, he closed his car window and took off. I waited five minutes, then took off myself.

  It made sense to check out Tony’s tip. I went back to the office and looked up Norm Hicks. I found a Norman J. Hicks at a West Side address. I drove over to the house. It was in a row of older homes in a well-kept middle-class neighborhood. The downstairs blinds were drawn but I saw light ribbons at the edges. I rang the doorbell. A fortyish woman with a sour face answered, peering at me from behind the screen door.

  ‘Who the hell are you?’

  I introduced myself as a reporter. I asked if Norm was home.

  ‘Senior or Junior?’

  ‘Not sure.’

  ‘Well, Junior got arrested. You already know that. That’s why you came around. As for Senior, he’s upstairs probably crying his eyes out.’

  ‘I’m sorry, ma’am. Didn’t mean to disturb you. I heard a rumor and had to check it out. What can you tell me? How old is Junior? Did he start the fires?’

  ‘I’ll tell you this, Missy – this is an honest house. My brother Norman – Norm’s dad – is a fireman. Our dad was, too. When Norman heard they nabbed Junior, he went into a funk. Doesn’t want to go into work. Canceled all his shifts. Junior’s twenty. I don’t know what he did or didn’t do. That’s all I gotta say.’

  She drilled her eyes into mine, then firmly shut the door.

  In some of the numerous messages I left for Gallagher I expressed my severe disappointment he never saw fit to call me back. In others I pleaded for him to do so. I t
old him that the public had a right to know what was going on, that an elite team was working hard on the fires. In one message I bluffed that the Times-Dispatch was prepared to conduct its own investigation and then we’d see which team cracked the case.

  I felt kind of dumb making such an empty threat, but Josh Tilly, my editor, told me to go ahead. Again no response.

  Soon as I got home from the Hicks house, I left Gallagher a new, more somber message: ‘I hear there’s been an arrest – firebug zero. I need to hear back from you, Nick. Otherwise, we’ll have to go with what we got.’

  The next morning I found his message on my office voicemail: ‘Hey, Joan, Nick Gallagher here. Sorry about the phone tag. Gimme a call back, will ya?’

  His voice was deep, authoritative, confident. I called back, and, to my astonishment, he immediately picked up.

  ‘Guess you think I’ve been avoiding you,’ he said.

  ‘Crossed my mind,’ I told him.

  ‘This is a highly confidential investigation. How’d you find out about FB-zero?’

  ‘An informant.’

  ‘I know better than to ask who.’

  ‘So don’t. What made you finally decide to get back to me? That I know about Hicks?’

  ‘That and because I admire persistence. My dad used to tell me: “Listen up, son – persistence is the secret to success.”’

  ‘Your dad sounds like my kind of guy. Are we going to meet?’

  ‘Yeah, on background only.’ He gave me the address. ‘Noon. No recordings. I’ll fill you in. If we get along, I’ll dole out more news to you from time to time.’

  ‘By that you mean you’ll deign to use me as your mouthpiece?’

  ‘How ’bout we use each other, Joan. Isn’t that how it’s supposed to work?’

  The address he gave was an old city building on West 4th, which, according to a plaque, was an out-of-use property belonging to the Calista Board of Education. There was a state-of-the-art security system installed just inside the outer door. I rang the buzzer. The responding voice was female.

  ‘Name?’ I told her. ‘Hold your ID up to the camera.’ I did. ‘Purpose?’

  ‘Appointment with Mr Gallagher.’

  ‘Second floor. Take the stairs. Meet you at the top.’

  The woman waiting for me was a grim-faced, brawny, kick-ass uniformed cop sporting a sidearm.

  ‘Follow me,’ she ordered, leading me down a corridor lined with unmarked frosted glass doors.

  She showed me into a room that contained nothing except a small bare table, two wooden school chairs and a large black mirror at one end.

  ‘Is this the interrogation room?’ I asked.

  She wasn’t amused. ‘Take a seat facing the mirror,’ she ordered. I figured the mirror was a pane of one-way glass.

  A couple of minutes later, Gallagher appeared – intelligent eyes, pencil-line mustache, curly graying hair. I figured him for early forties. My first thought was that he was movie-star-handsome because his mustache reminded me of Errol Flynn’s.

  ‘Finally we meet,’ he said, pulling up a chair beside me, then placing a device that looked like a TV remote on the table.

  ‘You’re a hard man to get to see.’

  ‘This is a tough town, Joan, and I’m working a tough case.’

  ‘Tell me about it?’

  He exhaled. ‘Most summers over the last several years there’ve been forty to fifty major fires here – most accidental, caused by gas explosions, kids messing around with matches, that sort of thing. Less than ten percent were labeled suspicious. So far this summer there’ve been one hundred twenty-four major blazes, about half of which we can attribute to arson. The thing about arson is that there can be lots of different motives. Some do it because they get off on it. They’re excited by flames and their power to create them. Then there’re highly motivated arsonists. They burn down a building to collect the insurance, or to destroy a competitor’s business or an enemy’s house. Regrettably, there’re also firefighter arsonists – men like Hicks who become firemen because they’re so fascinated by fires they end up setting them. When there’s an eruption of fires like we’re having here now, it’s usually a mix. Our job is to investigate each one, determine its origin and, if it’s suspicious, look into possible motives.’

  He picked up his device and clicked it, causing a large map of the city to appear on the black mirror at the end of the room.

  ‘As you can see, we’ve charted every major fire. You can also see there’re clusters, but no discernible geographic pattern. There’ve been big fires in nearly every neighborhood – commercial, industrial, residential. We believe many were set by people taking advantage of rumors that there’s a psychopathic arsonist at work. Say I want to collect insurance on my failing business. I pay a guy to burn it down and make it look like it was set by the psychopath. The more fires that break out, the more imitators emerge to take advantage. The forensics are difficult and the analysis is complex. I was brought in to supervise the effort to identify and arrest the one who started it all, the key arsonist, the one we call firebug zero.’

  ‘That’s Hicks.’

  He nodded. ‘So far he hasn’t confessed, but he will. Firebugs tend to be boastful.’

  ‘Hicks is a third-generation fireman.’

  He gave me a quick look. ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘Last night I interviewed his aunt.’

  Gallagher raised his eyebrows as if to signal he may have underestimated me.

  ‘I came here with eight of my best investigators. We set up here so there wouldn’t be any leaks. Because we suspected there was at least one uniformed firefighter involved, we had to work apart from CFD.’ He paused. ‘Is Hicks a psycho arsonist? We believe so, as there’ve been a number of fires set by his drone device. Those were the fires we were looking at most closely. As for the others, the ones set by copycats, we’ve gotten some tips. We’re watching some people. Are we close to making arrests? Not yet. The one thing I’d like you to get across to your readers is that every fire is being investigated to the max, and the ones that look to be motivated by insurance fraud or vindictiveness … those folks’d better watch out. We’re coming for them, and when we find them, they’ll be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.’

  I asked him how much of what he said I could use.

  ‘Everything except my name, where we’re located, the number of investigators, and that a firefighter arsonist started it. For obvious reasons, we want that kept quiet.’

  ‘I can’t not write about Hicks. I didn’t hear about him from you.’

  ‘Will you name him?’ I nodded. ‘I wish you’d wait.’

  ‘I can’t. Unless you let me interview him. In that case I’ll hold off a couple of days.’

  ‘Sorry, Joan – no can do. We’re still interviewing him ourselves.’

  By the set of our months, we acknowledged we were at an impasse.

  He studied me a while, then he squinted. ‘Here’s a tip to encourage you to hold off. Go over to the Wheaton district and take a look at the fire damage around Watomi Lake. If you see anything interesting, write about it. When we’re ready to go public with Hicks, I’ll give you advance notice. How’s that?’

  I told him I’d think about it if his tip paid off.

  ‘I’ll call you when I have more to say. And if you hear anything, call me.’ He smiled. ‘Now that we’ve met, I’ll make a point of returning your calls.’

  I called Josh Tilly, told him what I had, and that I was headed out to Wheaton. It took me nearly an hour to get there. Years before, most of the area had been set aside for heavy industry. It was regarded as the most heavily polluted part of town. ‘The Shit Hole’ was what they called it in our newsroom – a mix of factories, refineries and miscellaneous industrial works, surrounding a cluster of funky old workers’ houses along the edge of Watomi Lake. If the Locust Street area was in decay, the houses in Wheaton were decrepit even before the fire. It was an awful place to live due to the ch
emical stink that came off the lake.

  A huge fire had raged there in June, wiping out the lakeside community. It had started on the lake itself, when the chemical run off on the surface caught fire. If reporters called Locust Street ‘Street of Horror,’ they now called the Wheaton fire ‘The Fire on Shit Hole Lake.’ That a body of water, once sacred to native Americans, had spontaneously burst into flames became a national joke and a huge stain on the reputation of the city. But it hadn’t been funny to the people who were burned out. Several were killed and everyone in the torched community lost everything.

  As I drove around looking at the damage, I wondered what Gallagher expected me to see. The residential destruction had been well covered on TV news. I found that much of the debris from the fire had already been bulldozed into piles.

  What does he think I’ll find that’s so ‘interesting’?

  I circled the area a couple of times, then drove around the industrial sector. I asked myself what could have been the motive to create a toxic combustible slick on the surface of the lake and then set it afire. Perhaps, I thought, one of the companies wanted to expand into the residential area. In that case, it would be a lot quicker and cheaper to burn the houses down than to buy up each one, tear it down and then go through the laborious process of having the property re-zoned.

  So which bad-actor industrial company could have done such an awful heartless deed? As I drove around, I read the signs. One company, Cobb Industries, dominated the Wheaton sector. I was already aware of this, but it hadn’t previously registered with me in connection with the Watomi fire. Now I noticed that the burned-out residential neighborhood sat directly between two large Cobb paint factories. So … if they could get possession of that neighborhood and bribe their way through the permit process, they could build a new paint works and connect it to their existing complex at both ends.