Scorcher fc-2

by John Lutz

  “Get your mother, Nadine,” Kave told her. Then to Carver: “It would be best if you met the rest of the family now.”

  Nadine said, “Elana’s sleeping in her room.” One of those daughters who referred to her mother by first name.

  “Go get her,” Adam repeated. “Tell her Mr. Carver’s here.”

  Nadine glared at him, spun neatly on her sandaled heel, and left the room.

  “I’m afraid Nadine shows a streak of stubbornness now and then,” Kave said. “The rebelliousness of youth. She’ll settle down after she’s married next spring.”

  Carver wouldn’t have described her actions exactly as stubborn or rebellious, despite what was probably going on in her mind. But then he didn’t know Nadine. Certainly there was a flinty spark of defiance in her. As there must have been in Lizzie Borden.

  The intimidated yet high-spirited Nadine returned within a few minutes accompanied by a beautiful but faded blond woman in her sixties. Elana. Mrs. Kave. Paul and Nadine’s mother. Though age had robbed her of fluidity of motion, she still conveyed a gliding grace and elegance as she crossed the room and smiled. Adam Kave introduced her with possessive pride. She was wearing slippers and a long, pink and lacy robe that swished stylishly around her ankles as she walked, as if being worn by her was a privilege. Maybe the robe had something there.

  “I hope you can help Paul,” she said, as Carver gently shook her cool and bony hand. Up close, the frailty and a kind of resignation in her were obvious. There was also a precarious tension, a balance maintained with difficulty.

  Carver and Adam Kave sat down, Carver on the black sofa, and Kave on an uncomfortable-looking wooden chair with ornate iron legs. The women remained standing, as if both of them secretly longed to flee from the room and the presence of either Carver or Adam.

  “I’ll have to find Paul to help him,” Carver said to Elana.

  Her large but dimmed blue eyes took on a sad expression. Something tragic flared then died in them. “We’ve been given to understand the police probably won’t give Paul a reasonable chance to surrender if they find him before you do, Mr. Carver.”

  “That’s a fair statement,” Carver told her, “though the police would deny it.”

  “Detective McGregor doesn’t exactly deny it,” Adam said. “He confided to me that Paul wouldn’t have a prayer of survival if the law located him and he offered the slightest resistance.”

  “Would he resist?” Carver asked.

  “He’d resist,” Nadine said. Her voice vibrated as if she were the one who might be called upon to summon resistance and she were already geared up for it. This one was a fighter, all right.

  “Are you fond of your brother?” Carver asked.

  “Very.” She stared directly at him with her dark eyes, daring him to contradict her, to tell her Paul was no longer worthy of affection. Carver let the challenge slide.

  “Nadine is twenty-one,” Elana said, “only a year older than Paul.” She glanced at her husband. “Growing up together, they developed a truly remarkable closeness.”

  Carver wondered what exactly she meant by that. He decided to prod. “You think Paul’s guilty?” he asked Nadine.

  “No!” she snapped, and turned away, her sandal heel making a squeaking sound on the tile floor.

  “If Paul is guilty,” Elana said evenly, “he wasn’t responsible for what he did.”

  “You’re referring to his history of mental problems?”

  “Yes.” Elana wiped her hands on the laced robe as if they were dirty, holding her fingers stiff as she ran her palms down her hips. Carver again sensed something tightly wired in her. “Paul has long been under treatment for mild schizophrenia, Mr. Carver. Do you know anything about the affliction?”

  “Very little.”

  “Those suffering from it have a distorted sense of reality, and sometimes delusions of persecution. At times, in the advanced stages, they even hear voices, sometimes giving them destructive, bizarre instructions.”

  “Did Paul hear voices?”

  “Only his father’s,” Nadine said.

  Elana ignored her. Adam Kave worked his jaw muscles. He’d wear down his molars in no time like that.

  “Paul’s been in and out of therapy for years,” Elana went on. “Schizophrenia is still something of a medical mystery, though there’s a theory now that it’s a physical aberration in the brain, a chemical imbalance. The disease often appears in a victim in his or her teens, then gets progressively worse as the person grows older.”

  “Was Paul getting worse?”

  “No,” Adam said, “his medication seemed to be controlling the symptoms.”

  “Would you describe him as paranoid?” Carver asked, remembering what Desoto had told him about the cousin hurling change in a clerk’s face for no reason.

  “At times, mildly,” Nadine said. “But he never would have killed anyone.”

  “For God’s sake,” Adam said, “none of us is a psychiatrist! Let’s leave the diagnosis to Dr. Elsing.”

  “Dr. Elsing?”

  “The psychiatrist who treats Paul,” Elana said. “His office is in Fort Lauderdale. Paul had improved lately, though. He hasn’t seen Dr. Elsing in over six months.”

  “Before the murders and before he ran away,” Carver said, “did Paul say anything that might lead you to believe he was tilting toward violence?”

  “The police asked us that,” Adam said. “Paul’s behavior was better than it had been in years, actually. He’s had his minor skirmishes, but he’s never been really violent.”

  Until he set three people on fire. One of them my son. Carver felt his hate for Paul Kave grow to a revulsion he had difficulty hiding.

  “The past several years, he’d become enthused about scuba diving,” Adam continued. “And of course he liked to work in his lab in the carriage house.”

  “Lab? Carriage house?”

  “The garage, actually,” Adam said. “It has a room over it where the chauffeur used to live. We haven’t had live-in servants for years. Paul uses the place-used it-for his chemical lab.”

  “What did he do in his lab?”

  “Experiments,” Nadine said. “He’d gotten away from actual chemistry in the past several years. He was interested in oceanography, and he used his equipment to study sea life.”

  Carver thought about the deadly, flammable naphtha compound. He turned his mind away from a vision of fire and death, screams he couldn’t bring himself to imagine when awake yet couldn’t exorcise from his dreams. What he was doing here was worth it. He wanted Paul Kave! And Mc shy;Gregor was right; this was the way to get Paul.

  “Are there any other family members I haven’t met?” he asked.

  “Joel,” Nadine told him.

  “Not yet,” Elana said tightly. She was wiping her hands on the robe again, extending her wrinkled, lean fingers rigidly. Her brown-spotted arms and backs of her hands were the clues to her age. Still, she was innately lovely, as if it were her birthright. There were women like that, though Carver had only known a few. What had she been thirty years ago?

  “I’m not feeling quite right,” she said.

  Adam Kave was on his feet instantly. Time to tend to his treasure. “Why don’t you go to your room and lie down, Elana?”

  She nodded. Her face was suddenly very pale. Her pained, parting glance took in Carver. Without speaking, she turned and hurried out the door.

  “My wife’s ill,” Adam said. He said it in a way that discouraged any further inquiry by Carver. “In the past year she’s become more and more reclusive. And now Paul. .”

  Nadine slip-slapped to the window in her sandals, turned and padded close to Carver. Challenge time again. “And as you can gather,” she said, “my mother’s less than enthusiastic about me marrying Joel. Not that it will stop us.”

  Carver decided not to try to stop them either.

  “Joel Dewitt,” Adam explained. “He’s a car dealer in Fort Lauderdale who’s just asked Nadine to marry him
.” Kave didn’t seem to have any strong pro or con opinion about the upcoming nuptials. Maybe he was one of those wise ones who didn’t worry about what they couldn’t change.

  “Why doesn’t your mother like Dewitt?” Carver asked Nadine.

  “You’d have to ask her, but it wouldn’t do you any good. Elana has never come out with a direct answer to that question. Because she doesn’t have one.”

  “So there’s Dewitt,” Carver said, as if making mental notes. “Not yet a family member, but almost.”

  “And there’s Emmett,” Nadine said.

  “We don’t usually talk of Emmett in this house, Mr. Carver. He’s my older brother. I wish he weren’t. We haven’t gotten along for years.”

  “But Paul and Emmett got along,” Nadine said, “when Paul was younger. I don’t think they’ve seen each other for a while. Emmett lives in Kissimmee.” Kissimmee was a small town in central Florida, less than two hundred miles from the Fort Lauderdale area, but only a matter of a few hours or so on Florida’s Turnpike, where it seemed everyone drove over seventy.

  “Paul have any close friends he might contact?” Carver asked.

  “None, I’m afraid,” Adam said glumly. “The boy’s always played the loner.”

  “I’d like to see Paul’s lab,” Carver said, standing up out of the soft leather sofa and leaning on his cane.

  “I’ll go out to the lab with you,” Adam said, standing also. “There are some things I’d like to tell you privately.”

  He started for a door at the far end of the room, walking fast. Was he doing that deliberately?

  Carver limped after him, twisting his body to glance back and catch Nadine’s reaction to being shut out of the conversation.

  But Nadine was already striding from the room, her thighs and buttocks working powerfully beneath the silky white slacks.

  Carver followed Adam Kave out past a veranda and a large, screened swimming pool, along a path lined with junglelike foliage and the perfumed scent of blossoms, toward a garage the size of an average house.

  The rolling surf sighed louder as they made their way in the direction of the sea. A gull screamed and a private helicopter thrashed its way across the blue sky above the sun-touched ocean. In the shade of the palm fronds, Carver felt sheltered and temporarily at peace.

  He wondered what it would be like to grow up in a place like this. His own childhood had been lower middle class, with a father probably not much more sensitive to his youth and yearnings than Adam seemed to have been toward Paul’s. What had it been like here for Paul? It would help Carver to get a feel for that, to learn how to think like Paul-if such a thing was possible.

  “This is a rough time for us,” Adam Kave said in his gravelly voice. “I can’t tell you how much we appreciate your kindness and help, Mr. Carver. Are you a religious man?”

  “No, there’s too much of that in Florida.”

  “Well, I go to church regularly, and somehow God seems to supply what’s needed in crises like this.”

  Carver didn’t answer as he followed Kave along the winding stone path toward bright sunlight and blue sky and ocean.

  For an uneasy moment he felt like the serpent in the Garden of Eden. Putting another one over on Adam.

  Chapter 10

  A steep exterior flight of white steel stairs rose like a prehistoric, fleshless spinal column in a museum, to a landing and the top floor of the gray stucco carriage house. Carver could think of the carriage house only as a garage with a room over it. His plebeian background showing. The stucco was cracked and sloppily patched here and there, and grasping green vines had made it halfway up the wall beneath the stairs. He supposed whoever tended the grounds regarded the vines as ornamental; long nails had been driven into the stucco to aid the green tendrils on their upward quest. The nails were rusty, the higher ones waiting patiently for the vines to reach them before metal crumbled in the salt sea air.

  Adam Kave stood aside and let Carver take the steps first with the cane. Carver could feel the presence of Kave close behind him as he climbed, as if Adam were telling him he wished they could go faster. The hard walnut cane made hollow clanking sounds on the steel.

  On the landing, Adam edged around Carver, unlocked a heavy wooden door, and pushed it open. Heat and silence rolled out. Carver limped inside the lab.

  It was dim; only minimal light filtered in through curtains pulled closed over narrow windows. Dust swirled in diffused sunbeams. A fly droned through the dappled light. Carver expected the acrid scent of chemicals, but the air was stale and musty and smelled like attics everywhere. He remembered the heat and buzzing beneath the eaves of his father’s house, decades ago.

  He heard the click of a wall switch, and an overhead fluorescent fixture sent out intermittent signals of pale, flickering light, then fought its way to steadiness.

  Adam examined his hand as if the switch might have soiled his forefinger. “Paul wasn’t one to keep this place clean,” he said, “and he’d never let the maid from town come in here. It was his refuge from his problems, I suppose.”

  Partitioning walls had been removed so that the area above the garage was one large room. The floor was unfinished plank. The plumbing that had served bath and kitchenette was extended in copper pipe to the dry-walled ceiling and run to the east wall, then down to a long sink and workbench. Brown-tinted vials lined a shelf above the workbench. A crudely drawn skull-and-crossbones poison warning on lined notepaper was taped to the edge of the shelf. On the bench sat a Bunsen burner, an expensive and elaborate microscope, a series of glass beakers and slides, and an opened and apparently empty Pepsi can. There was a cot against the opposite wall, and near it a bentwood chair on which was piled diving equipment: swim fins, a snorkel, and what looked like the wadded top of a black rubber wetsuit. The only other evidence of Paul’s interest in the ocean was a large aquarium tank, empty, with colored pebbles and a miniature chambered castle on the bottom. There seemed to be dust over everything, as if no one had been in the place for a while, but that could be deceptive. An ancient air-conditioner was mounted in one of the windows. The sloping ceiling was insulated, but it was getting uncomfortable in the crude lab, and Carver felt like limping over and switching on the unit.

  “The police spent considerable time up here,” Adam said. “They removed a few items. I’m not sure what.”

  Carver nodded. He thumped across the floor with his cane and examined the chemical vials on the long shelf. He discerned nothing from the polysyllabic Latin labels. A brilliant teenage boy might have learned to concoct anything from explosives to aphrodisiacs with the stuff. “Did Paul spend a lot of time here?”

  “I don’t think he did in the past year or so,” Adam said, “though I couldn’t swear to it. He was increasingly fond of swimming, of the ocean and the creatures in it, and that took up most of his time. Now and then he’d come up here to closely examine something he’d found in the sea, but he wouldn’t spend days at a stretch here alone as he did when he was a boy.”

  “He ever share the things he found? I mean, talk about them with friends or family?”

  “No.”

  “Not even Nadine?”

  “Possibly Nadine.”

  Carver looked at the cot, with its light blanket and sheet folded at its foot. “Looks as if he slept up here sometimes.”

  “Maybe he did. I never kept that close a watch on his activities. Though Adam’s Inns has a national vice-president as well as district managers, I oversee my business from here, from an office in the house, Mr. Carver. I spend a great deal of time on the phone. If you accused me of neglecting Paul, I wouldn’t deny it. At the same time, the boy’s gone out of his way to cause quite a bit of trouble.”

  Adam was talking as if burning people were merely another of his son’s boyhood peccadilloes. And maybe he figured to use his influence so the resultant punishment turned out to be on a par with the consequences of wrecking one of the family Porsches. It was easy to forget, standing here in the st
ifling garage laboratory, the extent of Kave’s wealth and power. What was a little thing like homicide between friends with money and clout? Carver had seen it before; it made him nauseated. He felt that way now, standing there in the heat.

  “I’d like to see Paul’s room,” he said.

  “Sure.” Adam stepped aside again so Carver could cross to the door and negotiate the steel landing and stairs first.

  The outside air felt cool to Carver, though the temperature was pushing ninety. He heard the light switch click off as he balanced himself between cane and handrail and started down the steep steps.

  At the bottom of the stairs, he glanced in a window as he waited for Adam to finish locking up and join him. No Porsches. The garage had several windows, so there was enough light to see a late-model gray Cadillac, a low-slung red Datsun sports car, and a white Chevrolet sedan. There was plenty of room for more cars. Or a tea or a coming-out party.

  “The police impounded Paul’s Lincoln,” Adam said, clanging down the stairs on his two good legs and noticing Carver’s interest in the garage’s interior.

  “Yeah, I was told.” Carver probed with the tip of his cane until he found a hard spot in the sandy earth and moved away from the window.

  “Do you know Lieutenant McGregor well?”

  “We’re old friends,” Carver said, and walked ahead of Adam back along the winding stone path to the house. The sweet scent of the flowers was cloying and added to his nausea.

  Paul might not be the model of neatness in his lab, but his room looked like the executive suite of a plush hotel just before checkin time. The king-size bed was made up with the spread tucked in at the corners. Other than some oceanography magazines neatly fanned on a low table, there were no incidental objects on the dresser or writing desk. On the wall by the desk hung a large, framed, underwater color photo of what looked like a manta ray lurking among gracefully swaying, colorful undersea foliage while a school of small, bright fish swam past. There was something distinctly ominous about the enlarged print.