KISS THE WITCH (7 page)

“
All right then. Why don’t
you tell Spinelli that? Tell him how you want to have sex with his
fiancée.”

“
I’m not going to tell him
that.”

“
That’s right, and neither
will you tell him what I said. In fact, as far as I’m concerned,
this conversation never happened. You hear?”

He gathered the lines on his forehead and
narrowed his sights to a distant point on the road ahead. As we
made our approach down Howard Snow’s street, he said, “Dominic and
Ursula haven’t done it yet?”

I pointed to a parking spot outside the
cordoned off fire zone half a block from the house. “This will
work,” I said. “And no, they have not done it yet.”

“
Why not?”

“
I don’t know. I guess
because Ursula is not that kind of girl.”

“
Ha.” He threw the car
into park and shut the motor off. “Or Dominic’s not that kind of
guy.”

“
Maybe. I know he’s
nervous about it.”

“
`Bout his wedding
night?”

“
Yup.”

“
You think we should get
him a hooker, you know so he can practice?”

“
Carlos….”

“
I’ll pay.”

“
Absolutely not. Besides,
that’s illegal.”

“
What if she doesn’t
charge us?”

“
Oh? You have some
frequent flyer miles you need to cash in?”

He smiled at that. I’m not sure why, but I
knew I didn’t want to know.

We exited the vehicle and made our way to a
group of firefighters standing by a red sedan with NCFD markings
stenciled on the door. I recognized Larry Scorch (real name, I
know) standing among them. Larry is New Castle’s Fire Marshal now,
but I knew him when he was still green, a coyote up from the
Carolinas, skinny as a matchstick and unpredictable as wildfire. He
and the old Tony Marcella were good friends, back when I was still
in uniform. Larry would come by the precinct in the old fire truck
and pick me up for a ride out to Fenway to take in a Sox game. It
was a good racket while it lasted, which was not long. It ended the
day Sally’s Nail Salon burned to the ground because new Castle’s
only fire truck was dispatched elsewhere and unable to respond to
the call. Our respective departments busted us both down a pay
grade.

A year after the salon fire, Larry married
Sally. That settled him down some. They had a couple of kids and
she opened a new salon, which still stands today. The last time I
talked to Larry was at my retirement–slash–going away party. He
told me to call sometime. I promised I would, like I promised
everyone I would.

I never did.

“
Larry.” said Carlos, his
hand outstretched as we approached. The loose huddle of men broke,
leaving Larry open to receive us.

“
Rodriquez,” he said. They
shook. “Long time no see. What’s up?”

“
Not a lot. Hey, do you
know Tony’s kid? He’s a detective like his dad. Tony?” he presented
me with a sweep of his hand. “Larry Scorch.”

“
Marcella’s boy,
huh?”

“
Pleased to meet you,” I
said.

“
I don’t believe it.” He
grasped my hand and squeezed it tightly. “Tony’s kid.”

“
Yes sir.”

He shook his head, displaying a skepticism I
have come to know well in reacquainting with old acquaintances. “I
didn’t know Tony had a kid.”

“
Don’t think Tony knew,
either,” said Carlos, and the two laughed. “But here he
is.”

“
Yes, here he is,” said
Larry. I saw a familiar smile inch across his face. “You know, you
do look like your old man.”

He peered into my eyes the way Lilith does
sometimes when she knows I am lying. I get that often now when
introduced to someone I already know well. That is, someone the old
Tony knows well. People like Officer Brittany Olson, now Corporal,
who took one look at me upon my initial return and saw right
through me, made me think Lilith and Ursula were not the only
witches in my life. And Jack Cruz, New Castle’s medical examiner.
He did it, too. I actually got the chills when Jack looked into my
eyes. With a simple blink, he saw down into my soul and then gave a
nod and a wink for me to carry on, as if never missing a beat. I
remember he told me to have Tony senior call him. I told him I
would, but we both knew that would never happen.

And now here was Larry Scorch doing the same
thing, digging deep into my soul, peeling back the façade of an old
man hiding behind a young man’s eyes. He said to Carlos. “Yes sir,
he does look just like Tony did forty years ago.”

“
It’s uncanny,” Carlos
remarked. “I tell him that all the time. I say, Tony, you look
exactly like your old man. Don’t I say that, Tony?”

I smiled politely, wanting so badly to move
things along. “You do,” I said, and I pressed my finger to my
watch. “But you know we have to hurry. We have that thing to
do.”

“
Thing?”

“
Yes.” I stitched my lips
tightly and drew a bead down on him that should have hurt
him.

“
Of course. Yes. We have
that thing back at the ahm….” He looked at Larry and gestured over
his shoulder. “Back at the office.”

“
That’s right,” I said.
“So, if you don’t mind, can you tell us what happened
here?”

Larry backed away a measured step, taking a
deep breath and pulling on his suspenders to hike up his pants. He
gave a nod toward the smoldering rubble that was once Snow’s house.
“It’s early,” he said, “but preliminary reports suggest a gas main
rupture.” He sampled the air with a sniff like a bloodhound
catching scent of something on the wind. “Smell it?”

I didn’t smell it.

“
I smell it,” said
Carlos.

He didn’t smell it, either.

“
Anyone hurt?” I asked.
“The home owner?”

Larry turned to the crowd of onlookers
gathered on the safe side of the yellow perimeter tape strung
across the street. He pointed out a young woman in a tan sweat suit
and running shoes. “That one there. The hot jogger with the tits.
She told us she saw the owner about an hour ago come out to get his
paper.”

“
He went back in, did
he?”

“
He did.”

“
And he hasn’t come out
again?”

“
Not in one
piece.”

I pointed at the vehicle in the driveway.
The windows were shattered from the explosion, but it sat far
enough from the house to have survived the worst of the blast. “It
that his car?”

“
According to your boys,
it is.”

I said to Carlos, “Let’s tow it in.”

“
You got it,
Tony.”

“
Larry,” I said, “Will
you–” He interrupted me with a disapproving glare. “I mean Chief
Scorch; will you keep us apprised of further developments? That is,
if you find a victim inside or anything suspicious?”

He gave Carlos a classic sour puss. “He’s
just like his old man, isn’t he?”

Carlos feathered a shrug to make it look
ambiguous. “He is,” he said. “I think they partnered him with me
because no one else would have him.”

“
What?” I fell back and
gave them both an eye-full of eat me. “Who partnered with
whom?”

Larry reached out and gave Carlos a
good-old-boy pat on the shoulder. “Look, I got to go, but listen.
Keep your eye on this one.” He nodded conspicuously at me. “It’s
not too late to turn him around.”

“
I’m on it,” said
Carlos.

And like that, Larry Scorch was gone, not
even so much as a goodbye to me. I remembered then what an ass he
was when we were both still just a couple of punks rookies with a
fire truck and a gun. Two more pitiful examples of
over-compensating the phallic effect, I could not imagine.

Back in the car, I asked Carlos to call
Spinelli and have him meet us at the Perc for lunch. I felt like I
owed Spinelli that much after getting him upset about the upcoming
cleansing ritual thing. Besides, I think we do our best work when
we all sit down together and discuss things openly.

At the Perc, I waited until we placed our
orders and the beverages came before putting my thoughts out
there.

“
This is looking like much
more than a simple case of robbery,” I said. “What do you two
think?”

Spinelli said, “I agree. It smacks of
corporate espionage, conspiracy and cover-up.”

“
Not to mention murder,”
said Carlos. “I don’t know about you, but with Howard Snow getting
blown up this morning, that makes six dead people from one company
in three weeks. I don’t believe that’s a coincidence.”

“
All right then, so let us
pull together the big picture. Three people from Biocrynetix
Laboratories die in bizarre accidents in the three weeks leading up
to the break-in and robbery of a carefully guarded facility, in
which the item stolen is so secretive, the CEO doesn’t want the
crime reported to the press.”

“
Right.” Spinelli said,
stacking three sugar packets on the tablecloth to one side of his
drink, and another three behind it. “Then the second three
employees die in equally bizarre accidents right after the robbery.
If I have to go by gut instincts alone, I would say that all six
were somehow involved in the robbery.”

“
How do you
figure?”

He pointed to the first three sugar packets.
“These three all worked outside the research labs at what I call
logistical vantage points.” He peeled the first packet from the
pile. “This one, we’ll call Jake Gerardi, the guy that drowned in
his swimming pool, he worked security. He could have made gate keys
for anyone, shared pass codes and issued ID badges to any number of
perpetrators. Once he did all that, he was no longer needed.”

“
Wow,” said Carlos. “How
did you know that?”

Spinelli came back a bit wounded for the
question. “What do you mean? Do you think I just sit around waiting
for you to call me when you two are out in the field? I do
things–lots of things.”

“
I know you do.” I said.
“Carlos knows, too. Don’t you, Carlos?”

“
Sure, I know you don’t
just sit around. You do stuff. I was just saying.”

“
Go on, Dominic. What else
you got.”

I watch his face wrinkle in an unflattering
way, perhaps not wanting to let it go at that. I suspected he was
still uneasy about my thing with Lilith and Ursula, and if I
thought I could take him along with me, I would. But that would
mean I would also have to take Carlos, and that was just not going
to happen.

Dominic removed the second of the front
three sugar packs and placed it to the side.

“
Melvin Brookfield, the
poor slob that broke his neck on the escalator; he was a paper
pusher. With his access to certain records, invoices, status
reports, etcetera, he could not only put a dollar value to the
project’s worth, but also anticipate the final run up to the first
production. With that knowledge, he could initiate a strike before
any real volume of the product was produced, alleviating the need
to carry it off with the rest of the secrets.”

Carlos and I exchanged tantalizing glances.
The scenario Spinelli laid out seemed impeccably placed. “So you’re
saying these first three were used like, what, reconnaissance for
the actual heist?”

“
In a way, yes. Expendable
though they were.”

“
And McSweeney? What was
her unfortunate raison d'être?”

“
Other than her need for
greed? Miss McSweeney’s only asset to the robbers may have been
what made her a liability to them, as well. She was J.P. Ferguson’s
secretary. She could not only advised the robbers when Ferguson was
out of town on business, but also make sure that those business
flights got booked on times and days of the robber’s
choosing.”

“
That’s interesting,” I
said, as I pulled Ferguson’s plane tickets from my pocket to show
the two. “Ferguson was just saying this morning how unusual it was
for his secretary to book him on a red eye.”

Spinelli said, “Can I see that?” I gave it
to him. He studied it briefly before slipping it into his pocket.
“You know, maybe it’s no coincidence she wanted him out of town
last night.”

“
Hmm, maybe. So, let us
assume this conspiracy theory is a go for the moment. You have
expendable pre-robbery participants: Gerardi, Brookfield and
McSweeney. Tell me about the other three.”

“
The brains behind the
whole thing,” said Spinelli. “First, you have Williams, the
executive program coordinator. He is on top of everything below
Ferguson. He knows when the big things are happening, when testing
takes place, the results of those tests, perhaps more importantly
the failures of those tests. He’s the man to go to when the
operation hits T-minus now and go.”

“
I thought that was
Brookfield’s job,” said Carlos. “He was the one reading all the
reports and could initiate the plan.”

“
Yes, but he was just one
cog in the wheel.”

“
Seems like a useless cog
if you already have Williams.”

“
Let’s hear him out,” I
said. “Go on, Dominic.”

He fingered the sugar packet representing
Williams and pushed it aside. “Keep in mind, there is plenty of
room for interpretation. It’s possible that any one or all of these
people were not in on the heist, but murdered for what they knew or
found out.”