Daphne knocked lightly on Garman’s door and entered.
Garman was ensconced in a large leather chair in an immaculately kept office. He was a big, handsome man with soft brown eyes and a bushy mustache, younger than she had expected. There was a picture of Einstein on the wall, and another of Picasso. These seemed out of place to Daphne; a blue-collar fireman up on his Impressionism? What were his tastes in poetry? she wondered. There was a color shot of the space shuttle Challenger at the moment of its explosion, the entrails of white fumes caught in a tight corkscrew spiral, shuttle debris frozen forever in a sky of blue. Daphne remembered exactly where she had been on that day. Garman caught Daphne staring.
“I worked on that one,” Garman explained. “The debris reconstruction.” Maintaining strict eye contact, he said, “Like working on a jigsaw puzzle with cranes.”
“You were Air Force?”
“Does it show?” he asked, coming out of his chair and introducing himself with a handshake.
Maybe it did show, she thought, as she looked more closely. Maybe it helped explain the hard handshake and the riveting grip of those eyes. She wanted to like him right away, which only fueled her suspicion of him.
“Aircraft carriers, land-based, or what?” she asked.
“Bases,” Garman answered, motioning Daphne into a chair.
The desktop held a couple of faded snapshots of Garman with a very young boy. Wheat fields. Blue sky and lots of it. Kansas? she wondered.
At the forefront of her thoughts were Emily Richland’s mention of a military man and Boldt’s information that the accelerant might be rocket fuel. Steven Garman, ex-Air Force, had to be considered carefully.
She said, “Sergeant Boldt wanted to thank you for not opening the most recent note.”
“Listen, I wish I could tell you why he’s sending this stuff to me. I really don’t want any part of it.”
“He?” Daphne asked. “What makes you think so?”
“A girl? No way, no how. I’ve been around fire most of my life, arson investigation for the past seven years, and I gotta tell you that in all that time I’ve never had a female suspect. Not once. Some women trying to be firefighters, sure, we’ve gone through that. Maybe a few teenage girls as accomplices to their boyfriends. But primary suspect? No, ma’am. This is a man lighting these fires. I’d bet my badge on it.” He added, “Are you on Boldt’s squad?”
“I’m part of the in-house task force,” she answered. She felt compelled to skirt the truth. Garman might freeze up if he discovered she was a psychologist.
He had bright red cheeks and either dark skin or a 200-watt tan.
“The last note read, Suddenly a flash of understanding, a spark that leaps across to the soul. Mean anything to you?”
“He’s one sick mother, you ask me. Sparks leaping? I don’t know. You can overanalyze this stuff, you know? It’s some shitbird’s way of playing heavy. It’s a power trip-send this stuff ahead of time. He’s a tease is what he is, but he’s a killer too.”
“It’s Plato.”
“Is that right? Plato? Probably got it off a box of cornflakes.”
“Can I ask you a couple of personal questions?” she said, feeling for the cassette tape recorder that ran in the pocket of her coat, counting on it for transcripts later.
“Shoot.”
“Did you know either Dorothy Enwright or Melissa Heifitz, personally or otherwise?”
“Certainly not,” he said defensively, his voice strained with tension. He looked at her quizzically, suddenly more curious.
“The reason I ask is because it might help explain the threats coming to you-someone who knows you’re connected with the women.”
Garman said brusquely, “Not connected. I never knew either of them, never had so much as heard their names. Listen, I don’t want these things. Have you guys checked with the other Marshal Fives, other firemen? Do we know for sure that I’m the only one getting them?”
“I haven’t heard otherwise.”
“Well, neither have I, but that doesn’t mean anything.”
“One of the things Sergeant Boldt has asked me to do is act as liaison. There’s the Arson Task Force investigation, and there’s the Homicide investigation,” she said, indicating one of her hands for each department. Weaving her fingers together, she said, “My job is to help marry the two, now that Bahan and Fidler are so actively involved. We don’t think the weekly meetings are enough, and Boldt is no fan of meetings to start with. He says everything gets talked about and nothing gets done.”
Garman allowed a grin. “I’d go along with that.”
“You’ve worked over two hundred arson investigations,” she informed him, without consulting any notes. She wanted him to know she had been researching his record, wanted to have her eyes on him to judge any reaction. She was disappointed by the slight blush to his neck. He averted his eyes in what to her was an act of modesty. She realized she had lumped all firemen into cocky macho types despite her efforts to avoid prejudging.
“Suspicious fires,” he corrected. “Some we call as arsons. Some not.”
“Twenty-two arrests, nine convictions,” she added.
“Listen, I don’t keep notches on my gun or anything. It’s a job. You quote those numbers, and it depresses me. We only clear fifteen percent of our cases. You guys, it’s what? Seventy or eighty, I think? Vehicle fires are the worst. Last year we lost forty-five thousand vehicles in this country to suspicious fires. Forty-five thousand! Can you believe that? And we wonder why our insurance costs so much! Maybe half my stuff is vehicles. Most of the rest, abandoned structures. Every now and then revenge or a vanity fire.
“First thing I did,” he continued, “when I connected the Enwright fire to that note, was go back through my files. That’s what Boldt asked about; that’s what you’re going to ask too, so I’ll save you the time. I can’t place a single one of those shitbirds in something like this. A couple are still locked up, a couple more moved on. And every one of them was an obvious pour. Gasoline. You don’t convict them on anything less. Every drop of gasoline has its own fingerprint, did you know that? Every batch that comes out of a refinery is a little bit different, chemically speaking. A guy does a pour; we pursue him as a suspect; we find a can of gas in his garage and, bingo! the lab gives us a match. At that point we convict. Anything short of that, they walk. And I’ll be damned if I can make any one of my convictions stick for this thing.”
“Your arrests?”
“Same thing.”
“But why are you receiving these notes?” she asked. Again, Garman’s neck went florid, but this time his soft eyes went cold and hard; he nervously rolled a pen between his fingers. It was not what she expected; she registered that look, not wanting to forget it.
“Marshal Five, I suppose. There are only a few of us. Could have mailed it to any one of us. I got lucky, I guess.”
“Enemies?” she asked. “Anything in your past that might-”
“No,” he interrupted. The pen began to spin again. She used it as a barometer.
“How about your Air Force serv-?”
“Listen!” he interrupted again. “What is it with all the questions about me? It’s this torch we’re after, okay?”
“He’s chosen you for some reason, Mr. Garman.”
“Steven,” he corrected.
“Do we chalk it up to coincidence? To chance? Let me tell you something about Lou Boldt, if you haven’t already heard it. The word coincidence isn’t in his lexicon. It doesn’t exist. He’s a fatalist: Everything happens for a reason; there’s an explanation for everything. These victims?” she asked rhetorically. “Chosen at random? Don’t suggest that to Lou Boldt. There’s a reason, no matter how obscure. And Boldt will find it, mark my words.” The pen stopped moving. “These notes coming to you?” she asked in the same tone. “To Boldt there’s a reason for that. No roll of the dice is going to explain it. And my job is to provide him with a believable explanation. There isn’t a hell of a lot to go on in this one. You are about all he has. Why Steven Garman? he keeps asking. He wants an answer-and let me tell you something else about Boldt: He gets to the truth.” The pen started spinning. “He gets the answers. You want to talk clearance rates? Boldt’s is in the nineties-and we’re talking over a fourteen-year career on Homicide. You want to talk amazing?” The red flush crept back into Garman’s neck, and Daphne knew she had a live one. Like every other living human being, the man had secrets.