Four of a Kind Read online

  “The carpet fibers would act like wicks for the fuel. The whole thing would smolder for hours, making a lot of smoke, filling the whole house with it. It would kill the woman on the bed upstairs, but do it slowly.”

  He gaped, looked at the mask in his hands and then back up at me. “You’re serious.”

  “Completely. A rug that size saturated with fuel would have smoked for a long time, and never set the rest of the house on fire.”

  “But a fire did start,” he pointed out.

  “The rug was too close to the couch, or maybe it was the entertainment center. One of those started burning and it went on from there. But up until then the rug acted like an oil lamp, and she was upstairs chained to the bed, maybe for hours, maybe for a whole day. Did she show up for work yesterday?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Ask her employer, but if she didn’t I’d guess she was already sucking up smoke. It was a big house; it would have taken awhile.”

  Bobby wrote that down almost word for word.

  Another thought occurred to me. “Have you checked if she had an ex-boyfriend or ex-husband?”

  “No. Why?”

  “Because whoever killed her went to a lot of trouble to make sure she suffered while she died, and she took a long time doing it. That’s not something a stranger would do.”

  I watched as the Sheriff took notes rapidly, in a curiously flowing and artistic script.

  I was just spitballing here, murder investigations 101, and nothing that you couldn’t pick up from watching The Rockford Files reruns on television. Yet here he was writing it all down verbatim as if I was channeling Sherlock Holmes. The Chief had said that his criminology degree was from UNH. Did they even offer a degree in criminology? I didn’t know, but the fact that I was posing questions he didn’t seem to even know to ask was depressing the hell out of me.

  Five

  The woman on the television screen squinted slightly in the camera lights. She ran her tongue along her lower lip, pressed a manicured hand to her earpiece and then nodded at something she heard. Her heavily frosted and moussed hair never moved. She raised the microphone to her mouth. “I’m in Dunboro, New Hampshire where last night in the house behind me,” she paused and glanced momentarily over her shoulder down the driveway at the house, “police say a young woman lost her life in a fire they are calling suspicious at this time.” The bright wash of the lights just reached the structure revealing melted and soot-streaking vinyl siding, the glassless upstairs windows like eyeless sockets. She continued, “The victim has been identified as twenty-four year old Patricia Woods, a dental hygienist in Nashua who was originally from Vermont. She leaves behind her parents and a younger sister.”

  “Diane, are the police saying why they consider the fire suspicious?” The voice of the anchorman cut in from off camera.

  “No, but they do ask anyone who has any information to contact the Dunboro Police Department.” The phone number appeared at the bottom of the screen. “And we will continue to watch this story as it develops. I’m Diane Ridgely reporting for Channel Nine news.”

  The scene cut back to the newsroom where the anchorman shuffled some papers on the desktop in front of him and looked up at the camera, but before he could say anything the screen when dark.

  Valerie, my wife, put down the remote control. “Honey, don’t torture yourself over this. I’m sure you did everything you could.”

  “I’ve been hearing that a lot,” I replied, my eyes still drawn to the blank, glassy stare of the television.

  Standing next to me at the kitchen counter, she hugged me from the side, fitting her head into the curve of my neck. Her blonde hair tickled my cheek and smelled of jasmine.

  I put one hand on her waist, feeling the slick surface of the blue silk robe she wore. It was quite short and very sexy, but soon, as fall dwindled down and winter started to take hold, she would start wearing her yellow terrycloth one. She looked great in that one too; she looked great in everything, but it wasn’t the same.

  “Come to bed,” she murmured.

  “Soon,” I said.

  She took my chin in her hand and turned my head to kiss me on the lips. There was a lingering to it, a half promise that if I came upstairs quickly, before she fell asleep, there might be more to follow. She broke the kiss and headed up the stairs. Tonk, our English bulldog, scrambled to his feet and followed her, his nails clicking on the wood of the stairway treads.

  A part of myself, a very large part, wanted to follow her, but I instinctively knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep that night.

  After a big fire, a big car accident, a big anything, I’ve always found myself too wound up to get much sleep, and I suspect I’m not alone among firefighters in that regard. There’s too much adrenaline churning through the bloodstream, and it’s hard to get your brain to shut down as you replay every frame of the action that is often too fast to follow while you’re doing it. My typical solution has been to drag ass around the next day, try to get to sleep early the next night, and get myself back on track. As I was entering my second sleepless night since finding Patricia in that house, I had the feeling my traditional solution wasn’t going to cut it.

  My initial fear was that I would relive the incident in my dreams, distorted through a nightmare lens into endless, winding, smoke-filled corridors with the screams of the dying ringing in my ears. As I leaned against the kitchen counter looking at the blank television screen, I wondered if the nightmares or not sleeping at all and continually seeing her hands every time I closed my eyes was worse. I was beginning to think the latter.

  I breathed and closed my eyes (her hands!), repeatedly rolling my fingers into fists and then relaxing them. What I felt most of all, along with a sort of consuming anger at the brutality of the murder, was a type of restlessness, a feeling like I should be doing something. It was a feeling that wasn’t entirely unfamiliar.

  I knew early on in my life that I was different from my peers. The New Hampshire town I grew up in near the Canadian border, a place so small that to this day even Google can’t get a handle on it, was grooming my classmates to take their fathers’ places in the paper or lumber mills. It was a process that to me felt uncomfortably like lining cattle up in a chute for a long, particularly brain-deadening slaughter. I fled, a word I do not choose lightly, to Manhattan, where I embroiled myself in the most intellectually demanding major I could find – physics.

  I met my wife Valerie at Columbia University while I was in graduate school and she was an undergrad in need of tutoring. In a graduate physics department which was at that time completely male, the big draw in tutoring was the women. It certainly wasn’t the four dollars and forty cents an hour it paid, I’ll tell you that.

  The intensity of our relationship, the perfectness of our fit, left us both breathless. My graduate research into a new method to administer chemotherapy drugs using advanced fluid flow models looked like it was going to be a breakthrough. I was already filing patent disclosures and had visions of fat licensing fees eight weeks before I graduated, when we were married surrounded by friends and family.

  If I had to put a finger on the last time in my life that everything felt absolutely right, that would be it.

  Two weeks later, a grey and humorless guy in a very serious suit marched into my lab, dropped a two-hundred-page legal document in my lap and marched out. I’ve always marveled at the fact that someone had delivered the document by hand, like FedEx wasn’t good enough. I took the document over to a friend in pre-law who read it through and boiled it down for me. The government was seizing my technology and classifying all of the patents in the name of national security, but at least I turned out to be right about the licensing fees. Valerie took one look at the numbers and acted as though we had won the lottery, which in one sense we had, but almost a year later I realized what the government wanted the technology for, and in retrospect I felt naïve and stupid that it had taken so long.

  They were using my chemot
herapy technology to build bioweapons, off the books, unacknowledged, remarkably specific, and extraordinarily hard to detect. As easy as flipping a switch it would be possible to kill one particular man standing in a crowd of thousands, or ten particular men, or a specific half of the crowd. Or all of it while leaving the city around it untouched. Or the government could decide to go nuts and wipe out a given city, like the Roman soldiers of old burning crops and salting the Earth, and my research was at the root of it all. I could end up being responsible for killing more people than Josef Mengele.

  I was given my PhD without any thesis defense by a perplexed graduate committee who was told to do so by the President of the University, who himself had probably been told to do so by a grey and humorless guy in a very serious suit. But despite the PhD, physics was done for me, like if the inventor of the hypodermic needle had suddenly found out his invention was being used exclusively to give lethal injections.

  The government money gave us freedom. We traveled, bounced around the country, aimlessly and with a sort of unhinged pleasantness. When we decided to settle down Valerie wanted to return to Manhattan with its restaurants and theaters and museums, but I had small town living on my mind, where people actually knew your name and genuinely cared about you.

  I couldn’t go back to my hometown; I no longer had any connection to the people there, and it was so tiny it would have driven Valerie insane inside a week. Shades of Green Acres, we settled on Dunboro, which featured small town living within reach of Boston. Valerie built a circle of friends and discovered fulfillment in volunteer work, but I remained restless.

  I took continuing education classes in sushi making, blacksmithing, weather forecasting, maple syrup boiling, and woodworking. After erecting a workshop next to our house I started doing some furniture building and serious carpentry, joining local construction crews and rapidly becoming known as an exacting, hardworking, and reliable guy who was peculiarly adept at math. The wood felt good in my hands, the smell of sawdust sweet, a planned and measured joint that perfectly fit was a thing of beauty, but it didn’t fill some undefined need within me. I found the woodworking to be an enjoyable pastime but I didn’t want to be a woodworker.

  When I saw an article in the local paper that the Dunboro volunteer fire department was looking for new members, I joined, perhaps hoping that by helping people it would in some small way balance out the deaths my invention had caused, was quite probably still causing, on an almost daily basis. Yet my restlessness, accompanied by the feeling that I needed to atone, continued to nag at me.

  Alone in the kitchen with the television dark in front of me, I relived the fire in my mind, the heavy smoke, the press of heat around me. I remembered trying to lift the woman from the bed, felt the muscles of my shoulders bunch at the memory of the way she had bowed backwards, a small adrenaline spike to my heart when I recalled discovering the handcuffs on her wrists.

  Our Sheriff was a good old boy, his election engineered by his parents and his retiring uncle. That was what John had told me. The other firefighters thought Dawkins was a joke, and I valued their opinions; they knew him far better than I did. I had caught a glimpse of his investigative capabilities during my interview, and saw nothing there to inspire confidence.

  If left in his hands, her murderer would never be caught. Even the slightest possibility of that happening was unacceptable to me.

  I retrieved a pad of paper and a ballpoint pen, and then sat down on one of the stools with the blank page in front of me for some time. I ran a finger along the depressed lettering stamped into the barrel of the pen. Reliable Towing Service. I cleared my mind.

  At one point when I was a kid I had become obsessed with how memory worked. How did people remember things? What formed the interrelations between stored memories? Like your body, was it possible to improve your memory through exercise?

  I tried an experiment on myself, staring at a random page in the Concord phone book for one minute, and then seeing how much of the page I could recreate from memory. After just a few tries, I found I could memorize the entire page, and so shortened the time to forty-five seconds, then thirty, then fifteen. I envisioned the process as taking a photograph of the page, and then just looking at it later with my mind’s eye.

  I found it fascinating, because on the one hand it became almost automatic. Show me a page and without even trying I would remember it. And it didn’t matter what was on the page; numbers, a page of text, a crossword puzzle. Yet fifteen seconds was the absolute fastest I could ever manage to memorize the whole page no matter how much I practiced or what tricks I tried.

  Once the nib of the pen touched the paper I wrote in a flurry, without pause, line after line spooling out of my memory. Two minutes later I was done and I looked at what I had written.

  In the three seconds it had taken the Sheriff to pull the pad from the bottom of the stack of papers on his lap and cover the top page I had memorized a little less than a quarter of it. It was from a cell phone bill with the name Patricia Woods across the top. She had made three phone calls the evening of her death, and now I had those numbers.

  Six

  The miracle of the internet yielded all the information I could have wanted to know about the phone numbers.

  The first call, at just a few minutes after five o’clock, probably just after she had walked through the door from work, was to Ruth Woods, who at forty-nine years of age was married to Arnold, fifty-two, and lived in Rutland, Vermont. She had two children: Rachael, twenty, and Patricia, twenty-four. How long would it take for the internet to catch up and list her as deceased?

  The second call took place just after she got off the phone with her mother, and went to a phone registered to a Michael Carston of Amherst, New Hampshire. He was thirty-three years old and married to Samantha, thirty, with two daughters, Mary, ten and Alice, eight.

  Out of curiosity I looked myself up, and found that indeed I was thirty-seven years old and living with my wife Valerie in Dunboro, New Hampshire. She would probably be unhappy to learn her age was listed as well. Furthermore I found my Masters thesis online, the notice of my graduation with a PhD, and a picture of my own wedding. I wondered, not without a little hostility, when we as a society had decided it was perfectly alright to have our privacy violated by companies who bought and sold our personal information like they were stock prices or sports scores.

  Patricia’s last phone call of her life had been to Antonio’s Pizza in Milford.

  I ran it through in my head: she got home from work, she called her mom, she called some guy, and she ordered a pizza. I recalled the neat pile of her clothes in the bathroom. Maybe after dinner she had gotten in the shower and the killer had caught her there. Michael Carston was probably the last person to talk to her, discounting for the time being the pizza guy who had taken her order. I wondered if Michael Carston was perhaps a coworker, but another search told me he worked for an investment firm in Bedford, New Hampshire.

  So, not a coworker.

  My mind made a colossally ludicrous leap of illogic and whispered ‘her murderer?’

  I closed down my computer and checked that I had my keys as I went outside. The night was clear and the temperature was creeping downwards. My breath plumed in front of my face.

  I started my pickup truck, a maroon F-150, and pulled out, telling myself that I was just going to cruise around a little and let my thoughts percolate, but then wasn’t the least bit surprised when I glided past Patricia’s house. I made a U-turn at the end of the block and cruised by it again, then one more time for good measure. The next house down the road on the right had a ‘For Rent’ sign by the curb and long weeds in the gap between the wheel ruts of the driveway. I shut off my lights and turned in, parking at the very end in front of the empty house with the nose of the truck pointed out in case I had to make a quick getaway. The driveway was so long that I was invisible from the road.

  I was on the edge here, about to do something incredibly stupid, all because
I thought that the Sheriff couldn’t do his job. My veins felt filled with ice and my heart trip hammered in my chest. I opened the truck door, the dome light went on and startled me, and I quickly closed it again. I reached up and flipped the switch so it wouldn’t come on, and then reopened the door.

  I sat there unmoving, late season mosquitoes finding their way in to buzz and whine around my head. Crickets sang loudly from the nearby woods.

  There are decisions in your life you make which you can’t take back, and I knew that this was likely one of them.

  I put on a pair of rubber gloves from the box I keep in the truck for handling patients at accident scenes, removed a flashlight from the center console, and got out, closing the door softly behind me. I made my way carefully back to the road without using the flashlight, then up the driveway of Patricia’s place. The builder had cleared the trees back from the house for fifty feet in all directions, the waning quarter moon bathing the lawn in pale light but leaving the surrounding woods impenetrable and black. In the gloom the glassless windows looked more like eyeless sockets than ever.

  Police tape stretched across the posts of the front porch and a notice stapled to one of them warned trespassers to stay out, that the property had been sealed by the Dunboro Police Department and the New Hampshire Arson Investigations Division. Technically the Arson Division is an offshoot of the fire service of which I was a member, which meant absolutely nothing – I had no right to go back into the house at all and I knew it.

  I ducked under the police tape, climbed up the porch stairs, and opened the front door, the lock still broken from the night of the fire. The interior of the house, the walls now darkened with soot, was near pitch black inside. I pushed the door closed behind me and thumbed on the flashlight, illuminating the burned and broken sheetrock walls, the insulation that spilled from the stud spaces firefighters had broken out chasing after the fire. I climbed the stairs, experiencing a strange dislocation as I did so, seeing the stairway and upstairs hallway as it was today in the meager beam of my flashlight, but at the same time reliving crawling through it on my knees, my face pressed to the carpet, the heat of the fire surrounding me. With the cold fall air coming in through the broken front windows it was probably forty degrees in the house and I wore no jacket. Nonetheless I was sweating profusely.