“The Zoroastrians worshiped fire,” I offered into the silence. “Their good god was the creator of light and fire, and their bad god, whose name was Ahriman, was the creator of darkness. They saw the world as a series of twelve-thousand-year cycles of light and darkness, with first one god ascendant and then the other. They kept perpetual fires burning in their temples.”
“They still do,” said a very small, balding man in civilian clothes who was sitting next to the man with all the buttons. He gave us all a bland smoker’s smile, unsheathing crooked amber-colored teeth. “I’m Dr. Schultz,” he said to me. “Dr. as in psychologist.”
“Simeon Grist,” I said.
“I know who you are,” Dr. Schultz said, making the teeth go away. The crinkly smile lines around his eyes stayed put, as though he’d drawn them on with a pencil.
“Just being polite,” I said.
Dr. Schultz had forgotten me. “He’s an educated man,” he said, looking over his shoulder at the projection of the note. “No grammatical errors, no spelling mistakes, good sentence structure, he’s got some familiarity with ancient religions. He uses perhaps frequently. Most people would say maybe.” He subsided, pleased with himself.
“What my client would like to know,” said the lawyer to the room at large, tapping his briefcase for emphasis, “is what you’re going to do to capture this maniac.” He put his hand flat on the table again, and the gold ring made a clacking sound that put a large black period at the end of his sentence.
“We’re working on it,” the captain said shortly.
“With all due respect, Captain,” Annabelle Winston said, almost pleasantly, “I’m not sure you are. But maybe-or, rather, perhaps — that’s because we don’t know what it is that you’re doing.”
“We’re doing everything that can be done,” the captain said flatly. “What do you suggest we should do?”
Annabelle Winston thought for a second. “I’m not a policeman,” she said. “I don’t know what you should be doing. But I know what I’m going to do if you don’t make me happy. Tell them, Fred.”
“We offer a reward of a million dollars,” Fred the lawyer said. Large cop feet scuffled nervously beneath the table.
“After taxes,” Annabelle Winston said quietly.
“After taxes,” the lawyer parroted, although his eyebrows, skyrocketing toward his hairline, revealed that this was clearly a bulletin as far as he was concerned, “to any citizen who conclusively identifies this… this Incinerator.”
“My God, you’re turning it into the lottery,” the captain said. Nobody else said anything. Hammond pulled out a cigar.
“Please don’t light that,” Annabelle Winston said. “I can’t stand smoke.”
I stared at her. I’d seen her smoke. Hammond’s face turned the color of rare roast beef. Captain or no captain, it was clear whose meeting this was.
“We’re prepared to post the reward at a press conference at two this afternoon,” Fred the lawyer continued. “That will enable the television-news operations to scoop the Times, as I understand it.” Bobby Grant gave a nod of encouragement.
“It’s more their kind of story,” he said. “They’ll go to town with it. And then, of course, there’s the radio news stations.”
“Has this press conference been announced?” That was the captain.
“Not yet,” Bobby Grant said, “but I can have it on the city news wire in five minutes.”
“You’re interfering with a police investigation,” the captain said. His face was redder than Hammond’s.
“What investigation?” Annabelle Winston asked. “We don’t know what that means. Forgive me, gentlemen, but my father died last night, and so did Leo Quint — was that his name, Leo Quint? That makes a total of seven, and where are you? Seven human beings.”
“Ten,” Dr. Schultz said.
The silence that followed was broken by the lawyer unsnapping his briefcase and taking out a pad. He made a note in a lawyer’s tiny handwriting. When he was finished, he looked at Dr. Schultz.
“Ten?” he said.
“None of this goes out of this room,” the captain interposed.
“Listen,” Annabelle Winston said, leaning forward to put her elbows on the table. “It goes wherever we want it to go if we’re not satisfied with the course of action you propose.”
“Miss Winston,” the captain said with leaden geniality. He sounded as though he were talking to a little girl who’d just asked for a pony for Christmas. “Surely some information is privileged.”
“If the people the Incinerator is burning were privileged,” Annabelle Winston said acidly, “he’d be in jail by now. Let me make our position clear, Lieutenant.”
“Captain,” the captain said.
“It doesn’t make any difference to me if you’re a choir boy,” Annabelle Winston said without raising her voice. “Shut up and let me finish.” The lawyer tried to pat her wrist reassuringly, and she slapped his hand away. “Either you satisfy me, or we’re going to make a laughingstock out of the entire Los Angeles Police Department. You don’t think we can do it? I’m Baby Winston. I go to the bathroom and it’s news. I buy a hat in New York, and designers in Paris change their plans. I’ve fought that kind of attention since I was fifteen. Well, now I’m going to invite it. How would you like to see me on the cover of People? I can arrange it, or Bobby can.”
“‘Orphaned Heiress on the Hunt,’ something like that,” Bobby Grant said with relish. It would look good on his resume.
Annabelle Winston lifted the hand with the emerald, and Grant clamped his lips shut, further eloquence reduced to a bubble of air that pushed his mouth forward like a monkey’s. “The offer of a million dollars is on the square,” Annabelle said. “I could spend that on eye shadow and not miss it. I may only be a girl, Captain, but I’ve run a multimillion-dollar corporation on my own for three years. I went to Mr. Grist because I didn’t trust your abilities,” she said, looking at me while I tried to figure out how to slide under the table without being missed. “The fact is, gentlemen,” Annabelle Winston said, “as far as this case is concerned, you don’t know jack shit.”
I tried to think of something conciliatory to say as Dr. Schultz and one of the lieutenants both pulled out packs of cigarettes and then remembered the ban on smoking. The lieutenant put his pack back, while Dr. Schultz laid his on the table and drummed his nails on it.
“The deal,” the captain said grudgingly, trying to sound like someone with an option. “We might as well listen to the deal.”
“Give us all the information. Give us a full game plan. If I’m satisfied, Captain, I’ll be a good girl.” Annabelle Winston gave him a winning smile along with his proper rank. “Just persuade me that you’ve got an idea that will catch the Incinerator, and I’ll fade away. Catch him, you get all the credit. Don’t catch him, and I’ll fry you alive.”
She looked around the table. “Sorry about the metaphor,” she said. She didn’t sound sorry.
Nobody spoke. Then the captain looked at Dr. Schultz and nodded.
“Here’s what we know,” Schultz said smoothly. He directed the smile, crinkles and all, at Annabelle. “He started last year at about the same time, the beginning of the fire season. September twenty-sixth he burned a bum named Warren Fields. A transient, same as the others. October nineteenth we had another incident. Same modus operandi, same results. Two men this time. The victims died of third-degree burns. Then nothing. We hoped that the, um, Incinerator was one of the two, that maybe he’d made a mistake and doused himself with gasoline, too, and that the two of them had gone up in smoke, as it were, together.”
“Wishful thinking,” Annabelle Winston said, dropping the words onto the table like rocks.
She got a mournful gaze from Schultz in return. “Well, it seemed to be the case, because that was the end of it. Until this year.” Schultz gazed around the room, looking more defeated than he wanted to look. “Then it started again.” He regarded the note projected on the wall as though he hoped it held hidden clues.