“A clever killer,” Quinn amended.
Hertz snorted. “That, too.”
Something shifted above them, making a loud groan.
“Let’s get out of here,” Fedderman said. “Before the place falls on us.”
No one argued with him.
Back across the street from the burned-out building, the three men removed their helmets and smoothed back sweat-drenched hair.
“You need a shower after each of these inspections?” Quinn asked.
Hertz laughed and emitted his peculiar snort. “That’d be nice. ’Specially for my wife.” He looked from Fedderman to Quinn. “So, what’s next for you guys?”
“We’re going to interview the super,” Quinn said. “We’ll copy you.”
“Vice versa,” Hertz said. “Supers know everything in these buildings. See if he’s missing any alarm clocks.”
He was smiling again, obviously enjoying his work. Quinn liked him for that.
“His wife, Anna, is not to be taken lightly, either,” Hertz said. “She’s the beauty and the brains.”
10
Quinn and Fedderman found out from Hertz that Emilio and his wife Anna were staying temporarily in an apartment that was owned by the proprietor of Off the Road.
They were both home and both looked nervous when Emilio opened the door and invited them in.
“More questions,” Emilio said. He was a short, mustachioed man and seemed more tired than annoyed. “I’ve already told my story more than once to the police.”
“We’re fussbudgets,” Fedderman said.
Anna, a handsome Latin woman with a profile that belonged on a coin, smiled wearily and motioned for them to sit down. Quinn and Fedderman sat in uncomfortable modern wooden chairs of the sort that rigid religions might use to guarantee discomfort during sermons. Anna offered them water.
“We could have used more of that last night,” Quinn said.
“Yes,” Emilio said. “We found that out too late.” He and his wife sat down side by side on a sagging, stained sofa. It looked as if it would open and become a backbreaking bed. Anna absently reached over and patted Emilio’s thigh. Quinn saw that these two were actually in love. And the arson investigator wasn’t wrong about her being beautiful. Emilio wasn’t going to do any better.
“We read your statement,” Quinn said. “You saw someone who might have been the arsonist emerging from a basement window.”
Emilio said simply, “Yes,” as if testifying in court and a stenographer needed brief words from him rather than images.
Fedderman said, “Would you say he was trying to get away from the scene, or attempting to escape the flames?”
Emilio thought. Shrugged. “It could have been either. The whole thing didn’t last that long. He squeezed out of the window, then took off running and disappeared in all the smoke.”
“I only caught a slight glimpse of him, if I saw him at all,” Anna said. “The smoke, the smell, it played with the senses.”
Quinn smiled, wishing she was as helpful as she was beautiful. He focused his attention on Emilio. “Can you give us a description of the man?”
“I would be repeating it once again.”
“Yes,” Quinn said.
Emilio sighed. “Small man, dressed in black and wearing a blue baseball cap pulled down low. Moved in a very nimble way. One of his ears—his right one, I think—stuck straight out and came to a point at the top. Like he was a . . .”
“Gremlin,” Anna said.
“I thought you were going to say leprechaun,” Fedderman said.
Anna looked puzzled. Shrugged. “I don’t know leprechaun. I know gremlin. They tinker. Break.”
“You’d have to be Irish,” Quinn said. “What about his other ear?” he asked Emilio.
“I’m not sure. The cap was too large for him, and it might have covered his right ear, held it flat against his head. Hard to say. He moved very fast, like a mirage.”
“But you did see him?”
“My husband doesn’t see mirages,” Anna said.
That seemed definite and final.
Quinn smiled. “Don’t worry. That’s not what we think. The fire was started by someone who wasn’t a mirage, but was very real, using an alarm clock as a timer to set off an incendiary bomb.”
“Terrorism?” Anna asked, her dark eyes wide.
“We don’t think so. No terrorist group is taking credit, and this wasn’t a very skilled bomb maker.”
“But the bomb worked,” Emilio said.
“That’s a good point,” Fedderman told him. “But everyone who should know sees this as simple arson, committed by someone clever, but not very knowledgeable about bombs.”
“And you can’t put a policeman in every building,” Anna said.
Fedderman said, “Another good point.”
“The neighborhood gossip, who usually starts and ends nowhere, is speaking of him as a firebug,” Emilio said.
“That might be part of it,” Quinn said. “But it’s more than that. He seems compelled to look inside things, see how they work. Know anyone like that?”
“A lot of people,” Emilio said. “But not arsonists.”
“There is the off chance that they’re not the same person,” Quinn said.
“Not much chance of that,” Fedderman said.
“‘The Gremlin,’ some newscasters are calling him,” Anna said. “A kind of ghost in the machine, causing trouble.”
She apparently believed the single-killer-arsonist theory.
“Gremlins have been known to tinker with electronics or engines and bring down airplanes,” Fedderman said.
Quinn looked at him. “Who told you that? The FAA?”
“Harold.”
Of course.
“Those media people who tagged the killer the Gremlin,” Quinn said. “Was one of those mouthy newscasters Minnie Miner?”
Anna said, “How did you know?”
Quinn wasn’t telling.
Minnie Miner had cooperated, and the rapacious little newshound would surely want something in return.
But right now Quinn was trying to keep a lid on things, and gremlin was a kinder word than terrorist.
“‘Gremlin,’” he said. “Very descriptive.”
“We wouldn’t want it to become a household word,” Fedderman said.
“We wouldn’t,” Quinn said, “but the killer might.”
11
“About half an hour before the fire in the Village,” Renz said, “there was a similar fire uptown.”
It was the next morning, and he and Quinn were in World Famous Diner on Amsterdam, having coffee and doughnuts. Renz had a large red napkin tucked under his chin so as not to get powdered sugar on his Ralph Lauren tie, tan silk suit jacket, or white shirt. Quinn could see the tiny roughness of sugar on the part of the shirt that showed, like lumps of something under a recent snowfall. Probably all the sugar would drop onto Renz’s pants when he stood up.
“Coincidence?” he asked Renz.
Renz shook his head, causing sugar to drop from his napkin to somewhere beneath table level. “Diversion. Same arsonist.”
“How do we know that?”
“The fire was in a dry cleaners only a few blocks from a firehouse. It didn’t get a chance to burn very long before the FDNY arrived in full force and extinguished the flames.”
“Start with an incendiary device?” Quinn asked.
“Yesh,” Renz said around a mouthful of chocolate-iced doughnut. “Alsho an alarm clock timer. The firebug didn’t splash a lot of flammable liquid—probably plain old gasoline—around the place. Enough, though, that the blackened clock didn’t yield any prints or anything else. It was the same kind of job as down in the Village, only on a smaller scale. Like a warm-up as well as a diversion that would rob the larger conflagration of firefighters and equipment.”
“Any casualties?”