“Some bad blood between Cancerno and Corbett, that’s for sure,” he said. “And until this morning we didn’t have a logical motive for last night’s fires. But understanding there’s conflict between Cancerno and Corbett, it might fit. Why’s Corbett care if half the police department rolls out to look at those fires? They’re just going to focus on Cancerno. Be a hard sell for someone like Cancerno to convince investigators he had nothing to do with it, you know? A guy like that is an ideal smoke screen for Corbett.”
“And what does it gain for Corbett?” I said.
“Gives him a way to come at Cancerno. Because it seems the man is awfully scared of Cancerno. He’s hiding, afraid to use his credit cards, afraid to go home. Cancerno didn’t hide how bad he wants to find the guy—basically offered to kill him if you do the finding. So maybe Corbett’s returning fire. Making a preemptive strike, rather.”
We were walking east down the sidewalk, Joe moving fast and purposefully. I realized I had no idea where he was going. It certainly wasn’t in the direction of the office.
“You weren’t so sure the van’s intended stop was the same as ours?” I said.
“Don’t like being a passenger. Besides, we got places to go.”
“Yeah?”
“You catch what Cancerno said when he got to explaining why he’s so sure Corbett burned those houses?”
“That he had access to all of them.”
“Uh-huh.”
We reached an intersection but caught the light right, walked across the street without a pause.
“Well,” Joe said, “suppose you were hiding from some people. Suppose you were so scared you wouldn’t use your credit cards or bank accounts or seek help from friends. Where would you go?”
I turned to face him, slowed my pace. “You’re thinking the houses?”
He shook his head. “No. There’s work being done on them, people from Cancerno’s crew going in and out, neighbors watching. And, hell, most of them burned down last night, probably at Corbett’s hand. Think beyond that.”
“The school.”
He nodded. “Huge old building, sitting empty. Locked up, but Corbett’s got the keys. No work scheduled to begin on it for months yet.”
“That’s where we’re going?”
He shook his head. “No. First we’re going to find a convenience store. I think we’ll need a flashlight.”
The ground-floor windows were securely boarded up, the doors fastened with heavy steel chains and new padlocks. Entry into the building wasn’t going to be easy for someone without a key. And while Corbett might have had one, we did not.
Joseph A. Marsh Junior High had once been a gorgeous building—three floors of brick walls with limestone inlay around the doors and windows on the outside; on the inside, oak woodwork and tile floors built with a skilled craftsman’s greatest care. Everything in the blocks around the building had been knocked down and rebuilt at least twice in the lifetime of the school, and I figured that would be true for several more cycles. As we circled the building, looking for a point of entry, I remembered trudging through the grounds in sun, snow, and rain, Ed and Draper generally beside me. We’d been part of the last classes at both Joseph A. Marsh and West Tech, and looking back on it, there seemed to be something damned appropriate about that—Ed and Draper and I were the last vestiges of the old neighborhood, in a lot of ways.
“Basement window,” Joe said, coming to a stop and pointing. There was a narrow window just above the foundation, and while there was a piece of plywood over it, the corner was raised, showing that someone had pried it away.
I knelt beside it and hooked my fingers under the edge, gave it an experimental tug. The board rose easily, with a harsh scraping noise. I put both hands under it and yanked harder, and this time it came free.
“You know what’s down there?” Joe said.
“The metal shop.”
“Metal shop in a junior high?”
“This school fed into West Tech, so they had more trade offerings. Hell, Tech even had a foundry. There was a time when classes like that got some kids jobs when they came out of school.”
“That time was a few decades ago, LP.”
“You think it’s an accident that the school closed?”
He passed me the flashlight. I stretched out on my stomach and extended my hand, shining the light into the dark room. A musty smell rose at me, but there was more to it than that—the scent of metal and stone and, somehow, of heat, even though it had been years since any activity had taken place here. I passed the beam of the flashlight around the room, saw nothing other than old boxes and bare walls.
“We’re good,” I said. “Little bit of a drop to the floor, but not bad. Six feet from the window, maybe. Think you can make it?”
“I can make it.”
“All right.” I went first, sliding my feet through the window, then shoving my upper body in and dropping. The floor came up faster than I expected, giving me a jarring landing. I turned the flashlight back on and showed the floor to Joe, who was leaning down, eyeballing his entrance. He slipped through the window and dropped down smoother than I had. Thirty years my senior and still he moved with an athlete’s grace.
“You remember your way around here?” he said.
I nodded while I passed him the flashlight and freed my gun from its holster. “Well enough, at least.”
“Lead the way, then.”
It took us an hour to clear the building. We moved in silence through dark, musty corridors that I’d once walked through daily, past the classrooms where I’d devoted more time to studying girls than books and a principal’s office that Ed and I had known better than our homerooms. We’d had fun, though, and at the end of the day I don’t think we were the type of students that drove teachers to drink. Drove them to a bottle of Tylenol, maybe, but nothing stronger.
Even knowing that the building had been closed for years, the sight of the disrepair stunned me. Debris littered the halls, mice scattered at the sound of our footsteps, and dank puddles from countless leaks spotted the empty rooms. Looters had moved in once the building had been closed, tearing free everything of value. Most of the light fixtures were gone, faucets torn from the sinks, ceiling panels removed so people could get at the copper wiring.
In a room on the second floor, in what had once been the English department, we found the remains of several candles beside a filthy blanket, a broken bottle of Southern Comfort, and a few empty Campbell’s soup cans not far away. A dented metal waste-basket had been pulled up close by, and old ashes were inside. Joe ran the light around it and shook his head.
“Very old,” he said. “Some homeless guy sneaking in to get out of the snow, I bet.”
That was the closest we came, though. We didn’t speak at all on the third floor, just moved through the rooms in total silence, Joe scanning the floors with his flashlight, me standing behind him with my gun out.
Neither one of us felt much like attempting to climb back out of the basement window we’d used to enter. It was too narrow and too high. All of the double doors had been fastened from the outside with chains and padlocks, but the single doors had been locked only from the inside. We found one leading out of the back of the auditorium, unlocked it, and stepped back outside into the overcast day.
“Damn,” Joe said as I locked the door behind me and let it swing closed again. “I thought we might have some luck with that.”
“It was a good idea,” I said. “As good as any other we’ve had with this guy, at least.”
We walked out of the schoolyard and back to the street. Overhead, the clouds were roiling. Looking up at them was like looking down on an angry sea. The rain was light, though. Cold, teasing drops. Thunderclaps that were louder and closer.