“Pretty far from home, aren’t you?” he asked, holding open the doors.
“We’re not from Utah,” Willy growled.
“Yeah,” Joe said quickly, in response to their host’s startled expression. “Can’t get used to all the people. I like a little more elbow room.”
Giving Willy a covert second glance, the cop proceeded down a hallway to what looked like an apartment door, punched in a code on the combination lock, and ushered them into a suite of offices.
“The director’s office is right down here,” he told them, leading the way. “He’s expecting you.”
Benjamin Silva was short, compact, bald on top, and equipped with a thick black mustache that matched his bushy eyebrows. He came at them from behind his desk like a tiny linebacker and shook both their hands vigorously, waving them toward two chairs opposite the desk.
“Welcome to Newark. Have a seat. Want some coffee? How was the trip? I never been to Vermont. Hear it’s great.” Without pausing to await any response, he glanced at their guide and ordered, “Get Lil in here, would you, Phil? Thanks.”
Willy took him up on his offer. “Coffee would be good. Black.”
Silva crossed to a side table and poured a mug from a thermos. “You, Agent Gunther?”
“‘Joe’ is fine, and I’ll pass. Thanks.”
Silva handed the mug to Willy. “Great. I’m Ben. We’re far from the flagpole over here, so we run things a little looser, too.”
“I noticed the jeans,” Willy said.
Silva nodded. “For example. At the head office, they’re all bib-and-tuckered, but nobody likes it.”
“Why’re you in this building?” Joe asked.
“Dumb luck.” Silva smiled, adding, “Plus a little string-pulling. The Essex County prosecutor’s office actually has some five hundred people in it, including about a hundred and eighty investigators and a hundred and fifty lawyers. We have task forces like this one for homicide, child abuse, narcotics, rape, gangs, and internal affairs. That makes us the third largest law enforcement outfit in the county, behind the Newark PD and the sheriff, but by statute we’re on top of the heap. Which is why, the farther away from headquarters I can get, the better.”
“Politics?” Joe asked.
Silva laughed. “And how. Saying politics in Essex County is like saying snow in Vermont, I guess. It’s everywhere, and it gets into everything. One reason I wanted my squad out here in the boonies was to keep my people as free of it as I could.”
“How many do you have?” Joe asked.
Silva had by now returned behind his desk. He tilted his chair and linked his fingers behind his neck. “There are two attorneys, one lieutenant, and five investigators.”
“That’s all?” Willy blurted out. “Newark’s like the arson capital of the Northeast or something.”
Ben Silva smiled. “True. At its peak, just a few years ago, we had up to four hundred car arsons a year. There was one location off the McCarter Highway, where one off-ramp led to a short street named Riverside Avenue, which then hooked right back up to the highway. Arsons were so common there, cars were sometimes backed up waiting for service. The state finally closed the off-ramp. And that,” he added, “is just cars. We also have a ton of structure fires, since old-fashioned urban renewal is making a comeback. Either people who want to sell property torch the old factories and warehouses and abandoned buildings that sit on them, or they burn them to save money on demolition.”
“How do you handle it all?” Joe asked.
“We don’t,” Silva said almost cheerily. “We cherry-pick the worst ones and, if we have time, deal with some of the others. Otherwise, we train as many cops and firefighters as we can to keep their eyes open and apply the skills we teach them. That having been said, we don’t do too badly-the nation’s arson solve rate is fifteen percent at best. Ours is anywhere from twenty-five to forty, depending.”
Silva suddenly leaped to his feet again. “Lil. Glad you could join us. This is Willy Kunkle and Joe Gunther of the Vermont Bureau of Investigation. Lieutenant Lillian Farber, my second-in-command and the operational head of the squad.”
Silva dragged another chair over from the corner and offered it to the newcomer, a slim, middle-aged woman with a no-nonsense set to her face.
Silva resumed speaking as he sat back down. “I was just giving them an overview of the operation.”
“You want jobs?” she asked, smiling slightly. “I’ll swap you. I’d take Vermont any day.”
“That mean you’re not going to say we’re far from home?” Willy asked.
Lil Farber laughed outright. “Phil told me what you said. He thinks you’re a shit bird.”
Willy joined her laughing-much to Silva’s visible relief, Joe noted. He was a little surprised himself, if for another reason. Willy wasn’t usually the bantering sort, especially on first meeting.
“I suppose now I have to watch out for payback,” Willy said.
“In spades.” Farber pointed at his useless left arm, now squashed between his body and the arm of the chair he was occupying. “What’s the story there?”
Silva looked appalled at the bluntness, but Willy merely smiled. “Proof positive that anyone can be a cop in Vermont.”
“Rifle round,” Joe said briefly.
She nodded. “Tough break.” She then looked at her boss. “So what’s up?”
Silva in turn glanced at Gunther. “To be honest, I’m not sure. You two are after a torch you think has a Newark address?”
“Right,” Joe answered, extracting a sheet of paper from his inner pocket. “We don’t have a name, but after we ran his MO through the ATF database, they said you folks had filed a similar profile not long ago. This is what we have-what he used, how he used it.”
Farber took it from him. As she read, Silva commented, “Must be a big case to send two of you all this way, especially on something this thin.”
Joe heard Willy grunt his own skepticism softly as he answered, “It’s a homicide. A seventeen-year-old kid.”
“Sixty cows?” Lil Farber exclaimed, still reading. “That must’ve smelled good.”
“We’re looking at everything we can,” Joe continued, “checking motives and backgrounds, but it was clear from the start that we had a pro on our hands, along with the strong likelihood that he was hired. When this Newark connection came up, I thought an alternate way to get to whoever’s pulling the strings might be through the man he paid.”
Silva nodded agreeably. “Sounds reasonable enough.”
Farber handed the report back to Gunther. “The potassium chlorate and the potato chips sound like our guy. Also the way he pulled the fire downstairs from the hayloft with glue lines.”
“We figure he did that because he didn’t want overexposure to the cows,” Joe told her.
“Could be,” she admitted. “I wouldn’t know. I’m Newark-born-and-bred. I just eat cows. With our fire-a warehouse-it was convenience. He had more combustibles available on an upper floor.”
“Same with us,” Willy said, again surprising Joe.
“Well, there you have it, then,” she answered, “another similarity.”
“But you don’t have a name, either?” Joe asked.
She shook her head. “Nope. That’s one reason we posted the MO. You don’t have a description, maybe, or a car sighting?”
“We have sightings of a fedora,” Willy said, “and a dark sedan that looks like it came from the city.”
Both Farber and Silva stared at him.
“I know, I know,” he said. “Lame.”
“But not that lame,” Gunther added. “I got an e-mail as I was leaving the office with a little more. I had all the area motels and gas stations checked for the time periods of each of our three arsons. One of the motels reported a guy in the hat checking in under the name S. Corleone.”
Ben Silva laughed. “Sonny Corleone? A comedian.”
“The rest of the registration,” Joe continued, “was equally bogus, but the clerk picked up on the Godfather reference, too, and after Mr. Corleone had tucked himself in, the clerk went out to copy down the car license.” Joe extracted a slip of paper from his pocket and handed it to Lil Farber. “We traced it to a rental place at the Newark airport.”