He opened the trunk and set the box of romances inside. He had to be careful not to knock over the sloshing full red can of gasoline. It had already spilled some on the newspaper it rested on. He looked at the headline. Talk about irony.
Numbers one and two — the black dance club and then the gay dance club — one fatality each.
No fatality this time.
They’d all been lucky enough to get out alive.
He took another look at the red gas can. It looked so harmless most of the time sitting in garages to run power mowers and clean up paint spills.
But there were other uses for it, too. Yes, indeed.
2
They didn’t like me much and I guess I didn’t blame them. Nobody likes “experts” brought in from the outside to tell you that you’re doing a lousy job.
There were four of them, detectives, two male, two female, one black, one Hispanic. They sat at a plain table in a plain room and listened to me as long as they could stand. Then their eyes would look out the window that displayed the downtown across the narrow river and they had to be thinking longing thoughts about this gentle and colorful Iowa autumn afternoon. Football weather. They could be raking leaves, playing touch football with their kids, washing the new car, or sitting in a cop bar talking about the recent union meeting about the unpaid overtime hassle with the city council.
Instead, like school children being punished, they had to sit here, a narrow room painted city-sanctioned green, listening to me play at being a psychological profiler and private investigator for a large law-firm.
While they had their own individual cases, Captain Davidson, who’d introduced me, had put them all on the arson case, which was why I was here. The arsonist had burned his third dance club to the ground three nights ago. The first fire, two people had been killed, trampled in the melee. The second fire, nobody had died, but a number of people were in the hospital. The third fire, there’d been one more fatality, a just-divorced suburban housewife out celebrating with her girl friends. An upscale downtown dance club; a gay dance club; a black dance club. No pattern.
I said, “One thing distinguishes the arsonist from other serial murderers. The typical serial killer wants direct contact with his victims. So direct that sometimes he’ll reach in and take out a vital organ with his bare hands. He’ll also photograph or videotape what he’s done. He wants to remember the moment. He’ll masturbate to it later. The arsonist, however, wants the impersonality of setting a building on fire and standing back and watching what happens. A lot of the time, he’ll hide across the street so he can masturbate while watching the fire. Totally impersonal. Except for the fluid he uses to ignite the fire, he never gets his hands dirty as it were, never faces the victims. There’s an interesting note here. When you look into the background of the average serial killer, you see a dysfunctional boyhood often marked by cruelty to animals. You find that with serial arsonists, too. But with them you have to add bed-wetting. We don’t know why this is but from the hundreds if not thousands of cases we’ve catalogued, we’ve seen it play out time and time again.”
Detective Gomez raised her hand. “Who does this arsonist think he’s killing when he sets these fires?”
“Good question,” I said. “I just wish I had a good answer. As we know, many if not most male serial killers have real relationship problems with females. Even killing their victims isn’t enough. They’ll defile the corpses — make hideous slashes and cuts in the faces, cut off breasts, mutilate the genitals. So while we don’t know which female exactly the serial killer is destroying — a girl he is attracted to, his mother, maybe even his sister — we do know that in general he has a real problem with women.
“This particular arsonist, though, we just don’t know. Even in the male gay bar there were a few dozen women. But that still doesn’t tell us a lot. Based on what we know generally, we know he’s angry, we know he wants to kill people, and we know that in all likelihood, he’ll do this again.”
Detective Henderson, who looked like the poster-boy for clean-cut WASP detectives everywhere, said, “I take it he’s shy and withdrawn.”
“That’s probably right. Every profile I’ve ever seen on this kind of arsonist, he doesn’t have many social skills and he’s frequently unnoticed, even though he may hang around a lot. Almost invisible in some ways.”
They were paying attention now that the afternoon had gotten interactive. I should’ve done this earlier.
Detective Wimmers, the black man, said, “Are there any kinds of jobs this arsonist would be attracted to?”
“No job category, if that’s what you mean. But they’re likely to be low-level, relatively unsuccessful, whatever line they take up. These aren’t aggressive people. Not usually, anyway.”
Detective Holden, a red-haired, bulky man in shirtsleeves, loose tie, and an air of belligerence, said, “What if we waste our time looking for somebody like this and it turns out he isn’t anything like this at all?”
“Then he can sue the city,” I said. Nobody laughed. “This is isn’t an exact science. I make mistakes, no doubt about it. But generally profiling is helpful. And I think it’ll be helpful to you here. Any questions?”
There weren’t, of course. They just wanted out of here. All but one of them, anyway. Detective Wimmers, the black man. “Don’t pay any attention to them.”
I smiled. “Kind of hard not to. They always this pleasant?”
“They just don’t like outsiders.” He was tall, tending to beef, with a large, imposing face and a gold-toothed smile. With his red regimental-striped tie and herringbone slacks and polished black loafers with the tassles, he looked more lawyer than cop. Except lawyers don’t wear guns and badges on their belts. He pinched some skin on the thick black arm shooting from his short-sleeved white shirt. “I bring my sorry black ass in here six years ago — first black detective this city ever had — and you should’ve heard ’em, man. Always whisperin’ and jokin’ and pokin’ each other in the ribs. I coulda written all their jokes myself. Lots of watermelon and pork chops in the jokes, you know what I’m saying? They’d even leave notes in my locker. Death To Niggers. Shit like that.”
“I’m sorry.” And I was. That had to be a special hatred, to be singled out and despised that way.
“My wife and kids, they’d cry and beg me to quit. But I wouldn’t, ’cause I just wanted to piss these guys off. Stay in their faces. You know what I mean? I just wore ’em down. I didn’t go to the civil rights board. I didn’t complain to the police review board. I just stayed in their faces. And one by one, they started bein’ nice to me. The first guy, when he was nice, they started givin’ him more shit than they gave me. But one by one, we started bein’ friendly. And now they pretty much accept me. Our wives and kids get together. And we bowl and stuff after work. So it’s pretty good here, now. And the young black cops comin’ up say they aren’t havin’ much trouble at all, especially with the cops their own age.”