‘What witness?’ It was the first I’d heard of it.
‘Oh, all kinds of drones have been calling in, saying they saw this and know that. Same old shit that always happens when a case gets a lot of attention. And it don’t take an eyewitness to know the horses would have been screaming and trying to kick down their stalls.’ His tone turned to flint. ‘We’re gonna get the son of a bitch who did this. Let’s see how he likes it when it’s his ass burning.’
‘We don’t know that there is a son of a bitch, at least not for a fact,’ I reminded him. ‘No one has said it’s arson yet, although I certainly am assuming you and I haven’t been invited along for the ride.’
He turned his attention out a window.
‘I hate it when it’s animals.’ He spilled coffee on his knee. ‘Shit.’ He glared at me as if I were somehow to blame. ‘Animals and kids. The thought makes me sick.’
He did not seem to care about the famous man who may have died in the fire, but I knew Marino well enough to understand that he targeted his feelings where he could tolerate them. He did not hate human beings half as much as he led others to believe, and as I envisioned what he had just described, I saw thoroughbreds and foals with terror in their eyes.
I could not bear to imagine screams, or battering hooves splintering wood. Flames had flowed like rivers of lava over the Warrenton farm with its mansion, stables, reserve aged whiskey, and collection of guns. Fire had spared nothing but hollow walls of stone.
I looked past Marino into the cockpit, where Lucy talked into the radio, making comments to her ATF copilot as they nodded at a Chinook helicopter below horizon and a plane so distant it was a sliver of glass. The sun lit up our journey by degrees, and it was difficult to concentrate as I watched my niece and felt wounded again.
She had quit the FBI because it had made certain she would. She had left the artificial intelligence computer system she had created and robots she had programmed and the helicopters she had learned to fly for her beloved Bureau. Lucy had walked off from her heart and was no longer within my reach. I did not want to talk to her about Carrie.
I silently leaned back in my seat and began reviewing paperwork on the Warrenton case. Long ago I had learned how to focus my attention to a very sharp point, no matter what I thought and in spite of my mood. I felt Marino staring again as he touched the pack of cigarettes in his shirt pocket, making sure he was not without his vice. The chopping and flapping of blades was loud as he slid open his window and tapped his pack of cigarettes to shake one loose.
‘Don’t,’ I said, turning a page. ‘Don’t even think about it.’
‘I don’t see a No Smoking sign,’ he said, stuffing a Marlboro into his mouth.
‘You never do, no matter how many of them are posted.’ I reviewed more of my notes, puzzling again over one particular statement the fire marshal had made to me over the phone yesterday.
‘Arson for profit?’ I commented, glancing up. ‘Implicating the owner, Kenneth Sparkes, who may have accidentally been overcome by the fire he started? Based on what?’
‘Is his the name of an arsonist or what?’ Marino said. ‘Gotta be guilty.’ He inhaled deeply and with lust. ‘And if that’s the case, he got what he deserves. You know, you can take them off the street but can’t take the street out of them.’
‘Sparkes was not raised on the street,’ I said. ‘And by the way, he was a Rhodes scholar.’
‘Road scholar and street sound like the same damn thing to me,’ Marino went on. ‘I remember when all the son of a bitch did was criticize the police through his newspaper chain. Everybody knew he was doing cocaine and women. But we couldn’t prove it because nobody would come forward to help us out.’