No Mercy--A Mystery

by Joanna Schaffhausen

  “Pictures?” Ellery asked Bertie.

  Bertie hesitated a moment before withdrawing a folder from her briefcase. “The prosecution was allowed to show pictures of Bobby Gallagher’s body as it was found at the scene,” she said as she slid the folder toward Reed. “You can imagine how that went.”

  Reed put his palm on top of the folder and moved it slightly back and forth, watching Carnevale for a reaction. Carnevale just stared right back at him. Reed made him wait a few seconds longer before he flipped open the cover. Beside him, Ellery sucked in a short breath at the horrible sight. The eight-by-ten glossy photos showed a toddler’s body, badly burned and curled in on itself as though still in the womb. His face had melted away. Reed could just make out a patch of reddish hair and a little blue tennis shoe.

  When he looked up again, Carnevale was staring at the wall, his jaw set. He didn’t want to see the pictures, Reed realized. A dead toddler was definitely never part of the plan. “The jury saw the pictures,” Carnevale said tightly, “and it was all over. Didn’t matter what I said or did.”

  Reed closed the folder again and slid it back to Bertie. This time, Carnevale didn’t even track its progress. “The cops didn’t pick you at random,” he said. “You were at the fire.”

  “So was a lot of people.”

  “But when Kevin Powell looked at you, you ran,” Ellery cut in.

  “He looked at me like he wanted to rip my head off. Hell yeah, I ran. You would’ve ran, too.”

  “He said you smelled like gasoline.” Ellery was right to press him. If Kevin Powell really went after Carnevale the night of the fire, something must have set him off.

  “The whole place smelled like gasoline,” Carnevale said, waving his arms. “The air, the street, the trees. It was everywhere. What else you think gave that fire its juice?”

  His voice held a hint of awe, and Reed could appreciate this now, having seen how fierce the fire was last night as her truck burned up, flames licking ten feet into the air. The Gallagher store fire would have been bigger, brighter, a hungry dragon devouring everything around it. “The fire started around midnight that night,” Reed said. “How did you happen to be right there at the scene?”

  “I couldn’t sleep. I was up when I heard the sirens coming, lots of ’em. You could tell it was a big one. I just followed the trucks.”

  “You like fire?” Reed asked, trying to sound casual.

  If there was a spark in Carnevale’s eyes, he extinguished it in a hurry. “I was up already, like I said. I decided to go check it out. Biggest mistake of my life.”

  “Agent Markham and Officer Hathaway have been making some inquiries into the case,” Bertie said, apparently trying to cheer him up. “Their questions may have made someone nervous.”

  “Oh, yeah? Who?” Carnevale looked interested again.

  “Well, like I told your lawyer,” Ellery replied, “we’ve only talked to Kevin Powell.”

  “Powell.” Carnevale fairly spat out the name as he sat back in his chair. “Mr. Macho Hero Man. Yeah, he’d love to keep me locked up ’til I’m just a bag of bones. If I’m innocent, he ain’t no hero no more.”

  “I haven’t really focused on Powell,” Bertie said thoughtfully. “Maybe I should take another look. I will say I found it odd he didn’t testify at Luis’s trial.”

  “He didn’t?” Reed asked, clearly surprised.

  “No, the state put on the firefighter who found the boy’s body and the medical examiner who did the autopsy—and Myra Gallagher, of course.”

  “I know why he didn’t testify,” Carnevale said, and they all turned to look at him. He wore a smile of satisfaction. “He wasn’t going home that night. He was goin’ to get him some pussy—s’cuse my language.” He nodded to himself, adjudicating this new bit of information for the rest of them. “My lawyer, he even found the girl. Some skinny bitch Powell was banging when he was s’posed to be going home to his wife and kid. The girl, she didn’t want to testify neither, just wanted to stay out of it, but just interviewing her was enough to spook ’em away from putting on Powell.”

  Ellery exchanged a look with Reed. Here at last was a plausible explanation for why Powell was on a one-way street going the wrong way that night. “Your lawyer back then—who did he think set the fire?” Ellery asked him.

  “He liked Patrick Gallagher for it,” Bertie replied for her client. “Frankly, so do I. He was in debt up to his eyeballs and that two-million-dollar insurance made a lot of his problems go away. I think he hired someone to torch the shop, and the hired help didn’t realize Myra and Bobby would be on the premises. It was after midnight, after all.”

  “There was another brother,” Reed said, remembering.

  “David,” Bertie agreed. “He wanted out of the family business. Took his share of the settlement and opened up a pizza shop in Providence.”

  “David would have had the same problem with the debt from the furniture store,” said Reed. “Where was he the night the place burned up?”

  “Home in bed with his fiancée, Heather Soto.” Bertie didn’t even have to look it up. “She alibied him straightaway. Said he was with her the whole night.”

  “Fiancée,” Reed repeated thoughtfully. “Did they actually get married?”

  “Yep, and then divorced three years later. Just long enough that she probably got herself a sweet little piece of the pie. Why? You thinking the years might have changed her memory about where David Gallagher was that night?”

  “I’m thinking that if they were getting married, she was going to be taking on that debt, too. Instead they got a financial windfall. Besides, if Patrick Gallagher could have hired someone to set fire to the store, then surely David could have done the same.”

  “Sure. Only problem—no way to prove that a professional arsonist ever existed. The cops arrested Luis at the scene and never looked anywhere else. His original lawyer subpoenaed the Gallagher bank records, but they were a mess. Half their trade was in cash, and who the hell knows where that money went?”

  “The Blaze would’ve known,” Carnevale cut in. “He saw the guy.”

  “You have his statement?” Ellery asked, eyeing Bertie’s files.

  “No,” she replied with a heavy sigh. “He disappeared before he could tell exactly what he saw.”

  Ellery wasn’t buying what Bertie was selling. “Wait, so you’re saying this guy, The Blaze, said he saw the arsonist the night of the fire, but he wouldn’t say who it was? And no one followed up?”

  “The original lawyer on the case, he tried,” Bertie replied. “Initially, he couldn’t get Earl Stanfield to say on the record exactly who he saw that night, and then the guy up and disappeared. No one could find him.”

  “Greedy SOB wanted money,” Carnevale said, folding his arms. His sleeves pulled up at the wrists and Reed noticed a handmade tattoo, faded now and blurred at the edges: 111.

  “If you paid him off, his story would be worthless anyway,” Ellery said.

  “I think Luis’s lawyer knew that,” Bertie answered. “That’s why he didn’t pay, and why he was working to find another way to convince The Blaze to give up his information. Before he got anywhere with the guy, The Blaze disappeared.”

  “Or someone rubbed him out,” Carnevale said.

  “Someone,” Ellery repeated. “You mean the cops.”

  Carnevale fixed her with a hard stare. “They lock us up here like animals. Feed us crap that dogs wouldn’t eat. I’ve seen stuff in here that would give you nightmares, and it ain’t always the inmates dishing it out. We ain’t in here by choice, but those guards sign up for this. They call us human filth and they pretend like they’re better than us because they got the guns and they’re lookin’ in from the outside of the cage. But I seen what they do when they know cameras ain’t watching. And I can tell you: they aren’t so different after all.”

  Later, when they were on their way back from the prison with copies of some of Bertie’s files in the backseat, Ellery kept glanci
ng Reed’s way as if expecting him to talk. After several miles, she apparently couldn’t wait any longer. “Well?” she asked. “What did you think of him?”

  “Hard to say with such a short conversation,” Reed replied. “He seems bitter but reconciled to his fate. It’s clear that Bertie is the one driving this push to have him released and the case reexamined. Carnevale himself gave up hope a long time ago.”

  “Maybe he’s not fighting harder because he knows he’s guilty,” Ellery suggested.

  “Is that what you think?”

  She hesitated a moment. “He tried to play it off, when you asked him about whether he liked fire, but he has a tattoo on his arm: 111. That’s the Boston emergency code for fire.”

  “Is it? That’s interesting. I tend to agree that Carnevale wasn’t at the Gallagher fire as a mere interested bystander.”

  “Speaking of bystanders, you didn’t say anything to Bertie about spotting Jake Gallagher in the news footage.”

  “I’d like to verify I’m right before we ring that particular bell. Those additional clippings Bertie gave us might help, especially if I can take them back and have our lab techs enlarge and enhance the photos.”

  Ellery was quiet again, clearly thinking as she worried her lower lip back and forth with her teeth. “You said it makes sense to look at the other Gallagher brother, David. You’re right he would have a similar motive. Maybe he and Patrick even planned it together, if they both wanted to escape the debt from the store. They could’ve been covering for each other all these years.”

  “I have my doubts about Patrick Gallagher as the arsonist,” Reed said.

  Ellery looked over at him, plainly curious. “Why?”

  “Myra told you she was there unexpectedly late at night because Patrick was desperate to get his hands on his tax documents—the deadline for filing was the following day.” Ellery nodded, and Reed shrugged. “I can’t help wondering what man bothers to prep his taxes for a business he knows is going to burn down in a matter of hours.”

  * * *

  Reed had handled all sorts of crimes in his years with the Behavioral Sciences Unit, from noncustodial parents who kidnapped their children and disappeared with them to serial predators who left a trail of bodies in their wake. The murders were awful, of course, because there was no hope for redemption or a happy outcome, but it was the brutal rapes that Reed found most difficult to stomach. The murder victim’s pain was over, silent now, while the rape survivors lived and breathed their ongoing horror. Once, he’d had to conduct an interview with a woman whose attacker had been waiting for her with ropes inside her apartment. Reed’s job was to dive deep into the complexities of the M.O., but the woman started crying in response to his first question, and they’d sat there for an hour like that, with her weeping and him unable to help in any way. Another time, he had interviewed a middle-aged woman who owned a beauty parlor in Cincinnati. She had been cleaning up at the end of the day when her attacker came in through a back window. He had savaged her repeatedly, with his body and with the various tools he’d found around the shop, until just before dawn when he’d fled and left her near dead for her employees to find the next morning. She had seen the man’s face but did not recognize him. I don’t understand, she’d kept saying afterward, he didn’t even know me. Why would he want to do this?

  Reed Markham, the man from the FBI who was supposed to have all the answers, had no good reply. He’d hightailed it out of that hospital room as soon as he was able, and never looked back. Ellery was right: the first chance he got, Reed went home.

  At the moment, though, he was still in her home, reading through reports detailing recent sexual assaults in and around Somerville. The cops took down the details in clinical fashion but Reed tried not to focus on the pain behind the words. Stranger rape was thankfully uncommon, with only a few dozen cases in the greater Boston area each year. Add in the home invasion element that would link the M.O. to Wendy Mendoza’s case, and Reed could even risk entering all the reports into the geographic profiling program to see what it would spit out. He started with the most probable cases and took a quick look at the basic geography. The map showed a red dot for each separate attack, and they scattered across five different cities: Arlington, Medford, Somerville, Cambridge, and Boston.

  The first victim, a twenty-eight-year-old woman who’d worked as a receptionist in a dental office, had been attacked in her third-floor apartment more than six years ago. She had escaped with relatively minor injuries, whereas Wendy Mendoza’s arm had been broken and her windpipe crushed. Either Wendy had fought a lot harder, the crimes weren’t actually related, or, as Reed feared, the offender was becoming more violent. It wasn’t enough for the rapist to violate the women sexually anymore; he had to hurt them in other ways first.

  Reed rubbed the back of his neck to try to ease the knot of tension there. It was dark as pitch outside despite the early hour, which turned Ellery’s giant living room windows into light-reflecting mirrors. His own image looked pallid and worn, his face pinched and his clothes rumpled from two days of wear. He decided to recharge with a bit of physical exercise and some healthy food. He’d checked out the local surroundings online and discovered there was a gourmet grocery store only a few blocks away.

  He went down the hall to Ellery’s room, where she sat cross-legged on her bed, reading through the files that Bertie had given them. “Finding anything interesting?” he asked from the doorway.

  She sighed as she put aside the papers in front of her. “No, but I think I can tell you why nobody tried too hard to find this Blaze character. Near as I can make out from the notes, the last guy who spoke to The Blaze was a server at the Pine Street Inn, where The Blaze sometimes spent the night. The Blaze told him he was leaving town, going someplace warm.”

  “Did he say where?”

  “Yeah. Mars.”

  “Uh, come again?”

  “Mars. That’s what it says in the notes. The guy told people he was going to Mars. So I’m guessing it wouldn’t even matter what this guy did or didn’t see the night of the fire. If he had mental health problems, the prosecution would’ve eaten him alive.”

  “Mars isn’t especially warm,” Reed replied, almost out of habit. Before he’d set his sights on being a rock star, he’d planned to visit outer space. “Temperatures top out at around seventy degrees Fahrenheit.”

  She rolled her eyes at him. “Thank you, Mr. Wikipedia, for the astronomy lesson. Do you really think some street hustler who called himself ‘The Blaze’ was up-to-date on interplanetary climate data?”

  “You could have a point.” He patted the doorjamb, already restless to get outside and stretch his legs. “I’m going to jot over to the store for some dinner groceries. Do you have any objections to pasta and a salad?”

  “That depends. Is it a normal salad?”

  “Define ‘normal’ in this instance,” he said.

  “You know—carrots, lettuce, cucumbers, and tomatoes—that sort of thing. No weirdo vegetables like kale or artichokes or eggplant. And no octopus or anything with tentacles.”

  It was his turn to roll his eyes. She had the palate of a fourth grader. “Leave off the tentacles. Got it. May I borrow your keys?”

  She hesitated only a moment before extracting them from her pocket and tossing them his way. “Don’t forget dessert,” she said.

  Outside, the night air was crisp and cold. The snow squeaked under his footsteps as he set off in the direction of the grocery store. Few people were out, and those who were kept their faces bundled up away from the frosty night. Reed had come unprepared for the Boston winter, so he compensated by walking briskly to generate extra body heat. By the time he’d found his quarry at the store and returned to Ellery’s place, his face was raw and ruddy. He rewarmed quickly as he worked in the kitchen, standing over the simmering puttanesca sauce he had whipped up on the stove. The most adventurous vegetable he included in the salad was a yellow pepper.

  “Supper’s on,”
he called as he tilted the pot over the sink to drain the pasta. When Ellery did not appear, he went in search of her and found her fast asleep amid the folders, news clippings, and piles of old notes. He hovered just inside the room, knowing she would hate him standing there but unable to turn around and leave. Ellery—she’d been Abby back then—she hadn’t cried at all the night of her rescue. She’d been unconscious when he’d scooped her off the closet floor and run like hell with her into the woods to call for help. Coben might have been lurking anywhere on the farmhouse property. At first Reed had been afraid she might scream when she awoke, that she wouldn’t understand him as her rescuer, but Ellery was silent as the grave, her eyes round and dark in the moonlight. Later, he’d seen her just one more time at the hospital, where she’d been a pale waif under the sheets. She had not thanked him for saving her. She hadn’t said anything at all. Here’s my card, he’d told her. Call me if you ever need anything. He’d never dreamed she would.

  Cautiously, he drifted closer to the bed. On the floor, Bump whined and thumped his tail in greeting. “Shh,” Reed murmured distractedly. Ellery was curled like a comma, her hands tucked protectively beneath her chin. Slowly, carefully, he pulled the folded afghan from the foot of the bed and draped it over her. He froze when she sighed and stirred, his heart thudding at the prospect of being caught as a witness to her vulnerability, but she just rubbed one eye without opening it and quieted back into sleep. He hoped her dreams were pleasant ones as he tiptoed back out into the hall. In the kitchen, he turned the sauce down to low and covered it with a lid. Dinner would keep. For now, at least, Reed wasn’t going anywhere.

  Ellery slept until well past eight, when she emerged squinting and flushed, her hair askew, to mutter a sheepish apology. “I guess I was more tired than I thought.”