Dirty Fire (4 page)

Terry Posson spread her fingers wide over the sheet of paper laying flat on the desk. Abruptly, she closed her hand, crumpling the paper into a loose ball. With a single gesture that may have been frustration, the policewoman launched it at the brimming wastebasket across the conference room.

It flew past my head, rimmed off a paper cup—one of a dozen stained with the dregs of the morning’s coffee—and fell to the floor.

Gil Cieloczki leaned to the side and picked up the paper ball. Without turning in his chair, he caught my eye and arched his eyebrows minutely. It was the act of a co-conspirator. I closed an eye, the one out of view of the others at the table, in a slow wink.

I wondered if I somehow had been transported back to the third grade.

“Take it easy, Posson,” a voice growled, and it was not the classroom monitor. “Let’s try to get through this in a professional manner.”

The owner of the voice was Robert Johns Nederlander, whose official title was Director of Public Safety for the Municipality of Lake Tower. He tapped a gold pen against his own legal-sized pad. I was familiar with the make of pen, but only from a respectful distance. When I had been a detective here, with a desk less than twenty feet from this very conference room, it would have taken the better part of my weekly paycheck to buy one like it.

In my current circumstances, it exceeded my net worth by an uncomfortable margin. Like so much else in Lake Tower, it was beyond my reach. And maybe even my grasp
.

It appeared likely to remain so, if my former supervisor had any say in the matter. When Cieloczki had arrived with me in tow, Nederlander had glared at me with an expression that combined equal measures of disbelief and outrage. Before he could speak, Gil had waved me to a chair at the far corner of the table. The firefighter had then moved to Nederlander, and the two men spoke in low voices: Cieloczki’s, reasonable but firm; Nederlander’s, tight-lipped and cold.

For a tense moment, it was by no means certain that Nederlander would remain in the room. His eyes flickered between Cieloczki and me; he appeared to be weighing options, all of them unsatisfactory. Then he made his decision and settled pointedly in the conference room chair. He did not acknowledge my presence. The two plainclothes cops flanking Nederlander followed his lead: in the previous twenty minutes, they had addressed every comment to Cieloczki alone.

“So in a nutshell, here’s what two months of arson investigation has bought the fine citizens of Lake Tower,” said Posson, frustration heavy in her voice. “We have two dead people: Stanley Avron Levinstein, 66, and Kathleen Morris Levinstein, 59. Married thirty-one years, no children. Upstanding citizens; nothing in the incident files except for a couple of ten-fourteen calls—that’s a possible prowler report, Gil—and the most recent of
those
was three years ago. Members of B’nai Abraham Temple: that’s the big one over in Highland Park.”

“Place got written up in the
Beacon
last year,” Mel Bird offered. “Sends more cash to Israel than any other synagogue in the country.” Bird was junior to Posson on the investigation. Like his partner, he was physically short but with the body of an offensive guard and an underlying impatient energy.

“Levinstein probably could have financed a kibbutz or two on his own—I guess the construction supplies business did okay for him,” Terry continued. “Semi-retired, which his brother—he’s running the business now, has been for a couple of years—his brother said that meant he could show up at the office or not. Usually didn’t, at least not in the past year or so.”

Nederlander shook his head and looked at Gil. “You have copies of the interviews we did. We talked with people from the temple, the business, the neighbors—”

Bird interrupted. “And
that
was a waste of time, doing a door-to-door with people in that tax bracket. Most of the time, you can’t even
see
the house next door through the trees and stone walls. Nobody exactly drops by to borrow a cup of sugar.”

He fell silent as Nederlander fixed him with a stony eye.

“We have worked this investigation by the book,” the police chief said, and his tone did not invite comment. “The case files are extensive. They
have
to be, or we’d be derelict. Every lead that we’ve developed has been followed.”

“What it all adds up to is that Levinstein was just an ordinary citizen, if your ordinary citizen happens to have a house the insurance company says was worth about four-and-a-half-million bucks,” Posson said. “That’s about par for the area, of course.”

“So no leads,” I broke in. “Nothing to follow up on.”

“Nothing I can put a finger on,” Posson agreed before remembering that I was unofficially a nonperson. She slid another sheaf of papers, clipped together with a heavy metal clasp, from the thick folder.

“Okay, physical evidence—based on the State Police forensic report, Stanley was shot in the head with a .38 caliber weapon,” Posson said. “No casing recovered at the scene. But that could mean the gun was a revolver, or it was an automatic but the shooter took the brass away with him.”

“Or we just couldn’t find the damn thing in the ashes,” Nederlander frowned. He held up a hand, waving off the objections from the two detectives. “Not likely, but possible. We all know what the crime scene looked like.”

Cieloczki thumbed through several pages and tapped on one of the neatly typed items. “You have the bullet, though. Ballistics?”

“Got the slug. Need a weapon to match it to,” Bird replied.

“Anyway, Levinstein’s body was charred pretty badly,” Terry Posson said. “But at least we have a body for him. There’s luck for you—seems that when an outside wall collapsed, the body was close enough to get a partial coverage. The ME was able to get blood gas. Negative on carbon monoxide. That, and no soot in the lungs or airway, lead to the conclusion that he was dead before the fire started.”

“Of course,” Bird interjected, “that conclusion may have been influenced a little by the fact that Levinstein had taken a bullet to his brains.”

Terry Posson sat back in her chair and looked around the room. “Yeah. Well, that’s a wealth of information compared to what we know about the wife. Listen to what the ME wrote here.”

She flipped to the photocopied medical examiner’s report and recited in a singsong voice. “‘Determining the exact cause and time of death for Mrs. Levinstein is somewhat more difficult. The body was reduced to a portion of skull, a long tooth and a long bone. These artifacts’—that’s what he calls them, artifacts—‘are insufficient for determination of proper forensic conclusions.’ Helpful, isn’t it?”

“So here’s our best scenario,” Nederlander said to Gil. “Person or persons unknown enter the Levinstein house—could have broken in, could have been a home invasion kind of thing. Hell, maybe all they had to do was knock on the door. Once in, they confront either Mr. or Mrs. Levinstein, or both of ‘em. They make demands, probably rough them up. Somewhere along the line they shoot Levinstein. My guess is they shoot the woman, too. They take whatever they were after, or whatever they found. And then they torch the house to destroy any evidence.”

Nederlander blew out a long breath. “It’s a nice theory. The problem, Gil, is that it doesn’t give us anyplace to go. That’s the same problem every other theory has right now. As a murder investigation, we’re at a standstill. We’re catching hell in the newspapers—worse, I’ve got the city manager climbing all over my backside. The biggest murder case this city has ever had. And we don’t even have a decent motive, let alone a suspect.”

Nederlander locked eyes with Cieloczki.

“But this is an
arson
-murder, Gil. Look, I won’t kid you. You probably saw more arson cases in a month with the Chicago Fire Department than anyone on our police force sees in an entire career. You have the expertise, and Evans wants us to use it. And when the city manager talks, I damn well listen.”

He took a deep breath. “So. The reason we set up this meeting today is to see if you can give us a direction—
anything
—to break us out of this goddam logjam.” Nederlander looked at the policewoman seated alongside him and made an impatient motion with his hands.

Posson cleared her throat; as lead investigator, listening to her boss ask for help from outside the department had to be sour medicine to swallow. “Gil, you’ve had a chance to review our case files as well as your people’s reports. If you, uh, would, can you give us some of your insights?”

“Sure,” Gil said, as if she had asked him to pass the salt. “Let me start by saying that I’m limiting myself to my own field of expertise. That means the fire itself, and what it tells us.

“Okay. First of all, this was a big job somebody took on. The burn patterns we’ve reconstructed, the speed of progression we’ve documented—three floors were systematically drenched in gasoline, room to room. It’s a big house, and it burned hot. We know what it did to Mrs. Levinstein.”

He glanced at Nederlander, whose face wore a mask of polite interest.

“A conservative guess is that the arsonist used as much as thirty gallons of gas, maybe more,” Cieloczki replied. “And that alone tells us the fire was almost certainly premeditated. He already had the gasoline—enough to not just burn it down, but to burn it down thoroughly and quickly. Our guy went in knowing what he was going to do to that house. You don’t just go to the corner Mobil station on an impulse and fill up a half-dozen gas cans.”

“Could’ve gone out after the fact and bought it at different gas stations,” Bird objected. “Five gallons each stop, it takes him six stops.”

“Uh-uh,” Posson told her partner. “The math’s right, but I don’t buy the logic. Guy pops two people, then rides all over town buying gas? Even if people don’t notice, it’s going to
feel
like somebody does.”

“He goes to self-serve pumps; what’s to notice?” Bird argued.

“Can’t buy a gas
can
at a self-service pump,” Posson retorted. “You gotta talk to a clerk for that.” She made a note on her pad. “In fact, unless you figure he went back to empty it in the house each time, he had to buy
six
cans. You don’t do that in any one place, either. So we got a guy who dealt with six clerks, maybe.”

“It gives you something to look for,” Nederlander nodded. “You go back, canvass gas stations. Ask about people who bought one or more gas containers. Maybe we’ll pry something loose.”

“Check it out,” Cieloczki agreed. He turned to Posson. “But don’t limit yourself to the day of the fire. If he had this planned out in advance, it makes sense that he would have had everything ready before he went in—a couple of days, possibly as much as a week.”

“What makes you think he bought the stuff around here?” Bird’s voice was stubborn. “Why couldn’t he have brought it with him from—I dunno, someplace down in the city?”

“That’s possible,” Gil conceded. “I just don’t think our arsonist would want to drive too far with all that gasoline. Plus, there’s the questions of the containers. In almost every arson case I’ve seen where gasoline was involved, you find an empty container nearby. Not a lot of people want to get caught walking away from a fire carrying even
one
empty gas can. How many cans did you find at the arson scene?”

Neither Posson nor Bird spoke. Nederlander watched Cieloczki with the air of a man who has been asked a trick question.

“None,” he said, finally.

“Exactly. Our man went to the trouble of taking them with him. He didn’t want us to find them there. Why? Why risk it?” Gil shook his head. “There has to be something about them that we might find significant—something that might give us a lead.”

Posson was chewing her pencil, her eyes unfocused at the wall above Cieloczki’s head. “Okay, here’s a thought. All those cans—yeah, that’s a lot of stuff to put in a car trunk. And I don’t think our guy would want to drive around with ‘em in his back seat, empty or full.”

“So we’re looking for a van or more likely a panel truck,” Nederlander interjected. “Something with a lot of space and a minimum of windows.”

“That’s probably a good supposition,” Cieloczki replied. “I think it bears looking into.”

There was a moment of silence while the two plainclothes officers scribbled on their notepads. Nederlander’s fingers, I noted, tapped on the tabletop.

“The question of premeditation bothers me,” Nederlander said, finally. “I see the point about the quantity of gasoline. But frankly, that’s a damn weak basis to build a whole theory around.” He raised an eyebrow, inviting the firefighter’s response.

Cieloczki looked at me, briefly, and made a decision. “Well, Bob—we do have more than that to go on here, as a matter of fact. For one thing, I think we’ve found an indication in your case files that whoever set this fire had experience. Or got some coaching from someone who did.”

He tugged a single typed sheet from the file. “Every fire alarm that comes in triggers a set of automatic actions from my people. The firefighters are dispatched, sure. But it’s also standard procedure to notify the police in case we need traffic or crowd control assistance. We’ll alert the hospital or trauma center closest to the fire in case we require medical support. And we contact the utility companies for an emergency shutoff of electricity and gas service.”

Gil tapped on the report. “ComEd and the gas company arrived a minute or two after our first truck—that’s confirmed. ComEd cut electrical power from the main transformer serving the entire block. That’s standard procedure for them. But it’s different with the natural gas. Whenever possible, NI Gas tries to shut off the natural gas service from the outside valve that serves the individual house. At the Levinstein house, the valve is under an access cover about thirty feet from the house—but according to the report, he couldn’t shut it off this time. When he arrived, it was already turned off.

“We’ve talked to the guy,” Gil said. “He said he figured one of the firefighters did it. Technically, that’s against procedures, but nobody wanted to make an issue out of it. Except we polled the firefighters who were on the scene first, and they were still pulling hoses when the gas company arrived.”