The Peppermint Red Herring

After a quick tip from one of our readers last week, I did a little research on this bogus-sounding jewel, the Peppermint Rhinestone. Rumored to have disappeared from somewhere in JP over the last few weeks, this little rock is causing a bit of a problem for some of the other local dicks. Similar deal, but not from the deMontesque household--some folks from France or somewhere, Montagne or something.

Two gems taken in the same neighborhood in a short period of time. It's starting to sound a bit like there's a cat burglar prowling. I had heard something about one a little while back, maybe our gonif is back in town? Seems a little more likely than our Usual Suspects--pretty sure Busey and Glenn Beck are both away for now.

Not wanting to be late for a meet with Alice, I headed out to her place. "Best place to start is at the scene," I remember reading in a book once. Although I take that with a grain of salt, this was the same book that told me not everything comes out of a Pulp novel holds water. I say the best place to start is the end, but I guess the beginning will do in a pinch. I pulled into the driveway of the deMontesque house and locked my heap up. The place was far from a dump, and the inside looked even better. It was one of those places over by Pond Street, those really slick stacks of bricks with gardens in the fronts and fences made from something other than chain link between the neighbors. I flashed my ticket at the man who answered the door and stepped inside before he could protest--or even read it.

Alice appeared within a moment and told the man not to worry about me. He looked even more bewildered, but she whisked me toward the back of the house before he could string a question together. The room she lead me to had books scattered all over the floor and cabinet doors left open. There was an empty shelf, and a wooden box lay open, face down on the floor.

"This is where the Falcon was, I take it."

"Yes, until it was taken."

"Well, obviously. I'm guessing you have no idea who would want to do this."

"Yeah. No idea."

"Let me take a look around here."

The wooden box was maybe a foot square, four inches deep. Using the end of a pen, I pulled part of it up and looked under: thing was completely empty. I looked around the room for a point of entry. The window had been shattered, and I stuck my head out through the gap. It was only a few feet to the rosebush below. Easy to get in or out. As I stepped back, my foot crunched some of the glass deeper into the carpet.

"Whoever it was came in here," I observed, "Wanted it to look like a robbery, but the real target was the stone."

The blonde grinned ear to ear. "I knew I'd picked the right guys."

Real men never blush, so I didn't. "Glad I didn't disappoint."

I kept looking around the room. "Odds are he wore gloves, so fingerprinting would be useless. Only prints we'd find are, I'm assuming, yours and the stiff by the door."

"My Husband, yes."

"No cleaners, maids or anything?"

"Nope. None."

"Lovers?" I offered.

"No! I'm faithful."

Stubbed my toe on something and muttered a curse under my breath. It had been the edge of a bookshelf, and my foot had set all of the tchotchkes wobbling. A drinking glass on one of the upper shelves tipped like it'd gone over the edge with the rams, and went over the edge, spilling out onto the carpet. Only what was weird about this was that instead of water or a shot of white, it was a half-eaten candy bar. The glass shattered, flecks of it stuck in the chocolate.

"What was that?" deMontesque asked.

"Not sure. Candy bar in a glass."

"Maybe it's a calling card?"

I said nothing, but it was possible. I would have to do some research before I could come back to her with it. I suggested she locked the door and not let anyone in until I came back. Otherwise, the place seemed to check out, and it didn't look like I was going to get anything else out of it. Clambered back into the flivver and drove back to the office--had to get some dark slacks on and haul ass to my undercover gig.

A Lead in a Haystack

Saturday June 20th. Turner and I took a bite out of the dusty combo meal of knowledge and eccentric vagrants that is the Boston Public Library. Little did we know that it would come with a super-sized portion of McInsight and a 32oz cup of divisiveness.

After some bumbling in the McKim building, we found the sparsely-occupied microfilm room. We would have been quicker in divining the microfilm machines, but our associate Books Mahoney was occupied with a serious heart wound. She's recovered, thankfully, and the mug behind it all is on his way to a few years in solitary (i.e. Maine).

I pored over frame after frame of local news coverage from 2005 while Turner took a leap into the Net. And though his web was world wide, the one I began to uncover was more tangled than last year's Christmas lights.

2005 saw the (supposedly accidental) burning of the First Baptist Church on Centre St, and in its wake a slew of real estate squabbles that threatened to cool the gooey warm sense of community JP basks in - or at least severely irritate a fat gaggle of residents and readers. Nearly every issue I scoped contained a letter to the editor concerning tenants' rights, land disputes, and snipes between community groups. Issues of race and class were embedded in these like a slug lodged in a stiff's brainbox.

That summer brought heat waves of all sorts. There was the natural phenomenon itself, which, as any reader of Romeo and Juliet knows, portends nothing good. Then there were the Jamaica Plain Neighborhood Council (JPNC) elections, which were fiercely contested. And, a week later, El Oriental de Cuba was firebombed. The more I read, the more I felt like a bachelor trying to figure out what had gone rotten in his fridge. My sniffer pointed at the fuzzy black mold gestating in last week's political leftovers.

Residents reported that El Oriental de Cuba was often the scene of debate over Cuban politics. They also mentioned that local suits in the public office held informal meetings there. While most denied that this could lead to such a despicable crime, there was further speculation on who the arsonist was actually trying to hit. Some said he was going for the tenants of the apartments above the shop - which is much more consistent with the pattern that would later emerge. Weeks later residents of a Paul Gore St apartment would submit a frustrated letter to the editor criticizing the JPNC. El Oriental is at the corner of Centre and Paul Gore; and JP Auto Body is just down the street. That has to mean something. The threads of a theory were there, but I didn't know how to crochet.

One thing I did know: though the M.O. was different, this was definitely the work of our bug. One man tried pursuing him after the fire at El Oriental started, and his description fits the surveillance from the Sigourney Street fires. But it was beginning to seem that he was just a puppet on a string held by a twisted group of puppeteers.

Further reading laid out yet more disputes over land and the elections. Reports of voter intimidation surfaced, coinciding with those from the '03 elections. There's not a clear connection (or else the case would be closed), but I was starting to think that somehow our shamuse was not operating solitarily on the revenge motive, and that there was some salt to the notion of this being the work of a gang of some sort. A gang potentially with friends in high places. And I'm not talking the Treefort Club, unless they own property or have their hands in electoral cookie jars.

Turner holds steadfast to the profile we've already developed - a solo flyer with a racial chip on his shoulder. I did read about a rash of arsons that occurred in the '70s and '80s, when our perp was still in his underoos. This follows the profile Turner researched, which suggests a prior influence from or fascination with fire setting. Still, I've got my hunches and he's got his. But perhaps it works better this way - with two different theories, we can keep each other sharp and steer clear of outright conspiracy over cold facts and observation.

We've got a lot of dots to connect and some sketches to color. Our time at the library also left us with a host of new contacts with whom we will be getting in touch. This thing's about as cold as a burning tire in July, so updates will be soon and maybe even regular.

Set a Course for Justice

It was good to see Franklin back from Hotlanta relatively unscorched, but we'd only run into each other on a few social occasions and the case was going cold as pizza left overnight. We needed to act fast, no matter how good a day-old pizza sounded. Hastily, we met to talk about where things stood and where to go next. It was an overcast but still nice day, and as the office wasn't covered in bees, we set up shop.

"When all leads seem dead, start at the beginning" is the kind of advice I'd expect a mentor to give me, if we'd actually be trained by one. So, we went back to the articles we looked at on Day One and the maps from Day, uh, Several. We knew we needed a snitch, someone who knew the area well and knew the cases better. We pulled a name from the local paper and vowed to at least shoot him an e-mail. If we got a slant of some of scenes, that might also work as some kind of a lead; failing that, there was always the library, the archives or the Buttons.

While looking through our old materials, we came across a mention of a Real Estate fire. This was news to me, Franklin was blank on it as well. We noted it down, but as the night air cooled we gathered our things to head into the Waiting room to finish; preferring to be hard-boiled, not frozen. Something caught Franklin's attention, and he demanded to see the Surveillance photos we pulled. Taking a closer look, there were a few things we saw:

• This cat looks like he's fairly tall, in shape although not the most athletic chump, fairly dark hair, and what looks like muttonchops.
  
• He had a duffel bag, in which he could easily keep a gas can and a few matchbooks, as well as the hat he pulled out by the fourth photo.
• Putting the gas can in the bag, and either carrying or stuffing the tire in his bag, he wouldn't need to show up in a boiler at all. This, fits the profile we came up with.
• He wasn't wearing anything thicker than a t-shirt. After some quick digging on the weather, we crabbed that the weather couldn't've been more than the 23 to 37 degree range--he must have been cold.

There was one thing about the profile that Franklin needed to hear a second time: These kinds of perps usually use matches which they leave behind, or lighters which they take with them. He considered this for a minute.
"It has to be the book." He said. I looked at him quizzically for a moment, so he continued. "If the guy is lighting the tires with a lighter, it would take longer--which isn't easy with a lighter." He was right, the more I thought about it. Lighters would force him to get close to the tire and hold a flame on the gas for a while; A matchbook, he could light the whole thing and toss it into the tire before dusting.

There was one small thing that caught my eye, not as much a lead as a hunch. Looking at the difference between the first three scene photos, and the last one, there is a slight change in our guy. He stands taller and has a slight air of pride. I don't feel like he's congratulating himself on a job well done, my hunch is he's stepping back to see his latest work of art unfold. Franklin says he could see the confidence, but I don't think you could quote either of us on that second part.

A few days later, I tried to contact our egg at the paper. He got back to me, saying he couldn't comment but suggested trying the paper's archive or the library. It seemed that all signs pointed towards Boston Public Library.

The Night that Disappeared

Franklin here. More educated speculating (has a nice ring to it, right?) last night.

We were forced to use the back office again since the light's still out in the front. At least in the back the lighting was appropriately seedy. Fincher-esque, even. Armed with beers, we looked into a tip from Ninja Mahoney about the distance and chronological pattern of the fires. Noticed that there is somewhat of a counterclockwise motion - beginning at El Oriental de Cuba in July 2005, southward to the hair salon, then around and back to the autobody shop this past April. There are two anomalies, though - the perp hit the hair salon three times, and the Sigourney St. condos twice, once after lighting up a house on School St. The pattern is not linear, but the investigation provided us with a few insights and a few new questions:

1) There is likely a relationship between our firebug and the owner of the hair salon. Our hunch is that the perp is trying to punish them for some sort of continued behavior - also the case with the autobody shop. If the crimes are indeed racially motivated, he could simply be telling these people to close up, or else. This would explain why there were multiple attacks on the hair salon, which reopened each time. Same story with Sigourney St, a well-known site of a property dispute.

2) Assuming that these are all the work of one man and not any copycats, the firebug struck in '05, '06, '08 and '09. Where was he in '07? Cooling off in the hoosegow? Down and out in Paris and London?

3) The crime scenes make a radial pattern, suggesting that our man could be centrally located between them. The distance between sites indicates that a car had to have been used to transport the tires. We considered the possibility of his using a rental vehicle, but the specificity required by most rental organizations would be detrimental to one's alibi. This also brings up the question of a partner - does he have a wheelman?

We then thought about the hood himself, tried to stir up a profile of some sort. The one time he was caught on surveillance he appeared to fit the late 20s - mid 30s white male profile pretty well. We don't think he's striking at random. Specific motives means he's a JP resident, and has been since at least '05. Probably has his finger on the pulse of the community, but certainly isn't a good doctor. Not outspoken. Not interested in killing - or else he would've attacked the homes of the business owners. If you're going to go through the effort to bump someone off, you'd probably be willing to tail them home. As for the School and Sigourney St. sites, no one was injured in those fires. He just wants to get some sort of message across.

Towards the end of the conversation it started to get chilly in the office. We deduced that it was because the heat's broken. It'll probably stay that way. No one said this job has luxuries, and that no one was a dirty liar.

We share the office space with Dreads Mahoney and a shady figure named Tiny "Bling" Mahoney. While Turner and I made some more dead soldiers in the reception area, Dreads periodically contributed to our conversation, though she had some smut to write. All I can say is even our detecting skills can't figure out some of the choices Zack Snyder made in the Watchmen movie. Tiny lurked in late in the game and proffered up his maltese hookah. Knowing we might have to enlist his talents later, Turner and I kept on his good side and accepted. From there the evening vanished in a cloud of smoke.

I'm off to Atlanta to take care of some business (in the tune of a keg of beer and the Renaissance Festival). Turner has homework to do while I'm away, so keep your eyes peeled for the update. Then put some lotion on them so you can read it.

One For the Books

I was finishing up some dinner when someone rapped on the back door. It was of course Franklin with a book and some beer. Time was here to get down to some serious gumshoeing, and so we went out to the main office with some papers I'd drawn up for the occasion. A few seconds out there, we realized we were not alone: we had stumbled into a Battle of the Bees that can only be described as epic--in the Homeric tradition. One was hovering above the desk, dripping a strange liquid, another hiding out in the gutter, somewhere beyond the porch there was a third. Franklin and I made a clean sneak and decided the back office might be better.

Setting up the deck office chairs, we got to work; a cool breeze blowing the cigar smoke away from us while we talked shop. There is an arsonist still at large in Jamaica Plain, having hit five scenes since December. I came to the discussion with some notes, and here's what I figured:

1. All of these cases have the same MO: a gasoline-soaked tire starts the blaze.
   
2. One of the locations (which was hit twice) had an ongoing housing dispute.
3. Slices of toast are terrible witnesses, but make an excellent breakfast. Interrogated one for seemingly obvious connection, knew nothing. Sent downtown on unrelated charges.
   

Seemed to me a possible angle was vigilantism: someone was tracking down social issues and making a thing of them; although I wasn't convinced they'd put the curse on anyone--thinking instead the object was the message and the damage. Franklin's gut told him there was something else, and he tossed in a racial motive. At first, I wasn't sold, but we kept it on the table.

We started by filling in a map of the fire locations over some brews. I had one printed from Google which covered the area I thought most of them were. Using local sources, we painted a picture of a neighborhood in flames.

Local Sources:

• Jamaica Plain Gazette
• Another from the Gazette
  
• Boston.com
• Universal Hub
• The Metro
  (this is the article that started the whole thing)

We quickly realized that this has been going on for a lot longer than the past six months. Some quick research turned up some more:

• March '06
  
• August '06

Clearly, this was a little bigger than we expected, and I was starting to buy into the race theory. Most of the names mentioned in the articles were of Hispanic origin, all of them were those affected by these fires. One that seemed like the anomaly was the original fire at Maria's Salon, which had a different MO than the others. Our theory, assuming that these are not copycats, is that the original arson was a sort of experiment for our boy, and that the tires were a later addition--some might say an evolution.

We felt it was a good moment to take a break for some real hard vice. So we went through a half dozen vegan peanut butter cookies I'd baked the night before.
That's when a beep sounded from Franklin's pocket, and he spent a few minutes on the horn with his dame while I filled in the calendar with some dates. Despite misreading one of the Franklin's notes on the map, I did notice a pattern develop over the last few months. With the exception of March, there has been at least one fire every month since December. Which means three things:

• Something set him off, what Forensic Shrinks refer to as a "Stresser"
• Something stopped him in March.
• The Boys in Red have been kept busy.

Not that the last note helps at all, but the Firefighters deserve credit.

There was a moment of panic when I smelled burning, and we thought that the arsonist had already tracked us here, to our office. Then I remembered we were still smoking cigars--those things'll kill you.

One other angle we needed to explore was where he was getting these tires from, and how he was transporting them. If he is getting them from a junkyard, which junkyard? My initial take on the Auto Body Shop was that it was an anomaly and he used it to restock on tires--however, uncovering the other articles proved that the houses were the anomalies. So the big questions we were left with were:

• Where was he getting the tires, and how was he lugging them?
• What is the connection? If it is race, how was he choosing targets?
  

Having reached what we felt was a suitable place for the evening, we threw back another few beers and talked for a while. We tried to figure out if Boston was surprisingly grungy for a clean city, or if it was the other way around. As night fell on the city, the chick next door started an art project--she called up to us once about how we looked like we drank from the same bottle; we told her that this is because we're partners, in solving crime. Then we headed into the waiting room for some research on race relations: Die Hard With a Vengeance.