The Silver Bullet

With Franklin out of town, I knew that if I didn't get some work on this case, it would grow cold. Cold like the pizza I kept in the fridge overnight. So, I started with some quick research on Forensic Psychology--a few episodes of Criminal Minds I'd been saving--not sure if it was paranoia the research was inflicting or that Lady Luck just gave me a good hand that day, but I found myself on Google Maps again scouring it like a madman. I had something here: Gas stations. If he's using tires and gasoline to make fire, then he is getting them from somewhere. You have to ask yourself, how easy is it to get your mitts these things? All it takes to get a can of gas is a can and a gas station: pull your heap into the station, put the can on the ground and you got a few gallons of 85. Tires, you can probably get, no questions asked, from an auto body or tire store: just say you're putting 'em on yourself (obviously not on yourself, but by yourself maybe).

So where are there gas stations and auto body shops in the Plain? I kicked myself for letting Franklin take the notes and the map when I saw him last, so I noted some down to add later. I was going to hang with Books Mahoney later that evening, and she would be able to return the map. Books, Mix Mahoney and I spent the evening working on another case: Who at Fox Studios was so determined to see the X-Men series fail? Who profits? What happened to Shatner in Abrams' Star Trek?

In the cold light of morning, I went back to the maps. I drew the gas stations in red--maybe a poor choice--and the tire or auto body shops in green. Adding them to the map, I got this:

I then noticed something interesting and circled it: There is a gas station and an auto body shop right next to each other. A pump stand called Hatoff's and a garage that goes by CarStar--according to Google. Convenient location if our boy was in a hurry, isn't it. That's when something else hit me like an idiot's car door into a biker: He was in a hurry on one occasion, wasn't he?

He was hitting places regular for a few months and then stopped, but there was one exception: January 28, Maria's Salon. If you took that one out, it would almost seem like clockwork, hitting towards the beginning of the month in December (the 11th), January (the 6th) and February (the 7th). Which means maybe something got him a little jingle-brained on before the 28th.

He'd have to be on the swift to rush a plan together, and maybe that means he'd have to swing by the corner of Washington and Rockvale, which looks like his personal shopping mall from where I'm sitting. If I've got the right slant on this: Between the 7th and the 28th, he must have heard something about Maria's that set him off, and must have started planning then--The one-a-month thing seemed to be working out for him otherwise.

Something caught my eye then, and I marked a small X on the map. The spot I circled was about the same distance from that point as all of our scenes seemed to be. Odds are that our meat lives near there: he'd probably have a base of operations there he could be at day or night, like maybe his house. I thought maybe he'd take a day off work in that few weeks, but I don't know about that. I also don't know what he took a month off in March. Maybe he thought the heat was on, waited for it to cool? What I do know is that to stay ahead of the buttons, he'd have to be smart and organized. My hunch is, he would plan this out. If we're right, he's been at this a while.

What else I know is that I could go for a sandwich. Later, chumps.

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.