Where There's Smoke полностью

“Thanks,” O’Neil said. As we started down the em­bankment again, he turned to me and said, “This stinks.” He was right. It stank to high heaven. Coop was already down at the bus, going through the interior. He’d found the car’s registration in the glove compartment, and he handed it to O’Neil now. The registration was made out to Arthur J. Wylie at 574 Waverly Street. The key was still in the ignition. There were several other keys on the chain. Two of them looked like house keys.

“I’ll bet these fit the Waverly Street apartment,” O’Neil said. He put the keys in an envelope, and then went into the rear section of the bus, where he found several charred remnants of what had once been a blue rug. The scraps were almost threadbare. One of them had a dark-brown stain on it.

“Blood?” Coop said.                                         ^!

“Maybe,” O’Neil said. “The lab’ll tell us.” He tagged the scraps and put them in a large manila envelope. Then he turned to me and again said, “What do you think?”

“I think you’re right about the absence of skid marks or broken glass,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said, and nodded. “There’re a few other things that bother me, too.”

“Like what?” Coop said.

“The burns. The M.E. said they were fourth-degree burns. On the face, the hands, and the front of the torso. Typical in an explosion. But the gas tank’s in the rear of a Volkswagen bus. If the tank exploded behind Wylie, how’d he get the worst burns on the front of his body? Pa­trolman up there says only the front of the bus was on fire when he came down here with the extinguisher. The tank blew after he went back up the bill.”

Coop was silent, thinking. I let them work it out to­gether. I had no desire to step on O’Neil’s toes. He was young, and not too experienced, but he was smart as hell, and he was covering all the bases.

“What’s your guess?” Coop asked him.

“I think somebody doused the driver’s seat and the dri­ver with gasoline,” O’Neil said. “Or some other volatile liquid, it doesn’t matter. That bus was pushed over the embankment. When it hit the rocks down there, it exploded. Then the tank went up later.”

“Benny?” Coop said.

“I think he’s right.”

“But you know what else bothers me?” O’Neil said. “If the guy wanted an explosion, how could he be sure he was going to get one? Even if he closed all the windows, how could he have known all that enclosed vapor would blow?”

“Maybe he just tossed a match in before he shoved the bus over,” Coop said.

“Yeah, but that would’ve given him a fire, not an ex­plosion. I’ve seen cars roll over a dozen times and not ex­plode.” He shook his head. “Well, however he did it, he damn well did it. This was no accident. Somebody killed Wylie.” He was pleased with his deduction. So far, he had answers to the When, Where, Who, and What of NEOTWY. He was only partially sure of the How, but he was wondering about the same thing that bothered me: How could the man have been certain he’d get an explo­sion? And, of course, he still didn’t know Why. I decided to risk helping him.

“I don’t think it was Wylie behind that wheel,” I said.

Neither he nor Coop looked terribly surprised. The idea I’d expressed had not occurred to them before this moment, but they didn’t grimace in derision, or exchange smiles or glances or winks. Even though the bus had been loaded with all sorts of identification, they knew the body had been incinerated beyond recognition, and so they waited for me to elaborate.

“Can you get Hiller’s dental chart?” I said.

“Hiller?” Coop said.

“The corpse Wylie swiped last night,” O’Neil ex­plained. He was silent for a moment. Then he said, “Yeah, his dental chart. Yeah.” He shook his head. “I’ve been going nuts trying to figure out why anyone would want to steal a dead body.”

Coop was a little slower to follow the line of reasoning. When he caught on, he said, “Oh, I get it.” His voice sounded almost childlike. “I’ll be damned,” he said, and he, too, shook his head.

O’Neil suddenly thought of something. “Jesus,” he said, “the fire didn’t ruin his teeth, did it?”

“No,” I said. “The M.E. told me they’re okay.”

“Good,” O’Neil said. He sounded enormously re­lieved. Teeth are as good as fingerprints when it comes to positive identification. All he had to do now was compare Hiller’s dental chart with the teeth in the head of the in­cinerated corpse. That wouldn’t tell him where the real Arthur Wylie was, but at least he’d then be certain his killer was still on the loose. “I want to get moving on this,” he said. “Smoke,” he said, and hesitated, and then awkwardly stuck out his hand. “Thanks.”

He seemed very happy as we started the climb to the road. I did not tell him how depressed I was. There are some things employees of the Police Department simply do not understand.