Chapter 72
JUST BELOW THE edge of the highway, waves charged into rocks and exploded into foam. Sunshine beat down on the asphalt, making the air shimmer. You could almost see across the ocean to Japan, the day was that clear and brilliant. Justine barely noticed.
As Scotty drove the fleet car, Justine used her phone to confirm their appointment at Our Lady of the Pacific High School. They would be questioning Mr. Peter Tong, the head of the science department, a man Father Brooks had described as ordinary with “nothing radical or Fringe Division” about him.
Justine was pretty sure that the headmaster was wrong.
Tong’s car had been firebombed, and the explosive was an unknown chemical that had been packed into a condom, stuffed into the gas tank, and set off with a time-delay incendiary charge.
Peter Tong was a chemist, a science teacher who worked in the same general location as the bombed cars. One of those cars was his.
Was he a victim? Or, as Sci suspected, a serial arsonist who had just made a fatal error?
Justine replied to the text from Mr. Tong, saying they would be arriving within the next ten minutes, then put her phone away.
Scotty said, “So, tell me about your interview with John Leonard Orr.”
“Mmm. Okay. Well, it was about ten years ago. I had just started working at the Santa Monica psychiatric facility,” Justine said. “I asked to see Orr, and he said okay.”
“So, what was he like?”
Justine told Scotty all she knew. That John Orr had been a fire chief in Glendale, California, during a very long and devastating spate of fires that over the course of nine years had consumed sixty-five homes, acres of woodlands, and numerous retail stores and had killed four people, one of them a three-year-old boy.
Orr used a dirt-cheap and ridiculously simple time-delay incendiary device so that by the time the fire blazed, he was long gone. Often he had gone to another fire just a few miles down the road, where he assumed his job as fire chief, an excellent cover, a brilliant alibi.
After literally thousands of fires, Orr’s fingerprint was lifted from one of his time-delay devices, and that’s how he was convicted and imprisoned for life plus twenty.
Justine said to Scotty, “When I met him, I was a kid with a PhD and a new job. He’s a psychopath. I got nothing out of him except what he wanted me to believe: that he had been a terrific public servant and that he’d been framed. You know what, Scotty? Even in an orange jumpsuit and cuffs, he looked very nice, very ordinary.”
“Why is it that psychos can be so beguiling?”
“Because there’s a big hole in their brains where most people have a conscience. Orr doesn’t give a crap about the damage to life and property he caused.”
“Do serial arsonists always work alone?”
“No. Not always.”
Scotty pulled the car into the teachers’ lot, set the brake, and said, “Those reviews on Tong. While most of the kids who rated him hated him, he has some fans, maybe even acolytes. We don’t know how many people were involved in setting those firebombs, but two at least, right, Justine? One to drive the car, one to jimmy the tank door open, stuff in the explosive, and set the device.”
“Yes. Scotty, you read the review on Tong from the kid who calls himself Zero Sum?”
“Yeah,” Scotty said. “‘Tong is very dark and powerful in a great and exciting way.’”
“Let’s see if Mr. Tong lives up to his reviews,” said Justine.