Private Vegas (Private 9)

Ten minutes ago, Kelli Preston, head of the city lab’s arson division, forwarded him reports on a firebombed Dodge Charger that might be connected to Jack’s Lamborghini as well as to the Aston Martin and the other five cars.

Preston thought that the Charger was very likely the first in the series, possibly the learning model.

The photo on Sci’s center screen showed the blackened Charger chassis with its signature split-crosshair grille that had somehow survived incineration. The scene was a Ralphs supermarket parking lot, and the time of the explosion was 2:23 in the a.m.

The city’s deputy arson investigator had concluded that the fire was started under the left front side of the undercarriage and that there was a chemical explosive in the gas tank, a substance that the LAPD database didn’t recognize.

Preston’s note to Sci said Off the record, the LAPD closed the case on this because it was random and no one was hurt. The owner of the vehicle collected his insurance payout, and Allstate didn’t raise any questions.

Preston told Sci that the LAPD investigated the next four firebombs, but it had been a back-burner case until Maeve Wilkinson died.

Preston wrote, Let me know if you find anything that could help us, Sci. I’ll do the same for you.

Sci sent Preston a reply, then looked again at the report from the chemical screen of the Charger’s gas tank. He knew that the explosive was the same unnamed chemical he’d found in Jack’s Lambo. The vehicle had been registered to Peter Tong, a science teacher at a very tony private school: Our Lady of the Pacific.

Sci fed Tong’s name into his browser and got a hit on RateMyTeacher.com. This was a website students used to flame their teachers and occasionally praise them.

Peter Tong had about twenty reviews, and most of them were vile, defamatory, and anonymous.

Tong was described as a “diabolical hard-ass who liked to flunk kids just because.” Another student complained that Tong was “a sadist who did unnecessary experiments on lab animals and insects. In fact, he calls us ‘the insect population.’”

Sci knew that arsonists had various motivations: rage, revenge, the thrill, and, of course, the insurance money. He organized the Tong data into a single file and included it in his note to Justine.

Justine, see attached. Also, Tong collected ten grand in insurance money. We could be looking at a killer. Be careful.

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 psycho

path. 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?”