Narrows things down.”
“Any fingerprints?”
“Hundreds. The souvenir shop did a brisk business in shells, suntan lotion, and Florida T-shirts. You know the kind of place: Visa-card heaven for tourists.”
“How about at the restaurant where Chipper died?”
“Nothing to fix on there, either. Guy walks in with a small scuba diver’s air tank; not so unusual that near the ocean. Whoosh! and two people are dead. Nobody notices him going in or out from the street, or if they do they don’t pay particular attention to him. Except . . .”
Carver felt his heartbeat accelerate; he leaned forward, bracing himself with a hand on his extended stiff leg. He knew Desoto, knew he had something.
“Not a thing on the restaurant killings,” Desoto said, “but a couple of people at the murder in Pompano Beach say they saw a car leaving the area about that time, driving fast. A navy blue, late-model Ford with a white roof and a bashed-in right front fender, they think. They’re not sure. Nobody’s sure of anything yet. Maybe nobody should ever be sure of anything.”
Carver ignored Desoto’s musings. At times the lieutenant could be too philosophical for a cop. It grated.
“There might be no connection here, Carver. Coincidence. But then, coincidence is a policeman’s friend and enemy.”
“What style Ford?”
“Big. The regular sedan, judging by the scanty description. Nobody noticed its plate numbers.”
Carver sat still and thought about that. From outside the office came the faint staccato undercurrent of a dispatcher’s voice directing units to various reported crimes, reminding Carver of when he started on the force as a patrol-car officer. His future had seemed clearly charted then, before his life underwent a series of abrupt and tragic changes of direction. The divorce, the bullet, and now this. A bad stretch, all right.
“What about the lab report on whatever was used as flammable material?” he asked.
“As near as they can tell so far, it was a naphtha cleaning solvent, probably jetted by compressed air or propane. That’s a petroleum product, amigo, and this one was turned to a thick, sticky consistency with the addition of chemicals.”
“What kind of chemicals?”
Desoto rooted through some papers on his cluttered desk, singled out one, and said, “Aluminum soaps, is what it says here. Added to a liquid hydrocarbon—that’s the naphtha.”
“Aluminum soaps. That’s what they add to gasoline to make napalm.”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“Nobody sells something like that in a diver’s oxygen tank,” Carver said. “Or in a propane tank.”
“No, but it would be possible to fill part of a reusable tank with the naphtha mixture, then take it somewhere and have the propane pumped in without anyone suspecting. Or somebody with rudimentary knowledge—say, a scuba diver—could transfer the propane or oxygen from another tank to supply the propellant. We figure an ordinary welder’s igniter was used to create the spark. The guy could twist the valve, snap the igniter for fire, all in about two seconds. Presto! Flamethrower.”
“Christ!” Carver said.
“Scary, eh?” Desoto said. “And sick. We’re running checks to find area people with histories of mental illness that might conceivably result in that sort of action.”
“How long will that take?”
“Not long. The computer can be a marvelous tool as well as a pain in the ass.”
“You’ll keep me tuned in on this?”
“I don’t want to, Carver, because you’re my friend. But I will, because you’re my friend. Life is complicated; something for you to remember.”
“Sometimes life can be simple,” Carver said. “Sometimes knowing what you need to do is easy.”
“Or seems that way.”
“I need the names of the witnesses in the Pompano Beach souvenir shop,” Carver said.
Reluctantly, Desoto jotted the information on a sheet of memo paper and handed it to Carver. “A man and his wife,” he said, “Jerry