Rogue Island Read Free

editions, studied the AP state wire, and scanned the five small competing Rhode Island dailies, you’d have to walk up to his desk and ask him what he was talking about. And he would give you that look. The one that meant you ought to consider opportunities in retailing.
    I logged on and found this waiting for me:
    D OG STORY. T ODAY. N O MORE EXCUSES.
    I messaged Lomax back and got an immediate reply:
    C AN WE TALK ABOUT THIS?
    N O.
    I stood and caught his eye sixty feet across the newsroom. I smiled. He didn’t. I shrugged on my brown leather bomber jacket and headed for Secretariat, my eight-year-old Ford Bronco parked at a fifteen-minute meter in front of the newspaper building. It had been sleeting, and the yellow parking ticket tucked under my wiper blade was sopping. I peeled it off the glass and slapped it on the windshield of the publisher’s BMW, parked unticketed at an expired meter. It was a trick I’d picked up from the hero of a Loren D. Estleman detective novel, and I’d been using it for years now. The publisher just tossed the tickets at his secretary to be paid with company money. The secretary noticed the tickets were mine right off—but she’s my cousin.
    The dog story was waiting for me in the Silver Lake section of the city, just a few miles west of downtown. I decided to go east instead, sloshing on foot across Kennedy Plaza toward an old red-brick office building on the other side of the Providence River.
    By the time I got there, my Reeboks were full of slush. I wasted ten minutes watching a secretary flash her thighs and waiting for feeling to return to my toes before I was waved through to the fire insurance investigator’s cluttered inner office. Autographed photos of Providence College basketball greats lined the cream-colored walls. Billy Donovan, Marvin Barnes, Ernie DiGregorio, Kevin Stacom, Joey Hassett, John Thompson, Jimmy Walker, Lenny Wilkins, Ray Flynn, and my old teammate, Brady Coyle. No Mulligan. Benchwarmers didn’t rate.
    I’d met Bruce McCracken back in the days when he was a skinny kid trying to find himself, and I was a skinnier kid with dreams of being the next Edward R. Murrow. We’d taken a couple of journalism classes together at the little Dominican college before he decided the First Amendment was for suckers. Lately he’d become a gym rat, and he proved it with a crushing handshake. New muscles strained the seams of his blue Sears blazer.
    â€œWhat do you think we’re dealing with?” I asked, wiggling my numb fingers.
    â€œWell, it’s more than just a run of bad luck,” he said.
    â€œI gather you talked to Polecki.”
    â€œAnd his ventriloquist dummy. I swear, when Roselli talks I can see Polecki’s mouth move. I can’t decide if they’re totally incompetent or if they just enjoy being assholes.”
    â€œThe choices are not mutually exclusive,” I said.
    McCracken grinned. Even his teeth had muscles.
    â€œWe wrote policies on three of the Mount Hope houses,” he said. “The claims total more than seven hundred grand, so naturally we’re interested. Polecki gave me copies of his files on all nine fires. He’s happy to have me do his work for him. Can’t say I mind if you do mine for me.”
    He shoved a stack of manila folders to the edge of his desk.
    â€œJust don’t take them from the office. And no, you can’t make copies.”
    I flipped through the nine files and set aside two cases that were not labeled “arson” or “suspicious origin.” Then I settled down with the rest. Method of entry varied, but not by much. Sometimes the torch had gone in through the bulkhead, snapping off the padlock with a bolt cutter. More often he’d just kicked in a cellar window. Each fire had started in the basement, which is where I’d whip out the Zippo if I wanted to burn a house down. Even I knew fire spreads upward. Each fire had at