person or persons heading north, up I-95.”
“What time frame are we dealing with here?” Winfield asked. It surprised him that, after listening to Maloney for only a few seconds, he adopted his military-sounding speech pattern.
“Each local incident has been a day or two apart for the space of approximately a week or so. The time between local incidents seems to vary between two and three weeks. My gut feeling is that whoever is doing this is travelling on foot or hitchhiking. Anyone travelling in a car would be too noticeable. They’d be in the local area too long.”
“But you’ve had no reports of any arson north of Portland recently, correct? Nothing around Augusta or Bangor?”
“Affirmative.”
Winfield nodded and, glancing up at the ceiling, blinked his eyes rapidly. The Visine was starting to work now, and the small dots on the overhead acoustic tiles no longer blurred together. The caffeine from Kellerman’s was finally starting to kick in, too, so he was actually beginning to think he might make it through the day without falling asleep over lunch.
“Look Sergeant Winfield, I have a call on the other line. I appreciate your call and any help you can give me.”
“Sure,” Winfield said, but before he could say goodbye, Maloney’s line went dead.
Winfield hung up the phone and, looking down at his desk, realized for the first time that he had been doodling on the telex the whole time he had been talking to Maloney. A faint smile curled his upper lip as he looked down at the face he had drawn at the bottom of the page, but he also felt slightly unsettled as he studied his drawing. On top of a smooth, rounded, rather sexless-looking face, a shock of thick, long hair streamed out in all directions. It took him a moment to realize that the hair looked, really, more like a raging fire than hair. The mouth he had drawn was open in a large oval that might have been a scream, but what unnerved him most of all were the eyes he had drawn, round, blank circles, opened wide with what?
Surprise?… Pain?… Fear?
In the middle of the message from Maloney in Westbrook, he had also underlined the phrase “clusters of suspicious fires” with heavy, dark lines. So heavy, in fact, his pen point had worn right through the paper and marked his ink blotter.
“Burn, baby, burn,” he whispered as he pushed his chair back with the backs of his legs and stood up. He clicked his pen shut, not even remembering when he took it from his pocket to begin doodling, and replaced it in his shirt pocket. Shaking his head as though waking up from a nap, he went down the corridor to the front desk.
“Any calls today?” he asked Pam, whose fingers still flew over the typewriter keyboard as though they had a mind of their own.
Pam shook her head and continued with her work.
“I guess I’ll take a swing through town,” Winfield said. “Maybe drive out by Higgins’ farm and see if he’s started harvesting yet. He’s usually the first.”
Pam nodded and kept typing.
“I won’t be far from the radio,” he said. He was just turning to go when the teletype beside Pam’s desk suddenly chattered into life. Between that sound and Pam’s typing, Winfield began to understand, maybe, why Pam was so anti-social. Fifteen years of that much noise was as bad as working with a drop-hammer in an iron forge.
The teletype finished its brief flurry of activity and then fell silent. When Pam made no move to tear off the bulletin and give it to him, Winfield came around the side of the desk and got it for himself. He read it quickly and then left it on the desk for Pam to file later. It was nothing important, just a File-13 on an assault and motor vehicle left in Holden early that morning:
BE ON THE LOOKOUT FOR A RUST-RED 1967 FORD PICKUP. ASSAILANT OR ASSAILANTS UNKNOWN BUT CONSIDERED DANGEROUS ANY DEPT. HAVING INFO. PLS CONTACT:
SGT. MCCORMICK
HOLDEN 29 AUG 08:27
Winfield went out into the parking lot and got into
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