Bread (87th Precinct) Read Online Free PDF

told his Castleview friend to go ahead and set fire to his brother, and hung up. Naturally, the man didn’t do it. But there were many nuts in the city for which Carella worked, and not all of them were in the Police Department, and he was sure that none of them had set Grimm’s fires.
    Grimm’s warehouse was on Clinton Street and Avenue L, adjacent to the waterfront docks on the River Harb. The building was made of red brick, four stories high, with a padlocked cyclone fence running completely around it. A manin his sixties, wearing a watchman’s uniform, pistol holstered at his side, was standing inside the gate as Carella pulled up in his Chevy sedan. Carella showed him his police shield, and the man took a key from a ring on his belt and unlocked the gate for him.
    “You with the 87th Squad?” he asked.
    “Yes,” Carella said.
    “Because they’ve already been here, you know.”
    “Yes, I know that,” Carella said. “I’m Detective Carella, who are you?”
    “Frank Reardon,” he said.
    “Do you know the men who were on duty the night of the fire, Mr. Reardon?”
    “Yep. Jim Lockhart and Lenny Barnes. I know them.”
    “Have you seen them since?”
    “See them every night. They relieve me every night at eight o’clock on the dot.”
    “They mention anything about what happened?”
    “Only that somebody doped them up. Wha’d you want to look at first, Mr. Carella?”
    “The basement.”
    Reardon locked the gate behind them, and then led Carella across a cobblestoned courtyard to a metal fire door on the side of the building. He unlocked the door with a key from the ring on his belt, and they went inside. After the bright sunlight outdoors, the small hallway they entered seemed much dimmer than it really was. Carella followed Reardon down a dark flight of stairs that terminated abruptly in a basement still flooded with water from the broken main. Half a dozen drowned rats were floating near the furnace. The shattered pipe was one of those huge, near-indestructible cast-iron jobs. It seemed evident to Carella that the arsonist had used an explosive charge on it. It also seemed evidentthat he had not set his fire in the basement of the building, it being difficult for fires to burn underwater.
    “Want to take a little swim?” Reardon asked, and cackled unexpectedly.
    “Let’s take a look upstairs, okay?”
    “Nothing to see up there,” Reardon said. “Fire done a pretty good job.”
    The fire had indeed done a pretty good job, nor was it difficult to understand how $500,000 worth of miniature wooden rabbits, puppy dogs, and pussycats had provided excellent tinder for a blaze of monumental proportions. The mess underfoot was a combination of waterlogged ashes and charcoal, with here and there a recognizable head, tail, or paw. The crates had probably been piled on metal tables, the scorched and twisted remnants of which had been shoved aside or thrown over by the firemen in their efforts to quench the flames. Hanging light fixtures with metal shades, their bulbs shattered by the heat, were spaced evenly across the high ceiling of the room. One of these fixtures caught Carella’s attention because a fire-frayed length of electrical wire was dangling from its bulb socket. He pulled a table over and climbed onto it. The length of wire was an extension cord equipped with a fitting that screwed into the socket ordinarily occupied by the bulb. The hanging wire had been burned short by the fire, but it was reasonable to assume it had once been long enough to reach from the fixture down to one of the tables.
    Carella frowned.
    He frowned because Andy Parker was supposed to be a cop, and cops are supposed to know that most criminal fires are not started with matches; since the whole idea of arson is to be far away from the place when it bursts into flame, such instant ignition is impractical and dangerous. Parker had mentioned that he’d conducted a thorough search for wicks, fuses, mechanicaldevices,