Free The Perfect Crime by Les Edgerton Page A

away. See, when sodium hits water, it explodes. There’s water in coffee. And booze. Both. Either way, whatever, sodium just fucking explodes. Which it did. Twenty minutes out on the Mad River--wham! She mixes a drink and half her head goes bye-bye and the boat goes up like the homecoming bonfire. That’s Ideal’s plan as it turns out. Boroni picks an argument with her. Knocks her around some to show he’s pissed. Asshole knows what she’ll do, knows she’ll go jump on that boat, go out on the river and get shit-faced on coffee la-las, whatever you call that concoction. She did it all the time. Friends said it was a regular thing. Lots of yelling and screaming and then she’d go hightailing it for the boat, take off the whole afternoon and come back so ripped she didn’t know her name. Her friends said it was a shame how he drove her to drink. He doped it all out, the cunning bastard. Soaked charcoal starter fluid into all the woodwork. Really laid it in. Stunk to high heaven, but he figured, and rightly so as it turned out, she’d be so snockered she wouldn’t notice. Figured when the stuff blew up, the boat would burn and sink and they’d figure it was another boating accident. His luck wasn’t so good though. The boat didn’t burn enough and didn’t sink. He shoulda checked the weather forecast. It called for thunderstorms that day.”
    “So how’d your brother figure that out?”
    “He was with me when the call came in for Arson and Bombs so I asked him to come along. He could always tell more about a crime scene in ten seconds than the lab whizzes could in ten days with their microscopes and college educations. He doped the whole thing out in ten minutes flat. Not that they wouldn’t have sooner or later, but we gained the time we’da lost waiting on the scientists. Good thing, too. Boroni was on the plane that was warming up on the runway. Heading to Eleuthera. If he’d gotten away he might not have collected the insurance money, but it would have been a bitch getting him back to stand trial. You know how many little fucking nitwit islands there are down there?”
    “So, I ask you again...how’d he figure it out?”
    “Easy. From fishing with our grandfather.”
    “You lost me, Fogarty.”
    Grady reached in his pocket and got out a stick of gum, taking his time to unwrap it. The corners of his mouth turned up. “Our grandfather used to take him fishing when he was a kid. Only grandpa didn’t use worms. This was a serious fisherman, never mounted a damn thing, never threw a single fish away in his life.” Grady paused, remembering, and continued.
    “Grandpa used sodium. Sometimes magnesium or cesium, they both do the same thing I guess, the way Grandpa explained it. Quicklime works too. They all explode when combined with water only sodium has the best explosion. Grandpa would fill up a stone jug with the stuff and cork it. Put two strings on it. One to lower the jug into the lake and the other hooked around the cork. When the jug hit the bottom, he pulled the cork. The jug goes kaboom and you get your limit. Ten other people’s limits, too. You row around and pick ‘em up, throw ‘em in the boat, bass, bluegills, walleyes, fucking catfish. Your fishing trip is over. You go home and drink beer. Fuck, turtles. He’d get fucking turtlesand eels, crap like that. Takes all the hard work out of fishing. That’s what he always said. Anyway, that’s how Jack knew what the guy used. Actually, he didn’t know that right away. He got suspicious when he smelled the starter fluid. It was pretty strong. I smelled it too and so did every other shield on the boat, but I didn’t make any connections. We figured she was probably barbecuing something. I didn’t connect the smell, but then Jack spent a lot more time with Grandpa than I did. Time I was old enough, Grandpa was pretty sick. I only went a couple of times. Jack went fishing with him every weekend when he was a kid.”
    “So what put Jack