by Nora Roberts
When she approached Brendan Avenue, she slowed, eyes tracking. You’ll know it when you see it. She recalled his voice.
And her heart gave one hard skip when she did.
“Shit, shit.” She grabbed her phone, hit 911. “This is Detective Catarina Hale, badge number 45391. I’m reporting a fire in progress, 2800 Brendan Avenue. Shrine of the Little Flower Elementary School. On visual, the fire is fully engaged. Notify the fire and police departments. Possible arson.”
She whipped to the curb. “Stay in the car,” she ordered Bo, then grabbed a flashlight. She jumped out, speed dialing O’Donnell. “We got one burning,” she said without preamble, and called out the address and she dashed to the building. “He called to tell me about it. I’m on scene. I told you to stay in the car,” she snapped at Bo.
“Obviously my answer was no. Are there people in there?”
“No one should be, but that doesn’t mean it’s empty.” She shoved her phone in her pocket, drew her weapon as she moved toward the wide, ground-level doors.
His message was spray painted over them in gleaming, bloody red.
SURPRISE!
“Son of a bitch. Keep behind me, Bo. I mean it. Don’t think with your dick. Remember who’s got the gun.” She reached for the door, pulled, then shoved. “Locked.”
She debated. She could leave him here, exposed, or take him with her while she circled the building. “Stay close,” she commanded. And heard the first sirens as she rounded the building. She found the broken window. Through it, she saw the fire was streaming through a classroom, eating desks, crawling up walls and out into the hallway.
“You’re not going in there.”
She shook her head. No, not without gear. But she could see, the point of origin was right there, and trailers were set—crumpled waxed paper maybe—to lead out into the hall, across to other classrooms. She could smell gasoline, and see rivers of it still gleaming on the floor.
Was he watching?
She stepped back to scan and study the neighboring buildings, and something crunched under her foot. She shone her light down, then crouched.
Her fingers itched, but she didn’t touch what she saw was a box of wooden matches. And her heart thudded into her throat when she shone her light and saw the familiar Sirico’s logo. “Do me a favor. In the trunk of my car there’s a kit, evidence bags inside. I need one.”
“You’re not going in,” he repeated.
“No. I’m not going in.”
She stayed where she was, considering the matches, then raising her eyes to scan the area. Okay, he knew her, wanted to be sure she understood that.
Did he have the need to be close, to watch the burn?
People were starting to come out now, and cars were stopping. Excited voices swept through the air, and the distant scream of sirens pierced it.
When Bo brought her a bag, she scooped the matchbox into it and sealed it.
“We wait.” She hurried back to the front, hooked her badge on her waistband and began to order the gathering crowd to stay back.
“What can I do?” Bo asked her.
“Keep out of the way,” she began, and locked the evidence bag in her car. “I’m going to need to fill in the unit chief when he gets here. You’ve got a good eye. Pay attention to the gawkers. If you see anybody who seems too interested I want to know about it. He’ll be an adult male. He’ll be alone. He’ll be watching me as much as the fire. Can you do that?”
“Yeah.”
He’d never seen a response before, not outside of movies. Everything moved so fast, with so much color and sound and movement. Like some sort of strange sporting event, Bo thought as the trucks rolled up and firefighters leaped into action.
It made him think of the game they’d seen that evening. That same kind of intense and focused teamwork. But instead of bats and balls there were hoses and axes, oxygen tanks and masks.
These were the people who ran toward fire while the rest of the world ran from it. With helmets gleaming in the flashing lights, they walked into the smoke and the heat.
While he watched, firefighters in turnout gear broke down the door and walked inside while teammates soaked the building with great arcs of water from the hoses.
Responding police moved quickly to set up barricades, to keep the gathering crowd behind them. As Reena had asked, he studied faces, tried to find the type she was looking for. He saw flames reflected in wide, stunned eyes, the ripple of red and gold shimmering on skin, and imagined he looked very much the same. There were couples and loners, families with children in their arms, in nightclothes, in bare feet. More fully dressed who poured out of cars that stopped up and down the block.
Admittance free, he thought and glanced back at the building. And it was a hell of a show.
Fire shot out through the roof, quickening towers of it, flaming gold in the dense roll of smoke. The smell of it stung his eyes, and ash began to dance in the air. White water, geysers of it, spewed out, slashing the building with such force he wondered the structure could stand against it.
He heard the sound of breaking glass and looked up to see the jagged shower of it as a window exploded. Someone in the crowd screamed.
Even where he stood he could feel the press of heat. How did they stand it? he wondered. The force of it, the blinding storm and stench of the smoke.
Ladders rose, the men on them like flags, the hoses hefty streamers that gushed more water.
A man cut through the crowd. Bo stepped forward, ready to act—he wasn’t sure how—then saw the flash of a badge, the nods of acknowledgment from cops, from firefighters. Big guy, Bo noticed, broad shoulders, wide belly, grim Irish face. He moved straight to Reena.
O’Donnell, Bo decided, and relaxed fractionally.
He might have stayed that way, but he saw the man helping Reena into gear. He pushed through the crowd, was already shoving at the barricade when uniformed cops held him back.
“Reena. Goddamn it!”
She glanced in his direction as she hefted on tanks. He could see the irritation ripple over her face, but she spoke to her partner. He stepped away, moved over to the barricade. “He’s with us,” he said briefly. “Goodnight? I’m O’Donnell.”
“Yeah, fine. What the hell’s she doing? What the hell are you doing?” he demanded of Reena, his eyes narrowed now against the fog of smoke.
“Going in. I’m trained for this.” She adjusted her helmet.
“Pretty good smoke eater for a cop,” one of the firefighters commented, and she smiled at him.
“Sweet talker. I’ll explain later. I’ve got to move.”
Before Bo could make another protest, O’Donnell slapped a hand on his shoulder. “Knows what she’s doing,” he said, lifting his chin toward Reena as she headed toward the building with two others. “She’s qualified for this.”
“So are the dozen or so of these guys already in there. What’s the point?”
“Arson’s the point.” Smoke rolled over them in a wave, had O’Donnell coughing. He kept his hand on Bo’s shoulder, drew him back to clearer air. “Putting out a fire can screw the evidence all to hell. She goes in now, she’ll be able to see more before the damage is done. Somebody set this one for her. She’s not one to walk away from that. She’s worked with these guys before. Believe me, they wouldn’t let her in unless they knew she could handle herself.”
“Being a cop’s not enough for her?” Bo muttered, and O’Donnell showed his teeth in a grin.
“Being a cop’s plenty, but she’s a fire cop. And she walks the line between. Knows more about the son of a bitch than anyone I’ve ever worked with. The fire,” he explained at Bo’s puzzled look. “That girl knows fire. Now, tell me what you know.”
“I don’t know dick. We went to a ball game, went back to her place. She got a call.”
Bo kept his eyes on the building now—the hell with scouring the crowd—and while his heart drummed in his throat, strained to see her coming back out. “She filled
me in some. Some guy’s called her three times, used her name. Cloned cell phones. This time he told her he had something for her here. Fire was already going when we arrived.”
“How’d you manage to come along?”
He flicked his eyes back toward O’Donnell. “She’d’ve had to shoot me otherwise, and I guess she didn’t want to waste that much time.”
This time O’Donnell laughed, and the slap on Bo’s shoulder was friendlier.
“She tell you he wrote surprise on the front door?”
“Yeah, she brought me up to date.” Casually, he took a pack of gum from his pocket, offered Bo a stick. “She’ll be fine,” he assured him and folded two in his mouth. “Why don’t you tell me how long you’ve been going to ball games with my partner?”
Inside, Reena moved through the dense curtain of smoke. She could hear her own breath, the suck of oxygen from her tank, and the crackle of flames not yet suppressed.
The search for victims would still be under way, but so far—thank God—none had been found.
Easy pickings for him, she thought as she pushed through smoke. Plenty of time to plan and set this fire in this place. But what she was seeing was so amateurish, so simple. She might have taken it for kids or an ordinary fire setter.
He wasn’t. She was sure he wasn’t despite the use of basics like gas and waxed paper.
She’d find more.
Fire had gnawed its way down the steps, teased along by the use of gas and the trailers. It might’ve burned like a torch, but for the phone call sending her here.
So he hadn’t cared about destroying the building.
The second floor took a hit. Both the temperature and the density of smoke increased, and she had no doubt she’d find another point of origin. She could see the silhouettes of men moving through the fog of smoke like heroic ghosts.
There were remnants of trailers here. She picked up the charred remains of a book of matches, fumbled it into a bag, marked the spot to document.
“Doing okay, champ?”
She gave the thumbs-up to Steve. “Burn pattern on the east wall? Second point of origin, I think.” His voice and hers sounded tinny and strained. “Fire sucked into the ceiling here.” She gestured up. “Flashed back down there. He was already long gone.”
They moved together, documenting evidence, recording, climbing up into the still living heart of the fire.
It licked the walls, and men beat it back. It danced overhead along the charred ceiling with the guttural roar that always sent a finger of ice up her spine.
It was gorgeous, horribly gorgeous. Seductive with its light and heat, its powerful dance. She had to block out the innate fear, and her own intrinsic fascination, concentrating instead on fuel and method, on the fingerprints of style.
Gas, a stronger stench of it here, under the sharp smell of smoke, the dull odor of wet. The men who fought the leaping spirals of flame had faces blackened from the smoke, eyes blank with concentration. Water spat out of hoses and streamed in the broken windows from outside.
Another portion of the roof collapsed with a kind of shuddering glee, venting the fire, feeding it so that it spurted up in a sudden storm.
She jumped forward to assist with a hose, and thought of lion trainers slapping at a violent cat with a whip and a chair.
The effort sang in her muscles, shook down to her toes.
She saw where part of the wall had been hacked away to studs, and through the blur of water and smoke noted the char, the pattern.
He’d done that, she thought. Initial point of origin.
And knew, as her arms trembled and the fire slowly died, this hadn’t been his first.
The relief was wild, a kind of stupefying release, when he saw her come out. Despite the gear and her height, Bo recognized her the instant she stepped through the dense smoke.
However casual O’Donnell’d been, whatever he’d said before, Bo heard his release of breath when Reena waded out through the smoke and wet and debris.
Her face was black with soot. As she shrugged off her tanks, ash rained off her protective gear.
“There’s our girl,” O’Donnell said lightly. “Why don’t you wait here, pal. I’ll send her over in a minute.”
She took off her helmet—and there was a short spiral of dark gold as she bent from the waist, braced her hands on her knees and spat on the ground.
She stayed there, lifting only her head to acknowledge O’Donnell. Then she straightened, brushed off a paramedic. Unhooking her jacket, she made her way toward Bo.
“I have to stay, then I’m going to need to go in. I’m going to have somebody take you back home.”
“You’re okay?”
“Yeah. It could’ve been a lot worse in there. He could’ve made it a lot worse. No loss of life, building empty, school out for the summer. This was just for show.”
“He left you that matchbox from your family’s place. So the show was for you.”
“I can’t argue with that.” She glanced over where a couple of soaked, soot-covered firefighters were lighting cigarettes. “You notice anybody who seemed off?”
“Not really. I have to admit after you went in, I didn’t pay much attention. Praying takes most of my focus.”
She smiled a little, then lifted her brows when he wiped at the soot on her cheek with his thumb. “I’m not looking my best.”
“I can’t begin to tell you how you look. You scared the hell out of me. We’ll save the buts for when you’ve got more time.” He stuffed his hands in his pockets. “I figure we’ve got a lot to say to each other, and I’d rather do it without the audience.”
She looked over her shoulder. They were doing a surround and drown, and the worst was over. “I’ll get you a ride. Look, I’m sorry how this turned out.”
“Me, too.”
She walked away, arranged for his ride home. And she thought that the fire had done more than hull out a building. If she wasn’t misreading the way Bo had stepped back from her, the fire had also turned a developing relationship into ash.
She went to her car for her field kit, pulled it and a bottle of water she kept there out as Steve wandered to her. “So, is that the guy Gina said you’re seeing?”
“That’s the guy I’ve been seeing. I think he’s just decided the whole cop, arson, fires-in-the-middle-of-the-night routine is more complicated than he likes.”
“His loss, hon.”
“Maybe, or maybe he just had himself a lucky escape. I am hell on men, Steve.”
She slammed her trunk. Her car was coated with ash. And she stank, no question about it. She leaned on her car, opened the bottle to take a long drink of water to clear her throat.
She passed the bottle to Steve, stayed as she was while O’Donnell came to join them.
“They’ll clear us to go back in, just a few minutes. What you got?”
Reena took a small tape recorder out of her kit so she’d only have to say it once. “Phone call from unidentified subject, my home residence, at twenty-three forty-five,” she began, and moved through the events, her observations, the already collected evidence point by point.
She switched off the recorder, put it back in her kit. “My opinion?” she continued. “He made it look half-assed. Made it look simple. But he took the time to open the wall upstairs, set the fire in such a way that it would progress behind the walls as well as into the room. We had a broken window up there when I arrived. Maybe he did it, maybe it was already broken, but that ventilation moved the fire along. He used basic stuff. Gas, trailers of paper and matchbooks. But they’re basic because in the right circumstance, they can work extremely well. It doesn’t look like a pro, but it smells like one.”
“Somebody we’ve met before?”
“I don’t know, O’Donnell.” Tired, she pushed at her hair. “I’ve been through old cases. So have you. Nothing jumps out. Maybe it’s some wack job I met along the line, brushed off, and this is his way of courting me. This is the neighborhood school. My
neighborhood school.”
She unlocked the car, took out the bagged matchbox to show him. “From Sirico’s, to tell me he knows me, and he can get close. Left where I’d find it. Not inside, where if things got out of hand it could be destroyed. Outside, where the odds were better I’d find it, outside his point of entry, or what he made look like his point of entry. It’s personal.”