She heard a sound again. Her hand stilled on the cat’s back, and she felt its fur rise. “Cale?” she called again. “Cale, this isn’t funny.”
“No, it’s not funny.” The voice was not Cale’s, and she screamed and grabbed the empty beer bottle on her bed table.
The man was hidden in the shadows of the hallway as the first shot rang out, shattering the bottle in her hands. The second hit her in the chest, knocking her back against the headboard.
Fog closed over her as she struggled to catch a breath. Her last grasp of awareness was the smell of diesel fumes, but she was powerless to move or escape the death that had come to take her before she was ready.
Chapter Eight
The A Shift had just returned to the station from a wreck on Bonaparte, one that hadn’t really required their help, when the alarm sounded again. Still dressed in their fire gear, they headed back to the pumper, listening to the dispatcher’s orders as they took their places.
“Fire reported at 1302 Clearview Street…a neighbor reports that someone may be in the house…”
Cale Larkins reacted immediately. “That’s my house, man!”
Though they would have hurried for any call, the team made a special effort to screech out of the firehouse and fly to the scene.
“Is Jamie at home?” Nick asked, leaning forward in his rear seat as he slipped on the shoulder strap for his oxygen tank.
“I think so,” Cale shouted. “She was when I called around ten. What if she’s in there? What if she’s sleeping?”
“Take it easy,” one of the guys yelled over the siren. “She’ll probably have the fire out by the time we get there.”
Mark and Issie heard the sirens heading past the bar, and instinctively they threw down their tab and hurried out to the parking lot. Mark had a scanner under his dashboard and turned it on to listen as Issie stood at the driver’s side door. The dispatcher was still giving orders to the cops on duty. “Clearview Street,” Mark said. “I’m going.”
“Me, too.” She jumped in, and he pulled out of the parking lot and headed in the direction the trucks had gone.
Mark flew, and they caught up to the trucks and pulled up to the curb right behind the pumper. With a shock, Mark realized that it was Cale’s house. By then, one side of the house was dancing in flames, and that side of the roof was engulfed. Cale leaped from the pumper before it had stopped completely and bolted inside. Mark slipped on his bunker coat and tank, which lay on the back seat of his car, and followed Cale as the rest of the crew unwound the hose and began dousing the flames.
“Jamie!” Cale shouted as he ran from room to room. “Jamieeee!”
He headed for the bedroom, which was black with smoke and popping with flames, and Mark knew that nothing in that room could have survived.
Cale screamed his wife’s name as he bolted into the bedroom, and the anguished wail that followed shook the house even more than the flames. Mark rushed in after him. Cale had found his wife and was rolling her in the bedcovers to smother the flames. When they were out, he lifted her and carried her from the house.
The ambulance was there, as were several squad cars, and Issie ran up the walk with the other two paramedics to take Jamie from his arms. They laid her on a gurney and unrolled the blanket, but her burns were so severe that she was nearly unrecognizable.
“Do something!” Cale screamed. “She’s not dead! She can’t be dead!”
But Mark could see from Issie’s strained face that she was. “Cale…I’m sorry…”
“No she’s not!” he screamed again. “Do—” He gestured hopelessly. “Something!” He reached for his wife and lifted her up. Her hair was seared and her skin was charred, but as he crushed her against him, Mark saw the blood soaking her back.
“Issie,” he said, and she, too, saw the exit wound the bullet had made.
“Oh, no,” she whispered.
Chapter Nine
The house at 1302 Clearview Street was handed off from the fire department to the police department and marked as a homicide scene. Stan Shepherd, the detective who had been the first cop on the scene at the Broussard house earlier that day, stepped through the wet, smoldering rubble of the bedroom, looking for empty shells or lodged bullets, while in the part of the house that hadn’t burned, others dusted for prints and vacuumed the carpet for possible hair follicles.
As the only detective on the Newpointe police force, Stan considered this second murder to be a personal failure. If he’d caught the guy who’d killed Martha earlier today, Jamie would still be alive. But Stan had mistakenly assumed that the killing was an isolated event.
He picked up some of the charred wood from the wall and smelled it. The faint scent of diesel confirmed how the fire had started. From the evidence they’d already collected, he knew there was a psychopath out there somewhere with a .38, a can of gasoline, and a deadly intent that could not be predicted. He was glad Celia had gone to stay with her Aunt Aggie tonight. He didn’t want either of them to be alone.
He heard Cale wailing in the yard and cursed the fact that a homicide investigation called for such cruelty. He would rather have let the ambulance take Jamie Larkins away, but instead, they had to leave her there, in the front yard where the paramedics had put her, until they’d recorded all of the evidence. And Stan knew that Cale wouldn’t leave—not until the medical examiner came to remove her body from the scene.
“The two women were friends,” Jim Shoemaker, the police chief who had just gotten to the scene, said. “This can’t be a coincidence.”
“No,” Stan said. “No coincidence. Can’t be.”
“Stan?” Officer Anthony Martin called from the living room, which hadn’t entirely burned. Though everything had been damaged by smoke and water, most of the living room was still intact.
“Yeah,” Stan asked.
“I just found something you might want to see.”
Stan stepped through the wet, smoldering rubble, and Jim followed, until they were back on the smoke-stained carpet. Anthony showed them the vial full of white powder still lying in the drawer of an end table.
Stan frowned. Cale liked to drink, but he wasn’t a druggie. If he had been, he could never have kept his job at the fire department. They had random drug testing every few weeks. Cale had never had a trace of it in his system.
Jamie, on the other hand, had been through drug rehab a couple of years ago. Apparently, she’d slid back into her old habits.
“Tag it,” Jim said. “That just might be the key to what’s going on here.”
“What?” Stan asked. “You think it was a drug deal gone bad?”
“Might be.”
“But what about Martha Broussard? You don’t think she was buying coke.”
“No telling.”
“No way,” Stan said. He went to church with the Broussards, and there wasn’t a doubt in his mind that George and Martha were both devout believers. “Not Martha. Jim, you knew her.”
“Not that well, Stan. There’s got to be a connection. Maybe Martha knew something. Maybe she saw something. Maybe Jamie told Martha something she wasn’t supposed to, and somebody had to shut them both up.”
“A lot of speculation; no real evidence.”
“We have to start somewhere.”
Stan looked around him as the other cops took pictures and videos and collected what evidence they could find amid the soggy, charred rubble. “I don’t know, Jim. But I do know that whoever it is has got to be found, and fast.”
“We’ve already called in every cop in town to set up roadblocks.”
“It’s Fat Tuesday, man. All we’re going to find is a bunch of drunk drivers and dopers, and we’ll be backed up until November with paperwork to process.”
“Can’t help it. We can’t let ’em go.”
“No, we can’t. And maybe we’ll find him.” He looked through the damaged wall into the front yard. Ray Ford, Mark Branning, Craig Barnes, Dan Nichols, Nick Foster, and the others were clu
stered around Cale, trying to keep him calm as two cops questioned him.
“Yeah, if he’s a tourist, we’ll catch him in the roadblocks,” Jim said.
“And what if it wasn’t a tourist?” Stan asked quietly.
Jim looked up. “No way,” he said.
The men locked eyes briefly. If it wasn’t a tourist, then the person who had done this was someone from Newpointe, someone they all knew. Unable to deal with that possibility, Stan turned and continued sifting through the rubble.
Chapter Ten
Mark Branning felt as though he hadn’t slept in days. The combination of alcohol and murder had seeped the energy right out of him, and if there had been an extra bed at the station, he would have stayed and slept there tonight. But the shift was fully staffed, and it seemed that all of the firemen felt as he did, though many of them had grumbled about the futility of trying to sleep on a night when Newpointe seemed to be at its worst.
At three A.M. he was too tired to stay and help out anymore, but the unease in his soul made him dread going home to his barren, lonely apartment. With finances so tight now that he and Allie were maintaining two separate homes on already meager incomes—and because he’d originally thought it would only be temporary—he’d furnished the apartment with just a twin bed, a forty-year-old couch that someone had been about to throw away, a couple of chairs, and a half-dozen cardboard boxes that served as end tables, cupboards, and ottomans.
The bar usually provided a comfortable transition between the depression following a long shift and his lonely return to the apartment, but in the wee hours of the morning, he wasn’t in the mood to return to that smoke-filled room and all the noise and gossip.
The truth was, he longed for his real home, the home he’d shared with Allie. It was a tiny little house, only two bedrooms, one bathroom, a kitchen, and a den, but it had been all they could afford on a fireman’s salary and the pittance they got from the florist shop after all the bills were paid. It had been the most desirable place on the planet for him at one time, though, because of Allie’s knack for decorating. Flowers and plants bloomed all over the house, casting a pleasant and soothing scent. The furnishings, too, though inexpensive, were inviting and comfortable; they had saved for years to buy them. He supposed that, if their marriage ended in divorce, they would find some way of dividing the spoils, but for now, he’d chosen to leave them in their home. He didn’t know why, since the separation had been Allie’s idea. He should have taken at least half of what they’d accumulated together. But Allie was more materialistic, and she would probably fight tooth and nail for the things she had coveted for so long. He just wasn’t up for that kind of fight.
Still, he missed the house, the things they’d filled it with-and worst of all, he missed his wife. He didn’t like that, didn’t want to acknowledge it. But having seen George grieving over Martha and Cale mourning over Jamie, he’d felt a sick void in his heart, a smothering despair.
What if he’d answered a call to his own house and found his own wife shot to death and surrounded by flames?
Suddenly he wanted to see her, despite the hour. He wanted to touch her and talk to her, tell her about Jamie, make sure she was all right.
He headed out the back room of the fire station and pushed through the kitchen door on his way to the parking lot-then stopped dead in his tracks. Issie was hunched in a chair in the corner of the kitchen, still wearing blue jeans and that teenager blouse she’d been wearing earlier, but there was blood and soot on it from Jamie’s body. She looked tiny sitting there, staring off into space, her skin pale and her eyes vacant.
“Issie?” he asked. “Are you all right?”
She looked up at him and managed to nod. “Yeah. I was just thinking.”
“About what?”
“I was thinking…what a horrible way to die.”
Her eyes were dry, though clearly distraught. He stepped toward her. “Why don’t you go home? Get some sleep?”
“I’m a little scared,” she whispered.
He could understand that. As soon as the town found out about the second murder, there would probably be a panic among all of the women of Newpointe.
“Look, I’ll be glad to follow you home, if you want. Make sure you get into your apartment all right.”
“Would you?” she asked, looking hopefully up at him with tear-filled eyes that had a little too much power over him. She reached for his hand.
He knew he should have recoiled and stepped back out of her reach. This was how it had started before—tears, need, a touch…
His marriage was ending over it.
But he didn’t disengage his hand.
“I mean, I can do it alone,” she whispered. “I just…this has kind of got me strung out. You know, like there’s a murderer lurking in every shadow…”
“Come on,” he said, pulling her to her feet.
She grabbed her bag, and he walked her out into the night. The stars were brilliant, as was the moon, lending a false sense of security to the night.
“My car’s still at Joe’s Place,” she said. “Will you walk me over?”
He walked her across the street to her car, opened the door for her, and locked it before he closed it. Then he trotted back across the street and got into his own.
His mind raced as he followed her the few blocks to her apartment. He had avoided this in the past, worried that getting this close to her home might be too tempting. Tonight was an exception, though—any of the guys at the station would have wanted to watch out for her. It was a Good Samaritan thing, he told himself. Not a lust thing.
She parked in the parking space in front of her apartment, and Mark got out of his car to walk her up to her door. She locked her car carefully, then looked nervously up at him and headed for her door.
He walked a step or two behind her. Wanting to look at her in the moonlight, he forced himself instead to walk with his hands in his pockets and his head cast down—just a good guy doing his masculine duty to protect the fairer sex. She stopped when she reached the door and unlocked it, then turned back to him. “Mark, come in for a few minutes. We could have a drink and talk…”
It seemed so innocent, so tempting. Just a few minutes in a warm apartment, talking with a good friend over a glass of wine that would relax him and help him to sleep later…
But something inside him resisted. Until now, he’d denied Allie’s accusations of being involved with Issie by insisting that nothing had ever happened between them. And until now it had been true. But if he stepped through that door…
“I can’t,” he said, wishing he could. “I need to go.”
She looked up at him, her doleful eyes meeting his, and for a moment, he wished she’d coax him, persuade him, ask him one more time. They were both lonely, and it had been a traumatic day. What could be more natural than two people who’d shared such experiences winding down together and talking things over?
“I’m not going to beg, Mark,” she said softly. Silence passed as she waited, and he waited, thinking, weighing, wondering…Finally, she sighed, releasing him from the decision. “Thanks for following me home,” she said matter-of-factly, breaking the mood.
Deflated by the disappointment that she hadn’t tried harder, he said, “Sure. Lock up good, okay?”
She nodded and went in, closing the door between them.
He stood in the darkness for a moment, his heart pounding, wondering what he had let slip through his fingers—then wondering what he had escaped.
Allie. I need to see Allie.
The irrational need drew him back to his car, and the soul-deep fatigue and confusing emotions made him sit and stare out the windshield for a moment. He didn’t know what he wanted tonight, didn’t know where he belonged.
But as he cranked the car and pulled back out into the street, he drove by rote to his own home, where Allie lived, where things had once seemed so secure and so clear, where he’d known right from wrong and love from hate and security from fear
.
He pulled into the driveway, turned off the ignition, and sat still for a moment, wondering what he would say when he woke Allie up and she came to the door. Would he tell her about Jamie? Or could he somehow put that off until morning, and just convince her to let him stay here where he could make sure she was safe, where he could feel safe, not from the killer, but from the world that seemed to be tugging at him, tearing him apart?
He didn’t know, and didn’t wait for answers. He made his way to the side entrance, pulled open the screen door, and rang the bell. He still had the key and knew that he could just go in, but he had to offer her some degree of respect since they were no longer living as man and wife.
He knocked. Knowing she was probably afraid to answer or to even call “Who is it?” he leaned close to the door and said, “Allie, it’s me.”
She still didn’t answer, and he rang again as a sense of sick dread fell over him. Where was she? Had someone gotten her, too? Could she be lying in there, another victim of the psychopath who didn’t give his targets a chance?
Trembling, he sorted through his keys, trying to find the right one. He tried to insert it into the dead bolt, but his hand was shaking too badly.
Suddenly, the knob turned and the door opened. Allie stood inside the kitchen, her long white cotton robe pooled around her bare feet. In the dim glow cast from the night-light on the stove, she looked angelic, sweet, innocent in contrast to the ugliness he had seen tonight.
“Mark? What is it?”
He couldn’t stop the pounding in his heart, and he stumbled in and closed the door behind him, quickly turning on the light to make sure that she was safe and whole, unharmed.
Private Justice Page 5