by J. R. Ward
“You don’t think your union is on the pulse of its membership? And willing to share that information with me?”
Brent, you fucker, he thought.
“What I see,” he ground out, “is a group of people fighting fires with equipment that is aging in facilities that need renovation, and your buddy Ripkin’s ‘donation’ was more a showpiece for his name than a gift designed to help my department. Before you harp on me about a bunch of intangibles, maybe you should look at our resources.”
“Personnel are your resources. And they’re hurting. Your people need support—”
“Don’t talk to me about what I need.”
“If I don’t, no one else will.”
“Why, because you’re so special? Don’t believe everything your daddy tells you.”
“No,” she snapped, “it’s because I’m your boss. I’m the mayor of this town and that means you work for me, you answer to me—and I will have no trouble firing you if you don’t realign your attitude and realize you are part of a very serious problem in this city’s fire service.”
In the silence that followed, Tom knew he had to leave before he said something he regretted.
Leaning in, he said in a low voice, “Stay out of my business.”
“Do you hear yourself? I tell you you’ve got a problem in the department and your only response is about you. You’re not even open to hearing the issues or considering your own behavior. All you want to do is get territorial and shut off the noise. That’s not a leader, Tom. That’s a despot.”
“Don’t call me by my first name. I’m Chief Ashburn to you. And when I watch Barring whip your ass on election night, please picture me smiling from ear to ear, will you? It’ll add to my satisfaction.”
On that happy little note, he left the boardroom. As Perry came out of nowhere again and started to run after him, Tom nearly grabbed the guy by the throat and threw him across the lobby.
“Not now, Perry.”
“But I just want to put a bug in your—”
Tom wheeled around. “Stay away from me. Or you will not like what happens next.”
Apparently, the guy had basic survival skills in addition to all his ambition because he backed the fuck off like he had a gun pointed at him.
Smart. Real smart.
chapter
32
On Saturday morning, Anne walked up to a three-story apartment building that had about thirty units. On the second floor, its brick exterior was stained with black streaks and plywood panels had been nailed over a line of windows that had been broken. A tree close to the corner had sustained loss, its gumdrop shape given a heat shear on one side.
The crime scene investigators were on-site, two of their boxy vehicles parked in front, and there were a couple of marked NBPD cars behind them. Television crews from the local stations were parked across the way, a uniformed cop staring at the primped-and-prettied reporters and the casually dressed cameramen like he expected them to try to get into the place.
The media’s interest had been intense. Details of the murder of one of the building’s residents, supposedly by her grandson, and the subsequent fire that had started in the kitchen, were so sensational that the crime had been sucked into the vortex of the twenty-four-hour news cycle, clickbait to be served up as the Internet’s newest fast-food meal.
She’d already seen two memes featuring something cooking in a cast-iron pan.
Grandma. It’s what’s for dinner.
Grandma. The other white meat.
Bastards.
After flashing her ID to the uni at the door, she went up four flights of stairs, and the nuances of the fading smell of a contents fire confirmed on an olfactory basis that they were indeed some twenty-four hours out: The acrid stench had dissipated some, but it was still strong enough that she could catch the plastic high notes.
As she closed in on the apartment in question, there was a walk-of-shame element to the aftermath, the excitement gone, the frenzy over, nothing but water and smoke damage left as artifacts of the emergency. These residuals were concentrated down at the end of the hall, where some NBPD yellow caution tape ran on a diagonal to cordon off the scene’s door.
As she approached, she had her ID out, but the cop on the business side of the tape just held the length up so she could duck under.
“Gloves and booties are here,” he said.
“Thanks.”
Stepping over to a box of nitrile gloves and a larger container of shoe covers, she got herself ready to enter. Don had assigned her a support role on the case, the primary investigator having already been over during the night as soon as the fire was extinguished. Residents and the firefighters had been interviewed then, and a preliminary report filed. She was on origin and cause, but, as a probie, also required to do a start-to-finish on the investigation as training.
As she pushed open the door with her gloved hand, voices, soft but insistent, murmured deeper inside the apartment.
Initializing her recorder, she spoke into her iPhone. “Upon entrance, there is extensive evidence of a high-temperature contents fire in the living area . . .”
Following investigative protocol, she continued to describe what she saw as she proceeded forward into a short hallway, stopping at a marker indicating where the first body was found. Continuing on, she noted the fire’s characteristics and prevalence, its spread outward from the kitchen, its—
Anne stopped as she looked through an open doorway and into a bedroom that had been spared. Of the burn, at least. The violence that had occurred within its four walls more than made up for the lack of fire damage, and the pair of crime scene investigators working by the bed didn’t look out of place in the slightest.
She’d read both the preliminary investigation report and the log from the 499, and was prepared, but the bloodstained sheets were still a pause-maker. All she could think of was Danny opening the door in the blaze and seeing a relatively smoke-less room with a gutted seventy-nine-year-old woman tied by her extremities to the bed.
Must have stopped him in his tracks, too.
One of the crime scene team glanced up from where he was taking samples from the pillows. “Anne? How’re ya? Timmy Houlihan, Jack’s second cousin. We met last year at Fourth of July.”
“Oh, yes.” She lifted her gloved hand. “Hey.”
“Messy, huh,” he said as he indicated the stained bedsheets. “Horrible. This here’s Teresa La Favreau.”
Anne nodded at the woman who was bagging something on the floor. “This has been all over the news.”
“Kid had a history. Went off his meds. Tragedy.”
“Awful. I guess the residents all warned her?”
“Yeah, well, it wasn’t just him. Some jewelry, engraved with her name and birth date, showed up late last night in the west end at a pawnshop. The guy who brought the stuff in smelled like a fire and had soot all over him, and he took off before we could get there.” The man indicated around the tidy, modestly furnished room. “We’ve got good prints and some hair samples, along with the images from the shop. We’re going to find whoever it is.”
Anne focused on some framed photographs of a young man that were sitting on the bureau. “Well, I’ll just head down into the kitchen and do my part.”
“Good to see you.”
“You, too, Timmy.”
As Anne kept going, she talked into her phone, noting the evidence of intensifying heat in the hall, the Sheetrock eaten away, the studs in walls and the joists overhead showing signs of intense charring. Here, closer to the source, the fire had transitioned from contents to structure.
After taking samples and photographs, she began to construct a sequence of events. Photographs posted by the grandson on social media, since taken down and now used as evidence, detailed that he had been cooking his grandmother’s internal organs on the stove top. They hadn’t been selfies, however, which suggested they’d been taken by the second man. And then something had happened.
An argument? Or the plan all along?
According to the preliminary report, residents above the apartment and on the same floor stated there had been a big explosion, and the fire had been fast and violent, something that required a secondary, sustainable ignition source.
Dousing someone in lighter fluid would not get that effect. And tampering with a gas line? That would blow the whole apartment building up. In her training, she had read cases where entire houses were destroyed, with the debris scattered two hundred yards away in a circle.
No, that was too much power.
Instinct told her this was a gasoline blow. The problem was, with a fire as hot as this one had been? So much evidence was destroyed. But that would explain the explosion people had heard: Pawn-store suspect uses gasoline to get the grandson on fire after they murder the grandmother and leaves. Grandson careens around the kitchen, trying to put himself out. Lights things on fire like drapes, rugs, tablecloths, hand towels. Heat begins to build. He transitions down the hall. Meanwhile, the remaining gasoline in an enclosed can, stored somewhere in the kitchen where it shouldn’t have been, gets hot. Pressure builds and cannot be contained.
Gasoline in liquid form won’t catch fire below temperatures of 500 degrees. The vapors are the danger. And if you have it in a storage container that ruptures from heat expansion, and add sufficient air and ignition, you’re looking at a bomb because that vapor goes everywhere.
Residents heard the smoke alarms first. Had anyone smelled any gas? Because maybe that suspect decided to try to cover his tracks and doused things around the kitchen with the accelerant. But that wouldn’t account for the explosion—so there had to have been some gas left in a container in the hot zone.
And what about the evidence in the bedroom. If the guy had been thinking properly, he would have lit that room on fire, too.
Then again, considering what he and his friend had been doing at the stove, “properly” was not a word to associate with his mental processes.
As she voice-recorded notes and took other photographs for her own reference, she just kept thinking . . . what the hell had Danny thought as he’d walked through here?
He was like a shadow, following tight on her heels.
And that was when Moose’s wife, Deandra, called her cell phone.
* * *
Anne didn’t get back home until five. Investigating Ripkin Development had left her with some backlog work, and then there was the report to file on the apartment fire.
Plus, her mother.
The idea of spending an entire Saturday with the woman had been enough to take Anne’s work ethic, already strong, to juicehead levels. It wasn’t that her mother was totally awful—and that was part of the problem. If Nancy Janice had been rude, cantankerous, angry; then Anne’s avoidance would be justified. Instead, she was stuck with the reality that she was being a little unfair, especially after she’d let loose in anger the previous evening.
“Come on, Soot,” she said as she hooked the lead on his collar. “Time to check out your backyard again.”
She’d crated him at her office for the three hours she’d been over at the apartment site, and then they’d enjoyed a nice long walk to a coffee shop for lunch. After all that exercise, he’d curled up at her feet for the rest of the afternoon.
Bracing herself, she let them both in. “Mom?”
When there was no answer, she went through and let Soot out. She found a note, written in her mother’s flowery flourish, on the kitchen table.
Okay, so Nancy Janice was due back at six after an afternoon of bridge. Which meant Anne had an hour to decompress.
After feeding Soot, she went upstairs and started the shower. It felt good to take her prosthesis off. Even better to get under the hot water.
She was squeezing shampoo on the top of her head, which was what you did when you only had one palm and had to use it for dispensing, when she looked down and focused on her stump. The taper from her elbow down to the blunt end was pronounced due to muscle atrophy and the flesh was still mottled and angry from that infection even after nine months had passed.
Ripkin’s smug voice wormed into her ear, taunting her even as she told herself it shouldn’t.
But the truth was, there might have been more than one reason she hadn’t wanted to get all the way naked with Danny. And she hated that Ripkin, that shit, had tapped the nerve even as she’d denied it to his face. He’d been wrong about one aspect, though. It wasn’t a female thing to feel less than whole if you lost a limb. It was a human thing. She’d been in that rehab hospital with men who had been in motorcycle and farming accidents, even one guy who’d had some bad luck with a chain saw.
They had been just as scared as she’d been, not only about how to work through life and job issues, but with who they were. What they had become. And physical attractiveness was part of that.
Telling herself she was just fine, she finished her suds-and-rinse routine and stepped out. As she was drying off, she glanced at her naked body in the mirror—and couldn’t remember the last time she had really looked at herself.
It wasn’t going to start tonight, she knew that much.
Dressed in jeans and a fleece, she went downstairs and checked the clock on the microwave. Twenty-three minutes left of peace.
On that note, if she could get dinner organized, that would cut down on conversation. Opening the refrigerator door, she—
“Oh . . . God.”
Everything had been reorganized in there, the shelves moved up or down to accommodate a new arrangement of milk cartons and juice bottles and leftover containers. Shutting the thing, she went over to her cupboards on a hunch.
Yup. Her plates were—okay, all the way across the room now. Spices were also in a different location. Silverware had been put in plastic slides in a drawer that had previously been for hardware.
Great. How could she possibly have known that setting the don’t-touch-my-stuff boundary required an asterisk that included cupboards, closets, and drawers?
As her temper mounted up and got ready to ride the range, she knew she had to leave for a while. And there was only one option.
Talk about the lesser of two evils.
After putting Soot in his crate, she scribbled a quick note on the other side of what her mom had written on, and then she set the security alarm and was out of the house like she’d stolen something.
The evening was going so well. Really.
chapter
33
Moose and Deandra’s ranch was halfway to Danny’s farm, located in a not-quite-rural, but definitely not suburban, zip code that had the houses spaced on overgrown lots of ten and twelve acres. It went without saying that the couple was not going to last here. This was Moose’s dream, what with the privacy and the space for his car-restoration equipment—but a nightmare for Deandra’s urban, upwardly mobile streak.
Danny knew Moose had bought the place without telling her, a Surprise, honey! that had been meant to show the woman he could afford big things. When she’d lost her shit, his response had been to lease a closeout BMW 3 Series for her.
The second the oh-goody glow wore off that car, Moose was going to have a tiger by the tail, but that was his problem, not anybody else’s. Bad timing, though. Almost all firemen supplemented their income with second jobs in things like roofing or construction, and with the bad winter weather coming on, Moose was going to be forced to take on security work around the holidays to pay for keeping his wife in a good mood.
The guy hated walking warehouses alone, not because he was scared but because he needed constant stimulation.
Again, not Danny’s problem.
The road into the property was gravel, which had to be another negative in Deandra’s eyes, and as the curve rounded and the house was revealed, Danny laughed. A townie who was determined to elevate her status was going to see the otherwise perfectly nice ranch as a noose around her throat.
No Subaru parked off to the side on the mowed grass
with the other trucks. But he hadn’t expected Anne to change her mind and come.
Parking himself next to Duff, he got out and tucked his shirt in. It was a brand-new button-down flannel, the kind of thing his boys wouldn’t notice and smack his ass about, but that he’d chosen in case Anne showed. And anyway, his mother had always said he should wear blues and grays because they brought out the color in his eyes.
Too bad the thing was green and black. But it did have a pinstripe of gray in between the—
Okay, he needed to quit the pathetic shit.
Walking over to the front door, he found things were open, a screen keeping out what few bugs were left from the first hard frost the week before. He banged on the loose jamb and let himself in.
Holy . . . wow.
Even he, a confirmed bachelor with no fashion or decorating sense, knew the black and white furniture wasn’t appropriate—and not just because it was oversized, the bulky forms conceived for rooms that were three, four, five times the size of the single-story’s eight-by-twelves. The real problem was that everything was a cheap imitation: plastic made to look like leather, Plexiglas that didn’t fool the eye, and stretches of almost-chrome, like Deandra was trying to convince people that she was living in a Manhattan penthouse and working for a modern art gallery—instead of cooling her jets out here in the country and answering phones and taking messages at a second-tier spa and salon in New Brunie.
The knockoffs were striving rather than achievement. Which, on the theory that people’s houses reflected their identities, put paid to the couple.
And then there was the “art.” Christ, if he had to look at one more saccharine picture of her at their wedding from hell in a fake silver frame, he was going to hurl. The things were hung all over the walls and propped up on side tables, a shrine to the seven hours in Deandra’s life when she had been the princess, the winner of the beauty crown, the head of the line.
Did Moose ever notice that he had been cropped out of 90 percent of the photographs?