The Protector

by Dee Henderson

  Jack closed his eyes as she spoke. The man she called Jesus had been there to comfort when no one else could. No wonder Jennifer believed if that was what she had also found in the midst of the cancer.

  “Do you want to come to church with me next Sunday?” Cassie offered. “Pastor Luke explains things so much better than I do.”

  “Maybe.” He heard a beep on the line. His frustration was immediate. “Hold on, Cassie, I’ve got a call coming in.” He accepted the call. “This is Jack.”

  “It’s Ash. What’s Cole’s number? I’ve got a problem at my place.”

  “Something happen?”

  “Does popcorn mean anything to you?”

  “I’m on my way.”

  “No. I’ve got cobwebs growing on the message. Cole can handle it. If you come, Cassie will hear and have to come. It’s not the way I want her ending her Christmas.”

  “Then I’ll call Cole for you.”

  “I’d appreciate it.”

  Ash hung up. Jack warned Cassie he would be a minute coming back; then he called Cole, wondering what the message was that Ash had received.

  “This is quite a welcome home, Ash.” Cole shone his light on the living room wall revealing a huge mural of a fire. No wonder the arsonist liked big, sweeping letters. He liked to paint murals. It had been here a while for there were cobwebs in the corners of the room.

  This had taken several hours if not days to create. Cole walked back into the hallway near the front door where the painting began. He crouched down to study it. There was amateur skill in it and a good understanding for how fire began. The painting began low, just above the floor, as black smoldering impressions. As he walked down the hall it slowly rose on the wall. There was a flash as flames briefly flared for the first time and then it fell back to a steady burn and slowly grew.

  Cole traced his light up as the fire moved from the floor to the ceiling. The ceiling fire then dropped burning embers to the floor. There was an incredible burst of fire as the room was shown to reach the flash point. “Any spray paint cans?”

  “Not that I’ve found. Who paints murals?”

  “A young man who likes elegant graffiti.” Cole replied. It had to be a young man who knew all about fire. This was too accurate for how a fire moved and breathed to be chance. Cole stood back, looking overall at the problem. Ash’s home had not been trashed, and that was interesting. “How did he get in?”

  “Someone scratched the back door lock.”

  “That was Cassie breaking in. She lost her key.”

  “Then no, I don’t have any idea.”

  Cole frowned. After he painted the arsonist had taken the time to move the furniture back to their original spots, had taken the time to rehang pictures. And Cole found it interesting that he didn’t see any picture out of order. Why the arsonist had hit him, it made sense. He was part of the district leadership. But Ash—this had been painted when there was no idea when or if Ash might return.

  “Did you stay in touch with anyone here? Did you call someone? E-mail anybody?”

  “I was planning to leave it all behind and permanently end any idea of being involved with a fire department. I didn’t call or write anyone. I came back simply to see Cassie for Christmas.”

  “I’m tempted to give you a headache for giving Cassie cause to worry about you.”

  “Let’s not and say you did. I didn’t hurt her intentionally.”

  Cole looked at his friend, having understood more than Ash probably realized. “There is a reason they call those nightmares you were having flashbacks.”

  “They stopped about four weeks ago.”

  “Admit it, you’ve been bored without the firefighter job.”

  “If you think I was safety picky before, you haven’t seen anything yet.”

  Cole nodded and made an offer he’d been hoping he would one day have the opportunity to make. “Frank and I have the budget in shape to increase the training funds. If the board gives us the final approval at their next meeting, we’re going to need someone to run it.”

  “Cole—”

  “I want you back on rotation, and I want you teaching at the academy. It’s time to get back in the game and help me out.”

  “I suppose I owe you one.”

  It was a grudging admission, but Cole would take it. “In a month you’ll tell me you love it.”

  “Rookies? Please. I’ve done too much training through the years. I know the reality. It’s like corralling a bunch of show-offs.” Ash stopped by the entryway to his office. “At least he left this room alone.”

  “He called you chicken in the e-mail message he sent you.”

  “I wish he’d had the courage to call me that to my face.” Ash walked around the room to see if anything else had been touched. “Cassie said you think this is a firefighter.”

  Cole leaned against the doorjamb, watching Ash prowl around the room. “He’s setting fires within the walls using small flowerpots.”

  Ash stopped, then turned on his heel. “My signature?”

  Cole nodded. He knew it would get a rise and he watched, interested in knowing exactly what that reaction would be.

  Ash looked grim. “One of my students.”

  Cole understood the emotion clouding Ash’s voice. The idea this was a firefighter bit hard, and the realization it was someone they might have worked with was hard to swallow. “I don’t know if borrowing the signature is another way to turn the knife, like he’s doing using the popcorn and setting fires at the edge of the district, or because he knows it’s the best way to start fires in the wall.”

  “More than one rookie has washed out because they failed the training.”

  Cole nodded.

  “Getting my address would be easy to do.”

  Cole let Ash think, hoping he would be able to put a name to the details.

  “What’s the base he’s using?”

  “Tar,” Cole replied.

  From the front of the house came the sound of car doors slamming. Cole walked back to the foyer and turned on the outside light. His friend Joe, the police investigator who had worked the vandalism and garbage fire at his place, was coming up the drive.

  Cole held open the door for the man. “Sorry for interrupting your Christmas.”

  Joe stopped long enough to stamp snow off his feet before coming into the house. “Don’t worry about it.”

  Cole gestured to the living room. The investigator stopped at the door to the room and whistled.

  “Tell me about it,” Cole agreed.

  “No fire at all with this one?”

  “None.” Cole was worried about that. It was a change in MO and any change was a sign of possible coming trouble.

  “I’ll pull the same team that worked your place as they’ll have a better sense of what to search for. This is going to take a while. Give me a couple days.”

  “It would help if there was a way to figure out the brand of paint. He’s gone through a lot of it recently.”

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  “I appreciate it. Come on, Ash, you can spend the night at my place,” Cole offered. “I just got the spare bedroom put back together. You and I need to talk.”

  “I’ll take you up on that.”

  Thirty-seven

  It can’t be Charlie. He’s older than the man I saw.” Cassie tossed the blue folder into the eight-inch-high cardboard box collecting files of people they had ruled out. She tried to shift around in her chair and nearly kicked over her drink sitting on the floor by the box.

  “How many people did you train over the years, Ash?” Beside her on the table was a sliding stack of files to go through, and every hour more of them came from the records archive. Since she had seen the man they thought had started the fire, she was given the job of going through the files first. If she could absolutely rule out the person, it meant one less file for Ash to deal with.

  Ash lowered his feet from the corner of Cole’s desk so Cole could get back to hi
s chair. “About three hundred, give or take how many you count from the year I was an assistant at the training academy.”

  Cassie knew he had done a lot of training. Like most firefighters he had a specialty within the district, and his happened to be structure fires. She had not known the extent to which he had trained over the years.

  Ash was paging through a roster for a class six years ago. Learning who Cole suspected, Ash had dug out the class material and old rosters from a box in his attic. “Cole, do you remember a Larry Burcell?”

  “He’s working with the forest service in Montana.”

  “That’s a guy I could see setting a fire.”

  “Ash, you’ve gotten cynical in your travels,” Cassie protested.

  Cole laughed. “You’re just now learning your partner was a closet cynic? Where have you been all these years?”

  Ash laughed. “It’s called loyalty, Cole. I inspire more of it than you. Cassie still thinks I walk on water.”

  “The muck is getting deep in here.” Cole picked up one of the files Ash had quietly passed him to review. The two men were bantering back and forth as they worked, while underneath it was very serious business.

  Cassie was feeling a little out of her depth. She and Ash had been partners; they had worked for Cole. And while Cole had been her friend as well as her boss, she had not realized the extent of the friendship between him and Ash. She was hearing for the first time about a shared history.

  “Cassie, where’s that list you put together of businesses that sell tar?”

  She shot Cole an annoyed look at the idea of having to find it. What she knew for sure was that it was buried. Cole just laughed at her look.

  Trying to avoid the whole stack of files spilling across the floor, she moved the stack of files from her lap to the floor. The last time she had seen that list it had been somewhere on the round table with notes scrawled by Cole and three Post-its marking corrections. “You could print another copy.”

  “That’s work.”

  She started searching. “Here’s the phone list of attorneys you lost last week.” She checked the portfolio and found the page of the minutes from the budget meeting. She scanned a list of restaurant take-out order phone numbers. Cole had to eat better than this. She finally found the printout he requested and passed it over to Cole. “I was able to eliminate a few of them as being irrelevant to what you were looking for.”

  “Do you remember any of these being art, supply-type companies?”

  “Spray paint can be bought at a hardware store as easily as an art supply store.”

  “The guy has to have a job somewhere. We know he likes art.”

  “He’s an amateur,” Ash pointed out. “I would suggest you try frame shops or the like.”

  Cassie sorted through the files, trying to figure out if there was some way to get them in roughly chronological order for the age of the individual. Jack had been doing that for her, but he disappeared about twenty minutes ago to return a phone call. “I think Jack has gotten lost.” She appreciated the help even if Jack had been driving her crazy this morning with his teasing.

  “I asked him to see if the conference room schedule could be moved around so we could take all this stuff down there,” Cole replied.

  “It is a little much for your office,” Cassie agreed.

  Ash handed Cole another file of a possible suspect. “I still think the words should tell us something,” Ash commented, going back to a conversation they had had several times over the course of the day. “Doesn’t calling you a liar imply you made a promise to someone?”

  “Calling you a chicken probably implies someone ran into your cautious safety streak.”

  “I want to know how he got my e-mail address.”

  Cassie reached down to the red milk crate beside her holding temporary file dividers. She found last year’s training course catalog that was mailed to all departments in the surrounding counties. She flipped through it, spotted what she remembered on the back of the catalog, and tossed it in Ash’s lap. “That’s how.”

  “My picture too? Man, I look like some fugitive from the seventies.”

  “You still do.”

  “Ooh…cruel, Cassie. You wound me.”

  “If you’re coming back on shift you have to get a haircut,” she pointed out. She reached to the floor into the bag of chips she had carried back from lunch. Startled, she jerked her hand back up, then looked down. “Jack!”

  Cole and Ash broke up laughing.

  She very gingerly picked up J. J., the traveling mouse.

  Thirty-eight

  Jack, where are the new curtain rods for the window in Cassie’s bathroom?” Rachel asked, coming into the kitchen where Jack was working. He glanced back at her. It was Thursday, and he had recruited most of his family to help with the painting and wallpapering so it could be done in one long day.

  “I set them inside the hallway closet so they wouldn’t get tripped over.” He shifted his paintbrush to his left hand and reached for a rag to wipe paint off the countertop where a break in the masking tape had let paint touch the caulking. “Leave them for me. I don’t trust you to get the braces tight enough.”

  “Didn’t I hang all the curtains in my apartment?”

  “Didn’t I fix all of them?” he countered, smiling.

  “Fine.” Rachel looked around. “Stephen, I need curtain rods hung. The wallpaper is finished.”

  “Hey—” Jack protested, looking over at Rachel. “I said I’d do them.”

  She nudged him aside to reach for a cold soda. “You’re busy.”

  “So am I,” Stephen replied, lifting the globe light fixture into place, “but I’m almost done. Jack, what do you think?”

  Jack leaned back to see around his oldest brother Marcus. As usual Marcus was ignoring the debate going on between the rest of them. “Looks good to me.”

  Stephen used the power screwdriver and secured the fixture.

  “I’m going to start on the wallpaper in the hall then,” Rachel offered.

  Jack pointed to the sack on the countertop. “The double rolls are there.”

  “Stephen, after the curtain rods, I need someone helping me with the wallpaper.”

  “I nominate Jack.”

  Jack smiled at Stephen. “You’re taller. And I would hate to rob you of the fun.”

  “You just want to paint the ceiling in the living room.”

  “It is more fun,” Jack agreed.

  Laughter from the bedroom interrupted the football game commentary on the radio. Jennifer, Cassie, and Marcus’s fiancée, Shari, had taken over painting in the bedroom and were having a great time. He had known Jennifer and Cassie would become friends. He hadn’t expected them to shove the guys out of the room so they could have girl talk.

  Benji wandered into the kitchen.

  Jack nudged the ball of yarn, which had rolled up against the dishwasher, toward the kitten. B. J. pounced on it and tumbled over. In the space of a week the sleepy kitten had disappeared and been replaced with a kitten full of energy.

  “Jack, I want a hug.”

  He barely got the paintbrush out of the way before Cassie invaded his space and wrapped her arms around him.

  Bewildered, he looked over her head at Marcus. His brother just rescued the dripping paintbrush, offering no help on this situation at all.

  Jack indulged Cassie and wrapped his arms around her, enjoying the chance to hold her.

  She leaned against him, didn’t say anything, and he got more confused as the moments passed. She rubbed her cheek against his shirt, tightened her arms, then stepped back. “Thanks.” She disappeared toward the back bedroom before he could get a good look at her expression.

  He turned to Marcus. “Do you understand women?”

  “No.”

  Afraid he’d missed something, Jack was grateful for the clarification. “Okay, then.” Since his brain had short circuited, he left it at that. He picked up the brush and slapped paint on the wall.<
br />
  “You’ve got a mushy smile on your face.”

  “She likes me.”

  Marcus laughed as he punched his shoulder. “Good job, Jack.”

  Jack used a rubber mallet to tap the paint can lid down. “What was all of that about earlier?” The last of his family had headed home. In one long day Cassie’s apartment had been transformed. The place smelled of drying paint and it was enough to give a person a headache. They opened the patio door for a while this afternoon despite the cold in order to air out some of it.

  Cassie was rolling up paint-splattered newspapers. Her jeans were speckled by paint and her sweatshirt was marred by wallpaper paste. He was intrigued at the reality she was blushing. Jack reached over and tipped up her chin, amused. “Cassie?”

  “Did you really tell Jennifer I was gorgeous?”

  It was his turn to get a bit embarrassed. “Maybe.” He remembered telling Jennifer Cassie was adorable; gorgeous had probably showed up in the description along the way.

  “That was cute.”

  He grinned. “Worth a hug at least.”

  Cassie reached for the black garbage bag and shoved the newspapers inside. The plastic sheeting used to protect the furniture had been rolled and folded into the black trash bag.

  Jack scanned the room, seeing a few pieces of furniture that were close but not exactly back in place. Once the paint had dried he’d directed Stephen and Marcus as they moved furniture back against the walls. “Do you want to unpack any of the boxes tonight? We could do your desk, or start on the new bookshelves.”

  “Another day. You might have energy to move but I’m a puddle of mush.”

  Jack laughed at the image. He gently rubbed her shoulder. “It was a very long day.”

  “I think it would have been easier to just move.” She nodded to the bookshelf. “That was a really nice addition.”