Violet Darger (Book 6): Night On Fire

by Vargus, L. T.

  But rivulets of embers and flame poured out of the windows of the top floor as well, strange whooshing tentacles reaching out for fresh objects to touch, heat, consume. They seemed to move in unison, flowing and twisting together like some glowing flock of the tiniest birds.

  Watching this brick and concrete structure pulled apart with such seeming ease, the words burst at the seams sprang to Darger’s mind. It was hard to fully grasp, the destruction somehow awe-inspiring in its own disturbing way.

  Shock and awe.

  The fireman in the bucket squatted and hugged his arms around the bars, his little platform trembling like mad, the boom arm rattling all the way down to the truck. One of the guys on the ground had manned the controls, jerking the bucket away from the building just before the roof came down. That had kept him well out of the fire’s reach, and so far there was no falling debris.

  Darger could read relief in the body language of the men on the ground. The panicked arm-waving and jumping jack motions had fallen off into slumped shoulders, a few fist pumps, and smiles beaming out from behind the clear shields protecting their faces.

  And even if the sun plunged into the horizon now, the sky darkening around them in shades of an orange and purple smog sunset going dim, there remained an incredible light shining through this time and place. A softness. A warmth. Some lightness seeming to occupy existence itself, a weightlessness, if only for this moment.

  She still didn’t know how many had died here, but the firefighter in the bucket was going to be OK. That was something.

  For the first time in what felt like a long while, Darger tore her gaze away from the burning building above to examine the crowd around her.

  It had grown rapidly — probably more than a hundred onlookers huddled along the sawhorse perimeter with more lingering further back. Some could be survivors or regulars at the bar — there’d be potential witnesses and people of interest in each group. That’d be an angle they could work, which meant they should probably start filming the crowd immediately and canvassing sooner than later.

  More members of the task force had arrived by now, all of their faces solemn as they watched the blaze. Crazy how fire did that, she thought. Turned even the hardest law enforcement officers into spectators, numb and listless in the presence of the great burning spectacle, held them in rapture for a time.

  They had to break that spell now and get back to work.

  She noticed something else about the crowd, however — Agent Luck was no longer standing next to her.

  Darger swiveled her head. Eyes scanning the crowd and beyond. Seeking Luck.

  She looked for a suit amongst the hoodies and t-shirts and other casual garb most of the onlookers wore, then remembered that everyone on the surveillance detail had been in plainclothes. If she was remembering right, Luck had been wearing jeans and a polo shirt. Gray or navy blue, she thought. Not much help in either case.

  The flashing lights on top of the first response vehicles wasn’t helping either. It cast the whole scene with a disorienting strobe effect.

  Finally, she spotted him. Luck had crossed the perimeter and now advanced on the truck with the tower ladder extending from its rear end. Two men in uniform stood near the back bumper of the massive vehicle, conversing with a group of firefighters in full gear. She recognized the L.A. Fire Chief but blanked on his name just now. The other uniformed man was Chief Macklin. He must have sensed Luck’s approach, because he lifted an arm and waved him into the huddle.

  Darger watched the parley from a distance. The men seemed to take turns ducking their heads near each other to better be heard. She couldn’t help but think of a gaggle of geese as they craned their heads low one after the other. She chewed her lip a little as she wondered what they were talking about. They had to be discussing the body count, and that thought filled her with a mix of anticipation and dread. She resisted the urge to fidget, to bounce up and down on her feet. She’d know soon enough.

  After a few seconds, Luck turned back. This was it. In moments, she’d get word about how bad this one had been, a definitive answer to that question that kept repeating in her head, pumping along like the sound of her heartbeat: How many dead?

  Her throat got tight as Luck padded back over the asphalt toward her. She tried to read his facial expression. Did she see a grim line occupying his mouth, a mournful crease between his eyebrows, or was that just paranoia intruding into her perceptions? Fact or figments?

  Luck sidled between two sawhorses and leaned close to her. Without even getting that near to the actual blaze, he already smelled more like smoke than he had — that acrid, industrial smoke smell that made the odor of cigarettes seem like freshly bloomed roses by comparison.

  “Good news,” he said, his lips finally quirking into a smile. “They’re pretty sure everyone got out.”

  Darger blinked.

  “Everyone?” she said.

  Luck nodded.

  “Someone smelled smoke pretty early on, stood up on the bar, and directed everyone to the fire exit toward the back of the bar. A very lucky thing. It’s almost hard to believe looking at the wreckage now, but there were no casualties. Not even any injuries, as far as they know.”

  “Aside from the building itself, I guess,” Darger said.

  With that, they looked up at the structure, sparks glowing bright in the plumes of black smoke that seemed to twirl endlessly toward the heavens. Watching it now, it was hard not to think that the building would be a total loss.

  Bad, but not so bad, she thought. The building was a casualty she could live with.

  Chapter 37

  All of the law enforcement officers on hand at the scene of the bar fire huddled around the two Chiefs. That lackadaisical quality that had settled over everyone as they watched the early stages of the fire seemed to have fled the faces of these men and women. Darger noted a fierceness having arisen to replace the listlessness — creased brows and clear eyes — and she felt good about that.

  “Listen up, we got lucky tonight,” Chief Macklin said, his voice hitting some note reminiscent of a football coach giving a rousing halftime speech. “We believe everyone in The Blue Handkerchief got out in time. That’s significant for multiple reasons, obviously. But for right now, in terms of working this case, it means any potential witnesses lived to tell their tale. The way I see it, that means our unsub just made his first big mistake, a mistake we can make him pay for. So take a look at that crowd over there.”

  He extended his arm and swept it to the side, an oddly fanciful gesture, a little like one of the models on The Price is Right showing off a pair of Eddie Bauer edition jet skis.

  “One of those onlookers might just hold the next big break in this case. It’s a lot of interviews to process, and I know some of you are off duty just now, but we’ve got the right people here to make this happen. So let’s get after it.”

  After Coach Macklin’s pep talk had rallied the team, he asked Darger to give a few basic instructions for the impromptu canvassing session to come. Her words came out in a strange stream that she couldn’t quite keep track of herself, her mouth somehow talking on autopilot, as though the message were channeled into her brain from elsewhere. She’d only ever experienced this in moments of intense focus, in moments when she was in the zone.

  She knew why. Her instincts told her that something would shake loose tonight. Something important. And in her best moments, she often found that she wasn’t thinking, not consciously. She let her gut guide her.

  “The first step will be dividing the crowd into witnesses and onlookers. Let’s pull anyone who was inside the bar over to this area here,” she said, gesturing to an open space near one of the ambulances. “We’ll also be interested in talking to anyone who was outside the bar around the time the fire started. It was broad daylight. Someone very likely saw something. A suspicious person. A car speeding away.”

  The heat coming off the building was starting to make her sweat, and Darger pushed up her sleeves
as she spoke.

  “When you question your witnesses, focus on the moments leading up to the fire. Where were they? Who were they with? What did they notice first? Adrenaline has a way of jumbling up our memories when we try to recall an intense event, so asking for a chronological narrative usually helps them to sort things out.”

  The fire was to Darger’s back now, the orange light flickering against the faces of the task force personnel.

  “We’ll want to compile a master list of witnesses, including anyone who may have left the scene since the start of the fire. It’s important that we speak to anyone who might have seen something. And on that note, we want to know if any of the witnesses noticed anyone or anything suspicious in the area not just today, but in the last few days or even weeks.”

  Darger was certain this particular arsonist was more organized than most. Already they had evidence that suggested he liked to case his targets for days or even weeks ahead of time. Just another in a long line of Hollywood location scouts combing through these streets for the perfect setting, she thought. And while the organized behavior made him more careful in some ways — and thus harder to catch — it also increased the possibility of someone having laid eyes on him somewhere along the way.

  “We’ll need someone to take video of the crowd, and that will include both the witness group and anyone that was just here to rubberneck.”

  Having filmed numerous crowds without it leading to anything, she didn’t hold terribly high hopes that the killer would be here tonight, hiding amongst the crowd, but it was certainly a possibility. John Orr had often shown up to watch the fires he created, typically going so far as to volunteer his help in investigating them.

  “We’ll want a list of the surrounding businesses so we can get in touch with management. Not only are we interested to know if they’ve seen anything out of the ordinary, but if they have security cameras. Any footage we can get for this afternoon and the last few days will be key.”

  Before she’d fully caught up with the rush of canvassing tactics exiting her lips, she heard herself dismiss the crew, and then everyone began moving at once. Most of the officers knifed into the crowd, each pulling someone aside and asking him or her a few key questions. For the first time, Darger noticed that most of the crowd of spectators was made up of men, perhaps close to 90%.

  She nudged Luck with her elbow.

  “Is The Blue Handkerchief a gay bar?”

  “Yeah. You couldn’t tell by the name?”

  “What about it?”

  “The hanky code. It was a thing back in the 70s. You wore a different colored handkerchief depending on what you were… you know… into,” he said, blushing at the implication.

  Squinting, Darger said, “And how do you know about this?”

  He shrugged, shifting his feet. She’d forgotten how easily he embarrassed and couldn’t help but laugh.

  Luck cleared his throat.

  “You think that’s significant, him targeting a gay bar? I mean, is he a homophobe or something?”

  “Could be,” Darger said. “I was thinking earlier that some people might consider a bar to be the opposite of a church. And maybe in some ways they are. But there are also similarities. People often have a regular bar they frequent the same way they have a chosen church. They’re both community gathering places with built-in rules and rituals. Maybe he hates churches and bars because they represent all the ways he doesn’t fit in.”

  Luck smiled and shook his head.

  “What?”

  “You just always have a way of spinning things that I don’t see coming,” Luck said. “I mean, it all makes sense. But the inside of your head must be a bizarre place.”

  “I’ll take that as a compliment.” Darger thrust her hands in her pockets. “Anyway, the fact that it’s a gay bar may or may not be significant. He might be homophobic. He might be gay himself, and this is his way of lashing out at a group he wants to belong to but feels alienated from.”

  Her eyes wandered over to Murphy, who stood filming the crowd with a digital camcorder a little bigger than a can of Pepsi, panning across the mob slowly, trying to get clear shots of each and every face. Here and there she spotted members of the task force mingling among them, so many people chatting all at once after a long quiet stretch under the fire’s spell. She realized that she was examining the body language of the bystanders, looking for signs of nerves, jitters, paranoia. Maybe part of her did think the killer was out there.

  A chill crept up her spine at the thought, made the hair on the back her neck prick up.

  Her eyes flicked from face to face, scrutinizing as though somehow, someway her intuition would just know him when she saw him. Another part of her tried to quantify this absurd fantasy by drilling down to the minutiae. Would he have a goatee? A cleft chin? A crooked nose like a boxer? Would he wear glasses? Have tattoos? Crow’s feet around his eyes?

  So many faces, and one of them could be his, but no matter how hard she focused her stare, there was no way for her to tell. If only she could peak inside each brain, peel away the skull like a candy shell to see what kind of filling lay hidden inside, all of the secrets exposed, plain to see with the naked eye.

  She knew the truth, though. He probably looked ordinary. Plain. Just a man like anyone else. Indistinguishable.

  Like a dad or a husband or a brother. Maybe he even was some or all of those things when he wasn’t off setting fires.

  Normal. He probably looked normal, whatever that even meant.

  She caught movement out of the corner of her eye and that reeled her back in from the abstract place her mind had wandered to.

  Luck stirred, adjusting the collar of his shirt. Readying himself. Almost preening, she thought. She followed his gaze.

  Two witnesses were being lead over to them by Bishop. For now the shadows swathed their features, rendering them as two silhouettes tailing behind the towering officer, but Darger knew she’d shine her light on them soon enough and see what was there to see.

  Good. Time to get to work.

  Chapter 38

  Alejandro Zapata was a slim Latino man with blue hair and a single diamond stud in his ear. He’d been tending bar when the fire started, the first to smell the smoke, and the one responsible for immediately evacuating the place.

  “At first I thought someone had lit up. Everyone knows it’s illegal to smoke inside, but every once in a while we get someone trying to light a cigarette in the bar. I’ve even caught people trying to smoke pot in the restrooms a few times. But usually it’s late at night. People drunk enough they aren’t quite thinking straight. So I looked around, thinking I’d find some frat boy trying to be cute. They come in sometimes, thinking they’re woke or something for being in a gay bar.”

  It was instantly clear to Darger that Alejandro was someone who liked to tell a story. He was quite theatrical, making faces, and acting out certain things with his hands.

  “But you didn’t find anyone smoking,” Darger said, urging him along.

  “Uh-uh. No, ma’am. And then I got another whiff and thought it didn’t smell so much like cigarettes. It was… nasty. And not in a good way,” he said, waving his hand in front of his face. “So I hopped over the bar and went over to the door that leads to the stairwell, and I could see the smoke seeping in through the cracks around the door. I tested the door handle to see if it was hot, and my hand was a little wet from juicing limes. I swear to you that the tips of my fingers sizzled when they touched that handle! I’m lucky I didn’t burn my hand off.”

  Darger nodded.

  “What happened next?”

  “Well I knew then I had to get people out. So I marched right back inside, and I told Richie here,” Alejandro indicated the other man Bishop had brought over, “I said, ‘you go open the fire door in the back and make sure the ladder on the fire escape works, because we need to get these people out of here.’”

  Richie, who barely looked old enough to be in a bar, nodded. Darger was mome
ntarily distracted by the image on Richie’s t-shirt, which depicted Mario and Luigi, though both were much more well-muscled and well-endowed than she remembered from the video games.

  “I jumped up on the bar and told everyone that we needed to evacuate the bar. I made sure not to say ‘fire’ because I didn’t want anyone to panic. I got everyone in an orderly line and directed them to the fire door. I used to be a flight attendant, so I have a teensy bit of experience with that kind of thing.”

  He then did a little mimicry of a steward directing passengers to where the emergency exits were located.

  “And that’s pretty much it. People keep saying I’m a hero, but the truth is, it was all instinct. I didn’t really think about what I was doing at all.”

  There was a bandage on Alejandro’s wrist. Darger pointed at the white cotton wrap.

  “What happened there?”

  He clicked his tongue.

  “Just my luck. We got everyone down the fire escape safely, and I was the last one out. Then right at the bottom of the ladder, I scraped myself on this big rusty nail. The paramedics say I have to get a tetanus shot now.” He shuddered. “I hate needles.”

  “Still pretty lucky, all things considered,” Darger said, though Alejandro didn’t look convinced.

  “Any patrons in the bar lately that struck you as out of the ordinary? Or strange?” Luck asked.

  One of Alejandro’s eyebrows quirked upward, and a mischievous smile touched his mouth.

  “Who among us isn’t strange?” he said. “It’s the ordinary ones you have to worry about.”

  “This might be someone that’s only shown up recently. In the past few days or weeks. The kind of person that was more interested in studying the place than drinking. He might have even seemed a little nervous or keyed up,” Darger said.

  Alejandro shrugged.

  “We have a small regular crowd, but the early happy hour brings in a lot of randos. Tourists. College kids. I can’t say any of them stood out to me.” He clicked his tongue again. “Those boys all look the same in their pre-distressed jeans and flannel shirts.”