Flame Out

by M. P. Cooley

  “It took me months to get permits to knock down the wall,” he said, pointing to a spot midway down the room where the planks of the wood floor didn’t line up exactly. “Before it was two cramped little rooms.”

  That was hard to imagine. Hale had painted the walls a navy blue, but the room was so big that the dark color didn’t make the room feel closed in, but instead secure, an unassailable fortress. His sheets were a light blue, and taking up much of the wall over the bed was an abstract painting, splashes of rust-red paint bursting at the boundaries of the canvas.

  “Food’s getting cold.” He slipped around me, his broad chest brushing my shoulder as he negotiated the tight landing, before striding up the stairs.

  I followed him up to the roof, which was as spectacular as he promised. The sun was starting to set, and the gold sky was streaked red and purple. We would have rain tomorrow, but tonight was perfect. Hale waved me over to a teak table tucked under a pergola. I poured wine while he lit a citronella candle.

  “Too early for mosquitos,” I said. “Not hot enough.”

  “My southern training—I assume there’s always a gruesome bug lurking in the shadows. Plus, you know, atmosphere.” He picked up his wineglass. “To Albany.”

  “To Albany.”

  The salmon was perfect, the smooth fish offset by the sweet, sharp relish.

  I shoveled in another mouthful. “Where did you learn to make this?”

  “Miami,” Hale said.

  Hale explained he had been assigned there five years back after doing a long stint in Detroit. He did antiterrorism in both places, but in Miami the antiterrorism overlapped with gang activity, since some of the terrorist groups were raising money through the drug trade.

  “I loved the people of Detroit, but after those winters, Miami was a kindness.”

  I told him the story of working with an informant in Missouri who had infiltrated the Banditos. Fang proved to be one of our best sources; he slipped out right before we were able to indict him on weapons, human trafficking, and racketeering charges, going to California where he returned to his life of crime. I was transferred to California and was still doing anti-gang work when I knocked on the door of a person we were watching, acting like a drug-hungry tweaker, and met Fang again. I described how he kept calling me June, even though my contacts knew me as Maggie. Eventually, I had to pull a screwdriver on him as Maggie didn’t appreciate being mistaken for some skank called June.

  “He dropped his beer and ran out the back door.” Hale threw his head back, laughing, the hard lines of his face softening, reminding me of when I knew him over a decade ago, long before Kevin and I became a couple, the three of us trainees at Quantico. One night Hale and I were studying for our computer crime class—Kevin skipped out since he could basically teach the class—and we ended the night not just sharing notes, but with a kiss.

  I wasn’t stupid. I knew he was a player. I knew it would be good because his ego wouldn’t be satisfied unless I admitted the sex was fantastic, but the great sex was paired with a surprising intensity. When I thought about it—and I had—I imagined that he would be a couple of orgasms and a laugh. Instead, he wouldn’t stop kissing and touching me: my neck, my breasts, and less obvious places, like my fingers and the soft gap behind my knee. He slept wound around me and kissed me awake in the morning.

  I pushed my plate away, satisfied. A breeze came up, bringing with it the smell of lilacs and wood smoke. Spring had sprung but people still used their fireplaces.

  “So, when we tie this up,” Hale asked as he leaned back against the bench, “what did you decide?”

  I was honestly surprised he had held out as long as he had, never once mentioning his offer during the trip.

  “I didn’t want to trap you,” he said, as if sensing my question. “We were working your cases. I thought . . . to me, it seemed like things were going well. Teamwork and . . . trust.”

  “I’m still on the fence,” I said. He waited, his face expressionless, knowing the best way to get a perp to talk was to remain silent, but he shifted in his seat and leaned forward on the table.

  I leaned away. “You’re offering me a fantastic opportunity and I really appreciate that you’ve gone to such lengths to make me think you’re a better man—”

  He flinched. “I am a better man, June.”

  “You are. There’s no question you’ve changed. But, and I don’t mean to offend you when I say this, but there’s no way it can live up to what you’ve promised. It can’t. Opportunities to challenge myself, but keeping travel to a minimum? Exciting cases, but no danger?”

  “Since I’ve been working with you in your small town, you’ve almost died of hypothermia and were trapped in a burning building.”

  “But those were anomalies. Once-in-a-lifetime events.”

  “Which you have had two of in the last five months.”

  “So I’m done for this lifetime.”

  Hale raised an eyebrow at me. “June, you’re making all these excuses, but we could make this happen. You have your father. You would have me. And I bet if we talked about it with your chief, we could ensure some job security. Of course, I’d be happiest if you signed back on full-time, but my wishes aren’t the most significant thing here. However, they are”—he smiled—“important.”

  My phone rang. It was Chief Donnelly. I tried to draw out the conversation, but Donnelly kept it short and sweet: he had secured access to the Lawler home and assistance from crime scene units at 8:00 a.m. tomorrow. I hung up, ready to use the excuse of an early morning to escape, but I knew it was a bad idea: I would spend the next few weeks expecting Hale to bring it up again. I took a deep breath and dove in.

  “What I can’t understand,” I said, “is why you want me back so badly.” He started to protest, but I cut him off. “I was a good shot—”

  “A great shot,” he said.

  “And I was good on the anti-gang work. But out here, we’ve got a couple of Hell’s Angels, some Five Percenters, but nothing like LA or Oakland. Soon you’d have me doing other assignments, ones I’m not qualified for, and I’d end up botching them. I’d lose the faith of the other agents. You would, too, for being nice to an old . . . friend.”

  Hale dropped his voice low. “June. Here’s the deal. You got top scores on the shooting range. You have deep experience in organized crime, and a grasp of cybercrime having been married to Kevin.” At the mention of Kevin I pulled back, but Hale reached forward and wrapped his fingers around my arm, gently holding me in place. “Your mind, your dedication, your skills—with the new stuff, there would be no learning curve.”

  “I haven’t retained much knowledge about explosives,” I said.

  “We’ll keep you away from the C-4.” He patted my hand before pulling back, fixing me with his gaze. “Listen to me, June. I say this absolutely: there is no one I trust more. No one.”

  The two of us sat quietly. I watched as offices in the State Tower went dark, leaving a patchwork of light. I could hear cars down on the street and traffic on 787, a few blocks away, and beyond that the river, lapping at the shore, as quiet as a breath. The temperature was dropping, and a chill was traveling up from the base of my spine. Hale broke the silence.

  “I understand, June, that you might want to stay a small-town cop. Knowing your neighbors, your friends, your local criminals? It has appeal. And we can still be friends. But here’s the thing”—the sun had set and there was only his voice—“if you think you don’t have the resources to do this, that’s bullshit. And if you think I would jeopardize my first regional direction position so you felt comfortable, you’re flat-out wrong. So think about this. Seriously.” Hale picked up his plate. “C’mon, let’s go inside where it’s warm.”

  I offered to help with the dishes, but Hale refused and walked me to the garage. The car was running when he knocked on the glass, and I rolled down the window.

  “I’ll see you bright and early tomorrow,” he said. “I know your thoughts are on
these two cases, but I will need your answer soon. OK, June?”

  “Yes, Agent Bascom.”

  I backed out of the driveway. My headlights caught Hale, standing in the center of the alley, shielding his eyes against the glare. He never once moved, staying in place until I turned onto the street and was gone.

  CHAPTER 12

  LUISA LAWLER’S HEAD HAD HIT THE WALL HARD.

  In the pitch-black room the luminol glowed bright. The flashes from the crime scene techs’ cameras blinded me as they crammed as many photos as they could into the thirty-second window we had before the chemicals stopped working and the spots faded.

  “Again!” Annie called out of the darkness. There was a low hiss as the chemical was applied, and the blue reappeared, a solid stain of color at the center, with spots arcing out smaller and smaller, blood evidence for Luisa Lawler’s murder, the evidence as revealing as it had been thirty years ago. I saw Annie’s shadow scraping blood flecks off the wall to get DNA evidence that Deirdre Lawler hoped would absolve her brother Bernie of Luisa’s murder, and that I hoped would convict him of killing both his wife and Vera Batko.

  I’d seen a Polaroid of this image before in Luisa’s murder file. My father had discovered the blood evidence first, and it had been the clue that tipped him off that something very bad had gone down at the Lawlers’ house. There were other pictures of this room taken by a police photographer, glossy black and whites that captured the room’s early eighties tackiness in all its glory. A white shag carpet covered the floor, and one whole wall was taken up by wallpaper that was a photo of a true-to-size forest. Bernie Lawler had put in a glossy black bar that dominated the far corner, and a white leather couch sat opposite a forty-inch TV that looked heavy enough to crack the building’s foundation, the rabbit ears reaching almost to the ceiling.

  Nobody would have looked at the room twice, but then the Lawlers’ housekeeper, Natalya Batko, told my father that it had recently been repainted and the furniture rearranged. My dad and the officers moved the couch, taking away a layer of paint and revealing flecks of blood on the wall and a section of the shag rug that had been cut away. Dad sprayed luminol, revealing the same pattern we saw here today. Back then no DNA testing was available, but when he scratched off some blood, the type matched that of Luisa Lawler. From that moment, they stopped searching for an anonymous assailant and concentrated on Bernie Lawler.

  “Lights!” Annie called.

  Spotlights went on, and the room was bright white, unchanged in many ways from when my father first gathered evidence on Luisa’s murder. The couch had been removed by the police, and the TV had been taken years ago by muscular thieves. A pipe had burst above the bar, cracking the shiny black glass, spiderwebs spanning its surface. Brown rings on the formerly white rug marking a flood that had receded, and the forest on the wall was obscured behind a layer of dirt that upon closer inspection proved to be black mold. I was beginning to regret not taking Annie up on her offer of a protective suit.

  “We done?” Annie was more of a demand than a request kind of person, and if she was going to request my permission, I would agree.

  “Annie likes you,” Hale said as we trooped upstairs, the techs following behind with the lamps and a generator. The living room had the same trapped-in-amber quality as the basement. Sure, the stereo was long gone, but the house was still decorated in the latest fashions from 1983. This room showed Luisa’s feminine hand, with pastel couches and a brass planter, that, if I had to guess, had once held a spider fern. The room dropped into darkness as techs put blackout curtains over the windows and sprayed the luminol. Nothing.

  There continued to be nothing through the rest of the first floor. We walked up a half flight to the second floor and walked down the hall, lined with pictures of the family.

  Hale looked at the photos of Teddy, tracking the Lawlers’ son from birth until age three, a few months before he died. “Why didn’t Luisa’s mother take any of this?”

  We walked into the little boy’s room, blue with a bed shaped like a race car, the sheets disintegrating with age. Another small bedroom across the hall contained Teddy’s crib and changing table, and at the end of the hall was the master bedroom. Luisa and Bernie’s room had gold carpeting, and the bed was still made, a green satin comforter faded in places where the morning sun hit it. They put up the blackout curtains and again sprayed the luminol.

  “Where are the pentacles?” I asked Hale in the darkness.

  He gave a sharp laugh. “You think Bernie was flirting with the lord of the underworld? Sacrificing goats, maybe?”

  “No, no,” I said. “An abandoned place like this, where a murder took place, would be catnip to teenagers, either carrying a Ouija board or a case of beer. But other than a few missing electronics, there’s nothing.”

  “Was the murder brutal enough that they stayed away? Afraid of the ghost of Luisa Lawler?”

  “Or more likely, afraid of Jake Medved, ready to kick the ass of anyone who trespassed on his brother’s property.”

  Annie grabbed a single blackout curtain, a bottle of luminol, and a camera and locked herself in the bathroom, muttering something about getting out of this hellhole. The door swung open not twenty seconds later.

  “Get in here!” Annie ordered. Three of the techs sprinted toward the door. “No, not you,” she said. “The cops.”

  Hale and I slid past the group and into the cramped bathroom. Annie closed the door and the room went black.

  “Pay attention,” Annie said. The hiss from the spray canister filled the space. The bathtub started to glow, and then flash. I saw stars.

  “Can you hold off on the photos for a second, Annie?” I asked.

  Annie stopped. Out of the blackness an image appeared, brighter and brighter, blood smeared across the tile, marking the path of a slumping body. Several small handprints appeared at the edge of the basin along with one large one and there were rings in the tub where blood had sat and then drained.

  Annie vibrated with restrained energy. “So can I do my job?”

  I agreed and she sprayed again, taking pictures of the wall, careful to get close-ups of the corners and drains. She brought in the lights. No blood was visible under the glare.

  “Bleach,” Annie said. She grabbed a lamp and aimed it toward the drain, standing on her toes to change the angle.

  “I want the pipe under this tub,” she said. “Where’s my wrench?”

  As Annie and one of the techs worked on the plumbing, Hale and I followed the others out into the hall, which proved clean of blood.

  “So I hate to ask this,” Hale said when we were down the hall out of earshot, “but is there any chance at all that your Dad might have missed this,” he waved in the direction of the bathroom, “during the initial investigation?”

  “All the spatter analysis and the luminol tests were in the file—I re-read them this morning. With the exception of some trace elements, the rooms on the second floor were tested for blood and were clear.” I paused now, worried that I was making assumptions about my Dad’s initial investigation and jotted a note to myself to double check the results. “There is the possibility that the blood we found in the basement and Bernie’s trunk belonged to Vera—and we can know definitively with the DNA tests—but Annie’s discovery in the bathroom? It wasn’t here during the initial investigation.”

  Leaving Annie to finish up, Hale hit the flashlight app on his phone and we made our way down the stairs and out the door. We stumbled out into a world filled with light, and I took a deep breath of the fresh air. I needed to get out of 1983.

  ELDA HARRIS’S HOUSE WAS CLOSE TO THE RIVER, ONE OF A SERIES of Victorian mansions built by the first mill owners. It was no longer prime real estate, and most of the houses had been cut up into apartments, with Elda’s being one of the few exceptions. Luisa Lawler’s childhood home was perched on top of a steep slope, giving it excellent views. Both Hale and I were panting by the time we rang the doorbell.

  The d
oor was opened by the same young woman who had driven Elda down to the factory. In addition to her nursing duties, Caitlin acted as maid, leading us to the living room, which was papered in green and gold brocade and filled with expensive furniture built in the nineteenth century to last into the twenty-first. The spindle-legged tables were topped by a sea of pictures of Teddy and Luisa. Now I understood why Elda hadn’t taken any photos from Bernie’s house.

  Elda Harris limped in. She didn’t need a cane but moved between pieces of furniture, catching herself like a toddler learning to walk. She wore matching green knit pants and a turtleneck under a gray cashmere sweater. We introduced ourselves.

  “The FBI’s involvement is what my daughter’s case needs,” she said. Before I could explain, she rushed ahead. “Please know, Officer Lyons, I’m grateful for your father’s work.” She squared her shoulders. “Bernie was slimy enough to slither away from the charges, but my son-in-law didn’t realize he had two bigger foes: me and your father.”

  During the investigation into Luisa’s murder, the phone had rung constantly at all hours of the day and night. Then I’d hear my father’s tired voice from the downstairs hallway: “Yes, Elda. First thing in the morning.”

  Elda hopscotched past a few more chairs before landing on a settee, the brocade fabric matching the wallpaper. I sat down on a chair opposite her, my legs folding up like an accordion. Everything in this room had been built for a petite person. Hale continued standing.

  I explained as kindly as I could that we were there to investigate the death of Vera Batko and the fire at the factory, not Luisa and Teddy’s murder.

  “And why not?” Elda said. “You never found their bodies. Maybe the professionals at the FBI could change that.”

  I didn’t want him to promise Elda things we couldn’t deliver, particularly when we had two major crimes we were trying to solve, but Hale plowed on. “The deaths are very likely related—”

  “Did you know,” Elda said, “when they found that body in the burned factory I was hopeful. Can you believe that? I was hopeful that a dead woman in a barrel was my daughter.”