Flame Out

by M. P. Cooley

  Dave nudged Hale. “See that guy?” A man in his sixties, small and gray, made a sandwich and dropped it into his pocket. “That’s Tomas Wolschowicz. Oksana’s brother. The last woman who, maybe, possibly disappeared.”

  “We should go get his contact info,” I said.

  “He’ll dodge you. Cops make him nervous. Grab him now and take him to the backyard. It’s pretty quiet.”

  We approached and introduced ourselves, asking to talk about his sister.

  “Can I bring my food?” When we agreed, he followed us happily. We slipped out the kitchen door to the porch, but even outside the judge’s wreath was sickeningly sweet. We walked farther out onto the lawn.

  “Natalya’s house is such a sweet place,” Tomas said, taking in the land. “My parents would have killed for property like this. They were about Natalya’s age, always afraid of starving. Our whole backyard was a garden.” He nodded approvingly at some asparagus that were pushing through the earth. “My mom was a housekeeper; no way could she afford a place like this.”

  I looked at the back door where I saw Dave hovering. I dove into my questions about Oksana’s disappearance, confident that Dave couldn’t hear.

  “I’m not sure why you want to talk about my sister,” Tomas said. “She moved.”

  I relaxed, relieved there wasn’t another missing person. “When did you last talk to her?”

  “Talk?” Tomas shook his head. “It’s been a while.”

  “Since she left?”

  “No. But she sends letters, all classy and typed. She’s a legal secretary now.”

  I pulled out my notebook. “What’s the return address?”

  “There is none.” He shoved a large piece of pork roast in his mouth, chewing and swallowing so quickly I worried about him choking. “She sends me a hundred dollars for my birthday every year, not on my actual birthday or nothing, but it’s the thought that counts. I think she likes to show off a little, how good she’s doing, but doesn’t want my dad to track her down. Wish I could give her the all clear. The rat bastard died ten years ago.”

  “She and your dad fought?”

  “For a while, yeah. But she dated Jake Medved for a few years, and Jake threatened to kill my dad if he touched Oksana again.”

  “He was scared of Jake getting violent?”

  “Jake used to get his kicks beating the shit out of people, but that wouldn’t have stopped my dad. No way Dad was going to cross the judge, though.”

  “So just to clarify, Tomas, other than the letters”—which could be faked by anyone, I thought—“you haven’t had any contact with your sister Oksana in over twenty years?”

  “When you put it that way . . . no, I guess not.” He paused, food forgotten. “Do you think something happened to her?”

  “It would be good if we could rule that out,” Hale said. “Any chance you’d be willing to take a DNA test?”

  Tara bounced out of the house, her dark blue dress now replaced by a too-large cotton shift that was a swirl of hot pink and orange, a princess dress if the princess was from 1973. Lucas chased her outside with the judge and Jake on his heels.

  “Oh, sorry,” Lucas said. “Didn’t realize . . .”

  “Tomas!” the judge called. “A smart man you were, coming out here on this beautiful day instead of being trapped inside.” He smiles at me. “I hope we are not interrupting, Officer Lyons and Agent Bascom.”

  Jake stared at us. “A bunch of us are leaving, Tomas. Come now if you want a ride.”

  “Be there in a sec,” Tomas yelled. “They’re asking me a bunch of questions about Oksana!”

  Lucas and the judge were trying to corral Tara, but Jake stopped, staring at us. “Oksana? Something happen to Oksana?”

  “We should let you get back to your friends,” Hale said to Tomas, patting him on the back. “But let’s keep this conversation just among us. And let me know when you’re ready for the test and we can fix you right up.”

  Tomas didn’t answer, shuffling his feet.

  “What’s wrong, Tomas?” I asked. “It doesn’t hurt if that’s worrying you.”

  “No, it’s just . . . this woman I slept with says I’m her kid’s father.”

  I was at a loss. I wasn’t too impressed that he was trying to dodge his parental responsibilities. “They didn’t request a test before?”

  “She didn’t want much to do with me. But she could change her mind and come after me for child support.”

  “How old’s your daughter?”

  “Twenty-four.”

  While I still wasn’t impressed, at least I had a solution. “Too old. No child support for a child over eighteen.”

  “Then that’s OK. I might even try to talk my daughter into getting one herself. Get proof she’s my kid.”

  INSIDE, THE CROWD HAD THINNED. THE LADIES HELPING WITH food were still there, but the guys from the bar had left along with Dave’s friends.

  “You should take off,” Dave said. “Things around here are about to get real boring. They’re talking about who has cancer, and in a few more minutes, we’ll be discussing who died. I’d leave if I could.”

  “Dave, we have the investigation, but we’re also your friends,” Hale said and Dave grinned, too brightly. “I don’t know if I said this before, but I’m so very sorry about your mother. To lose the person who was there from the first, who named you.” Dave’s face softened, his smile blurring as he looked at the ground. “Well, it’s a big loss.”

  “We’d stay for you,” I said. Dave flinched. Everyone who remained was Island, and he knew they wouldn’t relax until we were gone. I gave him an out. “But we do have a lot of work to do.” Dave met my eye again, and I knew I was on the right course. “Want to meet up later?”

  Dave agreed, propelling us toward the door. I had to force him to stop so we could say good-bye to his aunt.

  On the way home, I stopped at the station to type up my notes on the interview with Tomas. It sounded like Oksana had a lot of good reasons to disappear—violent father, ex-con boyfriend, and a brother who at the very least was a deadbeat. My curiosity was piqued not because Oksana had left, but because she’d made the cursory attempt to stay in contact with her brother. Perhaps I was giving the letters she sent too much weight, but with Dave’s mom showing up dead after being a missing person for so many years, I was beginning to assume the worst about Oksana.

  I mapped out my plan for the next few days. I’d hit the dead end on Dave’s mother, having gone through all the forensics and interviews, and planned to switch to Louann Bazelon’s case. Now that we had a “who” with the burned woman, we could start to investigate the “how” and “why.”

  I waved my good-night to Lorraine, who, based on radio codes, was arranging a welfare check on Ernie Hollaran, a mean drunk whose family didn’t like him enough to visit but still cared enough to make sure he wasn’t dead. The streets were dim and quiet—except for a few old-man bars, we didn’t have much of a night life. I arrived home to find my spot in the driveway taken up by a new white Honda. As I opened the front door, I heard laughter from the kitchen, the conversation cutting off as I shut the door. I took off my shoes and padded in. My father was at the kitchen table, and Lucy was playing with a dream catcher, sitting on the lap of our guest. My mother.

  CHAPTER 14

  I SCRUBBED HARD AT MY FACE, RUBBING MY CHEEKS VIGOROUSLY with the cold water. I had escaped upstairs, ostensibly to “clean up after the funeral,” but really to get my head together. I felt ambushed.

  I had to prepare for my mother at the best of times. She was always so impractical, “off with the leprechauns,” my dad used to say when she would talk about “setting intentions” or walk through the house with burning sage to clarify the energies.

  My dad would sniff the air. “Smells like church,” he’d say, which infuriated her.

  I heard the stairs creak, and figured my dad must be coming up to apologize, or at least to explain. My mother and I hadn’t spoken since Kevin’
s funeral, and I had no interest in restarting the relationship. I’d given her too many extra chances for this lifetime. It was hard to see why Dad would have let my mother come, especially when things were crazy. There was a knock at the bathroom door.

  “Come in,” I said.

  It was my mother. She was wearing a loose shift in a golden sage color I guessed was Eileen Fisher, the embroidered cuff slipping to expose age-spotted hands.

  “I have to change,” I said, trying to slide past. I always reverted to fourteen and pissed around her. She wouldn’t give way.

  “I wanted to tell you,” she said evenly, “that I came up because I thought Gordon might need support at this time.”

  “Dad has support.”

  “You don’t think about supporting your father’s emotional needs because you’re his daughter. And your father, with his cop lifestyle, and his cop friends, and his cop daughter, he doesn’t have anyone to talk to about what’s really going on. In here.” She tapped her chest. “You can tell by how stiff his back is that he’s not at peace.” She rolled her shoulders, as if to give my father relief from a distance. “And I figured he would need a friend.”

  “You’re his friend?” I said.

  “I am. One of the few close ones he has.”

  From below I could hear my father and Lucy banging around in the kitchen, Lucy offering to set the table.

  “June, I don’t know if you remember what it was like last time—”

  “How could I forget?”

  “He never slept, taking Elda’s calls. You remember her? Luisa’s mother?”

  “Yes, I remember her. I visited her yesterday.”

  “Or he’d be up through the night, pacing from room to room, practicing the arguments he was going to make to the judge to secure a warrant.”

  “If only he’d had someone to support him back then,” I said meanly. “But you ran off with Larry.”

  “Now, June, that’s not true,” she said.

  “Don’t try to rewrite history.”

  “June, your father and I, we stayed together all during the trial. Both of us knew the marriage was over. We’d been young kids when we met, and our love, it felt like a lightning strike. But those lightning strikes are usually bad news—the sickest part of you speaking to the sickest part of another person. And once you get past the heat and power, you’re left with two people who don’t bring out the best in each other.”

  As always, my mother couldn’t stick to the facts—names and dates—and instead went for the grand metaphor.

  “Let’s make a deal, June,” she said. “I’ll stay at the hotel, although I hope . . . it would be so nice . . . if you would let me back into your life.”

  I was unmoved. She had spent so much time yelling at my dad back then. “Trying to get a reaction, any reaction,” she would shout. My dad would stop, tell her to pull herself together and leave, going for very long walks. One night I thought he wasn’t coming back, and when I opened the door, I found him sitting on the chair on the front porch.

  “Sorry, June,” he said. “Didn’t mean to scare you.”

  That was a bad time, and talking to my mother brought it all back. I wanted her gone, but my father hadn’t thrown her out. Driving her back to the airport probably wasn’t an option.

  “Leave now,” I said. “I need a break, and I’m not up to negotiating with you right now.”

  She nodded and, surprisingly, didn’t say anything.

  We went downstairs where Lucy was spinning around the living room, the feather from the dream catcher streaming behind her.

  “I’ve had a very long day, Lucy,” my mother said as she put on her coat. “Plane trips take a lot out of me—so much unhealthy air! I need a shower and some meditation. Why don’t we plan on meeting tomorrow after I get a good night’s sleep?”

  “You could stay,” my dad said from the doorway.

  “No, no,” she said, meeting my eyes briefly before looking away. “I do need some sleep. Since we’re both early risers, let’s have breakfast. Is Marie’s still there, and does she still make those sublime banana pancakes?”

  “It’s her daughter’s place now, but she kept the recipes,” my dad said. “How about six?”

  I wanted to protest, but it seemed unfair to remind him I needed him to get Lucy on the school bus at 7:30.

  My mother walked over and kissed him on the cheek—he looked shocked, but recovered fast, returning the kiss, and walking her to her car.

  The three of us ate dinner, ignoring the empty place next to Lucy. After dinner, Lucy and my father hung up her new dream catcher while I did the dishes, and he hauled the garbage to the curb while I read her a story.

  I considered going to bed, but I could hear him in the dining room, flipping through papers, no doubt rereading the file, and knew we had to talk about my mother tonight—I wouldn’t sleep otherwise. I made a cup of tea to fortify myself for the confrontation. As the water boiled, my phone rang. Hale.

  “My techs scraped the VIN off the van and were able to track down the specific Carfast office where it was rented. Las Vegas.”

  “Why would she rent it there? Vegas isn’t New Mexico.”

  “Well, it’s closer to New Mexico than Schenectady is.”

  I stayed silent. The longest longshot in the world slotted into place. “Can the place send us video?” I said.

  “Sure can,” Hale said. “I have a local agent there picking it up for us. The only problem—and thankfully it’s temporary—is that the owner recorded with videotape, not digital.”

  “Videotape?” I said. Not only was it years out of date, it was expensive. Digital imaging was more or less free once you set up the system. “Is it recorded on Betamax?”

  Hale laughed. “No, but close. As you might imagine, a franchise owner too cheap to install a new digital security system is also not going to be shelling out for new videotapes very often. We have the tapes, but they’ve been taped over and over and over so many times that the video of the person renting the van, such as it is, is difficult to make out.”

  I groaned.

  “Don’t despair now, June,” Hale said. “You have an in at the FBI. Our agency has technology available to transfer the video to a digital format, and then pull clear images out of that digital file.”

  “That’s nice of you to expedite the transfer.”

  “The faster we close these cases, the sooner you’re on my team.”

  “Hale. Seriously.”

  “Give it a rest,” Hale said. “I got it, June.”

  I hung up the phone and ran smack into my father.

  “You’re rejoining the Bureau?”

  “Absolutely not,” I said, and then reconsidered. “The chances aren’t zero, but they’re close.”

  “Why?” he said. “You’re through . . . the crisis.” Dad still avoided mentioning Kevin’s death. “And you liked the work. More than what you’re doing now.”

  “I might end up on the road.”

  “But around here?”

  The kettle whistled, and I walked over and poured my tea. “Between Vermont and Buffalo.”

  “Overnights?”

  I couldn’t believe this. “It doesn’t matter. Yes, there are overnights, and they’re not an option. And neither are undercover operations. And the first time I did mob or gang work and they came hunting for me? Who do you think they would find? Lucy,” I said, furious at even the thought of it. “And you.”

  My father didn’t protest, and I thought the conversation was closed. I was wrong.

  “Does no one in the Bureau have families?” he asked.

  I took a deep breath. “Some. Not all of them thrive.”

  “You and Kevin did. Successfully, as I recall.”

  “Kevin did cybercrime, following trails through the Internet, not across a desert or up a mountain. He covered home base.”

  “You have me now.”

  “I know, I know.” I pulled the teabag out of my cup and threw it away. “Bu
t Hale offered me a position as a consultant, anyway. It wouldn’t be permanent.”

  “Wouldn’t that be a positive? Try it out, see how it goes?”

  “And what if it fell through? Would you enjoy your unemployed daughter living with you?”

  My father squinted at me. “You’re afraid.”

  He was talking about feelings. My mother was a bad influence on him. I decided to change the subject to something I wanted to argue about.

  “So, Mom? Your new best friend?”

  “The lady you were rude to? Yeah, we’re friends.”

  “I would have appreciated a little warning. I could have gone and done some overtime. Run some errands. Anything other than coming over to talk to that woman.”

  He crossed his arms. “Twenty years, June. Let it go.”

  “I did. I let the divorce go a long time ago. But at Kevin’s funeral . . .”

  “It wasn’t so awful,” he said. “It wasn’t silent-treatment awful. Forgive her.”

  “For what she said at Kevin’s funeral?”

  “For that. And for the time in your twenties she invited you to a healing circle. And for when she let you ignore her. And when she left . . . left me, not you.” He paused. “Which was the right thing to do at the time.”

  He stood up and walked past me, picking up my cup and loading it into the dishwasher. I listened to him shuffle toward the dining room and expected him to dig in for another night of research, but he flipped the light and returned, stopping to place a kiss on the top of my head, the way he did when I was younger and shorter.

  The carpet muffled his steps as he went upstairs, but his tread was heavy, crossing between the bathroom and his bedroom. I waited until he was completely settled before walking upstairs myself, flipping off lights as I went. Sleep came fast.

  NATE AND THEO OFFERED TO COME DOWN TO THE STATION TO make a statement about their mother’s probable abduction, but Nate had a request: he wanted to see where the fire happened. Doing the interview at the station made my life easier so I was happy to oblige; Hale and I picked them up at the hospital. Darius stayed at Louann’s bedside, and we planned to get his information when we returned the brothers to the hospital.