“So, what? We just sit around and wait for him to do it again?” Bobby asked.
Gage shook his head. “We’ll do what we can. Increase our patrols, try to track down the purchases of cell phones and kerosene in the area. Do some background checks on any new residents.”
“Kerosene sales aren’t really going to help,” Cleetus said. “Most folks around here use it for backup generators, farm equipment, oil lamps for when the power goes out in ice storms.”
“Any idea what kind of a timer he used?” Wes asked, pulling them back to the evidence.
“The lab will analyze it to be sure, but I’m guessing a cell phone. Easy to tie into the ignition fuse and a simple phone call from the safety spot would set it off.”
“Anyone use this kind of timer before?” Gage asked.
“There was one guy about a decade ago who used kerosene and cell phones in his fires. Made a name for himself as an arsonist for hire across the northern third of the state for people looking to commit insurance fraud with their businesses.” Mike glanced at Deke then looked back at Gage. “Can’t be him though.”
“How can you be sure?” Bobby asked. “He could’ve gone dormant or been doing business in another state, couldn’t he?”
“That’s not possible,” Deke said.
“Why?” Gage didn’t like the sudden sense of dread creeping up his spine as he stared at his oldest friend.
Deke raised his cold, hard eyes to him. “Because I killed him nine years ago.”
* * * * *
Kyle stepped out into the alley carrying two bags of garbage from the café, heading for the dumpster. Of all the jobs at the café, this was the one he hated the most. Not so much because he hated trash. Nope, it was the fact that he had to haul this stuff out down an alley, in the dark, behind the small picnic area where the staff ate their meals.
Thirty long strides halfway down the alley to the dumpster and he had the lid open. It was a habit, counting strides to places, knowing how fast he had to move to be out in the open. Always, his eyes darted from side to side, looking for movement—any danger coming at him. One counselor thought it was from being moved from place to place. He knew the truth. From the day he learned how hard his dad’s fist felt connecting with his cheek and how much his arm hurt after the old man twisted it, he’d learn to be aware of his surroundings.
The dark was the hard part. Monsters liked to hide in the shadows.
He tossed the sacks in the dumpster, letting the lid slam to break up some of the quiet of the night.
Thirty more strides and he’d be back inside the safety of the café. Back to listening to old bee-bop music with Rachel. He smiled as he started back inside. When he’d walked inside today wearing the café’s logo T-shirt, she’d grinned and made a big deal of showing her mom how good they looked. Next thing he knew everyone else, including Pete had one on. It was like they were all part of a team.
Movement up ahead caught his attention.
He froze.
Two tall forms blocked the path between him and the back door of the café.
He looked behind him.
Yep. There were the other two, blocking the exit of the alley behind him. Shorter and more squat than the ones up ahead. His football teammates.
Trapped.
“Well, look what we have here,” the quarterback and leader, Brett Howard, said in front of him. “The showoff taking out people’s garbage.”
“Sort of fitting,” Tanner sneered as the pair took a few steps forward. “Garbage taking out garbage.”
Kyle flexed his fingers, then drew them into fists, taking one slight step to widen his stance, ready to fight since his first choice of taking off at a dead run was no longer an option.
“Seems the new kid needs to learn his place,” one of the guys behind him said.
Kyle didn’t recognize his voice, so he assumed it was the redheaded offensive lineman, Connor Riley, which meant the other one was the linebacker Mike Cohn, who was decidedly silent. Was that a good thing or a bad one? In Kyle’s experience no one was ever on his side, so the silence had to be bad.
“Yeah, not so intimidating now that he can’t run,” Tanner said. He and Brett moved forward, trying to crowd his space.
“Hey man, I was just doing what the coach told me,” Kyle said, taking a step backward in response.
“Coach,” Brett, now only a foot away, pointed at him, “didn’t tell you to go out there and make us look like fools.”
Actually, Coach Deke told him to make those guys play hard. And that’s exactly what he’d done, intercepting balls that were meant to float into Tanner’s hands, reading the routes telegraphed by Howard watching the receiver, and running the ball back for a touchdown. It had felt good making them look like chumps.
Now, it didn’t look like such a good idea. Hell, he’d never fit in anywhere before, why did he expect to do so here? He glanced from one to the other. Yep. He was going to take a beating.
“Can’t help it if you guys aren’t as special as you think.”
That was all it took. They blitzed him from both sides.
* * * * *
Libby glanced out the window into the dark summer night. No sign of a car coming up the street.
Stop it. If he seriously wanted to talk to her, he’d be here. Pacing the floor and watching the street weren’t going to compel him to magically appear. Normally she wouldn’t be this anxious, but ever since the kiss he’d planted on her before walking out of her office she’d been as jittery as a June bug on a griddle.
How had she ever forgotten the effect his kisses always had on her? Breathless. Wanting more.
She let the curtain drop. Determined to curb her anxiety, she went to the kitchen and focused on—what?
The fridge.
Grabbing a plastic trash bag, she started emptying the refrigerator of any old or moldy vegetables. Years ago, she’d learned to put nervous energy to work in the form of housework. Cleaning the fridge wasn’t her favorite chore, but tonight she’d do anything to take her mind off the conversation to come. When she’d issued the challenge to Deke she’d been angry at him. Now she had so many consequences of that ultimatum to face, not the least of which was finally telling him the secret she’d held inside for ten long years.
Hard, brisk knocking shattered her thoughts and she dropped the bag on the floor with a slight yelp. Slimy, smelly spinach popped out of the plastic bag and onto her tile floor.
Great. Just what she needed before having a heart-to-heart talk with the man she’d loved forever.
She stomped over to the door and jerked it open to find him standing there, hand halfway up to knock again. “Come in. I have a mess to clean up,” she said, not waiting for a response. Leaving the door open for him, she headed back into the kitchen. She snatched a handful of paper towels, wet them under the faucet and sank to her knees.
“What the hell is that smell?” Deke’s deep raspy voice rumbled over as she scooted the offending greens back into their bag and then into the garbage bag.
She gave him a duh look and went back to cleaning the slimy drippings from the tiles. “Bad spinach. Don’t tell me you’ve never had spinach go bad in your fridge before?”
“Nope.”
Again, she paused to look at him like he was crazy. He leaned against the door frame, his hands in his jeans’ pocket and the whisper of a smile on his lips. Then it hit her and she laughed. “Of course not. What man would have fresh spinach in his refrigerator to begin with, let alone have it there long enough to go bad?”
He shrugged.
“Men,” she muttered and scrubbed at the last bits of mess. Finished, she scooped the paper towels into the bag, too. Before she could close the bag, his hands closed over hers.
“I’ll take it out to the trash,” he said, taking it from her without waiting for her to protest and walking out the back door. No need for him to ask where the trash was stored. This was the house she and Bill had grown up in. Deke had been her
e so often, it was almost his second home when they were young.
She quickly washed her hands in case any of the nasty stuff had managed to get on them. Funny thing, as soon as the bag had left the house the smell had, too. She pulled her hair out of the hair tie, letting it fall down around her shoulders the way he always liked. Picking up the bottle of Zinfandel she’d opened earlier, she poured herself another half glass of wine. A moment later, Deke stepped back inside, closing the door and locking it behind him.
“I don’t have any whiskey in the house. Want a glass of wine?” She held up the bottle.
“I don’t drink very often anymore,” he said. “Maybe just some water?”
When they’d been together it wasn’t uncommon for them to finish an entire bottle with their dinner, and he’d often enjoyed a whiskey neat after work. A lot of things changed in ten years. Without asking about his decreased alcohol consumption, she poured him a glass of water, then led the way into the living room. She sank onto the sectional and waited for him to pick a spot.
He stood in the middle of the room, taking in the changes she’d made. The old, cotton-covered couch and loveseat had been replaced by the sectional with its soft-as-butter leather upholstery. The old console TV was gone. In its place sat a modern credenza with a large flat-screen TV on top. She’d painted the wood paneling an off white, but left the family pictures in place.
Finally, Deke sat on the sectional, two cushions away. “I like what you’ve done with the place.”
“After the fire, I came home to live with Mama. Her Alzheimer’s was aggressive and before I knew it, she was in the nursing home. So, I thought why not update the old home to sell.” She took a drink of her wine. “Funny thing was, after I made changes, I decided I liked how comfortable it was and decided to just stay.”
“Nothing like coming home. My mom sold the old place of ours before she moved to her condo in South Carolina a few years back.”
Silence filled the next few minutes.
“What happened at the meeting over at the sheriff’s office?” she asked, mostly to avoid the hard conversation she knew was coming.
He shook his head, staring at the fireplace across the room. “Nothing good.”
She waited. Despite the years apart she knew Deke well enough to know he’d talk once he’d weighed the information in his head. Finally, he turned and focused his gaze on her. “Mike confirmed what I thought. The fire was set intentionally.”
“Kids playing around?” she asked, hoping it was some only teenagers being careless or thoughtless.
Again, he shook his head.
“An arsonist?” she nearly whispered the word. What little she knew about the fire that caused Bill’s death and nearly taken Deke’s life was that it was the work of an arsonist for hire. In fact, the only contact she’d had with Deke since that fateful night, was a letter a year later telling her how he’d tracked the man down, but he’d died in a fire before Deke could bring him to justice.
His dark-brown eyes fixed on her, he slowly nodded. “Trouble is, Mike hasn’t seen this guy’s work before. He thinks it’s his first fire, but won’t be his last.”
“Dear God,” she said, setting her glass aside, her fingers shaking. “We were lucky no one was seriously injured this time.”
“Mike said our firebug could escalate his enthusiasm and his deadliness.” His mouth pressed into a thin line and she could see his jaw muscles working hard as he fought his own anger. “We think he’s been studying someone else’s style of arson. His signature is one we’ve seen before.”
“Who?” she asked, even though she knew what he was going to say.
“Leo Harkin.”
“The man who killed Bill.” The need to move had her bolting from her seat to pace the room. “You told me he died in a fire he’d set himself.”
“He did. I promise.”
She stopped and whirled to face him, pointing right at him. “How do you know for sure? He could’ve escaped, couldn’t he? Do you know for sure his body was the one in the fire?”
“Trust me, Libby, Harkin died in that fire.” He rose from the couch and stood just an arm’s length away.
“How? How do you know?”
Deke went completely still, His jaw once more hard as granite, his hands in tight fists at his side, eyes narrowed. “Because I watched him burn.”
Startled by his confession, she blinked and gaped at him for a moment. Then she gave her head a shake to clear the confusion that had his words had set off. “Excuse me?”
He took a step back from her, absently running his hand over the scars on his neck as he took a turn at pacing. “From the moment I got out of the hospital I’d been chasing down the leads that we had on the guy. We knew he’d been active in the northeast part of the state for months before the warehouse fire.”
She didn’t have to ask which warehouse fire. The only one that mattered to either one of them was the one in which Bill died. Slowly, she sank back down onto the couch as he continued to talk.
“It took me several months, but slowly a pattern started to emerge. Every time a fire with his signature appeared, there was a robbery days before, usually just blocks away at an electronics or phone store. So I started watching the surveillance tapes of those stores. And I found him. The local cops cornered him at his home.”
“What happened?”
Eyes bleak, he slumped onto the sofa beside her, staring into the empty fireplace once more, as if he were back at the scene. “The man was paranoid on top of being a sick bastard. He’d booby-trapped his home and kept his wife and son virtual prisoners inside. When he saw the police outside surrounding their house, he yelled out the door that if anyone came inside, he’d burn the house down with them all inside it. The SWAT team was called in, but before they could talk him out or take him out, the front of the house was engulfed in flames.”
“Oh, dear God,” she whispered, suddenly nauseated. “He killed his whole family?”
Deke shook his head. “We thought so at first. The place burned fast. When we went through the rubble we found him and his wife, but no sign of the son.”
“He’d escaped?”
“Apparently the wife suspected what was going in her husband’s mind. There’d been years of abuse on both her and the son. Somewhere along the way she’d gotten enough courage to provide a trap door beneath the pantry’s floor that dropped to a space under the back porch. She’d hidden the boy, he was all of about six or seven and told him to get out, to run to the woods behind the house and not to come back until she called him.” Deke closed his eyes a minute, inhaling slowly, his jaw muscles flexing again. When he opened them again, unshed tears glistened in them. “We found him the next morning. Poor kid had been out there all night in the cold winter weather, barefoot and in his pajamas, while his parents burned to death.
“We took him to the hospital for exposure and they took a little of his blood for DNA testing against those of the couple inside the house. Both were his parents.”
“Do you think this could be the son? Come to exact revenge?” she asked.
He shook his head. “Gage asked the same thing. Told him I had no idea what happened to the kid. He’s going to look into it in the morning. In the meantime, we’re all going to go on alert. There will be another fire. No question.”
They sat in silence a few more minutes.
“It was my fault, Libby,” he said in almost a whisper, his shoulders slumped as if he were collapsing into himself, his deep, raspy voice adding its own pain to the statement.
She narrowed her eyes at him. “Horse crap. You didn’t make him kill himself or his family, Deke.”
“I know that. That’s not what I meant.”
“Then what was your fault?” she asked, her heart pounding at the ache in her chest.
“Bill’s death.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“It was my fault. We were out,” he said, staring down at his hands clenched tightly in his lap, unable to sto
p the words now that he’d started. “We were safe. But then the night watchman asked us if we’d seen the guy and the kid.”
“What kid?” Libby’s quiet voice asked beside him.
He gave a harsh sound—half laugh, half choke. “That’s what Bill and I said, almost in unison.”
Suddenly he was back there, standing in his turnout gear, sucking in oxygen, the fire raging behind him, even as the rest of the team fought to contain it.
“The boy the man dragged inside with him,” the burly night watchman said, sweat dripping off his thick moustache. “I saw them on my camera. Little guy, dirty-blonde hair, maybe light brown. The man had a duffel bag in one hand, his other had the kid by the shirt collar, dragged him in behind the building.”
He slammed his hand into Bill’s chest. “Come on. We’ve gotta go back in.”
“Wait,” Bill said, grabbing him by the arm and looking at the watchman again. “You’re sure they went into the building? Not around the back? Maybe over a fence?”
“Doubt it. Was headed in to check it out and the next thing I knew flames were shooting up inside the warehouse. I ran to call 9-1-1 as fast as I could.”
“Come, on, Bill. We have to go now.” He was already putting on his mask and hat, ready to head back into the inferno, but he had to wait on his partner.
“Okay, okay. We go. But we tell the captain first.”
The rush hit him as they got the “go” order from the cap. They went in the side door on the first level. The heat was intense, the fire hotter than any he could remember. Bill grabbed his arm from behind, signaling to stay with him and they’d go to the right, away from the initial burn point up front.
“Deke.”
“Deacon.”
Libby’s voice.
The memory fading, he blinked, slowly raising his eyes to meet hers, knowing the hatred he’d see there. He’d killed her brother.
Only, it wasn’t hatred he saw there. Simply tears.
Close To The Fire Page 17