Fireproof

by Alex Kava

  It was too late anyway. Jeffery saw him and immediately shot a look back at Sam, with the question he left unsaid, You know this guy?

  Before Patrick could turn around, Jeffery hurried over, microphone in one hand, the other hand straightening his tie. Sam knew to follow, though she didn’t want to, her feet almost dragging along. The camera suddenly felt heavy, making her arms ache. She noticed a slight tremor in her fingers.

  “Jeffery Cole.” He introduced himself to Patrick. “Can you tell us how everything is going? Any news on the rest of the people trapped inside? Did this fire start like all the others?”

  Sam winced. She couldn’t look Patrick in the eyes. For a split second her fingers found the camera’s OFF switch and she almost hit it. But the light would go off and Jeffery would know immediately. He’d just insist she turn it on again. Still, it might give Patrick a chance to escape.

  “I’m not with this crew,” Patrick said, standing exactly where he’d stopped. Not retreating but no longer coming forward.

  Sam felt his eyes searching her face. She focused on the viewfinder and avoided looking at him even through the camera.

  “You’re all dressed up for a fire.” Jeffery’s voice took on a hard edge. “Who exactly are you with? You must have some idea of what’s going on.”

  Sam cringed and her back went rigid and straight. She pulled in a deep breath, waiting for Jeffery’s combative persona. Light and dark, up and down—there was no in between for the man. She felt her senses preparing, standing guard. She let her hand slip down and with a sweep of her thumb she cut the live feed.

  “I’m on standby,” Patrick said.

  Sam saw Patrick go into defensive mode. His jaw went taut. His gloved hands balled up. His stare hardened and went wide, away from her, away from the camera, and away from Jeffery.

  “On standby?” Jeffery laughed. “Seriously? You mean like a rent-a-cop? Only a rent-a-fireman? How interesting. Who exactly do you work for?”

  “I’m not obliged to answer that. In fact, I need to get back to work.” But he didn’t turn to leave.

  “Oh yes, of course, we wouldn’t want to keep you from standing by. So you know nothing about the fires? You’re just sort of here in case they need you?”

  Then Jeffery must have realized he would lose his only opportunity, because Sam saw him switch back from antagonist to newscaster. “Certainly you must have heard something. I mean, you are on the inside of the perimeter. What’s the mood? They must be frantic to get those people out. Or do they already know it’s hopeless?”

  Sam shifted the weight of the camera and in doing so adjusted her finger until the viewfinder went black. Her thumb found the mute button. The lights stayed on as if nothing had changed.

  “I’m not authorized to give you any information.”

  “What’s the harm in giving us a general sense of the mood? What it’s like to be behind the scenes?”

  “I believe he already said he had nothing to tell you,” a woman’s voice said.

  Jeffery’s head snapped to see the woman approaching them.

  “Special Agent Maggie O’Dell. So pleased you can join us today.”

  Sam moved the camera at his instinctive wave, but kept her finger in place. She was going to be in such trouble. Already her mind scrambled for an explanation. She had managed to get footage while sliding down a wall of mud during a hurricane. There would be no believable explanation for this blackout. And unless Jeffery heard the thumping of her heart, he seemed totally unaware of her secret.

  “Mr. Murphy’s not authorized to give you a statement.”

  In the back of her mind, Sam’s inner voice prayed, Please don’t say he’s your brother. Please don’t say I know him.

  “I was just leaving,” Patrick said. He looked over at her before turning and Sam saw Jeffery notice. If there was any doubt that he recognized they knew each other, his smile wiped that doubt away.

  “So Agent O’Dell, perhaps you can tell us what’s going on? Are there any fatalities? We’ve been waiting for some word to let our viewers know if everyone in that basement is okay.”

  “I have no idea.” And she started to turn to follow Patrick.

  “Maybe you’d like to comment on the profile piece we aired about you last night.”

  Sam could see the agent’s shoulders push back, but she continued to leave. Sam hoped O’Dell wouldn’t unleash her anger. Sam would never be able to compensate for not getting it on film. Jeffery would certainly fire her.

  And now Jeffery, ever the performer, turned so the camera captured a better angle of him before he delivered his blow. “Perhaps you’ll offer some comment after the interview tonight with your mother.”

  O’Dell stopped this time. “Excuse me?”

  CHAPTER 47

  The last time Maggie sat in Dr. James Kernan’s office she had been even more on edge. Her world had been turned upside down by a serial killer named Albert Stucky. Several years before, he’d gotten away, leaving her cut and bleeding in a Miami warehouse, but only after making her watch while he gutted two women.

  Albert Stucky ended up in prison, but during a transport he managed to escape, killing his two security guards. For his second rampage he decided to kill women who had the misfortune of simply coming into contact with Maggie: the pizza delivery girl, Maggie’s neighbor, a waitress.

  It had been his sick game of cat and mouse, seeing to it that she received or found pieces of the women—a spleen in a cardboard pizza box, a kidney on a hotel room service tray. How could anyone blame her for being on edge? For feeling the need to be on alert 24/7, constantly looking over her shoulder?

  Her old boss and mentor, Kyle Cunningham, had pulled her from the field, his idea of protecting her, not punishing her. Though at the time it certainly felt like punishment, working the teaching circuit. Talking about killers instead of tracking them, instead of hunting down Albert Stucky.

  Jeffery Cole’s profile included some of the very things she had worked so hard to compartmentalize. But the exposé wasn’t the only thing conjuring up old memories and fears. If Ramirez had seen a man behind Maggie’s house last night, who was he? And why was he there in the middle of the night, in the middle of an ice storm? Was it the same man in the tunnel? She had no evidence, nothing to support her suspicions except a gut instinct.

  It would sound ridiculous if it hadn’t, in fact, happened in the past. All of her memories of the Stucky murders came back to Maggie as she sat in her old professor’s office, waiting for him. In some ways it seemed like a lifetime ago. Right now it felt like yesterday, listening for the shuffle of his footsteps as she breathed in the remnants of cigar smoke, Bengay, and old leather.

  She had been in a much more fragile place in her life back then. She and Greg had just separated. She had bought the house in Newburgh Heights and had just moved in. It hadn’t even been a week when Stucky took her new neighbor. Days later he took her real estate agent. The only good to come out of the ordeal was Harvey. While Maggie hadn’t been able to rescue her neighbor, Harvey’s master, she had rescued him.

  Yes, she had been in a much different place then, her frame of mind much more volatile than ever before. And sitting in Kernan’s office brought it all back. It didn’t help that the constant ache in her head had made her feel as vulnerable about her body as Stucky had made her feel vulnerable about her mental state. Without warning, the ache could turn into a dull throb, sometimes escalating to a jackhammer drill against her temple. The throb had come and gone throughout the afternoon, and it was back now.

  How could she keep Kernan from seeing it?

  Even with his thick Coke-bottle glasses he’d spot a wince or a twitch. The man definitely had the power to see things no one else noticed. Perhaps that explained his office decor.

  She looked around the small space at his strange collection of paraphernalia. A Mason jar with the frontal lobe of a human brain acted as a bookend. It held up leather-bound volumes of what Maggie knew were rare fi
rst editions that included Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams next to Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. The latter appropriate because Maggie could easily envision Kernan as the Mad Hatter.

  Displayed on the credenza were antique surgical instruments. One in particular Maggie recognized as a tool used to perform lobotomies. She knew, because Kernan had brought it to the abnormal psychology class that he taught years ago at the University of Virginia. Maggie had been one of his students. One of thousands, and yet he still remembered exactly where she had sat in his classroom.

  She heard his shuffle down the hall and caught herself sitting up straight in the hardback chair, the only chair, incidentally, that he had in his office for guests or clients. Another sound accompanied Kernan, a click-pat, click-pat-patter on the hallway’s linoleum floor.

  “O’Dell, O’Dell, the farmer and the dell.” He began his ridiculous chants before he entered the room.

  Maggie’s back was to the door. She tried to stay quiet, tried to shrug off what sounded like the rants of a senile old man. He played word games, using silly rhymes to throw off his students and now his patients. He’d probably been doing it for more years than Maggie was old. It broke down anyone’s focus, little by little, and dismantled his opponent’s thought process, putting them on guard for the next slew of unpredictable phrases instead of thinking about a response to a question he lobbed into the fray. It wouldn’t work with her this time. She was prepared for his mental duels.

  It was the dog that surprised Maggie, coming in first. A small brown-and-white corgi who touched his muzzle to her hand as if to warn her of his master’s entrance.

  Directly behind, connected by a leash, Kernan shuffled past her, his short frame a bit more hunched, his thick hair completely white, his suit wrinkled, and his thick, black-framed glasses at the end of his nose. He didn’t even glance at her and continued to his chair back behind the desk.

  The corgi settled in a corner before Kernan sat down.

  “So O’Dell, Margaret,” he said, his back still to her as he eased into his high-backed leather chair. “Premed. The little bird who sat in the back left corner of my classroom taking very few notes. Miss FBI Agent with yet another scar to heal.”

  Maggie gripped the seat of her wooden chair. There was nothing to dig her nails into.

  The bastard.

  She wouldn’t let him get to her. Bring it on.

  “I thought I already fixed you once,” he said as he turned to face her.

  Even through the thick lenses she could see his eyes roam well over her head. She glanced at the dog and back at Kernan. The watery blue eyes weren’t focused on her face and tracked just a bit to the right of her.

  Maggie couldn’t believe it. The old man had actually gone blind.

  CHAPTER 48

  Sam felt relieved, even though Jeffery was in a foul mood. It had turned black—directly to black, no gray—as soon as they brought the last person out. Alive!

  Seven survivors. No dead bodies.

  Jeffery’s immediate response: “What a fucking waste of a day.”

  Sam realized she was probably just as bad as Jeffery, because her relief didn’t come from the news that everyone had escaped safely, but rather because Jeffery wouldn’t be using any of her footage. Especially not the footage she had purposely messed up of Jeffery’s exchanges with Patrick and Agent O’Dell.

  “Big Mac will cut this entire afternoon to a couple of minutes,” Jeffery huffed as he yanked his tie loose and almost snapped off the top button of his shirt. “He’s already said, ‘No dead bodies, no story.’ Doesn’t even matter that it’s churches. Or that you’d need a chemistry course to time these sons of bitches.”

  “Are you sure he’s not interested? Two churches in the middle of the day? And in Arlington? It’s not like the warehouses in a homeless district that nobody cares about.”

  She stopped herself as she broke down her equipment. Did she really just say that? Jesus! She really was starting to sound like Jeffery.

  “I talked to him earlier. Said he needed something to keep this story alive.”

  Jeffery stood watching her. Usually he’d leave her to do this by herself, but he needed a ride back to the diner where he’d left his car.

  “He loved the crap out of my profile on O’Dell,” Jeffery said. “Wait till he sees the interview with the mother.”

  Sam felt a momentary twitch. Would he be wanting the nonexistent footage after all? She hadn’t known about the interview. Jeffery had invited O’Dell’s mother to come down to the news station, so he hadn’t needed Sam.

  “Hey, maybe I can help you out.”

  She and Jeffery both startled. Neither of them had noticed the firefighter come over to them from behind the crime scene tape. He pushed back his hat and the first thing Sam noticed was how clean he was—no black smears on his face, no sweaty hair, no smoke or soot anywhere on him. Even his boots were dry.

  He looked about Sam’s age—around thirty—short and muscular, though the latter was difficult to judge under his heavy uniform. He had a square jaw, a nose that looked like it might have been broken at least once, and narrow, deep-set eyes that traveled too slowly over Sam’s body. Usually that sort of thing didn’t bother her. She wasn’t sure why it did now. What was it about this guy that didn’t feel right?

  “From what I hear,” Jeffery said, “there’s not much to tell.”

  “I recognized you when you were talking to my partner earlier. You’re Jeffery Cole from CNN.”

  Sam almost laughed. She should have looked away. She already knew what Jeffery’s response would be.

  Too late.

  She saw him smile and his chest practically puffed out as he straightened his tie.

  “What is it you think you can help us with, Mr. Firefighter?”

  “Actually my name’s Wes Harper. I’m a private firefighter with Braxton Protection Agency.”

  “Private? I didn’t realize there was such a thing. That’s interesting, but I don’t think we need any more footage.”

  “I saw that piece you did last night.”

  Now that Jeffery had decided this guy wasn’t one of the “real” firefighters and that he wasn’t interested, he had started to shut down, like an actor done with his role and donning his own persona. Even his smile waned, polite because he couldn’t resist a compliment and would certainly wait for this guy’s, but beyond that Sam could see he was no longer interested in resuming his role as Jeffery Cole, investigative interviewer.

  “I know you’d probably rather interview my partner, but since he turned you down maybe I could fill in.”

  “That’s nice of you, but I think we’re good.”

  “Aren’t you doing like a part two on his sister tonight?”

  Sam almost dropped the lens she had taken off and was carefully putting into its sleeve.

  “Excuse me?” Jeffery said, stepping closer to Harper as if he hadn’t heard him. “That young guy, that rent-a-fireman, is Agent O’Dell’s brother?”

  “That’s right,” Harper said with a smile, not the least bit bothered by the derogatory remark about his occupation.

  “Well, well,” Jeffery said. “It’s certainly a small world, isn’t it?”

  CHAPTER 49

  This would be a piece of cake, Maggie thought. A disabled Kernan wouldn’t be able to see the reactions his insults and swipes registered. She saw his head tilt, his chin track up—signs of a man depending on what he heard and smelled rather than saw.

  “Once again,” Maggie said, “I’m here only because my superior insisted.”

  “Oh, that’s right. And they’re always wrong. Aren’t they?”

  “They have rules and regulations they need to follow. I understand that.”

  He leaned back and his head cocked to the side as if gauging her response. He intertwined his fingers and laid them on his thick chest. That’s when Maggie realized his tie was navy blue but his suit was dark brown. He had no one to help him dres
s. No one to offer advice before he went out the door. Just the dog, who although he rested in the corner, still kept his eyes trained on his master. But a dog couldn’t tell you that your tie doesn’t match your suit. And suddenly Maggie wanted to kick herself, because she actually felt sorry for Dr. James Kernan.

  “But you still believe they’re wrong? That you shouldn’t be here?”

  She sat back in the chair, fingers no longer clenched and now resting in her lap. She stared at him and wondered what it was like to be cunning and sharp-tongued, to be brilliant and to win every mental game, and yet be totally alone in the world. No, she didn’t feel sorry for him, she felt uncomfortably like him.

  Was this her future? Instead of the paraphernalia from the history of psychology, she’d have strange tokens and memorabilia of the serial killers she had tracked.

  Then Maggie thought of Lucy Coy, the old Indian woman she had met in the Sandhills of Nebraska. She’d be content to be like Lucy, surrounded by dogs and quiet and a beautiful landscape.

  “Have you become hard of hearing, Ms. O’Dell?”

  She’d forgotten to respond and now Kernan would read something into that hesitation.

  “You’d much rather be shooting some killer between the eyes. Isn’t that right?”

  Ordinarily that jab would have made her wince, but now Maggie caught herself smiling. Kernan’s power to intimidate and humiliate, to make her question herself—all of that was gone. The only thing she saw now was a pathetic, white-haired old man who couldn’t even see her smile.

  “I’m a different person than I was five years ago, Dr. Kernan.”

  “Is that right?” He smacked his lips together and did his trademark “Tis tis,” which announced he couldn’t be fooled when, in fact, he already had been.

  Maggie was about to remind him that he also was a different person than when they last met, but he cut her off by asking, “How long have you been getting the headaches?”