Feeling somewhat guilty and not a little mean, Michaelson tore a blank page from the back of the notebook. He noted each date that appeared in the book and wrote out the sentence written under that date and the number of times it was repeated. When he had finished, he replaced the notebook on its shelf and folded the results of his own copy work into his suit coat, wondering if he’d get the remorseful urge tonight to sit at his desk and write i must respect the privacy of others one hundred times.
Probably not, he concluded.
His little finger felt damp and gritty where he had rested it on the desk while he copied Catherine’s penances. He looked at the desk, where water smears darkened a few square inches of the black burlap surface, with white granules scattered over them.
Cocaine? He captured several granules with the tip of his index finger and tasted them. Table salt. No surprise. After all, he hadn’t found any evidence of Catherine writing i must not consume harmful and illegal substances.
Glancing at his watch, Michaelson was astonished to see that over forty-five minutes had passed since he’d left Marjorie. He’d stolen a long peek at what looked like the diary of a very elaborate neurosis, and he felt he knew a lot more about the Shepherds than he had when he’d come downstairs. But he still didn’t have much of a handle on what Avery Phillips’ game was.
Oh well, he thought, as he started up the stairs. Maybe after all this time they’ve sold the house to Patrice Helmsing.
That’s when he heard, faintly filtered through two floors but nevertheless unmistakable, the shrill, piercing ululations of a smoke detector’s alarm.
Chapter Nine
Mental images of flame-engulfed rooms and hallways choked with thick smoke quickened Michaelson’s steps as he hustled up from the basement. An elemental reflex, an instinctive fear going back to Homo sapiens’ most distant ancestors, screamed “GET OUT!” As he stepped into the kitchen he struggled to master the panicky urge.
An uproar from the living room suggested chaos amidst a general rush for the door. In the kitchen itself, by contrast, Willie showed no signs of panic. Joined to the alarm’s piercing wail were hysterical screams coming from the second floor.
“I’ve told the conference operator to call nine-one-one and have anyone in the time zone with a siren get over here,” Willie was telling Marjorie, who looked like she had rushed in a few moments before Michaelson. “Project, quit looking for the fire extinguisher. If you haven’t found it by now, you’re not going to turn it up.”
“That scream’s coming from upstairs,” Marjorie said.
“Right,” Willie said. “Let’s go, Project.”
He began racing up the main staircase with Project behind him, followed by Michaelson and Marjorie. They skirted past Wilcox, who was scrambling down, cradling a hastily stuffed briefcase in one arm and a tape recorder in the other.
The first thing they saw on the second floor was Cindy trying to wrestle Catherine away from the guest bedroom door. Still screaming, Catherine writhed in her sister’s grasp. Wisps of smoke seeped insidiously from the cracks between the top and upper sides of the door and the jamb, gathering in a thin haze near the hallway ceiling. It was the hallway smoke detector that was screeching.
“Get her out of here,” Willie ordered as Marjorie stepped toward the two young women and Michaelson tried the door.
“Locked,” he announced. The hallway smoke stung his tearing eyes. “Not hot to the touch.”
Marjorie clapped her left hand gently but firmly over Catherine’s mouth and squeezed her nose shut with her right thumb and forefinger while Cindy continued to pin her struggling sister’s arms. Catherine’s eyes widened almost cartoonishly. The screams stopped as she ran out of wind.
“Hush,” Marjorie murmured, trying to make her near-whisper as soothing as she could. “Let’s go downstairs.”
After what her livid face suggested was a moment’s terrified incomprehension, Catherine nodded. Awkwardly but without resistance Cindy and Marjorie began to walk her toward the stairs.
Michaelson went into the bathroom that adjoined the guest bedroom. He tried the connecting door after a long touch told him the bottom panel was room temperature. The knob turned freely, but something stubbornly blocked the door as he tried to push it open.
He scurried back into the hall. Smoke was now gathering faster. Project rubbed his shoulder as he and Willie anxiously inspected a solid-looking hallway door.
“The lock doesn’t seem as tight in here,” Michaelson barked.
Four seconds later, Project was in a crouch, his right foot braced against the side of the bathtub. He launched himself toward the connecting door. His massive right shoulder slammed into it just beside the knob. That side of the door yielded perceptibly, and a noise compounded of shearing metal and cracking wood came from the other side.
Eyes streaming, Project stepped back, calmly resumed his stance, and charged again. The unmistakable crack of splintering wood reached them, and the door cleared the jamb by an inch or two.
Smoke began to flow in earnest into the bathroom. Michaelson jumped to open the bathroom window. When he looked back, Willie and Project had pushed the door all the way open and Willie was bulling into the bedroom with Project following.
Smoke seemed to fill the bedroom. A choking, dark gray fog billowed near the ceiling, thinning to a gauzy film below chest level.
Michaelson at first saw no fire at all. It took him another moment or two to spot the source of the smoke. Squinting, he could see smoke pumping from the fireplace next to the window. Two or three tongues of flame licked at the back of the charred logs and kindling still stacked in the fireplace itself.
The window next to the fireplace was closed. Handkerchief pressed over his mouth, crouching below the worst of the smoke, Michaelson crossed quickly to the window and strained against the lower frame in an effort to open it. The thermal pane moved up perhaps three inches and stopped. Every ounce of muscle Michaelson had, straining from the soles of his feet, couldn’t budge it another millimeter.
Demarest’s body lay near the fireplace, his head resting on the stonework just in front of it. His pants and underpants were bunched around his ankles. The hem of his shirt only partially hid his penis and testicles. Willie grabbed Demarest’s legs and Project his shoulders. They lugged him awkwardly toward the bathroom door.
Michaelson felt the acrid smoke beginning to sear his throat as the draft from the window sucked the stuff down from the ceiling and outside. As a ragged cough racked his lungs, he waved through the smoke, hurried around Willie and Project, and swung the connecting door completely open for them. In ten fretful seconds, Willie and Project managed to get Demarest through the bathroom and into the hallway.
The hallway held much less smoke than the bedroom, and that was apparently all Project needed. With a grunt he slung Demarest’s body across his shoulders and began lumbering down the stairs.
Michaelson remembered nothing but Project’s muscular legs and rear end until, standing shin-deep in the snow that still covered Calvert Manor’s front lawn, he put his hands on his knees and convulsively gulped blessedly sharp winter air into his lungs. He must have seen Marjorie attempting mouth-to-mouth resuscitation with Demarest because he recalled it later, but the image didn’t register with him consciously until afterward. For the moment he concentrated on wondering when the interesting black and red spots were going to stop dancing in front of his eyes.
The keening peal of sirens drew closer. Less than a minute passed before a fire truck and an EMT van hurtled into the driveway and then onto the front lawn. His eye drawn by the approaching siren, Michaelson glanced up long enough to see Willie fishing a black leather key case unobtrusively from Demarest’s trousers. Moments later Demarest lay on a gurney with a plastic mask pressed over his face and Michaelson was again bent over and taking deep breaths.
Two goggled, oxygen-mask
ed firemen scrambled up a ladder toward the pair of windows with smoke pouring from them. The first to reach the verandah roof crab-walked to the guest bedroom window, smashed the lower pane with the base of a fire extinguisher, and gunned a long blast of white foam into the room from the fire extinguisher’s cone. Then he disappeared into the billows of now-charcoal smoke that seemed to explode through the opening. His colleague quickly followed.
“What were you doing up there, explaining the Treaty of Westphalia to everybody?” Marjorie asked.
“Everything just seemed to take a long time,” Michaelson panted apologetically. “Willie and Project did a lot more than I did.”
“Well, Willie’s chatting on a cellular phone and Project’s looking on with avid attention, so offhand I’d say they’re in better shape than you are.”
“Hold that thought,” Michaelson said in a nearly normal voice.
He straightened and looked around. Wilcox stood on the driveway with C-Sharp and his entourage. Two med-techs were loading Demarest and the gurney into the back of the van. Catherine, standing about eight feet away, strained toward the van as she saw Demarest slipped into it. Cindy subtly held her back.
“Running hot,” Michaelson commented as red lights began to flash on the back.
“Just for the exercise,” Marjorie said quietly.
“You don’t think he’s going to make it?”
“I think he already hasn’t made it. I’m no Kay Scarpetta, but I’d bet my store’s stock of Patricia Cornwell hardcovers that I was blowing air into a corpse just now.”
A police car pulled into the driveway.
“May I borrow your cell phone?” Michaelson asked Marjorie.
“You’re thinking of something foolish, aren’t you?” Marjorie demanded, slipping the tiny phone into his jacket pocket.
“Thank you. Are you up to a ladylike scream?”
“That’s an oxymoron,” Marjorie said. She nevertheless produced a quite creditable yelp as Michaelson offered a gingerly semblance of collapsing and stretched out in the snow.
The police officer noticed him immediately and rapped urgently on the back of the EMT van. Seventy seconds later Michaelson, blanketed on a gurney, was being loaded into the van next to Demarest. The van peeled away with its siren screaming as soon as the door slammed.
The officer walked over to the fireman still waiting at the base of the ladder and talked with him. After what seemed like an hour and a half and was probably closer to eight minutes, the two firemen who’d gone through the guest bedroom came out of the front door of Calvert Manor. Their oxygen masks now dangled from their necks and their goggles were parked over the visors of their helmets. They joined the pair of men at the base of the ladder. Following ninety seconds or so of confabulation, the police officer and the fireman who’d been waiting outside walked over to Marjorie.
“Are you the owner?” he asked.
“No,” Cindy said, striding up. “I am. And my sister and mother. It’s kind of complicated.”
The fireman’s expression suggested scant interest in the intricacies of joint tenancy.
“It looks like someone started a fire in the bedroom fireplace with the damper closed. We’ve saturated the logs, opened the damper, opened some more upstairs windows to let the smoke out, and turned the furnace off.”
“Okay,” Cindy said.
“My men tell me there’s a smoke alarm in the bedroom that apparently didn’t go off. How often do you check the batteries?”
“Don’t have a clue.” Cindy shrugged.
“Do you change the batteries in all the smoke detectors at the same time?”
“I don’t really take care of it,” Cindy said. “How long before we can go back in the house?”
“You can go back inside now to get out of the cold,” the fireman said. “But stay on the first floor, in the living room. We have to make a report, and a fire marshal’s going to come out and take some statements.”
“Why?” Cindy asked.
Because I’ve won my bet, Marjorie thought.
“My sister needs to be looked at by a doctor right away,” Cindy said in a low, urgent plea, pushing closer to the cop as she spoke. “That was her fiancé on the meat wagon, and that Valium the techie fed her isn’t going to last fifteen minutes.”
“If you want to call your family doctor, it’s fine with me,” the officer said. “And if it looks like she needs it, I can get another ambulance out here. But right now I need to ask all of you to please move on inside and wait in the living room.”
The separate groups began shuffling toward the porch. As they bunched together near the front door, Marjorie saw Willie edge close to Wilcox. Without making a production of it, Marjorie strained to catch their exchange:
“Ageless says to tell you assign the insurance proceeds and the offer’s still good till midnight tonight,” Willie said.
“Auction rules,” Wilcox said, shaking her head. “The hammer never fell. We have to start over from square one.”
Chapter Ten
Would you take this, please?” Michaelson said to the med-tech, tendering a plastic oxygen mask. “I’m not sure where it goes.”
“It goes over your nose and mouth till we get to the ER,” the man said. “And lie back down. I’m in for beaucoup paperwork if you kick off before I wheel you out.”
“No danger of that. I’m perfectly all right, really.”
He pulled Marjorie’s cell phone from beneath the blanket covering him and punched in one of the numbers he carried in his head.
“It’s four miles of undiluted oxygen makes you think you’re all right,” the med-tech said. “But they’ll want to hold you overnight for observation.”
“I’m a competent adult with minimum insurance and I decline to be observed.”
Before the med-tech could offer any rebuttal a breathless female voice informed Michaelson that he had reached Cavalier Books.
“Ah, Carrie, there you are,” he said into the phone. “Two things. First, Ms. Randolph will be delayed. Second, would you do me the immense favor of calling a taxi to meet me at MRTC?…Nothing has happened to her except that she’s gotten a bit chilly, but she’s probably going to have to spend several more hours out at Calvert Manor answering rather tiresome questions.…There’s a girl, thank you, Carrie.”
He looked back toward the med-tech as he replaced the phone.
“I notice you haven’t devoted much attention to my quiet friend here,” he said.
“Can’t help him,” the med-tech said. “Never made it to the seminary. And I can’t help you much, ‘cause they don’t let med-techs practice psychiatry in Maryland.”
Siren wailing and lights flashing, the ambulance still needed another twelve minutes to negotiate the snow-snarled way to the Maryland Regional Trauma Center. As it backed up to the receiving dock, the med-tech glanced out a side window.
“Your cab is just pulling in,” he said, shaking his head. “You know, I do believe that was about the most high-handed performance I’ve ever seen.”
“You’ve led a sheltered life,” Michaelson said with a brief smile as he exited the ambulance. “You ought to see an ambassador’s wife in action sometime.”
The twenty bone-jolting minutes that it took the taxi to reach Demarest’s address were just enough for the cabbie’s explanation, in precise but heavily accented English, of the fatal shortsightedness infecting America’s attitude toward NATO expansion. A growing sense of urgency doing more damage to his arteries than smoke inhalation ever could have, Michaelson barely refrained from pointing out that Riga wasn’t crawling with cabbies who discussed foreign policy in American-accented Latvian.
Cloaking his hurry-up-dammit impulses behind a mask of measured serenity, he deliberately slowed his pace as he approached the door of the flat above Demarest’s. Its no-nonsense denizen had had ample ti
me to spot him as he walked from curbside to porch, and to recall his suspicious visit of a few days before. He was pleasantly surprised when she answered his buzz not with a warning shot but by asking him over the speaker what he wanted.
“I’m afraid I have some unpleasant news,” he said. “May I come in?”
“No. Spill it.”
“There’s been a fire at Calvert Manor. Mr. Demarest has been taken to Maryland Regional Trauma Center.”
Almost instantly he heard hurrying steps clomping down the stairway inside the door. The expression on the face that thrust itself at him when the door flew open was simultaneously stricken and accusing.
“How bad?” she demanded.
“I can’t be certain,” he said. “Smoke inhalation.”
She looked at Michaelson with intense concentration for a moment, as if trying to decipher from his eyes truth that she wasn’t hearing in his words.
“You’re his mother, aren’t you?” Michaelson said gently. “I’m very sorry.”
“How did you know?”
“Not many tenants guard their landlords’ property with Horatian intensity,” Michaelson said. “And once I got the idea that you were more than a tenant, the family resemblance seemed plain. Then I indirectly confirmed it through him.”
“I have to go there,” she said brusquely, pushing past him and closing the door tightly behind her.
“By all means. Before you do, though, there’s something you should know.”
“What’s that?” she asked, turning back toward Michaelson.
“Some men are going to come to search his apartment. Soon. If there’s anything in there that you don’t want these men to find, now would be an excellent time to remove it.”
“Police?”
“Eventually,” Michaelson said, “but the men I’m talking about definitely aren’t police, and they’ll be here a lot sooner.”
“How do you know they’ll be coming?” she asked.
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