McQueen's Heat

by Harper Allen

  “The fires continued even after Curtiss’s death?” Tamara prompted.

  “Yeah, they continued. An arsonist like Pascoe could probably name his price, and I’m sure most of the fires he set were written off as accidents—gas leaks, careless smoking.”

  “Petra was right. Claudia quit smoking for good at least a year ago,” Tamara interjected. She felt her throat tighten. “I—I came across it in one of her letters.”

  “You gonna tell Tiger?” A moment ago his gaze had been hard with remembered anger. Now it was fully focused on her, and shadowed with compassion.

  “As soon as I see her. Although I guess that might not be today, from what Mary Hall said,” she said, catching her lip between her teeth. “But I shouldn’t have interrupted you, Stone.”

  “We won’t call, we’ll just show up after we check out Glenda Fodor. I’ll persuade the Hall woman to let us take Petra out for an hour or so.” He tipped her chin up. “I wasn’t trying yesterday. But baby, when I want to I can pour on the charm like you wouldn’t believe.”

  “You jerk, McQueen.” She smiled at him, feeling suddenly weak with desire and knowing if she gave in to her weakness they might never leave the house. “I know it’s hard for you to talk about it,” she said softly, her smile fading. “But I’d like to hear the rest. When did you begin to suspect there was a master arsonist at work?”

  “When Jimmy Malone tried to swing a deal after he was caught for the Dazzlers blaze.” With his arms around her, it was impossible not to sense the tension that had seeped back into his muscles. “People had died in that fire. I wasn’t about to let the prosecutor cut a deal, but I’m not real sure anyone conveyed that information to Jimmy. The one time I went to see him in prison he told me he was small fry compared to the man he’d tried to model himself after.”

  “Pascoe was his hero?” She felt repulsed.

  “In my job I lifted up rocks. There were some freakin’ weird things scurrying around beneath them,” he said curtly. “Yeah, Jimmy hero-worshiped Pascoe, but he didn’t know much about him, not even his name. All he knew was that he’d set more burns than Jimmy had ever dreamed of, but that was enough to get me searching for a pattern. It didn’t take long to find it when I knew what I was looking for. And one day I arrived at an investigation scene and knew at once that Pascoe had struck on my watch. I could practically smell the bastard all around me in the ruins.”

  “That was the first of the series of fires leading up to the Mitchell Towers blaze, wasn’t it?”

  “Yeah, and each one of those six fires were started with the rocket fuel, as it turned out, so they were strictly for his amusement.”

  With a pang she realized that he was reliving those desperate months—months when he’d realized he was pitted against a ruthless killer, months during which he’d gradually come to know he was racing against time.

  “I don’t know who leaked it to the press that I not only suspected the first two of the series of fires were caused by the same person, but that I was convinced my mystery man had been operating for years and had once been associated with Curtiss, but the Globe got hold of the story and the other papers picked it up. The next day Pascoe introduced himself to me on the Charles Station platform, like I said. The day after that an old hotel burned down and a pensioner who lived on the top floor was killed. I knew what the accelerant was going to be even before the lab got back to me with the results, but what I wasn’t expecting was the melted remains of some unidentifiable plastic contraption a member of my crew found in the rubble.”

  He exhaled. “It was obviously meant to be some kind of triggering mechanism, but we didn’t find anything it could have triggered and Pascoe always started his fires by hand anyway. When we found the next one I took that back to my office, too, but I couldn’t figure out why he’d planted them. They were about as deadly as an alarm clock, but I knew I was missing something, because they just shouldn’t have been there. It was like Pascoe was taunting me by leaving them for me to find.”

  “And by then the whispers had started,” she said, more to remind him that he wasn’t alone than to second-guess him. A corner of his mouth lifted.

  “Yeah, the whispers had started. McQueen was losing it, McQueen was trying to get his name into the papers, McQueen had created his own personal Lex Luthor so he could be a hero. I started sleeping at the office, and I started belting back a couple shots of bourbon to help me sleep. I was sober on the job, so I told myself it was okay. It seemed even more okay when Pascoe’s next fire was knocked down before it took hold.”

  “Then you were closing in on him.” She couldn’t keep the frustration from her voice. “Why didn’t they see you were on the right track after that?”

  “Because I’d had nothing to do with it, honey,” he said harshly. “An anonymous tip was phoned in to the nearest stationhouse. The caller said he’d seen someone carrying what looked like a gas can around the back of a community center. The firetrucks were there even as the first flames started coming out of the ground floor windows, everyone got out safely and we recovered another of the plastic devices. It hadn’t had chance to melt. It was obviously an activation device of some type, but again with nothing to activate.”

  He took a breath. “The biggest thrill for an arsonist is to blend into the crowd gathered around the fire he’s started. I knew Pascoe had to be no different from the rest of his kind in that respect. The next night I was at the office poring over the structural plans of the buildings he’d torched in the last few weeks when I heard over the scanner that crews were responding to a massive blaze at the Mitchell Towers, and even before the report had finished I was in my car. All I could think was that there was an outside chance I might actually come upon him just standing in the crowd.”

  He closed his eyes. He opened them again, and although his arms were around her Tamara felt as if he was a million miles away. When he spoke again it was in a dead, flat tone.

  “I had my radio with me. There was a lot of static but I could make out the crew chief’s orders as he gave them. I heard the outside hose crew reporting they’d knocked down the fire on the upper storeys, and I heard the chief ordering the first unit in. I heard him mention Burke by name. I was only a couple of blocks away when I suddenly knew what Pascoe had been planning all along.”

  How often over the past seven years had he raced in his nightmares toward a disaster he knew he was powerless to stop? Tamara wondered wrenchingly. How many times had he heard a staticky voice over a radio give the last orders five brave firefighters had ever heard? Had he been reliving that doomed race against time and hearing those orders when she’d first seen him only two days ago, standing with his back to her and looking sightlessly out of a window?

  “I’d assumed the devices we’d found were incendiary triggers. I’d thought Pascoe had been toying with the idea of starting his fires remotely, and testing the toughness of the casings while still using his old method. Instead he’d been testing me. He’d wanted to see if I could figure out his plan before he armed his devices. I failed the test,” Stone said softly.

  “Even while I was screaming into the radio to be patched through to the chief’s frequency so he could hear me, I got to the scene. I pushed my way through to the chief and yelled at him to get his people out of there. I’d actually gone past him and was a few feet from the main entrance, intending to go in after them myself, when the whole thing just blew. This time Pascoe’s device had been operational. It had triggered the bomb he’d planted near one of the crucial supports of the building. From wherever he was watching he’d brought the entire building crashing down, knowing full well there were firefighters inside.”

  This time when he closed his eyes he kept them squeezed shut. His whisper was ragged.

  “Terry Cutshaw. I went to his funeral first. Max Aiken’s and Larry Steinbeck’s were held on the same day, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. In between the two services I went back to the hospital, and they told me Monty Stewa
rt had been taken off life support and had died. Two days later, while I was sitting at her bedside, Donna finally slipped from the coma she’d been in since the night she’d been pulled from the wreckage of the Mitchell Towers. After I’d attended her funeral I came back to the office, handed in my badge and ID, and went out and got drunk. I stayed drunk for the next seven years, but being drunk didn’t change anything.”

  “You’d looked into its face, McQueen.” Her own whisper was a thread, Tamara noted dispassionately. But thready or not, the words she had to say needed to be spoken now. “You thought you saw yourself looking back. You were wrong, dammit.”

  He shook his head. “No, honey, I was right. I should have gotten there sooner. Thirty seconds earlier and I would have made it into the building. I might have gotten them out.”

  She stared at him. “You wouldn’t have gotten them out. That was never a possibility, and you know it. You’d have been killed, too.”

  Suddenly it seemed as though a giant hand was gripping her heart. “Dear God—that’s what’s been tearing you apart all these years,” she breathed. “You think you should have died in there with them, don’t you?”

  His gaze met hers emotionlessly. Sudden fury tore through her.

  “You did your job, McQueen! You were hunting a monster no one believed in except you! Any other man would have knuckled under, but you told the rest of the world to go to hell and you kept hunting Pascoe—and came closer than anyone ever had to catching him. The fact that he got away wasn’t your fault. The fact that you survived isn’t a reason for guilt, either. I should know, dammit!”

  Her voice shook with emotion. “I was five years old, for God’s sake! I was five years old and I woke up in the middle of the night and I had to go to the bathroom. I didn’t want to be a baby and wake up my mom and dad, so I found my way there in the dark, even though I was in a strange motel room and I was scared.”

  She could feel the tears welling up in her eyes but she didn’t care. All that mattered was the man watching her. All that mattered was making him understand.

  “I closed the bathroom door—not all the way, but almost. I thought I could hear sounds from outside—a car door closing, voices from one of the nearby units. The next minute my whole world exploded in a ball of fire.”

  Impatiently she knuckled her eyes. Gently he pushed her hand aside and thumbed away her tears himself.

  “Don’t talk about it anymore, Tam,” he said tonelessly. “I can’t bear to see you hurting like this.”

  “And I can’t bear to see you hurting either!” She glared at him through her tears. He looked away.

  “There’s not much more to tell,” she continued. “When I was older I told Uncle Jack I needed to know how they’d died. He said it had probably been almost instantaneous, and from the explosion of the room’s gas heater rather than from the fire. It helped a little, but it didn’t take away the memories—that towering ball of fire coming toward me, myself screaming out for my parents and Mikey, the tiny window in the bathroom that I could just reach when I stood on the toilet tank. I was sure I was going to die. I knew I didn’t want to. I wriggled out through the bathroom window and dropped to the ground, and I don’t really remember much more after that.”

  She smiled tightly at him. “You’re wondering what this has to do with your situation, aren’t you? After all, I was just a little girl. Who could hold me responsible for something that wasn’t my fault?” Her voice took on an edge. “I’ll tell you who, McQueen. You do.”

  His head jerked up. Behind the opaqueness of his eyes she saw a spark. “That’s crazy, honey. How could you think that?”

  “I think it because it’s true.” She held his gaze with hers. “If you’re guilty, then I’m guilty, because we both committed the same crime. We survived, dammit. Others died. We lived. If you can blame yourself for that, then you blame me, too. And all the while, the one really responsible for those five deaths is still out there tearing lives apart.”

  “I know Pascoe set the bomb,” he said tersely. “I should have found some way to stop him.”

  His arms were no longer around her. It took no effort at all to slip away from him. Tamara stood.

  “There was no way you could have stopped Pascoe then, and deep down you know it. But we can stop him now.” She lifted her shoulders helplessly. “You’ve been handed a second chance to put the past right.”

  “You really believe that, Tam?” He looked up at her, his face unreadable. “You think that sometimes we get to change the past, to wipe out our mistakes and start all over again? Do you swear you really believe that?”

  His tone held an odd intensity, and just for a moment unease stirred in her. Then she nodded. “I swear I believe that, Stone. The past can be changed.”

  You changed mine, she thought tremulously. You took away the pain and regret I’d been carrying for so long by replacing the memory of a night in a stranger’s arms with the reality of the passion I found in yours.

  Slowly he stood. He took a step toward her. His hand reached out and she felt his fingertips lightly touching her hair.

  “I’d hoped it could be,” he said huskily. “I was afraid I was lying to myself, honey.”

  She saw the shadows fade from his eyes. She saw his jaw set and his mouth straighten to a hard line. He took a deep breath.

  “Robert Pascoe’s out there somewhere, Tam. Let’s get our butts in gear and go hunt the bastard down.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Robert Pascoe was out there somewhere, Tamara reflected hours later. They’d just had no luck today in picking up his track.

  Glenda Fodor, her landlord informed them, had done a midnight flit weeks ago. Tempting as it was to blame her disappearance on Trainor and Knopf, even Stone admitted it was obvious they’d had nothing to do with it—though from the landlord’s description of the men who’d been asking for her earlier that day, the two investigators had been there.

  They’d had a single lead. Now they had none. Stone had phoned Chandra at the office, only to get her voice mail. He’d left a message for her to phone them.

  “If she can get my old files I can go over them,” he’d said. “I don’t see any other option.”

  So investigation-wise, the morning had been a complete bust. But as if to compensate, the last few hours had turned out to be about as perfect as possible.

  “It’s the dog, isn’t it?” In the driver’s seat beside her, Stone grinned. “’Fess up, honey, you fell in love with him even more than Tiger did. That’s why you’ve got that big smile all over your face.”

  “I’m sitting here with a big smile all over my face because I’m happy,” she replied simply. “Happy that I got to see for myself that Joey was doing fine, happy about how it turned out with Petra and happy just to be here with you.” She felt her smile widen. “But Strawberry is adorable.”

  After they’d paid a brief visit to the hospital and she’d been allowed to look in on a sleeping Joey, they’d headed straight to Mary Hall’s home. What Stone thought of as his fatal charm Tamara been more inclined to call bulldozing, but finally the woman had let them take Petra for the afternoon. When the child had come out of the house she’d promptly thrown her arms around Stone when she’d heard where they were going.

  As she and Petra had gotten out of the car at the entrance to the animal shelter while Stone found a parking space, it had taken all Tamara’s courage to broach the subject she knew they needed to talk about.

  “Remember you said your mom had written me letters?” she said, squatting down on her heels so that her face was on a level with the carefully blank expression turned on her.

  “I remember. But now I think I was wrong.” The words dropped from the little mouth like stones. “She wasn’t writing to you at all. She was writing to her real best friend.”

  For a moment Tamara’s will failed her. Stone had a rapport with the child, she thought desperately. Maybe it would be better to wait until he was here to mediate this convers
ation. Sighing, she was about to stand up when she caught the furtive gleam of tears in the angry green eyes watching her.

  Her heart cracked.

  “I was her best friend, Petra,” she said softly. “I just forgot that for a while, that’s all. But I read all her letters yesterday, and they helped me remember how much I loved your mom. I read she quit smoking. You must have been pretty proud of her when she did.”

  “It was hard for her. She chewed a special kind of gum that wasn’t for kids.” Petra looked away, as if she wanted to make it clear she was keeping a distance between them.

  “And for the first few weeks she always had candy bars in the house,” she added. “We used to sit on the sofa after she’d finished washing the dishes and I’d done my homework, and we would each have half of one while I watched television for an hour before bed. It—it was fun.”

  She swung her gaze back to Tamara’s. Her eyes were wide and shadowed. “Stone said it was just like she fell asleep. He was telling me the truth, wasn’t he?”

  “Let me tell you something about Stone, sweetie.” Tamara reached for Petra’s hands. After a slight hesitation, the child allowed her to take them. “He always wants his own way. He’s kind of big and loud. And sometimes he drives me crazy.” She gave the fingers in her grasp a squeeze. “But he never, ever lies. He told you the truth, sweetie. Your mom didn’t suffer at all.”

  “I should have stayed awake, Tam-Tam.”

  Tamara wasn’t sure what was more poignant—the agonized whisper that rushed from Petra or the fact that she was calling her by the pet name Claudia had always used. She pulled the stiff little body closer.

  “We’d gone to the park and I’d been playing all afternoon. After supper I just fell asleep, and I didn’t wake up until—until—”

  Suddenly her arms were around Tamara’s neck, and her body was shaking with sobs. Tamara pulled her fiercely into her embrace, her own eyes overflowing.

  “Mom’s gone, and I’m never going to see her again, am I?” The anguished question poured from her with her tears.