“The damage is clearly done,” Sinclair bit off. He turned toward Isabella, who had lowered her phone a minute before Garza. “Where are we with the ADA?”
Isabella’s frown paved the way for her news. “Kingston said, and I quote, ‘Come at me when you’ve got a confession, a statement from a witness, or a weapon dripping with fingerprints.’ Other than that, no joy on an arrest warrant. In fact, she pointed out that we don’t even have enough to bring Rusty in for questioning.”
“That chick is a serious hard-ass,” Hollister muttered, but Isabella lifted a hand before Kennedy could pop off with the hasty agreement her expression said she’d been constructing.
“Maybe, but before we all curse her up one side and down the other, let’s not forget that she knows how to do her job. Kingston’s as frustrated as we are. She’s also not wrong. If we want to nail Rusty, we need the evidence to do it. Otherwise, the case falls apart in court and the charges get dismissed. Or worse, he gets acquitted.”
Sinclair didn’t disagree, but he also didn’t look thrilled in the least. “This guy is getting bolder and we know he likes an audience. Capelli, what’ve you got on the news footage?”
“Not much,” he said, pushing his black-framed glasses up the bridge of his nose as he shifted his focus from the laptop in front of him to the group in the room. “My source at the local news station said their reporter received an anonymous tip about the fire as it was breaking, directly to his home number. The reporter corroborated, and swears the guy never left a name, and his caller ID said the number was unknown. I traced the call anyway.” Capelli’s tone added an unspoken of course to the mix before he capped things off with, “It was placed before any of the nine-one-one calls came in, so the likelihood is high that it was Rusty, looking for some glory. But it dead-ended at a burner cell that hadn’t been used before last night and hasn’t been used since. I’ve scanned all the footage, and I don’t see Rusty anywhere in the background.”
The ensuing pause was packed with frustration, and yeah, Gamble could fucking relate. “So, we’re right back where we started, only now we have a body count.” Damn it, he should’ve gotten to Zach faster.
“For now, yes,” Sinclair said. “We know this fire was arson, but we can’t pin it on Rusty without more evidence. We’ll continue to work this scene with arson investigation and see if it garners anything we can use. But until Rusty reaches out to Xander…”
“Wait.” Kennedy’s shoulders smacked into the back of her desk chair, her shock on full display. “You want to just sit around until he does this again?”
And here Gamble had thought they couldn’t fit any more tension into the room. “Nobody wants that,” Isabella finally said. “But without Zach’s ID, we really have nothing else to go on.”
“He was there,” Gamble grated, his own patience stretching thin. “I get that you need evidence, I really do. But this should be game over. He fucking did this. He set that fire and he killed that kid. Who knows how many other people he might kill next time?”
Sinclair’s expression hardened, the tiny lines around his eyes growing deeper with his frown. “I know he did this just as well as you do, but knowing isn’t enough. We need proof. Proof we don’t have.”
“But we can get it. I can get it.”
Xander’s voice sliced through the tension in the room like a scalpel, clean and precise and right to the bone. The detectives exchanged a handful of expressions, ranging from brows arched to heads tilted, and oh hell, Kennedy wasn’t going to like this one fucking bit.
As if a switch had kicked off in her brain, her spine snapped to attention. “Xander,” she warned, but damn, her brother had come by that stubborn glint in his eyes honestly.
“I can get it,” Xander told Sinclair. “The ADA said she wants a confession, a statement from a witness, or a weapon, right?”
“She did.”
Xander’s shoulders firmed up beneath his T-shirt. “What about catching Rusty in the act? Will that do it?”
“I’m listening,” Sinclair said, much to Kennedy’s very obvious displeasure. Without thinking, Gamble reached down for her hand, nearly losing the battle with his emotions as he realized how hard she was trembling.
He closed his fingers over hers, forcing himself to be steady. Right now, she needed him.
And so he would be here.
“Why wait until Rusty comes to me?” Xander asked. “I mean, before, it made sense. No one was getting hurt, and we were going to stop him before he actually triggered the ignition devices downtown. But now”—Xander paused long enough for his hands to become fists at his sides—“Rusty’s getting out of control. People are dying, and more are in danger. If we need an airtight case, one that will put him away forever, then let’s go get it.”
“And how do you propose we do that?” Sinclair asked, echoing the question in Gamble’s head.
“By playing his game instead of watching it. Look, Rusty is all ego, and he loves an audience. All I have to do is seek him out and tell him I want a bigger piece of the action. Hell, with how ballsy he’s getting, he’s probably dying to start these fires, and he already knows the devices work. If I can get him to trust me with more information on this job, we can figure out what he’s up to sooner. I might even be able to get him to talk about the warehouse fire and the bomb he planted at the fire house. And if we could catch him in the act, with these remote ignition devices that match the ones found at these scenes—”
“We’d have him,” Hollister breathed. “This is a solid idea, boss. If Xander can convince Rusty that he wants to step up his arson game, Rusty could give him—and us—everything we need to put him away.”
“Or he might kill Xander where he stands,” Sinclair replied, making Kennedy flinch and Gamble’s pulse push faster in his veins.
Funny, Xander was the only person in the room who seemed a-okay with the risk. “It’s possible that he’ll try to kill me, but not until after this job is done. I might not know the particulars, but I do know that he needs me. If he didn’t, he’d have done this whole thing himself from the get.”
Gamble hated to admit it, but… “That’s probably true.”
“It’s definitely true,” Xander said. “So, if he needs me, let’s go all-in and use it. Let me go after him instead of waiting for him to come around.”
“Xander, this is really dangerous. You said it yourself. If Rusty suspects, even for a second, that you’re working with the cops, he won’t think twice about killing you. Don’t you think he’ll find your sudden enthusiasm for this job kind of suspicious?” Kennedy asked.
Xander shook his head, adamant. “I’ll make sure he doesn’t. Look”—he turned toward her, looking her fiercely in the eye although his voice remained full of certainty over confrontation—“That kid, Zach? His death is on me.”
“You didn’t kill anyone,” Kennedy insisted, but Xander didn’t back down.
“I might not have set that fire, no. But if I’d come forward sooner about Rusty, or if I’d tried harder to reach out to him over the last couple of days, maybe Zach would still be alive. It’s past time for me to right my wrongs, Kennedy. I need to do this. It’s the only way we’re going to catch him.”
Kennedy clutched Gamble’s hand, but he held firm. Steady. Strong.
I’ve got you.
She nodded, then turned toward Sinclair, her stare as serious as it was stalwart.
“Okay, Sergeant. Just tell me what I need to do to help keep my brother safe and nail this son of a bitch, once and for all.”
26
Rusty sat back in a corner booth at Houlihan’s and watched the media footage of the fire with a smile on his face and an erection in his pants. No one in the place noticed his attention or his arousal, although honestly, even if that changed, it wasn’t as if they’d be shocked. After all, worse things had gone down in this booth—probably in the last twenty-four hours—than him being glued to his cell phone and sporting wood. The fact that he was sitting h
ere in public, with more than a dozen people in his direct line of sight and maybe a dozen more at various other locations in the dingy, dirty bar, while he watched the coverage that had been posted on the local TV station’s website for anyone with Wi-Fi and two fingers to Google to see?
God, it was even more priceless than a fucking Michelangelo with Van Gogh sprinkles on top.
Rusty stared at the video clip splashed over the tiny, cracked cell phone screen even though he’d long since memorized it. Not the words—who gave a shit about the noob reporter who had bought every breath of his anonymous tip, hook, line, and of-course-you-can-get-as-close-as-you-want sinker. Shit, Rusty had muted the phone before he’d even hit play. No, he was focused on the background, on the rolling flames that reached up out of the windows, on the hypnotic way the fire danced and flickered and consumed every last bit of what it claimed before it moved on to the next thing to control it completely, too.
Fire was such a thing of beauty. Whether people were mesmerized or terrified, no one ever looked away from it. It never blended in or faded out. Everyone watched fire.
Rusty had watched. He’d stood outside that warehouse—way across the street, in the shadows, of course, because even though his audacity had felt addicting as shit, prison orange so wasn’t his color—and he’d taken it all in. The heavy, bitter smell of smoke, not homey like a lazy campfire with a side of Kumbaya and s’mores, but the scent of real destruction. The rush and crackle of the flames as they’d spread out and wrapped around every inch of that warehouse, on the path that he’d predetermined. The terror and panic on the faces of the idiot teenagers who had been inside, so thorough that Rusty had been able to see the whites of their wide eyes, even from where he’d stood. The first responders had masked their emotions better—they usually did, although occasionally there was some dumb rookie, like the one with all that crazy curly hair who had been at the scene last night. She’d snapped out of her stupor quickly, but that didn’t fool Rusty. She was as vulnerable as the rest of those fucking hose draggers.
Everyone was flammable.
Rusty shifted in the booth and continued to look at the screen, his attention snagging on the one firefighter, the huge guy, as he hauled some kid through the front door of the warehouse. Lieutenant I. Gamble, the back of his fire coat read in reflective letters that glowed against the camera lights. Excitement tripped through the lowest part of Rusty’s gut at the seriousness on the guy’s face as he looked back at the flames, and, oh, oh, oh, here was the best part. The guy turned on his boot heels and started hauling balls back into the warehouse, even though the place was fully engulfed in flames, and then…wait for it…waaaaaaaaait for it…
BOOM!
Rusty couldn’t cage his giddiness at the sight of the flashover, grinning wildly through the dim light of the bar. The footage ended seconds later, and unfortunately, he only had a few minutes’ worth of a mental reel to plug in to the dead air. After the idiot hero firefighter had come out with one of his idiot buddies on his back, all hell had broken loose with the cops and more ambulances and another fire truck arriving, so Rusty had reluctantly melted back into the shadows. It had meant not being able to hear the chaos or see the flames, but he’d still been able to smell the smoke for nearly a mile as he’d made his way back to his car and finally headed home.
“Well. There goes my theory that you’d gotten tired of North Point’s good life and blazed on out of town.”
Xander’s voice captured Rusty’s attention from the spot where the guy stood in front of the booth, his Converse planted on the questionably sticky floorboards. Normally, Rusty would be irritated at the interruption, but as it was, he was a little too surprised and a lot too intrigued to get his dick in a knot.
“What, and leave this paradise?” Rusty asked, the skin on his lip and cheek pulling uncomfortably tight as he flipped his phone face-down on the table and leveled Xander with a sardonic smile. With the competing odors of warm beer and stale piss filling the air, and the pair of worse-for-wear prostitutes sitting at the bar who would probably blow both him and Xander for the price of a McDonald’s Value Meal, Houlihan’s wasn’t exactly the lap of luxury.
“Whatever,” Xander muttered, sliding over the bench seat across from Rusty and taking a draw from his beer before putting the bottle on the table. “I’d take this place over The Plaza any day of the week and twice on Sunday. Downtown is full of pretentious pricks who think they’re so much better than everyone else. Those assholes deserve what they get.”
Ah, there it was. The chip on Xander’s shoulder had been just the thread Rusty had needed to sew those puppet strings right into place. “Good to see your priorities are still straight. No hard feelings about the arm, then?”
Xander rolled his lips together in a flat line, and Rusty would give him this. The little punk was growing a backbone. Whether Rusty could use it to his advantage or he’d have to turn the guy into a live-action Roman candle for it remained to be seen.
“If you’re asking whether I’m pissed at you for burning me, then the answer is yeah. It hurt like a motherfucker.” He took another sip from his beer, and this one seemed to douse the heat of his irritation. “But I get why you did it, I guess. You needed to be sure I’m in.”
“Mmm,” Rusty said, his curiosity firing on all cylinders. “And are you?”
“Hell, yes.”
Shock dominated Rusty’s chest at the level of resolve in Xander’s answer. “Bit of a change of heart, isn’t it?”
For just a breath, Rusty sensed an odd sort of tension hidden in Xander’s expression, some hint that he was…what was that? Restless? Shaky? Then a frown bracketed his mouth as if the tension had never existed, erasing all signs of anything other than his irritation.
“Funny how losing your apartment will do that to a guy,” Xander said, and huh, talk about a plot twist.
“You got kicked out of your place?”
Xander shrugged, but his shoulders were too tight to pull off true nonchalance. “Some fancy rental company bought out my greedy-ass landlady—there’s a frigging shock, I know—and they’re ‘revitalizing’ the place.”
He hung air quotes around the word, and Rusty couldn’t help but laugh. “The best way to revitalize that place would be to take a fucking flame thrower to it and start from scratch.” Ooooh, there was a thought.
One he’d have to put on hold until later, though, because Xander said, “Right? Like some spackle and a coat of paint is going to fix that shithole. But these GQ ass clowns are doubling the rent, so yeah. I’m out of a place to live after the first of the month. If this job you’ve got in the works will really screw over guys like that, then I’m so in. Just show me what to do.”
The words arrowed through Rusty’s gut and took root, making his pulse accelerate with an enticing whoosh. He’d never had a true apprentice before—that waste of space Billy Creed had been more of an errand boy-slash scapegoat than anything else. Xander had been filling the Billy-shaped hole in Rusty’s world pretty well ’til now. But if Rusty could turn him into a protégé, someone who would not only watch everything he did, but wanted to learn from it…fuck, the possibilities would be endless.
“Okay, then,” Rusty said, sweeping his phone from the scuffed tabletop and stuffing it into his back pocket. “Let’s move you up in the world a little. I was just going to leave for a meeting with The Money. I’m assuming you want in.”
McCory had called him in a panic just before lunch, insisting that it was “a matter of extreme urgency” that they meet. So, of course, Rusty had made the fucker wait until tonight. He was—oops—already a little late, but whatever. Listening to McCory whine about Christ-knew-what wasn’t on his list of Ooooh, Sign Me Up.
“Yeah, I want in,” Xander said with an emphatic nod. “Lead the way.”
Oh, this was going to be even better than Rusty had hoped.
He’d agreed to meet Chaz not far from Houlihan’s and the pier, so the drive took less than ten minutes. The n
ighttime air was humid and thick, the sort of thing you didn’t breathe so much as wade through. They parked a couple of blocks away, hoofing it to the residential intersection where he’d told McCory to be, and yep, there was the Aston Martin, just like clockwork.
“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” McCory snapped as he burst from the driver’s side of the car, immediately pulling up at the sight of Xander. Funny, both sets of eyes did the wide-and-round routine, with McCory breaking the standoff first. “Who’s this?”
Rusty measured McCory with an assessing stare. “My associate. We’re getting close to go time, so I figured we should all be on the same page.”
“I know you,” McCory said, his gaze narrowed over Xander, and ha, when had ol’ Chaz grown a sense of humor?
Xander snorted at the same time Rusty barked out a laugh. “Yeah, because I totally frequent your country club,” Xander said, rolling his eyes skyward. “Give me a fucking break.”
“No, I do,” McCory insisted, and wait. He looked serious. “Where have I seen you before?”
“Uh, nowhere.” Xander trotted out his newfound attitude like a show pony, turning toward Rusty with both brows way up. “You trust this guy enough to do business with him? Seriously? Because he seems a little…”
Xander broke off to twirl an index finger in a tight circle near his temple. Rusty’s temptation was to laugh it off and agree—after all, the vein in McCory’s forehead made a fairly regular appearance over the dumbest shit. Levelheaded, he wasn’t.
But Jesus, the guy was unshakable, looking at Xander with a metric ton of mistrust. “You and I have business to discuss,” he said to Rusty, crossing his arms over the front of the custom-cut dress shirt he’d already sweat through. “Privately.”
Rusty’s radar, the one that kept him from taking a dirt nap most of the time, started pinging, stirring the hairs on the back of his neck. “Xander, can you give us a second? Chaz here is a little twitchy when it comes to doing business with new friends.”
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