Death Night

by Ritter, Todd

  Yet more questions remained, the big one being who would do such a thing, followed closely by the matter of why. If it was Danny Batallas starting these fires, what on earth did it have to do with Rebecca Bradford? Kat also wondered how he would have found out about her in the first place, especially since Constance had insisted on being so secretive.

  “When you and Constance discussed the book, did she mention how she had found a copy?” Kat asked. “If it’s an obscure book, how did she learn about it?”

  She assumed Constance had purchased the copy that was discovered in the museum. But it still didn’t explain how she had learned about the book in the first place. It wasn’t as if she had started researching the Bradford case before reading it. Nor was it likely that Connor had sent her a copy. He didn’t know the incident mentioned in his book had taken place in Perry Hollow until Constance told him about it.

  “Actually, she talked about that,” Lucia said. “She said she stumbled upon it a few months ago.”

  Kat leaned forward, waiting expectantly. Henry, she noticed, was also at rapt attention, his pen poised over a fresh cocktail napkin.

  “Where?” he asked.

  “The library, of course,” Lucia said. “This town does have a library, right?”

  Henry sat in the passenger seat of Chief Campbell’s patrol car, gripping the edges of his seat as the vehicle veered around a corner on their way off Main Street. Five minutes had passed since they left Lucia Trapani at the restaurant. Not a lot of time, but enough to get a good grasp on what was happening.

  “Someone sure wants to stop that casino from being built.”

  “You mean other than me?” Kat said. “Once they hear about it, I suspect a lot of people in town won’t like the idea.”

  “Enough to set half of Perry Hollow on fire to prevent it from happening?”

  It was the only explanation for the fires sprouting up all over town. Someone else knew about both Rebecca Bradford and the casino. The book, Henry assumed, was sent to Lucia Trapani as a way of derailing the project. When that didn’t work, the person decided to start torching things in an attempt to scare them off.

  “You don’t think someone was simply trying to squeeze money out of Fanelli to keep quiet?” Kat asked.

  “Maybe,” Henry said. “But if that was the case, why start the fires? For that matter, why kill Constance Bishop?”

  “I’m still not sure she was the main target.” Kat jerked on the steering wheel again. “It’s possible she stumbled upon whoever is doing this while they were starting the fire at the museum. Collateral damage, so to speak.”

  “Do you think it was a member of the historical society?”

  “I’m not ruling anyone out,” Kat said. “Not even Connor Hawthorne.”

  “And where is Mr. Hawthorne?”

  “In the capable hands of Carl Bauersox.”

  Kat made another turn, barreling into the driveway in front of Deana Swan’s house. She brought the Crown Vic to a halt, remaining inside as Henry unbuckled his seat belt. This was now his job.

  He exhaled before getting out of the car and cutting across the lawn. He rang the doorbell. It was loud, just as he remembered it. Hearing it clang deep inside the house, his first thought was I hope it doesn’t wake the baby. But when the front door opened, Henry saw that little Adam was already awake. Deana was holding him, a bottle in hand and a towel tossed over her shoulder.

  “Hey,” she said, genuinely happy to see him. “I was wondering what time you’d be back. How’d the interview go?”

  She looked past Henry, seeing Kat’s patrol car in the driveway. Anxiety flooded her face.

  “What’s going on? Has there been another fire?”

  “Not yet,” Henry said. “But I need a favor.”

  Deana kept her eyes on the patrol car. “What?”

  “We need you to open the library for us.”

  11 P.M.

  They made an odd group, the four of them, crammed into Kat’s patrol car. She and Henry rode up front. Deana Swan was in the back with the baby. Glancing in the rearview mirror, Kat saw her huddled over the infant’s portable car seat, making sure everything was secure.

  No one had bothered to tell Kat what Deana was doing with a baby. There wasn’t enough time for explanations. Not that Kat required one. Yet another thing she and Henry needed to talk about once this was all over.

  Since there was a baby on board, Kat drove slowly, winding the Crown Vic down side streets on the way to the library. The slow pace gave her time to scan the houses along the street and the people who lived in them. The homes were all decorated for Halloween. Lit jack-o’-lanterns flickered on front porches, and ghoulish displays filled yards. Kat spotted scarecrows, fake cobwebs, strands of lights blinking orange and purple. And on nearly every front porch, sitting in stillness among the festive décor, were people with hunting rifles cradled in their arms.

  Kat wasn’t surprised by the sight of the guns. Perry Hollow was a hunting town, after all. Most households had guns. What startled her was the fact that Burt Hammond had been right. Folks in town, spooked by all the fires, had armed themselves, prepared to take matters into their own hands.

  Now they crowded their porches, waiting and watching. Watching the street. Watching their neighbors. Watching for any sign that someone was going to come and try to set their house on fire. Many of them stared blankly at the Crown Vic as it rolled by. They had already decided that Kat, Carl, and the state police weren’t doing enough to protect them.

  Kat didn’t care what they thought. She was doing the best job possible under extremely difficult conditions. She just prayed that no one did anything stupid. She had her hands full already. She didn’t need an accidental shooting to complicate matters.

  When she turned onto Main Street, Deana Swan spoke up from the backseat. “What are you two looking for again? A book?”

  “Not quite,” Kat said. “We know the book. We want to find out who might have taken it out recently.”

  “Why?”

  “Because whoever has been starting these fires might have found that book in the library.”

  Kat knew it was a long shot. There was no guarantee whoever sent a copy to Lucia Trapani had actually checked it out of the library. Still, they at least needed to look.

  The library was located on a corner of Main Street, right across from Town Hall. Parking in front of it, Kat saw a lone state trooper guarding the door. It was the same female trooper she’d noticed in her kitchen and outside the museum. The one who reminded her of her younger self.

  While Henry and Deana argued over who would stay with the baby, Kat approached the trooper.

  “What’s your name?”

  The trooper answered quickly. “Hicks, Chief. Tracy Hicks.”

  “Well, Trooper Hicks, you’ve been doing a good job today. But I need you to keep it up. We’re going to be inside the library for a few minutes. If you see or hear anything, even if you think it’s only your imagination, you run inside and get me, okay?”

  Trooper Hicks saluted her. “Yes, Chief.”

  By that time, both Deana and Henry had exited the Crown Vic. Henry carried the baby, leaving Deana’s hands free to unlock the library’s tall double doors. Kat stood beside her, listening to the jangle of keys as she looked up and down the street.

  “Got it,” Deana said, pushing the door open. She stepped inside, followed by Henry and the baby.

  “Remember,” Kat told Trooper Hicks. “Don’t hesitate to come running.”

  She looked up as she passed through the doorway, noticing something green hanging just above it. Wolfsbane. A gift, she supposed, from Connor Hawthorne.

  She hoped it would help.

  Henry tried to keep a tight grip on Adam’s carrier. It was a bulky thing—a bean-shaped contraption made of hard gray plastic that kept banging against his legs as he walked. The carrier was also surprisingly heavy. It doubled Adam’s weight, making Henry’s arms burn from exertion. Like many a fath
er before him, he assumed there had to be an easier way to transport a child.

  “How do you manage this all on your own?” he asked Deana. “This thing weighs a ton.”

  Deana, carrying a much lighter diaper bag, flexed a sizable bicep.

  “It’s a good workout,” she said. “I might be stronger than you now.”

  She was definitely more stubborn. Henry hadn’t wanted to bring the baby along at all, suggesting at first that Deana just hand Kat the keys to the library. But she insisted on doing it herself. He had also wanted to wait in the car with the baby, but Deana wouldn’t hear of it. It was understandable, of course. He had only known about his son for a few hours. Naturally, Deana wasn’t prepared to leave Henry alone with him. Although she’d have to eventually. Henry would insist on it. He only wished that time was now, especially since they were moving deeper into the darkened building.

  Just inside the door, Deana flicked a switch and fluorescent lights buzzed into brightness overhead. It didn’t make Henry feel any better. There was something creepy about an empty library. It was unnervingly quiet, with too many places for someone to hide. Now that he had a child to protect, Henry imagined danger everywhere.

  The building itself, another reminder of Perry Hollow’s more prosperous days, was large and complicated. In order to get to the circulation desk, you had to traverse a long hallway with tiled floors. Doors on either side opened up into various reading rooms, still pitch-black inside as the three of them passed.

  The hallway deposited visitors into the heart of the library—a massive octagonal room with the circulation desk, as wide and imposing as a judge’s bench, in the center. Fanning outward from the front desk, like spokes on a wheel, were wooden bookshelves that stretched from floor to ceiling.

  There were two ways to reach the bookshelves. The most common route was directly around the front desk, under the watchful eye of whatever librarian was on duty. The other way was via a small passage that ran the circumference of the room. This made it easy to slip in and out of the stacks without anyone noticing. Naturally, it was the route Henry had used when he frequented the library.

  Deana hit another switch when they entered the room, adding more light. Yet, Henry noted, it wasn’t enough to clear the shadows from deep inside the stacks. Nor did it illuminate the circular passage around them.

  “There’s a computer at the circulation desk,” Deana said. “Information about all of our books is stored in a database. If someone checked it out, I’ll be able to see it.”

  She slipped behind the desk and dropped the diaper bag on top of it. Then she moved to the library’s computer and tapped a few keys. “The system is shut down at the end of each day. I’m rebooting it now.”

  “How long will that take?” Henry asked.

  “A few minutes.”

  A noise erupted from somewhere deep within the building. It was an unidentifiable bang, like a door being slammed shut or an open window hitting the sill. Instinctively, Henry lifted Adam’s carrier to his chest. Kat, he noticed, dropped a hand to her holster.

  “Would there be anyone else here at this hour?” she asked Deana. “Like a janitor or maintenance worker?”

  Deana shook her head. “Not that I know of.”

  “What about other doors? Is there another way in?”

  “There’s an emergency exit, but it’s always locked.”

  “That doesn’t mean someone can’t get in,” Henry said. The bashed and broken door at the rec center was proof of that.

  He looked at Kat, who still had her hand resting near her Glock. She was nervous, which made him nervous. Finally, she said, “Where’s the door? I’m going to check it out.”

  The library’s emergency exit was at the rear of the building. To access it, Kat had to cut through the stacks, enter a dank and darkened hallway, and descend a short flight of concrete steps. The door was closed when she reached it, although that didn’t mean much. Kat herself had closed the library’s front door after they entered.

  Unlike those tall, wooden sentinels, this door was metal and opened by a push bar that ran the width of it. Kat pressed the bar and nudged the door open, instantly tripping an alarm.

  The noise—an earsplitting honk that rivaled a car alarm in sheer annoyance—blasted through the entire library. It didn’t shut off until Kat pulled the door closed again, shaken by the sudden assault of noise. If someone had been inside the building, he didn’t leave that way. They would have heard it.

  “False alarm,” she shouted up the steps behind her. “That was just me. You’ll hear it again in a minute when I go outside.”

  She looked to her right, where the concrete steps continued beyond the door into what appeared to be the library’s basement. It was pitch-black down there. The kind of dark that could swallow you whole if you were foolish enough to venture into it. Reaching for the flashlight on her duty belt, Kat descended the stairs anyway.

  The flashlight brightened things but not by much. From what Kat could see, the space was filled with relics of another era. She spotted card catalogs pressed up against microfilm machines. Wooden desks on uneven legs had either been stacked against the wall or were loaded down with electric typewriters.

  She crept past them carefully, aiming the flashlight into every inky corner and darkened crevice. All she saw were tangles of cobwebs and drops of water falling from the pipes that ran along the ceiling. Nobody crouched behind a broken bookcase. No one lurking in the shadows. Just an unoccupied basement that Kat couldn’t wait to leave.

  Backing out of the cellar, she climbed the steps once more to the emergency exit. This time, she gave advance warning of her actions.

  “I’m about to go outside again,” she yelled.

  When she pushed on the door, it once again set off eardrum-bursting blasts from the alarm. She exited quickly, turning around and shoving the door closed as fast as she could. Through the door, she heard the alarm shut off.

  Instantly, she heard another noise, this time from outside. It was a swoosh of metal on leather, followed by a click. The sound of a Glock being readied for shooting.

  “Don’t move!”

  Kat froze. “Is that you, Hicks?”

  The voice behind her sounded quizzical. Kat swore she could hear Trooper Hicks squinting in the darkness. “Chief?”

  “It’s me,” Kat said, at last turning around.

  “I heard the alarm,” Trooper Hicks said. “I came running. Just like you told me to.”

  “That’s good,” Kat replied. “But it’s just me.”

  She checked their dim surroundings, unable to make out much. They were in an alleyway behind the building—that much she could see. On the other side of the alley was the back wall of a hardware store. To her left was more wall and the zigzag of a fire escape. The only way out was to the right, where a narrow side street led back to the brightness of Main.

  While Hicks continued to scan the alley, Kat examined the door’s exterior. It appeared to be intact. No sign of tampering. Definitely no indication that someone had smashed it with an antique iron. When she tried the handle—a regular knob on this side instead of the bar—it wouldn’t budge.

  She was now locked out.

  “Smooth move, Campbell,” she muttered. “Real smooth.”

  “Locked yourself out, Chief?”

  “Yep,” Kat said, sighing.

  It would have been easier for her to pound on the door until Henry or Deana heard her and opened it again. But that would have prompted the alarm again, and frankly, they had all heard it too many times in the last five minutes. So they chose to trudge out of the alley, down the side street, and onto Main.

  The street, when they reached it, was free of traffic, just as Kat hoped it would be. Her Crown Vic, parked at the curb, was the only car she saw. Still, she glanced up and down the sidewalk, checking if anyone else was around. She saw no one, which led her to look closer, seeking out possible hiding places. The shadow of a neighboring building or a darkened door
way. There was nothing.

  “Looks quiet,” Hicks said.

  Kat nodded in the affirmative. “Good.”

  She turned and faced the library, a gasp catching in her throat.

  The library’s front door—the one she was certain she had closed behind her—was once again open.

  As far as Henry could tell, Adam was a heavy sleeper. The baby slept his way through both the ride to the library and being carried inside the building. Not even the alarm from the emergency exit, triggered by Kat, woke him up, a feat that amazed Henry. But just when he thought his son was able to sleep through anything, Deana called out from behind the circulation desk.

  “The system is up.”

  The sound of his mother’s voice—sharp and excited—set off Adam, who began to wail immediately. The pitiful sound made Henry set the carrier on a nearby table and lean over it in an attempt to shush him. Adam, all writhing legs and swatting hands, opened his eyes and started to cry harder.

  Henry’s first instinct was to just take the baby, carrier and all, back to Kat’s patrol car. He didn’t have a good feeling about being in that library, especially after Kat left. But now that the system was up, they couldn’t leave without at least looking to see if someone other than Constance Bishop had checked the book out of the library. It was the only thing that kept him there, even as Adam’s crying grew louder.

  “I don’t know what to do,” Henry told Deana. “Are there any tricks to make him stop crying?”

  “Give him your finger,” Deana said. “He likes having something to latch on to.”

  Henry pushed his extended index finger into the carrier, letting Adam grasp it with all five of his tiny ones. The baby grew quiet, his wails dying into a mere whimper.

  “That’s it,” Henry whispered. “Daddy is here. There’s nothing to cry about.”

  Behind him, Deana started tapping on the computer’s keyboard. “What’s the name of the book?”