Zachary withdrew to give him privacy. He sat on the bench outside the building where people sat to smoke when it was warm out. He cleared a spot of snow and sat with both of his hands under his armpits. A few times he looked back at the cop, who was still on his phone. Sometimes they made eye contact, as the cop looked to see if he were still there. It was a long time, and Zachary sensed that the cop had needed to make a long series of phone calls rather than just one to make any progress. He finally called out to Zachary, motioning him over.
“Mr. Goldman.”
He hadn’t given his name, so obviously, the cop had managed to get ahold of the officers on the case and to talk to someone who knew the details.
“I have permission to walk you into your apartment. You mustn’t touch anything. The arson investigator would like to talk to you when he gets here.”
“I’d be happy to talk to him. I’m going to need… somewhere warm to hang out. I’m freezing.”
The cop grunted. He motioned Zachary into the building and then locked the door that he had been guarding, barring anyone else from entering while he was showing Zachary to his apartment.
The electricity had been shut off, so they were forced to take the stairs. Zachary’s throat and lungs were sore from the fire. His ribs were still healing after the car accident. His ability to climb the stairs and know what to do with his feet following his spinal cord injury was impaired. All of which meant that he acted like a crippled old asthmatic going up the stairs, making the cop wait for him every few steps. Eventually, they made it up the stairs and to Zachary’s apartment.
The door hung open, the catch broken through the doorframe. At first glance, the interior was completely black, but as Zachary moved in and looked around, he saw that there were varying shades of black. Some things were completely burned, some were scorched, and some were only blackened by smoke. He walked around, the cop right with him, watching with eagle eyes to be sure he didn’t lay so much as a finger on anything.
It was such a foreign landscape. Nothing was familiar. Nothing looked like it was his.
Zachary pointed to the remnants of his phone and wallet on the side table by the couch.
“I guess that answers my question about the identification,” he said. The phone was mostly melted, and the wallet extra-crispy. He doubted any of the flimsy plastic credit cards had survived the heat. Nor any cash. He didn’t try to touch it and neither did the policeman.
Zachary wandered around the apartment. The computer sat under his desk. Like the phone, much of the plastic was melted and scorched. He was sure it wouldn’t start up. Perhaps the hard drive would be recoverable, but he doubted even that. It wasn’t the black box of an airplane, carefully shielded from the elements and any expected adverse events.
He looked over the rest of the rubble that remained on his desk. “I had a stack of papers here,” he pointed.
The cop looked at the table and shrugged. “They wouldn’t have survived. Papers burn the fastest, before anything else.”
“But… there’s no ash. There should be a whole bunch of ash from the burned papers, and there isn’t.”
“I’m no specialist in arson. I’m just here to keep the building secure. Talk to the arson investigator if you have any questions. I’m sure he’ll want to hear anything you might have to say. Anything you notice.”
Between the fire, the smoke, and water damage from putting out the fire, there was going to be very little that was recoverable, if anything. Zachary sighed. He looked at the small kitchen as he walked by.
“Oh… something in the freezer might have survived, right? They say to put valuable papers in the freezer, so they’ll survive fire…?”
“Maybe,” the cop agreed. “Did you put anything in there?”
“A few papers, yeah. I don’t remember what all I put in there. At the time, I got together everything I thought I might need if everything else was destroyed…”
The cop looked at the closed fridge. “I hope you put them in plastic bags, because everything in there is melting and going to stink to high heaven by the time they retrieve anything.”
“Yeah. I did. Hopefully…”
“With any luck.”
“I don’t suppose you could open the freezer, just take a peek inside?”
“Nope. My instructions are not to touch anything. You’ll have to talk to Darryl Reimer. He’s the arson investigator. He’ll be able to give you a timeline if anyone can.”
The cop, Lawson, conceded to Zachary waiting inside the building, just inside the doors where Lawson could still keep an eye on him to make sure that he wasn’t getting into anything. It was still cold, right in the doorway and all the utilities in the building being cut off, but it was significantly more comfortable than sitting on the cold stone bench outside in the snow. What should have been lunch time had come and gone, and the sun was low in the sky by the time Darryl Reimer showed up. He looked down at Zachary, sprawled on the floor inside the door, tired and bored, trapped with nothing but his thoughts in the little alcove.
“Mr. Goldman?” he inquired.
He was a stocky man. He wore a suit, not a uniform, and it appeared that he had been wearing the same shirt for a day or two. His face was red. He had a small black mustache.
“Yeah,” Zachary scrambled to his feet. “You must be Reimer?”
“That’s me.” Rather than shaking hands, Reimer pulled out a shield, held it up for only an instant, and then put it back away again. “Thank you for sticking around to see me.”
He headed toward the stairs, and Zachary followed him.
“I’ve read both your statement to the police last night, and your statement following the car accident on New Year’s Eve. I’m as much up-to-date as I can be without talking to you.”
“Uh-huh.” Zachary focused on breathing. The stairs were just as difficult to climb the second time as they had been earlier. Luckily, though, Reimer didn’t seem to be in great physical shape and was happy to take it much more slowly than Lawson.
“First off, do you have any questions or concerns for me? Anything you’d like to bring to my attention?”
“I looked around the apartment… I didn’t see a lot of ash from burned papers on my desk.”
“How many papers?”
Zachary went slowly through what he could remember of what was in the piles. The sizes and approximate number of pages of each stack. That took the rest of the way to the apartment. They were both silent as Reimer looked around. He had brought a powerful flashlight with him, so the setting of the sun didn’t bother him. He played the light over the desk and nodded thoughtfully.
“It does seem like there should be more,” he agreed. He played the light on the floor surrounding the desk, humming tunelessly.
“You had been getting threatening notes about one of your cases?”
“Yes.”
“And were there documents from that case on the desk.”
“Yeah. Sure. From all of my cases.”
“There was some question of whether your wife could have been involved?”
“Ex-wife,” Zachary corrected quickly. “Well, yes. I don’t think she was, but there’s a possibility. I know she wasn’t anywhere nearby when my brake lines were cut, so it doesn’t seem very likely.”
“Right. And there is a current girlfriend?”
“A girl I am seeing, yes.”
“And she was nearby when both attempts were made on your life.”
“Yes. She doesn’t have a motive, though.”
“If there’s both a girlfriend and an ex-wife, there’s motive. Believe me.”
Zachary stood in the middle of the room, watching Reimer move around, examining clues that didn’t mean anything to Zachary. It was all just blackened fragments of his broken life. None of it told him anything.
“I was dreaming before I woke up to the fire,” Zachary said. “And in my dream, it was Kenzie, the girl I’m seeing.” He paused, letting the words sink in. “That doesn’t
mean it has anything to do with her. It was just a nonsensical dream.”
“Our dreams often derive from the environment,” Reimer observed. “Did you dream about a fire before you woke up?”
“Yes. I was in a house fire when I was a kid. I dreamt I was back there.”
“Makes perfect sense, doesn’t it? And dreaming about the girlfriend could mean that she was here while you were sleeping. It’s not a forgone conclusion. Our brains aren’t just input and output.”
“She was here before I went to sleep, but then she left.”
“Did you lock up behind her? Walk her out?”
“No.”
“You are only assuming she left. Maybe you dreamed about her because she was here before you went to sleep. Maybe while you were asleep. No way to know.”
Zachary was glad that Reimer hadn’t taken it too literally. Zachary had been honest, and Reimer hadn’t overreacted, taking it as an accusation.
Reimer continued to look around.
“I have some papers in the freezer.”
Reimer didn’t look up. “Next time, invest in a fire-proof safe.”
“Okay… do you think we could see whether they survived?”
“When I get there.”
Reimer wasn’t in any particular hurry. His doggedness probably made him a good arson investigator. Single-minded, not easily shaken from the trail. Zachary was starting to get cold. The building kept out the chilly wind, but he needed somewhere with a furnace or heater to get warmed back up again. He’d been gradually losing heat all afternoon.
After a long time in the living room, the epicenter of the damage, Reimer finally moved on. He looked into the bedroom, where the damage was not as bad.
“Where were you sleeping? In here?”
“No. In the living room.”
Reimer stared off into space. Zachary tried to read his expression and figure out what he was thinking. Eventually, Reimer spoke. “That’s one audacious arsonist. Lighting a fire with you in the room? Arsonists normally stay far away from people. They light buildings on fire. Not people. Normally unoccupied buildings, but occasionally they will be bold enough to set a building they know is occupied on fire. When they do, they light the far end, furthest from the occupants. Not in the same room.”
He stared off into space some more.
“What does that mean?” Zachary asked finally. “What does that tell you?”
“Most arsonists are firebugs first and murderers second. I think this arsonist is the opposite. I think he was a murderer who took the opportunity to light a fire to achieve his ends. I don’t think we’re going to find a serial arsonist involved here. This may be his first arson, which means that he’s more likely to have made mistakes and left evidence.”
Zachary nodded. “That makes sense, since he didn’t put a bomb or incendiary device in the car. He cut the brake lines.”
“Right,” Reimer agreed curtly.
Zachary waited while Reimer made his way around the bedroom. When he was done, he looked up. “You wanted to look in the freezer.”
“Yes.”
Reimer went to the kitchen, and again surveyed the area as a whole rather than going directly to the fridge. He played the light on the floor and the counters, moving slowly and deliberately. Finally, he made his way to the fridge and opened the freezer door with a gloved finger.
As Lawson had suggested, everything was melted and starting to go bad. A foul, sour smell crept out into the apartment, and murky water dripped down the front of the fridge. Reimer shone his flashlight around the interior of the freezer.
“Where were these papers?”
“They might be under something. They were in a plastic zip-bag.” Zachary craned his neck to see over Reimer’s shoulders and around his head. “Check… under that pizza box.”
The box was, of course, sopping wet and tore when Reimer attempted to move it out of the way. He moved the few items in Zachary’s freezer around, and both of them could see that there was no plastic bag in the freezer.
“You’re sure you left them in here?” Reimer asked. “You didn’t change your mind and put them in a safe deposit box? Or give them to a friend to hold? Those are far safer methods than keeping important documents in your freezer.”
Zachary felt the sting of criticism. “Yes, I’m sure. I don’t have a safe deposit box or a fireproof safe, or anyone that I could have left the papers with. I put them in a zip bag in the freezer.”
Reimer shook his head. “Not there now. What papers?”
“My birth certificate. Copies of my credit cards. Important phone numbers if my wallet was stolen. Or burnt to a crisp.”
“They’re not here.”
“Can I look?”
Reimer stepped back and allowed Zachary to step in. He didn’t have any gloves on, and the frigid water immediately made his fingers numb. He pushed the thawed goods around the freezer, sure that the bag must just have gotten wedged between them, or crumpled up in the back of the freezer, but the whole time he was looking, his heart sank. They weren’t there. Whoever had come into his apartment had not only stolen or burned all the papers on his desk, but they had also taken the documents from the freezer.
“Why would anyone take those? They aren’t of any use to anyone except me!”
“Identity theft?” Reimer suggested.
“But what would be the point of that? You don’t go into someone’s apartment while they’re sleeping and steal their identity and set their apartment on fire! If all you wanted to do was steal their identity, you wouldn’t want to alert them to that fact by setting the apartment on fire. If it wasn’t for the fire, it might have been months before I realized that those papers weren’t in the freezer anymore.”
Reimer grunted. “Maybe it has been months. Maybe they were taken out of there a long time ago. You don’t have any evidence that it was during the fire.”
“No… it hasn’t been that long… I’ve seen them the last couple of weeks. They were stolen during the fire!”
“You want motives, talk to a psychologist. I can help with basic arsonist psychological profiles, but this guy wasn’t a firebug. This was something else. He wanted…” Reimer considered, shaking his head, brows drawn down. “This guy wanted to erase you. I don’t know. Talk to a psychologist. You’re sure there wasn’t anything in those papers that was connected with one of the cases you were on? The case that the perp keeps telling you to drop?”
Zachary thought about the contents of the bag and shook his head. It wouldn’t be of any use to anyone, except to assume his identity. His identity didn’t have anything to do with any of the cases he was investigating. He wasn’t an important feature in any of the cases. They were all about other people. It was professional. Not personal.
Zachary called Kenzie from Reimer’s phone. She was getting off work and agreed to pick him up at the apartment building. He still didn’t know what he was going to do for the night, where he was going to stay, but he could only move one small step at a time. He had confirmed that he was going to need to get all of his wallet cards reissued, and that was going to take some doing. He didn’t have anything to prove his identity. No birth certificate, no driver’s license, not even a piece of mail with his name on it. Everything had burned up or been stolen. He wasn’t sure how he was going to go about getting it all reissued.
But that was a problem for another day.
Kenzie said she would pick him up. She also, at Zachary’s request, agreed to bring with her another copy of the medical examiner’s report, though she seemed reluctant to do so.
Why did she care so much about him investigating the case? Was it really because she thought everything had been handled the right way and that he would be burning his bridges if he contradicted the medical examiner or any of the officers who had been involved in the investigation? Or was there something else going on?
Zachary shook the questions off. Kenzie didn’t have any connection with the case. The only thing that connected
her to the case was the fact that she was an administrator in the medical examiner’s office.
He waited in the doorway of the apartment building. Lawson was no longer on shift, but his replacement seemed to have no problem with Zachary remaining there while he watched for Kenzie’s car to pull up. It was a relief when he finally saw the familiar red sports car pull into the loading zone.
“Thanks so much for helping me out,” he told her, as he settled into the passenger seat.
“Yeah. We’ll have to discuss the parameters, though. I talked with Mario Bowman, and he said you could stay with him for a night or two. You’re not staying at my apartment.”
Zachary was both disappointed and relieved. At least he would have a place to sleep. A warm place. He didn’t have to rely on a homeless shelter. “Okay. Thanks. I really appreciate it. I’m just in a tough place now… everything is a little crazy.”
“I can sympathize, but I can’t let myself be pulled into your problems. We are not a couple, and you are not staying with me, not even on the couch.”
Zachary nodded. “Understood.” He massaged his hands in the air from the heater, trying to thaw out. He was cold to his core, just like the night of the accident. He was looking forward to spending the next few hours in central heating, no matter where it was.
Kenzie’s eyes were on his purple-tipped fingers. She looked back at the road. “You hungry?”
“Starving.”
“What are you in the mood for?”
“Whatever you feel like. I can’t pay, but I’ll pay you back when I get access to my bank account and credit cards.”
“No need. I’ll treat tonight. Pizza? Italian? There’s that buffet place on Hillcrest that has a bit of everything.”
“Yeah, let’s go for the buffet,” Zachary agreed. “Then we can each have whatever suits us.” And he’d have no worries about getting enough to eat, making up for a day of nothing but a cup of coffee and a chocolate glazed donut given to him out of pity.
Kenzie nodded her consent.
The ride to the restaurant was mostly silent. Even though Kenzie had agreed to help him out, it was obvious that she was still upset about the tracker on her car. He couldn’t blame her; he knew it was not something that he should have done.
She Wore Mourning Page 22