by Lisa Gardner
Which left me with the lingering feeling that he still wasn’t done.
Then something came to me. Like a whisper in the back of my mind. The media craning for a closer look of the Harvard fire.
The media that used to be camped out in front of Evie’s mother’s house. Documenting everyone coming and going. Making approaching that house nearly impossible.
The media, now drawn away to a string of fires on a college campus that was clearly more exciting than curb patrol.
My first instinct had been correct. Rocket Langley is still after Evie Carter. And he set the fires around the Harvard campus to lure away the media and expose his true target. Molotov cocktails for the foreplay. No doubt a fresh stash of gasoline for the main event.
I start to run.
CHAPTER 40
EVIE, D.D., AND FLORA
BY THE TIME I PULL my dazed mother out from behind my father’s massive desk, then convince her to leave her martini glass behind, the smoke is noticeable. We pass through the doorway, then draw up short.
Thick black plumes roll out of the kitchen.
I remember what I’d heard about the fire that took out my own home. It had most likely started on the stove top, some kind of homemade trigger system utilizing cooking oil, which had flared up, igniting a trail of gasoline . . .
I eye the edge of the open parlor in front of us, and almost as if I’ve willed it a thread of flame appears in front of my eyes and darts along the perimeter straight to the front door, where—whoosh—it hits the mother lode of accelerant.
My mother and I both stagger back, trying to shield our faces from the sudden heat. The entryway is gone, consumed in a wall of flame, while to our right the kitchen flares with fresh heat while belching out black soot.
My mother moves first. She tugs at my hand, moving in the direction of the stairs. I try to resist. We go up, and then what? Fire climbs, heat rises. We will only be trapping ourselves on a different level. But on the other hand, both first-floor exits are now blocked. I give up and follow.
My mother doesn’t talk. I can hear her ragged breathing as she hits the stairs, still holding my hand, still pulling insistently.
“Fire extinguisher?” I manage to gasp.
“In the kitchen.”
Which certainly isn’t going to help us. “We should . . . call . . . nine-one-one,” I try next.
“How can they not know?”
Indeed, a fire already this big in a neighborhood with houses this close together, half of Cambridge has probably dialed by now. Given the intensity of the flames, however, the fire engines need to get here miraculously fast.
Keep climbing. Help is coming. I have to believe it.
I choke on more fumes, use my free hand to cover my mouth, and think immediately, This can’t be good for the baby.
We make it to the second floor. My bedroom suite is to the right, but given how greedily the fire is burning in the entryway beneath it, we don’t dare risk it. We head toward my mother’s rooms instead, which are positioned over the kitchen. Halfway there, we pass the guest bath. I stop abruptly. My turn to tug at my mother’s hand.
“Wet towels,” I manage to choke out, the smoke growing heavier. “Wet towels . . . wrap around . . . our faces.”
She gets it. For once in our lives, we move together. I’m throwing bath towels in the tub, she throws hand towels in the sink, and we’re both running cold water, soaking through our piles. No more words. Working as quickly as we can. I throw the first dripping bath towel around my mother’s shoulders to try to block the heat, as she pretty much slaps the smaller version on my face.
It takes a few minutes to come up with our new ensembles of cold, wet white; then we brave the hallway once again. Only to find the shadow of a man standing right in front of us.
My mother screams.
Me, I simply stare at what the man has cradled in his arm: my father’s shotgun.
* * *
—
“THERE!” D.D. YELLED, hitting the dash with her hand, just before Phil hit the brakes. “Rocket Langley. Just took off through that yard.”
Phil didn’t even get the vehicle pulled over. She already had the door open, was tumbling out into the snowy bank. Her phone was buzzing away in her pocket. She grabbed it out of habit, taking off in pursuit even as she heard Phil on the radio, calling for backup behind her.
“Rocket Langley torched the Harvard campus as a distraction,” D.D. heard Flora exhale in a rush. “Evie’s mother’s house is his real target.”
“I’m on Langley. In pursuit now.”
“Okay. I’m almost at the house—shit! House is on fire. Repeat. Front windows totally engulfed. He got here first. Goddammit!”
“Are Evie and her mother inside?” D.D. demanded. There, Rocket’s black hoodie, disappearing around the corner. She attempted to put on a fresh burst of speed, slid in the slush, and forced herself to move more lightly. This is why a Boston detective wore decent boots even in December.
“Car’s in the drive,” Flora said tensely. “A second car, too. Uh . . . luxury SUV. Lexus.”
“Dick Delaney,” D.D. muttered. “Listen to me, Flora. He’s our shooter. He set this all up. If he’s in that house, they’re in double trouble.”
“That’s how Rocket did it!” Flora snapped. “I was trying to figure out how he could access such a prime target. Delaney set it all up for him!”
Up ahead, the firebug in question was gaining ground. The kid was young, fast, and all limbs. Just for a moment, D.D. really hated being a middle-aged woman who was none of those things.
But you didn’t have to be fresher. Just smarter.
“Phil’s called for backup,” she gasped, watching the kid dart forward, working the next line of angles, preparing her play.
“I’m on it,” Flora said.
D.D. clicked off, jammed her phone back into her pocket. Knowing it was her job to nab the arsonist.
And that she’d just sent her CI—a woman she respected, and even worried about—into the flames.
* * *
—
IT OCCURS TO me again that I don’t know fire. For all my training, preparations, dangerous scenarios, this isn’t something I know. How to start a fire in survival conditions, sure. But I studied fire as a tool, not as a threat for me to survive.
I shudder at the irony. I never worried about fire, because Jacob didn’t like fire. Further proof that all these years later that motherfucker is still running my life.
I seize my rage. Good things can be forged from bone-deep fury.
The front of Evie’s mom’s stately Colonial is an inferno. Porch windows shattering, flames roaring up in response to the fresh influx of oxygen, dancing around what has to be some kind of fire-rated front door in pure frustration.
Fire is a greedy bitch, I decide. But like all beasts, it’s a slave to its appetites.
With that in mind, I work on a strategy. Rear fire escape. Building has to have one. Cambridge loves its fire codes. Rooms must have a duel egress, meaning if there are bedrooms at the rear of the house, there must be a second way out.
Another glass window explodes. I reflexively throw up an arm as I dash around the side of the house. Out of the corner of my eye, I realize the neighbors are outside, watching the fire in horror.
“Call nine-one-one,” I call out reflexively.
“Someone’s in the second-story bathroom,” the woman screams back. “I saw someone through the window!”
“Thanks!”
Then I spot it, a rickety metal fire escape. I hit the bottom rung and start to climb.
CHAPTER 41
EVIE, D.D., AND FLORA
I DON’T SPEAK RIGHT AWAY. Beside me, my mother stands perfectly still.
As Mr. Delaney steps through the smoke, heading straight for us. He’s holding a handgun, I real
ize now. My eyes had been playing a trick on me, seeing the past when I need to be focused on the present. I’m not sure what kind of gun he currently has, but his grip is steady, his aim true.
“You’re not supposed to be here,” he tells me tightly, his voice already raspy from the smoke. “You said you had a meeting.”
“I finished early.” My voice sounds strange to me. Too normal. Too polite. Like this is any other conversation we’ve ever had. Like we’re not standing in the middle of the conflagration, and that his comments alone didn’t just reveal that while I wasn’t supposed to be here, he assumed my mother would be.
“You killed my dad,” I say.
Watching him now, the way he holds the gun, the way he moves comfortably through the house—how had I not seen it before? That day, I hadn’t seen anyone leaving the house or scuttling down the sidewalk—all the more reason to think my father had possibly shot himself. Except, of course, there was another option—the shooter hadn’t left the house. Maybe Dick Delaney had seen our car pull up and had simply moved to the front of the building, or even walked upstairs. He knew our house that well, my parents’ oldest and dearest friend. He could’ve cleaned up in one of the upstairs baths while my mother was screaming, I was sobbing. Then once my mother had called him, he could’ve used the ongoing chaos to walk out the front door and walk back in the side door. Neither one of us had been paying attention.
But now . . . Now I feel like I’m seeing everything.
“My mom told you what she’d done. She admitted that much to me.”
Delaney frowns. He seems agitated, but his grip on the gun is certain. The smoke is building around us, the fire growing closer. It occurs to me, he may have a pistol, but Mom and I have wet towels. Fire doesn’t care about bullets, but it does hate getting wet.
“You always were impetuous,” he snarls at my mother now. She still stands stiffly beside me. She’s thinking something, but I can’t tell what.
“You can’t just call off a hit,” Delaney says impatiently. “Good God, only you would be stupid enough to take one out in the first place, then honestly believe you could change your mind. That’s not how things work with these people.”
“You were one of them,” I fill in now, speaking my suspicions out loud. “That’s how you knew who to call. You were one of them.”
“I did my best,” Delaney says tersely. “I even paid the goddamn bill, once your mother saw the light, told the man it was for his trouble and he’d best go away. But I saw the look in his eyes. Hired killers don’t simply quit jobs. I actually came here that afternoon to warn your father.” Delaney glances at my mother. “Trying to kill off his mistress? Good God, you were always dramatic, but that was just plain crazy. Unstable. I tried to tell him. Because we all knew he wasn’t going to change his ways.” Delaney stares hard at my mother again. “Meaning what about the next mistress? Or the one after that?”
Now he positively glares at my mother.
“You tried to warn my father?” I ask, starting to inch backward, away from him, away from the blaze.
“He was cleaning his shotgun. Said Joyce had already confessed to it all. He was sorry for the trouble and expected there was some kind of reasonable solution that could be reached. When I tried to explain the severity of the situation, that you can’t just hire a professional assassin then simply walk away, that it was one thing for Joyce to be possessive, quite another for her to be homicidal. Good God . . .” Delaney stops. Coughs raggedly. I glance quickly at his gun, but he still has it pointed at my mother’s chest.
“He didn’t believe you?” I ask. Because I didn’t understand this either. My father was a very rational man. And there was nothing rational about a wife who tried to resolve marital disputes through contract killers.
For the first time, Mr. Delaney looks at me. What he says next comes out flat and hard: “He accused me of being jealous.”
In that moment, I get it. Mr. Delaney. His close relationship with my father. But always as a friend, the outsider looking in, because my father had my mother, not to mention so many other women.
“He knew how you felt about him. How you really felt about him,” I say. I’m saddened for this man and how much that had to hurt.
“He always saw everything,” Mr. Delaney muttered roughly, which is answer enough.
“You loved him.”
“It didn’t matter! He had her. For your father it was always about her!” He jabs the gun toward my mother’s chest. “So much so, that even when her actions threatened him, his reputation, his own mistress, for the love of God, even when I, as a good friend, tried to warn him no good would come of their increasingly volatile marriage, he didn’t hear me. He laughed. He . . . He . . .”
“He rejected you.” I can see it clearly. My father, who could be arrogant, who hadn’t wanted to hear how his relationship with his wife might be wrong. Easier for him to turn on the messenger instead. Dismiss a legitimate warning as nothing more than the jealous ramblings from a friend he’d always known had more than friendly feelings for him. And Delaney, standing there, having come in good faith to talk about something he was the expert on . . . Delaney, who had loved my father, respectfully, from a distance, only to have his closest friend turn on him.
I can see it. I can see all of it. And it hurts so much.
“I picked up the shotgun,” Delaney says now, as if watching the movie in my mind. “At the last minute, Earl realized what I was going to do. We struggled. It went off.” Delaney’s voice falters. He and I both know no shotgun just “went off.” It had to be pumped. It had to be fired. Into the torso of his best friend.
“He fell down. And I heard a car. Your vehicle in the driveway.” He glances at my mother. “I wiped down the shotgun. Took off my shoes and tiptoed out of the kitchen. Upstairs, in Earl’s bathroom, I rinsed my hair, hands, and face. Then I balled up my bloody clothes to be retrieved later and re-dressed in items from Earl’s closet. You never even noticed.”
My mother still isn’t talking or moving. But I feel it now, a subtle pressure from her hand, tugging me closer to her. For a moment, I resist. Because I have to know the rest.
“Then I said I shot him, and you were home free,” I provide now.
“I thought you knew.” Delaney stares at my mother. “I thought you knew and asked Evie to confess to protect me. I kept waiting for you to approach me, make some kind of demand in return. But you never did. Then one day I realized, my best friend was dead.” Delaney took a shuddering breath, coughed again from the rapidly thickening smoke now. “And I got away with it.”
“And Conrad?” I whisper because there’s more to this story; I know that now. More things I don’t want to hear but have to know. I press the wet towel closer to my lips and nose. I can feel the heat growing. The fire is coming for us.
In fact, that’s what I’m hoping for.
“You’re on the dark web, aren’t you?” I hear myself now. “A man with your past experiences, current contacts. What do you do? Run a site, a forum, something?”
“Even on the internet, it takes personal connections to vouch for, say, certain professionals.” Mr. Delaney shrugs, as if this is the most obvious thing in the world. Maybe for him, it is. Maybe for my husband, all those years, all those aliases, logged online, it was as well. I know too much, I think, and yet still feel like I know nothing at all.
“Conrad figured you out,” I venture. “Surfing the dark web, he came upon something.”
“Ironically enough, he lodged a complaint against a particular gun for hire. When I went to mediate . . . I realized from Conrad’s e-mail who’d sent it. I knew then, it was only a matter of time before Conrad realized my role as site manager as well.”
I stare at him. I don’t care anymore about the smoke stinging my eyes, the intensity of the nearing flames, the feel of my mom tugging my hand. “Tell me,” I order, my voice so thi
ck I barely recognize it. “I want to hear it. Straight from you. Tell me exactly how you killed my husband.”
“I didn’t have a choice—”
“Tell me!”
“I waited till you were out,” Mr. Delaney says slowly. “I went into the master bedroom and retrieved Conrad’s gun, which both of you had mentioned before. Eventually he came home, went to work in his study. I appeared in the doorway. ‘I never heard you knock,’ he said. Then I . . . Then I did what I had to do. Then it was done.”
“You killed my husband. You burned down my house.”
“I did what I had to do.”
“You burned your own house. Then this house? My mother’s house?” I’m practically screaming. At least I think I am. It’s hard to hear over the flames.
“She knows,” he said. “And now you do, too.” He stares hard at my mother again. “Sixteen years ago, you didn’t suspect?”
My mother doesn’t say a word.
“But when Evie told the police the truth, you started thinking about that day again, too. If Earl hadn’t shot himself, then there were only two logical solutions: The hired gun had come to the house, maybe to see you, and got in a confrontation with Earl instead. Or the only other person who knew everything that was going on had done it—namely, me. Of those two choices, who do you think you were going to turn on first?”
“You killed your best friend,” my mother finally snaps. “He loved you!”
“You hired a contract killer to take out the competition. And he loved you still!”
“He was going to leave me!”
“No! You should’ve just been patient, Joyce. For the love of God, you weren’t going to lose him.”
“No. You took him from me instead.”
