Every Crooked Path

by Steven James

  “Pepper?”

  “Yes.”

  “She misses you. She’s waiting for you.”

  That did it.

  A nod. “Okay.”

  I helped him onto the mat. Lily grabbed his armpits and slid him across to join her, but as she did, the mat caught on his foot and got pulled over to her side. It was burning enough so that she wasn’t going to be able to lift it up or slip it back onto the chair.

  With the sudden rush of oxygen, the flames on the chair shot higher.

  Getting over that chair was the only way out of here.

  “Move back,” I called.

  Lily and D’Nesh took a couple of steps into the living room.

  “Farther!”

  The chair was too high, I wasn’t going to be able to hurdle it.

  I backed up and sprinted toward it, then dove headfirst through the flames.

  If I were more coordinated or knew gymnastics, I might have been able to tuck into a somersault and roll to my feet, but I’m no acrobat and I just ended up colliding ungracefully with the floor, skidding across the carpet, instinctively protecting my face with my arm.

  The jarring impact didn’t feel great on the arm that’d been wounded in that fight with Randy McReynolds the other day, but I could deal with it.

  Now that I was on this side of the chair, I saw a meandering path through the flames to the front door. I told Lily and D’Nesh to leave and pointed the way. Lily reached for D’Nesh’s hand, but he was too scared to move.

  “Go, Lily.” I hoisted him into my arms.

  She hustled forward, disappeared around the corner, and made it outside.

  I sidestepped a long tongue of fire and was heading for the front door when I saw movement out of the corner of my eye from the man on the balcony, who was evidently not as dead as I’d thought.

  Still slumped on the landing, he swung the M4 up and I spun to protect D’Nesh with my body.

  The man fired. I felt a slice of pain rip across my left side, but it wasn’t enough to put me down, and I hurried through the front door.

  Burst outside.

  Fresh air.

  I carried D’Nesh to the other side of the street, away from the blaze, and set him down on the grass.

  Some of the neighbors had stepped outside and were staring at the fire. Some were filming it. Sirens whined through the day from cruisers on their way here.

  I told D’Nesh and Lily, “Both of you stay here. Help is on the way. I’ll be right back.”

  Checking my side, I saw it was just a flesh wound. I put a call through to dispatch that we had one suspect on the run and that we needed to get the neighborhood cordoned off and set up roadblocks. The arsonist had a head start and this was a subdivision near a forested park, which was going to be a pain to seal off, but if we could get units here quickly, we might have a shot at catching him before he slipped away for good.

  Analyzing the neighborhood and the street layout in relationship to what I remembered from when I was driving here earlier, I guessed that the most likely escape route for someone on foot was to the west, between the houses, and then through the park.

  I ran that direction, scaled a six-foot-tall wooden fence, leapt down on the other side, and scanned the area.

  No sign of anyone.

  The spot where the bullet had nipped my side was sore, but it wasn’t serious. My sliced arm was stinging more than the minor GSW.

  Quickly, I traversed the lawn, then looped south around the home to the serpentine street winding through the subdivision toward the park.

  Two women had stepped out of their homes. One was holding a baby.

  “FBI!” I yelled to them. “Did you see a man come running through here?”

  One woman shook her head. The other replied, “No.” Then she held up her cell phone and started taking pictures of me.

  Damn phones.

  A police car and an ambulance screeched around the corner on their way to the Romanoff house.

  I sprinted to the wooded area nearby. There was a path leading into it, and if it was laced with trails we might be out of luck.

  Who cares.

  It was worth a shot.

  I took the trail. The woods were thick with summer growth and it was tough to see more than a dozen or so meters in any direction. I followed the path to the top of a small rise, found nothing, and, frustrated, returned, circling around to the burning house again.

  By the time I’d made my way to Lily and D’Nesh, an ambulance had arrived and the paramedics were assisting the two of them, giving them oxygen to help them recover from smoke inhalation.

  I could’ve probably used some myself, but right now I wanted to do everything I could to find the suspect. I had a few minor burns, mostly on the backs of my hands and my face, but they weren’t serious.

  Police cars were arriving, and I told the responding officers what I knew and offered my best guess about the route our guy might have taken.

  Then we tightened the net around the area and sent officers to interview neighbors, search homes door to door, and inspect every car that was leaving the subdivision.

  34

  The man who called himself Shane hid the mountain bike in the underbrush beside the fence, and then opened the lock that chained shut the gate encircling the abandoned, condemned high school two miles from the house he’d just burned down.

  Earlier, he’d left some things in one of the classrooms here in case he needed them, in case things went sideways.

  And they had certainly done that now.

  It’d been close, but he’d made it out of the neighborhood before the police were able to cordon it off.

  He knew enough about how law enforcement worked to know that typically in a situation like this they would check cars and pedestrians but wouldn’t necessarily take too close a look at cyclists, so he’d grabbed the mountain bike from the garage and hit the trail through the park.

  People see what they expect to see, and he’d thrown on a helmet and looked the part. None of the neighbors would even have thought twice about seeing him on that trail.

  The ceiling tiles of the old school were falling in. The walls were marked with gang graffiti. The floor was covered with dust and grime. Slivers of light snuck into the hallway from a few open doors, but for the most part it was draped in long, looming shadows.

  Some of the lockers were open. Others were locked tight and would remain that way until the building was eventually torn down, holding whatever secrets the students might have left behind seven years ago when the doors to the school were shuttered.

  There was less than a week left to put everything into play and Shane wasn’t about to let this incident disrupt what they had planned for Wednesday night.

  He put in a call to make sure the Benz disappeared forever, then changed clothes, cleaned up, and took off before the police could check the school.

  35

  We found nothing.

  Not in the homes of the neighborhood. Not as officers went house to house interviewing people to find out if they’d seen anyone fleeing.

  Not even when we brought in dogs and a helicopter to search the area.

  Whoever the shooter was and whoever had started the fire—whether that was a man or a woman, the same person or a different one—had gotten away.

  Meanwhile, the fire department had been able to contain the blaze, but they weren’t able to save the house.

  Thank God there hadn’t been any other people in there.

  When there’s a fire, crime scene and evidence response units work closely with arson investigators to determine the cause of the blaze. In this case, the point of origin wasn’t so much in question, nor was there a question about whether or not this was arson, or even if accelerants were used. We didn’t know what they were yet, but something had been done to burn
that place to the ground quickly, and without an explosion.

  D’Nesh Mujeeb Agarwai bore no visible physical injuries, but time would tell how emotionally scarred he was because of what he’d been through since he was abducted.

  I watched when his parents arrived and were reunited with him.

  His mom was in tears and even his dad fell to his knees and just held his son and wept.

  This is a world racked with grief, but interspersed with fleeting moments of almost incomprehensible joy.

  And for the Agarwais, this was one of them.

  Christie’s words came back to me: “You never know what’s coming your way . . . Why not celebrate proactively?”

  Pain and awe.

  And right now, thanksgiving.

  But I also felt some regret that the other three missing children weren’t also here. We would have to tell their parents that their kids were still out there somewhere, and that was not going to be a welcome task.

  But the fact that this one boy was alive was good news. It meant that those other children might still be as well.

  Tomorrow, after D’Nesh had been checked out at the emergency room and given a little chance to recover, some officers and a psychologist who specialized in speaking with victimized or molested children would interview him to find out more about his captors. Until then he could just be a boy in the arms of his parents.

  And that was okay.

  I got a text from Jodie that she was ten minutes out and on her way here.

  I assessed things.

  We had two dead suspects, both burned beyond recognition in the house, and at least one more on the run.

  Even though the penthouse where Lily’s abduction had apparently taken place was under Romanoff’s name, we hadn’t been able to determine yet if he was the person who’d slipped away.

  Neither of the men in the house matched Romanoff’s description from his driver’s license.

  A van was in the burned-down house’s garage. Externally, it’d been damaged quite a bit by the blaze, but the inside was still intact and that was where our evidence response team would be focusing their attention, looking for hair, fibers, DNA.

  According to what D’Nesh had told us before his parents arrived, that’s how they’d transported him to the house.

  “They moved us back and forth for when they filmed different things,” he’d said.

  Though we were going to wait to ask about the filming, he had just said “us” rather than “me,” so I asked, “Were there other kids there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you remember their names?”

  “Maggie, Andre, and LeAnne. But I think they’re still at the other place.”

  “And do you know where that is?”

  He shook his head. “Uh-uh. But maybe Lizzie lived there.”

  “Was that another girl?”

  “I just heard ’em say her name once when they didn’t know I was listening.”

  I thanked him and told him how things were going to be okay now, and that he was safe.

  Before being transported to the hospital to have her burned arm treated, Lily spoke with me.

  She explained that she was twenty-one, but when the guy took her to the penthouse he’d told her she looked sixteen. “That seemed important to him, that I looked young. He wanted me to wear a ponytail.”

  “What can you tell me about him?”

  “He called himself Shane—but he also told me that it wasn’t his real name.” She recounted as much as she could about what had happened in the penthouse and how she’d used the hair clip to pick the lock on the chain that was around her ankle when she was in the cellar.

  “You were very brave,” I told her. “MacGyver would be proud of you.”

  “Who?”

  “MacGyver, from that old TV show—never mind.”

  She must not have been a very big television-watcher as a kid.

  Then the paramedics took her to the hospital to treat her.

  Jodie drove up and looked concerned about my side being bandaged.

  “The bullet just grazed me. Really, I’m fine.”

  She nodded toward the sky. “I’d say someone up there is watching over you this week.”

  “That may be true.”

  I related what’d gone down in the house.

  “And the guy in the hall?” she said. “His own man shot him?”

  “That’s what it looks like, yes.”

  “Any idea why?”

  “Motives, Jodie. You know I don’t go there.”

  “So he wouldn’t be able to testify against him?” she mused, but I sensed that she wasn’t so much asking me as she was thinking aloud. “I mean, everybody talks. If all of this is related—and it sure seems like it is—then Wooford was taken out before he could talk too. I mean, if he was killed.”

  “I believe he was.”

  “Based on?”

  “What Randy McReynolds told me before jumping off that balcony. He said we’d failed to protect Ted and wouldn’t be able to protect him either. Whoever’s behind this doesn’t want word spreading about what’s happening.”

  “Sounds like you just identified a motive.”

  “You really know how to go for the jugular, don’t you?”

  “What can I say?” A smile. “Did Lily tell you anything helpful?”

  “The guy who called himself Shane made a lot out of the fact that she looked young.”

  “Could be they needed someone younger on short notice and he settled for her.”

  “That’s a possibility.”

  While Jodie went to talk to the officer in charge of the search, I phoned Tobin and filled him in on what had happened here. When I asked about his mother he told me that she was doing better, seemed to be recovering, and that he was hoping he’d be able to return to the city tomorrow afternoon.

  “Don’t rush things,” I said. “Stay there with her if she needs you.”

  “Thanks. I will, but I hate not being there now. I’ll plan to see you tomorrow night.”

  “Sounds good.”

  As I was about to leave, I was surprised to see Assistant Director DeYoung show up, but then, considering how high profile this case had suddenly become, it didn’t really shock me so much after all.

  I overheard him speaking with the local police chief, assuring him that the Bureau would lend all of its available resources to helping find the suspect who was at large. Then he came over to me and cleared his throat in his typical, distinctive manner.

  “So, Pat. It’s been quite a week.”

  “Yes, sir, it has.”

  “Congratulations here today, on getting those two out of the house.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I’ve reviewed your report regarding the events the other night leading up to the death of Randy McReynolds. I’ve also looked over the autopsy findings and . . .”

  Okay, here it comes.

  The reprimand.

  Or maybe worse. He might put you on administrative leave.

  He said, “There are a few questions I have regarding the incident at the apartment Wednesday evening and the timing of the events that led up to the discharge of your firearm, but in light of everything that’s happened today, I think it would be valuable to take a little more time to evaluate that material. We’ll talk on Monday. That’ll give me the weekend to review things.”

  “Works for me.”

  Considering what we were dealing with here, we needed to assume that there were people out there who would not want Lily Keating and D’Nesh to have survived this, so I made sure we put them under protective custody.

  I phoned Christie, told her what was happening, and explained that I was going to get Jodie set up at my place and would be over as soon as I could afterward.

  36


  It was dusk by the time Jodie and I made it back to my apartment. After changing, I grabbed enough clothes to last a week or so and handed my extra key to her. “The lock sticks sometimes. Just jiggle it a little back and forth and you should be fine.”

  She thanked me, and then I said to her, “You told me earlier that Dell wanted you moved out by the end of the weekend. Do you need help with that?”

  “Actually, if you don’t mind. Late morning? Ten to twelve or so?”

  “Sure. Okay, I’ll plan to see you tomorrow.”

  Then I left for Christie’s apartment. I bypassed dinner, figuring I could probably grab some leftovers when I got there.

  She was seated in the living room with Tessa when I arrived. Both looked at me expectantly as I walked in carrying my computer bag and suitcase.

  “Yes.” I anticipated the question. “You’re going to hear about it on the news tomorrow. But this time it was good. We saved two people. And two bad guys are dead.”

  But there are still three missing children. And one guy is still on the run, I thought, but held back from saying that.

  “Did you kill ’em?” Tessa asked me.

  “The two men were fatally wounded during a shoot-out.”

  “But—”

  “We’ll leave it at that,” Christie inserted.

  “But what was it like?” Tessa asked me. “To be there when they—”

  “Tessa,” Christie said. “That’s enough.”

  “What? I’m just curious.”

  “Patrick can’t tell you about it. It’s related to the case.”

  “He can tell me how he feels, though.”

  “I can’t share any more details about it, Tessa,” I said.

  She sighed heavily and headed to her bedroom.

  When her daughter was gone, Christie asked me, “Are you okay?”

  Back at my apartment I’d changed out of the shirt that’d gotten bloodied when the bullet skimmed my side, and the bandages weren’t visible under this shirt, but still, it was a natural question for her to ask.