Devil's Pasture

by Richard Bannister

  "We assisted the elderly folk, then went room to room looking for stragglers, before conditions inside forced us to leave. Everybody is out as far as we know. It's fortunate, so many residents were at work when the fire started. We're using the old picnic area as an assembly point." The Chief pointed to where they'd seen the ambulances. "You should check there."

  "Any ideas about how it started?"

  "We'll have to wait for the state investigators, but there are multiple points of ignition, so it's intentional for sure."

  The picnic area was thronging with people of all ages, many clutching bags brimming with hastily collected possessions. There were women nursing babies, and small children running around unchecked. A few people sat in the back of nearby ambulances covered with blankets, oxygen masks clutched to their faces. Prentiss was relieved to find Ananda seated on a picnic bench.

  "Have you seen Detective Megan Riley anywhere?" Prentiss' voice was edgy.

  "I haven't. Who was she visiting?" Ananda asked.

  "That's the question of the moment, but Andrews is sure she is here somewhere, and she's not answering her cell."

  "I have no idea, sorry. I managed to grab some photographs as I ran out. Beyond that, I only have the clothes on my back. I don't know where I'm going to live. They won't let me back in even if they save my apartment. That happened to someone I know. The whole thing is a tragedy."

  "You can stay with me for the time being," Prentiss offered.

  Andrews appeared with his phone to his ear, and told them, "I can't find Riley. I'm having Mason trace her cell."

  "You know she has a new phone. The old one was trashed when Hildegard came after her,' Prentiss said.

  Andrews spoke into his phone, then said to Prentiss, "Mason's located her new cell. It's about one hundred feet toward the fire from here and not moving. Let's go and find it."

  Prentiss was reluctant to leave Ananda, but at her urging, he raced after Andrews. The first building they reached was untouched by the fire. As they rounded it, they found Danny Ellis staring at the blaze, clutching a handkerchief to his face.

  "Danny, have you seen Detective Riley?" Andrews asked.

  "No, I haven't."

  "Do you have any idea how the fire could have started?

  "I saw two men at the back of my block early this morning. It was barely light, and they seemed to me to be acting suspiciously."

  "Had you ever seen them before?" Prentiss asked.

  "It was too dark to tell. Shortly after seeing them, I smelled smoke."

  Andrews lifted his phone to his ear and listened. "Mason says we're getting closer to her cell." He pointed at two firefighters who had their hoses trained on a pile of smoldering refuse. "We're going to have to circle around them to reach it."

  They picked their way through the undergrowth and trash, emerging near the maintenance shed, which so far was untouched by the fire.

  "He says we're almost on top of her phone." Andrews searched the ground as he walked around the shed. He caught sight of the broken door lock and picked a crowbar off the ground. "This is mine. It's marked with blue paint. I gave it to Riley yesterday. She was here."

  They combed the long grass. Prentiss found the phone ten feet from where Andrews had recovered the crowbar.

  Andrews stepped inside the shed and flipped the light switch. "She's not here, but her backpack with my tools inside is on the floor. Riley must have gone into the apartment building. But why would she leave all this behind? Something must have happened to her."

  He stared at the nearest apartment block. It was generating most of the smoke and was the only one with visible flames at many of the windows.

  "If she's in there, she's gone," Prentiss said.

  Andrews ran to one of the firefighters who had their hoses trained on the back of the building. "One of our colleagues is inside. You have to do something."

  "Not much we can do at this stage, pal. The upper floors are about to collapse onto the ground floor. We're letting the structure burn and concentrating on preventing the fire from spreading to the surrounding vegetation. Our biggest concern is a wildfire threatening the city," the fireman replied.

  "Can't you look inside. She may be unconscious." Andrews' voice was cracked and raw.

  "If your friend is still in there, she's already dead from smoke inhalation. I'm sorry, pal."

  Andrews fixed his eyes on Prentiss and said, "If he doesn't look for her, then I will." He ran down the bank and through the open doors into the building, ignoring a chorus of shouting from Prentiss and the firefighters.

  The smoke which had seemed thin on the outside seared Andrews' eyes and his throat as soon as he was inside. The heat was intense, and he pulled his shirt over his face for protection. He darted into the nearest apartment and managed to find his way to the bathroom. Andrews stood in the shower and turned it on full, gasping at the cold as the water soaked his clothes.

  Back in the corridor, his flashlight scarcely penetrated the dense smoke. Barely able to take a breath, he dropped to his hands and knees, gasping hungrily at the clearer air near the floor.

  "Riley, hang on. It's Andrews. I'm coming for you," he shouted.

  He cleared the next two apartments he came to. The sound of the fire was all around him, a hungry, roaring monster searching for victims. He wondered if this was what death was like. Then he heard a noise that could only be from human activity. A rhythmic banging and rending, separate from the rumbling of the fire.

  "Megan Riley," he shouted. "It's Chris. I'm coming for you." The swirling smoke thinned for an instant, and Andrews saw a dark shape cross the corridor in front of him.

  "Megan, over here," he gasped as the hot choking smoke enveloped him once again, searing his eyes and lungs. Andrews felt his strength ebbing away, and he collapsed prone onto the concrete floor of the corridor.

  He tried to protest as two pairs of hands picked him from the floor, pulled his arms over their shoulders, and dragged him toward the exit.

  "She's in there. Megan Riley. I saw her," Andrews' voice was a hoarse whisper, inaudible to the firefighters over the roar of the fire and the hiss of their bottled air. Out in the sunlight, they laid him on the grass. Someone clamped a mask over his blackened face and adjusted the flow of oxygen.

  "Do you have a death wish, you crazy idiot?" The firefighter fixed his eyes on Andrews. "That was the stupidest stunt I've seen in a long while. You jeopardized my life and my partner's."

  "But she's in there, and she's still alive, I tell you." The mask muffled Andrews' voice. His face was smeared with soot and his clothes blackened and disheveled. His eyes looked around frantically.

  "Easy, fella," The second fireman said, "If she's in there she's dead, I'm afraid. We think we see people in the haze all the time, but it's just the smoke billowing. You have to let her go."

  CHAPTER 50

  DIRE SITUATIONS WERE no stranger to me—serving as an MP in Afghanistan had taught me, they are a fact of life. My tour of duty had long since ended, but the lessons lived on—along with the flashbacks and sleepless nights.

  The smoke was billowing around me, adding urgency to my escape. I figured that two of the walls must be adjacent either to other rooms or to the crawl space under the ground floor. After clearing boxes of cleaning supplies from the nearest wall, I lay on my back and pounded it with the soles of my hiking boots. After breaking through, I switched to bracing my feet against the sheetrock and pulling chunks of plaster away with my hands. It was painfully slow work, and the smoke burned my throat, making me cough and wheeze. When the hole was big enough for me to fit through, I pulled orange fiberglass insulation out in chunks—then stopped short.

  I was staring at a concrete foundation wall.

  I looked at my other options. The wall beside the door would take me into the smoke-filled corridor; the wall under the window would lead to more impassable concrete. I could only hope the smoke hadn't penetrated the space beyond the remaining one. I attacked the sheetrock a
s I had before, first punching a hole with my feet and then pulling pieces out with my hands. This time, when I took the insulation out, I had another layer of sheetrock to pummel. When I broke through, a delicious stream of smoke-free air assailed my nostrils.

  As soon as my bleeding hands had ripped a large enough hole, I shimmied through and fell into a room housing a line of water heaters and air handlers. Spider webs drifted off heating ducts crisscrossing the ceiling. Trees must have shaded the high window because this place was darker than the storeroom, and I couldn't see a switch for the overhead fluorescents. It felt hot, and I was hit by the realization that there may be no escaping the fire. Exhaustion hung over me like I was walking through molasses as I groped the semi-darkness for an exit.

  I tripped over something immovable and went sprawling across the concrete floor, grazing my hands and elbows. Pain shot through my right hip and leg and a wave of weakness threatened to overcome me. I pulled myself into a sitting position and examined my immediate surroundings. I had tripped on the bottom of a flight of wooden steps and landed on a metal toolbox.

  There was a glimmer of hope.

  I pulled myself up and climbed the stairs to a small landing at the top. Ahead of me was a solid door.

  Another locked door.

  I clambered back down the steps and found the toolbox. The top was full of boxes of screws and nails, but when I dug deeper, my hand closed on a hammer, then a screwdriver. It took a supreme effort to climb the steps one more time to the door, but I was able to use the tools I'd found to tap the pin out of the bottom hinge.

  It rolled off the wooden landing and clattered on the concrete floor. Moments later, the pin from the middle hinge followed suit. The top one was more problematic. It was a challenge to hold the screwdriver in place and bang it upwards without hitting my hands. After several frustrating minutes, and further skinning my knuckles, the pin was almost out.

  I positioned myself to the side of the doorframe and tapped it the rest of the way. The pin followed its brethren to the floor.

  The door didn't move.

  I pried with a screwdriver between the jamb and the hinge side. The door appeared to hang for a moment at an impossible angle, before crashing flat onto the landing and sliding down the stairs.

  The blast of smoke and hot air which enveloped me from the corridor tempered my relief. But this was my only possible escape route from the dungeon where my captors had left me.

  Fighting exhaustion, I pressed forward, out of the room, and into the unknown.

  The heat burned my eyes, making it difficult to see much, but I was in the corridor running between the ground floor apartments. A shaft of light came from the open door of the nearest one. Covering my nose and mouth with my shirt, I ran inside.

  The swirling red and blue strobe lights of the fire trucks created a ghostly scene, but the firefighters working the blaze were too far away to see or hear me. I shouldered a chair and hurled it against the window.

  The legs splintered, but the window held fast. I felt I was going to choke from the smoke, as I searched for something hard enough to penetrate the tempered glass.

  My hands closed on a weighty glass ornament, and I pitched it at the window. A spider's web of cracks spread across the pane. It shattered and fell to the floor in a myriad of pieces. I placed my foot on the sill and used my last remaining strength to boost myself over it.

  All I remember after I landed on the dry brown grass outside, was smoke billowing over me as voices shouted, and hands lifted me. Then, mercifully darkness overtook me once more.

  CHAPTER 51

  MY FIRST NIGHT IN THE HOSPITAL was the worst I could remember. After the trauma of my imprisonment and escape, my dreams jolted me awake every thirty minutes. The disturbed sleep was compounded by the noise in the ER, and by doctors and nurses who felt the need to wake me at regular intervals to administer medication, or just to ask how I was.

  I'd fall back to sleep, only to relive Jake's death. In this version of events, he died not at the entrance to the bank but pulling me from the burning Brockway Apartments. We'd reach safety, then Marcus Pascoe would come from nowhere and toss the pair of us back into the fire. Sometimes I'd escape, other times I wouldn't be so fortunate. It was an endless video loop that threatened my sanity, relieved only by the advent of daylight.

  The bandages on my hands complicated the simplest tasks, from eating to relieving myself. Apparently, I'd completely lost several fingernails and broken the rest. My hands had sustained deep cuts. The smoke inhalation had harmed my lungs, and I was covered from head to toe with bruises and abrasions. But I settled for being alive.

  After breakfast, such as it was, I figured daylight had vanquished my nightmares and closed my eyes. The nurse had given me another dose of pain pills, and I thought they would help me to catch some dreamless sleep.

  It seemed as if I'd only been snoozing for moments when Doctor Jenkins showed up to listen to my chest. He was an old school doctor with a thick head of gray hair, a deep raspy voice, and a twinkle in his eye.

  "I'm okaying visitors for you so long as they respect your need to rest. There's one waiting to see you, and I'm going to tell him that. Your lung function is still down, but it will improve in a week or two. I'll check back later in the day, and you should be able to go home then. But you must stay away from work for a minimum of two weeks, and after that, desk duty only for a month while your lungs recover. Your GP will okay your return to full duty. No more burning buildings for you, young lady."

  Moments after he swept out of the room, Prentiss walked in. "How are you feeling? They weren't allowing any visitors yesterday. Now the doc says I'm not to tire you out." He pulled a chair to the side of my bed.

  "Pretty rough. You don't want to hear me cough."

  "We need a brief statement from you." Prentiss was all business.

  I told him what I could remember—finding the home-made incendiary bombs in the shed; the assault by Pascoe and another man. But I held back on my real reason for being there.

  "So, Pascoe was the arsonist? We didn't see any incendiary materials in the shed when we came looking for you."

  "Maybe he used them all when he burned down the apartments," I retorted, trying not to sound a smartass.

  "We have some results back from the autopsy on the Baker kid. They collected two DNA profiles. One matches Pascoe, and there's a warrant out for his arrest for kidnapping and torture. We can add arson and attempting to murder you. The second set matches the unknown DNA recovered from Beth Gervais. We'll have to keep looking for a match."

  "What's happening with Brickman?"

  "He has been arrested, and Whitehead's laptop was found in his hideout, so in addition to Matt's murder, he's been charged with home invasion. But he's not a match for the unknown DNA."

  "Makes you wonder what him tying up Whitehead, and his girlfriend was about."

  "We may never know." Prentiss shrugged. "Why did you go to the apartments?"

  "There's a connection between the lists recovered from both Bennett and Gervais, and the residents at Brockway. All the children on the list lived there at one time. That's all I want to say for now."

  "It's just a coincidence. Hundreds of kids have lived at the apartments since they were built. The rent was low, and people stayed for as long as they could put up with the crappy conditions. You're always reading things into cases that no one else sees."

  "So why were Pascoe and his partner so intent on preventing me from going there? They tried to kill me."

  "It was just a convenient place to grab you. Who knows what was going through their minds?"

  "We still don't know who killed the two women or the motive behind it."

  "Ananda has remembered seeing Pascoe from her apartment window with another man on the morning the women were killed."

  "What?" I said too loudly. "Ananda said in her statement she never looked out of her window. So, who was the other man?"

  "She must have been repressing
what she saw, because she only just remembered Pascoe. She has no memory of what the second man looked like. Townsend thinks they were all mixed up in a drug deal gone bad."

  "Is he just making stuff up now?"

  "You know he's going to fire you for working on a case while suspended, and for gross disobedience regarding the Bennett case."

  "And I have questions for Townsend about his behavior on this case, and the Bennett investigation."

  "Acting contrite may be a better approach with him."

  "Nothing I've done calls for an apology."

  "If you're discharged today, Chief Kane wants to see you in his office tomorrow at 1 p.m. It's not looking good for you, Riley."

  Ananda appeared at the door dressed in street clothes and said:

  "Can you come and find me when you're ready to leave, Scott, so we can drive to your place together."

  Prentiss nodded to her.

  I said, "Watch out. Townsend will have you for socializing with a witness while on duty. How contrite will you be when he asks you about that?"

  Prentiss left without saying another word. Chief Kane had always been my number one supporter, but getting summoned to his office didn't sound at all good. I had a defense for my actions. I didn't trust Prentiss' allegiances enough to share it with him ahead of time. But I wasn't at all sure it would be enough to save my job.

  By 2 p.m., Doctor Jenkins had released me. Nurse Perino was helping me get dressed, when Kayla Ellis came into the room, holding the string of a silver balloon.

  "Oh, I came to see how you are, and it looks like you're leaving." Kayla looked to have aged a decade since my interview with her nine days earlier. Her hair was mussed, and dark circles ringed her eyes.

  "The doctor says I can go home, but I'll have to get a taxi or an Uber. The Jeep Mark loaned me is still at Brockway, if the fire didn't destroy it. Anyway, I couldn't drive with these bandages."