A man wearing a white helmet stepped out of the front passenger’s seat of the engine and waved to another white-helmet wearing firefighter who had just arrived on-scene in his personal vehicle. The two walked around the burning house, pointing towards a few spots of the house and were quickly surrounded by firefighters, some of whom had arrived on the fire truck, but most of whom had arrived in their personal vehicles.
The front of the house was fully engaged with fire, making entrance into the structure impossible. The chief, still surrounded by black-helmeted fire fighters, summarized the attack plan calmly, and with an abundance of confidence.
“Need Attack Team One to vent the front window and Attack Team Two to surround and drown through the window for one minute. Two inch line. We need to knock down the heat before we can make entry. I need a team of two interior firefighters to stage with an inch and a half charged line on the Charlie face of the structure. There’s a sliding door I’ll send you in through after we knock down the flames. Keep your radios on and if we go in, make sure you listen for the evacuation horn. I have no idea if there’s anything worth saving inside and am not going to risk anything till I know there’s something worth risking inside. I want a team on the roof, ready to vent. Two ladders, one on Bravo side and one on Delta side and two roof ladders on each side of the structure. Charlie side is also fully engaged. Bravo and Delta sides are showing rolling gray smoke but no flames visible. Let’s roll.”
The Ravenswood Fire Fighters were obviously well trained. As soon as the chief gave the attack plan orders, the fire fighters went about doing exactly what they were told to do. Each moved calmly but with an obvious urgency. Attack lines were pulled from the engine, dragged to the specified locations, then, once in place, the hoses were charged with water. Ladders were pulled from the back of the engine, each carried by two fire fighters, and placed on either end of the structure. As one fire fighter climbed the ladder, another handed him another long ladder with two large hooks at one end. That ladder was then pushed up the roof and the hooks secured it into place over of the roof’s vent ridge.
Attack Team One used a long pole to break the front window of the structure, making sure to pull or push out as many pieces of the now shattered window as possible. Seconds after the window was cleared, angry flames, driven mad with the supply of fresh oxygen, followed their flow path and bellowed out through the window. Attack Team One backed away from the window as two firefighters aimed their attack line in through the vented window opening, opened the hose line’s nozzle and streamed a line of water into the front of the structure. The smoke turned instantly black for a moment then slowly lost its darkness and traveled down the gray scale until it was a shade of death-gray.
The chief barked a command into his radio, sending the venting team on the roof into action. Using a venting saw, one fire fighter began cutting out a six-foot by six-foot hole in the roof, while the other member on the roof with him kept a careful eye on the roof. Two minutes after he had begun, the venting fire fighter pushed with his hand on a corner of the area he had just cut and watched the six by six-foot section of the roof fall into the structure. Immediately, the smoke that had been exiting through the sides of the structure diminished and re-routed their exit to the vented hole in the roof. The venting team backed away from the gaping square as heat and rolling, angry smoke began to charge out through the roof hole.
“Making entry through Alpha,” the Chief said. “Charlie side team, standby and prepare to make entry.”
ˇˇˇˇˇˇˇˇˇ
Derek raced up the long, sinuous driveway, leading to the double-gated grounds of the La Salle Compounding Facility. The gates were left wide open and swinging and Derek noticed that the iron gate on the left side of the entrance road had been damaged. Its bent and bowed out rungs suggesting that his car was not the only one to come racing into the facility.
As he took off up the driveway, he saw flashes of red lights behind and in front of him. Apparently, someone had noticed the smoke filling a narrow section of the Ravenswood skyline and had called the fire department, their angry red flashing, oscillating lights, sending crimson cries off the reflective glass windows of the compounding facility’s main building. A man wearing a highly-reflective yellow vest was holding a flat palm out in front of him, indicating that he needed Derek to stop his car, turn around and to get the hell away from the fire.
Derek jerked his wheel hard to the right and skidded to a stop, half on and half off the paved driveway.
“I need you to back away from the scene,” the man in the yellow vest commanded.
But Derek either didn’t hear or chose to ignore him. He ran towards the back of the burning house, jumping over charged fire hoses and low-growth bushes that lined the driveway leading to the burning home. He sprinted across the velvet green lawn and around the colorful blaze of carefully planted and maintained flowers lining the side of the house. He didn’t know if Nikkie was inside, but being unsure where Nikkie was, wasn’t a good enough reason for him to stay outside.
As he reached the rear corner of the house and started a wide turn, Derek saw that there were no flames or smoke coming from the window on the far end of the house. That window became his objective. Getting to that window and getting inside the house through that window was all he focused on. He didn’t bother to think about what he would do if he made entry to the house and found the room on the other side of the window empty, but he wasn’t worried about that possibility just yet.
During his years as a cop in Columbus, Derek had been on countless structure fire scenes. Back then, his duty was to keep people away from the danger and to assist the fire fighters where possible. His experience was screaming at him that breaking through that far window, despite the lack of apparent flames or smoke, was a suicide mission. Inside, behind the window, the air was certain to be toxic, void of oxygen and, quite possibly, filled with thousand degree heat. When he was a cop, he had seen people desperately trying to get into a fully involved house fire, some to save loved ones, others to save some trinket that held personal value. When he was a cop, he had stopped people trying to get into houses as filled with flames and smoke as was the one he was now resolute on getting inside.
Part of his training in both the Army and the police force included getting out of burning structures. Derek knew a fire in real life was utterly and nearly completely different from what Hollywood’s versions were. In movies and on TV, people were able to walk around houses as fire ripped above their heads or consumed the walls a few feet from their bodies. In movies, the actors could see a fallen victim clear across the span of a burning structure, and were nearly always able to reach them and pull them to safety. Then, depending on how brave the hero-actor’s role needed to be in order to sell tickets or rank high in the Neilson ratings, they would have time to run back in again to save the family dog. Of course, a beam would fall on the hero, stopping their exit. But burning trusses were no match for a Hollywood hero. The hero would come back to consciousness moments before the house erupted in a terrible explosion, and would be seen crawling to safety, dog in arms, from a point of egress no other actor-fire fighter thought was possible.
But in real life, the air inside a burning structure could reach a thousand degrees. A single breath would fry lungs and kill within seconds. In real life, thick, rolling and toxic smoke was so black that seeing an inch in front of your face was considered a miracle. In real life, victims trapped inside a burning house were recovered, but seldom saved.
Derek didn’t listen to the voice of experience shouting at him inside his mind. He lost his wife when he was told to follow protocol and would not, could not, risk losing Nikkie by following someone else’s protocols.
He was fifteen feet from the window he was preparing to jump through when he felt something smash into his side and drop him to the ground.
ˇˇˇˇˇˇˇˇˇ
“Get the hell off me,” Derek barked.
“You’re not going to do what
you’re planning on doing. You’re not going into that house.”
“She’s in there,” he said to the man whose arms were wrapped around him, holding his own arms pinned to his side.
“Derek,” the man said, “listen to me. You can’t go in that house. It’s fully involved. You’ll be dead two seconds after you get inside.”
Derek twisted his head around, hoping to see who had halted his efforts. “Get the hell off me,” he said again. Unable to mimic the head-turning ability of the possessed girl in The Exorcist, Derek instead cast his gaze towards the window he was so recently prepared to jump through. “The window,” he said, snapping his head back in another attempt to see his captor. “There aren’t any flames. I can get in through the window. Let me go!”
The man loosened his hold just enough that Derek could feel the ease but not enough for him to wrench himself free.
“Derek, it’s John Mather. I’m going to let you go but you cannot try to get in that window.”
“Nikkie may be in there, John.”
John Mather released his hold of Derek, then needed to reapply pressure when he felt Derek begin to twist in an attempt to free himself. “You go in there and you’re dead.”
“If Nikkie is in there and I stay out here, you might as well kill me. I’m going in.”
John Mather worked out four times a week in the station’s gym. Mostly cardio but he was committed to weight training at least two days each week. And while the hours he spent at the Ravenswood gym kept him strong and in shape, it was the boxing lessons he had been taking for over six years that gave him the punching power he needed to knock Derek out with one single shot across the chin.
ˇˇˇˇˇˇˇˇˇ
Attack Team One knocked down the fire in the front, or Alpha side of the house in a matter of a couple of minutes. Once the flames were drowned, Attack Team Two made entry through the rear of the house. Two fire fighters crawled through the open door on their knees, carrying a two-inch fire hose. The nozzle man pulled open the gate, and flooded the ceiling, walls, floor and furnishings with water, extinguishing the flames and causing acrid, gray smoke to pour upwards then out through the six-by-six-foot vent cut into the roof. As the two members of Attack Team Two moved deeper into the house, two more fire fighters, equipped with rescue netting, a Halligan tool and flashlights, followed, then broke off and crawled down the hallway.
The rescue team moved quickly, scanning each inch of floor with their hands and testing the integrity of the floor beneath them by smashing the Halligan tool into the floor. They used their hands to see as the hallway was thick with smoke, impenetrable by their LED flashlights.
The first doorway they came to led to a bathroom. The rescue member in front reached behind him and tapped his fellow fire fighter on the shoulder, telling him to stay at the doorway while he searched the bathroom. Seconds later, he returned after finding nothing and took position behind his teammate.
The two continued down the hallway, feeling the wall on their right-hand side. Their training taught them to always keep a wall on either their right or left-hand side. They planned to move as far through the house as the walls allowed, keeping in contact with a wall on their right, until they circled back and followed the left-hand walls.
The lead fire fighter felt another doorway, this time, the door was closed. He reached up, twisted the doorknob and opened the door. He reached behind, tapped his partner on his helmet, then entered the bedroom on his knees.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Leonard had just finished changing his clothes and entering notes into his journal when TJ came charging into his private lab. It wasn’t unusual for Leonard to discover that TJ—who not only knew the passcode of Leonard’s alarm system but also had his own set of house keys—had let himself inside to either rummage through the food pantry, to enjoy time in the home theater or to be waiting in the study. But for TJ to have be so presumptuous as to be standing just outside the basement in his private lab was, for Leonard, going a bit too far.
“What are you doing down here?” Leonard snapped, not interested in disguising the sense of violation TJ’s arrogance had caused. “You are welcome anywhere in my home, but not here.”
“We have a problem. You and I have a problem.”
“One that couldn’t wait until I was upstairs and have had enough time to prepare myself mentally to deal with an issue?” Leonard said.
“I didn’t say we had an issue, Leo. I said we have a problem and there isn’t time for you to prepare yourself mentally for this one.”
TJ explained everything to Leonard. He told Leonard about hiring Alex Manner to do a “test run” of the cocaine and jimsonweed product. He told him about paying two men from the facilities maintenance staff to plant and harvest the jimsonweed in the forest on the southeast part of Ravenswood. He explained how one of the facilities investors, Louis Randall, had hired a private investigative firm after his son, Bo Randall, had started a fire which killed two people.
“Brian Mack needed to be silenced,” TJ said. “He was always involved in the anti-drug movement with the school, but since he retired from teaching and from the fire department, he spent his time trying to root out the drug trade players in the area. I don’t know how he did it, but he came here and confronted me the day of the fire. He said he didn’t have all the proof he needed to put me and you behind bars but that he wasn’t going to stop searching for clues until we were shut down and put in prison.”
“You killed him” Leonard said. “You started a fire at his house and killed him?”
“Not me,” TJ said. “I told you about the drug mixture you made up and what it does to people’s minds. That evening, after Mack left the facility, I got a call from Bo Randall. He wanted to buy some cocaine.”
Leonard paused as he allowed his brilliant mind to flow ahead of the conversation. “You made this Bo Randall kill Brian Mack?” Leonard asked, desperately trying to understand everything TJ was saying and exactly what the problem TJ said they had, was. “You made him kill him?”
“Mack was going to figure things out,” TJ said. “He told me he knew about the weeds we were growing in the forest. Said he followed the two guys I hired to take care of the crop and saw them pull out bags of the weed and take them back to the facility. He promised he would be going to the cops. I didn’t have a choice.”
“So you had him killed?”
TJ sensed that Leonard was posturing himself for whatever legal battle he was about to be involved in. “You came up with the formula and you had no problems with my idea to sell it on the streets. You may not have been involved in setting everything up, but you made the drug. So, yeah, I had him killed but I was only able to do so because of the drug you developed.”
Leonard fell silent, his face slack with both shock and fear. What people thought of him meant nothing, but the possibility that his experiments, his quest for a spiritual connection with Rebecca Angela Miller could be forever halted because of what TJ had done, meant everything.
“I think we may be in the clear now, but the cops are absolutely going to have questions for you and me,” TJ continued. “We need to get our stories straight.”
Leonard was dazed. TJ’s words sounded as if they were spoken from the far end of a very long tunnel. The words reached Leonard’s mind but were twisted, distorted.
“Leo,” TJ snapped, “I started a fire at one of the houses on the facility grounds. I trapped three people inside that house. Two users that did some clean up work for us and a private eye that was working with the agency Louis Randall hired. They’re dead, Leo, and the firefighters are going to find their bodies very soon. They’ll tell the cops, who will be at your door five minutes after they find out about the bodies. We need to get our stories straight.”
A look of abject fear and disgust twisted Leonard’s countenance as TJ’s words began to take form and were registered in his mind. He backed away from TJ, shaking his head and looking at TJ as if he were a stranger; a monster tha
t had assumed control and residence of an old friend’s body. “Get the hell away from me,” Leonard said.
“Don’t even think of denying everything and trying to pin this whole shit storm on me,” TJ barked.
“I had nothing to do with selling those drugs, starting any fire or cleaning up whatever messes you created. You stay the hell away from me.”
Leonard continued backing away from TJ and was within a few feet from the security door of his private lab. TJ, sensing that Leonard was heading back inside the lab, lunged towards him, screaming as he closed the gap. Leonard turned, bolted inside the lab and slammed the door shut. With experienced fingers, Leonard slid the well oiled deadbolt into place, locking TJ out and himself inside.
TJ pounded against the steel and wooden door for several seconds before calming himself. Inside the lab, Leonard was enclosed in terrifying silence. He turned towards the dimly lit room that held his deprivation chamber and his supplies. His last formula, number 131, had failed to produce the desired results. Yes, it had brought him to the precipice of the spiritual connection he had sought for over twenty years, but failed to bridge the final and unknown span of distance. When his most recent experiment had concluded and after he had consumed another one of his formulas which was designed to counteract the effects of the cocaine and devil’s weed, he had jotted down an idea for his next formula. The idea had come to him while he floated in the chamber. It was brilliantly simple but also demanded heavy risks be taken. He believed the formula was sent to him by Rebecca as she too was certainly desperate for Leonard to finally learn the secrets of connecting with her.
But as he stood in the silence of his lab, with TJ’s words still ringing in his mind, Leonard knew there wouldn’t be time for experiments. TJ had seen to that. TJ had taken his work and twisted it into vileness so deplorable and crude. TJ’s lust for money and power would cost him everything. Leonard didn’t care about his business, his accounts or his reputation; he only cared about his experiments and Rebecca.
The Devil's Snare: a Mystery Suspense Thriller (Derek Cole Suspense Thrillers Book 4) Page 24
