by Harper Allen
Not on my watch, dammit.
“How did you sneak onto the site this morning without anyone stopping you?” Her voice held detached curiosity, nothing more, she observed. Good. She bent down to pick up Pangor’s water bowl, and noted the tremor in her hand as she waited to see if he would reply.
“I know you were there, Stone.” She didn’t look at him as she refilled the bowl at the sink. “I can smell the smoke on your clothes. Did you find anything?”
For a moment longer he remained silent. Just as she was beginning to believe he wasn’t going to answer her at all, he spoke, his voice low, as if he were talking more to himself than to her.
“The whole third floor was gone. When Trainor and Knopf finally make it their business to do a walk-through, they’ll have to bring in a dog if they want to do any serious investigating. I don’t think they’ll bother.” He looked down at the front of his khakis and brushed something from them. Walking over to the table, he dropped into a chair.
“Dammit, I made her a promise.” Wearily he raked a tanned hand through his hair. “I shouldn’t have made it, and maybe I won’t be able to carry it through. But I can’t just quit on her without giving it my best shot. She’s counting on me.” His smile was bleak. “I can’t remember the last time I used those words,” he said softly.
“And Claudia was counting on me.” Tamara gazed steadily back at him, her eyes bright. “God knows why. She could have reached into a hat and come up with at least a dozen others who would have made a better mom for Petra, but she chose me. You said you were up at five, Stone. Where the hell’d you get a dog at that time in the morning?”
He raised startled eyes to hers. Then the ghost of a grin passed over his features, and he looked down again at the telltale hairs on his khakis.
“I told you I still had some contacts. One of them just happens to be four-legged.” He shrugged. “Jerry the Wonder-Dog. He used to be a legend, too, but unlike me he was pensioned off with full honors and adopted by the widow of a retired firefighter I used to work with. Betty told me he spends his days playing with the grand-kids and napping in the sun. She wasn’t even sure if he still had what it takes to sniff out a site. Frankly, neither was I.”
“He was a chemical-sniffing canine?”
She’d seen them at their work, criss-crossing every square inch of still-smoking ruins, their extraordinary sense of smell trained for one purpose only—to pick out the single part in a thousand that bore the chemical makeup of an accelerant.
“I’d used him in the past. I know of at least two dirtbags who got sent up because Jerry sniffed out the evidence that convicted them.” Stone shook his head. “I swear that old German shepherd knew exactly where I was taking him as soon as he got into the car, and when we arrived at the scene…” His words trailed away.
“I had no trouble getting in, Tam. It was cordoned off, but it’s not even being treated as a suspicious origin fire.”
“That doesn’t make sense.” She stared at him. “Boyleston would have passed on what you saw. They have to go through the motions, at least.”
“I think you were right.” His smile didn’t match the suddenly hard look in his eyes. “I think I got voted off the island, honey. I bet what I saw doesn’t even make it into the official report. They’re going to screw this one up just like they did the Dazzlers blaze.”
“Dear God, he found something.” Alerted by his tone, Tamara’s gaze sharpened. “Jerry still has the magic. He found something, didn’t he, Stone?”
He nodded once, his jaw tight. “I don’t know what it was, but Jerry found something. And as near as I could tell, the piece of twisted metal he located it on came from the springs of a cot like the one Claudia was lying on when she died.”
“Then that means Trainor and Knopf are going to have to listen to—” she began, but he interrupted her, his voice harsh.
“Nobody has to listen to me, honey! Don’t you get it? I’m a has-been, an ex-drunk, a loose cannon that everyone knew would go down in flames one day. Even Chandra thinks I’ve gone over the edge on this. She said as much to you, didn’t she?”
“She said she didn’t think your information was reliable,” Tamara said reluctantly. “But that was before you had anything to corroborate it with, McQueen.”
“I told you the site was unsecured. What’s to prove that crazy bastard McQueen didn’t plant a trace of accelerant there himself in some feeble attempt to bring back his glory days, before he crashed and burned? That’s what they’ll say, Tam. I don’t even know that I blame them, but the fact remains that I need some heavy-hitting support behind me and I don’t have anyone left to ask for that kind of help.”
“I do.”
Why hadn’t she thought of it before? she berated herself. The solution had been right in front of her all the time.
“Uncle Jack officially retired from the department a few years ago, but he stayed pretty active in public relations for them. He’s still got a lot of pull with the powers that be.”
She saw the doubt in his eyes. “I know what you’re thinking, Stone, but for a man who started out as an ordinary jakey Uncle Jack’s got some influential friends. He was cited for bravery when he nearly got killed in a factory fire, bringing out a pregnant woman. After that he was never able to go back to on-the-line firefighting, and he was offered a position as liaison between the department and city hall.”
He was frowning at her. “His name’s Jack King? When he and his wife adopted you, your name was changed to theirs?”
She shook her head, not understanding what he was getting at. “Jack Foley. You probably ran into him once or twice when you were on the job.”
“It was the Corona shoe factory.” Under the tan his face had paled. “Ladder 11 got the call and by the time they arrived the place was an inferno. Some hotshot rookie got trapped in a stairwell trying to reach that pregnant secretary, and after your uncle got her out he went back in for the stupid son of a bitch. He brought him out, too, didn’t he?”
“He went back in and brought out a firefighter, yes.” Tamara gave him a wry smile. “Except the secretary gave birth the next day and named her little boy after my uncle. The papers loved that angle, and that’s what he got the citation for.”
Her smile grew thoughtful. “But if you’d joined the department by then I guess it would be the jakey you’d remember. When it’s one of our own it hits home, doesn’t it?”
“It sure did with me.” He got to his feet, his movements suddenly restless. “Honey, you’ve got exactly ten minutes to get into a pair of jeans, or I’m leaving without you.”
“In my car? I don’t think so, McQueen.” He’d reverted, Tamara told herself resignedly. He was being a jerk again.
She was getting kind of used to it, she thought in surprise.
“And just where were you planning on going, anyway?” she demanded, crossing her arms and fixing him with a half-hearted glare. He returned it with one of his own, but she could see a gleam of humor at the back of those smoke-gray eyes.
“I’m going to renew an old acquaintance, Tam.” His voice was huskier than normal. “I’m going to look up your uncle. I was the stupid son of a bitch Jack Foley pulled from the Corona fire.”
Chapter Seven
“I wasn’t tryin’ to be a hero when I saved your sorry butt at the Corona fire, McQueen. You owed me ten bucks on a Red Sox loss. I wasn’t about to let you welsh out on me.”
As they entered his kitchen, Jack Foley placed a hand on the younger man’s shoulder. “How’ve you been, laddie? I heard you hit a patch of rocky road these past few years, but no one seemed to know where to contact you.”
He wasn’t one to tiptoe around a subject, Tamara thought in affectionate resignation, studying the man she’d always thought of as a surrogate uncle. In his mid-fifties now, the full head of sandy hair he’d once possessed had thinned and his blue eyes were surrounded with a network of faint lines. Shorter than Stone by half a foot or so and with his once-mu
scular build a little stockier than it had been, he still projected an air of energetic enthusiasm. With relief she saw Stone didn’t seem to be taking offence at the bluntness of the question.
“You know how it is, Jack.” His answering smile was onesided. “You’ve seen more than a few of the boys go down that rocky road. I’m one of the lucky ones who found his way back.”
“The job can break you if you let it get to you.” Jack rubbed his jaw. “But there’s days when if you’re any kind of human being, you won’t be able to stop it from getting to you. My Tammy here found that out pretty fast, didn’t you, punkin?”
“It was only my second day on the job, Uncle Jack, and even some of the old-timers on the crew were shaken up by that fire.” There was a touch of defensiveness in her reply. “I’m tougher now. But yeah, I’ve got to admit I didn’t protest when Aunt Kate made up the bed in my old room and tucked me in like I was five years old again.”
“If Katie’d had her way, you never would have moved out in the first place. But she was the one who insisted we hang on to your parents’ house, instead of selling it and putting the money into trust for you.” Jack Foley’s blue eyes dimmed in remembrance. “She said you’d want to spread your wings someday, and if we kept the house for you at least you wouldn’t fly too far. God, I miss her, Tammy.”
He turned to Stone. “My wife,” he said simply. “She passed away last year. But enough about me—I want to hear how the two of you ran into each other. You back on the job, McQueen?”
Tamara went to the refrigerator, talking over her shoulder as she did. “It’s a long story, Uncle Jack. I’m going to have some lemonade—what can I get for the two of you?”
“The sun’s over the yardarm, so grab me a bottle of beer, will you, darlin’?” Jack looked suddenly dismayed. “Maybe that’s not such a great idea,” he added gruffly. “Make it lemonade for me, too.”
“Hell, Jack, watching you drink beer isn’t going to send me out on the streets looking for a bar,” McQueen growled. “Go ahead, for God’s sake. I’ll have some of the good stuff with Tam.”
There was no real heat behind his words. The firefighter’s world was small and tightly knit, Tamara reflected, and she shouldn’t have been surprised that the two men had crossed each other’s paths in the past. But given her uncle’s bluntness and Stone’s impatience, it was fortunate there’d been a bond forged between them that had led to their mutual liking now.
As Jack took a long pull at his bottle and Stone, after a first suspicious sip of the lemonade, raised an eyebrow and drained the glass, she launched into an edited version of the events of the past twenty-four hours. There was no need to go into Stone’s actions at the moment of their encounter, she thought, or her apprehensive reading of his state of mind at the time. When she reached the part about Joey, she faltered.
“Lieutenant Boyleston says the doctors are being pretty closemouthed about his condition. He’s off the danger list, but they won’t give us any details.”
“He’s going to need some skin grafts on his face, but they saved his esophagus. He’ll be back on light duty within six months and on the roster again within eight,” McQueen said briefly. “Maybe the next time he goes racing into a fire he’ll remember to put on his damn respirator.”
She stared at him. “How did you find out all that?”
There was a sliver of ice left in his glass and he tipped it into his mouth without looking at her. “I used to date one of the nurses who works in the burn ward,” he said, crunching down on the ice. “I phoned her this morning, which probably ruined her day since the last time I saw her she said there’d be a cold snap in hell before she ever went out with me again. I told her the temperature was dropping quickly, and if she didn’t want to find me on her doorstep with a bunch of roses and dinner reservations she could give me the scoop on your partner. She couldn’t talk fast enough. I don’t remember being that awful,” he added. “But anyway, Mr. Look Ma, No Air-pack is going to be okay, no thanks to his own foolishness.”
“She obviously never took the time to get to know your sensitive side,” Tamara said dryly. She winced as he crunched the last of his ice, and her expression softened. “Thanks, Stone. I—I was worried about him.”
“I knew you were.” He fixed his attention on the glass in his hand as if he was hoping to find more ice there. “Get on with the story, Tam.”
She flicked an exasperated glance at him but complied, only stopping at the point where he’d gone into the apartment for Petra. “You take it from here, McQueen. It’s better if Uncle Jack hears it firsthand.”
“She’s right, laddie.” Jack’s eyes narrowed in interest. “That first glance at the scene can tell a lot. Something looked wrong to you?”
“Dead wrong,” Stone said shortly. “But it didn’t hit me immediately.”
In a few curt sentences he outlined his suspicions and the reasons for them, ending with what he’d discovered that morning. As he fell silent, Tamara turned to her uncle, holding on to her composure with an effort.
“I haven’t told you the most important part. The woman in that room was Claudia, Uncle Jack—Claudia Anderson. The little girl is her daughter Petra, and apparently Claudia came back to Boston to ask me to look after Petra when she was gone. She…she was dying, Uncle Jack. She had some kind of cancer, just like her own mom did.”
He didn’t seem to hear this last. “Claudia? Claudia came back here to see you?”
He shook his head at Stone. “Did Tammy tell you what her best friend Claudia did to her, for the love of Mike?” Without waiting for the other man’s response he went on, his voice uneven. “Fifteen minutes before my little girl was supposed to walk up the aisle, her bridesmaid sent her a note saying she’d just ran off with the groom. I never thought Rick was good enough for Tammy, but Claudia—for God’s sake, Kate and I thought of her as our second daughter.”
She’d guessed the news would be hard on him, Tamara thought with a pang. At the wedding when, stunned and disbelieving, she’d passed Claudia’s note to her uncle and aunt, only his wife’s shaky entreaties had prevented a wrathful Jack Foley from acting on his threats to find the man who’d jilted his adored Tammy and thrash him within an inch of his life. But when it had sunk in that Rick had run off with Claudia, his fury had turned to incomprehension.
“Your aunt never stopped caring for her.” Jack lifted his gaze. “Kate always used to wonder if she wanted to come back, and was too afraid to.”
He scrubbed his face wearily. “And dammit, I always knew I couldn’t bring myself to stop caring about her, either. If she’d showed up on the doorstep I would have read her the riot act, but in the end I don’t think I would have been able to turn her away.” He shook his head. “Little Claudie, dead. That’s hard to take in.”
“It was hard for me to take in, too.” Tamara reached over and laid her fingers lightly on his hand. “But maybe Aunt Kate was right. Maybe Claudia always wanted to come home to us. After all, in the end she did just that.”
He gave her fingers a squeeze, his expression clouded. “Except she left it too late, punkin. She should have come to us sooner.” His brows drew together. “But don’t ask me to forgive and forget with that bastard Rick, dammit. Why wasn’t he with his wife and child, and what’s all this about you looking after the little girl when it’s her father who should be taking the responsibility for her?”
“The authorities are checking into Petra’s story, but it seems Rick was killed in a car accident only a few weeks after he ran off with Claudia.” Tamara bit her lip. “I keep thinking I should feel something more than just regret at how things turned out for him.”
“He was the one who broke faith with you, punkin,” Jack Foley said gruffly. “It’s the child you have to concentrate on now—the child, and the fact that Stone thinks someone was trying to kill her and Claudia with that fire.” He grunted thoughtfully. “What did the investigators assigned to the case say when you handed over what you found, McQueen?
”
“I didn’t,” Stone said flatly. “The investigators are Knopf and Trainor, and I’d get more results tossing evidence into the Charles River than I would giving it to those two. We want you to have someone run tests on it, Jack.” He frowned. “But maybe you wouldn’t feel comfortable doing something like that. Hell, for all I know you’re tight with Tommy and Bill.”
“The Dazzlers investigation wasn’t the only case they made mistakes on, it was just the only one the media learned about.” Jack leveled a glance at Stone. “I didn’t agree with the way you hauled out the department’s dirty laundry for the whole world to see, laddie, but I guess you felt you didn’t have much choice. I play poker with Bill Trainor once in a while. It’s like taking candy from a baby.” He shrugged. “Tommy Knopf seems a tad quicker on the uptake but it’s hard to know what makes him tick. He’s an even surlier son of a gun than you are, McQueen.”
“Then that’s a yes?” Stone’s grin flashed briefly. “You’ll send the stuff I collected to the lab and tell them this one’s off the record?”
“Dave Leung owes me a couple of favors.” Jack nodded. “He’ll keep it on the Q.T. if I ask him.”
“It’s in the car.” Impatiently Stone shoved his chair back, getting halfway to the door before he checked his stride and looked over his shoulder at them. “Thanks, Jack. The Sox play New York next week. Two to one odds suit you?”
Jack’s eyes gleamed wickedly. “How about we make it three to one? The Yankee pitchers are on fire lately.”
“You’re a bad man, Uncle Jack. Totally unscrupulous,” Tamara said in mock reproof. She heard the front door close behind Stone, and her smile faded. “Are we doing the right thing, keeping evidence back like this? I don’t want you doing anything that could get you in trouble.”
