by J. R. Ward
Don picked up on the first ring. “That sonofabitch.”
“You’re right. He’s capable of anything.”
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine. Did you like my speech at the end?”
“Outstanding, I couldn’t have said it better myself. The recording was a great idea of yours. Good job, Anne.”
A bloom of professional pride warmed up her chest. “Thanks, boss.”
“Drive safe. And watch out for anyone suspicious around you.”
“Will do. How’s my dog?”
“He’s in my office. I told him we’d have lunch at the deli—you’re coming with us.”
“Great. I should be back in about an hour.”
“Just be careful.”
As she ended the call, she took a deep breath and felt echoes of what it had been like to battle a fire, the rush of fight-or-flight as she faced off at a blaze with a charged hose in her hand, the mental and physical challenge, the conquering of fear, the triumph at the end.
The smile that hit her face came from a very deep part of her, a part that she had resigned to leaving behind.
t was affirming to find purpose—and, to use Danny’s monster analogy, something to slay.
On that note, she tried to remember what had happened to Ripkin’s daughter.
The young woman had been at Ripkin’s shore house by the Brunie yacht club when the fire had broken out. It had been off-season, December, and she’d been there alone. She had been found, badly burned, on the third floor, having run upstairs instead of outside from the fire that had started in the first-floor parlor. At the time, the blaze had been ascribed to a faulty gas line that fed the hearth in question, with a resulting explosion ripping through the old home. No internal sprinkler system—the mansion had been updated to include a car wash and a movie theater, but all it had had was the most basic of alarms.
Anne remembered what the daughter had looked like, being taken out on a stretcher, sheets of skin melting off of her even as she was put in the back of an ambulance. It was callous, but once they’d returned to the stationhouse, Anne hadn’t thought about it again.
Just one more in a long series of alarms that had gone off that night. That week. That month.
Why had Constance Ripkin gone up instead of out?
* * *
When Danny had first come in as a probie fresh out of the academy, Allen Barrister, a since-retired lieutenant, had taken him aside and told him that, sooner or later, every fireman went on the dead-baby run.
Horrible way of putting it, but an accurate enough description for the phenomenon.
As Danny sat rear-facing in the engine truck on the way back to the stationhouse, he remembered the morbid curiosity and shameful excitement he’d felt. He couldn’t wait to get into the grit and the grime, see the underbelly, lift up the rock of inhuman ugliness and see the twisted, gnawing worms beneath.
The dead-baby run was the incident that stained your brain, the first glimpse, out of the corner of your eye, of a woman who had been sexually tortured, doused in lighter fluid, and lit like charcoal for a grill with a match.
He could still remember how she’d smelled like barbequed meat.
He still didn’t order ribs in restaurants because of her, and it had been seven years.
Veterans usually had only one. That was because if you had more than one that stuck with you, followed you around like a ghost, became the nightmare your subconscious fed you when you were stressed, you got out of the service.
You either learned to process and let go of what you saw, and you had to, or you were not cut out for a long-term career.
Danny had always prided himself on his ability to triumph over all manner of gore and depravity. He had held people as they’d bled out, pulled the bodies of children out of crawl spaces and out from under beds, done CPR and lost that fight . . . hell, he’d thrown open the door to a messy room just as the seventeen-year-old kid on the bed had put a shotgun to his own face and blown his brains out all over the Shaun White poster above his headboard.
It wasn’t that he didn’t remember all of those incidents. But on the rare occasion he recalled them, they were a black-and-white foreign movie with subtitles projected onto a tiny screen—all of the frame-by-frame with none of the immediacy.
That was how it had to be. Otherwise, you’d crack.
“—some fucked-up shit.” Moose shook his head. “I mean, that old lady got tore the fuck up.”
Duff shrugged. “Just made me hungry. Any chance we can get some goulash for lunch?”
“You are some kind of Hannibal Lecter,” Doc said from up in front.
Moose stared at the guy. “How can you talk like that after you saw Betty White lookin’ like that?”
Danny looked out the window. They were passing by a stretch of strip malls, the boutiques, hair salons, and cafés all locally owned and struggling. The sun was out and people were walking in small groups. What day of the week was it? Thursday?
Guess so.
“—ain’t that right?”
When Moose knocked Danny in the thigh, he realized the statement had been made to him. “Sorry?”
“We’re making lunch when we get back.”
“Yeah. Sure.”
“Come on, how do you guys not want goulash?”
Danny returned to the view outside. As they rumbled along, the smoky postnasal drip down the back of his throat made him nauseous.
Just focus on the here and now, he told himself. And you’ll forget everything else. That’s how it’s always worked.
chapter
30
At the end of the day, Tom got into his SUV and told himself that he did not just put a clean shirt on and tuck it into a pair of khakis. He also did not get his best set of Merrells from the back of the closet, the ones that he was still breaking in. And he most certainly hadn’t shaved a second time.
Yeah, clearly all of that had been done by an alien who had taken his body over for a temporary, earthly visit.
He was pulling out from the stationhouse when his cell phone went off, and when he saw who it was, he cursed but answered it anyway. “Look, I told you I was working on getting the tree removed. I thought we could get over there today, but we were slammed.”
Yeah, dealing with an apartment fire started when a man with schizophrenia tragically carved up his grandmother and tried to eat her intestines come lunchtime.
“I’ll make sure it happens tomorrow, and yes, before you ask, I’ve already arranged for two of the boys from the six-one-seven to cover the roof patching. I’m on it. You won’t have to put up with Mom for more than another twenty-four hours—”
Anne jumped right in. “She can stay as long as she likes.”
And speaking of aliens, who the hell are you and what have you done with my sister.
“I thought you were desperate to have her out of there.”
“Listen, Tom, do you remember the fire at the Ripkin estate. About three years ago.”
“Yeah. Of course.” He took a left and headed to the better side of town. “What about it?”
“So, I’ve been reviewing the file over here. No charges were ever filed.”
“Gas line malfunctioned. Backed up into the house. When she lit the fireplace, everything ignited.” He hesitated to mention she’d been there. “Why?”
“So I’m working the warehouse fires.”
“Which ones? Down by the wharf?”
“Yes. And I went to see Charles Ripkin up in Boston today.”
“You got in to see him? How’d you manage that? From what I’ve heard, the man’s office is like a fortress.”
Her voice got dry. “Funny how if you mention you’re an arson investigator, doors open.”
“I gotta remember this.”
He braked at a red lig
ht and watched two young women pass in front of his SUV. They both looked at him, did a double take, stared like they were sizing him up for a fuck. Ah, yes, the younger generation with their high standards and fine-tuned morals at work. And if he had any sex drive at all, maybe he’d reroute from this stupid meeting and go pick the two of them up in a bar.
Instead, he might as well have been looking at a pair of bicycles.
There was something very, very wrong with him.
“Hello?” his sister said.
“Sorry.” He hit the gas as the light changed. “What were you saying?”
“I never got to sweep the house. As soon as the fire was out on the first and second floors, we got called onto another alarm. The six-one-seven closed the scene and you were the Incident Commander.”
“Yeah. So?”
“Did you guys find anything that wasn’t in the official arson report?”
“Are you accusing me of withholding evidence?”
“No. I’m asking because the agent died before he finished his job on the scene, and I’m worried that information was lost.”
“Oh . . . shit, that’s right. I remember something about the guy dying. Lemme think, I mean, you saw it all yourself: old house, daughter was a mess, Charles Ripkin shows up the next day and does a presser on how he owes the department an unbelievable debt. A month later, he sends a crew to break ground on the new facility. Daughter, Kristina, survived, but was scarred.”
“Constance was her name.” There was a pause. “It just doesn’t add up. Why’d she make her way to the attic? While she was one fire?”
“She panicked. Instead of dropping and rolling, she ran and ended up in the elevator. She told us later she thought that was where a fire extinguisher was. She flailed around, pushed a bunch of buttons, fell out upstairs. She was found right outside the open doors of the thing.”
“That makes no sense.”
“It’s what she told police happened. Why would she lie?”
“I don’t know. I want to find out, though.”
“Anne, you’re not a homicide detective, and the case is closed. Oh, and there was a fire extinguisher in the elevator, mounted under the button panel.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
“So why didn’t she use it on herself?”
“I guess she collapsed. I don’t know.” There was a silence. “Hey, before you go. What’s up with you and Mom? You can’t wait to get rid of her most times and won’t even talk to her on the phone—and now she’s staying with you?.”
Up ahead, the Canterbury Inn’s lit-up exterior looked like an ad for autumn in New England, the maples on either side just beginning to turn red, the colonial’s yellow clapboards, white trim, and black shutters as traditional as they were attractive.
“She’s fine,” Anne muttered. “And I want her to stay.”
As Tom pulled into the lane that went back to the parking area, he was aware of a loosening in him, his breath entering his chest and exhaling suddenly not that great an effort. How long had he been suffocating? he wondered.
Okay, that was a question he’d do well not to dwell on.
“Thank you,” he heard himself say. “Thank you for . . . being with her. She loves you a lot and has never understood why you hate her so much.”
* * *
Anne was pulling into her driveway as she ended the call with her brother, and as she tossed her cell into her bag, she glanced back at Soot.
“You ready for dinner?”
The dog wagged his tail and chuffed, which was something he was starting to do. After a couple of days of food and antibiotics, his personality was beginning to emerge. Turned out he was a talker, ready to respond with a vocalization whenever he was addressed. He’d also started dreaming, his paws twitching and muzzle working when he was in a deep sleep.
He was also sleeping with her now, apparently. After she’d found him in her bed the night before, she’d tried to crate him when she and her mom had turned in. He’d stared at her with such tragedy in his eyes that she’d brought him upstairs . . . and woken up with him curled in against her in the morning.
It had been the first good night’s sleep she’d gotten since before she’d lost her hand.
Too bad she was not going to enjoy one again anytime soon.
Hooking Soot to his leash, she went up to her front door and—
Her mother opened things up before she could unlock them, and the woman was ever perfect, ever smiling. The scent of meatloaf, home-cooked and prepared with a mother’s love, made Anne want to think up something she absolutely had to do—on the other side of town.
“You’re home!”
Charles Ripkin’s shark eyes came to mind. “Yes. Hi. Um, hello.”
As she stepped in, she stopped and looked around. “What the hell have you done?”
Her mother closed the door. “Well, I thought things would work better this way. The flow was blocked by your sofa, that chair was going to fade in the sun, and I bought you that new coffee table.”
“Where is my old one?”
“I put it down in the cellar. It wasn’t right.”
Anne shut her lids and started to count to ten. When that got her nowhere, she decided to shoot for a thousand. “Mother. You can’t just take over here. This is my house, my things, and I don’t care about ‘flow.’ Okay? Cut it out.”
“But it’s better this way.”
The words came out before Anne could catch them. “Your better and my better are not the same. Just like you and I have absolutely nothing in common and never will.”
Her mother clasped her hands to her chest. “I am sorry. I just . . . I thought you would like it.”
“Didn’t it occur to you that I put the furniture where it was because I wanted it there? And stop trying to please me. You’re only making me mad.”
“You’re so like your father.”
“I am not like him at all. But whatever, that’s a compliment compared to being like you.”
“Anne!”
She let Soot off the lead and put her purse down. “You are the most passive-aggressive person I’ve ever been near, but you crumble when it counts. You always have.”
Cue the tears. “I’ve only ever tried to love you. I know that you don’t . . . respect me because you think I’m just a housewife. But I’m proud of you, I always have been, and I’ve been worried about you.” That high-pitched voice with the Watertown accent, cracked. “When you were in the hospital, recovering, I just wanted to—”
“Rearranging my furniture is not the way to work out your issues about my injury.” She made herself dial back on her anger. “My hand is not your problem.”
“But I would like it to be. I want to be your mother, Anne. Even though you’ve only ever seen me as your father’s wife.”
Anne laughed harshly. “I don’t see you as that, either.”
“How can you say such cruel things?”
Crossing her arms over her chest, she looked around her little house and realized this confrontation, which had been coming for years, was the reason she hadn’t been around her mother. There were things you couldn’t take back, words that were daggers, glares that left marks.
But she didn’t want her mother to leave. As much as she would have preferred to have the woman anywhere else, she didn’t want to tell her brother Ripkin had threatened their mother because the last thing she needed was him taking over everything. And if she and her mother had it out? Nancy Janice would leave and either go back to that house, which had a goddamn tree in it, or she would go to a hotel, and there was no telling whether Ripkin could find her if he wanted.
Chances were good that was a yes.
Lowering her head, Anne decided she needed food and Motrin. “I apologize. I’m sorry.”
She didn’t mean it. But peop
le had levers to be pulled in certain circumstances and her end goal was to have her mother safe until she figured this Ripkin thing out.
At least she knew the woman was safe here.
“I am, too,” her mother said sadly.
chapter
31
Striding into the Canterbury Inn’s lobby, Tom felt the floorboards under the deep red carpeting bend beneath his weight, the adjustment causing creaks to rise up from his feet. Everything was brass-chandelier, old-school New England, lithographs of American revolutionaries on the walls, grandfather clocks in the corners, simple moldings on the low ceiling.
He half expected a lobster in colonial dress to be behind the front desk.
Wrong. It was a brunette in a uniform.
As she looked up at him, he gave her a wave and pointed in the direction of the dining room. She nodded and went back to whatever she was doing.
Probably refreshing her memory on the Boston Tea Party. Paul Revere. Faneuil Hall.
None of which was in New Brunswick, all of which the city had commandeered as part of its tourist trade, like a little brother mugging his older sibling’s stuff.
The dining room was red and navy blue, all patriotic, the tables set far apart, the place more than three-quarters full of the white-hair-and-dental-implant set. Autumn always brought the leaf peepers, busloads of over-seventies riding the highways through the colorful season so they could return home with Vermont maple syrup, fake ivory carvings from Maine, and miniature laminated maps of the Freedom Trail from Massachusetts.
“May I help you?” the hostess asked from behind her stand.
“I’m here to meet—”
“There you are!” Graham Perry came out of nowhere like a gremlin. “We’re in a private room.”
