Consumed (Firefighters #1)

by J. R. Ward

  In any other circumstances, Tom would have been pissed that he had to deal with the guy. But he would have taken anyone as a chaperone for this, including Mr. Hi-how’re-ya.

  “I’m not staying long,” Tom said by way of a greeting. “And why the hell are we meeting in a private room. I thought campaigns like to save money.”

  “We’re building a coalition.”

  “And you can’t do this at a Howard Johnson’s?”

  “They don’t exist anymore. And no, we can’t.”

  Perry opened a door, and yup, it was another boardroom setup, but this time Tom was looking at a whole bunch of aftermath, the seats turned away from the table, bound reports half-cocked in some places, mint wrappers and half-empty Snapple and Poland Spring bottles next to glasses with melting ice in them. A portable screen and projector were in place, and a laser point that had been left on was beaming across at the side wall, a red eye.

  “She must have gone to the bathroom. Hold on.”

  Perry shuffled out and Tom felt like following the trend. Instead, he sauntered over and checked out one of the reports.

  “Warehouse District Repurposing Proposal” was the title, and he smiled. Flipping through the pages, he saw Ripkin Development’s name all over the place.

  “Thanks for coming to see me.”

  Tom looked up at Mayor Mahoney. Navy blue dress tonight, same figure, same hair, same scent. God, he wished he weren’t attracted to her.

  “Warehouse wharf development, huh.” He tossed the report on the table. “Big plans. Expensive plans—what were you saying about firefighters and teachers?”

  “We need business development in this city.”

  “I thought we weren’t allowed to talk about your father.”

  She almost caught the frown before it hit her face. Almost. Her problem was that he’d seen it so many times, that expression that reflected the internal thought: Wow, you really are the asshole people say you are.

  “It’s not about my father.”

  “So is it about Charles Ripkin? I saw his name all over that.”

  “He’s a potential major investor.”

  “Who owns a lot of property down there.”

  “Which is why we have to get him involved.” The mayor shook her head. “But that’s not why you’re here.”

  Tom became very aware that Perry had not returned to the room. And that the doors were closed.

  He put his palms up and took a step back. “It’s not for that. I did not come for you.”

  “What?” The frown came back. “Are you suggesting—are you serious?”

  “Don’t pretend that it doesn’t happen. And you’ve made it clear that you’ll do anything to get reelected.”

  Mayor Mahoney’s jaw clenched, and he found it interesting that she was forcing control over her emotions—because it suggested there might be some heat underneath all that composure. Then again, he’d just accused her of using sex for union votes, soooooooo . . .

  “I would like to make this very clear,” she bit out. “I asked you here to discuss my plans for addressing the city employee pension deficit so that you can have some confidence that your firefighters will get what they deserve when they retire. I was also going to ask for your help with on-the-job injury compensation. There are some best-practice models out of LA and Chicago that we might be able to use. What I most certainly was not offering was any part of me.”

  See, this was the problem, he thought. He hadn’t understood as he’d driven across town why he was showing up. For a highly decisive person like himself, that was an anomaly, and a sign he needed to back off.

  Mirroring her pose, he crossed his arms, too. “I guess I misread you,” he muttered in a bored tone.

  “You know, you’ve got a problem, Chief Ashburn.”

  “Do I.”

  “You have a reputation around town for being inflexible and closed-minded. No one can argue how you run the department and its equipment and facilities, but you are very difficult to get along with and people are forced to work around you.”

  “You know, it’s strange. I thought my job was to run the fire department for the city and that includes its equipment and facilities.”

  “It is.”

  “So I’m knockin’ it out of the park.”

  “Not really. Compared to national standards, you have among the highest levels of personnel dissatisfaction and burnout. Your men and women feel disempowered to make changes in procedures, they’re frustrated by a lack of support from management, and they’re worried about their futures. You are the head of a very unstable foundation, Chief.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “You don’t think your union is on the pulse of its membership?”

  Brent, you fucker, he thought.

  “What I see,” Tom ground out, “is a group of people fighting fires with equipment that is aging in facilities that need renovation, and your buddy Ripkin’s ‘donation’ was more a showpiece for his name than a gift designed to help the department. Before you harp on me about a bunch of intangibles, maybe you should look at our resources.”

  “Personnel are your resources. And they’re hurting. Your people need support—”

  “Don’t talk to me about what I need. You don’t know the first thing about what our lives are like.”

  “If I don’t tell you, no one will.”

  “Why, because you’re so special? Don’t believe everything your daddy tells you.”

  “No,” she snapped, “it’s because I’m your boss. I’m the mayor of this town and that means you work for me, you answer to me—and I have no trouble firing you if you don’t realign your attitude and realize you are part of a very serious problem in this city’s fire service.”

  In the silence that followed, Tom knew he had to leave before he said something he really regretted.

  Leaning in, he said in a low voice, “Stay out of my business.”

  “Do you hear yourself? Seriously. I tell you you’ve got a problem in the department and your only response is about you. You’re not even open to hearing it or considering your own behavior. All you want to do is get territorial and shut off the noise. That’s not a leader, Tom. That’s a despot.”

  “Don’t call me by my first name. I’m Chief Ashburn to you. And when I watch Barrington whip your ass on election night, please picture me smiling from ear to ear, will you? It’ll add to my satisfaction.”

  On that happy little note, he left the boardroom. As Perry came out of nowhere again and started to run after him, Tom nearly grabbed the guy by the throat and threw him across the lobby.

  “Not now, Perry.”

  “But I just want to put a bug in your—”

  Tom wheeled around. “Stay away from me right now. Or you will not like what happens next.”

  Apparently, the guy had basic survival skills in addition to all his ambition because he backed the fuck off like he had a gun pointed at him.

  Smart. Real smart.

  chapter

  32

  On Saturday morning, Anne walked up to a three-story apartment building that had about thirty units. On the second floor, its brick exterior was stained with black streaks and plywood panels had been nailed over a line of windows that had been broken. A tree close to the corner had sustained loss, its gumdrop shape given a heat shear on one side.

  The crime scene investigators were on-site, two of their boxy vehicles parked in front, and there were a couple of marked NBPD cars behind them. Television crews from the local stations were parked across the way, a uniformed cop staring at the made-up reporters and the casually dressed cameramen like he expected them to try to get into the place and was prepared to cut ’em off at the knees to keep them out.

  The media’s interest had been intense ever since the details had started coming out th
e night before. The murder of one of the residents, supposedly by her grandson, and the subsequent fire that had started in the kitchen, were so sensational that the crime had been sucked into the vortex of the twenty-four-hour news cycle, click bait to be served up as the Internet’s newest fast-food meal.

  She’d already seen two memes with something cooking in a cast-iron pan.

  Grandma. It’s what’s for dinner.

  Grandma. The other white meat.

  Bastards.

  After flashing her ID to the uni at the door, she went up the four flights of stairs, and the nuances of the fading smell of a contents fire confirmed on an olfactory basis that they were indeed some twenty-four hours out: the acrid stench had dissipated some, but it was still strong enough that she could catch the plastic high notes.

  As she closed in on the apartment in question, there was a walk-of-shame element to the aftermath, the excitement gone, the frenzy over, nothing but water and smoke damage left as artifacts of the emergency. These residuals were concentrated down at the end of the hall, and there was NBPD’s yellow caution tape running on a diagonal so that it cordoned off the scene’s door.

  As she approached, she had her ID out, but the cop on the business side of the tape nodded and held the tape up so she could duck under.

  “Gloves and booties are here,” he said.

  “Thanks.”

  Stepping over to a box of nitrile gloves and a larger container of shoe covers, she got herself ready. Don had assigned her a support role on the case, the primary investigator having already been over during the night as soon as the fire was extinguished. Residents and the firefighters had been interviewed then, and a preliminary report filed. She was on origin and cause, but, as a probie, also required to do a start-to-finish on the investigation as training.

  As she pushed open the door with her gloved hand, voices, soft but insistent, murmured deeper inside the apartment.

  Initializing her recorder, she spoke into her iPhone. “Upon entrance, there is extensive evidence of a high-temperature contents fire in the living area . . .”

  Following investigative protocol, she continued to describe what she saw as she proceeded forward into a short hallway, stopping at the marker indicating where the first body was found. Continuing on, she noted the fire’s characteristics and prevalence, its spread from the kitchen, its—

  Anne stopped as she looked through an open doorway and into a bedroom that had been spared. Of the burn, at least. The violence that had happened within the four walls more than made up for it, and the pair of crime scene investigators working by the bed didn’t look out of place in the slightest.

  She’d read both the preliminary report and the log from the 499, and was prepared, but the bloodstained sheets was a pause-maker. All she could think of was Danny opening the door in the blaze and seeing a relatively smokeless room with a gutted seventy-nine-year-old woman tied by her extremities to the bed.

  Must have stopped him in his tracks, too.

  One of the uniformed crime scene investigators glanced up from where he was taking samples from the pillows. “Anne? How’re ya? Timmy Houlihan, Jack’s second cousin.”

  “Oh, yes.” She lifted her gloved hand. “Hey.”

  “Messy, huh,” he said as he indicated the stained bedsheets. “Horrible. This here’s Teresa La Favreau.”

  Anne nodded at the woman who bagging something on the floor. “It’s been in the news.”

  “Kid had a history. Went off his meds. Tragedy.”

  “Awful. I guess the residents all warned her?”

  “Yeah, well, it wasn’t just him. Some jewelry, engraved with her name and birth date, showed up late last night in the west end at a pawnshop. The guy who brought the stuff in smelled like lighter fluid and had soot all over him, and he took off before we could get there.” The man indicated around the tidy, modestly furnished environs. “We’ve got good prints and some hair samples, along with the images from the shop. We’re going to find whoever it is.”

  Anne focused on the framed photographs of a young man that were on the bureau. “Well, I’ll just head down into the kitchen and do my part.”

  “Good to see you.”

  “You, too, Timmy.”

  As Anne kept going, she talked into her phone, noting the evidence of intensifying heat in the hall, the Sheetrock eaten away, the studs in walls and the joists overhead showing signs of intense charring. Here, closer to the source, the fire had transitioned from contents to structure.

  After taking samples and photographs, she began to construct a sequence of events. Photographs posted by the grandson on social media, since taken down and now used as evidence, detailed that he had been cooking his grandmother’s internal organs on the stove top. They hadn’t been selfies, however, which suggested they’d been taken by the second man. And then something had happened.

  An argument? Or the plan all along?

  According to the preliminary report, residents above the apartment and on the floor stated there had been a big explosion, and the fire had been fast and violent, something that required a secondary, sustainable ignition source.

  Dousing someone in lighter fluid would not get that effect. On the other hand, tampering with a gas line? That would blow the apartment building up. In her training, she had read cases where entire houses were destroyed, with the debris scattered two hundred yards away in a circle.

  No, that was too much power.

  Instinct told her this was a gasoline blow. The problem was, with a fire as hot as this one had been? So much evidence was destroyed. But that would explain the explosion people had heard: Second suspect uses the lighter fluid to get the grandson on fire after they murder the grandmother and leaves. Grandson careens around the kitchen, trying to put himself out. Lights things like drapes, rugs, tablecloths, hand towels on fire. Heat begins to build. He transitions down the hall. Gasoline in enclosed can, stored somewhere in the kitchen when it shouldn’t have been, gets hot. Pressure builds and cannot be contained.

  Gasoline in liquid form won’t catch fire below temperatures of 500 degrees. The vapors are the key. And if you have it in a storage container that ruptures from force, with sufficient air and ignition, you’re looking at a bomb because that vapor goes everywhere.

  Residents heard the smoke alarms first. Had anyone smelled any gas? Because maybe the second suspect decided to try to cover his tracks and doused things around the kitchen with that accelerant. But that wouldn’t account for the explosion—unless there had been some gas left in the container? You had to have that pressure build up.

  And what about the evidence in the bedroom. If the guy had been thinking properly, he would have lit that room on fire, too.

  Then again, considering what he and his friend had been doing at the stove, “properly” was not a word to associate with his mental processes.

  As she voice-recorded notes and took other photographs for her own reference, she just kept thinking . . . what the hell had Danny thought as he’d walked through here?

  He was like a shadow, following tight on her heels.

  And that was when Moose’s wife, Deandra, called her cell.

  * * *

  Anne didn’t get back home until five. Investigating Ripkin Development had left her with some backlog work, and then there was the report to file on the apartment fire.

  Plus, her mother.

  The idea of spending the entire Saturday with the woman had been enough to take her work ethic, already strong, to juicehead levels. It wasn’t that her mother was totally awful—and that was part of the problem. If the woman had been rude, cantankerous, angry; then Anne’s avoidance would be justified. Instead, she was stuck with the reality that she was being unfair, especially after she’d let loose on the woman, and she hated that . . . even as she couldn’t change her overwhelming need to get away from Nancy Janice.
/>   “Come on, Soot,” she said as she hooked the lead on his collar. “Time to check out your own backyard.”

  She’d crated him at her office for the three hours she’d been over at the apartment site, and then they’d enjoyed a nice long walk to a coffee shop for lunch. After all that exercise, he’d curled up at her feet for the rest of the afternoon.

  Bracing herself, she let them both in. “Mom?”

  When there was no answer, she went through and let Soot out. She found the note, written in her mother’s flowery flourish, on the kitchen table.

  Okay, so she was due back at six after an afternoon of bridge. Which meant Anne had an hour to decompress.

  After feeding Soot, she went upstairs and started the shower. It felt good to take her prosthesis off. Even better to get under the hot water.

  She was squeezing shampoo on the top of her head, which was what you did when you only had one palm and had to use it for dispensing, when she looked down and focused on her stump. The taper from her elbow down to the blunt end was pronounced due to muscle atrophy and the flesh was still mottled and angry from the infection even after nine months had passed.

  Ripkin’s smug voice wormed into her ear, taunting her even as she told herself it shouldn’t.

  But the truth was, there might have been more than one reason she hadn’t wanted to get naked with Danny. And she hated that Ripkin, that shit, had tapped the nerve even as she’d denied it to his face. He’d been wrong about one aspect, though. It wasn’t a female thing to feel less than whole if you lost a limb. It was a human thing. She’d been in that rehab hospital with men who had been in motorcycle and farming accidents, even one guy who’d had some bad luck with a chain saw.

  They had been just as scared as she’d been, not only about how to work through life and jobs, but with who they were. What they had become. And physical attractiveness was part of that.

  Telling herself she was just fine, she finished her suds-and-rinse routine and stepped out. As she was drying off, she glanced at her naked body in the mirror—and couldn’t remember the last time she had really looked at herself.