Consumed (Firefighters #1)

by J. R. Ward

  The door was closed behind her and she debated taking a seat but decided to wait until Ollie was brought in.

  Five minutes later, the door opened behind her. Another deputy, different than the one who’d brought her in, stepped inside.

  “Are you here for Contare?” the woman asked.

  “Yes?”

  “Sorry, wrong place. His lawyer is waiting in an interrogation room for you guys.”

  Anne frowned. “You mean his public defender?”

  “No, his attorney showed up just now. Said Ollie could talk to you only if he’s in the room.”

  The rerouting was good news as it gave her a little time to adjust her approach. Preparation for interviewing witnesses or interrogating suspects was critical: Before you sat down with anyone as part of an investigation, you needed to know what you were going after, what the goal was. You also had to have your facts straight and be prepared to retain your composure no matter what direction things went in.

  A lawyer was a surprise. Especially when they showed up at the last minute.

  The room she was taken into was as she expected. No windows, a table and four chairs that were bolted into the floor, and a video monitoring camera mounted up in the far corner. There was also soundproofing on the walls and fluorescent lights on the low ceiling. Standard-issue.

  The silver-haired lawyer in a silk suit that stood up was not. “Ms. Ashburn? How are you. Sterling Broward.”

  No reason to correct him on the “Ms.” even though her title was inspector. “Mr. Boward, nice to meet you.”

  “Broward,” he corrected.

  “Of course,” she said with a smooth smile. “Shall we bring your client in?”

  “Just so you and I are clear, none of this is under oath and it is my intention to keep the focus tight.”

  “Your client is a person of interest, not a suspect.”

  “Exactly.”

  After Broward gave the deputy the go-ahead to get Ollie, Anne sat down and the attorney joined her in taking a chair.

  “Don’t you want to get your notepad out?” he said.

  “No. Do you?”

  The lawyer sat forward, linking hands that had buffed nails together. His expression was one of great kindness and benevolence. “I’m just trying to help you do your job.”

  The “little girl” was implied in the tone. And as Anne regarded the man, she couldn’t wait until the inevitable passage of time ushered this older generation of males off the planet and to their royal reward—rather like cleaning the pantry of things that were past their “best by” dates: Their condescending attitude’s shelf life was up, and it was time for their act to go into the trash.

  When she just stared him straight in the eye, he raised his brows, and she dubbed in his internal monologue on the hairy-arm-pitted feminist who was too much of a man-hater to accept some kind advice from someone who knew better and was looking out for them.

  But that wasn’t what was really going on here, was it.

  “You know,” he said, “I’ve heard you were difficult to deal with.”

  “My job is not to make people feel comfortable. I’m not here to get your coffee and your bagel.”

  “I think you’ll find you attract more bees with honey than vinegar.”

  Anne sat forward and mimicked his pose. “How long have you been working for Charles Ripkin?”

  The change was subtle but instantaneous, those brows lowering by a millimeter. “My client is Donald Contare.”

  “Douglas. His name is Douglas.” She leaned forward. “And right now, I’m wondering how a two-bit addict dealer like Ollie Popper can afford a lawyer with your kind of wardrobe. Mystery, isn’t it. Guess Ollie’s been saving his pennies from all that office equipment he’s been burning up in Ripkin’s warehouses.”

  “Those isolated fires have nothing to do with Ripkin Development.”

  “Man, that denial seems to roll off your tongue. I’ll bet you find yourself saying stuff like that a lot, huh.”

  The door to the interrogation room unlatched and opened, and Ollie was smaller in person than he’d seemed in those mug shots. He was only about five feet six, and he couldn’t have weighed more than a buck forty, buck fifty tops. His eyes were not manic anymore, whatever he’d been on during his arrests having been metabolized.

  The shackles were a surprise. He didn’t seem dangerous.

  When he saw Broward, he froze, the sheriff behind him bumping into him. He recovered quickly. “Hey. Wassup.”

  His voice was fried, the rasp a result of inhaling hot contaminants.

  His attorney made nice, shaking hands and doing that double-clasp thing with his palms, the equivalent of a politician’s I-really-care-about-you.

  “I told you I was coming,” Broward said. “You know what this is about.”

  “Yeah. Sure. I get it.”

  Ollie focused on her, not that that involved much more than his eyes passing over her. He seemed more concerned with Broward as he sat down, but he didn’t want to get too close. He tried to move the bolted chair away from the other man.

  Anne cleared her throat and took her ID out of her suit jacket pocket. “I’m Inspector Ashburn. I’d like to ask you a few questions about some fires down on the wharf.”

  “I don’t know anything about no fires.”

  “Okay. Well, maybe you’ll indulge me as I describe a couple of the incidents anyway. There are six of them in the last two years, and the reason I wanted to talk to you is because of excess office equipment found at the sites.”

  “I don’t know nothing about office equipment.”

  “That’s funny, because I’ve seen pictures of the three apartments you’re leasing right now. And there were rooms full of old laptops, desktops and phones.”

  “No, they ain’t.”

  “I’ve seen the photographs.”

  “They empty now—”

  Broward interjected. “We are off topic. This is about the fires down by the wharf, isn’t that right. In those abandoned warehouses.”

  “I don’t know anything.”

  Anne looked back and forth between the two of them. “I’d like to give you some dates and ask you where you were on them.”

  “I don’t remember where I was.”

  “I haven’t given you a date.”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Where were you last—”

  “I don’t remember.”

  Anne was not surprised when, after giving each of the six dates, the response was the same. She even asked him what his addresses were. She was going to ask him where he’d left his brain, but the problem wasn’t his gray matter.

  Although it had certainly taken a beating.

  Anne smiled. “Well, I’m just going to assume I know where you stand with regard to working with Ripkin Development—”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “So you don’t deny you’re working with them. You just can’t recall when it started.” She got up. “That’s all I need to know—”

  “My client has not responded in the affirmative to that question or any others pertaining to Ripkin Development. In fact, he has denied such an allegation.”

  “When did that happen?” Anne asked. “Wait, I don’t think he’s said that. Let’s give him a chance, shall we?”

  She cupped her ear and leaned in. “Come on, Ollie, say the words. And then maybe when they kill you and throw your body off a trawler on the ocean, they might not drag out the murder part.”

  That got Broward out of his chair—and good thing it was bolted or he would have knocked it through the wall behind him. “You are out of line.”

  “It’s a statement of opinion.”

  “By a city investigator in their official capacity.”

  “Now you’re remembering I’m an i
nvestigator, huh. I’ll make note of that. When I get my pad.” She shook her head at Ollie. “Don’t take the plea, Doug. You’re safer here behind bars than you are out on the street.”

  chapter

  44

  As Anne stood at her stove at home, dinner was making itself. Which was why she’d picked up a box of fettuccini, a flat of chicken breasts, and some broccoli after she’d left the office for the day. She’d already had a jar of alfredo sauce in her rearranged cupboards—something that, if her mom hadn’t worked her magic, she might not have known she had.

  It seemed strange not to have her mother under the same roof even though it hadn’t been a long stay . But Nancy Janice had gone back to the house after ADT came and put the contact on the new window.

  Almost seven.

  When her cell phone started to ring, she was aware she hoped it wasn’t Danny cancelling, but told herself that if it was, she’d have leftovers for two nights and that didn’t suck.

  “Hello?” She frowned when there was nothing but a whirring sound in the background. “Hello?”

  There were a click and then silence over the connection. Frowning, she went into her call log. Unknown Caller appeared at the top of the Recents page.

  Pounding on the front door brought her head around, and Soot jumped up from his spot by the back door, his ears flattening.

  “Anne?” More knocking. “Open up.”

  “Danny?” She jogged over to the door and unlocked it. “What’s—oh, shit. What happened to my car?”

  When she went to go out, he caught her by the shoulders and shoved her back into the house. “You’re not going out there—”

  “My windshield’s broken. I want to know what the hell happened—”

  He pushed his way inside and shut the door. “I think it was shot at.” He put his phone to his ear. “Neither one of us is going out there. Jack? Hey, I got a problem. Can you get someone over here to Anne’s on the QT? Right now.”

  Back in the kitchen, the pasta water overflowed with a hiss and she ran back over. As soon as she got to the stove, her phone went off, but this time it was with a text.

  That was turned out to be a file sent from WatchingAnne@gmail.com: Boiling over. Better watch.

  She looked over her shoulder to the glass panels where her office was. Then she looked out the window over the sink. Night had fallen, and she didn’t have any of the security lights on, so she couldn’t see anything.

  Or, rather, what illumination was thrown from her neighbors’ houses was so spotty, there were too many shadows for someone to hide in.

  “What’s on your phone.”

  As Danny spoke in a flat voice, she looked up and focused on him for the first time. He’d taken a shower and his hair was still wet, his NBFD navy blue hoodie adding heft to his shoulders.

  “This.” She turned the screen to him. “Can we trace it?”

  He leaned in and read the four words. “Probably not. There are all kinds of apps and websites both for iOS and Androids which allow people to be anonymous for shit like this. All you have to do is sign up with any random Gmail account and you’re good to go. And if they’re smart enough to do it from a burner phone as an extra level of protection? Burner phones are untraceable if you buy them with cash, and God knows they’re available at everywhere from Walmart to Target. The cops deal with these things all the time with harassers and it frustrates the fuck out of them.”

  That Unknown Caller had to be the same person. “Is Jack coming now?”

  “Yeah. Let’s close all the drapes in this house.”

  Moving quickly, they worked together, pulling halves together, dropping venetian blinds, closing shutters. When they were done, they returned to the kitchen and she tried to make like things were fine.

  “Dinner’s ruined.” She took the fettuccini noodles off the stove. “I think these have lost all their structural integrity.”

  Danny didn’t buy the distraction. He just stood with his boots planted and his brows in a caveman half-mast that suggested his frontal lobe was arguing with his brainstem’s base urge to go after whoever it was.

  “Maybe you were wrong.”

  “I wasn’t.” He shook his head. “I heard the impact.”

  “The shot?”

  “No, they used a silencer. I heard it impact the front windshield.” He jabbed his finger at the phone. “What is going on.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Yeah, you do. What are you working on now? Those fires down at the wharf, right?”

  Looked as though Ollie wasn’t the only one who needed to heed a warning.

  * * *

  Oh, it was good to have friends who were members of SWAT.

  Jack came with two friends who were trained killers just like him. And they didn’t announce their arrival. They showed up at the back door about thirty minutes after Danny had spoken to his roommate.

  They called first, though.

  As Anne let them in, she had to take a step way back and Soot immediate started growling in earnest, something she’d never seen or heard him do. Then again, the three men were dressed in black from head to toe and had ski masks pulled down over their faces.

  “Sorry,” Jack said as he took his all the way off. “Don’t mean to scare your dog.”

  Anne went over and sat with Soot as the other guys likewise revealed themselves. “Did you see anyone?”

  “No.” Jack took something out of his pocket with gloved hands. “We found this in your car, though. It was in buried in the inside jamb of your trunk.”

  The lead slug was small, but that didn’t mean a thing considering how fast it could go when it was shot out of a frickin’ gun.

  “She’s getting harassed on her phone.” Danny nodded at her. “Show them.”

  Anne tossed the phone over. “The code’s four-nine-nine-nine. I got a call from a blocked number right before it happened. I didn’t check when I answered because I thought it was Danny. All I heard was whirring on the other end.”

  “Did you meet with Ollie today?” Jack asked.

  “Yes. And he had a lawyer with him. Sterling Broward.”

  “I thought he just had a public defender. That’s what I saw listed on his case.”

  “That was who showed up. I looked into him when I got back to my office, and he does a lot of defense work. For Ripkin Development. It wasn’t in the press, but I found it in court records. He tries to keep a low profile, unusual for someone who relies on word of mouth for referrals, right?”

  Danny looked over. “I never liked Ripkin. Never. That fire at his house on the ocean was always bad news in my opinion. And he was creepy as fuck at the opening of the new firehouse six months ago.”

  “Let’s get this logged in,” Jack said. “And we’ll get—”

  “No.” Anne took her phone back. “I don’t want this going anywhere. I don’t want Ripkin to think I’m scared.”

  “He just put a bullet in your fucking window,” Danny snapped. “Next time it could be your head.”

  Jack nodded. “I gotta back my boy up here. Brave is just this side of stupid sometimes.”

  Anne shrugged. “Fine, put in an incident report if you want. Take that lead slug back to the lab and see what you can find on it. Come back during daylight hours and see if there are footprints. Try and find out who called me and sent me the text. But I will bet this house that you will find no identifiers on anything. If this is Ripkin, he would hire a professional to scare me and they will leave nothing behind, and certainly nothing that ties this to him.”

  There was some arguing at that point, and she agreed to file an incident report, but it was all just a waste of time. Then she enjoyed a lecture by Jack and his SWAT boys about staying safe, after which they left, disappearing into the night to whatever vehicle they had ghosted into the neighborhood in.

  �
�I’m spending the night,” Danny announced before the front door was even closed.

  Anne crossed her arms over her chest. She was about to say no when she saw Soot staring up at her, his eyes worried, like he sensed danger.

  “Okay.”

  “Good.”

  “I have to take him out, and then we can see if the chicken is edible—”

  Bing!

  As her phone went off, she felt a spike of adrenaline. But it could be anyone, really. Right?

  It was a text from that Gmail account: Left you present out in backyard.

  “Shit,” she whispered.

  Danny grabbed the phone and then marched to the back door. “Stay here.”

  “Are you out of your fucking mind.”

  Before she could stop him, he ripped open the—

  When he didn’t move, her throat closed up. “What is it?”

  Leaning to her desk, he took a pen out of the mug she’d put them in and crouched down. When he turned to her, there was a gun hanging upside down off the Bic, speared through the trigger circle.

  “Guess this is what they used,” he muttered grimly. “And it looks like we’re calling Jack back over here.”

  Her phone went off again with another text.

  “Read that out loud,” Danny demanded.

  Anne had to clear her throat. “ ‘Stop now and I go away. Your choice what happens next.’ ”

  chapter

  45

  Anne must have fallen asleep upstairs in her bed because she came awake in the middle of an explosive blur of movement. Her brain, used to dealing with accident scenes, caught up quick with what was going on. Danny, who had been naked in between the sheets with her, jumped out from under the covers with such force that he hit the wall across the way.

  “Danny! Are you shot!”

  Even though the drapes were unruffled and the windows were intact and the security system wasn’t going off, somehow it was as if a bullet had hit him in the gut. In the nightlight’s glow, he was clutching his stomach like it had been struck.