Consumed (Firefighters #1)

by J. R. Ward

  Soot was efficient. No sniffing around. No investigating what scents were on the wind or the bushes or the browning grass.

  Another good sign as far as she was concerned. If anyone was around, she had to believe he’d notice.

  Back in the house. Back with the locked door. Back on with the alarm.

  She kept the gun with her as she considered going upstairs to bed. In the end, she stayed downstairs. She felt like if someone tried to get in, she’d hear them better.

  As she resumed her seat on the sofa, Soot did the same, and she put her hand on his warm flank, stroking his short, smooth fur. When he let out a deep sigh of relaxation, she envied him.

  Picking up a random incident report, she tried to get her brain to connect the dots that were refusing to be linked. She had Ripkin. She had Ollie no-longer-Popper. And then whoever had showed up at that warehouse with the trailer—which might have been Ollie or might not have been.

  “When was he arrested?” she said out loud.

  Back into the paperwork to find the file on Ollie. Nope. Not him. He had been in police custody when the most recent warehouse fire had been set.

  Damn it, she wished she had CCTV for those other burns. Maybe she needed to talk to Ripkin’s daughter, although what would she be looking for if she did? The key was the identity of the unknown third person. If she could find out who it was, maybe she could make the tie to Ripkin. Before the bastard killed them, that was.

  She thought about Bob Burlington being found in the ocean. Shit, she did not want that to be her.

  As her phone rang, she braced herself as she picked the thing up. If that unknown caller was back—

  It was Danny.

  “Goddamn it.”

  She debated letting it go into voicemail again, but she wasn’t some coward to run from confrontation. And he was just going to keep calling until he got off shift and showed up on her doorstep at eight a.m. in the morning.

  “Hello,” she said.

  “I didn’t think you were going to answer.”

  “I’m busy.”

  There was a pause. “I left you a voicemail.”

  “I didn’t listen to it.”

  “Did Moose get in touch with you?”

  “Yes.” She put the paperwork aside. “Listen, we’re not going to do this, okay?”

  “Do what.”

  “Pretend. I don’t have time for it. Don’t call me anymore, don’t try to see me, and if you have a passing thought, some weeks or months from now that I might want to hear from you, I’m going ask you to replay this conversation again. I am never going to want to set eyes on you again.”

  “So you’ve made up your mind.”

  “There was nothing to make up.”

  She picked up the remote and turned on the TV across the room just so she could give herself a distraction as a form of disrespect to him. Even though he wouldn’t know it.

  “I didn’t fuck Deandra.”

  “We all know that’s not true—although it was a surprise to learn from her husband that you had her the night before she walked down the aisle with him. Guess you took what you wanted from her and told her to beat it.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “I’m not going to go into it—”

  “You better fucking explain yourself.”

  Anne bolted up. “Excuse me? What did you just say? You think I have to explain anything to you? Forget what happened between the two of us, I’m just some heart and a hole you played with while you were at work. But Moose was your best friend, Danny. For a decade. And on the night of his rehearsal dinner when he went back to get his tux, he saw you and Deandra in your bedroom at the apartment. Even if Deandra was lying at the stationhouse this morning, which I don’t think she was, there was no heresy involved with Moose seeing his future wife’s dress on the goddamn floor.”

  “I didn’t fuck her that night,” came the tight reply.

  “Do you really expect me to believe that? Because I don’t. And Jesus, you were with me the next night!” She wanted to throw her phone she was so pissed. “What I was very clear on is that your success rate speaks for itself. You got me good. Two separate times. I’d give you a trophy, but in my current mood, I’d put it up your ass, and I am not going to jail for felony assault with this year’s Best Lying Sack of Shit award.”

  “You got this all wrong.”

  “Do I? Gaslighting much?” She took a deep breath. “Here’s the way I am going to view what happened between us. It was a movie that started as a comedy, segued awkwardly into a romance, and ended with Anthony Hopkins eating someone’s liver with the fava beans and the fucking Chianti. I sat through it, enjoy a couple of parts, but overall, I’d give it a bad score on Rotten Tomatoes because the narrative didn’t ring true, the credible surprise was credible but no surprise at all, and the male lead was one-dimensional sexual predator. Good-bye, Danny.”

  chapter

  50

  Anne ended the call, put her phone down, and crossed her arms over her chest. She did not expect Danny to ring again. And he didn’t. Then again, the truth was out and there was nothing left for him to work with, no manipulations at his disposal, no wiggle room around reality. The thing with men like him—people like him—was they required instability and insecurity in their playing field.

  Someone with both feet planted on the ground was not a good target.

  She would never hear from him again. And he would, unfortunately, go on to find other women to consume, other marks to challenge himself with, other opportunities to exploit.

  Too bad scarlet letters were a thing of the past. She would have slapped one on him in a heartbeat with the A being for “ASSHOLE.”

  But at least she was on the other side now. Man, he’d gotten her going, though.

  She glanced at her prosthesis. Talk about hatchet jobs, har-har, hardy, har-har.

  Focusing on the TV, she saw Cher getting out of a boxy yellow cab, red shoes on her feet, a shimmering black coat catching the light as she walked toward a gleaming fountain. And there was Nicolas Cage, turning . . . turning . . .

  Pain, unwelcomed and sad, lanced through Anne’s chest as she watched his face change when he saw his woman. And then they were talking in those wonderful New York accents:

  “Hi.”

  “Hi.”

  “You look beautiful. Ya hair . . .”

  “Yeah, I had it done.”

  Anne let her head fall back as they went into the opera house, stared up at the chandelier, went to the cloakroom. Funny that a movie about a man who’d lost a hand was on. On that note, maybe she needed to try and date a Cher.

  She nudged Soot. “See, this is where she sees her father out with the other woman. Or shall I say ‘otha woman.’ ”

  It was also the part where Ronny Cammareri tells Loretta, “It’s been a long time since I’ve been to the opera.”

  “He’s not talking about the opera, Soot. And I feel you, Ronny. I totally feel you.”

  At this point, it appeared that she’d actually never been to the opera, and in her world, the Met was closed permanently, the sopranos and the baritones, the orchestra and conductor all home with head colds.

  Closing her eyes, she was lonely. And tired. And very sad.

  Tomorrow was a new day, though. She was smarter than she was, and stronger than ever. And what she needed to do was figure out this Ripkin mess.

  Danny Maguire was a thing in the past, nothing more than an ugly footnote in a life that was going to continue.

  * * *

  Disorientation struck as Anne opened her eyes. At first, she went for her gun because she heard the sound of bullets flying—but then she saw it was the movie on the TV, not anything inside or outside of her house.

  Picking up her phone, she saw that it was almost seven a.m. Soot was on his
back, paws curled in, snoring.

  As soon as she got up, he was on his feet, and she turned off the alarm and let him out, standing watch. People were stirring in their houses, making coffee on the first floors, showering and dressing on the second.

  She did the same.

  When she came back downstairs, she poured herself a cup of java, and realized she’d forgotten to take the phone up with her.

  Bracing herself, she checked the thing, expecting to see a picture of herself with her hair a mess on the back porch as Soot piddled in his favorite spot by the corner of the house.

  Nope. Nothing.

  Which was a relief of a temporary nature.

  She was about to put the phone in her bag when she thought about Danny’s stupid-ass voicemail. She hadn’t even gone in to erase it, but on the theory of starting as one means to go on, she opened the phone icon. The “Recents” screen popped up, and she was about to hit the voicemail icon with its red “1” on the lower left corner when something didn’t make sense.

  The list of calls started with Danny at the top. There was his name and “(4)” next to it, and the line was black because she’d answered the last call from him. Across the line there was “Yesterday” in gray.

  Then there was Jack. In black. With a gray “Yesterday.”

  And “World’s Greatest Boss,” which was how she had Don in her contacts. Black. With a gray “Yesterday.”

  And under that was “Unknown.” In black. With a gray “Yesterday.”

  Scrolling down the list, she found the other Unknown Caller. From when she’d answered the phone just before her window got shot out.

  But she’d hadn’t answered a call from an unknown number. Hitting the information button, she frowned. The time stamp was yesterday morning, and it showed a call lasting three minutes—

  The world spun and she threw out a hand.

  Moose. When he’d called her about Deandra and Danny. That was exactly the date and time he had called her to ask to meet.

  So he had to be one who had shot her car window. Put the gun on her doorstep. Texted her and watched her.

  Stumbling over to a chair, she sat down and stared at the details. Maybe he had phoned her from . . .

  She went through all her recents, all the way back to when he had first called her to go see Danny that night. There, the phone number in her contacts showed up with the entry that read “Moose.”

  So he had a regular phone, and had gotten a burner and made sure he was anonymous? Which was what you did when you wanted to threaten someone. But why? What was his tie to Ripkin and Ollie Popper, the warehouse fires and the office equipment—

  “The box trailer. Shit. The fucking box trailer!”

  Bursting up, she went to her sofa. She’d printed out a screenshot from the CCTV and it was here, somewhere—

  When she found the piece of paper, she tried to see if the trailer was the same as the one Moose used for transporting his cars in. She couldn’t tell. There had to be a thousand of them in the city of New Brunswick.

  There was a temptation to scream from the rooftops, call Jack and send the SWAT team over there, get a helicopter in the air. But she didn’t want to put her foot in it. Slow. Methodical. Let the situation reveal itself . . .

  It made no sense. Why would Moose set fires to destroy electronics for Ripkin? The two of them had never met.

  “Yes, they have,” she said to herself as she fumbled with the phone.

  As her call rang through, she prayed she was right. Prayed she remembered correctly—“Tom? Tom! Listen, I need a favor—”

  “What time is it?” her brother mumbled.

  “In your office. On the shelf behind your desk. There’s a picture—”

  “Sis, you’re talking too fast. What—”

  “The picture. From the opening of the new stationhouse. The picture behind your desk. I need you to take a photograph of it and send it to me right now. Okay? Just take a picture of it and send it to my phone.”

  “Why?”

  She thought about coming forward with everything. But this was not just her brother; it was Moose’s boss. What if she was wrong? All she had was Unknown Caller—she didn’t have the digits themselves. Jack was still working on that.

  “I just need to see it. Please?”

  “Sure, fine. Whatever. I’m upstairs in my bunk. Gimme five minutes.”

  After she hung up, she cradled her phone. Tom no doubt had heard about the blowup between Danny and Moose at the 499, and if she started talking like Moose was some kind of serial arsonist setting fires for a psychotic killer businessman, he was going to think she was nuts.

  What she needed was facts. Proof.

  Motive: Moose had, in the last year, somehow managed to fund a fancy wedding, a set of implants for Deandra, two expensive cars, a new house, and all that ugly furniture on a fireman’s salary. Even if you assumed he was working as a roofer every second he was off of work? That was a couple hundred thousand dollars right there.

  Ripkin could afford to pay well the people he had doing nasties for him.

  Means: Moose was on the fire service. Fire service people did training runs in abandoned buildings where fires were set to burn in controlled fashion. Back when she had been at the 499, he and Danny had always been the ones clearing the sites and setting the fires.

  It wasn’t that hard to imagine that he could set a controlled ignition by timer or remote device.

  Opportunity: That was the box truck on the CCTV.

  Assuming it was the one he owned.

  “Come on, Tom . . . come on . . .”

  From out of nowhere, an image came to her, coughed out of memories that she didn’t like to dwell on.

  It was from the fire, after she had had her hand cut. Danny was carrying her to the collapsed wall that had presented an escape. He was pushing her through the hole, forcing her out . . .

  Into Moose’s waiting arms.

  Back to her mess of papers, flipping through reports, and tables, and photographs, and—

  The incident report from the 499 was standard format, listing the time of call, the address, engines and ladders and ambulances that were sent . . . the crew that was working that shift. And down at the bottom, marked with an asterisk was the name Robert Miller.

  Moose had been med’d out that night due to a migraine.

  Which was why, when he’d helped drag her out of the collapse, he’d been in civilian clothes, not turnouts.

  How had he known to be there?

  Her phone went off with a bing, and she opened the text from her brother. Calling the image up, she enlarged it, passing by the line of officers and Ripkin standing in front of a red ribbon at the bays of the new stationhouse.

  And there it was. Off to the side.

  Moose talking intently with a man in a slick suit with silver hair. Sterling Broward, Ripkin’s fancy attorney.

  But how exactly had it worked? Ollie Popper had been running a multistate fencing operation involving office equipment, and anytime things had gotten too hot for him with the police, he’d disappeared the evidence against him in fires that happened to be taking place in Ripkin’s warehouses. Moose would know how to set a controlled burn and make sure the fire destroyed what it was suppose to. But that didn’t necessarily mean he and Ollie had a connection to Ripkin.

  Just because Moose clearly had talked to Sterling Broward at a public event didn’t mean the Ripkin connection was solid.

  Her gut, however, told her something was there. That fire at Ripkin’s mansion that had nearly killed his daughter? The arson investigator who had been killed in the boating accident? Ollie Popper dead in his jail cell before his case went any further?

  Putting her phone facedown, she continued to think about it all, especially about what Don had gotten on her about before: Beware information that
confirms your hypothesis.

  And start with what you knew for sure.

  When it came to Moose, she knew what she needed to do, she decided as she went for her bag, her keys, and Soot’s leash.

  On the way out of her house, she made sure she had her gun with her. And her license to carry concealed.

  chapter

  51

  Anne hit the gas hard through the farmland. Moose had been on shift with Danny the day before, so if she hurried, she had a chance of getting a look at that box truck before the firefighter got home. As for Deandra? She would just have to deal with the woman when she got here. If worst came to worst, she could pull the inspector badge out.

  It turned out no one was home.

  She circled the property once before getting anywhere near the drive, and she was able to visualize through the trees, the empty parking area in front of the ranch—as well as the mess that was out on the lawn.

  Someone had moved out. Or been thrown out.

  One more pass around the acreage and she discovered a back way in. Given that she didn’t know when anyone would be home, the camouflage was excellent and she was able to get her car within a hundred yards of the garage.

  And the box trailer.

  “You stay here, Soot. I’ll be right back.”

  Getting out, she had her gun in one hand and her phone in the other as she made quick time across the grass to the corner of the garage.

  She froze as she back-flatted against the structure. When nothing happened, she shuffled along and stuck her head out around the corner.

  The box trailer was big enough to fit a car in, with its roof and four walls enclosing its contents. The double doors in the back were shut with a heavy lock on them.

  Taking out her phone, she snapped a couple of pictures, and then she went closer. She had to get inside, but how?

  Moose’s garage had been left open, and it was hard to tell for sure, but she had the impression someone had trashed the place—although given the mess he kept his tools in, who could be sure?