Fade the Heat

by Colleen Thompson

  She’d mentioned the ME, Jack thought as he backed toward the entrance. The medical examiner, who would need to identify a body.

  Inside Jack something melted, leaked down through his legs, and cemented his feet to the spot. Reagan glanced in his direction, then walked away from him, talking in hushed tones as she moved. He stared after her, struggling to read meaning in the cant of her hand, the movements of her legs and shoulders, the way she stepped from the light into a band of deeper shadow. He wanted to rush to her, but he remained so firmly rooted he wondered how he would ever move again. So instead, he threw desperate prayers up to the heavens: jumbled snatches of the rosary, half-remembered Latin phrases, insane offers to God, as if the Creator took plea bargains. And through the tangle wove the desperate refrain: Please, God, no. Don’t take Luz Maria. Please.

  Reagan turned and walked toward him, the darkness hiding her expression until she’d nearly reached him. When the light from the glass door at his back finally touched her, he wondered if her grave expression was the same one he slapped on when he had to give a patient bad news.

  “This may be nothing,” she said. “Probably, it is.”

  It was the same line he told people when he referred them to oncologists. When he knew, deep in his bones, that it was something, something terrible and deadly.

  “When she’s not snapping shots of kids’ soccer teams, Peaches works part-time as a forensic photographer for the medical examiner. She got called in to do an acci—well, I guess you’d call it a crime scene, involving a young female, possibly Hispanic. But there’s no ID on the victim, nothing to indicate it’s—”

  “She’s dead?”

  Reagan hesitated for a moment that stretched out far too long. Jack tried to hold her gaze, but she looked away, seeking out the safer territory of an ambulance backing into the nearest loading area.

  “You said you’d tell me everything you knew,” he reminded her. “You swore it.”

  He heard her sigh before she spoke. “The victim’s clearly DOA,” she said, looking him in the eye now. “But we won’t know who she is until they finish—”

  “Where is she?” Jack demanded.

  “I can’t tell you that. You’ll have to wait and find—”

  “Like hell I will. If it’s Luz Maria—if—if it’s really…” He couldn’t force out the words, couldn’t even bring himself to think them. She was his little sister. He’d just seen her. She’d told him she was going to have a baby.

  And she’d said she was coming back home before midnight.

  When he glanced down at his watch, he had to blink away hot moisture before he could make out the dial.

  The time was 1:38 A.M., and Mama hadn’t called to say his sister had come home. And Reagan had heard a scream that came from Luz Maria’s cell phone.

  He pushed past the nausea and wrenched his mind open to the unthinkable.

  Laying his palm on Reagan’s upper arm, he told her, “Take me there now, to the scene, and I promise, I’ll never ask another thing of you again.”

  “They aren’t going to let you see her. You understand that, don’t you? For one thing, your sister’s not even a missing person at this point. And they can’t allow a civilian to compromise the scene.”

  “We’ll cross that bridge later,” he said. “Let’s just worry about getting there for now.”

  Reagan shook her head, but she pulled her keys out of her pocket. “I should have my head examined…but I have to know, too. That call…I keep praying it was only a fender bender, and that she’s been too distracted since then to pick the phone up off the floorboard.”

  Though Jack remembered that Luz Maria had told Reagan’s friend someone was following her, he said, “That’s probably it.”

  “Yeah, I’m sure it is,” Reagan answered, as the two of them headed back toward the parking garage.

  But Jack would bet his last dime she didn’t believe it any more than he did.

  As they turned onto Binz on their way to Highway 288, Reagan prayed that Peaches would beat them there. If not, the cops would likely send them packing before she could even pull out her fire department ID.

  Maybe it would be better if they did. Maybe then Jack could be spared a sight no family member ought to see.

  Reagan knew she had to warn him, had to talk him out of attempting to pull strings to get his way.

  “They think the woman was pushed out of a speeding car on 288,” she told him. “Although that may or may not be what killed her.”

  For a long time he said nothing as they sat at a red light while an HFD ladder truck raced by in the opposite direction, the wail of its siren at odds with the preternatural silence of the hour. When she resumed driving, he spoke, his voice as flat as the EKG of a cadaver. “She was wearing a light-orange top, with jeans. I think she had her silver watch and maybe silver earrings.”

  “The body—whose-ever it was—was found nude.” Chalk-dry in her throat, her words were barely audible, but when she saw him flinch, she knew he’d heard.

  “It isn’t Luz Maria,” she repeated.

  “It can’t be.”

  Once more, they fell silent as the Trans Am drifted over the eerily empty streets.

  “I—uh—I’ve lived here all my life,” Jack told her. “But I’ve never driven through this neighborhood.”

  Reagan grasped the change of subject as if it were a lifeline. Perhaps, for him, it was.

  “It’s part of my territory,” she said. “I hear it was really something once.”

  She turned a corner, and they passed huge brick homes that had fallen on hard times. Derelict cars, many missing tires, were parked haphazardly in front of sagging porches, lit only by those streetlights that hadn’t been shot out. Beside the doors and windows, bushy oleanders and overgrown azaleas crouched, serving better as cover for criminals than landscaping.

  “We get a lot of calls from senior citizens out here,” Reagan explained, more to fill the dark void than because she thought he cared. “Most of these houses look good on the outside, but the interiors are falling down around their owners’ ears. But the area’s getting gentri-fied along the edges—yuppies buying the properties and fixing them up, driving up the prices. It’s happening all over the inner loop.”

  “Good for the neighborhoods,” Jack said absently.

  She shrugged. “Good for the yuppies and the houses, but not the original residents. Their taxes shoot up so high they have no choice except to leave. I always wonder where those seniors end up—in nursing homes or some little apartment near a son or daughter out of town. How many of those elderly transplants take root—and how many just wither and die?”

  Reagan winced, realizing that the conversation she’d meant as a distraction had plunged back into gloom. For the rest of the drive, she kept her mouth shut and simply left him to his thoughts.

  Once they hit the freeway, they ran into more traffic, which had slowed due to rubbernecking near the line of emergency vehicles. A fire truck was parked farthest back, partially in the right lane, its lights flashing to protect the scene from the bleary late-night—or early-morning—drivers crawling by. Reagan passed the cop cars, the ambulance supervisor’s SUV, and the ME’s van before identifying herself to a black female cop directing traffic. She pulled in front of Peaches’ ancient Saab and a second fire truck.

  When Jack reached for the door handle, she grabbed his arm.

  “Wait for me,” she said before picking her purse off the floorboards and digging for her fire department ID. “Let me talk to Peaches or those firefighters and see what I can find out before you go charging in.”

  She thought she saw him nod, but she must have been wrong, because by the time she’d introduced herself to a burly bear of a fireman with thick, protruding eyebrows and a woolly red-gray mustache, Jack was standing next to her.

  She shot him a warning look before the driver, who had called himself Red McGaughey, asked, “Hurley? Are you Patrick Hurley’s daughter?”

 
At her nod, he explained, “I worked with Pat back when I was a rookie. Damned good firefighter.”

  It was all the opening she needed. After thanking him, she launched into a brief explanation of why they were there and what they wanted. “Do you know any more than we do?”

  The veteran firefighter shot Jack a wary glance.

  “I spent a lot of time in Hermann’s ER,” he said. “I’ve seen a lot of Friday nights.”

  Apparently, Red decided Jack was “in” too, because he shook his head and told them, “It’s a fucking shame, a goddamn crime, what filth will up and do. God knows if the poor thing was dead when she hit the road, but she by-God was once a couple of cars ran over her. I didn’t see much of it—been in this long enough that I don’t look any more than I have to, I can tell you. But what I saw was pretty bad. I hope like hell it’s not your sister.”

  Reagan was struck by the shifting of the pronoun, the way a person went from “she” to “it” in death. She’d doubtless made the same transition in her own speech on dozens, maybe hundreds, of occasions, but she wasn’t ready to make the transition this time…not with Luz Maria’s very live scream still echoing through her brain.

  “Long black hair?” Jack asked him. “Maybe in a ponytail. Silver watch, and possibly silver earrings, too. And she has a tiny tattoo, a little fairy on her shoulder blade. The left one.”

  Glancing at Reagan, he flashed a weak smile that did nothing to dim the pain in his dark eyes. “It was World War Three when Mama saw she’d done it.”

  From the fireman came another head shake, a pursing of the lips, a string of curses about the waste of it. And then: “I don’t know. Can’t say for sure. Could have had black hair. Might have been a white girl or Hispanic. Might have been a lot of things.”

  Without another word, Jack started walking toward the floodlit knot of cops and other personnel.

  “Hey, wait, Jack. Stop.” Reagan trotted up behind him and hooked his bent elbow with one hand.

  Tearing his arm away, he turned on her, his eyes reflecting the lurid flash of scarlet lights. “If you think for one damned second that I’m sitting here this close and—”

  “You want to get arrested?” she demanded. “You want to add that to everything else the cops and lawyers have to sort out? ’Cause I’m not bailing your ass out tonight, and I doubt your mother can handle it at this point.”

  His arms dropped to his sides, and he simply stood there, defeated…for the moment.

  “Let me go in, tell them what we know. Maybe I can talk the investigators into letting us take a look. For one thing, if we can ID the body, it’ll make their job easier, and the investigation will go faster. You wait here, and this time I mean stay still. Or I’ll tell ’em to arrest you myself.”

  She wasn’t sure how long her threat would hold him, but she hurried away and found a couple of cops and another firefighter. After she explained the circumstances, the firefighter, Dan Berryhill from her class at the academy, was all for letting her and Jack look at the corpse. One of the police officers agreed, but the other was a stiff-necked weasel who insisted upon calling a superior for approval.

  When he went to his unit to contact the station, his partner griped, “Tight-assed little shit-wad has to have a signed note every time he takes a dump.”

  She shrugged and waited, then introduced Jack when—big surprise—he showed up to join them. Finally, the pinch-faced weasel returned and gave them a reluctant go-ahead.

  “If you ask me, though,” he bitched, “if Lieutenant Scheffield weren’t off on vacation, he’d never go for this.”

  The man’s partner and the firefighter escorted them to the spot where Peaches was busy taking pictures of something behind a tarp held by two firefighters to shield the body from the view of passersby. Reagan barely recognized her neighbor, as she’d changed into a pair of jeans and a white blouse, pulled her strawberry-blond hair into a no-nonsense ponytail, and held an outsized digital camera with major-league attachments in front of her face.

  After the officer said something to Peaches, she shot Reagan and Jack an agonized look before snapping the lens cover on her camera and turning away.

  Reagan took Jack’s hand and gave it a squeeze, then told him one more time, “It won’t be her.”

  Jack looked at her so hard she could read the naked fear behind his eyes. And then, without another word, he let go of her hand and walked behind the orange tarp.

  Reagan followed, her stomach pulled into a tight knot, though she tried to tell herself she’d doubtless seen worse.

  But the bearlike fireman, Red McGaughey, had been right. This was bad. No one, no matter how young or vibrant or attractive, left a pretty corpse once struck by multiple cars cruising at freeway speeds. It was hard to look past the damage, the limbs twisted at impossible angles, the flattened sack of abdomen, the split flesh and the leaking fluids. And nearly impossible to compare this corpse to the beautiful woman she had met that morning, especially when moisture kept blurring Reagan’s vision, no matter how many times she wiped her eyes.

  Jack turned his back to the poor, broken thing, pinched the bridge of his nose between his fingers, and let his head fall forward. Within the shifting flicker of passing headlights, Reagan saw tears streaming down his face.

  “Oh, God,” she cried, and threw her arms around him.

  He grabbed onto her, his arms tightening until she could barely breathe.

  “It—it isn’t her.”

  His words felt warm against her scalp, but Reagan wasn’t sure she’d understood him, his voice was so thick with emotion. Pulling back, she looked into his face.

  “It’s not—it’s not Luz Maria,” he said. “Thank God, it isn’t her.”

  They fell together, both of them now weeping against the onslaught of relief. But not only relief, for mingled with it was the horror of the ending they had witnessed, spread across that length of pavement, and the stark realization that for one family, the morning would bring no miraculous reprieve.

  Chapter Twelve

  While Jack retreated to the Trans Am, Reagan forced herself to take another look at the woman’s corpse. This time, she squatted down—carefully avoiding a viscous, stinking puddle—and really made herself look into the woman’s face. She wasn’t a masochist, but she had to reassure herself that Jack hadn’t spoken out of shock, that he hadn’t denied the body was his sister’s because he didn’t wish to admit it to himself.

  But this wasn’t Luz Maria. Reagan saw it easily enough now. The body was too heavy, the facial features too coarse, and the hair too short and frizzy. Her hands, too, were all wrong, the fingers stubby and the nails far shorter than Luz Maria’s coral-painted ones.

  Satisfied, Reagan whispered to the dead woman, “I don’t know who you are, but I hope like hell they catch whatever bastard did this to you. And I pray you’ll rest in peace.”

  She rose and turned away, her face heating at the sight of the firefighter she’d known from the academy behind her, clearly listening. Tall and muscular, Berryhill had removed both his bunker coat and helmet, the latter of which exposed a freshly shaven—and somewhat pointed—head.

  But her embarrassment died when she focused on his badge, which had been shrouded in black tape, as HFD badges always were when a firefighter died in the line of duty. For a moment, Joe Rozinski’s face superimposed itself over Berryhill’s. Scowling at her, the way he had when she’d refused to listen to his arguments about her transfer.

  The keys slipped from her grip, jingling as they struck the pavement.

  Berryhill picked them up and dropped them into her hand, but her expression must have told him that there was something more than clumsiness in play. Touching the badge, he asked her, “Did you know him?”

  Reagan nodded. “My shift, my captain…my friend.”

  “Sorry to hear it. You’ve had a hell of a couple of days, haven’t you? But at least this wasn’t your boyfriend’s sister. By the way, I didn’t catch his name.”


  “He’s not my boyfriend, just an—an old acquaintance,” Reagan told him, though by now the denial rang false, even to her ears. What they’d been through hadn’t made them lovers, but it had forever pushed them beyond mere acquaintances.

  After stammering her thanks for Berryhill’s help, Reagan left without mentioning Jack’s name. Because the last thing she needed was the rumor circulating that she’d been seen again with Jack Montoya. The same man so many firefighters believed was at the root of Captain Joe Rozinski’s death.

  “I fucked it up, oh, God. I really screwed this thing up.”

  The man sitting in the green Ford couldn’t stop rocking. He didn’t feel much like the predatory presence he’d imagined last night. In fact, he wished like hell that he could call the Firebug to ask him what to do.

  The Firebug would know. The Firebug would have ideas, the way he always had. But what the pathetic bastard didn’t have these days were ears, or working hands to hold a phone up to the holes that he now heard through.

  So instead the driver called his contact. What else could he do? After he’d discovered his mistake, after he realized it had been a woman in the sleek black Mustang instead of Jack Montoya, he had taken her impulsively—thrown her in the backseat and started driving aimlessly.

  But what the hell to do with her? What to say if she came to?

  This was not the way he’d planned it. She was not the one he’d meant to punish, not the one whose death would net him the life he deserved. And try as he might, he could not take pride in her moaning, nor in the stench of gasoline from the backseat.

  “What the fuck now?” he asked as the contact’s telephone rang and rang. When an answering machine came on, he hung up and started rocking in his seat even harder.

  “What would the ’bug do if he’d screwed things up this way?” he thought aloud, as he was prone to do when the whole world went to shit. “He’d make a new plan, hash out angles. Figure out some way to make it look like he meant to do it all along.”