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Authors: Charles Atkins

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BOOK: Best Place to Die
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‘Get it,' she said. ‘I'll be fine. Just need a few minutes to collect myself.'

And Lil left her alone in the crisp spring air. Although, as she sniffed, and maybe it was on her, she still smelled smoke and burn. By the time she reached the phone the machine had picked up. It was barely eight.
Who would call this early on a Sunday morning?
She stood and waited as the outgoing message played and then a woman's voice. It took her a couple of seconds to realize who it was; she picked up. ‘Mattie?'

‘Lil, glad you're home. I've been trying to get you for the last hour and was starting to worry.'

‘I'm fine,' she said, trying to figure out why Detective Mattie Perez would call her at the crack of dawn.

‘Hank Morgan said you were at Nillewaug this morning. He said you were taking pictures.'

‘Yes . . . are you there?'

‘I am. He said you got shots of the fire and of Delia Preston.'

‘I did,' Lil said. ‘I haven't had a chance to look at any of it yet. We just got back. He practically confiscated my camera.'

‘It's all digital, right?' she asked.

‘Yeah, I think I got both stills and some video.'

‘Do me a favor, Lil, and I'm dead serious.'

‘Of course.' She could feel Mattie carefully choosing her words, this woman who'd only months earlier had saved her life. ‘Mattie, whatever it is you need, just ask.'

‘Lil, and please don't repeat this. Or at least not to anyone other than Ada. Things are shaping up in a bad way. I'm treating this as a crime scene.'

‘Arson?'

‘Too soon to know for sure, but here's a piece of the nightmare. You're the only one to get shots of Preston's body before it was moved.'

‘I heard Hank tell his officers to treat it like a crime scene,' Lil said, feeling the need to defend the local Police Chief.

‘Yeah, well . . . apparently a pair of paramedics scooped her up and brought her to the ED. Hank said you got bent out of shape when he asked for the film . . . something about needing a court order. Really, Lil?'

For the first time that morning she laughed. ‘He didn't say please.'

‘And if I say please?' Her tone shifted. ‘This is serious, Lil, even if this all turns out to be just some tragic accident, that film – depending on what you got – could wind up in dozens of civil suits, with everyone and their son and daughter suing Nillewaug and anyone else who might have contributed. I need you to not touch that camera, or connect it to anything until I get someone from the crime unit to do it. I swear you'll get copies of everything. But with digital recording the whole chain of custody thing gets dicey. It's already bad, where you've left the scene.'

‘Mattie,' she said, trying to figure what a real reporter would do in this situation. Then again –
just do the right thing, Lil.
‘If it's that important, just come by and get it.'

‘Lil, much as I'd love to see you and Ada, I've got too much to do here. I'll send another detective to pick it up.'

Lil's heart sank. Not only was she about to give up those pictures and video, but her shot at an exclusive with the lead detective on the biggest story in Grenville was flying out the window. It's strange how snippets from journalism classes she'd taken over thirty years ago came back – being a reporter has everything to do with being in the right or wrong place at the right or wrong time. ‘I'd love to have seen you too,' she added, figuring at least that wasn't disingenuous. ‘But more importantly I'd have thought you'd want to get a statement from Ada's mother, Rose Rimmelman.'

‘Her and seven hundred other residents of Nillewaug, not to mention the staff.'

‘Yes, but Rose saw Delia jump,' she added, dropping the carrot in front of the detective.

Mattie paused. Lil could hear someone ask her a question, and the funny echo of a siren over the phone and then over the crow-fly path from Nillewaug to where she stood. ‘Huh,' she practically grunted. ‘I don't remember you being quite this devious, Lil.'

‘I don't know what you're talking about.'

‘I'm sure you don't and I'll be there in twenty.'

The call ended and Lil was moving fast – twenty minutes is not much time. She clicked the computer on her dining room table out of sleep mode. The hook-up cable for the camera was already plugged in and, without pause, she attached it to the nifty little Canon. The screen flickered with images and a message screen appeared asking her if she wanted to delete the files once they'd been uploaded to the hard drive. Figuring that might be tantamount to obstruction of justice, or some other term that tumbled to mind from watching crime shows, she pressed
no
. The first shots were from yesterday's opening of the Saturday flea market in Brantsville. It now being Sunday, she somehow needed to find the time to whip up seven hundred and fifty words, with two to four pictures, for her
Cash or Trash
column about antiques and collectibles in the
Grenville Sentinel
. She'd figured on the large open-air market as a likely subject. She and Ada went most Saturdays from spring through fall. Fire or not, she'd need a solid two hours to hammer this out. A few dozen pictures of the market, interesting dealer stalls, and colorful vendors flickered on the monitor. There were a couple of disquieting moments as she stared at those seemingly benign images. It had to do with one stall, a not especially likeable dealer whom she and Ada mostly avoided – they called him Grumpy. Ada had spotted the stuff first, stacks of pictures and knick-knacks that had once belonged to Gwen Carrington, a friend of theirs, who had died in her sleep of a massive coronary last winter. The creep factor, in an otherwise fun early spring morning at the flea market, had been fast and big. Gwen had a thing for dachshunds, and Grumpy's forty-by-twenty double-sized booth had hundreds of her little figurines, pictures cut from calendars that she'd framed, tops of cardboard boxes filled with little dog-shaped brooches and earrings, mugs with dachshunds. With a pit in her gut, she'd asked the dealer how he'd come by them. He'd told her that he'd done the clean out on Gwen's condo. ‘Not the good stuff,' he'd said with regret, ‘the leftovers. In exchange for getting the place emptied out, I keep and sell whatever I find.' Clearly, this was the story she was supposed to write, how all this stuff people collect is just on loan. But how to do that without turning into Dolly Downer, something her young and ambitious editor, Corey Bingham, did not want. She stared transfixed at close ups of Gwen's ceramic dachshunds piled in mounds being pawed over by prospective buyers, who, continuing with her ebb-and-flow theory of tchotchkes, would one day have their finds returned to a different stall in the future. The first images of the fire flew past, and she thought about Mattie's instruction not to download or copy them. This was followed by a surge of pride; these were good, really good, in focus, clearly framed. Firefighters in motion, a pair of medics wheeling a resident toward the queue of waiting ambulances, flames shooting from the second-floor windows. As they sped past, she'd realized that they'd arrived not much after the first responders. She had clear images of the first ladder being raised, and of firefighters hooking up hoses and running in heavy boots and yellow coats into the burning building. If they'd gotten there even a couple minutes later they'd never have been allowed through.

She startled at the sound of the screen door opening and then closing. She glanced through the kitchen opening at the clock on the stove.
That was no twenty minutes,
she thought, feeling her heart in her throat, and then Ada appeared.

‘What's the matter?' she asked, her gaze riveted to the first image of Delia.

‘You don't see me doing this,' Lil told her.

‘What are you talking about?' Ada stood beside her, and they watched Lil's handiwork as she'd circled that poor, dead woman with her neck twisted too far to the side, her face mashed into the asphalt, her skirt raised over splayed stocking-clad legs. ‘I didn't feel right leaving her like that,' Lil said, unable to tear her gaze from the images. ‘I should have at least pulled her skirt down.'

‘No, I'm pretty sure the cops wouldn't want that . . . These are really good, Lil. But who wears garters?'

‘I know.' The resolution was sharp, the camera automatically adjusting to the low light, occasionally filling in with a flash. And then the screen went dark and a message box informed them that the computer was now uploading the video files, as a barber-pole-like bar appeared and under it an estimate of how long it would take – eight minutes.

‘Mattie's on her way,' Lil said, and walked quickly back to the rear bedroom, with Ada trailing. She stared out the window at the parking lot. ‘She wants that film and told me not to copy it.'

‘I see.'

‘Crap!' a boxy black Tahoe with dark tinted windows was pulling in. ‘
That was no twenty minutes.
'

Mattie emerged with a phone to her ear. She looked up, and, realizing they'd been spotted, Ada waved.

‘I'll intercept her,' Ada said. ‘Try to slow her down.'

‘She wants to talk to Rose, I told her she saw Delia jump. Take her into your place, and I'll come over as soon as the download finishes.'

‘Got it.' And she scurried back through Lil's condo, locking the door behind.

FIVE

A
ttorney Jim Warren sat rigid in front of the computer screen in his richly appointed home office. Ignoring the phone ringing on his mahogany desk and his cell, which he'd silenced soon after the first call came at four a.m., his thoughts raced –
Delia, you bitch! You fucking bitch! Why?
At fifty-two with a net worth in the tens of millions, he was master of the life he'd wanted. Hair, a shock of pure silver, and his body trim from daily runs on the treadmill and circuits with free weights in his state-of-the-art home gym, where Gaia, his twenty-five-year-old Norwegian personal trainer and masseuse came three days a week. His body-fat content was under ten percent and he could annihilate men twenty years his junior in tennis and racquetball. A perfect life, a perfect home, a lovely wife, Joanie, who long ago stopped asking questions about late-night meetings and weekend business trips, and two kids in high school – a boy and a girl. Jim Junior was the quarterback for the Grenville Ravens –
just like dear old Dad
,
although they'd never win a championship, not even close
– and Kayla, who even as a freshman was the even-on favorite for class valedictorian.

Aside from the hum of his computer and the phone, the house in Eagle's Cairn – a high-end development with multimillion-dollar mansions on multi-acre parcels perched on Grassy Mountain Road with the best views in the Nillewaug River Valley – was quiet. The computer streamed images of Nillewaug from one of the local stations, and if he strained he could hear the sirens in the valley below. His baby was going up in flames, and that, he mused, was a good thing.
Let it burn to the ground, and her with it.
A tight-lipped smile crossed his face as he pictured Delia.
I should never have hired the bitch . . . or slept with her. Don't shit where you eat. I should never have promoted her, or . . .
But then other thoughts, the feel of her hair in his hands, the way she'd look at him, the rasp of her voice as she gave him permission . . . encouraged him to realize his every sexual fantasy. ‘
Use me, Jim,
' she'd said, her words more potent than Viagra. And her ambition, her eagerness, her intelligence and, of course, her greed.
How could you do this to me? What were you thinking?
And most importantly:
how far did she go?

The desk phone began to ring again. He read the lit caller ID. ‘Idiot . . . moron.' He didn't answer. Nine, ten, eleven . . . Twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three . . . ‘What?' He angrily picked up the handset.

‘Jimbo!'

‘Yes, Wally.'

‘I'm at the Village. You got to get your ass down here. It's a fucking nightmare!'

‘I'm aware,' he said. ‘And what am I supposed to do about it? I'm not a fucking fire fighter and neither are you.'

‘But Jim . . . people are hurt . . .' Fat Wally Doyle's voice cracked. ‘There are dead. Jim, you need to be here.'

Jim Warren couldn't remember when exactly he'd started loathing his once good friend and teammate. But the man was an idiot, which at times served him well, but now could be catastrophic. ‘Go home, Wally. There's nothing you can do there.'

‘Jim, we need you here. There's no one in charge . . . Delia's dead. Did you know that?'

‘What are you talking about?' Wondering if not only was Wally a fool, but trying to do something else.

‘I feel like I'm in hell.'

Jim felt something catch in his throat and a twist in his gut –
watch what you say, something's going on here
. ‘Dead! That's terrible. What happened to her?' He felt panic take hold. He hadn't touched her . . . not in that way. He pictured their last meeting. ‘
It wasn't me, Jim, I swear.
' He didn't believe her, Delia was one hell of an actress – both in bed and out.

‘I don't know, they say she jumped, must have been trying to escape the fire.'

The frantic knot in his belly eased. ‘That's horrible. Poor Delia,' he said, his mind zipping, now back in her office, thinking through each step.
Fuck!
Did he get all the back ups, was there more of a paper trail?
You bitch! You greedy, stupid bitch!
‘
Where are they?
' he'd screamed at her, and her tears, her protestations that she was just as surprised as he at the empty shelves in the wall safe. ‘
Where the fuck are they, Delia?
' Staring at the TV, and the chaos of dozens of emergency vehicles and cop cars, he could go back.
But how stupid would that be?

BOOK: Best Place to Die
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