Embers (10 page)

“I saved the best for last.” Jenna picked up the cast of the mark from the concrete floor.

“Your symbol here has no tool marks.”

“It
has
to have tool marks,” Anya blurted. “It was carved into the concrete floor.” She immediately regretted her words. She didn’t want to doubt the lab’s competence, but. . .

Jenna held up a finger. “It wasn’t carved. It was melted.”

“But concrete melts at. . .”

“. . . around four thousand degrees for silica-based concrete,” Jenna finished. “Under the microscope, we could see drip marks and stretches in the material.”

Anya sat back. “Christ. So this guy is running around with. . . what? A blowtorch?”

“An acetylene torch isn’t hot enough. You’d need something like an arc welder. . . something hot enough to melt steel. That’s a huge machine needed to generate enough electricity to get the job done. . . and not something that your firebug can throw in a backpack and trot off with.”

“How in the hell could that happen?” Anya muttered, fingering the edges of the cast. She felt none of the shimmer of heat in the cast that she had felt in the concrete floor.

“Beats me,” Jenna shrugged. “But don’t take my word for it. I’m just the lab rat.”

Since she’d succeeded in pissing the forensic lab off, Anya was looking forward to spending the evening alone with her take-out Chinese food. Her solitary ambitions were dashed when she saw Brian’s battered van parked at the curb in front of her house. Brian sat on the front stoop, hands jammed into his pockets, listening to music on headphones. She had the urge to keep driving, but she knew Brian had already seen her.

Great. Another opportunity to offend.

Anya bumped the car door shut with her hip, juggling her keys and the take-out bag.

“Hey, Brian.”

“Hey,” he answered noncommittally. Anya sat down beside him. He looked like hell. A shiner blackened one eye.

Instinctively, Anya reached out to touch the bruise. “What happened to you?” He ducked self-consciously away from her.

“Rough night.” He didn’t elaborate.

Anya stared down at her hands. “Do you want to come in?”

“No. I came to tell you about Ciro.”

Dread prickled through her, quickening her pulse. “Is he all right?”

“Not really. The old man’s sick. Really sick. He doesn’t want anyone to know, but he went to the ER last night for chest pains.”

Anya jumped to her feet. “Let’s go see him—”

Brian waved her down. “He’s home now, sleeping. I just came from his house. Max is staying with him.”

Anya sank down to the stoop. “It’s his heart?”

“Yeah. They think he’s got a weak valve. He didn’t have a full-blown heart attack, but the scans they did showed some previous damage.” Brian looked away, fidgeting with the cord of his headphones. “Jules sent me to ask you something.”

Anya’s eyebrow lifted.

“Jules wants you to come out with us tomorrow night. With Ciro out of commission, we’re a man down.” Brian shrugged. “I think that we’re fine. Max is coming along well.”

Anya’s face froze. She knew Brian could see it.

Brian nodded. “I’ll tell him you said no. No big deal.” He stood to leave. “I’ll keep you posted on Ciro—”

Anya reached up and grasped his sleeve. “Wait.”

He paused, looking down at her.

Her phone rang. She swore under her breath. “Hold that thought,” she told him, as she released his arm and dug into her purse for her cell phone. “Kalinczyk,” she muttered into it.

“It’s Marsh. I’ve got bad news.”

Anya rubbed her brow. This was the day for it. “About. . .?”

“Neuman. He’s dead.”

“I’m sorry, Captain.”

“Yeah, well. . . the case is going over to DPD. Chief’s forming a task force to work on these arsons. Meet with DPD’s detective bureau in the morning and fill them in.”

“Understood.” She snapped the phone shut, grimacing. With Neuman’s death, the arson was now a homicide and control of the case would belong to DPD in the morning.

But tonight the case was still hers.

She looked up at Brian. “I’ll go out with DAGR tomorrow night. But you have to do a favor for me tonight.”

CHAPTER FIVE

“THIS PLACE IS LIKE THE Batcave.”

Anya emitted a low whistle as Brian turned on the light. Fluorescent lights fizzled on, one panel after another, reaching far back down a corridor stacked floor to ceiling with computer monitors, cords dangling from cabinets, and discarded circuit boards. A halfdozen wall-sized server racks stood silent sentinel, fans whirring, green lights blinking. Anya would never have thought that this hub of technology was here—the next door down in the bowels of the university services building had been a janitorial closet.

“Welcome to my lair.” Brian crossed behind a black glass desk covered with the largest computer monitor Anya had ever seen—it was larger than the HDTV displays at the electronic stores. Brian opened a drawer and began rummaging.

Anya felt Sparky stirring against her neck. She flipped the collar with her middle finger, and he settled back down. She didn’t want the salamander running amok in Brian’s toys. Unlike the microwave Sparky ate last week, these were very expensive items. Anya was certain that her entire lifetime salary wouldn’t begin to touch the cost of some of these pieces of equipment.

She plucked a pair of goggles from the top of a cabinet. They looked like a prop from a science-fiction film, wrapped in wires and dark plastic. She peered through them and saw shapes outlined in green and blue, the servers outlined in yellow. Brian’s red form glowed from the opposite side of the room, reflecting body heat against the metal cabinets behind him. Infrared goggles. “What the hell is it exactly that you do here, anyway?”

“Stuff for contract R&D,” he said vaguely, as he sorted parts on the top of his desk.

Anya put the goggles down and stared up at a map of cell towers taped to the wall. The bubbles surrounding them covered the entire Detroit metro area, the wireless carriers neatly labeled with Brian’s precise capitals-only lettering.

“What kind of ‘stuff’?” she persisted. The investigator in her wanted to know what exactly he did. The woman in her wanted still to know who he was; she hadn’t gotten close enough to him to find out.

His blue eyes flickered up. “You know those facial recognition systems that the feds tried to implement after 9/11?”

“You mean those cameras they wanted to install on street corners that would pick out terrorists’ faces?”

“Yeah. That stuff.”

“You work on that?” Anya’s jaw dropped. All this time, she’d thought he did tech support for the undergraduate computer labs, resetting passwords and filtering for porn.

“I invented that.” A trace of smugness quirked the corner of his mouth. “Among other things.”

“You are one scary dude, Brian.”

“It’s a living.” He dumped a seemingly unrelated group of mismatched plastic parts from a cardboard box onto his desk and began plugging them together. He blew dust off a lens and scrubbed it across his T-shirt. “The scariness is just one bonus that really enhances my personal life.”

Anya swallowed. “That’s not it.”

“What’s not what?” Brian didn’t look at her. He screwed the lens into a black plastic tube.

“You. Me. Your scariness. That’s not why there’s not. . . you and me.”

He snorted. “Are we having the ‘It’s not you, it’s me’ discussion? We don’t have to do that, you know. I get it.”

She bit her lip. “That’s not it. It’s my scariness.”

Brian set the parts down. “Your ‘scariness.’” He made air quotation marks around the word.

She stared down at her hands. “Look, you know what I do isn’t exactly normal.”

“This is not news.”

“And. . . I’ve got an elemental familiar who likes to play chaperone,” she finished lamely, wishing she could shut the hell up before she started going on about her fear of intimacy.

“I know about Sparky. I’ve picked up his temperature disturbances on my instruments. I get that he’s always around.”

“I mean. . . he’s
always
around.”

“So?” Brian shook his head. “I live in an old apartment building. There are probably a couple of spirits who get a kick out of watching me do my Hendrix impression in the shower.” He sat on the edge of the desk. “If that’s an issue for you, okay, I get it. You’re shy around Sparky. But I’m not.”

“But. . .”

He caught up her hand, kissed her palm. Anya’s breath snagged in her throat. The kiss thrilled up her arm. “I’m more interested in the flesh and blood world than the spirit world,” he murmured around her fingers.

Anya rocked forward on her toes. She wanted so much to leave the spirit world behind, to feel grounded in the physical world. The more the spirit world impinged on her life, she had to admit, the more she craved the stability of something. . . wholly human. She lifted her head toward him and his mouth brushed hers, then melted against her lips.

She drank him in, the taste of him, the feeling of his hands winding in her hair. She could feel his heart beating against her chest as her arms slid around his waist. He felt real, his breath rising and falling against her palms. He smelled real, like soap and coffee, and she clung to that, to him.

His mouth brushed her jaw, behind her ear. She stiffened, feeling Sparky stir against her throat. She focused her attention on the feeling of Brian’s lips against the pulse behind her ear, and lifted her hands around his neck. His arms wrapped around her waist, and she leaned back against the server cabinet. She could feel the warm breath of the server’s heat sink fan against the small of her back, tickling the hem of her shirt.

He pursued her, kissing her among the litter of computer parts. Something rolled off the desk and smashed on the floor; he ignored it. She wrapped her leg around the outside of his knee, feeling the length of his body pressing against her. She felt wanted, desired. . . and that was a new sensation for her, one she wanted to taste in all its delicious gravity.

She felt Sparky’s heat sliding off her neck, down her back. She ignored him, feeling him peel away from her skin and scrabble among the circuit boards. She ignored him, wrapped up in Brian’s arms and the feel of his mouth on her skin. . .

Right up until Sparky took a bite out of one of the servers. A blue flash of light arced over the server panel, and the fluorescent lights overhead flickered.

“Sparky!” she snarled. Anya passed her hand over her eyes. “I’m sorry. He just ate your computer. . .”

Brian pushed himself back on his palms, twisting to stare at the server. He couldn’t see Sparky standing beside the server, licking the access panel as if he were a child with an ice cream cone.

“No big deal. I’ve got protection—surge suppression and a backup generator.” His hair fell over one eye, and he grinned.

Anya leaned her head on his shoulder. “This is what I mean. He. . .”

“Hey.” He lifted her chin, kissed her forehead. “Don’t worry about it, okay?”

She nodded, but her cheeks flamed. Her hands fell to her sides, and Brian pulled back. Anya circled around the desk to chase Sparky from the servers.

Brian cleared his throat. “You said you wanted to do some surveillance. What are you looking for?”

Anya dug into her purse. She unfolded printouts of the picture of the man from both the arson scenes, then handed them to him. “This guy showed up at two of the previous arson scenes. I want to know if he’s going to turn back up at the warehouse fire site.”

Brian smoothed the grainy photos out on his desk. “I don’t think that the resolution is good enough on these to do facial recognition.” He looked up at her. “But I can rig something up so that you can watch your sites, see if he comes back.”

Anya smiled. “Thank you, Brian.”

He shrugged. “Hey, it’s what I do. It’s the evil-genius gig.”

Without the scurry of EMTs, fire trucks, and police buzzing around it, the warehouse felt entirely too still, like a hosed-down hive abandoned by its bees. In the evening dimness, it had finally begun to cool. Lacking light and movement, the hulk was plunged in darkness. Yellow hazard tape cordoned off the scene from the sidewalk and a makeshift fence of orange plastic netting had been stretched around posts at the perimeter. No Trespassing signs were stationed at regular intervals along the edges.

Anya drove around the northeast corner of the building, where her witness had seen the light. She parked in the alley. Brian grabbed a box of his gear from the backseat, and she switched on her flashlight to lead the way to the building. Footing was treacherous, and they were forced to pick their way through the rubble. She pulled aside a corner of the makeshift fence, and they ducked inside.

“Where do you want to set up?” Brian asked.

“If we can, I’d like to set up a wide-angle at the front door, and one in the basement. Our firebug seems to have spent the most time there. I would think that if he’s coming back, he’d want to see that again.”

Brian set down his bag and fished out a wireless camera the size of his fist. The lens was the size of a silver dollar, and two iridescent black wings spread from its housing, like a black satellite. He pointed to the ruined lintel above the door. “Up there?”