Fade the Heat (16 page)

Reagan staggered after Jack as he pounded toward the back door.

“Wait,” she called after him, thinking about the possibility that someone else remained inside the house. Someone who had come into her bedroom, who had left Luz Maria.

But it was no use. Jack was already up the steps and flying through the kitchen. And even if he heard her, Reagan knew he wouldn’t care.

Breathing hard, she followed, though she was already tearing her cell phone from her pocket and dialing 911.

“I need an ambulance.” She stopped running to shout at the dispatcher. “I need an ambulance right now—and cops. There’s been a stabbing—and I think the guy’s still here.”

Reagan had no idea if what she said was true, or if the mess she’d seen through the window had been more paint instead of blood. She only knew that her
words would bring a swift and sure response—which was exactly what they needed…

Even if the woman inside was dead already.

“Reagan. Reag, get in here. I need you,” Jack called.

Something in his voice sent panic sparking along her spinal column, prompting her to hang up on the dispatcher’s questions as soon as she gave the address.

Bracing herself for what she’d glimpsed from outside, Reagan rushed inside her bedroom. And into a scene so terrifying that it took every fiber of her training and experience to keep herself under control.

Damp crimson dripped from every surface: words whose every brush stroke looked like a slashed and bloody wound. Everything on her walls and dressers had been smashed to pieces. Broken glass from framed pictures, lamps, and a mirror’s bright shards sparkled beneath the overhead light and the slowly turning, scarlet-spattered fan blades.

And in the middle of it all lay Luz Maria, arranged carefully atop the now-speckled, white bedspread, where she looked absurdly peaceful in her funereal pose, with her slender hands clasped on her chest and her loose hair arranged in a smooth coil that crossed her neck. A light, multicolored throw had been placed over her and tucked beneath her folded arms, as if whoever left her here had wished to keep her warm. Or had wanted to hide whatever outrage lay beneath the cloth.

Yet the covering did nothing to disguise the fumes of paint and gasoline.

“Luz Maria, wake up. Luz Maria, can you hear me?” Jack was bent over his sister’s face as he spoke, his trembling hand pressed to her throat. Feeling for her carotid pulse, Reagan realized.

Even before he nodded, she saw the shallow rise and fall of Luz Maria’s chest. Still, she made no response to Jack’s voice. Definitely unconscious.

“She’s breathing, but it looks quick and shallow,” Reagan told him. “We have paramedics en route.”

As Jack peeled back one of Luz Maria’s eyelids, Reagan saw the dark bruising across her swollen brow. Moving closer, she saw, too, the abrasions on her otherwise-pale face: abrasions that Reagan recognized from her years of working accidents.

But why would Luz Maria have an air-bag injury? Though the fine white powder clinging to her skin seemed to confirm it, Reagan had to put her question on hold for now.

“Pulse is weak and rapid; skin cool and clammy to the touch,” Jack said. “But the pupils are equal and reactive.”

Reagan carefully lifted Luz Maria’s hands—noting what felt like a fractured forearm as she did so—then peeled back the cover to check her chest for any injury that might impede her breathing. The clinging, pale apricot T-shirt showed neither blood nor a deformity.

With the stench burning in her nostrils, Reagan glanced at Jack, saw him pushing aside his sister’s hair to observe her neck before running his hands along it. As he proceeded, Reagan pushed the throw aside, exposing the whole of Luz Maria’s body.

Including the bloodstain between her legs.

“We’ve got some bleeding,” Reagan coughed out. “Heavy spotting anyway, soaking through the jeans.”

“Neck looks and feels all right. But where the hell’s that ambulance?” Jack reached for Luz Maria’s left hand.

“Try the other one,” said Reagan. “I think she’s got a broken forearm on that side.”

Jack did as she suggested, pressing down on the
base of his sister’s thumbnail to watch for capillary refill. Reagan looked on as the nail bed slowly returned from white to pink.

Shocky, yes, but not advanced shock. At least not yet.

And still Luz Maria made no response whatsoever as Jack repeated her name.

When Reagan could no longer stand the fumes, she stepped over the contents of several emptied drawers and threw open both windows. To her immense relief, she heard sirens approaching from the street.

“I’ll go let them in,” she said.

As she turned to leave the room, her gaze landed on the wall beside the door, on the still-dripping words that screamed: AMERICA FOR AMERICANS—BORDERS FREE 4 DEATH.

Dear God.

Dragging her gaze from the blood-red slogans, Reagan bolted for the door, her mind overloading with her own shock, worry over the injured woman, and a swarm of unvoiced questions.

Who could have done this? How and why? Despite the inflammatory message, had Sergio somehow been responsible—the same Sergio they had chased and cornered? The same Sergio who had held a gun pressed to her throat as he swore he knew nothing about Luz Maria?

Reagan wracked her brain, struggling to remember whether he had smelled of paint fumes, as this room did; whether he’d been wearing blood-red smears. He’d been dirty, yes, and bleeding from his fall on the motorcycle, but aside from that his black clothing showed no—

Flashing red lights distracted her. Stepping out the front door, she flagged down an advanced life support
squad unit—the type sent to the most serious emergencies. They pulled in front of her house and flipped off their sirens, but she heard more wailing drawing near.

Both the police and a transport ambulance would soon be here, but for right now, she was happiest to see the first paramedic that climbed out of the emergency-equipped Suburban. As usual, half of Vickie Carson’s frizzy chocolate curls had escaped her hair clip to swirl around her round face like Medusa’s hissing locks. Although she looked a few pounds heavier, Vickie moved with the same brisk confidence and purpose Reagan remembered from the days the two of them had ridden together.

Reagan felt better knowing she was here, for Vickie was an expert in assessing and stabilizing patients on the fly. And unlike Jack, she didn’t have to deal with the emotional fallout of treating a family member.

Vickie, her fellow paramedic, and their EMT/driver began pulling their equipment out of one of the ambulance’s compartment doors.

“What’s up, Hurley?” Vickie asked her. “Dispatch says the assailant may be on site. Do we need to wait for the cops to clear the scene?”

“The scene’s safe—and they won’t need to send a pumper crew for manpower, so you can have them turn around,” Reagan answered.

“The patient’s a Hispanic female,” she continued, “early twenties. Breathing but unconscious. Looks like a trauma case, possible MVA. Here, let me grab that stretcher for you.”

“But it came in as a stabbing,” the EMT said, his narrow face a study in confusion.

Which was understandable, considering that car-accident victims weren’t often found indoors.

Vickie’s fellow paramedic, a light-skinned black man in his mid-thirties, slammed shut a compartment door and frowned at Reagan, his expression just as puzzled.

“At first glance, it looked like it could be a stabbing, but it’s definitely not that,” Reagan said, shaking her head. “Her brother’s a physician. He’s in with her now. We did a head-to-toe and found no sign of penetrating trauma. There’s some facial bruising and abrasions, what looks like vaginal bleeding and apparent fractures of the distal radius and ulna. And this is definitely a crime scene. You’ll see when you get in there.”

“A motor-vehicle accident? At a crime scene?” the EMT asked, the creases in his forehead digging deeper.

“Injuries seem consistent. Besides the facial abrasions, she has some kind of white powder all over her,” Reagan answered. Ignoring the curious stares of a couple of neighbors who had come outside in bathrobes, she pushed the wheeled stretcher toward the front door.

Vickie asked, “This your house?” as she and her partner followed Reagan up the walkway.

Reagan nodded. “We found her like this when we got here, maybe seven or eight minutes ago. We were running all over, looking everywhere for her, and she ended up back here.”

Vickie cut her a sharp and curious look, but she asked no personal questions, not even when Reagan led them to her bedroom, and the second paramedic muttered, “Holy shit.”

Jack looked up from Luz Maria. “Oxygen,” he told them. “We’ll need to get her on O
²
right away.”

“I understand you’re a physician, sir,” Vickie responded. “Is this your patient?”

“She’s my sister, damn it. Just get a mask on her. And we’ll need a C-collar, in case there’s—”

Vickie didn’t move. “Are you taking responsibility for the patient and the scene?”

Reagan placed a restraining hand on Jack’s arm. “Let them do their job, Jack. They know what they’re doing.”

“She’s my little sister,” he repeated, while the EMT stepped outside to radio a cancellation on the pumper call.

“Then help her by explaining what we know already. And back off. Back off so we can get her to the ER fast.”

He stared at Reagan, pain welling in his eyes like blood from a fresh wound. For several beats, she didn’t move, didn’t even blink, as she waited for Jack’s common sense and training to overcome emotion. He must know as well as she did that his interference would only slow the process, and that his attachment to his sister could overwhelm his judgment.

His shoulders sagging, Jack nodded and took a step back. As the paramedics and the EMT worked, he gave them the details, as calmly and thoroughly as if he were discussing a total stranger…and not the sister he’d helped raise.

The sister some sick bastard must have left here after running her car off the road.

Things changed when the first cops showed up. The two of them took one look at the slurs splashed across the bedroom walls, looked at each other, and said, “Roll call.”

“This is the address the lieutenant mentioned, right?”

“I’ll radio it in, Mike,” said the older of the two, a thickly built specimen with an ill-fitting uniform and
an accent that sounded more like Philly than East Texas. “The feds from that task force’ll be all over this.”

Apprehension coiled in Jack’s gut, distracting him from the paramedics as they taped Luz Maria securely to the backboard. The sight of her, with a C-collar underscoring her facial injuries, sent fresh anxiety spiking through him.

Would the investigators try to take him away from her, to question him again for hours at the FBI field office?

“I’m riding with them in the ambulance.” His voice was firm and his gaze unyielding as he zeroed in on the remaining officer. “We’ll be at Ben Taub’s ER.”

The younger cop was young indeed, a skinny white kid with an Adam’s apple that jerked like a fishing bobber in a stocked pond. “I—uh—I don’t know if I can let you go to the hospital. We’ll need to question you, sir.”

“Then you know where to find me.”

The female paramedic said, “On three,” then counted off until the crew moved his sister to the stretcher.

“Are you the homeowner?” the officer asked him.

Reagan had been lifting the paramedics’ jump kit and monitor to return them to the ambulance, but she looked up at the question. “That would be me. I’m the one who called this in.”

The Adam’s apple twitched, but the young officer held his ground. “We’ll need to interview you.”

“But I was going with the—”

“Someone has to explain to us what happened.”

She glanced down at Luz Maria, then nodded to Jack. “You go on with her then. I’ll talk to these guys and meet you at the ER when I can.”

“You don’t have to come—” Jack began.

She silenced him by pursing her lips in obvious annoyance. “I’ll be there,” she repeated, her gesture sweeping the trashed room. “I have a stake in this, Jack—and I have a heart.”

So far, his attention had been fixed solely on his sister. But now, he saw that all around the room, angry red slashes formed letters. His gaze lit on the set that read, NO MORE GRAVY TRAIN—FUCK THE WETBACKS!

The words rocked him like a body blow, sending his breath hissing through his teeth and jerking his attention back to Luz Maria. And riveting his thoughts to the splotch of bright red blood that he had seen between her legs.

Rage roared through him, shuddering along his limbs and drawing both his hands into painfully tight fists. A rage so all-consuming that he knew that if he found those responsible, nothing would prevent him from killing whoever had laid hands on his sister.

Reagan counted herself lucky that the young officer allowed her out of his sight long enough to help the squad’s crew pack up their equipment. Not that she had any intention of taking off, but she wanted a last word with Jack before he left.

She caught him behind the ambulance as the EMT and paramedics loaded Luz Maria. The flashing light bar pulsed a lurid intermittent glow.

Leaning close to him, she said, “I want whoever did this caught. For your sister, and for Joe Rozinski, because you can’t tell me all this stuff is not related.”

He looked her in the face, his dark eyes narrowing. “And you think I don’t want the bastard caught? How the hell can you imagine I—”

“I think you’re conflicted. You’ve been protecting Luz Maria your whole life; we both know it. You’ll think long and hard before you implicate her, even to put the man who did this behind bars.”

He said nothing, but she could feel words warring within him: arguments he didn’t dare raise with so
many ears around them. Yet the heat of his regard seared her flesh like a hell-hot August sun.

“Just so you know,” she told him, “the decision’s out of your hands. I’m going to give a full and accurate accounting. I have to, to be able to look myself in the mirror—and to stand up at Joe’s services with my head high.”

He nodded slowly, then turned away, leaving her to shiver in the absence of his gaze.

As he climbed inside the ambulance, she noticed a figure standing across the street, a tall man wearing dark sweats, who stared at her with single-minded purpose, his arms folded across his chest as if he were either chilled or angry.

“Beau?” she called out, walking toward him. “Beau LaRouche, is that you?”

As she stepped into the street, a rust-spotted station wagon hit its brakes. She stopped short, then waited for the driver to finish cursing her in Spanish and ease past the emergency vehicles.

By the time she looked up again, Beau had vanished. Leaving a sick feeling in her stomach and a question roaring through her mind.

Who was she to pass judgment on Jack for wanting to protect his sister? She had only worked with LaRouche for the past nine months, yet she’d failed to report what had happened at her house yesterday morning. And even now, with his earlier threats toward Jack ripping through her brain, she mentally balked at the idea of telling the police about his presence here tonight.

Because he’s not the guilty party
, her conscience supplied.
There’s no way he hurt Luz Maria or set the fire he was working to put out.

Yet she doubted that LuzMaria had set ablaze her own brother’sapartment,either. Butthatstill didn’t prove her innocence any more than Reagan’s rationale did Beau’s.

Her first lie was the hardest, Reagan realized. Her heart pounded out a quick tattoo, but she forced herself to look the older cop straight in the eye.

“Where’d you get that bruise?” he repeated, his voice deceptively casual as he pointed to her cheekbone.

She touched her face reflexively. “I guess it’s from that guy we chased, the one we saw hanging around Jack’s sister’s window.”

After that, the slope grew steadily slicker, making it increasingly difficult for the truth to keep its footing. But that was the way of lies, thought Reagan. Once even the smallest was uttered, that cosmic mote of falsehood took on weight and gravity until, before one knew it, it was spinning on its own. After the first, she had to tell more, leading the officers away from Beau to focus on tonight’s ordeal with Sergio and Luz Maria.

So much for the self-righteous bull she’d thrown at Jack about her “full and accurate accounting.”

Though the younger of the two cops didn’t seem to notice, the thick-necked veteran honed in on her nervousness as the night wore on. He must have passed word to the head of the task force on his arrival, too; either that or the FBI’s special agent in charge had some sort of sixth sense. Whichever was the case, the man’s questions grew increasingly more pointed, until the sharp-faced, sharp-eyed man sat across from her at her kitchen table and demanded to know why she had told them earlier that she was not involved with Jack Montoya.

“I
wasn’t
,” she insisted as she watched yet another
gloved technician leave her bedroom. “I did tell you, though, that I’d known him a long time ago, when both of us were kids. And since all of this started, it’s gotten weird, you know?”

The agent’s skin was so white it nearly glowed in the room’s dimness, so white that though his card read R.J. Lambert, she had long since mentally renamed him Casper. “Has it gotten so ‘weird’ that you’ve forgotten that the man might be involved in a terrorist organization, to say nothing of your own captain’s death? I’m not just pulling this idea out of thin air, Miss Hurley. We’ve subpoenaed Montoya’s records, bank and credit-card statements, phone bills, all of that—and I can tell you, this is very real, and if you don’t cooperate fully, you could be making one hell of a mistake.”

With every syllable he banged a big gold class ring on the table, as if he were attempting to subliminally telegraph his authority to her. Her dislike deepening with each tap, Reagan decided he was even worse than Detective Dough Gut.

Bluffing
, she decided. The jerk was bluffing about his “evidence,” piling on intimidation, figuring he could scare her into breaking down.

“Jack stopped by to express his condolences and see how I was doing.” It was none of their business that she’d invited him to stay the night—and she didn’t even want to
think
about the humiliating way she’d thrown herself at him after hearing of Joe’s death. “When he left, he forgot his cell phone. And then tonight—or last night, I should say—I get this call on it, and it’s a woman screaming. I heard how frightened she was. You think I should ignore that? You think you could tell me how?”

Though he never got around to answering her ques
tion, Casper and his cohorts strung her out for hours, leading her back over the rough terrain of her account whenever another of the team arrived. Trying to trip her up, she figured. The investigators seemed especially interested in what she could tell them about Sergio: what he looked like, what he’d said—especially the part about following the money—and whether he had given any indication that he and Jack were well acquainted. And not a one of them would give her any news on LuzMaria’s condition, no matter how often Reagan asked.

Though the sun was by now peeking through the windows, and Peaches had long since come and gone—taking poor Frank with her for some warm milk and a bath—the interviews dragged on. Finally, Reagan’s patience reached its end.

“We’re finished now,” she told an ATF guy whose prematurely white hair put her in mind of the actor Peter Graves.

“Says who?” he asked as he glanced at his partners. “I thought we were going back over the events leading to your finding Miss Montoya in your bedroom.”

With her hand rubbing at the stiffness in her neck, she looked longingly at the now-empty coffeepot. “You’ll have to get it from your colleagues, because unless you’re arresting me, I’m out of here. I’m going to the hospital to find out about Luz Maria.”

The man threw up his hands in a pretense of surrender. “Look, I’ll tell you what. We’ll call there, check on her ourselves, and let you know how things are going.”

“I guess you misunderstood me. You’ve collected your evidence, gotten your pictures, and picked my brain until it’s bleeding. Now I want every one of you out of my house.”

“You don’t want to get this cleared up now?” Casper interrupted, banging once more with his ring.

Reagan felt her temper spike past reason. “Knock on that freaking table once more and you
are
going to arrest me—for disorderly conduct when I cuss your lily-white ass into traction.”

That got a laugh out of the ATF guy and a frazzled-looking older woman from the state fire marshal’s office. Reagan got the feeling that neither was a big fan of the ring-banging routine.

For whatever happy reason, their reaction seemed to take a little of the wind from Casper’s sails. After the obligatory spiel warning her about the gravity of the case, the importance of giving complete and accurate statements to agents of the government, and how now might be a super time to upgrade locks on her doors and windows, they finally packed their things and vanished.

Leaving her alone in an all-too-silent house.

She didn’t see them out. Didn’t even get up from her kitchen table. Instead, she laid her head down on her crossed arms and closed her eyes against the staccato images that stuttered through her mind.

The apartment building blazing on the television news; the fire truck as she imagined it, heading out without her; the grill of the green car racing toward her; the dead woman on the freeway, her twisted limbs contrasting sharply with Luz Maria’s carefully arranged, blanketed form.

Carefully arranged
, mused Reagan. As if the one who’d brought her here had cared about his victim.

The next thing she knew, an alarm was ringing and she was coughing—choking on air thick and bitter
with hot ash. Her lungs seized as moisture streamed from both her nose and eyes.

She flailed her limbs—or tried to—in an attempt to get away. But something was confining her, preventing her escape, even as the wall of smoke pulsed orange with the fast-approaching flames.

She couldn’t drag in breath enough to scream. Couldn’t move or call for help or—

Heart thudding wildly, Reagan woke up blinking in a warm, yellow streak of sunlight shining through her kitchen window. The telephone was ringing, as she realized that it had been, off and on, for quite some time. That must have been what she’d heard as she’d slept.

Still shaking from the dream, she jerked her head toward the microwave. But the digital display was flashing 12:00, so she focused on her watch instead and saw that it read 10:37.
Damn it.
She had meant to drive straight to the hospital, to check on Luz Maria.

Was that Jack calling? God, she should already be there with him, as she’d promised. How could she have allowed herself to drift off to sleep?

She rose too quickly, knocking over her chair as she reached for the wall-mounted cordless telephone.

As soon as she said hello, the caller said, “Rea—Reagan, is that you?”

She nearly dropped the receiver as her pulse pounded in her ears. All traces of fatigue were swept away on a fresh surge of adrenaline. “Matthias? Matthias, oh my God, is Mom—? Has something happened to my mother?”

“No, Reagan.”

At least her stepfather didn’t bristle over her calling him by his first name, the way he always had. Maybe
after all these years, he’d decided it didn’t matter. Or maybe he was too upset to care.

“Your mother…your mother’s healthy enough,” he said, then cleared his throat. “It’s just…she hasn’t been herself since you called the other night. Why would you? After all these years—it was after four
A
.
M
., you know that? You might have given her a stroke.”

“I thought she’d want to know.” Reagan felt her own blood pressure rising at the censure in his voice. Why had she imagined that he might have changed? “Or would you rather she found out on the news or in the papers?”

“What was it you said to her? What was it that couldn’t wait ’til morning?”

“You mean she didn’t tell you?” asked Reagan, thinking that Matthias Wooten wasn’t the only one who hadn’t changed. She’d thought that by this time her mother would have gotten therapy or something, maybe even learned to cope with the past all on her own. “Joe Rozinski died on duty, at a fire.”

“I think I read about it—he was that friend, wasn’t he? That one you went to stay with?”

“He was my captain,” she answered, her anger boiling over. “And my father’s. He was the one who broke the news to Mom and me. And the one who finished raising me when the two of you couldn’t get the job done.”

Her stepfather swore softly, as though he didn’t want someone in the house to hear. “Why’d you have to go and dredge up all that old stuff for her? We were all set to go on this three-week cruise, everything first-class and—”

“Didn’t you hear me? I said the man was dead, not
fucking playing possum to screw up your vacation.” Reagan tried hard never to let her language degenerate to this point, but she was so far beyond incensed that hot tears coursed down her cheeks and the warm brick of her kitchen had just dissolved in a red haze. “For some reason, I thought that maybe you and my mother had gotten past thinking the whole world revolves around you and your damned money—”

“Don’t you understand?” he interrupted. “Whenever the phone rings at night, whenever a strange car pulls up at the curb, your mother starts shaking, thinking it’s about you. That it’s
you
who’s died on duty.
You
whose funeral she’ll have to live through.”

Her mother thought about her, even worried? The same mother who hadn’t bothered calling after the attacks on 9/11, when so many firefighters had been killed?

“But I imagine you’ve always known that she would suffer,” Matthias went on, the rising emotion in his words threatening to blister her ears if not her heart. “You knew it from the day you told us you meant to become a firefighter like your father. You knew it, but you simply didn’t give a damn.”

He slammed the phone down hard. The second time she’d been hung up on in as many days.

But on this occasion, she asked herself, had both her mother and her stepfather had some reason for their anger? Was it possible that Reagan’s decision to throw herself into suppression firefighting had been less about honoring her father than about punishing her mother? Or were Matthias and Georgina Wooten simply another pair of self-absorbed, pretentious boomers, caught up in the world of who-owned-what?

For a lot of years, that had been the easy answer,
but Reagan was no longer quite so sure it was the right one.

After letting out a deep breath, she picked up the chair she’d knocked down, then found some clean clothes she’d left folded on the dryer—a small mercy, since there was no way she was going back into her room to face that mess. She made time to shower quickly, brush her teeth, and dry her hair, then added a little makeup to counteract the walking-dead look of the pathetic stranger in the mirror.