Fireproof (5 page)

Yeah, she was good, and yet she still missed him.

To be fair, who really paid much attention to a construction site after hours? You just didn’t expect anyone to be peeking around the ripper of a bulldozer or standing behind the rubble of pavement it had clawed up that day.

Besides, he didn’t need to hide. He blended in most places without drawing suspicion. In fact, he could buy this woman a drink at the local cop watering hole and she’d never think twice about his being anything other than an interested citizen paying his respects. He’d done just that many times. He liked hanging out, listening to them. Got some of the best information directly from the cops. Details that would help him tweak his methods or give him fresh ideas for his future ventures.

Yeah, he liked cops. Respected them. Even admired them. Probably would have been one, once upon a time, if he hadn’t become so successful in his own profession. Now he made too much money to even consider something in law enforcement. He was good at what he did, in demand. He liked his lifestyle. It gave him plenty of freedom for his outside interests, for his restless spirit and his curiosity-induced adventures.

He watched her walk the entire block, then suddenly she turned around.

Damn! She was good
.

He stayed in the shadows and smiled. He’d never expected to
find someone who piqued his interest here. A most unlikely place. He liked this lady cop. Liked that she could sense his presence. Made it interesting. A challenge.

She was confident, smart, strong-minded. He liked strong women. He particularly liked to hear them scream.

“Hey, are you okay?”

Racine was right beside Maggie. Her voice so quiet and gentle, Maggie almost didn’t recognize it.

She hated that tone, that look of concern. It grated on her nerves and shoved her guard carefully back into place. Since she’d gotten shot last October, too many people approached her like she might shatter or snap before their eyes. And she was getting sick and tired of it.

“I’m fine.”

“You don’t look so good.” Racine dealt the second blow. At least, that’s what it felt like.

Maggie’s best friend, Gwen Patterson, had told her to ignore the kid-glove treatment. People were just showing their concern. Getting pissed off by it would only validate their concerns, their suspicions. Actually, Maggie added “suspicions.” Gwen had used “concerns.”

“I thought I saw someone. Back there behind the lamppost.”

She saw Racine glance over to the area but her eyes didn’t spend much time there and she looked back at Maggie.

Oh great!
Now they’d all think she was paranoid, seeing things in the shadows.

“You said on the phone the body was outside.” Maggie needed to change the subject, wipe that look of concern off Racine’s face. “Where is it? Can we take a look?”

“It’s in between the burning building and the next.”

Maggie turned and started walking toward the perimeter, making Racine follow and hopefully transferring the detective’s mind back to the scene and off Maggie’s newly revealed vulnerability.

“We have to wait until the hose monkeys are finished,” Racine said. “Just hope they don’t wash away and trample all the trace. Right now they say it’s too dangerous for us to be there.” Then Racine shrugged and crossed her arms like they were in for a wait.

Maggie wanted to ask her,
Why didn’t you wait to call me or say not to hurry?
Her patience ran thin with Racine, sometimes hanging on by a frayed thread. Maggie wasn’t quite sure why the woman still pushed her buttons after five years. After all, they’d become friends … sort of friends.

In the beginning, Racine’s reckless tactics had grated on Maggie. The young detective was all bravado, taking unnecessary risks, smart-mouthing and bullying her way through the ranks as though she believed it was necessary to compensate for being a woman. All the while it was like she was shouting, “Yeah, I’m a woman, you wanna make something of it?”

Even now Maggie wondered if Racine, with her jacket left open, was showing off her badge and gun or her full breasts in the tight knit shirt. Or both, as a way of constantly pushing, constantly daring. Racine’s version of Dirty Harry’s “Go ahead, make my day.”

Maggie had spent her entire career doing just the opposite, trying to draw little attention to herself, wanting to blend in by wearing suits that matched her boss’s style. She spent extra time at the shooting range, worked out, and kept in shape so she could defend herself and cover her partner’s back. She didn’t want special credit. Unlike Racine, the last thing she wanted her colleagues to notice was that she was a woman.

Now Maggie started to glance around, pretending to assess the scene and trying to hide the fact that she was searching for an escape. She avoided looking into the fire. It could scald your eyes like looking into the sun. She saw Tully and had to hold back a sigh of relief.

Tall and lanky, R. J. Tully was one of the few men Maggie knew who looked good in a trench coat. And tonight, with his jaw clenched tight and his sight focused just as tightly on something or someone, he looked more like a spy out of a James Bond movie than an FBI agent. Something across the street had his attention.

Maggie headed in his direction and heard Racine following behind her.

“What is it?” Maggie asked him when Tully finally glanced over.

He tipped his head back toward the sidewalk, avoiding drawing attention by keeping his hands deep inside his coat pockets.

Maggie saw what he was looking at immediately.

News crews scrambled to find parking spaces. Some pulled and carried their equipment, jockeying to get as close to the crime scene as possible. There had to be a dozen of them. But one camerawoman and one reporter were already filming in a prime location, up against the perimeter. The cluster of bystanders behind
them was enough to suggest that the news team had gotten there and set up before other people noticed the fire.

“How long have they been there?” Maggie asked.

“They were already here when I arrived,” Tully said, and both he and Maggie turned to Racine.

“Now that I think about it, they beat me, too.”

Samantha Ramirez held the camera in position with one hand. With her other she swiped and tucked a strand of wild hair back up into her baseball cap. She’d already tossed off her coat, yet sweat dripped down her forehead. Another line trickled down her back. Being close to the flames for this long made her feel like the Wicked Witch of the West, melting inch by inch. They had plenty of footage, but Jeffery insisted she leave the camera running.

“You never know what might still happen.”

That’s what he always said. And usually he was right. That’s how they got lucky capturing an unexpected rescue off a rooftop after Katrina. Sometimes not so lucky, when they drew unpredictable rage. That’s how they ended up recording the skid marks and trail behind Sam as she got dragged into a crowd of young male protesters in the streets of Cairo. The latter should have been enough warning for her to say, “Never again,” if not for the additional footage that showed an equally enraged Jeffery Cole racing after her, grabbing a rifle right off the shoulder of a surprised soldier.

The machine gun had spit over the heads of the men who had their fingers dug into Sam’s arms. They already had her shirt wadded
into their fists, ripping at her, grabbing, poking, by the time the bullets zinged overhead. It wasn’t until later, when Sam and Jeffery were safe back in the States reviewing the footage, that she saw the look on Jeffery’s face, the one that had made the men drop her to the ground. The look that told them the next round of bullets wouldn’t be in the air.

“I got your back, you got mine,” he told her that day, and she’d been hard-pressed since then to argue.

Her Spanish-speaking mother, who lived with Sam to help care for Sam’s six-year-old son, didn’t like Jeffery. She called him “Diablo.” Not to his face. Mostly she called him the devil when he woke the household in the middle of the night, like tonight. Her mother didn’t know any of the details about the danger zones they traveled, but she suspected enough that she lit candles at St. Jerome’s Catholic Church every single Sunday.

The longer Sam worked with Jeffery, the more she wondered if her mother was right. Sometimes working with Jeffery Cole felt like she had, indeed, made a pact with the devil.

This was the third fire in less than ten days, but their bureau chief had told them to back off.

“No body count,” he said. “Registers low on the sensational meter.”

He called it an “oh-by-the-way blip,” fifteen, maybe twenty seconds, tops.

Not even close to the feature spots Jeffery prized. Tallying seconds and minutes had become an obsession for Jeffery. He claimed he could find the feature in any news, peeling away the leaves like an artichoke until he got to the tasty heart.

That’s what a good investigative reporter did, he’d lecture anyone who’d listen. Usually it was only Sam, who was unable to
shrug off his bravado and walk away because there was an invisible chain that bonded them together. A chain, like handcuffs … actually more like an umbilical cord, because her life, her career, had come to depend on Jeffery’s success.

She wasn’t exactly happy or proud of that fact, but she’d started living by the saying “It is what it is.” A bracelet she never took off, the leather worn and the pewter pockmarked, had the words engraved on it. It was a constant reminder. Maybe she couldn’t always control all the crap that was thrown at her, but she could damn well control what she made of it.

Her mother’s version was a little more colorful: “It’s your life. Only you can choose what you make with it, whether it’s chicken salad or chicken shit.”

She noticed that Jeffery had taken a break and gone off somewhere, either to find a responder to interview or to take a piss. She didn’t keep track of him when he was off camera. Often she simply got lost in the world through the camera’s viewfinder.

Now, suddenly coming up from behind her, he said, “Looks like we have company.”

She glanced around without stopping what she was shooting. A tall man in a trench coat and two women were headed their way. They were on the inside perimeter of the crime scene tape. The tall woman in the bomber jacket was definitely a cop. Sam bet the other two were feds.

“Keep the camera running,” Jeffery told her. “No matter what, keep me in the shot, too. Remember to get my good side.”

Sam wanted to roll her eyes. Instead she repositioned the camera.

Here we go again.
You never know what might still happen
.

“The bastards are like vultures.”

Maggie ignored Racine’s muttering. It was the fourth time she’d called the news media bastards during the short walk over. She wondered if Racine clumped her partner, Rachel, into that same category. Rachel worked for the
Washington Post
.

Maggie convinced Tully to let her take the lead even though he was definitely the better diplomat.

“Good evening,” the reporter said, an announcement more than a greeting, like the opening to the morning news.