Stone Cold Crazy (Lil & Boris #4) (Lil and Boris Mysteries) (4 page)

Never assume you don’t have victims just because you don’t hear screams.

I ran for number 23 and thanked God for topography. Spottswood Lane is technically a semi-circle, but it’s a semi-circle that takes a bend, and 23 sits on the outside of that bend. The inner part is an outcrop of metamorphic rock. I loved that hunk of rock. It had taken the brunt of the explosion.

I like anything that reduces the number of potential victims.

I hit what had been the front porch of number 23. Yeah, I know, you’re thinking “What an idiot!” Well, that’s the job. You go in when everyone else would be running out. Even when your survival instincts are screaming at you, which mine definitely were.

I went through what would have been a front door if it hadn’t been blown to Kingdom Come. I had to find the Weeds. Vicky taught English down at the high school, so chances were she’d already gone to work. Not that I found much comfort in that. It still left me three potential bodies.

The fire was gaining ground. I paused. I could run upstairs, but the stairs were missing. So were big chunks of the floor. Where the hell would the Weeds have been? This hour of the day? If they weren’t in what used to be upstairs and was now litter, they’d be in the kitchen. I started forward. The smoke was building big-time. There was also a huge geyser of flame spouting out of a wall. Blue flame.

Natural gas?

It took me a lot less time to think all this than it did for you to read it, and I was plunging toward the living room‌—‌more or less intact‌—‌when two hands grabbed me and hauled me backwards. Punk screamed in my ear, “Leave it!”

I’d have fought him if I could. Punk is not, how do I put this, a big-muscled guy. I mean, Tom could have thrown me over his shoulder no problem. Okay, not no problem, I’m at least 160, but he could’ve done it. Punk would’ve gone down in a crumpled heap of crushed vertebrae if he’d tried it. But he could get me going backwards, and down the steps onto the road again.

I know his heart and his head were in the right place. I still came close to decking him.

I tore free of his hands and ran around the house and into the backyard. Every McMansion on Spottswood has a big yard with a deck coming off the kitchen. Number 23 was no different. If the Weeds got out, maybe they’d have gotten out that way.

The fire department arrived behind me. Somewhere, I could hear more sirens. Hard to hear anything over my heart. I shook so hard I have no idea how I got my muscles coordinated enough to propel me forward. I rounded the garage and saw the two doors in the ground.

The thing about being sheriff of a town of merely 300 is, you get to know everyone. You carry their dossiers in your head.

Adam and Vicky Weed had come here to live because they were country people. Liked a quiet, small, rural town kind of life. And they had come here from Tornado Alley. One thing houses around here tend to lack is cellars. It’s the geology. Granite you can deal with, but some of those metamorphic rocks? Forget it. I know for a fact that Spottswood Lane houses lacked real cellars. To the Weeds, that was unacceptable. They’d paid eight grand to put in a storm cellar, and most of that, by the way, was for blasting a decent hole in the bedrock. Explosive experts do not come cheap.

I kicked part of their deck off the doors and yanked. One came up. I looked down into three terrified faces: Adam Weed, and his kids. Aida and Stone. Their eyes swiveled to the fire now consuming their house.

“Anyone hurt?”

Adam shook his head. “I smelled gas, and matches. I just grabbed the kids and ran.”

“Smart man,” I told him as I helped Aida up and out. Typical teenaged girl, gangly and wearing too much eye make-up. Stone came next, clutching a backpack. Adam went last. “Vicky’s gonna cry,” he said. “She’s gonna cry
buckets
.”

Punk brought blankets. We threw them around the Weeds, and led them gently to the minivan that passes for an ambulance. Dr. Hartley’s baby, suitable for minor trauma only, but it’d do. He and his nurse, Kris Spivey, had both gotten their EMT certs, and tucked the Weeds up and drove them to the Emergicare, which is also Dr. Hartley’s office. On the porch of number 24, Rachel Vogt sat and cried. Half the windows in her house, as in number 25, had been broken.

I wiped my face with my hand. It came away coated in the greasy sweat of pure panic. I sat on the hood of my cruiser as the fire department rolled in. Their big house is on the highway at about the midpoint of the county’s north-south axis. They could get to Crazy in twenty minutes in a pinch. I couldn’t believe that much time had passed.

Punk dropped onto the hood with me. “Jesus. We better call…”

I nodded. The gas company. I took out my cell phone, got the number from information, and let them know they had to cut the gas to the area. That’d make people happy. Most of Crazy runs on natural gas for cooking and heat. One of those other bonuses of having Ellers and Littlepages here, like decent internet access and lots of cell phone towers.

Punk exhaled gustily, wincing a little as part of the Weed house caved inward. “Damn,” he said. “You scared me.”

I couldn’t reply. The shakes had me. I couldn’t breathe, the way I shook. Felt like someone had attached a jackhammer to my ribs.

“Lil?”

It’s not something I talk about. It occurred to me, sitting there, that there’s a lot I don’t talk about. Not to Aunt Marge, not even always to Bobbi. There’s some things only someone in the job can understand.

I looked sidelong at Punk. In the cruiser, Boris was watching anxiously, mewing and scratching at the windshield. He wanted out, to be with me. The fire and noise scared him.

I took a very deep breath. I said, “I wasn’t in the New York field office. I was one of the grunt agents they sent up after…‌You know. Some of it stuck in my head.” I tried to cage the memory with words. “It’s the smell that sticks most. What was left of some of the bodies. Their effects. The burning.”

If Punk put his arm around me, I’d have never forgiven him.

He passed me a bottle of water.

I relaxed enough to function. “All right, let’s play this safe and evacuate Spottswood. I’ll park by the office, you catch the Madison Pike end. Last thing we need is rubberneckers.”

4.

A
fter the fire department cut the gas to the house, the fire went out fairly quickly. The state police showed up to lend a forensic hand, not that we needed much of one. At least, that’s what we thought. Gas leaks happen, and they have multiple causes. Faulty fittings, faulty pipe, bad valve, you name it.

Arson.

I looked at the county fire chief. He was about my age, had the hardened eyes of someone who has seen people burned to a crisp. There’s no describing that look. You know it when you see it, and you’re grateful it’s not you.

Unless it is you, that is.

Chief Perry Teague led me around the side of the building, to a fair-sized crater. “Take a looky here.”

I took a looky there. Two hunks of concrete block lay there, like pieces of puzzle. Put together, they still weren’t entire. Someone had drilled a pretty decent hole through the block. I frowned, sniffed at it as I bent close. Gunpowder?

I remembered Adam Weed’s comment. “He smelled matches.”

“Probably the safety additive to the gas,” said Perry. “It can be kind of sulfurish. Or the ignition source, either one.” He swiped an arm over his face, which ended up dirtier than it started. “This wasn’t just a prank, Lil. I don’t think this fucker… Sorry, I mean…” He actually blushed. Blushed, for God’s sake. “Well, we’re damn lucky there was nothing worse. This was a two-stage set-up. Pipe bomb goes bang, there goes the gas line.” He showed me a small bundle of something blackened. “And this was ignition for the fire. Probably cotton soaked in lighter fluid, something similar. That’s my guess, anyway.”

He’d been fire chief and inspector and marshal for years. I’d take his guess over most people’s sworn word in court.

“Why such a big boom?” I asked. “Half the house is all over the neighborhood.”

Perry grinned crookedly. “Natural gas can do that. Google it sometime. There’s blasts take out a city block. In this case, though, I’m betting the homeowner was keeping old paint or something like that in the utility room. I saw some wicked smoke.” He glanced at the burned shell of the house. It was down to a very few timbers and some charcoal. “Cheap crap house,” he commented idly. “No interior insulation. Barely any exterior. Nothing to slow this up. Even the drywall…‌Stuff was so damn thin it might as well have been cardboard. Thank God this didn’t blow the whole damn neighborhood.”

I agreed. “So who should I look for?”

Perry shook his head. “Anyone with internet. You can find out how to build damn near any explosive on some website or other.”

I bit back impatience, and coughed as the wind brought a gust of scorched house into my face. “Narrow it down, Perry. You said this was two-stage.”

“Yeah. Concussion from an explosion can suppress fire, in a tight space like this would’ve been. There had to be secondary ignition to guarantee a fire.” He jingled a bag in which a few tiny shards rested, looking like confetti. “I can already tell you it’s gonna be common pipe. I’d bet Schedule 40 steel, and we had rapid pressure rise. Slower pressure rise doesn’t give you this kind of fragmentation.”

I raised my eyebrows. “You know a lot about it.”

“I have four sons,” he pointed out. “My boys have blown up a lot of old stumps. State lab’ll tell you the same thing about this, by the way.”

They probably would. I jotted the information down. “Thanks, Perry.”

I sighed as I walked away. I’ve never handled a case like this. Sure, we get the occasional ambitious teenager who clears a day off the class schedule by putting a pipe bomb in the school, but they’ve never detonated. I’ve never once handled a bomb or arson as sheriff. Or up in Charlottesville. I’d gotten some basics back in my Bureau days, but I’d never had to use the knowledge. Like my ex-fiancée, I’d been just one more shmuck in a suit, until I went into the anti-terrorism gig, and I’d spent most of that as a shmuck in a suit, too.

I walked back to my office. My cruiser was still blocking the road. I left it there, and caught Boris as he launched himself indignantly at me. He was not a happy kitty.

“Sorry, baby,” I told him and left him on my desk to sulk. “Hey, Tom. Sorry to ruin your day off.”

Tom shrugged. “Talked to Adam Weed. Nothing unusual going on, according to him.”

“We’ll talk to the neighbors. Someone drilled that thing, and someone had to light a fuse on it. Unless we find a detonator.” I smiled sourly at both my human deputies. “Guess what we’re doing all afternoon?”

Tom groaned. “There’s bits of that house a quarter-mile away!”

“More like an eighth,” I corrected. “Look, Perry’s already bagged what he thinks is important, and he’s not bad at his job, so let’s just think of this as a nice day in the fresh air, okay?”

Tom rolled his eyes but clomped to the restroom to change out of his civilian clothes. Punk opened a filing cabinet and pulled out a lot of evidence baggies. I laid my head on my desk. Boris snuffled at my hair, sneezed, and begin to industriously wash me. He purred.

Punk came near, surprisingly quiet on his feet considering one was a metal peg. “You gonna be okay, Lil?”

I drew myself up, to be brave and tough and chipper. I sagged, and shook my head. “Dunno. I just keep thinking, if that whole line blew…”

We shared a shudder. Then I pushed myself to my feet. “Okay. Let’s get this over with.”

***^***

There’s this idea that everyone knows everything in a tiny town. Usually, they do. Unfortunately, Spottswood Lane isn’t really considered part of Crazy, though it’s in town limits. It is a freakish addendum built by the Ellers some years back to make money off the people who want rural privacy within an hour of either Charlottesville or Lynchburg. Back before the McMansions were built, Spottswood Lane didn’t exist. The bulk of it was actually the lower part of Turner Gap Road, off which Turner Mountain Road leads up to Aunt Marge’s house. Then the Ellers bought up a bunch of land, and put up the McMansions. There are thirteen of them, and most are on the inside of the semi-circle, their yards overlooking Spottswood Park. Which was bought by the Littlepages and donated to the town for a park as a slap against the Ellers for building the McMansions. And since most of the houses on Spottswood weren’t bought by locals, and the feud hung over the whole matter, very few people in Crazy pay any attention at all to the goings-on of Spottswood Lane.

To complicate matters, a third of the town’s commuters use Spottswood to get to Turner Gap Road, in hopes of avoiding the speed trap I usually set up somewhere on Piedmont. Asking which cars had been seen on Spottswood was more or less pointless.

Pointless as it was, we asked.

It never fails to amaze me that people who can tell you all about a neighbor’s inability to weed the flowerbeds, trim the hedges, properly bag trash or maintain control of a pet will still, in event of a crime, have noticed absolutely nothing of use to a cop.

I plodded over to what remained of the Weed house, and joined Punk. The firemen had trampled the grass, destroyed any hope of evidence beyond traces of the pipe bomb. And even half of those were probably washed into the mud.

Boris bounded past us and began sniffing eagerly around the perimeter of the back yard. I tossed Punk a cold bottle of Gatorade that Mrs. Vogt had given me. I could hear the thunk of her hammer as she nailed plastic over her broken windows. “Anything?”

Punk swigged, shook his head. “Can’t believe this,” he said, and perched on a beam from the collapsed deck. “Here. Hell, anywhere. Who’d hate enough to do this to someone?”

Rhetorical question, I knew.

“I mean, adults, okay, but kids…” He gestured broadly. “The neighbors’ kids.”

He passed me the Gatorade. I drank, and handed it back. “We’ll get ‘em.”

“Yeah.”

In the privacy of the destroyed house’s back yard, Punk’s hand crept over and came to rest on mine. I squeezed back. We let go simultaneously. It wouldn’t do to get caught on the job.