Deep Burn (Station Seventeen Book 2) Page 10

  Shae’s heart kicked against the crisp white cotton of her uniform shirt. “It had to have started down here.”

  “And that’s why I definitively rule out the least likely possibilities first. It’s almost always easiest to do.”

  “God, you really are Starsky,” she murmured, turning over the methodical process in her head.

  But Capelli dismissed the notion before the words had even fully disappeared into the smoke-stale space between them. “I’m on the RPD’s payroll, but I’m not a cop. This is all just part of my job. Speaking of which…” He gestured to the Bravo side of the first floor, and Shae blinked herself back to the task in front of them.

  “Right. I did the search on this side of the house.” She walked into the first room, her thoughts shifting through everything she could remember about the call. The space was veiled in shadows thanks to the boarded-up windows over her shoulder, but of course, Capelli was prepared.

  He clicked the button on the Maglite he’d produced from his jacket pocket. “The damage is definitely more extensive down here,” he said, swinging the beam slowly over the room to illuminate it fully. Angry black scorch marks marred the walls in more places than not, and what the furniture had looked like in its glory days? Yeah, that was anybody’s guess.

  “Yep,” Shae agreed, taking one last look at the charred remains of the couch now sitting crookedly in the middle of the room. “This was already burning heavily when I did my sweep, too.”

  “And you found Richardson in here?” Capelli’s footsteps echoed in muted thumps as he moved into the next room, which held a lot more natural light thanks to the one-way trip the curtains had taken to the floor courtesy of the flames.

  Shae nodded, her memory churning along with her gut. “Right by the table.”

  “I’m assuming that’s what this was.” He gestured to the ash-covered kindling littering the far wall. The chemicals Shae had seen when she’d last been there had all been removed as part of hazmat protocols. Not that she was surprised—with how flammable they were, leaving them anywhere close to the scene would’ve been a surefire recipe for a flare-up, even once the fire was technically out. But from the warped and buckled floorboards to the fire-ravaged drywall both beside them and above their heads, the sheer damage to this whole section of the room might as well have been a fifty-foot neon sign.

  The fire had started here.

  Shae’s heart began to pound, her gut locked with certainty. “Yes. This part of the room was burning the hardest. See where the fire ignited this wall here, then traveled up to the ceiling and continued over to the wall over there?”

  “So this is almost certainly the point of origin,” Capelli said, his voice so quiet that he seemed to be talking more to himself than to her.

  But she answered him anyway. “It is. If someone mixed the chemicals improperly and left them over one or more of these portable burners long enough”—she pointed to the barely recognizable black metal stands that had been washed to the corner of the room, ruined heating coils and frayed electrical cords set beneath each one—“it would have definitely ignited a fire that would leave burn patterns exactly like these.”

  Capelli’s eyes moved over the room with such deep concentration, Shae would swear he was memorizing every detail. Finally, he looked at her and gave up a slow nod. “I guess there’s really just one question left to answer then.”

  Her brain filled in the blank at the same time he said, “Is there another point of origin that would make this fire arson?”

  With care that bordered on excruciating, Capelli retraced his steps to the front of the house. Although she had no idea how, Shae resisted the urge to elbow her way around him, forcing herself to slow the thrum in her chest and the anticipation in her veins as best she could by double-checking their surroundings for anything she might have missed. The process yanked her back to the last time she’d been here, her memories combining with the adrenaline already doing its very best to commandeer her senses. Finally, they made their way through the foyer and into the other side of the first floor, her breath catching tight in her lungs at the sight of the scorch patterns—some scattered, some in clusters, all dark and destructive—covering nearly every surface. Shae’s chest squeezed harder at the wide, gruesome stain on the floorboards where Denton’s body had been, and a sheen of cold sweat bloomed between her shoulder blades, causing her uniform shirt to hug her skin.

  She’d forgotten, not accidentally, how much blood there had been. The sticky press of her gloves against her palms as she’d adjusted her grip on Denton’s body to keep her hands from slipping. The coppery smell, like a bag full of dirty pennies, that had punched her in the throat the second she’d taken her mask off.

  The bones of Denton’s spine, four of which she’d been able to count with ease through his gaping, gory wound when she’d finally laid him on the gurney outside the house.

  Shae tore her eyes from the floor just in time to see Capelli looking not at the scene, but at her instead, and she shook her head before he could verbalize the are you okay clearly brewing on his lips.

  Breathe in. Breathe out. Do your job.

  Help solve the case.

  “Slater found Denton’s body over here. Obviously.” She swallowed and turned to study the rest of the room, the task calming her brain even as it kept her pulse at a steady clatter. “He was shielded from a lot of the fire by that armchair, but it also made him a little harder to see at first.”

  “CSU went over that part of the room pretty carefully,” he said. His voice carried a slightly softer tone than usual, and despite how desperately she wanted to help with the case, God, she was grateful as hell not to have to relive the memory of dragging Denton out of there.

  Marshaling her thoughts back to the fire itself, Shae squinted, trying to firm up the picture in her mind. “Most of my focus was on Slater when I came back in here, but I definitely remember that this table had the same kinds of chemicals all over it as the one in the other room.”

  She reached out to skim her fingers over the warped surface of the tabletop, which had only sustained less damage than its counterpart on the other side of the house because it was a heavy plastic and metal folding table rather than made of wood. “There,” she breathed, pointing to a huge, upward bloom of fire damage on the interior wall. “Yeah, look. There must have been another one of those portable gas burners plugged into this outlet.”

  Shae scanned the wreckage in the room, her heart beating faster in anticipation, and come on, come, on—ah! A mangled unit with four connected burners lay upside down on the floorboards a few feet away.

  Her brain spun. “If someone left enough chemicals over the burners in both rooms, then threw some more around as accelerant, that would explain how the fire spread so quickly.”

  “Spreading out the chemicals does make sense,” Capelli said, his stare moving meticulously over the table and the burn patterns behind it. “Less risk that the fire would accidentally cause an explosion that could hurt the person setting it that way.”

  “Exactly,” Shae said, undisguised excitement kicking through her chest. “So do you think maybe this was some kind of argument gone wrong? Lawrence kills Denton, then sets fire to the house to try and cover up the murder, only he gets over-zealous with the chemicals and eats too much smoke before he can get out?”

  Capelli frowned. “I think you’re jumping ahead of the facts.”

  “How’s that?” She slid a hand to the hip of her uniform pants. “With how closely these burn patterns match the ones on the other side of the house, there’s no way there weren’t two points of origin for this fire. It’s definitely arson.”

  Although Capelli didn’t argue with her, he also didn’t agree, and for the love of fucking pockets, what more could the man want by way of evidence?

  “That doesn’t mean the L-Man set it, or that he killed Denton. He didn’t have any blood on his hands or clothes. Still, there is more damage on this side of the house.” Again,
his brows bent in concentration, his shoulders locking into a broad line as he continued to examine the room. He seemed more lost in thought than scrutiny, but damn, he sure didn’t pull up on his intensity in the switch.

  “There are two points of origin, but they couldn’t have been set simultaneously by one arsonist. It’s likely that whoever did this started the fire over here first, which gave it more time to burn. That still makes Lawrence the most likely suspect,” she insisted. “Either that or you’ve got the world’s luckiest criminal on your hands.”

  Sure, the chemicals used to cook meth were toxic, but the chances that a third party could kill Denton, set the fire, and ensure that Lawrence would be overcome by the fumes and smoke before he escaped the house? Capelli of all people had to know how steep the odds were on that one.

  A soft chime interrupted whatever he meant to say in response. He slid his cell phone from the back pocket of his jeans, giving her a fast glance of apology as he pressed it to his ear, and after a few minutes’ worth of “mmm hmm”s and “I see”s, he lowered the phone with an exhale.

  “Actually, it looks like our guy has more brains than luck after all. The ME just finished the autopsies, and it looks like both Richardson and Denton were pumped full of sufentanil just before they died.”

  “Sufentanil?” Shae blinked. “What is that, specifically?”

  “It’s a synthetic opioid that’s used as a painkiller or an anesthetic in small doses,” Capelli said.

  She pushed past the confusion in her brain, thinking and processing, and oh God. “What about in larger doses?”

  “In larger doses, it would render a person fully unconscious—even if the building they were in was burning down around them. Which means not only were Lawrence and Denton both murdered and this fire was set by a third party…”

  Dread centered itself behind Shae’s breastbone, digging in deep. “But whoever did it is still out there, and we have no idea who he is or how to find him.”

  Chapter 8

  Vaughn tugged the key to his apartment building from the pocket of his hoodie and fought the deep-seated urge to puke. From the neatly swept sidewalk to the oversized planters boasting fancy yet tasteful winter greenery, everything about this place made his teeth hurt. At least in the shitholes and the slums of North Point, what you saw was exactly what you got. But here in the upstanding part of the south side, Vaughn was stuck with a bunch of fake cheer and rah-rah work ethic crap.

  Fuck, this extortion plan couldn’t work fast enough to get his ass out of Remington and permanently planted on a beach, Mai Tai in hand and millions in his offshore bank account.

  Vaughn slumped just far enough into his hoodie to look standard instead of suspicious. Making certain the glance he swiveled over the area surrounding the entryway was as casual as it was indifferent, he slid the key into the lock on the building’s front door and tugged the thing on its hinges. Five days had passed since his Playing With Matches adventure in North Point, and while Little Ray had given up some semi-decent attempts to find him (presumably in an effort to shoot him in the face, blah blah blah), Vaughn was far too smart not to stay four steps ahead of the idiot.

  Even if he’d had to find a vacant apartment in the goddamn sweet spot of South Hill in order to do it.

  “Oh, hello, Brian. Just coming home from work, dear?”

  He looked up at the tiny, birdlike old lady belonging to the voice, hating his aw-shucks smile with every ounce of his being as he slipped it over his face. “Oh, hi, Mrs. Abercrombie. I sure am. Those third graders know how to wear a teacher right out.”

  Normally, Vaughn cut a wide-as-shit berth around anyone and everyone around him, because truly, so many of them were just so fucking stupid. But elementary school teacher Brian O’Connell, a.k.a. the fictional renter of the poor schmuck whose apartment Vaughn was squatting in while the guy was serving overseas, had been an all-too-easy persona to pull over on the old bat. Since he might be stuck here for at least a little while, it was better to have the building busybody think he was such a nice boy than to be suspicious of him.

  Mrs. Abercrombie pressed her inch-thick glasses higher on her nose, her hands fluttering over the front of her horribly floral housecoat. “I’ll bet you keep those kids busy right back! It’s so lovely to have such hardworking young people living in the building.”

  Briefly, Vaughn wondered if old Mrs. A had an online retirement fund he could drain before he got out of this hellhole. “Not as lovely as it is to be here. You have a nice evening.”

  He crossed the threshold of his stolen apartment T-minus three seconds from sugar shock, and oh yeah, this was more like it. Turning to flip the two-inch deadbolt he’d installed less than a minute after he’d stolen the place, then propping the solid steel door jammer beneath the doorknob and bracing it against the floorboards, Vaughn exhaled in relief. The security in the building itself was good but not great, which was exactly what he needed. Too little and he’d pull a fucking hamstring taking countermeasures, but too much, and he’d have to blow his wad to make sure he stayed under the radar. This place still used regular keys instead of higher tech key cards that could be tracked for usage, and the closed-circuit cameras at all the main entry/exit points were monitored by a private security company that Vaughn had hacked one-handed and half-asleep.

  Which was exactly how he knew Mrs. Abercrombie went to Bingo twice a week at the church up the street, the medical intern down the hall was either not home or in a sleep coma, and the blonde with the fake tits in 6A? He didn’t even want to get started on some of the freaky shit that chick was up to in her free time. But he had eyes on everyone, which was the most important step in staying undetected.

  If he saw every piece on the board, he could control the strategy to outmaneuver and outsmart every last one of the players.

  Vaughn grabbed a bottle of Mountain Dew and a bag of Doritos from the once-tidy kitchen before parking himself at the work station he’d set up in the living room. Powering up his laptop, he threw a handful of chips into his cakehole as he scrolled through the list of alerts he’d set up for various databases, his dusty orange fingers freezing over the keyboard as one in particular caught his attention.

  Remington Fire Department, Office of Arson Investigation.

  “What the fuck?” His heart thumped out a steady stream of you’ve got to be shitting me. Vaughn had flagged the RFD’s database just to keep tabs on the two fires he’d been forced to set so far. He’d rigged the causes of both to look accidental enough on the surface, and really, it wasn’t like most people tended to give a shit about a meth lab run by gang members and a shitty Italian restaurant that had really been the front for the local Mob. Setting fires to make his nastier payback-related crimes harder to investigate was ironically a little nugget he’d borrowed from his good, dead buddy, Julian DuPree. Only since Vaughn had been far more meticulous along with far less emotional about the whole thing, he’d been certain both cases would be open and shut, at least as far as the fires themselves were concerned.

  Yet the fire at Little Ray’s meth lab and the torch job he’d done at Fiorelli’s when that Mafioso prick had refused to pay up were currently marked as “active, pending further investigation”, and huh.

  Guess it was time for more countermeasures.

  Vaughn scrolled through the reports, his mind spinning like a Tilt-a-Whirl at a sideshow carnival. While he wasn’t worried he’d get caught—that would take an act of God and Congress put together—he did need to figure out what steps the RFD was taking so he could outwit any advances they might get lucky enough to make.

  Eh, looked like they had precious little to work with. Knowing how difficult it would be to prove arson with all the gray-area maybes he’d left at both scenes, Vaughn would bet his left nut that the idiot fire marshal would still be knocking around theories a month from now. Actually linking those fires to him on top of it? File that under “never gonna happen”.

  “Let’s see who else is doing backgro
und on these babies,” he murmured. With any luck, it would be that fucktard, Wisniewski. Ol’ Frank couldn’t even find his ass with both hands and a three-way mirror.

  Clicking through the rest of the report, Vaughn landed on the sign-off page, and sure enough, Wisniewski’s name flashed up at him from the bottom of his laptop screen. But it was the one next to it that made him pause, and he narrowed his stare over the screen with a curse.

  Shae McCullough, Engine Company, Station Seventeen.

  He sent a rude noise through his teeth. Those firefighters at Seventeen were such a righteous pain in the ass. Kellan Walker had been a big part of the sting that had taken down DuPree, and now this chick McCullough was shoving her nose into an arson investigation.

  The question was why.

  Three keystrokes and just as many seconds had her personnel file splashed over Vaughn’s laptop screen, and holy shit on a swizzle stick, ‘pain in the ass’ didn’t even begin to cover this woman. She’d been written up a half-dozen times in her five-year tenure with the department, which was ironically also the number of letters of commendation she had to her name. Her latest misstep—insubordination, natch—had landed her ass-first in arson for what looked to be another week and a half. She’d obviously put all of her cases under a fucking microscope, and now Vaughn had to deal with her to ensure that the ones with his name on them stayed cold long enough for him to grab his payday and get gone.

  He re-read McCullough’s file and sorted through a handful of possibilities. While popping her would probably be fun, it also carried a high likelihood of being both messy and suspicious. She was only pushing paper in arson for seven more days, after which the case would presumably get dumped in Wisniewski’s big, fat, lazy-as-hell lap. So really, all Vaughn had to do was distract her a bit, maybe rattle her a little bit more, and bam! He’d be on his way to becoming a permanently unsolved mystery, yet again.

  Leaning all the way back in his desk chair, he uncapped his Mountain Dew, the bottle letting out a soft hiss that echoed his mood as he flipped the lid to the crumb-laden surface of his kitchen table-slash-desk. Yeah, this firefighter bimbo would be easy enough to scare off in the short-term, but if the RFD was going to eagle-eye the fires he was setting as payback in this extortion scam, then logic dictated that he needed to set less fires in order to stay under the radar.