The fire burned for over two hours. Bea and Pete were in bad shape by the end of that time, both weeping openly. As the rest of us tried to shore them up, I found myself outwardly numb, unable to display my emotions. Within, I was not far from collapsing like that roof.
Firefighters were still moving in and out of the building when I saw one of their officials walk up to Captain Bredloe, glance at us, and turn his body so that we could see only his back. I recognized the signs.
“No,” I said aloud as I watched Bredloe cover his eyes. “No….”
The others followed my gaze. Now Bredloe was talking to someone in a blue jacket, a man who used his radio. The man turned toward the building, began walking toward it. The bright yellow letters on his jacket said “Coroner.”
Bredloe began walking toward us. Bea grasped my hand. I wanted Bredloe to stop, to never reach us — but he kept drawing closer, and now I could see his face was drawn into a terrible frown.
“We don’t know where Frank is,” he said. “I want you to understand that before you hear anything else. Do you understand? We don’t know where he is.”
We all nodded.
“There’s a body in the building,” he said. “We don’t know who it is. Coroner is going in there now.”
I felt myself sway. Jack moved closer, let me lean on him. Bea was trembling.
“It’s not Frank!” Pete half shouted. He walked off, reached the limit of the police tape around us, and began pacing, swearing to himself in Italian. Rachel watched him in silence.
“Perhaps we should all sit down,” Bredloe suggested. Pete and Rachel stayed standing; everyone else moved to a chair. Bea began crying quietly again.
Think, I told myself. Think. You’ll have all kinds of time to panic later, hours and hours to fall apart. Right now, just think.
“Only one body?” I asked.
“Yes — so far. It may take us a day to sift through the debris. But we were watching the building with thermal sensors before the fire broke out, and there were only two people in the building — one who moved about and one who stayed stationary. What’s more, the body is in the part of the building where Ryan and Neukirk had special construction done.”
“The soundproof room?”
He nodded. “We asked the fire department to try to get to that area first, because we assumed that might be where they were keeping Frank.”
“And that was the area where….”
“Where the remains were found,” he finished for me. “Yes. The fire department believes a separate fire was started in that room — using an accelerant, perhaps gasoline — that’s what was used on the roof. The chemical analysis will take time. And while it will take some time to make any final determination, they believe the fire in that room may have started after the roof fire. It fits with the last thing the helicopter saw — the person who was moving around in the building left that area not long before the rooftop fire started. Otherwise, the men in the helicopter would have detected the fire in the room before they had to pull out.”
“Any sign of that person?” I asked. “The one who was moving around?”
“No,” Bredloe said. “But we’re searching the area.”
“The arithmetic is all wrong, isn’t it?”
“What do you mean?” Bea asked. She had stopped crying, was wiping at her face.
“There should have been four people in that building,” I said. “Frank, Bret Neukirk, Samuel Ryan, and a woman — Faye Taft — Samuel’s girlfriend.”
As I said her name, I thought of Samuel’s voice as he’d spoken to us during the last phone call, of his chilling lack of regard for her.
“Yes,” Bredloe said. “Two of them were out of the building before we arrived.”
“And at least one of the other two knew you were coming.”
“Why do you say that?” Bredloe asked.
“They were ready with the gasoline on the roof, and had some method of igniting it without going up there, right?”
“Yes. The arson investigators will find the ignition device, I’m sure.”
“Unless it leads them to Frank, I’m not sure I care.”
He didn’t reply.
“There are other signs that this was all set up in advance,” I said. “Ryan and Neukirk have contacted me by phone several times in the last few days. They never once allowed themselves to be traced — until now. I think they wanted to be traced. Ryan picked a topic that was bound to elicit an emotional reaction from Cassidy. Maybe they even wanted you to do just what you did — remove him, at least temporarily, from the case.”
“Why would they want to do that?” Bredloe asked.
“I’m not sure. Maybe because Cassidy is getting a feel for them, is starting to anticipate them to some degree. Maybe if he had been here, he would have reacted differently from Lewis. I don’t know.”
“The negotiator was never really allowed to get involved in this one,” Bredloe said.
“No, I guess not.” I reconsidered. “Maybe it wasn’t to get Cassidy off the case. Maybe it was a distraction — they knew you’d be concerned with Cassidy’s reaction — and might not stop to think about the length of the call,
