NEW YORK CITY
Although the last thing Shawn wanted to do was stop at the grocery story to get food for dinner, especially since it meant paying for food for Luke, he did it anyway. He was in that good a mood. Not only had he made a single day’s largest progress in his document unraveling, but Sana had already run a second sequencing of the tooth-pulp mitochondrial DNA, and the sequence was exactly the same as the first. Thus, all around it was by far their most successful day in relation to the ossuary, and such progress bode well for papers in the not-too-distant future.
“I had an idea,” Sana said, as she and Shawn loaded the groceries into the trunk of a yellow cab.
“Really?” Shawn questioned jokingly. “Such a novel occur rence.” Sana hauled off and smacked Shawn playfully with a package of paper towels.
In such a playful attitude, they arrived home. While Shawn paid the fare, Sana walked to the rear of the taxi to get the groceries. As she lifted them to the curb, she thought about Luke and wondered how he was going to act. She truly had no idea, and her thoughts ranged between anger on one extreme to humor on the other. As for how he had acted in the immediacy of the episode, she felt certain he’d be embarrassed, and she hoped he planned to apologize, as she had strongly suggested, so that the incident could be put behind them. After having thought about his response on and off most of the day, Sana still considered it as over-the-top inappropriate. “Satan’s whore,” she murmured inaudibly. Such language coming from such an angelic-appearing person seemed shocking to her.
“Do you have the groceries?” Shawn’s voice rang out. He’d finished paying the driver.
“I could use a hand,” Sana yelled back.
Shawn appeared around the side of the taxi and took the two bags that Sana had already lifted from the trunk. She fished out the third and last and slammed the trunk’s lid with her elbow.
As they walked up to the front door, Sana got her circle of keys from her purse. “Fine time for one to be thinking of this now,” Shawn commented. “I think we finished the final bottle of wine last night.”
“If you want, you can walk over to Sixth Avenue later and get some for tonight,” Sana suggested. “Our celebrating that you mentioned to Jack is going to be rather lame unless we get some wine.”
“Maybe I’ll invite Luke,” Shawn said. “It would be good for him to get out of the house.”
“That’s nice of you,” Sana said, and meant it. At the same time she wondered what Shawn would say if she told him that Luke had called her “Satan’s whore” the night before. When Shawn was angry, he had a sailor’s vocabulary.
Sana got the usual three locks open with their respective keys but then noticed there was another one, which she was certain was new. She was about to ask Shawn about it when she tried the door. It opened without a problem, and that was the last she thought of it.
Instead, she stepped aside to allow Shawn to enter first, as he was carrying the bulk of the groceries.
“Hello, Luke,” Sana heard Shawn say as she kicked the door closed behind her. She then reached around and threw the three dead bolts. When she turned again, Shawn was talking with Luke, but it was not sociable talking. Shawn was telling Luke that he was not allowed to smoke in the house under no uncertain terms.
“It’s just a cigarette,” Luke responded. His tone was not defensive or even apologetic. It was more challenging, as if the house rules were his to determine.
“I’m telling you, there is no smoking in this house,” Shawn repeated slowly but definitively.
“Fine,” Luke said insouciantly. He stood up from the chair he was in, pushed past Shawn, and made his way to the front door. Instead of opening the door, he locked it more securely with a key, which he pocketed, then headed for the stairs.
“Where on earth are you going?” Shawn questioned when he thought Luke was going upstairs. “Don’t make me repeat myself yet again!”
Luke passed the entrance to the stairs, blithely rapping his knuckle on the newel post. He seemed strangely detached, openly ignoring his hosts, who had just come home.
Shawn looked at Sana as if he expected her to have an explanation for such bizarre behavior. The man had a lit cigarette but wasn’t smoking it, nor was he getting rid of it.
It seemed as if he was on a walking tour of the residence until he came to the door to the cellar, which was under the front stairs. There he stopped, and once he had a hand on the doorknob, he turned back to look directly at Shawn and Sana. Appearing now as breezy as he’d sounded just a few moments earlier, he recited a Hail Mary, at the conclusion of which he snapped open the basement door, threw in the lighted cigarette, and slammed the door closed.
”What the hell!” Shawn yelled near the top of his voice. Without a moment’s hesitation, Shawn ditched the groceries he’d been holding onto the couch and bolted for the cellar door. Whether he had felt or heard the throaty
She did call out to him, but he was not to be deterred. His goal was to get the cigarette just as soon as he could and crush it into harmless cinders. As he got to the door, he threw Luke aside, grabbed the doorknob, ripped open the door, and started down, all in the same motion. Unfortunately, a huge ball of exploding gasoline vapor seeking lower pressure rocketed upward and immediately seared off his eyelashes, eyebrows, and most of his hair. Within seconds the old wooden house with its hundreds upon hundreds of pockets of air within its aged walls was a flaming inferno, and the fact that the only insulation in the building was crumbled period newspaper caused the fire to spread even faster. Seconds later, the heat flux soared over the thirteen-hundred-degree flash point such that objects within the building, including people, spontaneously burst into flame.
Sana and Shawn, although on fire, did reach the front door, only to find it impossible to open.
Fifteen minutes later, a neighbor, noticing the glow coming from outside his house, looked out and then frantically called nine-one-one. Eleven minutes later the first fire trucks appeared, but by then the only possible thing to save was the chimney.
Epilogue
7:49 A.M., THURSDAY, DECEMBER 11, 2008
NEW YORK CITY
Since Jack wasn’t doing autopsies for the week, he didn’t make it a point to arrive at the OCME particularly early, and today he arrived at seven-forty-nine. On normal days by that time he surely would have already picked out what he considered the best cases and would already be down in the autopsy room with Vinnie Amendola, giving him a hard time or vice versa. Instead, Jack was content to be locking up his bike at the side of one of the intake garages in full view of security. When he was finished, he gave security a wave, comforted by knowing the guys would keep an eye on his bike.
Since Shawn and Sana were not expected in until ten or thereabouts, Jack decided to finish the paperwork on all his outstanding cases if possible, so that when he went back to doing autopsies he’d be starting out with a perfectly clean slate, something he’d not experienced in the thirteen years he’d been there. Wanting to get a coffee as well as a sense of what was generally happening in the morgue that morning, Jack went up to the ID room, where he knew one of the better MEs was on duty for the week, Dr. Riva Mehta. She had been Laurie’s office mate for many years and was a dedicated, intelligent, and hardworking colleague, which was more than Jack could say about too many others on the staff.
He could smell the coffee even before he got there. Although he teased Vinnie mercilessly about most everything else, Jack never teased him about making the coffee.
Vinnie had it down to a science, and by not varying his technique, the coffee was not only good for institutional brew, it was also consistent. After a half-hour bike ride, it always hit the spot.
“Anything particularly interesting?” Jack asked Riva, squeezing behind her where she was sitting at the desk to glance over her shoulder before turning his attention to the coffee.
“It’s about time, you lazy bum,” a husky voice announced.
Jack looked up from the coffee machine to see his old friend Lieutenant Detective Lou Soldano toss Vinnie’s
