“I don’t know. The firemen will be taking videos of the crowd, and probably the cars parked close enough to see. They always do that when there’s a chance of arson. I doubt that they’ll have much question about this one.”
Emily and Ray got out of the car. She stayed close to him, but she began looking in every direction except the direction of the fire. A small crowd had gathered, and she recognized a few of her neighbors standing on the sidewalk near their own houses, their faces illuminated by the fire. A few were still in bathrobes, and others dressed in what must have been the clothes they took off a few hours ago.
She scanned the crowd for a stranger who might be the man who had come into her bedroom in a ski mask, but she didn’t see anyone who frightened her. She saw the O’Connors, all seven of them lined up on their front lawn, staring up at the sparks rising on the heated air above the flames on Emily’s house. Denny had the garden hose connected to the spigot at the corner of their house. She hoped that the flying sparks didn’t ignite anybody else’s roof.
There were the Weilers on the other side, all the kids on their front steps as though they were bleachers. The parents must be on the other side or in the back yard. After a moment, she saw the Weilers’ car back out of the garage slowly and stop just above the sidewalk. It was probably a wise precaution. The fire could easily catch their garage, and this would save their car. If they planned to move anything out of their house, this might be the time.
She saw a couple of firefighters walking along the line of people on the sidewalk, and it looked to her as though one of them had a camera on a strap around his neck. This could be the one Ray had mentioned: the fireman who would take a long, careful look at who was there to watch the spectacle of her house burning down.
A woman came out of the line and spoke to the fireman for a few seconds. She pointed at Emily, and the firefighter looked over his shoulder at her. The woman hurried across the street, and Emily saw she was Margaret Santora. “Oh, my God, Emily!” she said. “We were all so afraid you didn’t get out. We were so scared. How did it happen?”
“I … was out,” said Emily. “I have no idea.”
Emily didn’t miss the way Margaret’s eyes flicked to the side to take in Ray Hall, then back to Emily’s face.
“Margaret, this is Ray Hall, one of the detectives from the agency.”
“Pleased to meet you,” Margaret said. She didn’t seem to be, and her left hand rose to the neck of her robe to pinch the sides together in an unconscious gesture. She said to Emily, “Well, I’m just glad you’re okay, that’s all. The rest of it is the insurance company’s problem.” She waited for a moment to see Emily’s reaction.
Emily had not thought about financial loss, or about insurance. She was thinking about destructive power, the heat of the flames, the malice of the man who had tried to burn her to death in her sleep.
She was distracted by the firefighter she had noticed with her neighbors. He had appeared only a few feet off. “Mrs. Kramer?”
“Yes?”
“I’m Captain Rossman. I need to talk with you for a few minutes.”
Emily was alarmed by his manner, which seemed more insistent than she would have expected. But she noticed that Ray had moved to the man’s side and a step behind, and he was nodding. “Sure,” she said. “Here?”
“Let’s go to my car.”
He halfturned and nearly bumped into Ray. “This is Ray Hall,” she said. “He’s a … colleague of mine.”
“Hello,” said Captain Rossman. He gave Ray’s hand a perfunctory shake, barely looking at him. He took Emily to a Ford Crown Victoria that looked like a police car that had been painted red, opened the door for her and got in behind the wheel.
She said, “Are you the arson investigator?”
“I’m one of them.”
“Do you know yet if it was?”
“Yes. There were accelerants in the corners of all the rooms. The first people in said it looked and smelled like the whole place was soaked.”
“I was afraid of that.”
“Oh?” he said. “You expected this? Why?”
“It’s complicated. My husband owned a detective agency. He was murdered nine days ago-shot on the street. Two days ago, I had a visit here in the middle of the night from a man with a gun and a ski mask. He wanted some information that my husband supposedly had about someone.”
“What was it?”
“I have no idea.”
“Who was the person the information was about?”
“I don’t know that, either. But the man in the ski mask said he’d kill me if I didn’t give it to him. I think he would have, but he got interrupted when another of our detectives showed up and scared him off. He was back last night, but the guys couldn’t catch him.”
Rossman sat scribbling in his notebook, but she was sure he had a recorder. He had reached into his coat as they had sat in the car, and his hand had come back empty. Finally he said, “You called the police?”
“Yes. They were here for hours two days ago, then again last night.”
“So there’s a police report?”
“I assume there is, or will be.” She stared at him. “Are you having trouble believing me?”
He turned in his seat to face her. “I’m sorry to give that impression. At this stage, I’m just collecting all the facts I can while they’re still fresh. The firefighters told me that the house wasn’t arranged in the usual way. The living room had furniture piled up in it, and the rest of the house was empty. Why was that?”
“I had just had a horrible experience in that house. When the man broke in the second night, I knew that whatever else happened, I didn’t intend to live there again. But I knew that it was also the most likely place to find whatever it was that my husband had hidden and that the man in the ski mask wanted. Mr. Hall and I were searching the furniture-mostly drawers and cabinets-and then moving everything to storage so that when it was gone we could search the house itself. We had already taken a couple of loads out. The furniture in the living room was going tomorrow.”
“Did anybody besides Mr. Hall know you were doing that?”
“Yes. The other people from the detective agency.” Various thoughts raced through her mind. She couldn’t mention that April had loved Phil; she couldn’t tell this man that Dewey was Phil’s son. “They were my husband’s friends, and my friends. They were working all day doing the same to the agency office.”
Rossman looked at her for a moment, but this time it was different, less distrustful. “I guess I should be the one to tell you, Mrs. Kramer. Your office had a fire tonight, too.”
25
Jerry Hobart walked along the street, looking over the low rooftops of smaller buildings at the office fire. Smoke from the office building looked black against the sky, but inside the blackness there were flames, appearing at first like small lightning flashes inside a dark cloud. But as he walked toward the building, the flames seemed to gain rapidly, now coming out of the roof of the building and flickering above the smoke.
The firefighters swarmed around the foot of the building, but the fire seemed to Jerry Hobart to be all above the fourth floor, where Kramer Investigations had its office. The firefighters had gone up on long ladders and broken widows to spray hoses inside, but they were mainly soaking the levels below the fire because that was all they could reach.
There seemed to be yellow raincoats moving past upper windows now and then, but Hobart supposed they were just searching for people trapped inside, and before long those firefighters were going to have to come out, too. Hobart stopped almost two blocks from the building and watched for a minute. He heard more sirens, com ing fast from somewhere behind him. The sirens weren’t police sirens, but Hobart decided it was time to go. There was no reason to see more. He walked across the street and around the corner where he had left his car, then heard the
