The waitress showed up with menus and a carafe of coffee. I picked up the photos and held them out of harm’s way so no inadvertent drips from the pot would mar them.
Mel reached over and touched the back of my hand. “Are you all right?” she asked.
I shook my head. On the one hand, I wasn’t all right. On the other hand, I was. For the first time in my entire life I was a whole person-one with both a mother and a father.
“It’s a little much to take in all at once,” I said.
Ralph nodded. “I’ve made some discreet inquiries,” he said. “If you want to see your father’s sister before she passes, you should probably go to Texas as soon as possible. She’s a cancer patient who has decided to accept no additional treatment.”
“You mean like hospice?” I asked.
Ralph nodded. “Pain meds only. If you use your jet card, you can be there in a matter of hours.”
“I can’t walk away from this case,” I said. “Ross Connors is counting on us.”
Like me, Josh had been a fatherless kid until Marsha Longmire and Gerry Willis had tried to take him under their wing. Unfortunately, Josh had turned away from everything they’d offered him-a new family, a place in their universe, life itself. He had rejected it all. I didn’t want to make the same mistake.
But on the other hand. .
“Let me pull together a few more documents,” Ralph continued, “so that when you go you’ll have the benefit of the full story insofar as we know it. But don’t go by yourself,” he cautioned. “Take Mel with you.”
“Are you kidding?” I said. “She’s my partner. When it comes to family matters, she’s got my back.”
I looked at Mel. I expected her to be smiling; she wasn’t.
“I was worried that I had overstepped by turning Ralph loose on this,” she said. “I wasn’t sure how you would react.”
“I’m still not sure how I’m going to react,” I said. “But I think I needed something to get me off dead center and help me overcome decades of inertia.”
“So it’s all right then?”
I nodded.
The waitress stalked up to our table. “What’ll you have this morning?” she said. “And do you want separate checks?”
“No,” I said. “One check only. This one’s on me.”
We ordered breakfast. I don’t remember what I ate. I don’t remember what was said. I sat there the whole time continuing to stare down at the pair of photographs of the man who had been my father.
It was an odd sensation. Seeing him made me happy and sad. Glad to see who he was and to know he had once existed. Sad to realize that I had never known him; would never know him. And sad, too, to realize that he never knew me or my kids, especially his grandson, Scott, whose face was stamped with the same indelible family features-the Mencken family’s in Hank’s world; the Beaumont family’s in mine.
Hello and good-bye at the same time. It made me happy; it broke my heart.
Then Mel’s phone rang. She answered. “No!” she said. “When?” And then, “Okay. We’ll be right there.”
She picked up her purse. “Sorry,” she told Ralph. “Time to go to work.”
“What?” I asked.
“That was Ross,” she said. “There’s been a fire at Janie’s House overnight. He says the office building is a total loss.”
Chapter 23
Ralph’s cell phone rang just then, too. Answering, he waved at us while I gathered up the photos and took them along as we left the restaurant.
“Are you okay?” Mel asked as we got into the car.
“Okay,” I said, “and more than a little amazed. Thanks for putting Ralph on the case.”
“You’re welcome,” she said.
It took only a few minutes to drive from the Red Lion to what was left of Janie’s House. Contrast is everything. The restaurant had been quiet and verging on sedate. At Janie’s House, chaos reigned for several blocks in either direction on Seventeenth Avenue Southeast. As Ross had told Mel, the middle building in the three-house complex had burned to the ground. Sparks from that had ignited the roof on one of the other two buildings and had burned through the shingles and into the attic space. No doubt that one would have suffered both smoke and water damage. Only the charred back wall of the middle building was still standing when we arrived. Firemen swarmed around it, extinguishing hot spots.
Our Special Homicide badges were enough to get us through the police barricades. Officers there told us that the fire chief in charge of the incident was Alan Mulholland. Dressed in full firefighting gear, he stood at the center of the action waving his arms and shouting out orders, while a frantic Meribeth Duncan, wearing sweats and with her orange-and-purple hair in sleep-tossed disarray, dogged his every step.
“How is it possible that there’s this much damage when the fire department is just down the street?” she demanded. “Couldn’t you have done something sooner?”
“Look, lady,” he said impatiently, “we were here less than four minutes after the call came in. You should have had hardwired smoke detectors in all the buildings. The one in the second building went off just fine when the roof caught fire,” he said, pointing toward the house next door.
“All three buildings had the same kind of equipment,” Meribeth insisted. “We had to install smoke detectors in order to bring them up to code. We have state-of-the-art intrusion detectors as well.”
“Then maybe you should have a chat with the installer,” Mulholland said. “This one didn’t work at all.”
Mel took Meribeth by the arm and led her away, giving me a clear shot at Mulholland.
“Is there a chance someone disabled the alarm?” I asked.
“That’s a possibility, I suppose,” Mulholland began, then he stopped answering my questions, glared at me, and fired back one of his own. “Who the hell are you?”
When I showed him my badge, he gave me an appraising look. “Special Homicide,” he mused. “That’s Ross Connors’s outfit, isn’t it?”
I nodded.
“What are you doing here? I haven’t released any information about finding a body.”
“Is there one?” I asked.
My question was met with a sharp “No comment.”
Which told me that there was a body, but I didn’t press him about it.
“We’re here working another case,” I told him.
“A case connected to what happened here?” he asked.
“Could be,” I said.
When someone starts a game of noncooperation, it’s always pleasant to return the favor.
“So what are we talking about here,” I asked, “arson?”
Mulholland gave me a long look. Then, because I seemed to have passed some kind of first-responder professional muster, he gave me a reasonable answer.
“Looks good for arson, but we don’t know that for sure,” Mulholland said. “It’ll have to cool off before we can do any real investigating. It’s too soon to send in the accelerant-sniffing dogs, but I’d say, yes, my best guess is arson. And, yes, there’s at least one body in the rubble and maybe more. If it turns out that alarms and sprinkler systems were disabled, that would boost the likelihood of it being an inside job.”
Mel came over and joined us at that point. “How tough is that to do?”
Mulholland looked at her and then at me. “We’re together,” I said.
“It might be tough, but for someone with a reasonable amount of tech savvy, it wouldn’t be impossible.”
“Who called in the fire?” I asked.
“Some guy out delivering newspapers on his morning route saw it first. The 911 call came in just after six A.M., but the fire had been burning for some time before that. It looks like the fire was started in one of the back
