OR SOMETHING THAT sounded much like a bomb, an explosion that blew them both off their feet and sucked the air right out of their lungs. When Kyle opened his eyes, he could see a great tongue of blue flame reaching down the stairwell and lapping at his feet. Still on his back, he scurried away, pulled the old man, lying dead flat, with him.
“Dad? Dad? Are you okay?”
The old man came groggily to consciousness. “What in the blazes?”
“He set the house on fire.”
“The devil.”
“He’s going to burn us to cinders.”
“And burn the file, too,” said the old man.
“What?”
“The file. That’s what he’s after.”
“Who?”
“Did you look in it?”
“A l it t le.”
“Then you know.”
“The senator?”
“Who else?”
“The hell with it,” said Kyle, tossing it aside. “He can have it.”
The old man gasped, but Kyle ignored him. The heat from the flames coming down the stairs pressed upon Kyle’s skin. But the heat was coming from somewhere else, too. He stood up, raised his hand, could feel it pour down from the ceiling. The floor above was burning. It wouldn’t be long before the whole thing collapsed on their heads.
“We have to get out of here,” said Kyle. “Now.”
“All right, then. Up the stairs it is.”
“But he still has the gun. He’ll be lying in wait outside the house, probably in the back, hoping we’ll charge up the stairs and out the open door. We’ll be gasping for air as he picks us off.”
“Maybe he’ll get one, but it’s still our only chance,” said the old man. He slowly rolled onto his knees and then crawled toward the file that was now leaning up against one of the walls. “I’ll follow you.”
Kyle turned and looked at the old man as he scuttled across the floor. “It really is you, isn’t it?”
“In the flesh.” The old man grabbed the file and then, with much struggle, pushed himself to standing. “Let’s go, then. Up the stairs with you. ‘Half a league, half a league, half a league onward.’ ”
“What the hell is that?”
“Tennyson.” Pause. “Alfred Lord Tennyson?”
“What was he, a ballplayer?”
“A poet. Golly God, son, have you no culture?”
“Not yours,” said Kyle. “Then what’s a league anyway?”
The old man thought. “I don’t really know. Isn’t that something?”
“That’s something, all right.” Kyle looked at the old man. He wasn’t small, but there was something fragile about him. Kyle still wasn’t sure how this miracle had happened, but he knew instinctively that this old man was his father and that he desperately needed Kyle’s protection. And protect him he would, whatever the cost.
“Okay,” said Kyle. “Let’s do it.”
Kyle made his way toward the stairway and then stopped as the flames started dropping down, catching onto the wood step by step. The idea of rushing through the fire, his feet burning all the while, only to be shot as he cleared the doorway, seemed the most futile of acts. He stopped, shook his head, turned around, saw the rusted washer and dryer by the front wall, and flashed on a memory.
It was dark in the memory, and he was scared, just like now, and he was hiding, just like now. It was when he was sixteen, and it involved the empty Simpson house, a rat, a bong, and a small fire that had been accidentally set—the less said about all of which, the better. The police had shown up with their sirens, and they had, each of them, Kat included, stormed out of there and torn off in all different directions. He had headed home but he couldn’t rush in his house like a madman, he was more afraid of his mother than of the police. So instead he dove under his own front porch and stayed there, peering out, as the police cruisers slipped by, searchlights panning the doorways. And he remembered a comforting wash of warm, sodden air flowing over him as he cowered. A wash of warm, sodden air flowing from the dryer.
An explosion blasted him out of his reverie, forcing him into a crouch of fear. It was loud, but it hadn’t come from the house. It had a familiar sound, as if fireworks were going off nearby. Fireworks? That made no sense, but nothing made sense just then, and there wasn’t time to figure any of it out.
He pointed the flashlight at the dryer, found the exhaust pipe, followed it up to where it exited through the drywall.
“Hold this,” he told his father, handing over the flashlight as he climbed atop the dryer. With a single savage jerk, he yanked out the exhaust pipe, leaving a hole in the drywall. Wildly he started ripping the drywall away until he saw, behind it, a plywood patch, larger than any of the windows, through which the dryer’s exhaust had vented.
“What’s that you found?” said his father.
“Our way out,” said Kyle.
He banged the plywood with his fist but couldn’t break through. He grabbed hold of the hole in the exhaust and pulled, but it wouldn’t release. The patch had been screwed into a frame set into a large opening in the stone foundation. He reached up to an edge, worked his fingers as far into the crack as he could, pulled with all his might. Nothing.
Another explosion from outside the house, and then others closer, explosions like gunshots that seemed to come from the top of the stairs.
“I need a screwdriver, or something like a knife,” shouted Kyle in frustration.
A quick
click-swish
from beside him. He looked down. His father was holding out a black-handled knife with a long, narrow blade.
“Will this do?”
Kyle stared for a moment at the incongruous sight of his father holding a switchblade, something he could never have imagined in the years before this very moment, then grabbed the thing and started working the blade beneath the plywood and around the screws. He thought it would be a tougher job, but decades of moist, warm air had weakened the wooden frame. With a shot of leverage from the knife, the plywood began pulling away from the frame. When there was enough of a gap to get a proper grip, he put the knife in his teeth, took hold, and heaved. He almost fell off the dryer as the plywood wrenched free, leaving a wide opening leading to the area beneath the front porch of his house.
“Can you make it through?” said Kyle.
“Watch me,” said his father as he struggled to lumber atop the dryer.
Kyle reached out a hand and pulled him up and then dropped to his hands and knees to make a stepping stool.
A few moments later, they were lying side by side beneath the front edge of the front porch. It was a strangely delicious moment for Kyle Byrne. He was racked with fear, yes, and in pain still from the beating, yes, and the heat bearing down on the two of them from the house was excruciating, despite the cool air that was now bathing their faces. But here he was, in the same spot where he’d been lying alone ten years before, once again smack in the middle of trouble, but this time with his father.
An explosion overhead, and the street, already illuminated by the fire raging above them, lit up even brighter. In the distance, sirens could be heard.
“My car is in the driveway,” said Kyle, “around the back. Stay here while I grab it.”
“Don’t play the fool, boyo,” said his father. “The car’s gone, along with the house.”
“The house I don’t really care about, the bank took it already, but the car’s pretty much all I have left.”
“Not anymore. Either it’s been immobilized or he’s waiting for you to jump inside before he starts shooting. It’s a death trap now.” “I can’t leave it.” Pause. “It has your ashes in it.”
“You kept them all this time?”
“Funny, isn’t it?”
“Yes, actually, but not worth your life anymore, are they? I parked my rental about a block away.”
“But, Dad, it’s my car.”
“It’s our only chance. We have many things still to do. We need a clean breakaway. Trust me on this.”
Kyle turned and looked at him, looked at his father, and suddenly he didn’t give a damn about the rusted old Datsun. What he wanted, what he had wanted for years, was someone he could rely on. His father, even before he supposedly died, had never been what you could call reliable, and his reappearance after fourteen years of what could only be considered desertion didn’t bode well for a swift turnabout. And yet Kyle had so often dreamed over the years of just this, a chance to put his fate in his father’s hands, that he couldn’t refuse. There were questions that needed to be answered, and soon, but not now. Now he’d rely on the old man, because it’s what he had wanted to do all his life.
“All right,” said Kyle. “I’ll follow you.”
“Good. Are you ready?”
“I’m ready,” said Kyle, and then he turned his head. “Hey, Dad.”
“Yes, boyo?”
“Happy Father’s Day.”
A gentle smile on his father’s face. “Is that what it is?”
“That’s what it is,” said Kyle, his voice choked, his heart so full it cracked. “Okay, let’s go.”
In the street a small crowd had gathered, pulled out of their parlors and off their porches by the light and the noise, watching the inferno devour the empty old Cape Cod as they waited for the arrival of the fire engines that had been summoned over and again from one cell phone after another. And every now and then, another rocket would shoot up from behind the house like a signal flare from some fiendish battle, exploding across the stars in fingers of fire emanating from a perfect blue eye hanging fierce and unblinking in the night sky. And the crowd would go “Awww” as if the display were being put on solely for their amusement.
And just as one of those rockets burst incandescent in the darkness over the flaming house, while most faces were tilted to the sky with mouths involuntarily open in delight, a young boy noticed two strange shadows rising like ghosts from the ground beneath the burning house’s porch, one ghost seemingly young and strong, the other older and thicker, moving stiffly as he clutched something to his chest, both running from the house with their waists bent, as if trying not to be seen, running down the street, the young one turning back to take in the splendorous sight, and then running away, away.
“Look, Mommy,” said the boy, pointing at the disappearing shadows.
“Yes,” said his mother, her chin high as she stared at the sweet show in the sky, “isn’t it beautiful?”
DAWN WAS JUST BREAKING as Henderson and Ramirez toured the charred and stinking wreck with mouths shut and hands in pockets. The roof was gone, jagged shards of wall stood out from the debris, the whole site was soaked through as if it had rained nonstop for weeks on end just upon this one patch of blighted earth. The two detectives took it all in with stony expressions. This crime scene was out of their jurisdiction, and they had no inherent authority here, but they had come right out once notified of the fire by a suburban inspector named Demerit.
“I recalled the request you sent in about any information we might have on Kyle Byrne,” said Demerit as he accompanied them around the scene, kicking aside any burned timbers that had fallen in their way. Demerit was short and gray and wore the cheap blue suit of a cop a bit too long on the job.
“We appreciate it,” said Henderson. “It was quite a thing for you to remember that request right off.”
“I knew the kid. Byrne was the best running back we ever had at Haverford High, and that wasn’t even his sport.”
“What was?” said Henderson.
“Baseball. I coached against him in Little League. He had a swing so beautiful it could make you cry. We didn’t have a fence high enough to contain him. I could have sworn he was going places.”
“A regular Babe Ruth,” said Henderson. “So what happened?”
“Life, I suppose. I played drums all through high school, was going to be a rock star, right? What about you, sweetie?” he said to Ramirez. “What were you going to be when you grew up?”
“A police detective,” said Ramirez.
Henderson looked at the interaction with amusement. This Demerit had been talking mostly to Henderson, which had ticked Ramirez off, considering she was the one who had put in the request for information about Kyle Byrne. And then the “sweetie” had pissed her off even more. One more strike and she’d be at his throat, which wouldn’t get them anywhere but would be fun as hell to watch.
“What do you have for us, Inspector Demerit?” said Henderson.
“The fire marshal found evidence of accelerant all over the place, so it’s definitely arson. The house used to belong to Byrne’s mother. The son inherited it when she died.”
“How’d she pass?” said Ramirez.
“Cancer. The neighbors say it came quick and with a load of pain. Nothing to be done for her. Sad. Supposed to have been a nice lady and still young. The son stayed in the house for about a year or so after, but there was a mortgage that he never paid. The bank seized it about a month ago, kicked him out, cleared it of everything, and put it up for sale. Pretty good motive for arson, don’t you think?”
“You’re figuring the kid for setting the fire?” said Ramirez.
“It’s not so hard. We were wondering if you knew of any contact information or the boy’s current address.”
“You don’t really have much on him, do you?” said Ramirez. “He was angry at a bank. Who the hell isn’t angry at a bank? If the headquarters of my credit-card company ever exploded, they’d be looking at me. You have any evidence tying him to the accelerant?”
“Nope.”
“Any fiber samples or blood?”
“Nothing that survived the fire.”
“Any threatening letters to the bank, anything said to friends or relatives?”
“Nothing yet.”
“Then you don’t really have much tying Kyle Byrne to the fire, do you?”
“Well,” said Demerit, rubbing his jaw, “there is the car.”
Just then they reached the rear of the driveway, where a burnedout wreck of a sports car squatted on singed and ruined tires. The left front was still bright red, with its headlight and bumper fully intact, but the right side, closest to the house, and the whole rear end, starting with the doors and moving back, were a discolored, stinking mess of gray and black, leading to a hatchback where sheets of metal had been stripped away by fire and force.
“How long has this been there?” said Henderson.
“Wasn’t there yesterday, according to the neighbors. And it’s registered to Kyle Byrne, though the registration has lapsed and it’s overdue for inspection, which seems par for the course in the way Byrne’s life has gone lately. And then a kid on the street claimed he saw two figures running from the house. One was big enough to have been Byrne.”
“I guess you might have enough cause to pull him in at that,” said Henderson.
Demerit rubbed his jaw again, looked right at Ramirez. “Any idea where I could find him?”
“That’s why you called us down?” said Ramirez. “To get an address?”
“That was one reason. I was also wondering why a Philadelphia police detective was so interested in the Byrne boy.”
Ramirez looked at Henderson, Henderson looked at Ramirez. They could argue bitterly between themselves for hours, but throw in a third party like this Demerit, with his cheap suit and annoying jaw rubbing, like he was auditioning for the role of detective in some community-theater group, and suddenly they were a team, trying to figure out how much to hold back from this suburban stiff. Henderson gave a quick shrug to let Ramirez know it was all up to her.
Ramirez turned to Demerit. “There was a break-in at a law office. Kyle Byrne was picked up inside. Before we interrogated him, we sent a request to your office, since this was the last address he gave. But it turned out he had a valid reason to be there.”
“And what was that?” said Demerit.
“It was his father’s office.”
Demerit looked at her for a moment, turned to Henderson and then back. “I thought his father was dead. He died . . . what?” He pulled out a pad, paged through it quickly. “Fourteen years ago. And a few days before the kid’s house burns down, he has a hankering to break into his father’s old office?”
“Maybe it’s a coincidence. The office was in the process of being closed. No one pressed charges, and he was released.”
“Did he give you guys an address?”
“This one,” said Ramirez.
“What was he doing there, did he say?”
“Looking for souvenirs.”
“Is that what he said? Well, maybe that’s what he was doing here, too. But the bank had already cleaned the place out. So maybe he just got angry, lost control, maybe he burned the place down, and his car got caught in it. Maybe that explains everything.”
“You think?” said Ramirez.
“It might,” said Demerit, rubbing his jaw, “if it weren’t for the fireworks.”
Henderson and Ramirez looked at each other with a mutual puzzlement as a uniform came up to Inspector Demerit and motioned him away. They talked softly for a moment, and then Demerit came back over.
“Give me a minute, will you?” said Demerit. “The fire marshal just found something that might be of interest to the two of you.” He left them outside and followed the uniform into the bombed-out wreck that had been the Byrne house.
“Did your boy Byrne really do this?” said Henderson.
“He strike you as a kid just welling with anger, ready to throw a bomb at anything that pissed him off?”
“Not really.”
“Me neither. Best as I can tell, he doesn’t care enough about anything in this world to break a sweat, better yet to set it afire. And this was his boyhood home—”
“Taken from him by the bank.”
Ramirez sighed. “Do you remember the house where you grew up?”
“Sure I do. Parkside. I still pass it now and then and remember.”
“You care who owns it?”
“Not really.”
“Neither would he. If he wasn’t paying the mortgage, he knew it was only a matter of time. And why would he burn his car in the process?”
“Maybe it just caught on fire without him trying. Maybe he’s a fool.”
“Of course he’s a fool,” she said. “We know he’s a fool. But even a fool wouldn’t park in his own driveway if he were going to burn down his house.”
“True.”
“And what was that about the fireworks?”
“Don’t know. Maybe it was gunshots mistaken as fireworks.”
“Or maybe,” said Ramirez, “the fireworks were a cover for something else. You figure this moron will ever tell us what he knows?”
“I suppose he will when his jaw gets all itchy again.”
“Yeah, what is up with that jaw rubbing anyway?”
“He’s been watching
Columbo
reruns on cable.”
“Next time he starts up, I’m going to smash that jaw with my fist. That would be the end of the rubbing.”
“I’d pay to see that,” said Henderson, laughing as Demerit came out of the burned shell.
“Why don’t you two come inside and down to the basement,” said Demerit. “I’ve got something you might want to see.”
They had to climb down to the basement on an aluminum ladder placed by the firemen, since the stairs had been rendered useless. The space was a wreck of scorched framing and ruined drywall, still flooded from burst pipes and the firefighters’ efforts to drown the blaze. Seared scraps and timbers floated in a few inches of dark, filthy water. The place smelled of smoke and damp cement and singed dreams. The charred overhead beams were still in place, though much of the floor above them had been eviscerated, so that slashes of sunlight gouged their way through the open roof and the two ruined floors into the basement, illuminating thick motes of drifting ash. Ramirez couldn’t shake the feeling that she was entering a church.
“Over here,” said Demerit as he waded through the muck to the edge of the basement. The two Philadelphia detectives followed, water seeping into their shoes. A number of fallen beams had created a blackened frame around some singed rectangular object.
“What the hell’s that?” said Henderson.
“A file cabinet,” said Demerit.
“I thought you said the bank had emptied the place out,” said Henderson.
“I did. But if you follow the line of framing still standing, you can see that this little jog in the foundation walls was boarded up.”
“So the file cabinet was hidden.”
“That’s what we figure.”
“You check out what’s inside?”
“Nothing of much interest, best as we can tell, just some outdated legal files and records, all of them at least a decade and a half old.”
“You mind if we take a look?” said Ramirez, a little too eagerly.
“Not at all,” said Demerit, rubbing his jaw, “once we figure some things out. So let me get this right. The boy was caught breaking into his father’s old law office a few days ago. And then he’s at the scene of an arson where an old file cabinet is mysteriously discovered. And there’s a murder involved somewhere, because all of this is of intense interest to the Homicide Division of the Philadelphia Police Department. How am I doing?”
“Pretty damn well,” said Henderson.
“For a suburban cop,” said Demerit.
“I didn’t say that.”
“You didn’t have to. So tell me, Detectives, what is this boy looking for?”
Henderson glanced at Ramirez, who shrugged.
“We don’t know,” he said.
“Well, that boy does,” said Demerit. “And whatever the reason, it just took out a house in my township and set off a fireworks display that had the phone banks clogged for hours, so you damn well know I’m going to find that boy and get the truth. Now let me ask again, Detective Ramirez: Do you have any idea where to find Kyle Byrne so I can ask him what the hell is going on?”
Ramirez gave Inspector Demerit Kyle Byrne’s cell-phone number and a copy of the card of that friend of his, that Korean tax lawyer. In return, Henderson and Ramirez got to look into the file cabinet.
“It was his father’s file cabinet,” said Henderson as they drove east on Haverford Avenue back into the city. “And he took something from that bottom drawer, the one that was still open. And whatever it is, it is dangerous as hell.”
“You figure Toth was killed for the same thing?”
“Maybe.”
“By Kyle?” said Ramirez.
“Of course not. If he killed Toth in the office, he could have searched it then. Why would he go back later just so we could catch him? And you’re right, why would he leave his car in the driveway so that it would go up with the house and the fireworks? No, the kid didn’t do any killing, but I’d bet the killer is after him.”
“The guy who put him in the hospital.”
“Probably,” said Henderson, “unless his problems are bigger than we can imagine.”
“So who is it?”
“Don’t know, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was the same person that called in the burglary.”
“I’ll get hold of that tape.” She thought for a moment. “We need to find Byrne and warn him.”
“He already knows he’s in trouble, he doesn’t need our warning. But this whole thing seems to be about one of his father’s old files, right?”
“I suppose.”
“Which means it’s at least fourteen years old. And if it was dangerous now, it must have been dangerous then, too. How’d the father die?”
“No one seems to know for sure,” said Ramirez.
“Well, then,” said Detective Henderson, “don’t you think you ought to find out?”
A MOTEL ROOM IS where romance goes to die.
The two Byrnes were in unit 207 of a cheap roadside motel in Bellmawr, New Jersey, just over the bridge from Philadelphia. The dark room was lit only by a flash of neon that slipped through a gap in the curtains. It smelled of yesterday’s urine, of indifferent adulterous sex, of the smoke that had permeated their skin and clothes from the night of fire they had passed through together.
Kyle sat in the tattered upholstered chair he had dragged across the floor so that it blocked the door, and he stared at his father, who lay sleeping on his back in one of the sagging beds. His father was wearing just his pants and socks, his thick torso was bare, his sagging breasts covered with gnarly gray hair. He was snoring loudly enough to drown out the strange goings-on in room 205 next door, which was just as well. Kyle sat in that chair, watching his father sleep the sleep of the unperturbed, the sleep of the innocent, and he brooded.