Someone Always Knows (8 page)

Now the acrid smoke and odors of burning wood and fire retardants made my eyes and throat hurt. The heat from the glowing remains seared my skin. The hissing of streams of pressurized water, the cries of firemen, cops, and onlookers rang in my ears. There was nothing I could do but keep on standing there, watching the old house die the same fiery death mine had.

2:15 a.m.

T
he first thing I did when I got home—naturally—was feed the cats.

Before they would go to their bowl, they sniffed suspiciously at me, and Alex retreated under a table while Jessie's tail puffed up. People claim cats have short memory spans, and maybe they do, but the odors that clung to my clothing and hair must have called forth visions of the fire in which the three of us had nearly lost our lives.

Next I got on the phone and called Chelle's mobile unit. She answered groggily, sounding as if I'd awakened her.

“Where are you?” I asked.

“In my own bed at Mom and Dad's,” she replied in a sulky tone. “Nemo stood me up, the asshole.”

“Where were you supposed to meet him?”

“At a friend's place in the Sunset. She gave me a key and told me to use the flat while she's visiting her folks in Indiana.”

The lives of young people like Chelle and Nemo struck me, as they often had before, as nomadic. Few possessions, no permanent addresses, no connections except through electronic devices that might or might not work. Granted, I myself hadn't lived a conventional life, but I'd always felt grounded. Maybe younger people like Chelle and Nemo felt grounded in their freedom. But where had Chelle gone when Nemo hadn't shown up? She'd left the borrowed flat in the Sunset and gone home.

She seemed to come fully awake then. “Did you see Nemo?”

“Uh, no. He didn't show.”

“Then he's a double-dog asshole.”

“I wouldn't say so. Chelle, there was a fire. The house burned down.”

She gasped. “My God, was anybody hurt?”

“I don't know.”

“Nemo…he didn't have anything to do with it, did he?”

“I don't know that either.”

“Then why hasn't he called me?” Her voice was spiraling upward in pitch.

“There're plenty of good reasons—”

“Shar, I've got to stop talking about this. I'll call you back later.” She broke our connection.

I went upstairs, stripped off my clothes, and stuffed them in the hamper. Then I took a shower, vigorously washing my hair. A good comb-out, body lotion, and a touch of the Allure perfume Hy had given me for my birthday last month, and I felt back to normal. That is, as normal as a woman can feel when she can't contact her husband, has just witnessed a horrific fire, and has a maniac breathing down her neck.

Thinking of Hy, I went to my laptop and dashed off an e-mail to Craig, asking him to contact his former colleagues at the FBI to see if any of them knew about Hy's presence in D.C. and why a deputy director had summoned him there. Then I crawled into bed. Five minutes later the landline rang. I picked up, hoping to hear Hy's voice.

Gage Renshaw.

“Out late, McCone.”

So he'd been trying to reach me, but not leaving messages. Or he'd been watching the house and waiting for me to go to bed. “I had business to attend to.”

“What kind of business?”

“None of yours.” Quickly I depressed the control Hy and I have on our home phone for recording calls.

He said slyly, “Putting out fires, maybe?”

“I don't know what you mean, Renshaw.”

“I'll give you a hint: Webster Street.”

“What about it?”

“Are you tracing this call?”

“We don't have that capability on this line. Now what about Webster Street?”

“You were there.”

“How do you know that?

“I know a great many things that you wouldn't expect me to.”

“Are you following me? Or having me followed?”

He cackled in that annoying way he had. “Hell no. Why would I do something like that?”

“I wouldn't put anything past you, if you had something to gain.”

“But I don't. Or do I?”

“Damn you! Why don't you tell me what it is you're after?”

“Because I like to keep you guessing.”

“Guessing games are for children. I don't have time for them.”

“My, you've turned into a sour bitch since I first knew you.”

“Don't call me again until you're ready to talk sense. No more games!” I clicked off the phone.

As I was having my first cup of coffee, Mick called my cell. “You seen the news?”

“You know I don't watch TV news in the morning.”

“Where are you?”

“Home.”

“Well, turn on CNN and call me back.”

“If this is about the fire last night, I was there—”

“Just check it out, okay? Sounds like it was arson.”

When I turned on the TV, CNN was reporting on a suicide bombing somewhere in the Middle East. A collapsed building, an old woman crying, a child bleeding in his mother's arms. I looked away from all that misery until I heard the anchor's voice say, “In other news, the investigation continues into the fire that consumed a deserted house in the Fillmore district of San Francisco last night, killing one.”

Killing one.…

I looked back, listened more intently. The anchor was one of those perfectly made-up, every-hair-sprayed-into-place women, and she was smiling. Actually smiling!

The picture switched to the house sheeted in flames.

“Fire chief Danielle Albin said the cause of the blaze has not yet been identified, and arson has not been ruled out. A body found early this morning by fire inspectors sifting through the site was burned beyond recognition.…”

A body, burned beyond recognition. It wasn't only the house that had died in the Webster Street conflagration. Someone trapped inside it had died too.

Who? A squatter? One of the neighborhood thrill-seekers? Nemo? For Chelle's sake I hoped not.

I picked up my cell and called Chaz Witlow, an old friend from college who was on the city's fire commission. As I'd expected, because of last night's fire, he was in his office.

“I was just about to call you,” he said. “You were spotted by a couple of our personnel at the fire on Webster Street last night—how come you were there? On a job?”

“That's confidential.”

“Come on, Shar, this is me you're talking to.”

“All right. I have a client who owns that house and we were running a surveillance on it because it had been plagued by intruders. From what I heard on the news, it sounds as if you've already decided it was arson.”

“There's evidence that points that way. The house was an open invitation to firebugs.”

“I agree. When I toured it, there were piles of debris all over the place. One flick of a Bic, and fire would spread very rapidly. Did your investigators find any evidence of accelerants?”

“Not yet. But the fire appeared to have several points of origin. If it wasn't arson, I'd be very surprised.”

“And what about the body that was found there?”

“No identification yet. It was a real crispy critter.”

“That bad, huh?”

“That bad.”

“Chaz, there must've been two people in that house when the fire started. I saw somebody running away from it just seconds before the flames flared up.”

“You get a good look at them?”

“Not good enough to identify him.”

“But you say ‘him.' Are you sure it was a man?”

“Reasonably. He had a man's stride.”

“Height? Weight?”

“Over six feet. He ran like a heavy man, but I couldn't tell because he was bundled up in a dark parka and jeans. He wore running shoes.”

“Like half the men in this city. Any markings on the parka? Team or club names?”

“None that I saw.”

“All right. We'll get onto it. I'll keep you posted, and if you remember anything else, call me.”

Kendra nodded at me when I entered the offices, and returned to whatever she was typing. I went down the hall to my private space and curled up in my chair under Mr. T., contemplating the brilliantly green Marin headlands. Until recently the hills had been browned off from last summer's heat and drought, their oaks and eucalypti and bay laurel standing out in sharp relief against long grasses that resembled wheat. Now patches of green showed through. It was another nice day. The morning commute was winding down, although cars moved slowly on the bridge. Waldo Grade was backed up in both directions as people left the city and vice versa. Used to be the heavy traffic was inward bound in the morning and outward bound at night, but in recent years the volume had become about equal, as many businesses had spread to the suburbs.

As I sat there, I began to feel lower and lower by the minute. I missed Hy. There had been no news of him from Craig. I wished we were together at the ranch or the seaside. But then I've wished for any number of things; some hadn't happened, but a lot more had. Not bad, on the average.

A knock on my office door. Mick stuck his head inside. “May we come in?” Then he walked in anyway, bringing a short, wispy-haired man in stained cargo pants and a rumpled T-shirt with him. The man looked nervous; he twisted the Giants baseball cap he held in his thick fingers.

Mick said, “This is Lester Harwood. He's…he used to be a serial arsonist, and has written a book about his experiences called
Firebug
.”

I blinked. “Uh…great. Please sit down.”

Mick motioned the man toward one of the sofas. “Les decided to give up his profession before his luck ran out. His book is a tell-all under a blind pseudonym that will be published next spring.”

Harwood remained standing, as if at attention. “Should've gotten a bigger advance,” he said in a rusty voice.

Where, I wondered, did Mick find these characters?

Harwood cleared his throat and went on. “You're probably wondering why I agreed to talk to you, Ms. McCone. It's not that I expect payment. But if the details of our conversation and a plug for my book should appear in the local media, I would be grateful.”

Publicity hounds bark constantly in our society. I glanced at Mick; he nodded encouragingly.

“I can't guarantee it, Mr. Harwood, but I do have contacts with press people.”

“So Mr. Savage here told me. You want information on arson, I'm your man.” He sat down, seeming to gain confidence. “You know there are two kinds of arsonists?”

“Amateur and professional?”

“Right. In my lifetime I've been both. Now I've turned into a truly legitimate professional.”

“And what does a truly legitimate professional arsonist do?”

“
Former
arsonist. I'm a consultant for three of the biggest insurance companies in the country.”

Talk about turning a criminal activity into an asset!

Lester continued, “Let me go back to when I was an amateur—eight years ago, as I recall. I always knew I was ready to start a fire when my fingers started to tingle.”

“Tingle.”

“Yeah. Sometimes I'd see something that reminded me of fire, and the old tingle would start. I've always been fascinated with it.”

“With the tingle?”

“No, fire.”

“What about fire fascinates you?”

“The way each blaze has a personality all its own. How it spreads in certain ways, and not always like you expect it to. It's as if it thinks. It's got
power
.”

“And does creating fire give you a feeling of power?”

He pondered that. “I
do
feel more powerful after I set a blaze—I mean, I used to. But now I got this good legit job and my book coming out. I guess I owe it all to fire, huh? I mean, before, I had no high school diploma, no family, no friends. No woman either. What kinda woman was gonna look at me? They all thought I was a nerd.”

I did too—a dangerous one—but I said kindly, “I'm sure they didn't all think that way.”

“Yeah, they did. A couple of them even told me so.”

“And your reaction to rejection was to set fires.”

“Why not? At least it was something I liked to do.”

“What about the people you might have hurt?”

“I always made sure that the buildings were clear beforehand. Never made a single mistake.”

“What about the occupants' possessions?”

He looked blank for a moment. “That's just stuff. You can always replace stuff.”

I thought of the irreplaceable things I'd lost when my house on Church Street was torched: old photographs, scrapbooks, diaries, love letters, and much more. No, you can't always replace “stuff.”

With an effort I kept my voice even as I said, “You have any things you'd really miss if you lost them, Lester?”

“Listen, lady—until I got this consultant's job I lived on the second floor of an abandoned warehouse. Never mind where. I'd heat up cans of baked beans and hash and soup on my so-called neighbor's little gas burner. I'd share my food with him because it was his propane I was using. The cans came from wherever I could five-finger 'em. My clothes I stole from Goodwill. You think
stuff
matters to me?”

Evidently not. His small eyes watched me. I wondered if Mick had told him about my history with arson, and he was deliberately goading me.

“Right,” I said, “so you set fires for pleasure and power, not for money.”

“
Used
to set fires.”

“And how did you get this job with the insurance companies?”

“My upcoming book. And word gets around, who's a good torch. Insurance companies like the bad guys on their side. Believe me, I been approached by all sorts of policyholders to torch their property—some of 'em pretty high-toned.”

“Such as?”

“Uh-uh. I protect my clients—former clients.”

“Then your book isn't a tell-all?”

“No, ma'am. I don't name names or give locations.”

I glanced at Mick; he was leaning, arms crossed, against a file cabinet.