“Just to let you know I can meet you at the scene tomorrow around eight. I’ll bring the coffee.” He waited. “Is that okay?”
“Fine.” She sounded preoccupied.
He swallowed. Damn! He didn’t want to tell her this, but she’d find out anyway. “Rach, they found another woman in tonight’s fire.”
Rachel remained silent for a moment or two, then said, “Damn.”
“A.J.’ll give you the details tomorrow after we check out the scene.” He blew out a long breath. “I’ll let you get back to work.” While he climbed into his car, he continued to hold the phone to his ear, reluctant to break even this tenuous connection. “So…see you then.”
“Luke?”
“Yes.”
“Thank you for…for being there tonight.”
“No problem.” He wanted to add I’ll always be there, but he knew she had no reason to believe such a promise, coming from him.
Silence.
“’Night.” The connection went dead.
“Dream of me,” he murmured into the car’s dark interior. It was what they’d said to each other every night before dropping off to sleep. It was what he still whispered into the darkness every night from his lonely bed.
He folded the phone and tossed it into the passenger seat. For a long moment, he stared down at the phone, then gripped the steering wheel and rested his forehead against his hands.
He’d lost his precious Maggie to this sick criminal. In his gut, he knew he could lose Rachel, too, if he didn’t find a way to protect her from herself. But how did you protect someone who didn’t want to be protected? Whose pride was so ironclad, it would take the Jaws of Life to get through it?
The next morning, at precisely eight o’clock, Rachel pulled up her rented Chevy Malibu outside the previous night’s fire scene. She refused to give Luke any reason to think she was letting her emotions rule her head. Digging through the burned rubble would be another first for her, another step back into her past, but she’d spent most of last night preparing for it and was determined to do it without any hitches.
She powered down the car window, then shut off the engine. The pungent yet familiar smell of wet, burned wood drifted to her on the humid morning air. A smell she’d never gotten completely out of her nostrils or her blood.
Leaning back, she sipped the coffee she’d picked up at the 7-Eleven and watched a handful of firefighters securing the scene and stamping out flare-ups, their soiled yellow helmets and slickers standing out against the black debris. Their sluggish movements told her they’d pulled an all-nighter, and they were badly in need of sack time.
She checked her watch. Eight-fifteen. Luke, always the prompt one of the two of them, had obviously decided to play with her head. He probably hoped that, if he took long enough, she’d give up and leave, not having the wherewithal to go into the scene alone.
She smiled. Not a chance.
Rachel finished the coffee, put her empty cup in the cup holder, then slipped from the car, making sure to grab the notepad, the pen and the camera she’d brought with her.
As she approached the ruins, firefighter Samantha Ellis came around the side of the fire truck. Rachel and Sam had been friends ever since they’d been the only females in their class of rookie firefighters. When Rachel had left the company to take the ATF arson investigators training program, she’d wanted Sam to come, too, but Sam had been happy to keep hauling hoses, and the lieutenant’s insignia on Sam’s helmet told Rachel she’d done well.
Over the past two years, Rachel had lost touch with Sam, as she had with most of the people who reminded her of the past.
Sam came toward her, her face set, a stern warning to stay out of the scene hovering on her lips, then recognition washed over her expression.
“Rachel?” Her face broke into a broad grin. “Great to see you.” Then she paused, a frown knitting her forehead. “What are you doing here?”
“Hi, Sam. Chief Branson invited me to your…uh…party.” She surveyed their surroundings with a critical eye.
Sam cast a quick glance toward the ruins. “Yeah, we’ve been having a lot of these parties lately.”
“So I’m told.” Rachel smiled. “Can you loan me some of your turnout gear so I can get started?”
“Sure thing.” Sam went to the standby truck and hauled out a helmet, a small shovel, one of the cumbersome jackets and a pair of boots.
Rachel took them, put the jacket aside, then sat on the running board of the truck to exchange her sneakers for the heavy rubber boots. After she’d slipped into the boots, she smiled up at Sam. “I’d forgotten how these things make you feel like you’re wearing your big sister’s clothes.” She stood and grabbed the jacket. “Did you find any trace of an accelerant in there?”
“We won’t know until the lab confirms it for sure, but my guess is this torch’s choice of fire starter was regulation, backyard charcoal lighter.” Sam gave Rachel’s clothes the once-over. “Better put on the slicker. You’ll trash your clothes in there.”
Rachel glanced down at her jeans and snowy-white T-shirt. Then, grinning at Sam, she plopped the helmet on her chestnut curls and shrugged. Having second thoughts, she glanced at the slicker. “These things always made me feel like I had a two-thousand-pound elephant sitting on my back.”
Sam sighed tiredly, but managed a grin. “Try carrying it around for eighteen hours.”
As she donned the weighty slicker, Rachel noted that Sam’s back was slumped with fatigue. Dark smudges rimmed her red eyes. Black soot encrusted the woman’s fatigue-lined face.
Under all that grime, it was hard to tell that Sam had once been a Miss Florida finalist. Rachel had never understood why Sam always played down her looks, no makeup, no salon hairdo. Even more, Rachel had wondered why she’d picked firefighting as a career. She’d asked once, but Sam had danced around the subject with all the expertise of a prima ballerina. Sam’s blatant avoidance convinced Rachel the subject should be left alone until Sam decided she wanted to discuss it.
“You’ll need these, too.” Sam handed Rachel a pair of latex gloves, then started toward what was left of the house.
Hauling on the gloves, Rachel sloshed through the wet grass behind Sam. The closer they got to the burned-out structure, the stronger the smell of burned wood and man-made fibers became. Her stomach churned.
Rachel stiffened and reminded herself sternly that she had a job to do. As she prepared to enter the house, determination cloaked any misgivings left over from the previous night.
“We’re about done in here,” Sam told her as she guided her through the opening where a front door once hung. “Fire’s out. Most everything that could burn did, except the woman they took to the morgue about eight hours ago. The closet door was closed—”
“Closed? It was always open with the others.”
“We figure the wind currents from the fire either closed it or it swung closed on its own. I doubt our torch did it. This sicko wants these women to see what’s coming for them.”
Rachel had blanked her actual experience of her apartment fire out of her memory. The doctors called it voluntary amnesia. Whatever it was, until this very moment, Rachel’d had no recollection of the actual fire. Now, as if someone turned a movie projector on and off quickly, a quick flash of the fire eating away at her bedding while she watched it from the floor of her closet, helpless and certain her death was imminent, passed through her mind. Though bits of the panic she’d felt that night and a tiny bit of residual memory remained behind, the image was gone before her mind could register all of it.
Sam continued