Even now Maggie wondered if Racine, with her jacket left open, was showing off her badge and gun or her full breasts in the tight knit shirt. Or both, as a way of constantly pushing, constantly daring. Racine’s version of Dirty Harry’s “Go ahead, make my day.”
Maggie had spent her entire career doing just the opposite, trying to draw little attention to herself, wanting to blend in by wearing suits that matched her boss’s style. She spent extra time at the shooting range, worked out, and kept in shape so she could defend herself and cover her partner’s back. She didn’t want special credit. Unlike Racine, the last thing she wanted her colleagues to notice was that she was a woman.
Now Maggie started to glance around, pretending to assess the scene and trying to hide the fact that she was searching for an escape. She avoided looking into the fire. It could scald your eyes like looking into the sun. She saw Tully and had to hold back a sigh of relief.
Tall and lanky, R. J. Tully was one of the few men Maggie knew who looked good in a trench coat. And tonight, with his jaw clenched tight and his sight focused just as tightly on something or someone, he looked more like a spy out of a James Bond movie than an FBI agent. Something across the street had his attention.
Maggie headed in his direction and heard Racine following behind her.
“What is it?” Maggie asked him when Tully finally glanced over.
He tipped his head back toward the sidewalk, avoiding drawing attention by keeping his hands deep inside his coat pockets.
Maggie saw what he was looking at immediately.
News crews scrambled to find parking spaces. Some pulled and carried their equipment, jockeying to get as close to the crime scene as possible. There had to be a dozen of them. But one camerawoman and one reporter were already filming in a prime location, up against the perimeter. The cluster of bystanders behind them was enough to suggest that the news team had gotten there and set up before other people noticed the fire.
“How long have they been there?” Maggie asked.
“They were already here when I arrived,” Tully said, and both he and Maggie turned to Racine.
“Now that I think about it, they beat me, too.”
CHAPTER 8
Samantha Ramirez held the camera in position with one hand. With her other she swiped and tucked a strand of wild hair back up into her baseball cap. She’d already tossed off her coat, yet sweat dripped down her forehead. Another line trickled down her back. Being close to the flames for this long made her feel like the Wicked Witch of the West, melting inch by inch. They had plenty of footage, but Jeffery insisted she leave the camera running.
“You never know what might still happen.”
That’s what he always said. And usually he was right. That’s how they got lucky capturing an unexpected rescue off a rooftop after Katrina. Sometimes not so lucky, when they drew unpredictable rage. That’s how they ended up recording the skid marks and trail behind Sam as she got dragged into a crowd of young male protesters in the streets of Cairo. The latter should have been enough warning for her to say, “Never again,” if not for the additional footage that showed an equally enraged Jeffery Cole racing after her, grabbing a rifle right off the shoulder of a surprised soldier.
The machine gun had spit over the heads of the men who had their fingers dug into Sam’s arms. They already had her shirt wadded into their fists, ripping at her, grabbing, poking, by the time the bullets zinged overhead. It wasn’t until later, when Sam and Jeffery were safe back in the States reviewing the footage, that she saw the look on Jeffery’s face, the one that had made the men drop her to the ground. The look that told them the next round of bullets wouldn’t be in the air.
“I got your back, you got mine,” he told her that day, and she’d been hard-pressed since then to argue.
Her Spanish-speaking mother, who lived with Sam to help care for Sam’s six-year-old son, didn’t like Jeffery. She called him “Diablo.” Not to his face. Mostly she called him the devil when he woke the household in the middle of the night, like tonight. Her mother didn’t know any of the details about the danger zones they traveled, but she suspected enough that she lit candles at St. Jerome’s Catholic Church every single Sunday.
The longer Sam worked with Jeffery, the more she wondered if her mother was right. Sometimes working with Jeffery Cole felt like she had, indeed, made a pact with the devil.
This was the third fire in less than ten days, but their bureau chief had told them to back off.
“No body count,” he said. “Registers low on the sensational meter.”
He called it an “oh-by-the-way blip,” fifteen, maybe twenty seconds, tops.