He’d now chosen another warehouse. But tonight was different. Racine had said there was a body. That changed everything.
Maggie walked slowly, approaching the scene from a distance, giving herself a big-picture view but also trying to calm herself and reverse the strong instinct to flee. She had to physically coax her entire body—from her rapid pulse to her staggered breaths—to go toward the flames. It didn’t help matters that she could already feel the heat.
The smell of smoke assaulted her nostrils almost immediately, gaining strength as she approached. She could hear the violent hisses, the crackle and pop as flames ate away chunks of the building, leaving other pieces to crash down. It sounded like trees being timbered—a slight crack followed by a whoosh and then the crash.
Unnerving sights and sounds and smells.
Stick to your job, she told herself. Observe. Look for any clues he may have left.
She walked by an empty lot under construction where the bulldozers and huge equipment with clawed scoops and trucks with dump wagons seemed out of place in this landscape. Her eyes jumped from cab to cab—dark and abandoned for the night. A sign three feet back from the sidewalk announced it to be the future home of something called the D.C. Outreach House. Even if she hadn’t noticed the small print “in partnership with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD),” Maggie would have guessed that in a neighborhood of warehouses and displaced homeless people, the project was most likely another sleep shelter. For now it amounted to several piles of concrete chunks and yellow monster-size equipment.
She continued up the street, glancing down alleys and into door wells. Her eyes darted up to rusted fire escapes and instinctively her right hand reached inside her jacket. Her fingertips brushed over the leather holster cinched tight against her left side. She settled her fingers on the butt of her revolver as she peered inside vehicles parked along the curb.
She was close enough to the fire now that the hisses and the whoosh of flames were the dominant sounds on an otherwise quiet night. Traffic had been cordoned off. There was no one on this street. No voices or footsteps. Behind darkened windows there were no silhouettes, no movement, no sounds coming from the warehouses that were closed and locked up for the night. Everyone who had been in the area was now pressed against the crime scene tape’s perimeter about two hundred feet away. In fact, there was absolutely no evidence of anyone, and yet Maggie stopped in her tracks. Slowly, she turned completely around.
He was here.
She could feel someone watching. A sixth sense. A gut instinct. There was nothing scientific on which to base the claim.
She stood perfectly still and started once again to examine the buildings. She scanned the doors and windows. Was he looking out at her? Her eyes darted up to the rooftops. She looked at the empty lot she’d just passed. But still she saw no movement, no shadows. She heard no footsteps.
“Hey, O’Dell,” someone yelled from behind her.
Her head pivoted to see Julia Racine ducking under the crime scene tape, headed in her direction. But Maggie stayed put, her eyes darting back in the other direction, not ready to leave the empty street.
From the corner of her eye she saw a shadow peel away from under a lamppost. A flash of movement, nothing more. But now she wasn’t sure. Sometimes the pounding in her temple blurred her vision.
Annoying. But it is temporary. It had to be temporary, she kept trying to convince herself. And she certainly wasn’t going to let Julia Racine notice.
CHAPTER 6
He didn’t much care about fire. It was a cheap way to get attention.
Sure was pretty, though.
Almost like fireworks on a dark July night. Lighting a fuse, the smell of sulfur, sparks followed by glittery explosions of color. Like a thousand shooting stars. Good memories.
He still remembered his momma frying chicken for their picnic basket. He and his brother would spend the entire morning helping to butcher those poor stupid birds—beaks chattering, beady eyes staring up at him even after the head was chopped off and lying on the ground. So very fascinating to watch.
That’s where his mind was when he first saw her.
The street had been empty for quite a while. Everyone had gone to watch the flames like moths to the light. They came out of door wells and pulled themselves off warm grates in the sidewalk just to go take a look, and he shook his head as he watched the pathetic parade of the ragged.