The Darkness Inside: Writer's Cut (22 page)

“Something like that,” I said.

“Well, anyway, see you tomorrow.” He stopped then, looking at my apartment. “Alex, your door’s open.”

True enough, the door was hanging a couple of inches ajar. The lock looked bent out of shape. There was a dim glow coming from a couple of the windows. Unsteady, moving. Orange.

“Is that what I think it is?” Rob said.

Fire.

32.

I didn’t answer him, just ran up to the busted door. I could smell smoke through the gap, but I couldn’t feel any heat.

“You’re not seriously going in there?”

“Call 911,” I said, “tell them there was a break-in as well as a fire, so it looks like arson, and get the neighbors out of the building just in case.”

Rob looked like he was considering arguing, but he didn’t try to stop me as I pushed through into the hallway. Smoke hung like thick fog up around the ceiling, but the air wasn’t too bad lower down. It was getting worse, though.

The door to the front room was open, and I saw my notes and papers scattered on the floor. Anything that could have been opened, anything that could have been thrown around, had been. Nothing obvious stolen — the TV and stereo were still present, and although the monitor had been knocked over, my computer hadn’t moved. Nevertheless, the place had been trashed.

I didn’t even try the kitchen — I could hear the hungry roar of flames in there from the hall and the smoke was at its thickest and blackest where it crept past the doorframe. The only extinguisher I owned was in there. Life was funny like that.

I pulled the bottom of my shirt up, over my mouth and nose, and headed deeper into my home, hoping the gas wasn’t going to blow or the ceiling about to collapse. Into the bedroom, which had been tossed like the front room. I grabbed a couple of sentimental things I didn’t want to lose — a bunch of photos, a broken necklace — and stuffed them into my pockets. Then I got the hell away. By the time I returned to the hallway, my eyes were streaming and the smoke was too thick to see far. Up ahead, I heard uncontrollable coughing. Rob was leaning against the wall and looked ready to collapse.

I grabbed him by the arm and hauled him outside, trying not to breathe in. When we reached the open air — fresh, clean, lovely open air — he started to breathe more easily, but it was pretty obvious he had lungs full of smoke.

“Thought… you’d got… trapped…” he managed to gasp, laid out on the grass. “Went… in…”

“Thanks, Rob. You’re an idiot, but you’re a friend. I was in the bedroom. The air was better there.” My throat felt like I’d inhaled ground glass and my eyes were still watering.

He tried to answer, but gave up in favor of remaining conscious. I tried to make him as comfortable as possible, but apart from that there wasn’t much I could do. I checked to make sure the apartment’s gas had been killed at the meter and that the neighbors were all aware and out of the building. They gathered in the parking lot and on the grass. A few asked me about Rob.

The magnitude, the reality of what had happened — or what
might
have happened — started to sink in while I waited for the ambulance and the fire department to show up. I’d been shot at before. I’d been punched. On the arrest of one fugitive while I was with the Atlanta field office I was even deliberately hit by a moving car. But my home had always been safe.
 

Until now.

The fire department arrived just ahead of the paramedics. I gave them a quick rundown on events, and they hauled ass inside the building to deal with the flames. Rob was stretchered away. The paramedics didn’t seem too worried by his condition; they had him on oxygen for smoke inhalation, nothing more. I called Teresa and let her know everything that happened before riding with Rob to Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Centre.

The ambulance blasted through the city streets, rattling with every crack in the concrete, every resurfaced crosswalk. The paramedic in the back offered me oxygen as well, but I didn’t feel too bad. I thought of the email I’d sent, trying to draw out Goddard. I saw flames gutting my home. I saw myself, lonely and exposed. And guilty. The haloes around the lights outside looked like hazy, burning eyes.

33.

“Your husband should be fine, Mrs Garrett,” the young-looking doctor in spotless whites said to Teresa. Rob had been away for tests and examination somewhere in the depths of the hospital for nearly an hour now, and I was keeping Teresa company in the waiting area. She looked tired and drawn, still wrapped tightly in a winter coat. Normally she was a bundle of energy with a sharp wit and a sharper tongue. Not now. “We’ll need to keep him here for observation, but there should be no lasting effects. He just needs oxygen and rest.”

“When can I see him?”

Her voice was strong and steady, but there was pleading in her eyes. I’d known Teresa for years, and I’d never seen her like this. But then I’d never seen anything happen to Rob before.

“In theory, right now, I think. But he’ll probably be unconscious until the morning at least, so you might want to get some sleep.” He smiled. “Best not to stay up all night, only to nod off the moment he wakes up tomorrow. I’ll go find out what room he’s likely to be put in, and I’ll see what we can do to make it comfortable. You might have to make do with a couple of chairs and a blanket, though.”

“Thank you, doctor,” she said. “That’s really good of you.”

She watched him walk through the double swing doors, then turned to me and said, “Who did it, Alex? Who nearly killed my husband?”

“I’m not sure, Teresa.”

“You can guess, though.”

I nodded. “Yeah. Yeah, I can. Cody Williams’ friend, the one who’s been holding Holly Tynon for the past seven years. At a guess, he wants me either scared or out of the way.”

“You
get
him, Alex. You make sure he never does anything like this again. Eight years I’ve been married to Robin, and I’ve never had any reason to worry about him.” She lowered her eyes, looked away. “He could’ve been killed tonight, Alex. You both could. When you called me, I didn’t know what to think. I was so afraid it was… that you were trying not to worry me, that it was worse than you were saying.”

“I wouldn’t do that.”

“I know, I know. I just… you get him, okay, Alex? I never want to worry like that again.”

The doctor waved Teresa in through the doors and she followed him out, hand brushing my shoulder in farewell as she went. I stood there for a moment, thinking about what she’d said. As I turned towards the hospital’s main entrance, a cop in a suit, badge hanging from his top pocket, made his way through the doors and headed in my direction.

“Alex Rourke?” he said. “I’m Detective Jack Connell with Boston PD. We need to take a statement from you, to find out exactly what happened and what you saw at your apartment. Are you feeling up to that?”

“Yeah, I’m fine. Feels like I’ve chain-smoked a couple of cartons of French cigarettes, but that’s the worst of it.”

“In that case, if you could come with me to the station, that’d be appreciated. You want a lift or have you got a car?”

“No, it’s back home.”

Outside. The night smelled of snow and the long slide into winter. Further down the vehicle bay, beneath the harsh lights of the apron roof and the red and white glare of an ambulance’s emergency strobes, a team of paramedics rushed a gurney from the back of their vehicle and ran towards the doors to ER. A bag of plasma rattled above the body strapped to its surface. A neck brace and a shock of scruffy black hair. I caught a brief glimpse of the guy’s bloody face beneath the oxygen mask and he looked like Clinton Travers. 

“The Fire Department put out the blaze pretty quickly,” Connell said as we drove through the near-deserted streets. “The last I heard, they didn’t think the damage was too serious. If the structure’s still sound, you might be able to move back in once it’s been repaired. You got a place to stay tonight?”

My attention snapped back from the streetlit blackness beyond the glass. I was tired, fatigue dropping onto my shoulders like lead snowfall. “I hadn’t thought about it. Should probably sort something out.”

“You got any friends or family you could go to for a couple of days?”

“No. Not this time of night, anyway.”

Connell nodded. “There’s a Yellow Pages at the station. Make a call to a motel or something when we get there, find somewhere with a room.”

“Thanks.”

The D-4 District Station was a modern brick building, three stories, solid and well-built. An odd arched portico on one corner of the street gave the entryway a church-like appearance. It mirrored the towering form of the Cathedral of the Holy Cross opposite, illuminated by spots in the ground at its feet. The lights in most of the station windows were still on, the cold blue-white of fluorescents unfiltered by blinds or curtains.

Down a short, echoing tiled corridor to an open-plan squad room. Connell found a copy of the Yellow Pages and got me a coffee while I got a hotel room for the night. Then I told him what he needed to know about me, and everything Rob and I had found when we reached my apartment. The place turned over. The busted lock.

“Do you have any enemies, anyone with any reason to want to do this to you or to your property?” he said once he’d finished typing.

“You mean anyone I could put a name to, anything like that? No, not recently.”

“No one you’ve encountered through work? You’re a private detective, right?”

I nodded. “Yeah, but I can’t think of anyone specific we’ve worked on recently who would’ve gone as far as torching my home.”

“How about from your FBI days?”

“I can’t remember any arsonists. I suppose anything’s possible, but it doesn’t seem very likely.” I shrugged. “Someone’s got a grudge against me, that’s for sure. And there’s a bunch of people who I suppose might have had something to do with this — old friends of a guy called Cody Williams, say, or the people trying to get him released from jail who’ve hassled me in the past few weeks. But I can’t think of anyone I know for sure would be a good make for a suspect.”

Connell looked at me. “Oh, you’re the Cody Williams guy. Yeah, I saw that on the news, along with those idiots outside prison. Why didn’t you mention it before?”

“I’ve worked unpopular cases plenty of times. And the kind of dipshits who call you up to hurl abuse at you are usually restricted to phoning because they’re not the sort to go any further — cowardice or fear of getting caught keeps them at a distance. None of the ones who called threatened to kill me, not from what I remember.”

“Well, we’ll have a check on your phone records to see if we can find them and question them, just in case. What about these friends of Williams you mentioned — anyone in particular?”

“No one obvious I can think of. He didn’t have many friends.”

Maybe that was all it’d turn out to be, I reminded myself later as I lay on the scratchy sheets at the Jefferson Lodge. Some wacko tried to torch my place in revenge for me hassling an ‘innocent man’. Another decided to send me snippets from the home porno collection he’d tried hawking to half of California that happened to feature a girl who looked a lot like Holly Tynon. Cody latched onto the idea and tried to use it for leverage against me.
 

A whole lot of coincidence. Believe that and I’d have to watch for people trying to sell me bridges.

Another morning of cold and bitter rain. I picked up some grapes on the way to Beth Israel to check on Rob, not because he liked grapes, but because I knew he’d appreciate the humor in the tradition. I also left a message at the office so everyone knew what had happened and not to expect either of us in for the time being.

Rob was awake when I reached his room. His eyes looking a little red and raw, but otherwise he seemed unharmed. And he was off the oxygen. Teresa was by his side, nursing a cup of coffee. From what I heard of their conversation when I came in, he’d be going home in an hour or so.

“Hey, Alex,” he said. “Some night, huh?”

“You could say that. I brought something to keep your strength up.” I dropped the grapes on the table next to him.

“I was hoping for an apple Danish and a cappuccino.”

“Hope all you like. This place must have a cafe. How are you feeling?”

“Like I’ve smoked the whole of Cuba. But not bad, considering. Next time we’re messing around with a burning building, I’ll leave you to it. Your lungs take it a whole lot better than mine.”

Teresa laughed. “You’d do it too, you chickenshit son of a bitch.”

“I thought the injured hero was supposed to be treated with great sympathy and have every need pandered to.” Rob rolled his eyes. “I’m hurt. I don’t have to take that sort of thing. Ask him what he was doing in there.”

I sat down on a spare chair and helped myself to a grape. “I see I needn’t have worried. I was trying to examine the scene, see if they were after anything. If I hadn’t, we wouldn’t know they’d tossed the place.” A lie, but I was getting good at those. “Quit whining, you’re fine.”

“Yeah, it’s nothing. I’ll be back at work tomorrow. How bad’s the damage to your apartment?”

“I don’t know yet. I picked up the car from the lot on the way to the hotel last night, but the place was sealed off. The cops said the fire wasn’t too bad, so I might be lucky. Hopefully I’ll be able to pick up some spare clothes and stuff there later today. It’ll all reek of smoke, but hey.”