chapter nineteen

In total, five fire engines, four patrol cars, and one ambulance show up. Only three of the fire engines are used, the other two park at the back, the excess firemen standing around watching the blaze, one of them talking to a young blond woman in the crowd and making her laugh. I sit in the back of the ambulance with my view of the burning house obstructed, but there are still some pretty clear views of lots and lots of smoke. We’re parked far enough away to no longer feel the heat, but close enough so we still have to talk loudly to be heard over the crackling wood. I’ve drunk about a liter of water since being dragged away from the flames, my lungs are sore, I’m no longer coughing but my hands are shaking. I could have gotten back in there. I know I could have. Wouldn’t have mattered if only one leg was going to support me, I could have made it back in there and found Emma and made it back out. Instead I let those two men drag me away and I could have done more.

I try to focus on the positive. The positive in this case is that I didn’t see Emma, so that means she may not have been in there. The positive is that I’m still alive.

It only takes one paramedic to look me over, and the second one stands outside with everybody else. My knee has swelled up to twice its size from the impact of my fall and has almost no movement. The paramedic is a guy in his midthirties and is completely bald, his scalp glistening with so much sunblock you can see the ambulance walls reflected in it. He gives me anti-inflammatories and painkillers and the pain disappears somewhat but the tightness remains. He jabs my hand with a needle and injects some local anesthetic and digs out a few pieces of glass before cleaning the wound.

“You’re going to need stitches,” he says.

“Can’t you do it?”

He shakes his head. “You’re gonna have to come to the hospital for it.”

Now I shake my head. “I don’t have time. Can’t you just patch it up?”

“You cops are all the same,” he says, and he secures some gauze and padding around my hand, followed by some bandaging and tape. “It’s still going to need stitches, and unless you want more damage, you should get it done today.”

“I’ll try my best.”

“Good. And as long as you’re trying things, try to keep it dry,” he tells me, “and try not to use it.”

“Not even for swimming?”

“Is that a joke?” he asks.

“It was supposed to be,” I say, but with the fire still burning, no joke is going to come out sounding funny.

“You won’t be laughing if it gets infected,” he says, “especially if we have to cut off your hand.”

“Is that a joke?”

“No.”

“I’ll keep it clean and dry, I promise.”

My feet are slightly burned and he smears ointment on them and covers them with gauze and a lighter layer of bandaging than on my hand. Schroder waits outside while I’m being looked at, the argument we were having until the ambulance arrived put on hold. My hands have some blisters on them from patting down the flames on the bottom of my pants. It’ll only take a couple of days for everything to heal except for the cut in my palm, which is going to take at least a week if I get around to having it stitched. When I’m all patched up they help me out of the ambulance and I lean against it, taking all the weight off my bad leg. I grab my shoes from the ambulance floor. The leather has charred and the tips of the laces and the soles have melted. They’re a tight fit with the new bandaging.

Schroder comes in and puts his hand on my shoulder. “I’m sorry,” he says, “and, if it helps, we don’t know she was in there.”

“I could have saved her,” I tell him.

“And on that note,” he says, pulling his hand away, “now I have to lay down the law. You fucked up, Tate,” Schroder says. “It was only a matter of time before somebody tried to set you on fire.”

“People are always warming up to me,” I say.

“Jesus, Tate, this could have been much, much worse.”

“Well, I’m grateful for your concern.”

“Don’t be. I mean people could have gotten hurt here, Tate. People could have gone rushing in to save you when you weren’t supposed to be there in the first place.”

“I’ve told you why I went in. You got a picture of Riley yet?” He holds one up and it matches up with the Cooper I saw in a couple of the shots inside, Cooper with friends, with family, Cooper on holiday, Cooper not being burned alive or attacked in his driveway. This one looks like it could be an ID photo from the university. Cooper has a short gray beard, he’s bald on top with hair running around the sides.

I shake my head. “That’s not the guy I saw. This guy was younger by ten or fifteen years.”

“Then who?”

“Like I said earlier, I didn’t get a good look at him, only from above, but it certainly wasn’t that guy,” I say, nodding toward the photograph.

“Okay. Work with a sketch artist. See if you can put something together.”

“I’ll do my best,” I tell him. I look toward the smoldering remains of the house. “Even if Emma isn’t in there, I think you’re going to be scraping your second dead body out of a fire in two days.”

“Yeah, that’s what I’m thinking too.”

“He live alone?”

“Yeah. He divorced three years ago. No current partner, according to anyone we’ve questioned.”

“You think they’re related?” I ask. “Two fires in two days.”

“Could be. Both were obviously arson,” he says, “though it’s anybody’s guess what the connection between Pamela Deans and Cooper Riley could be.”

“She was a nurse, right?”

“Goddamn it, Tate, isn’t there an off switch in there somewhere?” he asks, tapping me on the forehead. “Let it go. I know I said earlier I was happy to let you look for Emma Green, but this has advanced beyond that now. You see that, right? You see how you can fuck things up for us by getting in the way?”

“I’ll back off,” I say, not really sure if I mean it.

“Sound like you mean it,” he says.

“I mean it,” I say, still unsure.

“No you don’t.”

I shrug. “I’m sorry,” I say, but I’m not sorry, and I don’t know what else to add.

“No you’re not. You’ve been out of jail for twenty-four hours and you’re running around like a damn cowboy. I should have known it’d be this way. If you had just used that goddamn phone of yours to call me the moment you saw Emma Green’s car, things would be different. You’d have seen the arsonist come out. You could have followed him. We’d have somebody in custody, Tate, if only you had waited.”

“Come on, Carl, I had no choice but to go in once I smelled that petrol. I knew from the moment I stepped inside that place might burn down around me, but I couldn’t take the chance Emma was alive in there getting ready to be cooked. How’d it have looked if I just waited out here while she died? You’d have done the same damn thing, so stop acting so pissed at me.”

He looks mad, and then he sighs and slowly shakes his head. “Okay, Tate, point taken,” he says. “Are you sure you didn’t recognize the arsonist? I wouldn’t put it past you to recognize him and not tell me because you wanted to find him yourself.”

“Screw you, Carl.”

“Hey, I’m just putting it out there,” he says, holding his hands up. “And don’t pretend to take offense. It’s exactly the kind of stupid thing you’d do.”

“Not this time.”

“You sure on that?”

“Positive.”

We both look toward the fire. The car has been put out, and the house is now just a smoldering wreck. “If we’re lucky,” Schroder says, “one of those Taser ID disks survived the flames.”

We both look at the driveway and at the car, it doesn’t look like we’re going to be lucky.

“It’s not the car that sped out from behind the café,” Schroder says.

“I know. You got any leads on that at all?”

“Not yet. The café doesn’t have any surveillance, and the owner says it’s pretty much a cash business. We’re still waiting on testing to see if the paint can be matched to any specific car, but that’ll take a few more days.”