Embers, page 13
The rolling grass of Holy Sepulchre Cemetery was still green, though the many trees had turned color and begun to drop their leaves. Anya scanned the crowd assembled here in the newest part of the cemetery, the fire engines parked beyond at the access road, back at the oldest part of the cemetery with its sinking, ornate tombstones and crypts. The new section was planned in symmetrical rows with sharp, geometric tombstones, rolling away in meadow and grass to the jagged, ornately wrought stones of the turn of the last century. Those stones had been blackened by pollution and time, much of their information erased by years and acid rain. The cemetery had been begun during the park cemetery movement at the turn of the twentieth century, when graveyards had been planned to be pleasant, tree-lined places for picnics and children to play. Then, the Victorian idea of death breathing close to the living still held sway. As society chose to have less and less to do with death, the tombstones became plainer, less elaborate, and less visited.
Today, there were too many figures for Anya to single out just one, to pick her arsonist out of the crowd. The hundreds of mourners at Neuman’s interment spread over several rows. The press stood at a respectful distance, clicking a few pictures and shambling away back to the news trucks. Beyond them, mourners for dozens of other sites wandered among the stones, clutching flowers. A woman was busily clearing out the overgrown weeds on a plot fifty feet distant. A group of high-school-age students were making grave rubbings of the older stones with crayons and butcher paper. A man who might have been a historian or genealogist stepped among rows with a notebook and pen. And those were the living. The park cemetery movement would have been pleased.
The dead walked in the sun as well. In the afterlife, this place remained a park, by design. The ghost of a child sat on a stone, swinging his legs back and forth, while a girl the same age climbed a nearby walnut tree. The spirit of a young woman stretched in the shade of a pine tree, playing with her infant child. A middle-aged pudgy man sat on one half of a double tombstone, ball cap in his hand. There was no death date for his wife on the other half, and Anya wondered how long he would have to wait for company.
An elderly man’s ghost walked his dog between the rows several yards away. Sparky scampered away to play with the dog. The old man chuckled as the salamander and dog sniffed under each other’s tails and romped around a headstone.
“I’m sorry about that,” Anya said, moving to retrieve Sparky. In the hundreds of mourners at the gravesite service, no one noticed that she was gone.
The ghost of the old man laughed. “Let ’em play. Bones gets bored. It’ll make his decade to play chase.”
The guns fired the salute, jolting Anya back to the commitment rite. The guns sounded twenty-one times. Anya thought that even the spirits turned their attention to the scene, to the parents with no living children clutching the flag, to the riflemen with the white braid over their shoulders turning the rifles with white gloves.
But one man did not turn to look. In the distance, in the old part of the cemetery, Anya saw a figure walking in the spaces between the trees. He wore a black jacket, pants, and sunglasses. His profile was indistinguishable from this distance, but there was something familiar about the way he moved, the way he favored his right leg as he walked. In his path, the ghost of a man in a suit and a bowler hat strolled, hands in his pockets. The man seemed to quicken his pace, walking toward the spirit.
Anya slipped away from the ghost with his dog, breaking into a sprint. Sparky tore himself away from the ghost-dog and surged beside her, loping like a giant squirrel. The cool October air burned in the back of her scraped and ruined throat, her lungs threatening to reject it.
The walking man ignored her, advancing toward the ghost drifting along the edges of the tombstones. The ghost’s feet didn’t touch the ground; he wandered as slowly as a cloud, drifting down the worn path between the stones.
She shouted for the man to stop, shouted a warning to the ghost, but she could only emit a hoarse rasp. She doubted that anyone from the graveside service could hear her, much less the distracted ghost.
Too late. The man walked briskly across the grass, into the ghost. As if he walked into a wall of smoke, the ghost dissolved. The ghost shredded into tendrils that faded into the crisp blue air. A thin sigh, like an exhalation into the vault of a shell, rolled over the grass.
He’d devoured the ghost, as easily as if he’d walked through a sheer curtain. The nonchalant ease with which he did so shocked her… and he kept on walking, never breaking stride, heading over the hill to the crypts.
She chased him and he disappeared around a stand of trees. Winded, she ran out into a clearing dominated by an Art Nouveau limestone mausoleum. A trio of walnut trees stood before it, their branches skimming toward the ground in graceful arches. Two black iron lions guarded the arched entrance, paws lifted. Past them, the pierced iron door was cracked open.
An invitation?
Sparky’s gills bristled, and his nostrils flared. Anya unbuttoned her dress jacket, reaching for her gun. She pushed open the door, snatching her hand away at the heat still lingering in the metal. The lock had been melted away, leaving the elaborate iron piecework intact.
The daylight cast her shadow long before her. Geometric shapes from the door and high grates played on the marble floors and the tarnished brass plates on the walls. In the center of the mausoleum, a marble bench rose from the floor. A dark figure stood at the far wall, fingering a smear of graffiti paint on one of the brass plates. Sparky lowered his body to the ground in a fighting stance, growling.
“They don’t build places like this anymore,” he said. In calm profile, without the aura of fire, his face was handsome: square jaw, chiseled chin, deep-set eyes under a thick brow. His sunglasses hung on the collar of his shirt. He could have walked from the pages of a glossy magazine. “Such a shame to deface them.”
Anya laughed, a short, rasping bark. “An arsonist who’s a historical preservationist.”
He turned to look at her then, lifting an eyebrow. His left eye was a warm brown, the iris dilated in the half darkness. Over the other, a milky cataract spread over a frozen iris that didn’t react to the light. The eyebrow over that eye was slightly twisted, as if scar tissue lay beneath the perfectly groomed eyebrow. He was blind in that eye, she realized.
“One has to remove the old to make room for the new,” he said.
Anya kept her gun trained on him. “Is that why you’re setting these fires? To make room for—”
“To make room for Sirrush.” He broke into a brilliant smile, his teeth flashing white in the darkness.
“Who the hell are you?”
“I’m the Right Hand of Sirrush. Obviously.”
“I don’t care if you’re the right hand of God. Put your hands up,” Anya ordered.
“No,” he said. “I’d much rather talk with you here, privately, than in the back of a police car.”
Her eyes narrowed. “I’m not letting you out. You’re coming with me, and I’m going to frog-march you down that hill.”
He smiled. “I don’t think that you can force me to do anything.” His hand flamed brightly as a torch, and he delicately wiped away the graffiti from the brass with his fingers. He shook his hand out, as easily as if he doused a match. “You certainly aren’t going to be able to get those cuffs around me.”
Anya backed toward the door. She reached into her belt for her handcuffs. She fumbled them behind her back, wound them into the ironwork. She snapped them shut, securing the door, and tossed the key out into the grass.
“That’s interesting,” he said, crossing his arms.
She plucked her cell phone from her handbag, and dialed 911. “This is Lieutenant Kalinczyk from DFD… I need backup at Holy Sepulchre Cemetery…” She told them the location of the mausoleum, heart hammering in her chest. “Bring fire extinguishers. Lots of them.” When she hung up, her arsonist hadn’t moved.
“You’ve got about five minutes to talk before this place is swarming with cops.”
He lifted a finger, limned in red fire. “I can burn through that door.”
“Sure. Eventually. If it doesn’t offend your artistic sensibilities. But I could probably shoot you a few times first.” Sparky growled at her feet. “And you have to get through him, too.”
His face split into a smile. On any other man, in any other place, she would have found it attractive. “How did you acquire a fire elemental? I confess to being… jealous.” He reached his hand toward Sparky, and Sparky bared his teeth.
“Hands off the little guy.”
“Indeed.”
“What did you do with Virgil? And the ghost of the man here in the cemetery?” she demanded. Now was her moment to ask questions, before he was surrounded by the reality of Vross and his detectives at police HQ.
He shrugged. “I consumed them.”
“Why? They weren’t bothering you, or anyone else.”
He looked back at her, as if puzzled by the question. “It’s what we do.”
She thinned her lips and decided to be obtuse. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You. Me. We’re Lanterns.”
“I’m not anybody special, though at one point in time I was a Girl Scout.”
He snorted. “You see them, every bit as I do.” He approached her, and Anya leveled her gun at his dark, burning eye. “You’re a Lantern. I can sense that hole in your chest, the heat from your skin…” He planed his hand in the air, inches from her. “You’re like me. Burning from the inside out, like you’ve swallowed a star.” His stare was black as obsidian and pale as quartz, taking her in from head to toe. “You’ve got no idea what you’re capable of, what I could teach you to do…” He took another step toward her.
“Stay where you are.” Her finger flexed on the trigger. “I don’t know what you are, but nothing’s immune to bullets.”
He inclined his head. “True enough.” When he moved to turn away, Anya saw the glimmer of white gauze peeking out from his right collar. She had struck him the other night. For all his power, he wasn’t invincible. “I am what you could be, with the right teacher…”
“You’re what I could be if I was completely, entirely insane. Who would want to summon Sirrush from his dirt nap? Why?”
His gaze glowed—with magick or avarice, she couldn’t tell. “Sirrush is the city’s last hope. You’ll see…”
She heard footsteps racing up the grassy hill to the mausoleum, shouting. There had been enough cops at the firefighter’s burial to take down a small army, and they were coming.
“In here,” she called.
The arsonist laced his hands together. “You’re wasting time, Lieutenant Kalinczyk.”
“No. I’m keeping you from playing out your sick little fantasies.”
He smiled, seeing the police crowding behind the pierced iron door. “We’ll see whose fantasies are real.”
She’d thought that the Right Hand of Sirrush would put up more of a fight.
The cops and firefighters cut open the door with bolt cutters. Anya warned them that the suspect likely had “flammable substances and an ignition source” on his person, but he let them cuff him without incident, fire extinguishers at the ready. The Right Hand of Sirrush smiled behind the glass of the police car, the same way he smiled at her now behind the one-way glass at police headquarters.
Vross and his cronies looked through the glass at the man in the interrogation room. “His ID says his name’s Drake Ferrer.”
“Why does that name sound familiar?” Anya asked.
“Used to be a big-shot architect trying to revitalize the city… tried to raise some grant and private monies to tear down the warehouse district and some of the worst neighborhoods. Wanted to build low-income housing, schools, that kind of crap in their places. Real do-gooder. Couldn’t raise the money. He got the shit beaten out of him in a robbery several years back, and he dropped off the society pages. Hell, I’m surprised that he’s still here.”
Anya stared through the glass. He hadn’t seemed like a typical, nervous fire-starter. He’d been too poised for that. “Maybe the failure drove him around the bend.”
“Maybe, maybe not.” Vross hitched his belt up over his considerable girth. “He says that he was minding his own business, looking at the design elements of the mausoleums when you took him prisoner. His lawyer’s on his way, making noises about unlawful imprisonment.”
Anya snorted. “You saw that note on my car.”
“There are no prints on the note. And we don’t know what the hell it means.”
“The prints at the warehouse scene, on the window grate… they’re his.”
“There are twelve sets of distinguishable prints on that grate. That’s assuming that the lab didn’t fuck up. None of ’em are his… at least, none of the ones they can find now.”
“Then he wore gloves. I’ve got his face on videotape at two of the scenes.”
“That’s circumstantial. He says he was at the school to pick up a teacher’s aide volunteer form and he was on the beauty shop street to look at a rental.”
Anya spun on him in frustration. “I shot him. Look at that wound on his shoulder.” She stabbed the glass with a finger.
“All that’s there is a burn. Could be a cauterization, could be who knows what. No record of him going to any emergency room that night.”
“I saw him.”
“Says you. It was dark. You also said that the arsonist had a blowtorch.” Sarcasm dripped from Vross’s voice. “You saw a guy that looked like him.”
“Where was he the night of the warehouse fire, then?”
“The dude’s got an alibi. He was at a high-society wedding. One of the commissioners was there. He’s got alibis for the other nights, too.”
She blew out her breath in frustration. “What are you saying to me, Vross? You working for the defense here?”
“I’m saying”—Vross crossed his arms over his stomach, and Anya could see the sweat stains in his armpits—“that we don’t have enough to hold this guy. You jumped the gun, and we got nothing. I’m saying that you made an ass of yourself at Neuman’s funeral, got his parents all riled up for no good reason. We’re going to be turning him loose in twenty-four hours.”
She slammed her fist on the wall. “How stupid are you? I just handed you this guy on a silver platter. There’s more than enough to take to a grand jury.”
“Watch your mouth with me, princess. There isn’t a case until I say there is.”
“The hell there isn’t.”
The door to the suspect observation area opened. Marsh stood in the doorway, still in his dress uniform.
“Call your bitch down, Marsh,” Vross snarled.
“Shut the fuck up, Vross,” Marsh told him.
Anya blinked. Marsh never swore.
“A word with you, please.” Marsh gestured to the hallway. Anya followed him out.
“Captain, I—” she began.
Marsh held up a finger, and her protests died away. “You just stepped on some very big toes, Lieutenant,” he said in a low voice.
“Vross isn’t…”
“I’m not talking about Vross. Vross is useless. I’m talking about your suspect. He’s got some friends in very high places.”
Anya’s cheeks burned. “But the evidence…”
“Does point in his general direction. But we need more. We need to be able to place him at the scene at the time of the fires. And we can’t. The DA won’t touch him in this case unless we’ve got a damn signed confession.”
“This is the guy, Marsh, the guy who was in the warehouse the other night. I saw him.”
“You and who else?”
Thinking of Brian lying in his hospital bed, Anya’s heart dropped. “The other witness is no shape to talk.”
“Get me more.” Marsh’s mouth was set in a hard line and he reopened the observation room door. “Get me enough to lock that son of a bitch up for the next fifty years. Put him at the scene.”
Anya stared at the man behind the glass. He’d kicked back in his seat, staring at the one-way glass. She could swear that he could see her behind it.
“I want to talk to him,” she said.
Vross began to protest, but Marsh held up his hand. “You didn’t get anywhere with him, right?”
“He just keeps saying he wants his lawyer.”
“Then, there’s nothing to be lost by letting her try.”
Vross crumpled his coffee cup in his hand and threw his electronic key card to the interrogation room door lock to her. It missed her head, and she plucked it from the air like a snake snapping up a bird. Her mouth quirked in amusement at him, but Anya could feel his glare on her back as she left the observation area.
Standing alone before the metal door to the interrogation room, she fingered the copper torque around her neck.
“Wake up, little dude,” she murmured.
She felt Sparky stir. He stretched, yawned against her hair, and took his full shape as he clambered down her jacket sleeve and pant leg. He stretched up to her hand, licked the keycard. He made a face, as if he could taste Vross’s fingerprints on it.
Anya swiped the card in the door lock slot. A green light flashed, and the door unlocked with a metallic thud. Anya let herself in, Sparky sidling beside her.
Ferrer leaned forward in interest. “Hello, again.”
She pulled up a chair opposite him, then rested her elbows on the table. She didn’t carry a notebook, a recorder, or have any deals on paper to offer him. But she knew he had been baiting her.
“Why are you here, Mr. Ferrer?” Conscious of the video camera over her head, she kept her tone civil.
“I think I already covered that with the police. You cornered me in the crypt, accused me of being a serial arsonist.” Amusement glinted in his good eye. She watched as his attention drifted from her face downward, trickling down her neck. It was then that she was conscious of the fact that her dress uniform jacket was unbuttoned, that it flared open when she sat. She’d opened the collar of her dress shirt to allow her burns to breathe. She hadn’t been able to stand the constriction of a bra on her charred skin, and she could feel the antibiotic ointment sticking her skin to the fabric. Her first impulse was to button her jacket, but she stubbornly refused to give him the satisfaction of knowing that she felt vulnerable under his scrutiny.
