Embers, page 17
Her first impulse was to tear it up, but she paused. Why shouldn’t she? Why shouldn’t she take the opportunity to glare at him, to make him uncomfortable… to show him she wasn’t afraid of him.
She looked down at her feet. “Sparky, do you want to go to a party Friday night?”
Sparky paused in his intense scrutiny of the electric meter. His tail kinked up.
“Yeah. A party. With wine and cheese, snotty art, and an opportunity to bite that nasty man from the graveyard again.”
Sparky’s tail wagged. He was on board.
Now, she just needed something to wear. Piss. She supposed it would be in poor taste to turn up in her firefighter’s boots. She looked down at her hands. Maybe Mimi had been right. She could use a coat of nail polish.
She’d worry about that later. She chucked her mail and her keys on the kitchen table, beside the microwave she had yet to return. The light on her answering machine blinked furiously and she sighed.
She stabbed the button.
“Kalinczyk, this is Marsh. Turn on the news. Call me.” That was Marsh: to the point. The time stamp on it was fifteen minutes ago. She hoped she hadn’t missed whatever he was talking about.
Anya clicked on the television, an old set plugged into a scorched surge protector. The local evening news was still on, and the news anchors blathered in full-crisis mode. A newscaster in a hardhat was yelling above sirens that obliterated the sound feed. Behind him, she saw an apartment building going up in flames.
Anya put her head in her hands. “Oh, shit.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
ANYA’S VISIT TO ST. FLORIAN had apparently done little to improve the karma of firefighters in the greater Detroit area.
By the time Anya arrived at the scene of the apartment fire on the northwest side of town, trucks from five different ladder companies were trying to keep the blaze under control. The fire had apparently begun in one building of twelve units and had spread to another. These were newer apartment buildings, built within the last ten years. Anya would never have considered living in such recent, cheap construction: the siding had melted and the firewalls only reached up to the roofline, allowing the fire to roar through the attic space from one unit to the next. There was a reason why firefighters called so many of the new builds tinderboxes. They were built to look good, with enough pretty details to impress the shallow eye, but not all the crown molding and walk-in closets in the world could protect you from a disaster the way solid metal doors and cinder-block firewalls could. There was definitely something to be said for old and ugly.
This fire was a bad one. Anya had passed two ambulances racing to the hospital on her way in. While this wasn’t the worst time of day for a fire—most of the people who lived there would be awake—many of the occupants would be home from work and school.
Anya geared up and made her way to the perimeter of the scene. Five apartment buildings were tightly packed around a central parking lot, which was crammed with emergency vehicles. It looked as if a child had dumped out a box of toy cars on his sister’s broken dollhouse. Residents wandered, dazed, in the lot. A woman somewhere was crying for her child. A man sat on the bumper of his car with his keys in his hand, watching his home burn. A teenage girl sat on the curb beside a police car, clutching her pet cat. A little boy holding a gerbil cage tagged along beside his mother, who was carrying a baby. The police were trying to keep the civilians out of the lot and behind the line, but more people kept pouring out of the buildings.
A patrolman was trying to hold back a wailing woman trying to cross the line. She was dressed in a waitress uniform, clearly just off work.
“You have to let me in!” she yelled. “My dogs are in there!”
Anya slipped on her helmet. “How many dogs?”
“Two dachshunds. Please get them!”
“Which apartment?”
“It’s 1811… A8…” She pointed toward the next block of buildings to go.
“Give me your keys.” Though Anya was a big fan of kicking in doors for fun and stress relief, there was no point in being inefficient.
Anya ran to the building, clumsy in her booted feet. The uniform scraped against her burns. She never remembered her uniform being this heavy before.
The waitress’s unit was a ground-floor apartment. A plume of smoke drifted from two doors down, and the fire had spread to the roof shingles. She smelled burning tar. With clumsy gloved fingers, she jammed the key into the lock. She hoped with all her might that the woman had crate-trained her dogs, and that she would find a wire cage in the living room that she could simply pick up and carry out.
No such luck. The door opened to reveal a small apartment with a galley kitchen, a pretty decorative fireplace, chintz couch, and no dogs.
She tried whistling. “Here, doggies, c’mon!” She thunked through the apartment, hearing fire crackling in the units above her. There wasn’t much time. She looked under the couch, under the desk, and finally under the bed in the bedroom. No dogs.
“Sparky, I need your help,” Anya hissed.
Sparky unwound himself from the copper collar around her neck, then scrambled up from her fire-coat collar. His tongue coiled, tasting the smoke.
“We need to find those dogs.”
Sparky slithered away, digging into laundry baskets. Anya opened the closets, rifled through the centipedes’ wardrobe of shoes she found at the bottom. No dogs. Time was running out.
She heard Sparky mew from the bathroom. Anya rounded the corner, shining her flashlight into the shower, then behind the toilet. Four frightened eyes peered from behind a toilet scrubber.
“C’mon, you guys.” Anya got down on her hands and knees to drag the dogs out by the scruffs of their necks. They nipped and wailed, but there was little damage that they could do to her gloves or coat. She jammed the dogs unceremoniously in a laundry basket and backed out of the bathroom.
“C’mon, Sparky. Let’s go.” The smoke had grown thick enough to make her cough and obscure the path to the door.
Sparky beat his little webbed feet ahead of her, incandescing brightly like a beacon. She followed him into fresh air, stumbling out over the porch steps. Anya rushed back over the grass behind the police line, carrying the laundry basket, with the giant salamander loping beside her. A woman’s bra dangled from the laundry basket, and Sparky was fascinated by the tassels dangling from it.
Anya ducked under the police tape and dropped the laundry basket in front of the waitress. She was too out of breath to speak, coughing against the back of her hand. The waitress dove into the pile of laundry, pulling out two squirming brown dogs. One was tangled up in black thong underwear.
“Ketchup! Mustard! You’re all right!” The lingerie-bedecked dogs slobbered all over her neck, and the waitress started to cry. “Thank you!”
Anya fell back on her ass, bracing herself on her hands. She gave the waitress a sooty grin. Moments like this were when it was all worth it. Maybe St. Florian liked wiener dogs.
As she was catching her breath, she felt a tall, cool shadow fall over her. She looked up to see Captain Marsh tapping his foot.
“Kalinczyk. What the hell do you think you’re doing?” His voice was harsh, but she detected a smile under his moustache.
“Um. Roasting wieners, sir.” It popped out of her mouth before she’d had the chance to edit it.
“Quit loafing and get over here. I have some info for you.”
Anya climbed to her feet. “Sorry, sir. May I ask”—her hand sketched the horizon line of the fire—“why you called me in? It’s not cool yet.”
“This one is the work of your firebug.”
“How do you know?” Anya hoped he was wrong; there was no way any personnel could have gotten into the basements to look at the floors of the laundry rooms for Drake Ferrer’s signature.
He pointed to the parking lot. “This is how I know.”
A ladder truck pulled aside, exposing the striped center of the parking lot. There, dug into the asphalt, was the mark of the Horned Viper, carved large as the fire truck that just passed over it. It crossed over a dozen painted stripes, gouged into the black center as clearly as if it were painted on the fifty-yard line at the stadium.
Ferrer got around. And now he was just showing off.
The fire had cooled a day later. DFD found two bodies in the rubble: a guy doing laundry and reading porn in the basement who died of smoke inhalation, and a woman in a wheelchair who hadn’t been able to get around the stacks of canned goods and bottled water she’d been hoarding for the apocalypse. One person was in the hospital in critical condition and there were a handful of minor injuries. The fire had spread to three apartment buildings, seeming to defy prevailing winds, fire hoses, and chemical foam. It moved like a living thing, surging through the buildings as it flashed over from rooftop to rooftop, until the decision was finally made to sacrifice one of the buildings and focus the entirety of the firefighting on preventing spread to further structures.
Anya had moved to cover the sign of the Horned Viper on the parking lot with a tarp as soon as she’d seen it, but had been too late. A news helicopter had gotten a nice aerial shot of it, and it was plastered all over the news outlets with the byline “Ritual Arsonist Torches Apartment Complex.”
Vross held a press conference at DPD headquarters the following morning, once the bodies had been counted and his authority over the scene was made absolute by the administrative machine. He repeated the favor to the media twice a day, in the interest of “keeping the public informed of this serious public safety situation.” He’d managed to find a jacket that actually buttoned over his belly, strutting like a chicken with his shiny badge pinned to his chest.
“There’s been some suggestion that Satanism is involved. Is that true?” a reporter asked Vross.
Vross screwed up his pudgy face in thought. “There’s been some discussion about ritual elements in the crime, yes.”
“Are there other arsons connected to this case?”
“Tentatively, yes. DPD feels that there’s a connection between some of the more recent crimes and the fire at the apartment complex.”
“Which ones?”
“I’m not at liberty to discuss the details of a pending investigation. Suffice it to say, DPD is committing its full resources to find and apprehend the perpetrator—”
Anya killed the video feed on her computer. She’d watched each one of the press conferences he’d been giving for the past two days. Vross had no new information and would continue to mouth her results to the press, twisted with his own bent. Devil worshippers. Christ. She rolled her eyes to the stained ceiling. Vross was a media whore. He’d latch on to anything that would get him in the papers… and a story about fire-crazy devil-worshippers just days before Halloween would guarantee him several interviews. The national news might even give a shit.
She simply hoped the media feeding frenzy would keep Vross occupied and out of her hair. That would be the best that could be accomplished for now. Anya had been inundated with messages about whether there were other connected cases. She hadn’t returned any of the calls and was avoiding her office. She’d set up a temporary office in the basement of the Detroit Public Library, next to the microfiche readers in the archives. Here, no one bothered her.
Sparky had finally mustered enough interest in the microfiche readers that Felicity had set him up with an old card of newspaper images of gangsters and flapper girls from the Prohibition era. He sat hunched on the desk, playing with the focus knob and horizontal and vertical adjustments. In deep concentration, his tongue curled out of his mouth, and he squealed in delight every so often when an image came into focus.
She studied the photographs she’d taken of the parking lot. A fragment of memory jarred loose. On this large scale, the Horned Viper symbol reminded her of a place she’d visited as a child: Serpent Mound. Built in rural Ohio by Fort Ancient Indians, the mound stretched over a thousand feet long, featuring a horned snake swallowing an egg. To her, the opening of its curved jaws around the egg was strongly reminiscent of the hieratic character of the Horned Viper.
“Hey, Felicity,” she whispered.
The librarian’s ghost peeked her head out of a cabinet. Anya had asked her to search for records that might tie Ferrer to the burned properties. She had a hunch that the targets, though intended to wake up Sirrush, weren’t entirely random. She couldn’t imagine any of his actions being less than deliberate.
“Check this out,” Felicity said, brushing a long piece of hair behind her ear. “I pulled the addresses of your arsons and cross-checked them against known family members of the perpetrators of Ferrer’s assault.”
“I thought that the records of the juveniles were expunged.”
Felicity rolled her eyes. “Yeah. Well, there’s a difference between expungement and sealing. A juvenile’s criminal record can be sealed automatically when the kid reaches the age of majority. Alternatively, the kid or his parents can petition the court for an expungement. The expungement requires nearly all traces of the criminal record to be destroyed. If the court isn’t petitioned, then the records are simply sealed. Which means they’re lying about in a file cabinet in records storage somewhere.”
“You can get at those?” Anya asked, surprised.
“I know ghosts at the juvenile detention bureau. You probably can’t use any of this in court, but it might point you in the right direction.”
“What’ve you got?”
“The beauty shop that burned down, Hair Out There, was owned by one of the suspects’ mothers.”
“No kidding?”
“Yep. And the warehouse fire? One of the people leasing storage space from the owner was one of the suspects. Your firebug apparently managed to torch all of the possessions he left stateside before joining the military.”
“Interesting.” Anya leaned back in her chair. “Sounds like Ferrer is trying to cause a bit of misery to his perpetrators while he’s at it.”
“I’m going to keep looking for connections. I’ll keep you posted.” The hippie librarian made to duck back behind a wall, but Anya called out for her to wait.
“Felicity, can I ask you to switch gears for a moment?” Anya felt guilty about bugging the librarian, but the heart-shaped face seemed to brighten with each new question.
“Sure. You’re the only customer I’ve had in decades. I’m all yours.”
“Thanks. I appreciate it.” Anya blew out her breath. “This may be a wild-goose chase, but can you find me anything on Serpent Mound in Ohio?”
“That’s easy,” Felicity chirped. “You’ll have to come with me, though. Those books will be too heavy for me to carry.”
Anya grabbed her gear and followed the spirit up the stairs to the second floor. Felicity drifted among the stacks and pointed to a shelf.
“Here you go.”
Anya was impressed. “I can’t believe you’ve memorized where everything is.”
“I’ve read most everything in this section. Things get boring.” She sighed. “But I have to say, if you ever get the choice to be a ghost, becoming one in a library is the way to go. Decades of entertainment await.”
Anya crawled down on her hands and knees, brushing her fingers over the titles. “I hope it’s not too personal, but how did you come to be a library ghost?”
Felicity shrugged. “It’s not a terribly exciting story. I was interning here during a remodel. A fifty-pound bucket of drywall patch fell off some scaffolding and hit me in the head. Not much to tell.”
“But…” Anya tried to word it delicately. She had a lot of questions lately about what came after. “… There wasn’t a bright light or anything that took you?”
“Nope. There was no big, glowing vacuum cleaner in the sky that sucked my soul up. I just remember making a decision: stay here or move on. Since there were books here I hadn’t read and I couldn’t imagine not reading them, I stayed. I mean”—she stuffed her hands in her pockets—“I had just picked up Jonathan Livingston Seagull when the bucket hit me. I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t find out how it ended.”
“Do you think you’ll always stay?”
Felicity’s eyes roved over the stacks. “As the afterlife goes, I’m quite content. I may consider moving on after I’ve read every book here… and if there aren’t going to be any new ones I’m interested in.” Her eye twinkled when she spoke. “So I guess I’m going to be here a very, very long time.”
Anya smiled. “It sounds like a very pleasant eternity.” Much more pleasant than the ones she imagined for the spirits she’d devoured.
She opened a book on her lap and flipped to the color plates of Serpent Mound in the center. These were aerial photos of the effigy, faded a bit with time. Indeed, the curve of its open mouth seemed almost identical to the horns on Ferrer’s symbol. The pictures were as she remembered it: a shallow mound covered in closely mowed grass with lawnmower tracks in it, surrounded by forest.
She remembered her mother taking her there when she’d been on summer vacation. It was one of the rare times her mother had taken her out of the city for a trip, and Anya had watched the flat farmland of Michigan and northwestern Ohio give way to the rolling, forested hills of southern Ohio. It was a completely different world than the one Anya had grown up in. Here, hawks perched on power lines, buzzards circled overhead, and jet contrails barely interrupted the blue of the sky. Grass, honeysuckle, and trees grew wild, untamed by sidewalks or yards.
Anya recalled walking around the edges of the mound with her mother. She hadn’t been impressed at the time. The mound wasn’t more than three feet high and it seemed to melt into the grass, like a sea serpent sleeping. Sparky had thoroughly enjoyed himself, gamboling over the giant serpent’s body and chasing chipmunks through the grass.
Anya’s mother had stood over the serpent in an attitude of reverence. She had only seen her mother’s face that pensive in church.
“What is it, Mom?” she asked.
