Currying Death, page 18
Kenzie nodded and took her leave.
She might have been a bit lead-footed on the way home, maybe had run one yellow light that she could easily have stopped for, but she hadn’t technically broken any law. Except for maybe speeding a little.
Kenzie drove past the front of the house on the way to the garage, and her heart sank.
Zachary’s car was not parked in its usual place at the curb. He was not home. She pulled over and took out her phone, again looking for his location. She had resisted doing so again since talking to Heather, reasoning that looking at it more often would not make Zachary come online any faster and she would just make herself crazy with worry until he did. If she just ignored the fact that she couldn’t track him, everything would be fine.
No location found
Kenzie could just sit in the empty house waiting for him to come home. Sooner or later, he would.
But she had sat around for long enough, being calm and reasonable and patient. Now, she was starting to get worried and angry.
Worried something had happened to him.
Angry he was not there and might be stalking Bridget or doing something similarly stupid or dangerous that he didn’t want her to know about. Why else shut off his location tracking?
She pulled out again and headed for Bridget’s house. Roxboro was a small town and it only took a few minutes to get there. Kenzie didn’t see Zachary’s car on the street in front of the mansion. But he wouldn’t necessarily have parked somewhere so obvious. She drove around the block, eyes peeled for his car parked on any adjoining street. His white compact was meant to blend in, and it did just that. She had to slow down and check every single white compact on the street to see whether it was his.
It was time to buy him an eye-catching bumper sticker so his car was easier to spot.
But, of course, that would defeat the purpose of having such a nondescript car, and he would never use it.
She drove around the house twice, then parked her car and got out to walk around looking for any sign of Zachary.
Still nothing.
She didn’t like to stay out too long, making herself visible. She didn’t want to attract the attention of Bridget or Gordon. They had both always been cordial to Kenzie, but she did not want to make them think that Zachary might be stalking Bridget again when he was not. They all needed to give Zachary the benefit of the doubt and not assume he was doing something he should not.
Kenzie heard sirens in the distance. Her stomach clenched. There was trouble somewhere nearby. She didn’t want to associate it with Zachary’s disappearance, but she couldn’t help it.
The sirens got louder. She could hear the loud horns of fire engines honking for traffic to get out of their way.
A fire?
37
Kenzie climbed back into her “baby” and started the engine. With the window down, she could hear the sirens well enough to guess their direction and did her best to follow at a distance. It was ridiculous to associate Zachary’s disappearance with a fire, but she couldn’t help it. She knew how much Zachary was affected by fire. He had grown and progressed a lot since they had first met, but that didn’t mean that he liked fire or wanted to be close to one. He could be around a fire now without being thrown into a flashback. At least usually. The way that he had been triggered lately by abuse scenarios, she couldn’t make any assumptions. Something that would not normally set him off might anyway.
The fire engines might not even be going to a fire. They might be going to a medical emergency. She might even be wrong about the sirens being fire engines. Maybe she had just assumed they were fire engines because she was thinking of Zachary, and she had failed to recognize the slightly different sound of a police car or ambulance.
Trying to put everything else out of her mind and not to speculate on what she might find, she just focused on following the sound of the sirens.
Her phone vibrated in her pocket, but Kenzie ignored it. She was driving, and it would be dangerous to try to dig it out and see who it was. The caller would have to wait until she had reached her destination.
It would be ironic if Zachary were trying to reach her, realizing that his phone had been off half the day. She had left him several messages, so he should call as soon as he turned the phone on, got back into cell range, or rebooted it.
She reached Main Street in time to see the last fire engine in the convoy turn off and disappear from sight. She stepped on the gas and sped up to reach the turn it had taken.
Up into a residential area. Kenzie might lose them if she couldn’t keep the fire engine in sight and they all turned off their sirens when they reached their destination. She would have to drive around looking for the flashing lights and big red trucks.
They slowed down on the residential side streets and cul-de-sacs. No matter how bad the call they were going to was, they didn’t want to hit a child running out into the street after a ball or excited by the sight and sound of the flashy emergency vehicles. Kenzie closed the distance between herself and the last fire engine.
She breathed a sigh of relief. She wasn’t going to lose them. She would see their destination, and it would have nothing to do with Zachary. She knew now that he wasn’t stalking Bridget again, and that made it less likely in her mind that he was doing anything dangerous. She would tell him later how she had chased the fire engines in case it was something he was involved in. He would think it was funny. Did she actually think he would be running toward a fire?
The fire engine took another turn, slowing to a crawl, and then pulled up behind another firetruck.
The street was jammed with emergency vehicles. There was no way Kenzie was getting any closer than she already was.
She backed up until she found a parking space she could get into. She unbuckled her seatbelt so she could get her phone back out of her pocket.
When she saw the caller ID, her heart started to race. She had hoped it would be Zachary, and he would put all of her fears to rest with a story of how he had goofed up again, or his phone had run down, fallen into the toilet, or something silly.
But the caller was Mario Bowman. And one thing that she knew about Zachary’s friend Mario was that he knew everything that went on at the police station and, if there were a case or rumor that involved Zachary in some way, he would call Kenzie to give her a heads-up.
Cold sweat trickled down her back.
Looking at the fire engines with their flashing lights up the street, Kenzie tried to swallow the lump in her throat and tapped the recent call log to call him back.
“Kenzie, glad you called back,” Mario greeted. “Listen, there’s nothing to worry about, but—”
If there wasn’t anything to worry about, then why had he called her in the first place? He knew that it was something she would be worried about or needed to know about.
“Where is he?” she cut Mario off.
“There’s a situation in the heights—”
“Is there a fire?”
Zachary could not be involved in a house fire. He was already experiencing the negative effects of witnessing domestic and child abuse.
But there was no smoke in the air. Kenzie had to believe that the firetrucks were there for something other than a residential fire.
“No fire yet,” Mario said, his tone cautious, as if he were afraid of saying the wrong thing. “Zachary was concerned about the possibility of a fire.”
Well, he would be, wouldn’t he? Zachary was always concerned about the possibility of a fire. And it made perfect sense after what he had been through lately that he would be more concerned about a fire than ever. He was probably having flashbacks about it almost constantly.
“Is he here?” Kenzie asked. “On… Goldenrod Road?”
There was a silent pause from Mario before he answered. “How did you get there so fast? I didn’t even tell you where he was. Did he call you?”
“No, he didn’t. I’ve been trying to reach him, but he hasn’t answered, and his location tracking is blocked.”
“Then how did you get there?”
“I followed the firetrucks.”
“Oh. Well, okay. He is there. You might be able to talk your way in to see him.”
“I will. Can you give me the background? Did he say why he thinks there is going to be a fire?”
“Everything I got was garbled. At least secondhand. There is… a situation. A standoff.”
“Not with Zachary,” Kenzie said, trying not to sound shocked. He might have been destabilized by the multiple trauma triggers, but he would never use a gun and he would never hold someone hostage.
“No. He called it in. An assault in progress. Police showed up. The guy is still holed up inside with his wife. Then Zachary starts going off about a fire. So… fire brigade was called in… and now you’re caught up.”
“Okay.” Kenzie swallowed and kept her voice calm and steady. “Great, thanks for the background.”
She disconnected the call and headed toward the command center for the standoff, a quickly assembled white canopy where a number of officials were gathered in a beehive of activity.
Before Kenzie reached the perimeter tape, an officer moved in to stop her.
“Ma’am, you need to stay back, please. Go back to your house and let us handle things here.”
“My name is Dr. Kenzie Kirsch. I’m the assistant medical examiner. My partner, Zachary Goldman, is here with the police. I need to get in there. Who is in charge?”
“Dr. Kirsch.” The cop’s voice grew deferential. “I don’t think we need you here. Not yet, anyway. If you want to stick around, you could just stay here and wait until—”
“I didn’t ask you that. I asked who is in charge,” Kenzie told him, putting as much steel into her voice as possible.
He looked startled by her response and straightened his spine immediately.
“Sergeant Campbell is in charge, ma’am. He—”
“Please tell him Dr. Kirsch is here.”
He opened his mouth to argue. Kenzie raised her brows and folded her arms over her chest, waiting. The officer looked around for a higher authority. He flagged down another uniformed officer and spoke to him in a low voice, motioning to Kenzie. The other officer nodded and retreated to the command center. Within a few minutes, Kenzie was being escorted into the tent, where Campbell and Zachary were at the center of the hive of activity.
38
Zachary was not looking particularly good. He was pale, with dark bags under his eyes and a sheen of sweat glistening on the surface of his skin despite the chill in the air as the sun got lower in the sky.
“Kenzie? What are you doing here?”
Kenzie shrugged. “There seemed to be a lot of activity around here. I thought you were going to take a quiet day today.”
Zachary was unable to hide a slight grimace at the suggestion. “The day… didn’t go quite like I’d hoped.”
“What happened? What brought you out here? Is this the couple you’ve been surveilling?”
“Yeah.”
“I thought you were finished with the file.”
“So did I. But… then I knew it wasn’t over. I couldn’t just leave things the way they were.”
Kenzie nodded slowly. “You had proof that he was abusive. You filed a police report and gave your final report to your client, but then…”
“Then… he wasn’t going to stop. Even if my client talked her into breaking up with him, he wasn’t going to stay away. The detectives would look into my report and evidence, but if he wasn’t arrested right away, he was going to come right back here…”
Zachary turned and looked at the house. Kenzie looked at it, but couldn’t see anything. Zachary had been watching them closely for a few days so, when he looked at the house, he saw a lot of things in his mind’s eye that Kenzie could not. Each room and its layout. Where they spent their time. Where the husband sat when he drank. All of those little things. But all Kenzie could see were the curtains pulled across the windows.
“So he’s in there now?” Kenzie asked. “You were right, and he came back again? Did the wife allow him back or tell him to stay away? It’s so hard to get women out of abusive situations. If they’re not ready…”
“Her dad talked her into filing a Restraint from Abuse order against him,” Sergeant Campbell told Kenzie with a friendly nod. “Temporary RFA was granted. And as you may gather, he immediately violated it.”
“So you came back here and saw him,” Kenzie addressed Zachary. “And got the police out.”
“Did anyone think he was going to stay away?” Zachary asked heavily. “They all knew he would come back here, didn’t they?”
“Unfortunately, we can’t arrest people for what we think they are going to do,” Campbell responded.
“You could keep violent offenders in jail until their hearings.”
“I wish we could. Unfortunately, even when the crime is witnessed or recorded, we still can’t always keep them in custody. They get bailed out, often by the very person they are charged with assaulting. They go home, and…” Sergeant Campbell gestured toward the house.
“Well,” Kenzie kept her voice carefully neutral. “Now that the police are here and have a handle on things, maybe we could go home.”
Sergeant Campbell gave her an amused look, his face turned away from Zachary so he couldn’t see it.
Zachary immediately shook his head. “I need to stay here and see this through,” he insisted.
“I’m not sure there is anything else you can do.”
Zachary pointed to a few TV screens showing the interior of the house. None of them, as far as Kenzie could see, showed the occupants of the house at the moment.
“These are my spycams,” he pointed out. “They wouldn’t have eyes in the house if I hadn’t set those up.”
“But now that they are set up, they don’t need you here. I’m sure they’ll return them to you when everything is over.”
Kenzie wasn’t “sure” of any such thing. Were the spy cameras even legal? The police might just as easily confiscate them.
Zachary shook his head. He wiped his sweaty forehead. “I’m not leaving. Not until he’s out of there and she is safe.”
“That could be a while. Do they have some kind of hostage negotiator? Are they trying to talk him out?”
“He’s trapped. You never know how someone will behave when backed into a corner. Animals are dangerous when you corner them.”
“I know. But they must have trained professionals…”
“He doesn’t think he has anything left to live for,” Zachary said. He ran his fingers through his stubbly hair in a gesture that would have messed it up and made it stand on end if it hadn’t been just a quarter inch long. Zachary walked up to the monitors and scrutinized everything he could see on the screen. Kenzie could see that other monitors were not blank as she had first thought, but were picking up cameras pointed at closed curtains. Zachary leaned close to them to see if he could see through the crack between two curtain panels or worn moth holes.
“What do you think happens when you take away the thing someone loves the most in the world?” he asked, staring at the monitors.
Kenzie swallowed. “Is that why the fire engines are here?” she asked. “You think he’s going to hurt her or himself?”
“If this place goes up, they’ll only have seconds to get in there to save her.”
“Why do you think he’s going to set it on fire?”
Zachary paced, not able to get very far without bumping into anyone in the enclosed space. But he needed to keep moving to keep his thoughts flowing. Kenzie knew how agitated he would get if he had to sit quietly instead of being allowed movement.
“The place is full of highly flammable material,” Zachary told her. He jabbed his fingers at the screens, which showed windows obscured by curtains. “Bundles of newspapers and magazines. Bales of clothing. I thought they were sorting them for a charity drive or something. But they weren’t. He was bringing them in because he wants instant ignition. He wants an inferno.”
“You don’t know that,” Campbell told Zachary reassuringly. “You are guessing at his motives. I’d be more inclined to believe the theory of a charity drive than a bonfire.”
“You’re just letting your fears take over,” Kenzie agreed.
But the firetrucks were already there. On some level, Campbell must believe that Zachary could be right, or he wouldn’t have called them.
“I’m not. He had gasoline in the back of the truck.” Zachary pointed at an outside camera shot of a black F-150 with an empty bed. “He had at least three gas cans.”
Kenzie couldn’t deny the anxiety that crept into her chest at the thought of three gas cans disappearing into the house filled with tinder where an angry, cornered abuser held his wife, knowing he was never going to be able to get out without being arrested. She glanced at Campbell, who gave her a slight nod. Signaling, she thought, that he trusted Zachary’s observations well enough to make sure that there were firetrucks lining the street outside the house.
Kenzie wondered if the operations center might be a bit too close to the house, given the fact that at least three gas cans could go off in a blazing inferno without further warning. She bet each can would become a pretty good fireball.
Would the husband pour the gasoline all over the piles of newspapers and clothes before setting it alight? Or would he run fuses into the cans and try to explode them that way? She’d heard it was harder than Hollywood would have everyone think to set off a gasoline explosion. She crossed her fingers and hoped that was true.
“But they have a negotiator, right?” she asked again. “They have a trained hostage negotiator talking to them?”
“They’re trying to find someone,” Campbell said. “To get someone here from the city.”
Burlington was a couple of hours away.
“He’s not answering the phone anyway,” Campbell added philosophically. “So there’s no one to negotiate with.”
