Lincoln Perry 02 - Sorrow's Anthem (20 page)

“Ed Gradduk didn’t start this fire.”

“No.”
“But another Neighborhood Alliance house is burning. So what
the hell’s going on, Lincoln?”
“I don’t know.” I dropped down from the wall. “But I’d like to
see for myself.” I walked away from the library, back toward the
avenue.
“Are you going down there? To the house fire?”
“Seems like I ought to.”
“Want me to meet you down there?”
“If you’d like.”
I thanked her, hung up, slipped the phone back into my pocket,
and quickened my pace. I wanted to get to West Twenty-fifth
while the house was still burning. And I wanted my gun.

I had the Glock in its holster and the key in the ignition of my
truck when Amy called again. I started the truck and answered the
phone as I pulled out of my parking space.
“I’m on my way, Amy.”
“It’ll be a shorter trip then you thought.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re not going to believe this, Lincoln, but we’ve got another
fire going now. Another Neighborhood Alliance house. It’s on
Hancock Avenue.”
“You’re sure?”
“Positive. They just called it in. We’ve got two fires going at
Neighborhood Alliance houses now. Two in about twenty minutes,
Lincoln. Who’s doing this? And why?”
The annoying thing about hanging out with a reporter is that

she tends to keep asking questions, even when she knows you don’t
have the answers. I told Amy I’d call her back, and I pulled into the
street and hammered the accelerator, the big truck’s exhaust roaring.
While I drove, I dialed Joe’s home number and put the phone
back to my ear. It took six rings before I remembered that he’d still
be at the office. I disconnected and called him there. He answered
immediately.
“Something strange is going down, Joe.”
“Yeah?”
“Two house fires just started on the near west side in the last
half hour. They’re both Neighborhood Alliance houses.”
Silence.
“This isn’t Ed Gradduk’s work,” I said, echoing Amy’s obvious
statement.
“Where are you?”
“On my way to Hancock Avenue. It’s fresher.”
“You think it’s going to do one damn bit of good for you to
stand on the sidewalk watching that thing burn?”
“I don’t know, Joe. But I’m sure not going to sit at home and wait
for Amy to call me with updates. This has to be arson. Somebody
might have seen something, just like Gradduk was caught on tape
with the last fire. The time to try to talk to people is now, while
they’re all out on the street watching the show. It’ll be easier than
trying to knock on doors tomorrow, hoping to find out who was
home when the fire got started.”
He grunted, which was the best acknowledgment of support I
could hope for. “You want me to meet you down there? Work the
crowd as a team?”
“I don’t know yet. Let me get an idea of what the situation is
and call you back.”
“All right.” There was a long pause, and then he said, “You got
any bright ideas as to what this could be about?”
“No.”
“Me neither.”

“I’ll call you back, Joe.

A quarter mile away from the fire on Hancock, I could hear the
sirens and see the smoke. I got within two blocks of the house before
I ran into a roadblock of police cruisers parked sideways in the
street, keeping traffic away from the fire. There was no parking at
the curb on this side of the street, but I pulled my truck in anyhow,
rolling the passenger-side tires up onto the sidewalk to get as
much of the vehicle out of the way as possible. I left it there, sitting
at an angle, half on and half off the sidewalk, and then I began
to jog toward the house.
I jogged into view just in time to see the porch roof fall in under
the deluge from the fire hose. Two trucks were working on the
blaze, one parked in the street and one pulled into the narrow
driveway. Neighbors stood huddled in little groups of five or six
across the street, watching with a mix of horror and excitement.
The flames seemed to have been beaten back by the water, but
thick black smoke continued to pour out of the second-floor windows.
When the roof of the porch caved in and collapsed, one
woman screamed and covered her eyes, while a young boy beside
her clapped his hands and bounced up and down on his toes, eyes
wide, soaking up a scene that was much better than whatever show
he’d been watching on television before the sirens had interrupted
and drawn him out of the house.
The temptation was to stand there with them and watch the
blaze, stare with awe as the old house—first burned and now
soaked—continued to crumble to the ground. I put my back to it,
though, and looked at the crowd instead.
Maybe twenty-five people were watching, staying in small
groups, but I didn’t see any familiar faces. I approached the woman
who had covered her eyes when the porch roof fell in and pulled
out my wallet, letting it flip open to expose my private investigator’s
license. Showing a license, any type of license, is often a great
way to convey authority and convince people to give you more
than cursory attention, and in this situation I figured it would be
the only way to get this woman to look away from the fire.
“Ma’am, do you live around here?” I said, showing the license for
all of two seconds before snapping the wallet shut and returning it
to my hip pocket. She looked at me and blinked, surprised by my
approach and not following the question. She was about thirty,
with shoulder-length, blond hair and an ample stomach and abdomen
pinched by a belt. I assumed the boy beside her was her
son, judging from the way she kept pulling him back onto the sidewalk
and out of the street.
“Do you live around here?” I repeated once I had her attention.
“Um, what? I mean, yeah, I live, you know . . .” She waved a
hand behind her that could have indicated any of ten houses, and
her eyes began to drift back to the fire.
“When did this get started?” I said, stepping closer, trying to
command her attention.
“Like, five minutes ago?”
The kid beside her, who was maybe ten, was looking at me with
far more interest than his mother, and he shook his head impatiently.
“No, it was longer than that. Before the end of the inning.
We were watching the Indians game.”
“Were you out here before the fire department got here?”
She looked from the kid to me and shook her head. “No. Well,
like, about the same time. We heard the sirens, right? So I went to
the window and looked out, and I saw the house was burning. We
came outside right when the fire trucks were pulling up.”
My phone was vibrating in my pocket, but I ignored it and
stepped closer to her, fighting to hear over the sound of the hoses
and the shouting firefighters and neighbors.
“Any idea how it got started?” I asked.

“What? No. I mean, nobody lives there, so it couldn’t have been
like a cooking fire or anything.” We were standing close now, our
faces huddled together, and her breath came at me with a heavy
smell of pickles that made me want to lean back.
“Was there any sort of explosion?”
“I don’t know. Jared had the TV on so loud . . .”
Another man who’d been standing near us, a tall, lean guy with
an Indians baseball cap and a scraggly goatee, now interrupted.
“Yeah, there was an explosion. Well, you could hear it go up, at
least. Kind of a whoosh noise.”
I turned to him. “Where were you when it got started?”
He pointed at the house immediately to my left. “Right there,
smoking a cigarette on the lawn. I was the one who called it in.”
He looked at me curiously. “You with the police?”
“I’m an investigator.”
“Oh, fire department?” he said, and rather than answer the question
I threw another back at him.
“How long had you been on the lawn?”
He tugged at the goatee with his fingers. “Oh, ten minutes at
least.”
“You notice anything going on across the street? See anybody
walking around, maybe sitting in a car watching the place, anything
like that?”
One of the fire hoses changed direction now, approaching the
house from a new angle, and the breeze caught the spray and carried
some of it across the street, brushing over us like raindrops
blown off a tree’s leaves. The smell and taste of the smoke was
heavy in the air.
“I didn’t notice anything,” the man with the goatee told me as
the fire captain shouted that it was time to go inside the house. I
turned away long enough to see three of the firefighters approach
the porch in full gear, armed with axes.
“The house has been empty for a while, right?” I said.
“Oh, yeah. Couple months, now. I never seen nobody over there,
though. Probably was a neighbor kid or something. You know,
playing with matches.”
More sirens were coming from the east now, growing steadily
louder, and the kid who’d been fidgeting around us the whole
time covered his ears with his hands. His mother had turned away
from me completely to refocus on the scene across the street. My
phone was vibrating again, buzzing against my leg, and I held my
finger up at the man with the goatee, asking him to wait a
minute, then stepped away and pulled the phone from my pocket.
The display showed it was Amy’s work number. She hadn’t even
left yet.
I answered and said, “I’m down here, Amy. Get in your car and
drive instead of calling me for updates.”
“Lincoln, this shit is getting out of control. There’s another one
burning now. Clark and West Thirty-sixth.”

“What?”
“You heard me. We’ve got three houses up in flames, all of them
in under an hour. All Neighborhood Alliance properties.”
The sirens were close now, making me wince. I hunkered down
on the sidewalk, elbows on my knees, and covered one ear, fighting
to hear Amy.
“We’ve got two reporters out now, and my editor asked me to
stay here and coordinate with the field reporters,” she said. “Not
my choice, but I’m going to have to stay here.”
“This is insane,” I said. “Three of them burning at once?”
“Hate to be a pessimist,” Amy said, “but do you really think it’s
going to stop there?”
“Maybe not.” Even as I said it, I realized I was wasting time
standing here talking to the neighbors. “Shit, Amy—you’ve got the
list of all the Neighborhood Alliance homes right there, the one
you sent me.”
So?
“Well, it looks like someone’s working their way through the
same list, right? Opportunity knocks.”
“You’re going to try to catch up with whoever’s doing this?”
“You said it yourself, Ace—it’s probably not going to stop at
three. And there’s a chance I might be able to get ahead of this guy.”

CHAPTER
20

Amy read the list to me and I wrote the addresses down with a
pen and paper borrowed from one of the neighbors watching the
fire. Then I hung up and returned to my truck. The first house on
my list that wasn’t already in flames was on Erin Avenue, a few
blocks north of Clark and not far from Mill Park. There was another
house on Erin, too. I figured I’d start with the one near the
park and then move east.
Soon I was far enough away from the other fires that the sirens
seemed distant, and the neighborhood was quiet despite fairly
heavy traffic. I made a right turn onto Erin Avenue and slowed
down, watching the house numbers and looking for the right one.
Chaos was coming from behind me. I pressed the brake pedal all
the way down, bringing the truck to a jarring halt, and leaned out
the window, listening. A lot of shouting joined by fresh sirens. A
car behind me honked, and I pulled forward about twenty feet before
making a hard left turn into a narrow alley. I put the truck in
reverse and looked in the rearview mirror, waiting for an opportunity
to back out and change directions, but then I said the hell with
it and threw the truck into park. I figured the police had more important
things to deal with right now than worrying about towing
a truck out of an alley.
By the time I reached the sidewalk I could see the smoke. It
wasn’t the house near the park, which stood somewhere to my left,
but the house that was farther east along the avenue. I broke into
a run.
It was a one-story house, smaller than any of the others that
were already burning, and this time I’d arrived early enough to see
the flames at work. They crackled and roared as they licked out of
broken windows and through the eaves of the roof. Inside, something
collapsed, and the noise of the flames swelled with a sound
of ecstasy, a primal monster bent on destruction.
There were no fire trucks yet, just two cops working out of one
battered cruiser, shouting at the crowd to stay back. One man was
in the middle of the street, refusing to move, and when the cop ordered
him to get back on the sidewalk, he shouted an angry response.
“That’s
my house next door, man! If this thing spreads, it’s going
to get my house!”
“The fire department will get it under control,” the cop answered,
placing a firm hand on the angry man’s chest. “Now, sir,
please go to the other side of the street.”
“Hell with that,” the man said, knocking the cop’s hand off his
chest and running back across the street and into the house that
stood no more than twenty feet from the burning home. The cop
swore and ran after him while his partner turned to the crowd,
hands up. It was Jack Padgett.
I stood and stared at him as he shouted orders at the onlookers,
his partner pursuing the man who’d run for the house. Padgett was
in uniform, stalking about the street confidently, tall and strong
and angry.
I moved back down the sidewalk and called Joe again.
“There’s another house burning,” I said when he answered, “and
guess what cop is down here working the crowd.”
A pause. “Padgett?”
“Uh-huh. Kind of strange, him turning up at the scene like this,
don’t you think?”
“You know how long he’s been down there?”
“No.”
Joe grunted. “I don’t like this, Lincoln. If I were you, I’d get the
hell out of there.”
Padgett had calmed the crowd and was now gazing up the
street. I was standing out in the open, and he saw me. For a moment
our eyes were locked.
“Shit,” I said. “He’s looking right at me. I’m going to hang up
now, clear out of here, and check on the other houses.”
Joe was issuing another warning when I disconnected the call.
Padgett was walking toward me, but his head was turned, looking
for the other cop who’d been with him. I hesitated only briefly before
turning and walking back down the street. Any confrontation
with Padgett could wait. This fire was a lost cause; the house by the
park might not be.