On that note, she tried to remember what had happened to Ripkin’s daughter.
The young woman had been at Ripkin’s shore house by the Brunie yacht club when the fire had broken out. It had been off-season, December, and she’d been there alone. She had been found, badly burned, on the third floor, having run upstairs instead of outside from the fire that had started in the first-floor parlor. At the time, the blaze had been ascribed to a faulty gas line that fed the hearth in question, with a resulting explosion ripping through the old home. No internal sprinkler system—the mansion had been updated to include a car wash and a movie theater, but all it had had was the most basic of alarms.
Anne remembered what the daughter had looked like, being taken out on a stretcher, sheets of skin melting off of her even as she was put in the back of an ambulance. It was callous, but once they’d returned to the stationhouse, Anne hadn’t thought about it again.
Just one more in a long series of alarms that had gone off that night. That week. That month.
Why had Constance Ripkin gone up instead of out?
* * *
When Danny had first come in as a probie fresh out of the academy, Allen Barrister, a since-retired lieutenant, had taken him aside and told him that, sooner or later, every fireman went on the dead-baby run.
Horrible way of putting it, but an accurate enough description for the phenomenon.
As Danny sat rear-facing in the engine truck on the way back to the stationhouse, he remembered the morbid curiosity and shameful excitement he’d felt. He couldn’t wait to get into the grit and the grime, see the underbelly, lift up the rock of inhuman ugliness and see the twisted, gnawing worms beneath.
The dead-baby run was the incident that stained your brain, the first glimpse, out of the corner of your eye, of a woman who had been sexually tortured, doused in lighter fluid, and lit like charcoal for a grill with a match.
He could still remember how she’d smelled like barbequed meat.
He still didn’t order ribs in restaurants because of her, and it had been seven years.
Veterans usually had only one. That was because if you had more than one that stuck with you, followed you around like a ghost, became the nightmare your subconscious fed you when you were stressed, you got out of the service.
You either learned to process and let go of what you saw, and you had to, or you were not cut out for a long-term career.
Danny had always prided himself on his ability to triumph over all manner of gore and depravity. He had held people as they’d bled out, pulled the bodies of children out of crawl spaces and out from under beds, done CPR and lost that fight . . . hell, he’d thrown open the door to a messy room just as the seventeen-year-old kid on the bed had put a shotgun to his own face and blown his brains out all over the Shaun White poster above his headboard.
It wasn’t that he didn’t remember all of those incidents. But on the rare occasion he recalled them, they were a black-and-white foreign movie with subtitles projected onto a tiny screen—all of the frame-by-frame with none of the immediacy.
That was how it had to be. Otherwise, you’d crack.
“—some fucked-up shit.” Moose shook his head. “I mean, that old lady got tore the fuck up.”
Duff shrugged. “Just made me hungry. Any chance we can get some goulash for lunch?”
“You are some kind of Hannibal Lecter,” Doc said from up in front.
Moose stared at the guy. “How can you talk like that after you saw Betty White lookin’ like that?”
Danny looked out the window. They were passing by a stretch of strip malls, the boutiques, hair salons, and cafés all locally owned and struggling. The sun was out and people were walking in small groups. What day of the week was it? Thursday?
Guess so.
“—ain’t that right?”
When Moose knocked Danny in the thigh, he realized the statement had been made to him. “Sorry?”
“We’re making lunch when we get back.”
“Yeah. Sure.”
“Come on, how do you guys not want goulash?”
Danny returned to the view outside. As they rumbled along, the smoky postnasal drip down the back of his throat made him nauseous.
Just focus on the here and now, he told himself. And you’ll forget everything else. That’s how it’s always worked.
chapter
30
At the end of the day, Tom got into his SUV and told himself that he did not just put a clean shirt on and tuck it into a pair of khakis. He also did not get his best set of Merrells from the back of the closet, the ones that he was still breaking in. And he most certainly hadn’t shaved a second time.
Yeah, clearly all of that had been done by an alien who had taken his body over for a temporary, earthly visit.
He was pulling out from the stationhouse when his cell phone went off, and when he saw who it was, he cursed but answered it anyway. “Look, I told you I was working on getting the tree removed. I thought we could get over there today, but we were slammed.”
Yeah, dealing with an apartment fire started when a man with schizophrenia tragically carved up his grandmother and tried to eat her intestines come lunchtime.
“I’ll make sure it happens tomorrow, and yes, before you ask, I’ve already arranged for two of the boys from the six-one-seven to cover the roof patching. I’m on it. You won’t have to put up with Mom for more than another twenty-four hours—”
Anne jumped right in. “She can stay as long as she likes.”
And speaking of aliens, who the hell are you and what have you done with my sister.
“I thought you were desperate to have her out of there.”
“Listen, Tom, do you remember the fire at the Ripkin estate. About three years ago.”
“Yeah. Of course.” He took a left and headed to the better side of town. “What about it?”
“So, I’ve been reviewing the file over here. No charges were ever filed.”
“Gas line malfunctioned. Backed up into the house. When she lit the fireplace, everything ignited.” He hesitated to mention she’d been there. “Why?”
“So I’m working the warehouse fires.”
“Which ones? Down by the wharf?”
“Yes. And I went to see Charles Ripkin up in Boston today.”
“You got in to see him? How’d you manage that? From what I’ve heard, the man’s office is like a fortress.”
Her voice got dry. “Funny how if you mention you’re an arson investigator, doors open.”
“I gotta remember this.”
He braked at a red light and watched two young women pass in front of his SUV. They both looked at him, did a double take, stared like they were sizing him up for a fuck. Ah, yes, the younger generation with their high standards and fine-tuned morals at work. And if he had any sex drive at all, maybe he’d reroute from this stupid meeting and go pick the two of them up in a bar.
Instead, he might as well have been looking at a pair of bicycles.
There was something very, very wrong with him.
“Hello?” his sister said.
“Sorry.” He hit the gas as the light changed. “What were you saying?”
“I never got to sweep the house. As soon as the fire was out on the first and second floors, we got called onto another alarm. The six-one-seven closed the scene and you were the Incident Commander.”
“Yeah. So?”
“Did you guys find anything that wasn’t in the official arson report?”
“Are you accusing me of withholding evidence?”
“No. I’m asking because the agent died before he finished his job on the scene, and I’m worried that information was lost.”
“Oh . . . shit, that’s right. I remember something about the guy dying. Lemme think, I mean, you saw it all yourself: old house, daughter was a mess, Charles Ripkin shows up the next day and does a presser on how he owes the department an unbelievable debt. A month later, he sends a crew to break ground on the new facility. Daughter, Kristina, survived, but was scarred.”