He grabbed some clothes in the dark and, taking a quick shower, thought about Marcia Hobart.
He had a file on her, and he’d refresh himself there, but he remembered she’d been divorced when her son had opened fire in the DownEast Mall Cineplex. Hobart had lived with his father, and his younger sister with the mother.
Domestic worker, he recalled as he pulled on jeans. Moved twice—that he knew of—since the shooting.
His alert reported firefighters battling a five-alarm blaze at her current residence—one that threatened neighboring properties. They’d recovered a single body inside the Hobart residence.
He snapped on his off-duty weapon, grabbed his keys and a bottle of Mountain Dew from the refrigerator. Chugging some, he jogged down the two flights of steps from his apartment to the weedy gravel lot and his car.
The car, the same Dodge Neon his parents had given him when he’d graduated high school, was pretty much a piece of crap. Just the way his apartment building was pretty much a dump.
He’d opted to make do and follow Essie’s lead, saving whatever he could toward a down payment to buy a house.
And as it turned out, his dump of an apartment put him five minutes from Marcia Hobart’s address.
In under two he heard sirens.
When he spotted patrol cars, he pulled over to park. He recognized one of the uniforms working the barricades, aimed for him.
“Hey, Bushner.”
“Quartermaine. In the neighborhood?”
“Not far. What do you know?”
“My ass from a hole in the ground.”
“Good you confirmed that. What else?”
“Heard the nine-one-ones reported an explosion and the fire. House down there is toast with a crispy critter inside. Smoke eaters are still knocking it down. The house on the east side took a hit, but everybody got out.”
“Mind if I walk down?”
“No skin off mine.”
He could see the firefighters in turnout gear silhouetted against the snaps and pulse of fire. Spumes of water arced through the haze of smoke and raining ash. Civilians stood back, clutching children or each other. Some wept.
He heard the bark of orders, the crackle of radios.
And saw Bushner had it right. The house where the beleaguered Marcia Hobart lived was toast. He watched it fold in on itself, shooting flames and firefly sparks into the smoke-choked dark. More hoses attacked the flames crawling up the west wall of the house on the east side, still more soaked down the walls of the house on the west to stop the spread.
The patch of lawn in front of all three houses, the narrow strips between, were a blackened morass of soaked ash and mud.
He scanned the crowd, considered the young couple with the infant in the woman’s arms and a yellow Lab at their feet. Tears streamed down the woman’s face as they stared at the east-side house.
Reed moved toward them.
“Is that your place?”
The man, late twenties by Reed’s gauge, with a sleep-tousled mop of blond hair, nodded as he put an arm around the woman. “It’s burning. Our house is on fire.”
“They’re putting it out. And you got out. You and your family got out.”
“We just moved in two weeks ago. We haven’t even finished unpacking.”
Reed watched the water drowning the flames. “You’re going to have some damage, but nothing you can’t fix.”
The woman sucked in a sob, turned her face into her husband’s shoulder. “It’s our fixer-upper, Rob. We bought a fixer-upper.”
“It’ll be all right, Chloe. We’re going to make it all right.”
“Would you mind telling me what happened? What you know. Sorry.” Reed pulled out his ID. “Not just nosy.”
Chloe swiped at tears. “God. God. Custer, our dog, started barking and woke the baby. I was so mad because we’d barely gotten her down. She’s not sleeping through the night, and I’d just fed her at around two. It was just after three when Custer started barking, and the baby started crying.”
“I got up. My turn,” Rob said. “I got up, and I yelled at the dog. I yelled at him.” Rob bent down now to stroke the Lab, who leaned on him. “But he wouldn’t quit. I glanced out the window. It just didn’t register at first—the light—then I looked, and I saw the house next door. I saw the fire. I could see the fire through the windows of the house next door.”
“Rob yelled at me to get up, get the baby. I grabbed Audra, and Rob grabbed the phone to call nine-one-one while we were running out of the bedroom.”
“Something exploded.” Fire reflected in Rob’s eyes before he pressed his fingers to them. “It was just this boom. Our bedroom windows shattered.”
“The glass. If Custer hadn’t— The glass flew. Audra had been in her bassinet on the window side of our bed. If Custer hadn’t barked, woken us up, the glass…”
“That’s a good dog.”
“We ran out,” Chloe continued. “We didn’t even stop to get anything, just ran out while Rob called nine-one-one.”
“You did just right. You got your family out. That’s what matters. Fire’s out,” he told them.
“Oh God. It didn’t burn down. Rob, it didn’t burn down.”
“You’ll fix it, and I’m betting you’ll make something special out of it. Look, if you need anything—supplies, clothes, hands to help put things back together?” He pulled a card out of his pocket. “My mother’s always organizing something, so she knows a lot of people. I can hook you up.”
“Thank you.” Chloe knuckled another tear away while Rob slipped the card in his pocket. “Do you know when they’ll let us go back in? Go in and see?”
“That’ll be up to the fire department, and they’ll want to make sure it’s safe. Let me see if I can find out anything, maybe get somebody to talk to you.”
He moved off to one of the pumpers, spotted a sweat-and-soot-soaked Michael Foster.
“Michael.”
“Reed. What are you doing out here?”
“JJ Hobart’s mom—that used to be her house.”
Michael’s eyes sharpened in his soot-covered face. “You’re sure about that?”
“That’s my information.”
“Son of a bitch.” Michael sucked in air. “Son of a fucking bitch.” And released it in a hiss. “Hobart,” he murmured, “again.”
“I know, man. Look, have you got a minute?”
“Not now, but I will have in a few.”
“I’ll hang until you do. Meanwhile, that couple over there with the dog and the baby? That’s their house you guys just saved. Is there somebody who can talk to them?”
“Yeah, I’ll send somebody over. Hobart’s mother? Did she live alone?”
“As far as I know.”
“Then there’s not much left of her.”
Reed figured there wasn’t any harm in talking to some of the people still gathered outside, on the street, on their own lawns, on their porches.
The main impression he formed said Marcia Hobart hadn’t just kept to herself, she’d isolated herself. His secondary impression was the neighbors hadn’t known her relationship with the organizer of the DownEast Mall massacre.
“You, there!”
He turned, saw the old woman in a creaky rocker on a creaky porch. “Yes, ma’am.”
“You a reporter or some such?”
“No, ma’am, I’m a police officer.”
“You don’t look much like a police. You come on up here.”
She had a face like a raisin, golden brown and wrinkled beneath a snowball of hair. Glasses rested on the tip of her nose as she eyed him up and down.
“Good-looking boy, I’ll give you that. What kind of police are you?”
“Officer Reed Quartermaine, ma’am.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“I’m trying to be good police.”
“Well, some are, some aren’t. Maybe you will be. Sit down here, ’cause I’m getting a crick in my neck looking up at you.”
He sat in the equally creaky chair beside hers.
“You being the police, you’d know who the woman was who died in that house tonight.” She pushed the glasses back up her nose to peer through them at the smoldering rubble across the street. “Maybe you’re not stupid police as you know to keep your mouth shut waiting to see if I know what I know. That poor woman had a son go bad on her, and he killed people. DownEast Mall.”