So This Is Love

chapter Two

The fire call came in at three o'clock in the morning on Monday, three hours after the Callaway party ended. Emma had been asleep, lost in a crazy dream that involved her ex-boyfriend, Jon, the annoying Inspector Harrison and her grandmother, when she'd been awoken by the sound of her cell phone.

It had taken a minute for the bad news to sink in. This wasn't just any fire, it was a fire at Brady's Bar and Grill, and first responders on the scene had determined the fire to be suspicious.

She threw on her clothes and drove back to the bar. She had to park a block away; there was a line of fire engines and police cars blocking the street. As she walked toward the fire, she saw flames shooting out of the roof and through the broken windows. She felt sick to her stomach. The warm, cozy, neighborhood bar where she'd spent so many hours was totally engulfed with fire. It seemed a bitter irony that a place so special to the firefighting community was now going up in smoke. A few hours ago there had been dozens of firefighters celebrating her father's promotion. Now there were dozens fighting the blaze.

Was that the point? Had someone wanted to make a statement in a place where firefighters gathered?

Her mind whirled with questions as she drew closer to the scene. She scanned the gathering crowd for anyone who looked out of place or appeared a little too interested or too happy about the fire. It wasn't uncommon for arsonists to stay and watch their handiwork. It was part of the thrill. Some even called the fires in so they could watch the fire trucks come roaring down the street and see the terrified residents pouring out of their homes.

Fortunately, this city block was made up of commercial buildings, with only a few second and third floor apartments mixed in, so they didn’t have many people to worry about. There were a dozen or so individuals wearing pajamas and robes standing across the street. The adjacent buildings had obviously been evacuated. Fighting fires in San Francisco was always a challenge as many of the structures shared common walls. A fire could spread through an entire block if it wasn't caught early.

As soon as she arrived on scene, she checked in with the Incident Commander Grant Holmes, whom she'd worked under in her firefighting days.

He gave her a tense nod. "Callaway. You got here fast."

"I couldn't believe it was Brady's. We were just here celebrating my father's promotion."

"Looks like it will be the last party here for a while."

"How did it start?"

"We found gasoline cans inside the front and back door. The rear portion of the roof collapsed seconds after the first guys in reported a deceased female. We haven't been able to get her out yet.

Emma's stomach turned over. She knew several of the female servers at Brady's. "Do you have an I.D.?"

"No."

"Has the owner been contacted?" she asked, looking around for Harry Brady.

"He was here with his son, Christian, but Harry started having chest pains, so the paramedics took him to the hospital."

She was sorry to hear that. "I hope he's okay. This bar is his whole life."

"Let's hope he wasn't the one who burned it down," he said cynically.

She couldn't believe Harry would destroy his livelihood, but as the owner, he would be at the top of her interview list.

As Grant moved away to talk to one of the crew captains, she saw Max walking toward her. He wore the same clothes he'd had on earlier, but his hair was tousled, and there was a shadow of beard on his jaw. He looked even sexier, if that was possible.

"What do you know?" he asked abruptly.

"Not much. There's apparently a female victim. I guess that's why you're here. They haven't been able to retrieve her body." She glanced at the building. "I feel like I'm dreaming. We were just here a few hours ago. Everyone was having a great time. Now, this raging blaze…"

"An interesting irony," Max said. "Firefighters' bar goes up in flames."

He'd jumped to the same suspicion she'd had, that someone had wanted to make a statement to the firefighting community. "It could be a coincidence," she felt compelled to say. "But I will find whoever decided to torch this place. This one isn't just business; it's personal."

Max tilted his head, giving her a thoughtful look.

"What?" she challenged.

"Just thinking that the last two fires were also personal to you—the high school and St. Andrew's Elementary School."

"I grew up in this neighborhood, and all three fires have been at buildings important to the community, but that's hardly personal to me. It's a matter of geography. It's not unusual for firebugs to work close to home. It adds to the secret thrill that they know something no one else does."

"A logical point. But you have to admit that you're a common denominator."

"So are a lot of people. Thousands of children have gone through St. Andrew's and the high school in the last twenty years." She paused. "Speaking of St. Andrew's, has there been any progress on locating Sister Margaret?"

Margaret Flannery, one of the teaching nuns at St. Andrew's had disappeared a little over a week ago, right before the fire at the school that had destroyed two classrooms. Sister Margaret had also been a teacher at the high school a decade earlier, a fact that Max had used to link her as an arson suspect. But Emma didn't believe for a second that Sister Margaret was their firebug.

"Unfortunately, no," Max replied. "What about your fire investigation?"

She hated to admit that she was no further ahead on her case, but there were no witnesses to the school fire and no forensic evidence. Her investigation was basically stalled. "Nothing new. I need to focus on this fire. I'm going to talk to the neighbors."

"I'll go with you," he said.

"If you must," she said unenthusiastically.

Her words brought a small smile to his lips. "I can be helpful, Callaway."

"You can also get in the way," she retorted.

"So can you, but don't forget we're on the same side."

Somehow, it never quite seemed that way. Most of the time they were butting heads and challenging each other's results. They needed to find a better way to work together; she just hadn't come up with one yet.

It didn't take long to speak to the small group of people huddled together. They were shaken up and worried about their apartments. No one had seen anything. They all reported having been woken up by firefighters or cops ordering them to evacuate. By the time they'd gotten outside, the fire was blazing.

Emma jotted down names, addresses and phone numbers. After her first few questions, Max disappeared, and she couldn't help wondering where he'd gone. He usually liked to be right in the middle of the action.

When she'd finished her interviews, she saw Max coming out of an alley between two buildings across the street. She walked over to him. "Where did you go?" she asked suspiciously.

"Just looking around."

"For what?"

He shrugged. "It's probably nothing," he muttered.

"Tell me."

"When I left your father's party, I saw a guy outside of Brady's. He was staring through the windows, and he jumped when I came out, as if he'd been caught doing something he wasn't supposed to be doing. He ran off before I could get a good look at him. He was probably in his twenties. He wore jeans and a gray sweatshirt with a hood up over his head."

She doubted Max would have mentioned the man if he didn't think he was a possible suspect. She didn't like the way Max took over their cases, but she did respect his instincts.

"There's our victim," Max said, moving quickly across the street, as two firefighters brought out a body. They set her down on a stretcher.

Emma stepped up next to Max to take a look. The woman's features were shockingly familiar. She gasped, putting a hand to her mouth as waves of nausea ran through her. "It's Sister Margaret," she said.

Max's eyes widened. "Shit!"

It was hard to look at the lifeless body of a woman who had been a mentor to her, but she forced herself to do just that. Every detail was important.

Sister Margaret had very short, white, thin hair. Her face had not burned, but her skin was very white with tints of blue. She wore black loose-fitting slacks that hung in shreds over her burned, blistering legs. What had once been a white button down shirt was blackened from smoke and dirt. The long sleeves had also been burned away, and her hands and fingers showed only remnants of flesh over the bones.

Emma had to breathe through the urge to vomit. She saw burn victims a lot, but she never got used to it.

"Her hands are burned," Max commented, as he, too, took a good look at her body.

She wanted to say that there was no way Sister Margaret had set the fire, but she couldn't. Had the woman had a secret fascination with fire? Had she gotten caught up in her own work?

There were no other visible wounds from a knife or a gun or any other type of weapon. Had she died from smoke inhalation or had something else happened?

"The medical examiner should be able to tell us more," Max said, motioning for the paramedics to take the body away.

"I can't believe this," she muttered, watching them load the body into the ambulance. Her mind ran through the clues they'd already accumulated. "Whoever set this fire killed Sister Margaret."

"That's one theory."

"Stop trying to make Sister Margaret the villain," she said sharply, taking out her anger and pain on Max. "She didn't do this."

"I'm keeping an open mind. Maybe you should do the same instead of letting your personal feelings cloud your judgment."

"My judgment is not clouded," she snapped. "You do your job, and I'll do mine."

"We need to work together."

"Not tonight we don't. You're not cleared to enter the building until the fire is out, but I can get in now."

"Emma, wait," he said, as she turned to leave.

"What?"

His lips tightened. "Be careful."

She didn't know how to take his words, because it almost sounded like he was worried about her.

"I always am," she said, then strode away. She was relieved when the commander gave her clearance to enter the building. Sister Margaret's death had raised the stakes, and she wanted to find the bastard who'd killed her favorite teacher and torched Brady's Bar.

* * *

Max watched Emma enter the still burning building. He couldn't help but admire her courage. The fire was under control, but it wasn't out, and part of the roof had already collapsed, but there was no hesitation in her step. She was a woman on a mission. He wished he could have gone inside with her, but he would have to wait, and he hated to wait. He also hated the fact that Emma would get first crack at the crime scene, but she knew what she was doing, and her goal was to preserve as much evidence as she possibly could. Hopefully, that evidence would take them both in the right direction.

Glancing down at his watch, he realized it was four-thirty in the morning. There was nothing more for him to do at the moment. He would wait until the medical examiner gave him official identification before notifying Sister's Margaret's family. That wouldn't happen before tomorrow. He also wouldn't be able to get inside Brady's for a few more hours. He might as well go home and grab a couple of hours sleep. He had a big day ahead, and he was nowhere near ready for it.

After returning to his apartment, he tumbled into bed. Unfortunately, his mind was too worked up to let him rest. Whenever he caught a new case, he had a rush of adrenaline, and Sister Margaret's death had sent a million questions racing through his brain. He'd originally taken on the case as a favor to his mentor Captain Hank Crowley. Hank had known Sister Margaret for years and he hadn't wanted to dump the case onto an already overloaded missing persons detail, so he'd asked Max to investigate.

He'd spent a lot of time interviewing the nun's friends and family since her disappearance, and he'd been hoping for a different outcome. Now that the worst had come true, his investigation would continue in a new direction. Hopefully they would find some DNA or some clue as to who had killed her, if, in fact, someone had killed her.

While he appreciated Emma's staunch defense of her former teacher, he couldn't overlook the fact that she'd disappeared right before a fire at her place of employment and now had turned up dead in yet another suspicious fire. If she wasn't the arsonist, she was tied to him or her in some significant way. He just had to figure out the connection.

After three hours of tossing and turning, he took a shower, grabbed some coffee and headed to his mother's house. He arrived at exactly eight a.m. as promised. The front door was open, and as soon as he pulled up, his mom was out of the house and locking the door behind her. She was eager to get on the road. He didn't feel nearly as enthusiastic.

As she walked down the stairs, he couldn't help thinking that she looked more energetic and put together than she had in a long time. She'd lightened her brown hair with blonde highlights and exchanged her usual jeans and sweaters for black slacks and a gray blazer. As she got into the car there was a sparkle in her brown eyes, making her look younger than her fifty-six years. Susan Harrison had been reborn into someone with optimism and energy. He barely recognized her from the tired, weepy, depressed woman she'd been for most of the last two decades.

"I didn't think this day would ever come," she said, as she fastened her seatbelt. "It feels like a lifetime."

It could have been an actual lifetime, he thought, as he put the car back into drive, but fortunately for his brother, the murder charge had been dropped to manslaughter.

"I bought all your brother's favorite foods," his mom continued. "Dinner tonight will be roast beef, mashed potatoes and mixed vegetables, followed by apple pie and ice cream. I haven't cooked like this in years. It felt strange to go to the supermarket and buy for more than one person."

"I'm sure Spencer will love whatever you put on the table."

"You'll come to dinner, too," she said.

"I don't know if I can."

She shot him a dark look. "Don't be ridiculous, Max. This is the first night in forever that we'll be able to eat as a family again. Of course you're coming to dinner. We have a lot to talk about." She drew in a deep breath and let it out. "I hope Spencer is all right. I hate to think of what he's had to go through in that terrible place. I hope prison hasn't damaged him forever."

He hoped the same thing, but he had his doubts.

"I wish we were there already," his mom said. "I can't wait to get my boy home."

He didn't bother to reply, knowing his mother was lost in anticipation of a happy family reunion. His older brother had always been her favorite. Spencer had been twelve when their father took off, and his mom had turned her oldest son into the man of the family. At eight, he hadn't been able to offer her the kind of support she needed. But Spencer had stepped up to the challenge.

Max had looked up to his older brother, too. Later on, as an adult, he'd come to realize that his hero had a few flaws, but he doubted his mother had ever come to that realization. She'd always seen the best in Spencer.

"You're not saying much, Max." His mother gave him a warning look. "I don't want anything to mar this day, so if you've got something negative to say, say it now, before we pick up Spencer."

"I don't have anything negative to say."

"Good. I know things have been complicated and awkward between us all. But we're family, and we're going to be together again, and that's all that matters."

"You're right." He just hoped Spencer would be able to let go of his anger and move on.