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Hate was kind of strong.

Goddamnit
. He wished he could disagree completely.

“I don’t wet the bed,” he offered, because really, he wasn’t sure how he felt about her leaving. “Can you give me a free consultation before you go? What are the odds I’ll start doing that?”

“Carry this out to my car.” She inclined her head toward a box. “And then I will be out of your hair and you will, I predict, be relieved.”

He got to his feet. Annoyed, relieved, which was he? “A scientific opinion?”

“No,” she said with a thin smile. “Just intuition. I’ve always been more into this relationship than you.” She tossed her bag back over her shoulder. “If you want to laugh, the funny thing is I knew it from the very beginning. I would like to stay a lot more than
you
want me to stay.”

Not that funny really, he thought as a few minutes later she put her car in gear and pulled away from the curb. He wasn’t amused, but then again he wasn’t a damned psychologist either. Turning, he went back into the apartment complex, walked up the one flight of stairs to his unit, and entered into a combination of welcome solitude and the bereft feeling of missing pictures on the desk in the corner and the empty sound of the clock ticking in the kitchen.

He stared at the clock moodily. She hadn’t taken it, which said something. He’d only bought it because she liked chickens and the ridiculous thing had a rooster on the face, pecking at something on the ground, maybe kernels of corn, he’d never paid attention, but he did notice it stayed, and she’d left.

He was left with the goddamned cock clock.

His mother had left too. It meant nothing really, but it stung a bit. If he was like Kate, with her overemphasis on everything that might make a psychological impact, he would read more into it, but the truth was … at the end of the day, she’d left him.

Simple. Fine. She left. He’d dealt with it before, and he could deal with it now.

The apartment had a small balcony that faced a pool only used maybe three months a year, four if it was a good summer, square and fairly big but unimaginative, blue and with some scattered chairs and umbrellas. He couldn’t remember getting into it even once, but it was crowded today with the heat. He wandered outside and dropped into one of the two lawn chairs and decided a little people watching might make him feel better.

And for whatever reason, he didn’t so much think about Kate’s departure as he did the case. She might be more intuitive than he thought. Besides, he really couldn’t do much about her moving out but he could hopefully solve this murder. No use wasting his time on regrets.

So … body one was an unidentified female in a torched house.

Body two, the owner—kind of—of said house splattered on a sidewalk downtown. No way it wasn’t related, and no way so far to connect them. Antagonistic father-in-law, meek wife who barely spoke a word … and just plain nothing else.

It was possible, he decided while watching two kids who couldn’t be more than six fling a ball at each other and splash in the pool, that Matthew Tobias had secrets. People who killed themselves had secrets, whether they were deep and dark, or just slightly private. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t be left alone for five minutes.

Fucking someone else?

He just didn’t buy it. The guy wasn’t the type in his opinion, but then again he really didn’t think he’d have the balls to off himself by jumping off an eleven-story parking garage either. For sure when he’d interviewed him Tobias had been nervous, but then again, his house had just been burned down with an unknown person in it smoldering along with the carpet and the cheap furniture.

Helton, the real owner, middle-aged, with a tobacco cough, wasn’t helpful. He was in Florida for a wedding apparently during the fire, and when they showed up on his doorstep, he was still unpacking. Airline tickets don’t lie considering heightened security, and the man swore he had no idea who the victim might be or why anyone would have chosen the Tobias house.

The more Jason thought about it, Tobias committed suicide in his opinion. Offed himself by jumping, and it muddied the waters, but it was not pertinent to the real intent of the homicide they were investigating. A casualty, but not a contributor.

Dismiss it.

Fine.

The sky had taken on a hazy hue due to the humidity, the clouds holding together like the gluey air got to them too, and he was sweating through his T-shirt. The kids in the pool shrieked with joy as they splashed each other.…

As he tipped his beer back, he wondered if he’d ever had that kind of innocence, and came to the conclusion that “probably not” was the answer.

Chapter 9

The building looked roughly the same; brick with genteel ironwork over the windows that was supposed to be decorative but really represented that the level of crime in the neighborhood required some sort of security. Two kids on skateboards went by and looked at me curiously and I realized I was driving too slow and sped up a little.

I used to live there. I’m not ashamed of it, or proud of it, or really anything else in between.

I just used to live there, in that building.

There was a woman, walking alone and wearing a baggy pink-striped dress, holding a purse, her pace slow, her face tired, shoulders drooping …

She reminded me of someone … and the monster in the swamp stirred in my brain, sluggish but rippling the surface of the stagnant, steaming water.

Maybe that was a sign.

JULY 6

Ellie was sleeping,
deep and dreamless as far as she could tell, and the sound of the alarm jolted her out of a comfortable place.

No, she registered later, not the alarm, but an actual ring on her cell … and who the hell, she wondered as she squinted at the clock, would call her at four in the morning? Next to her Bryce stirred and rose up on one elbow, groping for the light.

“MacIntosh.” Her voice was throaty with sleep.

“It’s happened again.”

She blinked, not quite awake still, but Santiago’s tone had an interesting quality; he sounded just the same at this hour as he did midafternoon. A little brusque, sure of himself, nonapologetic.

She sat up and brushed the hair out of her face. “Okay, I’m listening. What happened?”

“Metzger called me. There was a fire in an apartment building that was reported around one this morning and has the exact same methodology. There’s a charred body inside. Fire department goes in, think they are containing a situation, destroy pretty much all the evidence and then realize they’ve got a corpse on the table in the middle of the room.”

She was already out of bed, feet on the floor, searching for her discarded clothes. “Address?”

“I’ll pick you up.”

Well, this was slightly embarrassing, though she wasn’t sure why. “I’ll meet you there.”

“Why do I have the feeling you don’t have a pen on you, or anything else for that matter,” Santiago said sardonically. “Same place as last time? This will be faster. I’m already on my way.”

Unfortunately, he had a point.

“Fine, I’ll be out front in five minutes.”

“Sounds about right.”

She pushed a button and Bryce said in a voice still slightly thick with sleep, “I take it that isn’t good news. I’ll make you a cup of coffee.”

“Most of my phone calls from the department aren’t good news and coffee would be great.” She found her underwear and headed for the bathroom. Teeth brushed, hair swept into a ponytail, sleeveless blouse—she didn’t have anything else there—and shorts with tennis shoes and she was ready, slipping her gun into her shoulder holster, reminding herself that if she was going to spend the night so often, maybe she should bring some more clothes over if Bryce didn’t mind.

He
wouldn’t
mind.

She knew it, and couldn’t decide how she felt about it.

The Mustang was a little loud for the hour and the peaceful street. True to his word, Santiago pulled in about the same time she came out the front door. She opened the door and slid in, balancing her cup as she fumbled with the seat belt. He never bothered with greetings, so neither did she. “Where did this happen?”

“Bayview again.”

“That’s interesting. Maybe we’ve got a pattern.”

“We might. Hold onto that cup, this is a sweet ride, but not necessarily a smooth one.”

He was right, the precarious matter of holding her cup upright and his speed making it difficult to talk anyway. He hadn’t done much better in the clothing department, wearing shorts and a Hawaiian-style shirt, and if he’d combed his hair, it hadn’t worked out all that well. It was still pitch dark, though she could swear that the temperature was in the seventies with matching humidity even at this hour of the morning.

The scene was a disaster.

Fire
was
considered a disaster, she was informed as she stooped to duck under the police tape, a very messy business, and the timeline needed to save the other apartments in the building made for an expedient entry and enthusiastic response from the efficient Milwaukee Fire Department.

Damn
.

Once they were inside the building, they were stopped. “We can’t let you in yet, ma’am.” A firefighter, streaked with soot and water still dripping from his slicker, stood in the hallway, flanked by several uniformed police officers. One of them recognized her, a curly haired young rookie, and as she reached for her badge, he said helpfully, “This is Detective MacIntosh from homicide.”

“Oh. Sorry.” The firefighter smiled through the grime. “People are crazy about being evacuated. They want to see how their apartments fared and a few of them are going to be unhappy, but the fire is contained and extinguished, and hey, I say if you’re still alive, you did pretty well.”

A healthy attitude. “Someone didn’t survive, or so I understand,” she said. The hallway stank of smoke and wet drywall. It was still hazy and one of the officers coughed repeatedly. Her own eyes were already watering. “That’s why we’re here. Safe to go in yet?”

“Structurally, yes. There still could be hot spots though. You’ll need to clear it with someone higher up than me. Right now we’ve been told to keep everyone out.”

“Then point me in the direction of your supervisor.”

He did, which proved to be someone harried and uncooperative who told her they hadn’t yet cleared the building and to go get a cup of coffee or something. Santiago surprisingly didn’t argue.

“I’ll buy,” he offered. His eyes were red from either the smoke or the early hour. “I need some. Unlike you, I haven’t had any. There’s an all-night place around the corner.”

There was, but it was jammed with anxious people rousted from their apartments, so they settled for a fast food restaurant instead, taking their cups back to the scene, standing outside, watching as equipment was hauled out of the building. Her partner wasn’t given much to talking in the predawn hours, Ellie discovered. She was sweating already in her light shirt.

When the surly supervisor finally came out to signal them clear, a deputy medical examiner had arrived, and the crime scene unit techs were standing around, talking about the heat, the temperature outside, and the predicted high for the day.

“Midnineties. Lake will be busy today,” one of the techs said to her, rubbing the back of his neck. “I was supposed to go sailing, dammit. Let’s get this done.”

As they walked back into the building, Santiago asked him a question about his sailboat, obviously well versed in the subject, but she didn’t pay much attention. Canoes she knew about, from special handmade fiberglass river canoes like the one her father had by Badger Boats, built way up near the Hayward flowage and almost forty years old, to aluminum commercial lake canoes with a completely different shape to handle bigger water. She’d inherited that old river canoe after her father had passed away at far too young an age and her mother decided to eschew the frigid northern winter for sunny Florida. She took care of it, but it was getting harder and harder to find someone to repair it. Before the move to Milwaukee, she’d taken it out only on rare occasions because she was so worried about damaging it. Still she loved the feel of gliding through the water, and truly, it handled like a well-trained thoroughbred racehorse, sleek and fast …

Now, reentering the building contaminated by the pungent smell of the recent fire, she wished for a cool, crisp autumn morning and a quiet paddle on the Wisconsin River, alone, the leaves whispering in a slight breeze, the air so clean you could inhale it like drinking a glass of fine wine, the current flowing like silk under the canoe.

Why the hell had she moved down here again? At the moment, she wasn’t sure.

*   *   *

“I
don’t know
about you,” Santiago said, pulling gloves from his pocket, “but I’m getting fucking tired of this particular smell. I didn’t apply to the fire department for a reason. Jesus. I couldn’t do this.”

He was right, it was noxious. Part of it, she knew as they passed the tape and walked into the apartment, was that among the various other smells like melted plastic, sodden half-burned carpet, and whatever other damage the fire had done, there was something else.

This time the body was on a kitchen table, or what was left of one from the metal legs that were splayed around the corpse, the structure itself collapsed. Unlike the last one it was visibly a woman, but the body was badly burned enough that facial recognition would be impossible.

“Point of origin,” the firefighter who had been managing the scene said in a dour voice, pointing at the grisly display. “Whoever you are looking for started the fire by lighting your victim on fire. There was obviously other accelerant sprinkled around because the whole place started to go up fast and it wouldn’t happen that quickly without it, but I’d say the main purpose for this was to burn the body.”

He spoke with enough authority that Ellie didn’t doubt for a minute his opinion, but there was the now eerily familiar mess of soaked debris, which meant all the evidence was virtually obliterated. Santiago must have been thinking the same thing because he said sarcastically, “Maybe he dropped his driver’s license or something.”