Fire Beach: Lei Crime Book 8 (Lei Crime Series) (10 page)

“C’mon, girl. Let’s go to bed.” He summoned her with a snap of his fingers and made one final stop, to check on Kiet.

The nightlight lit the baby’s room with a soft yellow glow. Stevens tiptoed over to the crib.

Kiet was asleep on his back, dark hair like feathers around his head, arms flung wide in utter relaxation. The baby’s soft pink mouth worked an imaginary nipple in his sleep, the white blanket Stevens had covered him with still in place.

Stevens felt a constriction around his chest, a tightness in his throat. His son was so beautiful. He couldn’t resist reaching in to touch the baby’s hair, the feeling like the finest silk under his fingertips. As it always did, that hair reminded him of Anchara and brought the complicated maelstrom of feelings thinking of her murder always brought—guilt, sorrow, anger, regret.

He swallowed the lump in his throat and tiptoed out, shutting the door.

Jared had begun to snore in the living room, a soft rumble.

Stevens smiled at that, and went into the bedroom. Keiki pressed close, right behind him, and he closed the door and turned on the baby monitor on his side of the bed.

“Relax, old girl.” He pointed to Keiki’s spot on their bed with her special blanket. She hopped up, but she was still looking at him, her eyes worried, when he turned off the light. He patted her flank and she finally lay down. “Maybe I’ll take you to the vet tomorrow. You’ve been acting weird all evening.”

Chapter 9

K
eiki’s barking brought Stevens abruptly upright. The smell of smoke, with its terrifying memories of another fire he’d lived through, pumped adrenaline through his body as he bolted out of bed.

The floor felt roasting hot on his bare feet as Stevens yanked the bedroom door open, still half awake but driven by terror for Jared and Kiet.

A wall of smoke swirled in, searing his eyes and blinding him. He dropped to his knees, coughing convulsively.

“Mike, get on the floor!” Jared’s voice. He was too blinded to see, but his brother’s voice came clearly to him. “I’ve got the baby!”

“Oh, thank God,” Stevens tried to say, but nothing came out but a croak as his throat seemed to shut down. He lay flat on his belly, and through slitted, streaming eyes, saw the shadow of his brother crawling toward him.

“Get Keiki and let’s go out through the kitchen,” Jared said, crawling by rapidly. “I don’t see any fire by that door.” Stevens wiped his eyes on his shirt and could see the lump that was Kiet stowed against Jared’s chest inside his T-shirt, held tight with one arm. “I’m taking the baby out!” Jared’s voice cut through the roar. “Follow me. Stay low. Find something to put over your face.” He disappeared, obscured by a back draft of black smoke.

Flames shot up inside Stevens’s bedroom with a roar, igniting underneath the small table in front of the window and blocking it as an escape.

“Kitchen door,” Stevens muttered, trying to orient. Jared had already disappeared. He looked around for Keiki and was dismayed to see she’d crawled under the bed. The bed was pretty close to going up in flames.

Stevens crawled back. He hauled the dog out by her collar using brute force and ripped a pillowcase, already hot, off the bed and covered the big dog’s head, hoping that she’d do better by not being able to see. He pulled his arms out of his T-shirt, pushing it up over his nose and mouth. Keiki crouched down, whimpering with terror, and tried to pull away. One hand on the hot floor, the other on the dog’s collar, towing her, Stevens crawled toward the kitchen.

The living room was well on its way to gone. He couldn’t see anything but flames in that direction.

He tried to decide where to turn outside his bedroom. Was the kitchen to the right, or was it left? He couldn’t remember, and he couldn’t open his weeping eyes, and he couldn’t breathe. Keiki felt like two hundred pounds of deadweight at the end of his arm.

Someone grabbed him by the shoulder. “It’s Jared. Come on, Mike. Grab my shirt.” Jared’s voice was muffled by something over his face. Stevens blinked, trying to see what was going on, where they were going.

“It’s okay to shut your eyes. Lie on your belly and crawl with me. Just stay right next to me,” Jared yelled hoarsely. “And let go of that dog if you have to. Come on!”

Leave Keiki? No way.

Stevens dug deep for more strength. His brother had already gotten Kiet out and had come back for them. It was going to be okay if he could just get himself and Keiki outside. He pressed close enough to touch his brother and crawled after him, giving an awkward heave every foot or two, hauling the dog’s weight until finally he felt fresh air, a touch like a balm on his face, breath like diving into cool water filling scorched lungs as he rolled out the kitchen door, hauling Keiki after him.

Somewhere off in the distance, a timpani against the roar of hungry fire, he could hear sirens.

“Come out a little farther from the house.” Jared’s voice. “It’s going up fast. I left my turnouts in the car. I’m going to try to knock some of the fire down.”

Turnouts. Knock the fire down.
Meaningless gibberish in the scope of what was happening.

Stevens crawled forward a few more feet and collapsed on his face on the cool grass. He gasped at the fresh air and convulsed with more coughing.

“Kiet?” he managed to get out.

“Wayne has him. He’s okay.”

Stevens lifted his head enough to see Wayne, cradling and patting the baby against his shoulder, way back against the fence. The baby was crying, great, big, healthy-sounding yells. That was a very good thing.

Stevens lowered his face into the grass and felt tears filling his scorched eyes. Their home. Burned. Everything they’d been trying to build destroyed again.

This was no accident, and they’d barely made it out alive. He was pretty sure there was a shroud lying around somewhere.

Lei. He had to call her, but his phone was gone, just one of the many things he’d think of needing and find had been burned. He remembered that constant disoriented feeling all too well. He crawled toward Wayne. “Phone?” he croaked, reaching out his hand.

Lei woke to the chattering of mynah birds in the huge banyan outside the motel. Somewhere not far away, she heard the shrill chirp of the invasive coqui frogs that had emigrated from Puerto Rico to the Big Island and made it their home. Warm, leaf-dappled sunlight fell through the louvered window whose drapes she’d forgotten to pull last night.

She’d gone to bed late after putting in hours at the South Hilo Station computer lab, searching through scores of cases on the secure computers. The good news was she’d been able to find some patterns and put together a list of victims and complainants to interview today. Not only that, she’d identified the two knee-breakers as small-time criminals from the Hilo area. She had names and addresses to call on.

She was actually working the case, and getting somewhere, too.

Lei rubbed her eyes, then shut them again. There was nothing too urgent going on today. She planned to set up a distance-feed surveillance cam on Chang’s house so she didn’t have to waste hours in the car in the hot sun. Then she’d see if she could get one of the other detectives to go out on some interviews with her.

She felt that funny feeling in her stomach, the twitching like gas bubbles.

The baby was awake, too.

She slid her hand under her sleep tee onto the smooth skin of her waist, pressed down on the hard, round bulge of her uterus.

There it was. A fluttering like a moth against the palm of her hand. She held that movement in her hand for a long moment, gently feeling around. She pulled up her shirt. If she lifted her head and sighted down her body, she could see where the baby was growing, a slight rise between her hipbones making a round shape as firm as a grapefruit and about as big.

Curious whether she could see the baby kicking, she pulled off her sleep tee and propped herself up on her elbows, watching the expanse of pale ivory skin that ended at her panties.

There it was again, that silvery movement. This time Lei could even see it happening, a staccato beating that jiggled the skin of her belly. “You must be hungry or something, Baby,” she said aloud, and swung her legs to the side of the bed. “Can’t believe I’m talking to you, but it’s obvious you’re really in there, doing your thing.”

She smiled as she stood, feeling happy as she imagined Kiet and his brother or sister together. She couldn’t wait to show her belly moving to Stevens. The message light was pulsing on her phone, but she needed a shower before she dealt with anything more to do with work.

She took a long shower and washed her hair. She’d noticed it was growing in fuller and even curlier, something the pregnancy books said to expect. Like she needed more hair. Her stomach fluttered again. “Okay, finding food, Baby,” Lei said aloud.

She dressed and scooped up the phone, unplugging it from the charger, and loaded it into her purse along with her weapon and creds.

She didn’t listen to the message until she had eaten a full breakfast of bacon and eggs and was sipping her second cup of decaf coffee.

Stevens’s voice was so hoarse it was almost unrecognizable.

“He burned down the house.”
Cough, cough
. “We got out, but he burned down the house. Call me!”

Lei’s belly tightened so hard she almost hurled the breakfast back up all over the table. She took deep, slow breaths so as not to do that and looked at the time of the message: 1:35
a.m.
She had the ringer off and had slept right through the crisis.

Twin demons of terror and guilt stabbed her.

Lei called his phone number back, but it went to voice mail. Then she checked the number the message had come from and realized it was her father’s phone. She called it back, trying not to hyperventilate, wrapping her hand tightly around the poky tines of a fork to keep herself in her body.

“Dad, it’s Lei. Oh my God, I just got Michael’s message! Is he okay?”

“Aw, Sweets, your house is gone.”

“Is Michael okay? The baby? Keiki?” Her voice had gone high and tinny, and her sweating hands could hardly hold the phone as her vision telescoped down to a dot.

“Everyone’s okay.” He used a gentle tone. “They made it out okay.”

“Oh, thank God!” She focused on trying to breathe.

“Jared was spending the night, and good thing he was. He got them all out okay. It was a bad fire, honey, and the whole place went up unbelievably fast.”

“Was anyone hurt?”

“Keiki and Stevens went to the hospital for burns and smoke inhalation, but they’re both recovering. They’re going to be a little bald for a while, but okay. In fact, Mike’s right here and wants to speak to you.”

Lei squeezed the fork, feeling her terror recede, leaving her shaky and queasy in its wake. The big breakfast had been a mistake.

“Lei.” The croak of his voice brought tears springing to her eyes. She stood up in agitation, ripping a twenty out of her wallet and throwing it on the table.

“Oh my God, Michael. I’m so sorry I had the phone off! I just got your message.” She walked rapidly out of the restaurant to stand on the sidewalk in the shade of the banyans. She paced back and forth to work off the adrenaline. The baby kicked, and she realized it was feeling everything she was.

“I’m okay. We’re all alive and we’re gonna be fine. But the house, Lei.” His voice cracked and broke. “Everything we had. Gone.”

Lei shut her eyes, breathed in through her nose, out through her mouth. She reached up to clasp the rough, white gold medallion around her neck as she walked back toward her car, feeling her heart rate come down as she deliberately controlled her responses. “It’s just stuff. It came easy; it went easy. We have each other.”

“I know. I can hardly talk.” He coughed, and it hurt her to hear the sound like ripping cloth. “I’m on oxygen, if I need it, for a couple days. Kiet is totally fine. Jared got him out first. We’re here in Wayne’s cottage and we’re okay, but Keiki and I got pretty singed.”

“This has to stop,” Lei said. She got into the car and stared out the window, feeling blind and deaf to anything but this one thought. “This has to stop.”

“I love you. Come home,” Stevens croaked.

“I love you, too. I’ll come. Just as soon as I can,” she said. “I will be there as soon as I can.” She closed the phone and whipped the car around, out into traffic.

Chapter 10

T
he Fireman opened the bin from yesterday’s fire. He sorted the few tools remaining back into the tool chest: the staple gun, the tranquilizer pistol, the empty bottle of nail polish remover, the plastic bag the cotton balls had been in.

He could have left everything, including the bin, and it would have been obliterated by that masterpiece of a fire he’d set. Sure, they would find out it was arson, but that didn’t matter. In fact, the blackmailer had wanted him to leave a message at the scene. That fire had done exactly what he wanted it to, right down to leaving the family a way out.

He sat back on his heels, replaying in his mind the scene he’d watched last night.

From his perch in the tree, he’d known they were out when the old man had run around to the backside of the house where the kitchen door was out of his view. He’d reappeared holding the baby—someone had carried it out to him. A few minutes later two men and the dog had appeared, one on his feet, the other crawling.

Where was the woman? He remembered the twitch of panic he’d felt as he swung the glasses around the scene of the blaze—and realized her truck wasn’t there. Hadn’t been the whole time.

She wasn’t at the house. So much the better. He’d released a breath of relief. He didn’t want that on his conscience. Nor anyone’s death, in fact. He’d already had nightmares about the homeless man, gobbled by the Bitch. So he’d left a way out, and burned the house so dramatically that he was pretty sure the blackmailer would be satisfied. It was the best he could do for them.

He would know soon if it was enough.

Stevens lay back on the couch in Wayne’s little cottage, sucking oxygen through a cannula into his sore lungs, and trying to recover from talking to Lei. His throat was still so painful, the tissues inflamed.

“She said she’s coming home as soon as she can,” Stevens said to Wayne, who was sitting with the baby on his lap and trying to feed him rice cereal. The spackle-like mixture was ending up on Wayne’s shirt and all over the baby’s hands and face as Kiet kept trying to grab the spoon.

“Of course she is,” Wayne said. “Little man, we’re making a mess here,” he said to Kiet. “I really miss that bouncy seat. Soon as I’m done and cleaned up from this, I gotta go to the store and buy him a new one and more formula and diapers. Good thing I had some extra stuff out here.”

“Thanks, Wayne. Don’t know what we’d do without you.” Stevens inhaled through his nose, which hurt less. He was needing less of the oxygen, but every time he exerted himself, he realized his body just wasn’t getting all it needed right now.

He shuddered, remembering the experience of last night. That first big waft of smoke, when he’d opened the bedroom door, had seared his throat and lungs, causing them to constrict. By the time the EMTs got to him, he was almost unconscious, but not so far gone that he didn’t remember the struggle to breathe as they strapped a mask over his face and turned on oxygen. Pain medication had helped him relax enough to get more of the oxygen into his system.