Mortal Crimes: 7 Novels of Suspense (50 page)

He turned on the phone and dialed again, punching in the numbers quickly before he weakened and called her.

Three rings.

“Brent, man, you up for some beer and wings?”

“You know it, my brother.”

Joe exhaled, and relief at having narrowly avoided a pitiful show of weakness flowed over him like water or, better yet, a frosty glass of Yuengling.

“Meet you there in twenty.”

Rufus lifted one eyelid and eyed him disapprovingly. Then he pawed his nose, snorted, and went back to sleep.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Saturday morning

Aroostine crouched alongside the creek and listened. Most of the trees were winter-bare, and their dried, fallen leaves blanketed the ground, covering twigs and rocks.

There.
A faint
crunch
sounded from the other side of the water.

She scanned the opposite bank, her eyes narrowed and focusing hard, her head cocked. Another
crunch
, this one barely audible.

It, whatever it was, was moving to the south.

She slipped through the icy water, making no sound, causing no tell-tale splash. As she stalked the animal through Rock Creek Park, she felt just a bit silly. Her behavior was ridiculously out of place for an urban park. But she had to do something to clear her mind and re-center after her disastrous work week.

Some people golfed. Others meditated or practiced yoga. Her adoptive mother knitted intricate, colorful sweaters and scarves and hats. Rosie, in an obvious display of mental imbalance, trained for and ran marathons. And she sat. She sat for hours in all sorts of weather in whatever wilderness environment she could reach and observed and tracked the wildlife. She was beginning to adjust to doing it in an urban park setting. She filtered out distant traffic noises and learned to disregard the occasional dogwalkers or couples looking for privacy who ventured deep into the woods.

It was worth it. The natural world was a balm to her heart. Peace. Oneness. A connection with the planet and all its beings.

Joe had once observed that her tracking was the only piece of her heritage she’d taken along with her when she’d left her native culture behind. And as much as that statement had riled her, it was true.

She’d learned to track at her grandfather’s elbow. From the time she could waddle behind him on unsteady toddler feet, she’d found refuge in the woods. It was quiet. It was calm. And, he taught her that if she paid close attention, the woods would share all the secrets of the wild with her.

She allowed herself a faint smile as stepped careful out of the creek and bent to examine the disturbed mud and gravel on the bank.

The distinctive tracks gave the animal away. Raccoon. It had probably come to the water to wash its food and had slunk away into the woods when it spotted her.

You can’t avoid the case forever
, she admonished herself.

But she needed this, she reasoned. She felt increasingly disconnected from nature the longer she lived in the dense, noisy city. One morning spent mucking around in the woods wasn’t going to tank the trial. Rosie’s contact in the Clerk’s Office would track down their wayward motion. The defendants own words would convict them. And maybe, just maybe, the quiet stillness of the winter woods would help her rid her mind of distractions, like Joe.

She settled back on her haunches. The thin rays of sun fell on her upturned face. She closed her eyes, filled her lungs with the cold, fresh air, and emptied her mind.

CHAPTER NINE

“Do you understand?” the man asked in a cold voice.

Franklin’s fear and worry masked his irritation at constantly being treated like an idiot. If this man thought Franklin was so stupid, why had he chosen him?

“I understand.”

“Good. It needs to start in her home office. That’s the second room on the left side of the hallway as you walk away from the door.”

Franklin placed a finger on the square labeled “study” on her apartment’s floor plan.

“I see it.”

“Can you overload the circuit her computer is on, start a small electrical fire?”

Of course he could.

As Franklin was learning, as long as he didn’t care about societal rules and the law, he had the technical ability to do almost anything. The knowledge of how much power he possessed as long as he had a keyboard was nearly as frightening as the fact that the man on the other end of the phone held his mother’s life in his hands.

“Yes.”

“If possible, the damage should be confined to her apartment. If it is not possible, that is acceptable. What is the goal?”

“The goal is to destroy her computer.”

“Yes.”

“And you will override the sprinkler system?”

“Yes. To her apartment only.”

“Very good. Do it.”

The man hung up.

Franklin pushed away the thought of what might happen if the lawyer was sleeping in and overcome by smoke. He couldn’t get distracted by worrying about other people. He had to do whatever was necessary to get his mom back safely.

He tapped into the system that controlled the Delano Towers Apartment Building’s electrical systems and pulled up the detailed grid. He clicked on 609. A detailed plan of the apartment, with a blinking square to indicate every outlet currently being fed juice, filled his screen.

He found the study on the map and enlarged it. There was no doubt which outlet powered her computer. The bar graph at the bottom of the screen showed the overwhelming majority of the electricity going to an outlet on the north wall. Franklin assumed a lawyer would be careful enough to purchase and use a decent surge protector.

He scratched his chin. How the surge protector would work would depend on if she had one that had a built-in fuse, a gas discharge arrestor, or a metal oxide varistor. Metal oxide varistors were by far the most common type. He’d just start there. A varistor worked by diverting excess voltage away from its protected load. But, by design, it worked best to conduct electricity during a short spike or a transient surge. Exposure to a persistent overload, for as short a time as several seconds, should overwhelm it, overheat it, and cause it burst into flames even if she spent the money for an internal circuit breaker. He’d try that first and readjust if it failed.

He pulsed power to the line, ramping up the load to 208 volts. Then he waited. He did not have long to wait.

After about fifteen seconds, the building’s sprinkler system and hard-wired fire alarms began to light up. He minimized the electrical system window. With three clicks, he overrode the fire alarm and disconnected the system that would activate the sprinkler in the study of Apartment 609.

Her computer would literally melt. And the flames would take care of any papers sitting on or near the desk. The man would be pleased.

He gnawed at a flap of jagged skin hanging near his thumb.

“Please don’t let try to be a hero,” he whispered aloud. The thought that the lawyer or one of her neighbors might rush into the burning apartment to save her work ate at him.

He’d be responsible for anyone who was injured—or worse.

Panicky tears filled his eyes.

His mother had always worried that he was too soft to survive in the modern world. Maybe she was right. Maybe he was so soft and weak that he would fail to save her.

Pull yourself together.

He forced himself to slow his shallow breathing and punched in the man’s telephone number to let him know that he’d done it. He’d added arson to his growing list of crimes.

________

The sense of tranquility that Aroostine had spent an entire morning cultivating evaporated in an instant when she rounded the corner onto her street and saw the crowd of residents huddling on the sidewalk and in the street near her apartment building. A small fire truck blocked the street, and parka-wearing police officers directed the mass of people to stay back.

Aroostine spotted Mr. Cornhardt, who lived across the hall in 610, standing with the Indian couple from the end of the floor. He wasn’t wearing a coat but had a knitted afghan thrown over his shoulders. Peanut, his Westie, was whimpering in his arms. She noticed that unlike his owner, Peanut was bundled into a jacket.

“What happened?” she asked as she approached the group.

The Indian woman’s eyes widened when she saw Aroostine.

“Oh, Aroostine. There’s been a fire,” Mr. Cornhardt said, his voice trembling. At the sound, Peanut started to shake.

“There, there, Peeny,” he soothed the dog.

“A fire? Was anyone hurt?”

“No, thank the Lord. But Mrs. Patel here says one of the building managers told her it started on our floor.”

“In your unit actually,” Mrs. Patel said in a soft, apologetic voice.

“My apartment caught fire?”

Aroostine’s mind reeled. Where would she stay? How bad was the damage? Were her belongings all destroyed?

“You have renter’s insurance, don’t you?” the Indian man—presumably, Mr. Patel—asked.

“Yes,” she said numbly, trying to claw through the shock to remember her agent’s name.

“That’s good. We heard it was an electrical fire. It started in the walls.”

“But … I have a surge protector,” she said.

Mr. Cornhardt shook his head. “It wasn’t a surge. Nobody else noticed anything out of the ordinary. I was watching ‘Ocean’s Twelve’ with Peanut here. He likes that George Clooney. ‘Ocean’s Eleven’ is a clearly superior movie, but the second one was free with my streaming account, and Peanut isn’t very picky. Anyway, my power never flickered or anything.”

The Patels nodded their agreement.

“But, how—?”

“I don’t know. You need to find someone from building management and get some answers. They’re crawling all over the place in a panic because your sprinkler malfunctioned.”

Aroostine just stared at him wordlessly.

“It’s true,” Mr. Patel chimed in, “the fire alarm didn’t go off and neither did the sprinkler.”

“Are those—connected?” She didn’t think they would be, but she hadn’t ever had a reason to think about it. At the moment, her brain was struggling to make sense of the jumble of words her neighbors were throwing at her, engineering details were definitely beyond her grasp.

“Two different systems,” Mr. Cornhardt confirmed. “And they’ve tested them both. They’re both working properly now, including in your unit. So, why are we still freezing our butts off in the street? That’s the real question.”

Mrs. Patel gave Aroostine a sympathetic smile. “You must have very bad luck. If they let us back in, you’ll join Ajit and me for dinner tonight.”

“That’s very kind of you, Mrs. Patel.”

“Call me Dia.”

Aroostine forced her mouth into an approximation of a smile.

“Thank you, Dia, but I’m afraid I have a case getting ready to go to trial and I really need to work this evening. Can I get a rain check?”

“Certainly,” Ajit said.

“Thanks. Well, at least I finally met my neighbors,” she joked.