Sweet Justice (16 page)

It might as well be the moon
, Mallory thought. “I— I'd appreciate that. I don't know how I'll swing it, but—”

“Well, about that. I was talking with Ma—I hope you don't mind. She suggested mentioning an idea that Cara and DeeDee had after they saw your progress on Kimberly's dress. They were thinking—we were all thinking, actually, that maybe you could sew our bridesmaid's dresses. I know, you're swamped with work and taking care of Katelyn and sewing the wedding dress. Kimberly's open to something simple, like a sheath. Ma says she's going to buy that dress you suggested from BASH, so we won't be cutting Eleanor out of that sale.”

Mallory slapped her hand to her mouth to keep from crying. She'd had many small kindnesses extended to her over the years, but none this big.

“Oh, Maegan...are you suggesting a barter?”

“Eh, I can't do that, as much as I'd like,” Maegan said with a rueful chuckle. “After all, we're looking at four sessions a week for eight weeks, and even at half price, that adds up to over five grand. I hope your bridesmaid's dresses don't set us back that much, or else we'll have to shop somewhere else.”

“Oh, gracious, no,” Mallory told her. “If it's as simple as a sheath dress, even with a lining and shantung silk for the fabric, I'd be surprised if it cost more than fifty bucks a dress for the material, and I could sew a sheath in my sleep. Hmm, maybe since I'd be doing, what, three?”

“No, four, because Kari's going to be a bridesmaid, too. We're pitching in and buying her dress since she's supplying the cake.”

Four dresses,
plus
the wedding dress. If it hadn't been for the bad news from the insurance company, Mallory would have been dancing a jig. “How about seventy-five dollars a piece, then? If you go with the silk. Less, of course, if you go with an easier-to-sew fabric.”

“Wow! That sounds like a deal! For us anyway...” Maegan trailed off. “For you, it won't pay for Katelyn's therapy.”

Mallory squared her shoulders and focused on the positive. “Maybe not, but it would help pay for several sessions, wouldn't it? And you're being so generous with your discount already.”

“Hey, we need the dresses, and Katelyn needs the therapy. Plus, we've got Kari's wedding coming up next year, so...if you're still around...”

To be around a year from now. To still be a part of the Monroe family, surrounded with people who honestly seemed to care for her and for Katelyn.

Maybe by then, even Andrew would have decided she wasn't all about glitz and glamour, and maybe she wouldn't mind him knowing that about her.

But after she sued the county—and she'd have to now. She couldn't pile the extra therapy charges on top of the money she already owed without having some way to pay.

No, Mallory feared, after she sued the county, none of the Monroes were likely to speak to her again. Most of all Andrew.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

“O
H
,
MAN
, I
need coffee,” Andrew announced as he stumbled through the door of Dutch's conference room. “Give me a java jolt if you expect me to make any sort of intelligent conversation.”

Daniel and Rob, looking entirely too well rested to suit Andrew, didn't bother to hide their amusement.

“I heard that somebody got the ol' chain saw trick pulled on them this morning,” Daniel commented, stretching his hands behind his neck as he leaned back in his chair.

“Bounced up like a rubber ball, the way I heard it,” Rob added with a smirk. “If they'd asked me, I would have told them that was the only way to get you out of bed in the first place.”

Andrew growled in sleep-deprived frustration. “You think it's funny, you should get the whole deal thrown at you—all the pranks at one time. Not to mention that I had to respond to a call-out on the interstate at 3:00 a.m. So I wasn't awake enough at five thirty in the morning not to jump out of my skin when somebody came at me with a chain saw. Big deal.”

“Aww, poor baby,” Rob said. “Was he scared of a chain saw without its chain? Did the big, bad noise terrify him?”

Andrew didn't dignify the tease with anything but silence. He fixed himself a cup of Dutch's coffee. A swallow told him that his buddy still made his coffee strong enough to stand up and walk on its own. Another swallow convinced him that perhaps he might survive the morning after all.

He sat down at the table and gave Daniel a pointed stare. In a mock serious tone, he posed the question, “As chief, don't you think such foolishness is inefficient? You're always telling us not to waste time on non-essentials. Priorities, isn't that your watchword?” He raised an eyebrow along with his coffee cup.

“The way I see it...” Daniel rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “A good firefighter is proactive. I'm surprised you didn't think about all those possibilities and prepare for them in advance.” He winked at his brother. “After all, you've been pranked by the best.”

Andrew nearly choked on his coffee. “I haven't been pranked like that since I was a probie. You just wait. I
was
taught by the best, and I can still teach the teachers a thing or two, since you two have zero sympathy.” He yawned again. “Where's Dutch?”

“Oh, he's coming. You know him. He's probably calculating the odds of something catastrophic happening to all of us as we sit here on our own dime,” Daniel remarked.

“Wouldn't doubt that a bit,” Andrew agreed. “Besides the reporter nosing around, is there anything else that's worrying Dutch?”

Rob snickered. “Who? Dutch? Worry? You don't say. When someone in the department sneezes, he thinks we're all about to wind up with pneumonia.”

“I meant real worry, not baseless Chicken Little stuff that means the department is in for another four hundred gajillion new policies and procedures,” Andrew replied. He fidgeted with his cup, antsy as he waited for Dutch to come in and say whatever Dutch had to say. For all their teasing, everyone in the room knew the lawyer was good at his job and could spot trouble a mile away.

“You poking fun at me?” Dutch asked as he finally joined the party. “I'm only trying to keep everybody happy and safe. If we'll all learn to color
inside
the lines, I wouldn't have to run around and scream about the sky falling. Because just as sure as if I don't warn you, a big old piece of blue horizon will come crashing down.”

He came around the conference table and claimed a chair, spreading out files, papers, two legal pads, four markers, three pens, plus a mechanical pencil and a stack of sticky notes.

“Sheesh, Dutch,” Rob said. “Give you ten minutes and you could clutter up an empty warehouse.”

Dutch didn't pay Rob any mind, just cracked his knuckles and picked up one of his three pens. He stared at each of them in turn. “You know why you're here.”

“Actually...” Andrew cleared his throat. “What I want to know is why I'm here and Eric and Jackson aren't. They were on the scene that day. Oh, and the captain. Why isn't he here?”

“Good question. First of all, you guys are the three musketeers. I know you won't talk out of turn about what we're discussing today. Also, Daniel's here in his capacity as chief, and Rob investigated the cause of the fire—”

“No, I didn't, not to my satisfaction—the case is still open,” Rob interjected. “There wasn't a whole lot left in the way of evidence, and the landlord wasn't the most cooperative.”

“Duly noted,” Dutch conceded. “However, you have looked at the cause of the fire, so you'd be called to testify in the event of a jury trial.”

The thought of both his brothers being dragged into a courtroom to testify in a case that he was the center of wigged Andrew out. He didn't want to contemplate Maegan's reaction if she were subpoenaed.

“But Eric and Jackson were there,” he protested. “They can back me up, right? Corroborate the events.”

“Eric can't. Due to the head trauma, he's not clear on the events of the day. And Jackson didn't come in the structure with you until after Katelyn Blair was down for the count. As for the captain on the scene, all he can do is relay what
you
told
him
.”

Andrew folded his arms across his chest. “Why do I feel as if I'm defendant in a criminal case here? I followed the regulations—regulations
you
helped Daniel and Rob write, Dutch.”

Dutch nodded. “Stinks, doesn't it? But the sooner you get your mind wrapped around the question of liability, the sooner you can approach this thing with an eye to helping us all out. The plaintiff is going to have to blame someone, Andrew. And I'm afraid that someone is you.”

Andrew grimaced. He took another sip of his coffee in an effort to cover up how shaken he was at the prospect of Mallory pointing a finger at him in open court. She wouldn't do that, would she? True, she'd been plenty angry that first night, and super fired up the day she'd realized he'd been the one to suggest Happy Acres to Katelyn.

Since then? The sharpest edges of her anger had been worn off by time.

Or it seemed as though that were the case. Was Mallory's cooling off simply an act? Something she was doing to sandbag them into believing she wouldn't sue?

Now Dutch was going over the timeline in detail. He'd sprung up and stood in front of the conference room's whiteboard, which was mottled with a rainbow's worth of traces from past meetings. A dry-erase marker squeaked across the hard surface as he listed the events along a not-so-straight line that extended the width of the piebald board.

Each point in the call was listed with a to-the-minute time attached to it, from the original 911 call by a neighbor at 6:09 a.m. to the time the fire was fully contained and controlled with not a hotspot in sight, at 10:26 a.m. In between...

In between was Katelyn.

Andrew realized he didn't want to talk about that day because he didn't want to think about his actions. They were what had put Katelyn in that wheelchair. He didn't want to think that his choices were what had caused a bad fire to become a near tragedy.

Dutch consulted his legal pad. “According to the tape transcript and the interviews I've done, by 6:15 a.m., the first engine had arrived on scene. You and Eric were on the second rig, right?”

“Yeah. House went up in flames like a chimney stuffed with newspaper,” Andrew remembered. “They called in the second engine when they got on scene and realized how bad it was. We were there by...what, Daniel? 6:19?”

Daniel consulted his notes. “I've got that, yeah. By then, I'd gotten paged out as well, because the captain on the scene had been informed there were possible entrapments.”

Entrapments.
For the first time, Andrew realized that the purpose of firefighter jargon might well be to distance those on the job from the horror that it could hold.

“Here's what I want to know,” Dutch said. He scratched his head with the capped end of the marker as he studied the board. “You've got two calls to the power company, one before Andrew went in and one after. Why?”

Andrew spoke up, “That has to be a mistake. Right, Daniel? I remember when we got on the scene, the first rig had already checked and there was no power to the structure. So...that second call, it didn't happen then.”

Daniel and Rob exchanged glances. Something about their silence sent an alarm through him. “Right?” he prodded. “There was no power to the structure.”

Dutch asked. “Is Andrew right?”

“That's the thing,” Rob finally said, his index finger tracing a circle on the dark finish of the conference table. “One reason I can't close out the investigation is that, in my opinion, the cause of that fire was electrical in nature.”

“That's crazy, Rob!” Andrew insisted. “I was there, and you weren't. You didn't begin your investigation until the next day.”

“I know, and, like I said, there wasn't much of the house left standing. But there is a discrepancy. The power company told the first unit that the power had been cut off for non-payment. The meter had been pulled. Since the house was fully engulfed where the meter would have been, the guys on the scene couldn't verify that no meter was there, not at first. They knocked down the fire, and two guys say there was no meter. When I investigated, I found no trace of a meter in the debris.”

“See?” Andrew said. “There you go. No meter, no power.”

“Not so fast, little brother. One of the guys laying down suppression on the basement said he could have sworn there was a light on upstairs. And a neighbor that I talked with—a woman who lived down the street—said she saw lights on early that morning before she went to work.”

A pool of acid began to form in Andrew's gut. Had they missed something after all?

“It was pitch-black when I went in there,” he insisted. “Granted, it's pitch-black in any fire, but I didn't see anything that would have signaled power still connected to the house.”

Rob shrugged his shoulders. “Well, the log shows that the guy in the backyard, the one who saw the light on upstairs? He alerted the captain, who called back into the power company, and to be certain, they cut the power at the transformer.”

“I'd remember that, though,” Andrew said. He frowned, trying to recall if he'd seen a bucket truck at the scene.

Dutch looked back over the times and then his notes on a legal pad before he answered. “You would have been inside with Eric at the time. And the captain had to get the power company to move their truck in order to get the ambulance in for Eric and for the—”

“Katelyn,” Andrew interjected. “We all know it was Katelyn.”

Dutch groaned. “See?
That's
what worries me. You're involved in this, Andrew. You've invested yourself into knowing these sisters.”

“Of course I have! I want you to pull a half-charred body out of a burning building after you've nearly lost your partner, Dutch! I wouldn't be human if I didn't care.”

“You get on that stand, and you start going all weepy-eyed, and the jury is going to believe that you feel guilty—”

“We all feel guilty, Dutch,” Daniel said quietly. “We all wish we could have gotten Katelyn out before she was injured. We did what we were supposed to do. We followed the rules—we even did a redundant power check. Does it matter when the power was actually cut off? Because it seems to me that it wasn't our fault here. It may have been a mix-up on the power company's end.”

“The power company's not the one they're going to sue, Daniel,” Dutch pointed out. “Because at the end of the day? It wasn't a power company employee who chose to leave a girl in a burning building.”

Andrew felt anger and shame and guilt burn through him. “I did my—”

“Job.” Dutch's voice was flat. No trace of his usual humor lightened it. “I know. You did your job. Explain that to the jury. Explain why a civilian gets left behind and a trained firefighter doesn't—”

“Whoa, Dutch!” Rob rocked forward. “If Andrew hadn't pulled Eric out of that fire, you might be dealing with a grieving mama of a firefighter and have every newspaper in the state breathing down your neck. He
saved
Eric. I may tease my little brother and prank him every chance I get, but he's good at his job. He follows orders. He does what he's supposed to do. And what he was supposed to do was pull Eric out of that fire.”

“I
know
that.” Dutch collapsed into his chair and threw the marker down in disgust. “Don't you see I get that? We make these regulations exactly for this purpose, so that firefighters don't have to think in situations like that. For the most part, it works out. A case like this comes down to whether a jury will understand why we make these rules and forgive us when someone—” He stared at Andrew. “When Katelyn falls through the cracks. They'll be asking you why it happened. And what will you say?”

Andrew dropped his gaze to his coffee cup. The liquid was as dark and murky as his thoughts. “What can I say? That it was an impossible choice. That I hate like hell that I had to leave anyone behind. But I did my job, Dutch. That meant leaving her to get Eric to safety, and only after that going back in and getting her out.
I did my job
. Nobody could expect me to do more.”