The Price of Innocence (27 page)

‘He was by the center island, where we’d set up most of the equipment over the ranges. I couldn’t see any of it left except for some of those metal dowels that they’d attach the glassware to. I couldn’t tell, really, because every surface had become nothing but flames. At first I thought the kid was running up the aisle, trying to get to the door, but he was just flailing because then he stopped and took a step backward. He—’

Here he paused again, and took a deep breath, pushing the words out even as they trembled. ‘He was completely on fire, like some kind of … cartoon, or movie or something. I couldn’t understand how he could still be on his feet, and just as I thought that, he toppled over.

‘I went in. I remember wondering how I was going to grab his hands to pull him out, since they were burning. I couldn’t use my shirt, I needed it to breathe. So I held the material to my face with my left hand and grabbed his arm with my right, which was stupid, since I’m right-handed.’

Theresa turned his right hand, gently, until the palm faced upward. Only a few patches of scarred skin remained, and could have been taken for calluses. She stroked them with one thumb.

‘Even the
floor
burned, which I didn’t understand, linoleum burning. The chemicals must have sprayed all over in the explosion, like an oil spill on the ocean. The soles of my shoes got sticky – they were melting. I grabbed the kid’s arm and pulled.’

His hand clenched in reflex from the memory. Theresa rubbed his fingers, trying to massage away the pain. It didn’t seem to work. ‘You were brave.’

‘No, I was stupid. I pulled him, but my hand felt like someone had stabbed it a hundred times. I stumbled and let go, and his arm fell back on me – that’s how I got the burn across my chest. I pushed it away and tried to grab his wrist, where the shirt had burned off, but it still felt like it was on fire to me. I was choking, and couldn’t see. The ceiling was on fire, the walls were on fire, the whole world was on fire, and suddenly I thought the upper floors would cave in and trap me there.’

Theresa waited. She knew what would come next.

‘I left him.’

‘David—’

‘I got up and ran out. I left him there.’

‘You couldn’t have saved him.’

‘You don’t know that,’ he said, his eyes angry and wet. ‘I might have. I ran into Marty outside the door. He helped me put out my shirt. He asked if anyone else was inside and I said no.’

‘He’d have died if you’d let him go in. As you would have.’

‘I remembered to pick up my books on the way out, did I mention that? Even with my burned hands. Even with another person incinerating in the next room, I picked up my books from the rear hallway so that no one would know that I knew about that back entrance, so that no one would connect me with the meth lab.’

‘It wasn’t your fault.’

He wouldn’t look at her, and dug one fist into his eyes instead. This time she did not resist. In one quick, unthinking second she straddled his lap, wrapped both arms around his head and pulled his face into her neck. She felt wetness at her throat, and great heaving gasps of breath.

After a few moments these subsided, but she felt no hurry to release him, enjoying the warmth and the smell of the short, silky hair her fingers found their way into. Just as she began to tell herself to get up and finish the conversation, she felt his lips on her shoulder and that decimated any remaining resolve. Words were crowded out in an instant.

As she slid her tongue into his mouth and wrapped her feet around the lower rungs of the chair for leverage to pull her groin more tightly against his, it occurred to her that she hadn’t asked him if Joe McClurg had been the one called Doc or if he, David, had only asked her out in order to keep tabs on the investigation, hoping that Marty Davis’ past, and by extension his own, would not come up. But surely he could not be faking this, surely the way his hands crossed her back to bring her closer, pressing almost hard enough to bruise, could not be an act.

She wanted the answers to those questions, but not enough to stop what she was doing. Hell, she couldn’t stop assaulting his mouth long enough to pull his shirt off even though desperate to feel his skin again—

Two things happened.

The door to the garage opened and her mother walked in.

Then the phone rang.

Theresa stared.

Her mother stared.

David gulped. His Adam’s apple moved against her arm, still wrapped around his neck.

The phone rang again, and Theresa realized with a crushing disappointment that she had to do a few things right now besides kiss David Madison. She got to her awkward feet, greatly peeved.

‘I’m so sorry,’ her mother said, cheeks bright red under the gray hair. ‘I didn’t mean to—’

‘Mom, this is—’

David introduced himself. He did not stand up, indeed did not move, either because he didn’t know what to do or to try to hide the evidence of his excitement. Theresa felt a rough, nasty sort of hope that it was the latter and snatched up the phone. ‘Hello?’

‘Is this Theresa MacLean?’

‘Yeah, what do you want?’ To her mother, she said, ‘Come on in, Mom, it’s all right. I know this must be—’

Then the man on the phone identified himself as a sergeant with the Cleveland police department, and asked if Theresa would please sit down.

‘I
don’t understand,’ she said to the sergeant an hour later. ‘Though I seem to be saying that a lot lately. I really have to come up with a better response to explosions than endlessly confessing that I can’t figure out what the hell is going on.’

The sergeant looked at her with an odd expression, and patted her arm.

She choked her emotions down – not easily, as they’d been on quite the roller-coaster ride for the past hour – and tried to sound more professional. ‘How close were they to the bomb?’

‘On an inside staircase, I guess. It took out most of the second floor.’ She had never met this sergeant, a well-toned black guy with acne scars and gorgeous eyes. His name badge read
Altman
. ‘The other tenants were lucky. Most of them were downstairs waiting for dinner. Two were at work, and the other two were far enough away to be hurt but not killed. One’s in surgery now but expected to make it. Beltran’s the only one who died. He must have been right on top of it.’

‘So Frank and Angela were going to search his room, but when he saw them he ran inside?’ Theresa asked.

‘Yep. A few seconds later, boom.’

‘Boom.’

The sergeant leaned on the nurses’ station desk, and nodded at a security guard who walked by. The emergency room seemed to be functioning at its usual level of controlled chaos. ‘We figure he went for the explosives, either to hide them, or maybe to use them for some kind of stand-off. They detonated. Or he detonated them because he’d rather die than go back to the joint or because his wife left him, but I don’t go for that, really. Types like him never take themselves out. It would make life too easy for the rest of us.’

‘Why would Terry Beltran even have explosives?’

‘Who knows? You can learn a lot in the joint. Maybe he came out with a new skill, only he wasn’t too skilled at it yet.’

‘Why would he shoot Marty Davis, then? Why not put a bomb in his car?’

‘I don’t know,’ the sergeant admitted. ‘All I know is that the halfway house staff said no one was staying in Terry Beltran’s room except Terry Beltran, and that they don’t inspect the rooms because it doesn’t set the right tone for their felons’ little self-esteems. I said they might still have both halves of their halfway house if they had worried a little less about self-esteem. Let me tell you about the self-esteem of your average criminal. It’s pretty darn good. They all think no one matters but them and that they happen to be the baddest mother in the valley.’

‘Can I see him?’ Theresa asked. ‘I need to see him.’

‘Sure.’ The sergeant pushed off the desk and led her down the hallway. ‘But I have to warn you—’

‘He looks bad?’ Theresa tried to picture her cousin as a blackened, twisted fire victim, having burned as David Madison described the dead student—

‘His looks are fine,’ the sergeant said as he pulled back a curtain. ‘It’s his mood that’s bad.’

‘Like that’s news,’ Frank said.

Her cousin had been stripped to the waist. Both arms and the left side of his face had red patches where some shiny ointment had been applied, and there was a bandage over one wrist, but otherwise he appeared blissfully unhurt. The worry she hadn’t acknowledged broke into a relief so sharp that tears came to her eyes.

‘Don’t you start bawling,’ he warned. ‘And don’t call my mother.’

She perched next to him on the bed since her knees no longer wished to support her. ‘Too late.’

‘Damn! What did you tell her?’

‘Same thing I told my mother. That you and Angela had a few scratches and that was it.’ Theresa took a closer look at his injuries. A red patch on his neck seemed to have a straight edge, as if it had come from something rigid and very hot. An area next to his belly button formed a more amorphous splotch. ‘Does it hurt a lot?’

‘Not as much as losing our prime suspect under seriously questionable circumstances. Or what happened to my car. Did I tell you about the car? I worked so hard to keep that new-car smell, and what happens?’

‘Does it involve flying debris?’

‘A piece of the damn
house
fell on it! Big chunk of wall and part of a window. The hood is bent in now.’ He pinched the bridge of his nose as if trying to blot out the memory.

‘Sorry about your car. How is Angela?’

His jaw tightened until it looked like his teeth might break, but of course all he said was: ‘Better or worse, depending on how you look at it. I landed on top of her.’

‘Ouch.’

‘Cracked one of her ribs. It softened my landing, yes, but it also meant that most of the burning debris landed on me and not her, so that makes us even. On top of that she owes me for waiting for Beltran.’

‘What do you mean?’

Frank accepted a pill from a comely nurse; under less trying circumstances he would have noticed the appreciative glance the woman in white cast toward his torso. Instead, he merely growled, ‘This had better be OxyContin. Because, cousin, if we had gone in to search his room, it might have been us who stumbled on his little cache of blow-up stuff, and it would have been us it blew up. Obviously it had a hair trigger.’

Theresa slid off the bed, stepped a foot closer and hugged her cousin, putting her face to his neck, just as she had so recently done with David Madison. Odd how the same gesture under different circumstances produced such different feelings.

‘There, there, cuz.’ Frank patted her back. ‘I know you love me.’

‘I do – love you, I mean – but that’s not why I’m smelling your hair.’ She backed up. ‘Did you notice the odor?’

He sniffed. ‘I haven’t noticed much of anything in the past hour and a half – oh.’

She nodded. ‘Yeah. You smell like iodine. Terry Beltran had the same explosives in his room that brought down the Bingham building and the Lambert workroom.’

Theresa went to check on Angela. The poor girl had to sit up very straight and breathe very carefully while the orthopedist spent more time gazing at the contents of her bra than applying the Velcro binding. Theresa did what she could to help by glaring at the doctor until he regained his focus and finished up.

Then she went back and waited with Frank until the hospital got around to discharging him. While driving to his apartment for a change of clothes, they bounced around possible connections between a violent parolee and a terrorist stockpile in the Bingham building. None seemed to make sense, though one fact remained – terrorists did a great deal of recruiting in prisons. A captive audience of the disconnected and disaffected provided fertile ground for their ideals. Frank planned to examine every prisoner or ex-prisoner with whom Beltran could have come into contact during his tenure there for some tie to Nairit Kadam. This would not be easy; it would require either cooperating with or duplicating the work of the FBI agents, and according to rumor they had not yet found
any
ties to Nairit Kadam. He seemed to have led an ordinary, law-abiding and utterly apolitical life until three years ago. Then, according to any and every fact recorded on the planet Earth, he ceased to exist.

So finding a link between him and Beltran would not be easy. Kadam had never been to jail, and even if they worked for the same organization they might not have known each other. ‘That’s how they try to work,’ Frank had said as she drove. He fidgeted, searching for a comfortable way to lay his arm on his lap. ‘So if one is caught, there’s only a few others he can take down with him.’

‘None of this would explain why he killed Marty Davis.’

‘That could be what we first thought – revenge – and have nothing to do with his other activities.’

Nor might a twenty-five-year-old meth lab explosion have any relation to Terry Beltran and terrorists. It most likely had no relation to anything, save her worry about falling in love with one of the involved parties.

Unless Terry Beltran had some connection to Joe McClurg, and had heard the account of the college group while in jail. Inmates had nothing to do all day but talk, after all. When had Ken Bilecki last been incarcerated?

But she could not picture Ken Bilecki involved with a political cause, unless it involved legalizing certain drugs. And Beltran didn’t need to stumble on a motive to kill Marty Davis; he already had one. No, her brain had gone punchy with weariness, that was all.

Still, she said nothing to Frank about her talk with either Ken Bilecki or David Madison. She certainly didn’t mention pinning the latter to a kitchen chair while Frank was getting blown on to East Forty-ninth Street. Or how much she wanted to do it again.

What a mess.

W
hen she returned home for the second time that evening, she found an attention-starved dog, a hungry cat and David Madison’s car still in her driveway. Moreover, David Madison was in it.

He got out as she parked. ‘How’s your cousin?’