I went to the bedroom closet and opened the door, stood there in a daze, until I heard Joe say behind me, “You can’t wear any of this, honey. It’s all a loss. You’ve got to walk away from it.”
I turned and tried to take in the utter ruination of my four-poster bed and photo albums and the treasured box of letters that my mother wrote to me when I was away at school and she was dying.
And then I focused my mind and scanned every inch of floor, looking for something specific, a book that might be out of place. I found nothing. I went to my dresser, pulled at the knobs of the top drawer — but the charred wooden drawer pulls crumbled in my hands.
Joe strong-armed the dresser and the wood cracked. He gripped the drawer and heaved it open. I pawed through my underwear, Joe saying patiently behind me, “Sweetie, forget this. You’ll get new stuff . . .”
I found it.
I palmed the velvet cube in my right hand, held it into the light, and opened the box. Five diamonds in a platinum setting winked up at me, the ring that Joe had offered me when he asked me to marry him only a few months ago. I’d told Joe then that I loved him but needed time. Now I closed the lid of the box and looked into his worry-creased face.
“I’d sleep with this under my pillow — if only I had a pillow.”
Joe said, “Got lots of pillows at my place, Blondie. Even got one for Martha.”
Captain Walker stood at the door waiting for us. I took one last look around — and that’s when I saw the book on the small telephone stand just inside my front door.
I’d never seen that book before in my life.
That book wasn’t mine.
Chapter 69
I STARED IN SHOCK and disbelief at the large 8½ by 11 paperback, tomato-red with thin white stripes running crosswise beneath the title: National Guide for Fire and Explosion Investigation.
I started screaming, “That’s evidence. That’s evidence.”
Captain Walker was worn out and he was also out of the loop. He said, “The arson investigator will be back in the morning, Sarge. I’m boarding up your place so it’ll be perfectly safe, you understand?”
“NO,” I shouted. “I want a cop. I want this thing locked up in the evidence room tonight!”
I ignored Walker’s sigh and Joe’s hand on the small of my back. I dialed Jacobi’s number on my cell, already decided that if he didn’t pick up, I would call Clapper and then I would call Tracchio. And if I didn’t get Jacobi or CSI or the chief, I would call the mayor. I was hysterical and I knew it, but no one could stop me or tell me I was wrong.
“Boxer, that you?” Jacobi said. His voice crackled from a poor connection.
“I found a book in my apartment,” I shouted into the phone. “It’s clean. It didn’t burn. There could be prints. I want it bagged and tagged, and I don’t want to do it myself in case there’s any question down the road.”
“I’m five minutes away,” Jacobi said.
I stood in the hallway with Joe and Martha, Joe telling me that Martha and I were moving in with him. I held tightly to his hand, but my mind was running a slide show of all the fire-razed houses I’d walked through in the last month, and I was feeling the searing shame of having been so professional and so removed. I’d seen the bodies. I’d seen the destruction. But I hadn’t felt the terrible power of fire until now.
I heard Jacobi’s voice and that of the building manager downstairs, then Jacobi’s ponderous footsteps as he huffed and wheezed up the stairs. I’d ridden thousands of miles in a squad car with Jacobi. I’d been shot with him, and our blood had pooled together in an alley in the Tenderloin. I knew him better than anyone in the world, and he knew me that way, too. That’s why when he arrived at the top landing, all I had to do was point to the book.
Jacobi stretched latex gloves over his large hands, gingerly opened the red cover. I was panting with fear, sure that I’d see an inscription inside, another mocking Latin saying. But there was only a name printed inside the front page.
The name was Chuck Hanni.
Chapter 70
IT WAS 1:03 A.M. and sixty-eight degrees outside.
I was lying next to Joe tucked inside the cool, white envelope of his six-hundred-thread-count sheets, wearing one of his T-shirts, staring up at the time and temperature projected onto his ceiling by a clock made for insomniacs and former G-men who needed to have this critical info the second they opened their eyes.
Joe’s hand covered mine. He had listened to my fears and my ranting for hours, but as he drifted off, his grip loosened, and now he was snoring softly. Martha, too, was in the land of nod, her fluttery breaths and dream-yips providing a stereophonic accompaniment to Joe’s steady snores.
As for me, sleep was on the far side of the moon.
I couldn’t stop thinking how the fire skipped the first two floors but had torched my apartment out to the walls. It was undeniable. I was the target of a vicious, premeditated killer who’d already deliberately burned eight people to death.