The Panic Zone

46

Santa Ana, California

A stern-faced police officer stood before Emma’s car and pointed at her then at the curb, commanding her to park.

What was going on?

Traffic clogged Third Street. Emma was still a block from Polly Larenski’s duplex when she got out and started walking toward the emergency lights splashing red and blue on the neighborhood. Excited children on bicycles and worried adults hurrying behind them gathered at a cluster of police cars, fire trucks and news crews that ringed a spectacle down the street.

The smell of charred wood permeated the air.

Emma heard the roar of a pumper truck, the bursts of radio chatter. The pavement was wet from water leaking from the lines of fire hoses. As she got to the yellow plastic tape that cordoned the site, she stopped.

Polly’s duplex had burned.

Firefighters hosed the ruins. Spears of scorched walls rose from smoldering heaps of rubble and ash. Emma’s heart raced.

Where was Polly?

The boy beside her was sitting on his bicycle and talking to the boy standing next to him.

“I heard the fire guy say that a lady died.”

“Do you know who it was?” Emma’s intensity startled the boys.

“I think it was the lady that lived there.”

Emma cast around the area and rushed toward a firefighter carrying a hose to a truck.

“Excuse me. This is my-my friend’s house. I’m supposed to see her. Was anyone hurt?”

The firefighter’s face was smudged with soot.

“There was a female fatality. Better talk to the captain. He’s in his van over there.”

Emma spotted the fire van and hurried toward it, the ramifications of what happened enveloping her with each step. She felt something fracture, felt something break off and slip away.

She couldn’t believe this was happening.

The captain’s window was down. He sat behind the wheel reading from a clipboard, ending a conversation on his radio.

“That’s right-get back to me. Ten-four.” He clicked his handheld microphone.

“Can you help me, please?” Emma said. “My friend lives here. We’re supposed to meet today. What happened?”

“Your name?”

“Emma Lane.”

He glanced at his clipboard. “Well, Emma, unfortunately a fire started in the garage. We suspect the cause was faulty welding equipment belonging to a neighbor, a male resident working on his car.”

“Was someone hurt?”

“Yes, I’m sorry. One fatality, likely due to smoke inhalation, a female resident. Everyone else got out, both homes were destroyed. We estimate damage at-”

“Polly Larenski? Did she get out? I need to see her.”

The captain checked his clipboard, flipped a page, his chin tensed. Before he flipped it back, Emma glimpsed Larenski on his sheet.

“I can’t confirm anything until next of kin are notified.”

“It is Polly! Oh, my God!”

The earth shifted under Emma; the world swirled around her.

“My baby’s files are in there. My baby was saved from a fire!”

Concern registered on the captain’s face.

“Your baby’s in there?”

The captain seized his microphone, called for assistance then got out.

“Ma’am, are you aware of other people in the residence?”

“No, no! I’ve come here from Wyoming. My husband was killed. My baby was rescued from a fire. Polly knew! Are you sure she’s dead?”

Incomprehension flooded the captain’s eyes.

“Ma’am, you’re losing me. Are you all right?”

“What am I going to do now? She knew about my baby, she knew everything!”

Emma covered her mouth with her hands and gazed at the remnants of Polly Larenski’s home as a circle of faces emerged around her-firefighters, police officers and paramedics. An officer with the Santa Ana police touched her shoulder.

“Do you have any identification, ma’am?”

Emma fumbled in her bag. The officer studied her Wyoming driver’s license. “Will you come this way, please? These folks just want to make sure you’re okay.”

Emma sat in the back of an ambulance.

While paramedics observed her, she told the officer her story. He listened, then went to his patrol car beside the ambulance. The door was open. Emma saw him checking her name through the car’s small dash-mounted computer and talking on his radio.

At one point she heard him say, “Not a relative, a bystander. Wyoming DL. Right. Seems disoriented, overcome. Then it goes to OCSD?”

Some fifteen minutes later, a black-and-white cruiser with a six-point gold star on the door arrived. The new officer took Emma’s license from the Santa Ana officer, then they both approached her.

“Emma, I’m Deputy Holbrooke with the Orange County Sheriff’s Department,” the new officer said. “I’m going to take your information.”

Emma sat in the deputy’s car. Again, she told her story while he entered information into his computer. Then he left the car to make a call on his cell phone, pacing near the trunk where she overheard him say, “Right, not ours. Thanks, Lou.”

In the time since she’d arrived at the fire, Emma had pinballed from the fire department to the Santa Ana Police Department to the Orange County Sheriff’s Department, and through a maze of police bureaucracy until she landed in the jurisdiction of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Now here she was in the office of the FBI’s Santa Ana Resident Agency on the top floor of the bronze three-story building on Civic Center Drive. For nearly forty-five minutes, special agent Randy Sikes had listened to her. Occasionally, he’d excused himself to take a phone call on the status of an ongoing identity theft investigation.

Before Emma had arrived at Sikes’s desk, he’d been briefed on the phone by the Santa Ana Police and Orange County.

Sikes was a quiet, cerebral agent in his mid-forties. He wore a suit with a white shirt, conservative tie, and his hair was combed neatly. He said little as Emma spoke, but from time to time he paused to study his computer monitor and the results of his query to the National Crime Information Center, the FBI’s major database known as