Aftershocks

CHAPTER SIX

WHILE PATRICK was busy in his office, Briana received a call from her uncle Cecil.

“I heard about what happened last night,” he said as soon as he’d identified himself.

Her heart sank. Somehow, she’d hoped no one would find out about her forced confinement with her boss. If Uncle Cecil knew, he was no doubt wondering if she’d made good use of her time and obtained evidence to incriminate her boss.

Well, she wasn’t going to tell anyone what had happened last night. She’d been crazy to tape their lovemaking, crazier still to think she could make love with a man and then betray him.

“Look, Uncle-”

“Your aunt and I have been worried sick. Are you all right? I phoned your home first. I can’t believe you’re at work. You should go to the hospital and get checked out. I’ll come and get you.”

She smiled into the phone. He wasn’t even thinking about her mission. He was worried about her. It was nice to be fussed over, even if it was unnecessary. “I’m fine, really. I should have phoned you this morning to let you know I was all right. I’m sorry. I didn’t realize you’d worry.”

“Of course we worry about you, honey. You’re the closest to a daughter we’ve got.”

“I know. Thanks. But I wasn’t hurt at all in the elevator.” Well, not physically anyway. She suspected her heart might be in danger, though.

“Why don’t you come for dinner tonight. Irene will look after you. You can stay over in the guest room if you like.”

So far, she’d been careful not to be seen too much in her aunt and uncle’s company, since no one was to know about their relationship. They must really be worried about her. She was touched by their love. “I’d love to come for dinner. I’ll stay at my own place, though.”

“Whatever you say. But at least go to your doctor and make sure everything’s fine.” He blew out a breath. “When I think of what could have happened if that cable had snapped…”

“It didn’t, though. I’m fine. How about you? Were you both all right?”

“Oh, yes. We were watching TV and everything shook for a few seconds. That was it.”

“I’m glad to hear it. Well, thanks for calling. I’m sorry you and Aunt Irene were worried. See you tonight.”

She sat for a couple of minutes simply staring at her computer screen but not seeing it.

The tape was like an unexploded land mine sitting there in her purse. She’d been crazy to record what had happened last night. Not only crazy, but devious. She’d destroy the tape today and try to talk to her uncle at dinner about the possibility that Patrick wasn’t the one who’d set him up. In two months, she hadn’t seen him act with anything but integrity. Even last night, it had been Patrick who’d tried to call a halt to their lovemaking. She’d been the aggressor in the end. That tape was history.

She listened carefully for a minute. She could hear Patrick on the phone and knew she had time to take out the tape and destroy it.

Grabbing her bag, she dug into it. Where was the damn tape recorder?

Looking inside the bag didn’t help. Had the recorder somehow become wedged at the bottom? A flutter of panic started in her chest. She dumped her bag upside down on her desktop and shook it. A small avalanche of keys, wallet, cell phone, half a roll of mints, lip gloss and makeup bag tumbled out, along with the small silk bag that had come in so handy last night, a quarter and two pennies.

Frantic, she scrambled through the stuff. The tape recorder had to be here. She hadn’t touched it since last night.

Biting her lip, she decided it must have fallen out in her car or at home.

Her intercom buzzed. “Briana? Can you come in here for a moment?”

“Sure.” She shoved everything back into her bag and tucked it out of sight, then took her notebook and entered the adjoining office. Patrick was behind the desk, working up some notes in his angular handwriting.

“Can you organize an emergency council meeting for tonight?”

“Tonight?” she asked. After stonewalling Patrick’s efforts to increase the emergency team’s budget, council might be more receptive after this latest disaster. But calling a meeting the day after was almost unheard of.

“It’s important.”

“Yes. Of course,” she said. “Seven o’clock?”

He rubbed his jaw. “Make it eight. I’ve barely seen my kids in the last week.”

She nodded, hearing the bleakness in his voice and doing her best to offer comfort. “At least you let them call you at work when they need you. A lot of fathers wouldn’t do that.”

He made a sound of irritation in his throat. “A lot of fathers would see their kids more than an hour a day, too. If it weren’t for our housekeeper, I don’t know what I’d do.”

“Isn’t there anyone else who could help out? Family?”

“My family do their best, but they’re all busy, too. My wife’s parents retired to Florida. We see them a couple of times a year, but they’re not close enough to be much help.” He forced a smile. “We do okay. Once things settle down around Courage Bay, my job will be a lot easier.”

With a soundless sigh, she went back to her own desk, picked up her phone and started calling the councilors. Because he was on her mind, she called her uncle, Cecil Thomson, first.

When his secretary at the bank answered, she was put right through. “Yes, Briana,” her uncle replied. “What can I do for you?”

“The mayor has called an emergency council meeting tonight at 8:00 p.m.”

“I see. What’s this all about?”

Briana knew her uncle’s secretary must be in the room, or he would have grilled her further. “I’ll be faxing out an agenda later this afternoon.”

“Well…” She knew her uncle wanted to refuse, not only because he hated the mayor but because he’d have phoned Aunt Irene immediately to let her know Briana was coming for dinner.

“I’m sorry to hear that. I had dinner plans, but I guess I’ll have to cancel them…?”

“I think that would be best,” she agreed, knowing she’d be busy putting together info packets and preparing for the council meeting. She’d be lucky to get dinner at all.

Briana was on the phone with Councilor Gwendolyn Clark a short time later, when Patrick strode out of the office, pulling on his jacket as he went. He waved goodbye, and she raised her hand back at him, then watched hungrily as he left, trying not to remember what that tall, athletic body had felt like last night.

Please, let him be innocent so I can love him. The direction of her thoughts almost caused her to fall out of her office chair. Love? What was wrong with her? Patrick was a nice man and a wonderful lover. But who said anything about love?

PATRICK WALKED down the main stairs at city hall deep in thought. He’d gone over the city budget again this morning. He bet he knew that complex document as well as the city treasurer did. There was money available. Courage Bay wasn’t bankrupt. They had a couple of million in secured savings. There was no specific purpose for the money; it existed so that Courage Bay would never go bankrupt, and to cover any extraordinary expenses.

Well, if bumping up the emergency forces after the year they’d had wasn’t an extraordinary need, Patrick didn’t know what was. The money was set up as a trust, designed to be pilfer-proof and wisely spent. A one hundred percent yes vote by council was required before any expenditure could be approved. In order to draw more than half a million dollars from the fund in any one year, a city plebiscite was required, a referendum whereby the citizens of Courage Bay could decide how they wanted their money spent.

He intended to try one more time at tonight’s meeting to get the full vote of council to free up some of those funds for the emergency teams.

The noise of a power drill reminded him that the elevator repairs were under way. He headed over for a second to see how they were going. Bert was there and obviously knew one of the two men at work. “Here’s the man who spent several hours in your fine elevator last night,” Bert joked as Patrick came closer.

He nodded to both men. The one who’d been chatting with Bert said, “Well, you were never in any danger. We’ve checked the elevator out thoroughly. Should have it back in operation within the hour.”

Bert crossed the foyer to speak to a passing file clerk and Patrick thanked the two men for their quick response time. “No problem,” said Bert’s acquaintance, turning back to his drill.

The second man emerged from inside the elevator and said, “Did Bert say you were the guy stuck in here last night?”

“That’s right,” Patrick confirmed.

“This must be yours, then,” the worker said, holding out a small silver tape recorder.

“Yes it is.” Patrick recognized the small recorder. “It must have fallen out of my briefcase.”

The elevator repairman handed the tape recorder over and Patrick dropped it into his case. With a final thanks to the two men and a wave to Bert, he headed out for his meeting with Dan Egan.

Since he fully believed that part of his job was to be a leader in times of crisis, Patrick stowed his grim mood as he pulled up in front of the Jefferson Avenue firehouse and got out of his car.

“Hey, Patrick!” he was hailed by Louis Alvarez, an engineer with squad two.

After joking for a few minutes with Louis and his squad members, Patrick said, “Came to see the chief.”

“He’s in his office.”

That was unusual. Dan Egan was more of a man’s man than a paper-pusher, and whenever possible, he preferred to be out with his men and away from his desk. As Patrick looked around at the faces of the firefighters, he saw how fatigued they all appeared and was determined to get the funding that would lighten their load.

“Where’s my kid sister?” he said, already having noted that Shannon wasn’t out front.

“I saw her with Bud Patchett a couple minutes ago.”

He nodded. If she’d been trapped by the garrulous firehouse mechanic, it could be days before anyone saw her. For a second Patrick missed the camaraderie and hard physical work of the firehouse. The blazes these guys fought were real smoke-and-flame jobs, not the insidious political fires that wasted so much of Patrick’s time and energy.

Shaking off the momentary nostalgia, he made his way back to his former office, which looked almost exactly as it had in his day, except the pictures of Janie and the kids were gone, and it was a different guy behind the desk.

At the moment, though, Dan Egan wasn’t behind his desk. He was standing with Sam Prophet and both men looked grim.

“What’s up?” Patrick asked as he entered the room.

Chief Egan, a Texan with a big smile and a hearty laugh, didn’t offer a hand to shake or an easy word, merely an unsmiling nod.

Sam Prophet, the arson investigator, didn’t look any happier.

Patrick got a bad feeling in his gut. Taking his cue from the heavy atmosphere in the room, he closed the office door behind him.

“You said you had something important to discuss?” Patrick asked.

“That’s right,” Chief Egan said. “Show him, Sam.”

Prophet reached onto the desk for a plastic evidence box and handed it to Patrick.

He looked inside, careful not even to breathe on the twisted and charred scraps of plastic inside. A bit of charred wire also sat in the box.

“The remains of a cell phone,” Prophet said in a clipped tone. “I found it this morning when I went through the basement suite that burned down last night. This is what caused the fire that killed Patty Reese. Someone packed the phone with explosives, and then dialed the number, setting off the device.”

“Have you confirmed traces of explosives?” Patrick asked.

“I haven’t sent this into the lab yet, but I’d bet my pension on it. We’ve seen this M.O. before. Dan and I have named the bastard The Trigger.”

“We’re going to get that bastard. I swear to you, Patrick, that we are going to get him.” Dan’s slow Texas drawl was filled with disgust.

“But not without more resources.” Patrick heard the edge of fury in his own voice.

“Hey, we know you’re doing everything you can,” Dan said. “I’ve sat in those damn council meetings. Nobody’s blaming you.”

But Patrick was. It was still his responsibility as mayor of this town to see that the city ran smoothly. What a laugh. When he thought back to his early days of campaigning, he’d imagined there’d be nothing more required of him than that he perform his job with integrity and fiscal responsibility.

Who could have foreseen that within months of him taking office, his town would face a host of natural and human foes. Would he go back and change his place in all of this if he could?

No, by God, he wouldn’t. He’d been voted in by the people of this town, not the council, and if the council wouldn’t see reason, maybe he was going to have to go straight to the citizens of Courage Bay.

An idea was beginning to form.

“Sam,” he said, “how long until the media gets hold of this?”

“You mean that the fire last night was arson?”

“Yeah.”

Sam gave a tight smile. “Well, I’m not going to tell them-at least not until the tests are completed. Right now, we haven’t got so much as a lead on the guy. All you have is my hunch.”

It was more than a hunch and they all knew it. But Sam was also right that they couldn’t go public until the test results were in.

“I’ve called an emergency council meeting planned for tonight to try and get five heads out of five asses,” Patrick said. “If I don’t succeed, I’m upping the pressure on council. You guys need the resources to get to the bottom of this.”

Sam took the evidence box and carefully replaced it in his leather case. “I’ll get right on it.” He glanced at Patrick. “Anything you can do to help us catch this guy means…” He cracked a grin. “You get my vote for mayor next time around.”

Happy to help lighten the grim mood, Patrick said, “I thought I got your vote last time.”

“You did,” Sam conceded. “Okay, you help us get the resources to catch The Trigger and you’ll get both my vote in the next election and a beer.”

Patrick chuckled. “Don’t you know better than to attempt to bribe a city official? I’ll buy my own beer. But thanks.”

The two men shook hands and Sam left the office.

“Leave the door open,” Dan said. Turning to Patrick, he explained, “I like to be available for any of the guys.”

“Speaking of which, here’s one of the ‘guys’ now,” Patrick said, raising an eyebrow at his chauvinist friend. Shannon was on her way to the office with the fire mechanic, Bud Patchett, in tow.

“No, really, Shannon. No need to bother the chief. I was just letting off some steam,” they heard Patchett say as Shannon pretty much manhandled him into the chief’s office.

If Shannon wasn’t with the mechanic, Patrick might plead an urgent appointment and hustle out of there. Bud Patchett could talk.

“Hey, bro,” she said, seeing Patrick. “You okay after last night?”

Whether she was referring to the elevator ordeal or to his intimacy with Briana, which Shannon had obviously guessed at, he didn’t know. But he decided to assume she meant the elevator. “I’m fine. You guys did a great job, thanks.”

“That’s what we’re here for,” she said. She smiled at him, but there were lines of fatigue around her eyes, and knowing Shannon, she’d have taken the death of Patty Reese hard.

He might be the mayor and she might be a firefighter, but he was still her big brother. “I’m sorry Ms. Reese didn’t make it, kid.”

Shannon nodded. “Yeah. Me, too.”

For a moment no one spoke, then she seemed to pull herself together. “Bud here has something to say to you, Dan, and maybe since you’re here, you ought to hear it too, Patrick.”

“I didn’t know the mayor was here. Hello, Patrick.”

“Hi, Bud. Don’t mind me. If you’ve got something to say, go ahead and say it.”

The mechanic glanced back and forth between the fire chief and the mayor, finally addressing his remarks to the chief. “Dan, I’m sorry to add to your troubles today, but I’ve got to get some more maintenance help. Our trucks have been used to full capacity in the past weeks. They need more frequent maintenance, and one of the guys said there was a small leak in the spare fire hose. I need another part-timer at least.”

Dan nodded, his gaze fixed on the mechanic. One of the reasons Patrick respected his replacement as fire chief was the way Egan listened to his people. Bud knew his way around a fire engine better than anyone, and if he said he needed more help, then he did.

The familiar burn of anger intensified in Patrick’s belly. Damn it, it was his job to make sure the fire crews had the resources they needed, right down to enough guys to check the brakes regularly.

“Let me see what I can do, Bud,” Dan said. “In the meantime, I appreciate knowing you’re doing your best.”

“Yes, sir. I do my very best. I love those engines. And I like to see them running smooth and polished to a shine.”

Patrick knew they had more to worry about than shiny fire trucks. They had a murderous arsonist to catch, and it was his job as mayor to find the funding to ensure they stopped the killer.