The Wrong Girl

68

Plumes of white steam hissed from the remains of 27 Margolin Street. Snaking canvas fire hoses connected hydrants up the sidewalk and across the street. Neighbors clustered on the sidewalk, faces bundled against the cold, shielding their eyes from the glaring daylight-bright spots the firefighters switched on to help them in the darkness.

Jane could no longer feel her feet, but could not bear to wait in the car. She stood with the others, behind the firefighter lines, watching, mesmerized, as the water froze almost as quickly as it hit what was left of the roof and puffed white into the dark night. The snow had stopped, but the temperature had plummeted, Jane could tell by her fingers and tingling face. Firefighters, some with icicles on their helmets, stood red-faced and determined, rooted, aiming their powerful hoses.

“Losing battle,” Jane heard one guy mutter. “The place went up like a-”

“Miss Ryland? Jane?” The incident commander touched her coat sleeve. Jane recognized Sergeant Monahan from her general assignment reporter days. Her heart clenched. This was going to be about Ella. It could not be good. And it was her fault. Jane’s own fault.

She’d watched, tears streaming down her face, as a canvas-clad firefighter emerged from the still-black smoke, emerged from where the front door used to be, carrying a blanket-draped-well, a person. Jane saw feet poking from under the edge of whatever covered it. Had to be Ella. Ella’s body. Motionless. The firefighter had not been running. Might Jane have been able to save her?

Jane lunged forward, toward the figures silhouetted in the flames, but Jake had held her back, one hand wrapped around her arm, his body pressed against her back. Stronger than she was.

“Honey, Janey, stop. There’s nothing you can do. Nothing you could have done. Just-let’s see what happened.”

“But I could have… should have…”

“No. You shouldn’t have,” Jake said. “Trying to help is one thing. Being an idiot is another.”

“But what if-”

“There’s no ‘what if,’” Jake told her. “There’s what is. And that we don’t know yet.”

The commander was saying something. She had to focus.

“Ma’am? Jane?”

Jane turned. The air still reeked of fire and smoke, the choking darkness blanketing the night. Jane could taste it, and could smell nothing else.

“She’s asking for you,” the sergeant said. “She’s getting oxygen, she shouldn’t remove the mask. We’re transporting her any second. But she was trying to tell us something, pretty upset, so we gave her paper. She wrote ‘find Jane Ryland.’ And here you are.”

Monahan touched his mustache with the tip of a finger. “Is there something you’d like to tell us? You have ID on her? Could she have set this fire? This one’s clearly suspicious. Arson’s on the way.”

“Huh?” Jane tried to sort this out. Of course the firefighters couldn’t know who Ella was. How could they? “Her name is Ella Gavin. She works at-She’s a friend of the person who-She’s asking for me? I’m sure she couldn’t have-wouldn’t have-She’ll be okay?”

“She’d covered herself with a thick tablecloth of some kind,” Monahan told her. The glare from the emergency lights made elongated shadows on the snow and slickening ice as Jane and Monahan picked their way toward the ambulance, stepping over an obstacle course of engorged canvas hoses.

“She was trying to carry a bunch of papers, something like that, but O’Toole says they dropped as he carried her out.” He gestured at the smoky destruction. “Hope they weren’t important.”

“Hello, Detective Brogan, I remember you. Do you remember me?”

Jake felt a tug on his sleeve as he watched Jane follow Monahan toward Ella Gavin. He knew how Jane felt. He, too, had stood there, helpless and surprised, as freaking Hennessey shot Curtis Ricker. Barely a moment had gone by since the shooting when he hadn’t wondered-Might I have prevented it? Was there something I could have done? To hear Jane express the same wish and know she felt exactly the same remorse made him care about her even more. If that was possible. Such a genuinely good-

“Detective?” The tug grew more insistent. “Remember?”

He turned. In the bright circle of the street light, wearing a white crocheted hat and too much rouge, stood-Dorothy. Debbie. “Dolly,” he said. “Dolly… Richards.”

“Yes, exactly, Detective Brogan.” Dolly poked his arm with a finger. “I told you something was going on here, didn’t I? Now don’t you agree? Don’t you suspect it might be those people in the van?”

“People in the van?” Jake’s peripheral memory dragged up the image of a gray van driving away from the fire when he’d been focused on yanking Jane out of the burning house. He turned to Mrs. Richards with narrowed eyes. “What van, ma’am?”

“Ella?” Jane’s whisper was almost more to herself than to the blanketed form on the gurney. Ella’s face was covered with a plastic oxygen mask, her body silvered with a space-blanket throw. Her eyes were closed. Was she-?

“Ma’am?” The EMT beside the gurney, brush-cut and zipped into a parka yellow-stenciled DONALD CANNON, stepped between them. “We’re transporting her now. Please contact Mass General for more information. She’s on oh-two, she cannot take off that mask to talk to you.”

On oxygen. Ella was breathing. Jane looked at Monahan, pleading for intervention. “Will she be okay?” Tell me she’ll be okay.

“Don, this is Jane Ryland.” Monahan stepped up, showed the EMT the handwritten paper. “The person your patient was asking for.”

Cannon frowned, shook his head. “Negative. She cannot talk. Let her see you’re here, Miss Ryland. Then we’re going.”

Jane took one step toward the gurney, fearing what was under that blanket, fearing the future, knowing she might have made a difference, and didn’t. Didn’t.

A movement under the blanket, and Ella’s right hand came out, gestured Jane toward her.

“Go ahead,” Cannon said. “Thirty seconds.”

Ella made a motion like writing.

Cannon handed Ella a mechanical pencil, then pulled a tiny pad from a pocket in his coveralls and held it in front of her, not touching the blanket. The three of them watched, Jane holding her breath, as Ella scrawled something, then something else.

“Pocket?” Jane leaned in to the paper. “Cat?”

The pencil moved again. “Feed?” Jane read.

“There’s something in your pocket, and you want me to feed your cat?” Jane struggled to keep herself from crying and laughing at the same time. “Are your keys in your pocket? Blink twice for yes.”

Ella did. Then pantomimed write again.

“I’m sorry,” the EMT said. “No more. The sooner we get her out of here, the sooner she’ll recover. Say your good-byes.”

The EMT had said “recover.” That was a good sign.

“Cannon, let’s do this,” Monahan said. “Get her keys. And whatever. Quickly.”

“Yessir.” Using two fingers, the EMT lifted the silver blanket, inch by inch. Then turned to Jane, holding a keychain in one hand. A folded piece of paper in the other.

“Is this what you want me to have?” Jane leaned in, close as she could.

Ella’s eyes widened, blinked twice, then closed.

“What van?” The woman shot Jake a withering look, right out of grade-school detention. “The van I told you about before. They’ve been here a couple times now. Looked to me like some kind of cleanup crew, you know? Carrying in buckets and mops, carrying out big green trash bags of-whatever. It reminded me of that movie, where the girls come and clean up after murders and things? I thought that’s who these people were. That’s why they had those rolls of yellow tape. But they wouldn’t come after dark, would they, Detective?”

Afterwards? Was here? He’d keyed in on them outside the funeral, but had been crazed with the Ricker thing since then. Afterwards was the crime scene cleanup crew who’d interrupted Kat McMahon’s examination of Brianna Tillson.

They’d been called to Callaberry Street. That must have been okayed by landlord Leonard Perl. And they’d been here. Who okayed that? This was Finch’s house. She owned it, not Perl. Jake had checked with Alvarez in Records. Finch lived alone.

So. Brianna Tillson-murdered. Lillian Finch’s death-ruled a homicide. Niall Brannigan’s death outside Finch’s house-suspicious. The glue that held all three together was Afterwards. And, possibly, the elusive Leonard Perl.

“Did you see any of the people from the van, Mrs. Richards?”

“Dolly, I told you. There were two at least, maybe three. I can’t be sure.” She gestured toward the house with her mitten. “You think the fire is out? Who was the body that firefighter was carrying? How do you think the fire started? The van people could have done it.”

Mrs. Richards paused her monologue and nodded, apparently approving of her own detective skills. “They sure could’ve.”

Jake had to agree. They sure could’ve.

He reached for his cell, ready to alert DeLuca to accompany him on a come-to-Jesus visit to the now-unsuspecting folks at Afterwards. Folks who would not be so happy when he interrogated them about their role in the death of Niall Brannigan. And their certain knowledge of the whereabouts of Leonard Perl.

He hit DeLuca on speed dial. Then Jake hit “end call.” Shit. How many gray vans were there in Boston? No way to prove whose van had been on Margolin Street. Any evidence of their “cleanup” was a smoking mass of embers and debris. Some defense attorney would rip them to shreds.

“Ma’am?” Maybe she could ID one of them. Something. Anything.

“Look at that Jane Ryland,” Mrs. Richards was saying. “So pretty. I’d recognize her anywhere. What’s she doing here, a story for TV? That’s her little black car, must be.”

“Yes it’s…” Jake watched Mrs. Richards take out a little pink spiral notebook, a ballpoint pen dangling from the spiral.

She clicked open the pen and began to write. “Is that a three or an eight, Detective? My eyes aren’t what they used to be.”

“A three or an-on Jane’s license plate?” Jake was confused. “Why would you be writing that down?”

“Like I told you the other day.” Mrs. Richard puffed out an exasperated breath. “I always take license plates. Always. Even yours. It started when some neighbors were bringing in all kinds of unsavory types. Then it got to be kind of a habit. Tell you a secret, I use the numbers to play the lottery.” She smiled up at him. “Silly, I know. But very lucky.”

Jake was almost afraid to ask. Might he get lucky? “Mrs. Richards?”

“Dolly,” she said.

“Dolly. Let me ask you.” He eyed her notebook. “Do you keep track of the dates? Did you write down the license number of the gray van?”