Never Tell (Detective D.D. Warren #10)(108)

Screaming. Chaos. None of the fires are big; it’s the sheer number and randomness that are leading to panic. Trash cans bursting aflame here and then there and here again. Students are trying to scurry off campus as fast as I and various firemen try to push through. The firefighters need to hose down each trash can and stomp out embers. Me, I need to get to the head of the line, spot the source.

How is Rocket pulling this off? No way he boarded the subway with canisters of gasoline or a backpack of Molotov cocktails. Had he already stashed supplies nearby? A first stockpile for the lawyer’s town house? A second buried behind a dumpster on campus? Is there another target?

I spy a figure moving ahead. Not running, but definitely moving in a brisk, direct fashion. Dark hoodie—not dissimilar to mine—pulled over his face. I don’t stop to think if this is wise, or what I’m going to do if I draw too close and Rocket notices me. I trust in my training and the low buzz of adrenaline that’s jolting through my entire system.

As I’d explained to Keith, it’s hard for a girl like me to experience an up.

But this … this does it for me every time.

Rocket. Right in front of me. He turns just as I start to close the gap. For one moment we’re eye to eye. He has a backpack slung over one arm. As I watch, he pulls out a small clear bottle. Alcohol. With a rag stuffed into its neck. A Molotov cocktail, just as I had expected, in a bag he must’ve stashed somewhere nearby. Meaning he knew he was coming here. All part of his plan. Burn down a lawyer’s tony brownstone in downtown Boston, then head to Cambridge and light up a college campus.

Why?

My time for thinking is up. Rocket is no longer holding the Molotov cocktail; he’s lit the fuse and is hurtling it straight at me. I yelp, dive left. The flaming alcohol hits the ground to my right, where lucky for me, it sputters out against the winter mush. I don’t bother checking it. There are enough professionals on-site and my mission is clear. I clamber to my feet and start running. There, up ahead. I spot the dark hoodie again. Rocket, running pell-mell through a startled crowd of bundled up students. The kid is crazy fast. In a straight-out sprint, I’m never gonna take him. Instead, I do my best to guess his direction, then race a diagonal intercept.

I’m just starting to gain on him, when he glances over his shoulder and realizes my strategy. Just like that, he veers left, farther away from me. I redouble my efforts, plowing through a huddle of students, leaping over a bench.

I land wrong, my right foot sliding out on the slushy ground. My shoulder hits hard, and briefly, I lose my breath.

“Are you okay?” someone asks.

Another: “What happened?”

I just shake my head, stagger to my feet, and take off again. Except I no longer see my target. Maybe there, around that corner. Wait, that coffee shop. That entrance to the subway.

I rattle down the steps as fast as I can, but belowground, on the waiting platform, I encounter a sheer wall of people. Heavy coats, obscuring hats, strangling scarfs.

I look all around, but it doesn’t matter.

I’ve lost him.





CHAPTER 37


    EVIE


WHEN I FIRST ARRIVE AT my mother’s house and discover the media gone, I’m nearly disoriented. Where are the flashing bulbs, the screaming questions? Three days later, the silence is almost disturbing. What did I do to deserve this?

Then I remember the fire trucks in Harvard Square. Of course, a local fire. The media have moved on to bigger news. How kind of them.

I walked home from my meeting with Katarina. Only a mile and a half, and the kind of brisk trek I needed to put my thoughts in order. Still, when I reach the side door of the kitchen, place my hand on the knob, I can see my gloved hand is shaking.

All these years. All these years I considered my parents a great love story. And now this? My father had been cheating on my mom. Worse, she had known about it, and probably taken extreme measures to secure her own future.

Is that how she’s lived in this house all these years? Because coming home that day to my father’s body wasn’t some terrible, shocking tragedy? Just a well-executed plan? That she then conned her own daughter to take the blame for?

I feel like such a fool. I’ve spent most of my life as nothing but a pawn for my mother. I was never strong or clever enough to have helped my father. Then I went on to marry a man who also kept me entirely in the dark.

All these years, I thought I was the one carrying around secrets. Instead, it’s the people I love who’ve never trusted me with the truth. Who’ve manipulated me, over and over again.

I open the door and march right in.

My mother isn’t in the kitchen. The vodka bottle is out, though, a fresh lemon peeled on the cutting board, meaning she couldn’t have gone far. I pull off my gloves, hang up my coat, begin the search.

The sitting room with the impeccably decorated mantel: nothing. The ridiculous parlor with all its silk sofas: not there either.

Then I know.

I walk to my father’s office. My mother is sitting, quiet and still, behind his desk. To judge by the empty state of her martini glass, she’s been there a bit.

And she looks, at this moment, so small, so lost, so alone in the world, I lose my head of steam, just like that.

“This is where I feel him the most,” she says quietly, not looking at me, but clearly knowing I’m in the doorway. “It’s why I could never bring myself to change it. The kitchen was mine. But this room … Sometimes, I swear I can still smell him, his aftershave, the whiff of chalk from his fingers, the shampoo I bought him from Italy because it really did help thicken his hair. He swore only I cared about things like that, yet he smiled every time I got him a new bottle. Silly, all the ways we knew each other. Awful, to still miss him so much after all these years.”