Consumed (Firefighters #1)(100)

“Not since you got with her!” Holy shit, he couldn’t breathe. “Not since—”

“Like anyone can believe you? You don’t give a fuck who you hurt! It’s all about you—”

Deshaun locked his arm around Moose’s thick neck and took his wrist in his own hand. Yanking back on the chokehold, he pried the man free. Moose kicked and punched, but it was all air.

Danny flopped flat, his arms rolling out to both sides as he brought his legs up to relieve the pressure on his back. Taking deep breaths, he got his vision back from checkerboard-landia.

Captain Baker burst into the room. “What the hell is going on in here!”





chapter




47



“You are a gentleman and scholar. This is amazing.”

Anne put the receiver of her office phone between her ear and shoulder and went into her email, hitting refresh on her Outlook. When nothing came in, she hit it again. And a third time.

“Has the link come through?” her new buddy from the traffic office asked.

“Not yet—oh, here it is. And I got the log-in you set up for me. Thank you so much—I know you rushed it for me.”

“No problem. Call me if you need other files. I’ve limited your access to your scope of inquiry. Sorry we don’t go back more than four weeks.”

“This is going to be a big help. Thanks again.”

Hanging up, she double-clicked the link, got to the log-in, and entered her ID and temporary password. The screen presented her with a table of links to video feeds marked with alphanumerical descriptors that matched the street addresses of the cameras around the most recent warehouse fire.

Opening the first one, she saw a black-and-white image of the dark street and a navigating panel at the bottom. Using the mouse, she ran time fast-forward starting at 12:01 a.m., watching what was an empty street. Vagrants entered and left the scope of the monitoring. Then the sun came up.

She stopped and took a map of the city out of her desk. Flattening it, she found where the camera was, orienting herself. Then she went back to the files. According to the incident reports filed by the crew, the fire started sometime around nine thirty p.m.

Talk about watching paint dry.

Nothing changed but the shadows, the relentless shift of the sun broken up only by the occasional truck or car. Night came back. Now there was once again nothing but the glow of the streetlight on the corner where the pedestrian box announced to absolutely no one when it was safe to cross the traffic-free road. Nothing approached the warehouse from the front—until there was a sudden flash. Smoke. Then the fire engines and the rescue crew’s ambulance arrived.

She switched to another camera after she reoriented herself. Now she was checking out the road that went along the side, and the process started all over again, the monitoring starting at 12:01 a.m. and going through to nightfall. Then the fire.

And again with the street camera on the other side. Dark. Dark. Light. Midday. Late afternoon. Nightfall. Flash. Evidence of smoke. Fire trucks. Ambulance.

“Shit.”

Sitting back, she cracked her spine and rotated her shoulders. Soot was snoring softly in his crate, and it was almost lunchtime.

One more. Firing it up, she started the review again.

Frankly, it was amazing that there were any feeds at all given how deserted that part of town was. But the mayor’s office had set up cameras throughout the zip code as part of an initiative to encourage businesses to move down there and invest in real estate renovation projects. With the amount of crime, there had been some pushback on safety, and in a rare moment of loosening purse strings, the former mayor, Greenfield, had stepped in and identified the monitoring as a priority.

And of course, God only knew what Ripkin had kitted his properties out with. Not that she expected to see anything from that information request anytime soon. Sterling Broward was going to pump the brakes—

“What? Wait, what was that?” she muttered to herself.

Leaning in toward her monitor, she reversed the feed. Initiated the file at a slow speed.

Three thirty-two a.m. Dark street. Dark street. Empty—

The box trailer and truck rolled past the camera and then bumped up over the curb and continued across the scruffy lawn. It stopped. Someone got out and opened a bay door. Drove inside and closed themselves in.

Forty-six minutes later, at 4:18 a.m., the bay was opened, the truck reemerged with its trailer, and then the driver shut everything up and drove off. Unfortunately, the footage was so grainy, she couldn’t catch any license plates or markings on the trailer or truck, and the individual who’d gone inside had been wearing a dark hoodie.

But it proved that someone had gone in there

“Gotcha,” she said with a smile.

As her cell phone started to ring, she absently shoved her hand into her purse and answered the call. “Hello?”

There was a pause. “Anne, it’s Moose. We gotta talk.”



* * *



Twenty minutes later, Anne was at Hereford Crossings, an outdoor shopping center that had cafés and locally owned restaurants along with stores that sold clothing for middle-aged women and shops that had pottery and handmade rugs in their windows.

It was the kind of place that her mother would have loved to check out, Anne thought as she walked along with the light crowd.