Dirty Fire Read online

  DIRTY FIRE

  Table of Contents

  Dirty Fire

  Copyright

  Dedication

  December 28

  Prologue

  January 23

  Chapter 1

  April 10

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  April 16

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  April 17

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  April 20

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  April 21

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  April 22

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  April 23

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  April 24

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  April 25

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Afterword

  More from Earl Merkel…

  About the Author

  Connect with Diversion Books

  Dirty Fire

  by Earl Merkel

  Copyright

  Diversion Books

  A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.

  443 Park Avenue South, Suite 1004

  New York, NY 10016

  www.DiversionBooks.com

  Copyright © 2001 by Earl Merkel

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  For more information, email [email protected].

  First Diversion Books edition May 2013

  ISBN: 978-1-626810-13-6

  Dedication

  As always, for my family.

  December 28

  Prologue

  The truck flashed its lights once and swung out to her left. The slush thrown up in its passing beat against the side of the car in heavy, soggy thuds, and Rebecca Hunt’s hands tightened even harder on the steering wheel. The windshield went suddenly opaque, as if a gray blanket had been tossed over it. Then the truck was past, a partially obscured pattern of red-and-yellow taillights and reflectors through the muddy smear left by her wipers. In a moment, even those pinpricks of light were lost in the relentless volley of wet snowflakes—each the size of a half-dollar—that flew at her from the darkness.

  “Shit, shit, shit!” she said aloud, and heard the near hysteria in her voice. She took a deep breath and willed her heart to stop hammering. Once again, she clicked on her high beams; once again, the amplified glare from the millions of flakes only made it harder to see outside the windshield. She switched back to her driving lights and unconsciously leaned forward in the seat, intent on the road ahead.

  Winter weather is a fact of life for Chicago-area drivers, and Rebecca had learned to accept the often-hellish conditions it entailed. Being sound of mind, she had never learned to enjoy it.

  Not even her choice of car allayed the concerns she always felt driving on the expressway. It was an almost-new BMW convertible, less than a month from the showroom floor and a surprisingly extravagant vehicle for one so young. Rebecca had selected it more for the sinful leather luxury of its interior than for any bad-weather handling capabilities it might have offered.

  When she had made the purchase, Rebecca had envisioned herself as she would look in the springtime, speeding top down along Lake Shore Drive: a carefree beauty—heiress to some vast old-money fortune, no doubt—envied by every woman and admired by every male she left in her rearview mirror.

  She had not envisioned herself crawling along a snow-slick expressway, an undersized and insignificant piece of prospective roadkill for the massive trucks that buffetted her in passing. She had not envisioned herself on the expressway at all. Still, it was the only practical route from the trendy Lincoln Park neighborhood where she lived to the sprawling north-suburban campus of TransNational Mutual Insurance Company.

  But here she was, in the inky black of a late February pre-dawn, the object of scorn from faceless Teamsters who rocketed past in a spray of impatience and dirty slush. In less nerve-wracking weather conditions, Rebecca would have felt humiliated. She would have preferred to be in bed at her apartment, even though she well appreciated the secret benefits that an unusual work schedule had provided.

  Suddenly visible through the snow, a green sign announced her exit. She almost sighed in relief; the campus was only a half mile away now. In fifteen minutes, she would be at work—a mixed blessing, given the often stultifying nature of her job. In her experience, insurance companies offered little stimulation and less excitement.

  But there was money. Insurance companies deal in great sums of money. Everywhere it seemed, lots of it coming and going—buckets of money, rivers of money, vast torrents of money. In the three years she had worked at TransNational, Rebecca had seen no small amount of it flowing around her in amounts that were so large that it first seemed to her unreal and then unfair.

  Despite the plowing by the night maintenance staff, the snowfall overwhelmed their efforts. A two-inch layer of slush covered the driveway that ran a quarter mile to the multilevel company parking garage. As she turned onto the entry road, Rebecca’s car fishtailed slightly.

  She snapped back to attention and wrenched at the steering wheel. It only made matters worse. She overcorrected, jabbed inexpertly at her brakes and barely avoided a skid off the pavement. The car slid to a stop, angled crosswise to the roadway.

  Rebecca Hunt took a deep breath, straightened the wheels and stepped on the gas pedal as if it could shatter under her foot.

  Aside from the foreshortened tunnel of light her headlights carved before her, the snowy darkness dominated. Rebecca picked her way along tentatively, grateful for the faint pathway that another early riser had blazed toward the garage. She followed the parallel indentations, trying to match her wheels to the rapidly filling tire tracks.

  At the ramp, she rolled down her window, her right hand fumbling in her purse for the digital ID card that raised the garage entrance gate. There was no need. On this god-awful snowy morning, some maintenance staffer had taken pity on his coworkers and ignored what Rebecca had always believed was a silly company policy. The gate was already up, and Rebecca barely slowed as she rolled up the snow-slick incline. She turned right, toward the lower level of the garage.

  One of the advantages of being among the first to arrive each day was the selection of parking spaces. Senior managers and executives claimed the very best slots: those in the basement level, the only level completely protected from the elements and, extravagantly, the only one that was heated. But some oversight of bureaucratic planning had left a handful of basement spaces unassigned. Whenever possible—and with her early hours, it was almost always possible—Rebecca descended the sloping ramp to park in one of them. They were located on the far side of the garage from the elevator. It was an inconvenience counterbalanced by the secret satisfaction it always gave her to park among the executives. It had the added advantage o
f providing her with a car that would start at the end of the day.

  The basement level was still empty, the only evidence of early morning human activity a single pair of wet tire tracks that rounded the corner toward the executive parking spaces.

  She motored through the concrete parking expanse and turned toward the stairway.

  • • •

  He pressed back against the rough concrete and waited. His hands, clumsy in the lined leather gloves he had pulled on before leaving the car, flexed noiselessly.

  The gloves were expensive. The long coat he had donned was not, an off-the-rack brand he had bought especially for this occasion. The tight twill weave was more than adequate protection against fingernails, should that problem arise. Just as important, it would leave little fiber evidence. He had bought it several sizes larger than what he normally wore, and the sleeves reached almost to his fingertips. According to the label, the coat been factory-treated with ScotchGuard, though he did not anticipate an excess of bodily fluids.

  He had been confident that his preparations covered every contingency, but the heated garage had been a surprise. Under the coat, beneath the suit jacket he wore, a trickle of sweat itched along his spine. As he waited, he shifted slightly in discomfort.

  Finally, he heard the wet tires sing on the concrete floor, noted how the efficient Germanic hum of the engine rose slightly as the transmission shifted into park before it shut down. A car door opened, and there was the slight squeaking noise leather makes when fabric slides over it.

  Then the door closed, and light footsteps approached the stairwell.

  • • •

  For a moment, Rebecca had been tempted to park near the elevator. She still had not recovered from the anxiety of her drive, and the relief of having arrived safely rapidly transformed itself into irritation. It found a focus as she passed the empty executive parking slots. The last time it snowed like this, almost none of them came to work.

  With difficulty, she fought down the urge to pull into the space adjacent to the elevator doors, the one usually occupied by an immaculate Jaguar.

  My luck, she thought, I’d get towed as well as fired.

  She parked in her accustomed location and walked toward the stairwell. Her footfalls echoed in the vast empty room.

  • • •

  The woman passed his hiding place, so close that he could smell the slight floral scent she wore. It seemed to flood his senses, to become almost a physical presence around him. He looked down at his hands; they shook as if with an intense chill. At the same time, he found his heart pounding madly. All his senses felt magnified, intensified. He saw everything with a clarity unprecedented in his experience.

  It was, he discovered to his surprise, not an unpleasant sensation.

  He stepped around the door, moving quickly but feeling as if it was slow motion. She was three steps above him now, and he lifted his hands, high, as if they were joined in prayer. As he did, his sleeve brushed against the wall. It sounded unnaturally loud to his ears.

  And to hers.

  He saw her stiffen in surprise, but it was too late. He was already upon her.

  • • •

  Though she heard the rasp of fabric against concrete behind her, there was no time for Rebecca to react. A shadow flashed downward past her face. Something clamped hard around her throat, jerking her body violently backward.

  Instinctively, Rebecca opened her mouth wide to draw in the breath that would fuel her scream. Nothing came. At the same instant, she felt herself flung sideways and saw the rough gray concrete of the stairwell wall rush toward her face. Her scream was stillborn, aborted in a shock of light like a photographer’s strobe. Her arms, which had flown up to claw at the stricture mercilessly locked around her neck, surrendered the strength her terror had fueled. Her hands could only paw at the air weakly, as if reluctantly gesturing someone infinitely more fortunate to come closer, to help.

  Somewhere deep inside, a voice screamed at her to fight, to resist, and even now Rebecca tried to make herself listen. Then her attacker again whipped her body sideways, and the side of Rebecca’s head smashed into the wall with the sickening clack of two bowling balls colliding. She heard the sound only dimly, lost in the red rushing noise that pounded in her ears.

  It was almost a relief. Now there was no pain, not even from the merciless grasp around her throat.

  Rebecca was vaguely aware that she was now lying on the stairs, her head tilted slightly sideways so she could see the bright glare of the blue-white fluorescence from the fixture overhead. Its glow was starkly vivid in the center of her vision, at the end of a long gray-black tunnel. Slowly, the tunnel narrowed as the light blossomed into a brighter and brighter hue, a fiery conflagration that collapsed in upon itself like the dying of a star. Finally, all she could see was an intense white-hot pinpoint far, far below.

  Rebecca Hunt surrendered to the light, floating toward it in an almost weightless fall that took forever.

  January 23

  Chapter 1

  Gil Cieloczki moved gingerly over the ground, trying to avoid the worst of the ice-coated rubble. He glanced back at me, his expression wordlessly repeating the warning he had given in the car.

  It was an unnecessary caution. A slip, I knew, would mean more than just a painful fall; everywhere I looked, a wide assortment of impalements awaited the unwary, the inexperienced, the impatient.

  It was a surreal landscape, painted in stark tones of blacks and grays and dirty white.

  Razor-edged shards of plate glass; steel reinforcing rods broken and contorted by intense heat; shattered brick and concrete: all jutted from mounded-up ice that in places rose almost knee high. Spray from the fire hoses had frozen on the tangle of pipes that had burst from the heat, their ends jagged and menacing. What once was, by all accounts, a showcase of North Shore architecture was now reduced to just so many scorched and sharpened mantraps. Even the steel-shanked boots I had borrowed from the firefighter were scant protection.

  And, of course, making everything geometrically more difficult was the wind—a hard, flat and relentless rush of frigid mid-January air TV weather reporters like to call an “Alberta Clipper.” Firefighters and other unfortunates forced to work outside in the Chicago winter call it “The Hawk,” a term of wary bravado that included no allowance for contempt. The Hawk dared us to keep our heads up and slapped tears from our eyes when we tried.

  Alongside Cieloczki, a short and stocky figure whose firefighter’s helmet bore a lieutenant’s shield, also picked his way, hunch-shouldered against the icy gale, toward the burned mansion.

  “We lost this one big-time, Cappie,” said Jesús Martinez, his heavy turnout coat crackling with sooty ice. “We lost it before we even got here.”

  “Yeah,” Cieloczki said flatly. “All we did was make a lot of steam. Somebody wanted to build a vacant lot here.” He eyed the ruins and shook his head. “And did a damn good job of it.”

  At the one remaining wall, a thin figure watched us approach. His face was owl-eyed where goggles had shielded him from grit and soot, and he stood with the overly stiff posture that signals extreme exhaustion. A cigarette hung on his lip as if forgotten. He nodded as we stopped, sharing the windbreak of the wall.

  “Chief Cieloczki. Lieutenant. I see you brought the cops with you. How’s it going, Mr. Davey?”

  He did not offer to shake hands. Instead, he took the cigarette from his mouth and waved it vaguely in the direction of a half-dozen men, one of whom was holding the leash of a black dog.

  “Not much yet. It’s a mess, naturally. We had to wait for things to cool down, and our prelim search didn’t turn up anything. The dog got here an hour ago, just after sunrise. They’re still looking.”

  “Any thoughts, Roy?” Cieloczki asked. “What’s your guess on cause and origin?”

  “Careless smoking,” the firefighter replied automatically and grimaced at the callousness of his own reply.

  “Sorry. Bad joke, Gil. W
hen my guys got here, the ground floor was already completely enveloped, and before we even got off the truck we had breakthrough flames on the roof. This one went fast. The house had one of those systems that ring through to Emergency Services automatically when the smoke alarm goes off.”

  “Arson?”

  Roy nodded, grimly.

  “If the log is right—and we got no reason to doubt it—I’d bet there was one helluva load of accelerant in there. We’ll know soon. You can’t put that much stuff in a house without leaving a lot of evidence around.”

  Martinez had been watching the dog and its handler. “Directory says this place belonged to a couple named Stanley and Kathleen Levinstein. Any sign of them? Anything to indicate somebody was still in there when the fire started?”

  Roy shook his head. “Lieutenant, all I can tell you is that by the time we arrived, anybody who was inside wasn’t coming out alive—for sure, not on the ground floor. We got a ladder team up to the second floor as soon as we could, but there was no way to get access.”

  He stopped, and written on his smoke-smudged face was every firefighter’s recurring nightmare: the horror of having done something wrong that cost a life—or worse, the lingering self-accusation that he had not done everything possible to have saved one.

  “I don’t know—maybe somebody could’ve been in a bedroom on the second or third floor…”

  Cieloczki reached out and grasped the firefighter’s arm.

  “Roy,” he said with a gruffness meant to mask the compassion. “Don’t go there, son.”

  “They’ve found something,” said Martinez.

  As one, we turned.

  On the far side of the gutted structure, the black dog was sitting on his haunches. His tail wagged as his handler squatted beside him. The rest of the search team had gathered around the pair, and even at a distance I recognized the peculiar attitude they struck. It was a not-quite-embarrassed, not-quite-awestruck, fascinated-yet-repelled posture that even experienced firefighters assume when they see what flames do to human flesh.