Fire Engine Dead Page 22

  I grabbed the door handle and pulled. And pulled again. It didn’t budge. I looked frantically for a latch or a button or anything at all that would release the door: nothing. Maybe the release switch was somewhere else in the building, but I sure didn’t know where. I realized I was sobbing, although with the water still falling on my head it was hard to tell. I kept tugging ineffectually at the door until I heard the sound of sirens outside, and then I gave up and raced to the front door and hauled it open before the firemen could even knock.

  They were apparently taken aback by the sight of me, drenched, grimy, and incoherent. “Fire’s out, but there’s a man…a door, in the vault…and EMTs…go, hurry, please.” I don’t know what they made out of that, but at least they took off in the right direction. I followed, and once inside the reading room, I pointed. When the guy in the lead looked at me, I managed to say, “Automatic fire door. I don’t know where the release is. There’s somebody inside.”

  The fireman said one word. “Halon?”

  When I nodded, his expression changed. He barked some orders to his team; an axe materialized, and someone went to work on the door. I could have told them it wouldn’t be easy: the building had been built too well. The dull clangs as metal met metal echoed through the room and beyond, but it took a while before anyone could force the door open, first a crack, then two guys got behind it and shoved it back into its slot.

  I knew it was too late when they stopped hurrying.

  CHAPTER 25

  I sat in one of the reading room chairs—damned uncomfortable, I found myself thinking irreverently, maybe I should think about ordering cushions—while the firemen poked around the sodden pile of ashes, making sure the fire was out. Someone had turned the sprinkler system off, and I studied the scorched spot on the floor, the streaks of smoke creeping up the walls, and the steady drip, drip, drip of water from the shelves. Somebody had better think about rescuing all those books before they were beyond salvage. That somebody was probably me, but I was incapable of doing anything at the moment. So I sat and tried to avoid thinking at all.

  I sat while the EMTs arrived and went straight to Peter, still slumped against the shelves. They found his inhaler in a pocket immediately, then started giving him oxygen before hoisting him on a gurney and making a quick exit. I thought he was unconscious, but as the gurney passed me, he opened his eyes, and the look he gave me was so bleak that it was all I could do not to turn away.

  I waited while the police arrived. Initially they ignored me, conferring first with the milling firemen. I watched as though it were a play: a police officer strode across the room, spoke briefly with the fire team leader, then entered the vault. He emerged more slowly, shaking his head, and barked instructions to his colleagues. It all sounded like gibberish to me. The fireman pointed at me, and the officer started to make his way in my direction. I shut my eyes for a moment, trying to gather my strength and my wits, and when I opened them, James was kneeling in front of me.

  “Nell, are you all right?”

  I debated about how to answer that. Physically, yes, more or less, although I was still dripping wet and shaking. Otherwise—I’d have to say the jury was out on that.

  “Nell?” he repeated, laying his hands over mine. The touch of his warm hands was startling, as if I’d forgotten that humans were supposed to be warm. I wasn’t.

  “What are you doing here?” My voice caught, and I coughed.

  “The police said there was a fire here, and I figured it had to be connected.”

  “Ma’am?” That police officer had arrived in front of us. “You’re Eleanor Pratt?”

  I nodded. That was my name, and it seemed safe enough to admit it.

  “I need to ask you some questions.”

  James rose to his full height of six foot whatever. “Officer, Ms. Pratt will be happy to answer all your questions, but right now she’s not in any state to do so.”

  The officer didn’t back down. “You her lawyer?”

  “No.” James reached into a pocket and pulled out a badge. “FBI.”

  I almost felt sorry for the officer.

  “We still need some basic information,” he said stubbornly. “Does she know who the dead man is?”

  Dead. That was the word I was trying not to think about. I cleared my throat. “His name was Scott Ingersoll. The other man, the one the EMTs took away, is his brother Peter Ingersoll. Will Peter be all right?”

  “Can’t say, ma’am. Now can you—”

  “No,” James interrupted. “She cannot. She will talk to you in the morning.”

  They locked stares for a couple of seconds, but it was the police officer who backed down. “Ten o’clock at headquarters. You’ll be responsible for her?” he asked James.

  “Yes.” He stood guard next to me as the officer went back to consult with his peers. Then he turned back to me. “I’m getting you out of here.”

  I seemed to be processing things very slowly. “My bag. It’s upstairs in my office.”

  “I’ll get it. You stay here.”

  “No! I’ll come with you.” I didn’t want to be left down here with all these strangers and their questions. I struggled to stand up—my legs had stiffened. James grabbed my arm to help, but I was still wobbly when I was upright. He gave me another hard look, then said, “Keys?”

  I fished in my pocket and handed them to him. He led me to the elevator, and we ascended in silence. He didn’t let go of my arm; did I look like I needed to be held up? Still, I was grateful for it. Upstairs I moved by habit down the hall to my office, but when I walked through the door, nothing looked familiar, and I couldn’t remember why I was there.

  James came up beside me. “Where do you keep your bag?”

  I pointed toward the desk, and he found it in a drawer.

  “Jacket?”

  “On the door.”

  He found that, too, and draped it around my shoulders.

  There was something else important…“James, find Jennifer. She was in on it, working with Scott. She might even have planned it all.”

  “You sure?”

  I nodded, and he fished his cell phone out of his pocket, then turned away to make a call. I didn’t listen. I just stood there, still trying not to think of anything at all. It was hard work.

  When he was done, he came back. “We’re going now.”

  “Where?”

  “My place.”

  “Oh.” I didn’t want to argue. I didn’t want to make any choices. Let him make decisions; I was done with that.

  We went out the back way so no one would see us. After James had settled me in the passenger seat of his car, we pulled out and drove slowly by the front of the building. The fire truck was still there, although the firemen were standing around or folding and stowing things. A police car; no, two. Two news vans. And the coroner’s van pulled up. We kept going.

  I shut my eyes, and when I opened them again, James was shaking me carefully, as though I might break. “We’re here,” he said. I looked around but didn’t recognize anything. University City? He was holding the car door open, and I realized I was supposed to get out. He offered a hand, and when I took it he pulled me up from the seat. My legs were still rubbery, and everything seemed very far away.

  We walked across the sidewalk and stopped at a triple-decker, climbed the front stairs, and then I stood there numbly while James opened the outer door, then nudged me through it. “Second floor,” he said. I walked up a flight of stairs, carefully putting one foot in front of the other. We stopped again while he unlocked a door on the second-floor hallway and ushered me through it. We were in a room, and I could see a kitchen and a bedroom. James shut the door behind me and slipped off my jacket, hanging it on a coatrack, and he hung his beside it. I focused on the details. The room was neat, and the furniture matched. There was a nice area rug in the middle of a polished hardwood floor. There were some framed prints on the wall—I should look at them later. After…what?

  He was s
tanding in front of me again, and he was holding my upper arms. “Nell?”

  I finally looked at him, and something inside me broke. “I killed him.” And then I burst into tears and fell against him.

  I woke up sometime later to find myself lying on a couch with a blanket tucked around me. It took me a moment to figure out where I was, but the fact that James was slouched in a chair a few feet away, leafing through a magazine, was a big clue. His shirt was white, but the front of it was streaked with grey smudges—and then the rest of the events that had led up to this moment came flooding back, and it was almost more than I could take. Shutting my eyes and hoping it would all go away did not work.

  “You’re awake,” James said.

  I opened my eyes again. “You’re very observant,” I replied, in a croak that I didn’t recognize as my own voice.

  “I am, after all, an FBI agent. You hungry?”

  I considered and decided the answer was yes. “I could eat.”

  “Good.” He got up and went toward the kitchen, and I realized he was out of uniform: he’d taken off his tie and rolled up his shirtsleeves. Did that mean he was off duty? I checked my watch: it was after midnight, so I must have been out for a few hours. I still felt heartsick, but at least my brain seemed to be working again. I sat up, rolling back the blanket, and pulled various parts of my clothing up and down, trying to restore some sort of order to my appearance. Then I realized that my clothes and I had been the victims of an indoor downpour and it was hopeless, so I wrapped myself up in the blanket again. I ran my fingers through my hair, and they came away smelling of smoke.

  James appeared bearing a tray with a mug of something, a bowl of something, and some crusty sliced bread. The mug and the bowl were both steaming.

  “What are you, a magician?”

  “You have heard of a microwave?”

  “I’ve met a few in my day.” I inhaled the aroma of the soup and realized I was ravenous. Halfway through the bowl—and half the stack of bread—I realized he wasn’t eating. “You aren’t joining me?”

  “I ate a couple of hours ago.”

  I finished the bowl of soup before asking, “What happened?”

  “I brought you back here and you crashed.”

  “Ah.” I finished the bread in record time, then set the tray down on the table in front of the couch. I finally felt warmer, except for the cold lump in the center of me. “So, what now?”

  “That’s up to you.”

  “But aren’t there procedures that have to be followed?”

  “Tomorrow. I’m on my own time here. It’s not my place to question you, not that I would anyway.”

  “Oh. Then I should go home.” I looked vaguely around. I thought I had brought my coat and my bag. What time was it? Probably too late for a train, but…

  James’s voice cut through my mental wandering. “No. You aren’t going anywhere right now.”

  Well, that seemed kind of abrupt. “I’m not?”

  When I cocked my head at him, he said more softly, “I don’t think you should be alone tonight. Marty can bring you something in the morning.”

  “You’ve talked to Marty?”

  “No, I haven’t talked to anyone.” He kept looking at me in a way I couldn’t quite fathom.

  “So why am I here?” Maybe my brain still wasn’t firing on all cylinders. I wasn’t in custody, and I seemed to recall that the police had said James was responsible for me. What did that mean?

  “Instead of police headquarters? Because a man died tonight, or last night actually, and you need time to process that. You don’t need a bunch of officials yammering at you. And much as I like my cousin Marty, she’s not the most sympathetic person in the world. Tomorrow’s time enough to let her in on what happened.”

  A tiny part of me was glad—he was right about Marty. “So you’re my babysitter?”

  “Nell…” He stopped, trying to find words. “I brought you here because I was worried about you. The police would have torn you to shreds, and I didn’t think you could handle that right now. You weren’t in any shape to get yourself home. And I couldn’t let you face this alone.”

  Okay, so this wasn’t official, this was personal—between the two of us. We’d been dancing around it for a while, but it looked like the events of the night had pushed things to another level. Scott Ingersoll’s death wasn’t the only thing I had to process—and I was sure there would be plenty of official help to do that. Instead, I was sitting here looking at a man who had swooped in and rescued me from an unpleasant confrontation with the police, following a thoroughly harrowing experience; had brought me to his home, held me, and let me cry on his shoulder or chest or whatever; had fed me good food; and wasn’t pressuring me for anything at all, personal or professional. I was pretty sure this was one damn unusual man.

  “Thank you.” The gears of my mind spun and caught. “Tell me, James, have you ever killed anyone?”

  He regarded me levelly. “Yes. Twice.”

  “I don’t want the details, but how did you feel? I mean, after?”

  “It wasn’t easy. In both cases it was justified. That doesn’t mean I felt right about it. Taking a life is always wrong.”

  “Even in defense of your own?”

  “Is that what happened?”

  I settled back on the couch and pulled the blanket around me again. “More or less. Scott Ingersoll broke into the Society with the intention of killing his brother and me and then framing Peter for everything else. He told us that much. He planned to set a fire at the Society and make it look as though Peter had done it and I had tried to stop him, and we would both have been found dead. I think he figured he could handle Peter, but he was ready to shoot me if I didn’t go along with it. He even brought along a gun that had been their father’s.”

  “Instead he ended up dying as a result.”

  “Do you know how he died, James?”

  “No, I didn’t get all the details. I haven’t talked to anyone since we came back here.”

  I chose my words carefully. “He died because I locked him in a room that suffocated him. He started the fire, and the fire triggered the fire retardant systems in that part of the building. In the reference room it’s sprinklers, but in the vault it’s halon, which can be deadly because it consumes all the oxygen in the space, which is what puts out the fire. He was the one who set the fire, but I locked him in the vault. And when I remembered what could happen, I couldn’t get the damn door open again. So you might even say the building killed him.”

  “You acted to save Peter Ingersoll, and yourself. Not to mention the institution and its collections. What else could you have done?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know—figured things out sooner?” I said bitterly.

  “Nell, neither the police nor the FBI had Scott Ingersoll in their sights, not yet. You can’t blame yourself for that.”

  “Shouldn’t, maybe, but that doesn’t make me feel any less guilty.”

  “You want me to sugarcoat it? Tell you that you did the right thing, and you’ll feel better in the morning?”

  “No, I don’t. I just want you to tell me how to deal with the guilt.”

  “I won’t pretend it’s easy. But I’d respect you less if you didn’t feel guilty about it.”

  “Ah.” I was surprised to find that mattered to me. “Do you want to hear the details?”

  “All right. You’ll have to run through them with the police in the morning anyway.”

  I settled back into my blanket and began with Jennifer’s phone call, after I’d last talked to James, and how she had suggested I meet Peter after hours, when the building would be empty. And Peter’s confusion about why he was there, and the sound of breaking glass. And Scott’s anger at Peter, and his contempt. There were elements of the story that obviously I didn’t know, undercurrents that went beyond the recent events. Questions I wanted answered, for my own sake.

  I told James about the feeble plan I had hatched, knowing as
I did how the systems would work. I had hoped that even the small fire would be enough to trigger the nearer halon system, as it had. It had looked like the only chance I had, and I had taken it. I had guessed right, but I hadn’t expected it to cost Scott his life.

  “Where does Jennifer fit in?” James prompted.

  I shook my head. “Scott didn’t get into the details. I’m pretty sure they planned the theft together, but I’m not sure who was using who. Listening to Scott talk about the fire, I began to wonder if in fact he was an arsonist at heart. Maybe it was Jennifer’s idea to take advantage of that and make some money from it, whenever they managed to unload the fire truck. I gather they were both full of resentment, but toward different things. Anyway, Scott was trying to shut down the investigation by framing Peter for all the fires.”

  It must have taken an hour to get through it, in fits and starts. James was quiet for most of it, inserting a brief question now and then. He didn’t take notes; he just watched me, his eyes serious. I finally ran out of steam, when I came to the point when he had arrived. “I should have realized…”

  He stopped me. “No, you shouldn’t have. You’ve never had reason to need that fire system, right? You had no idea how it would work, or even if it would work. Why were you supposed to know that halon gas could be deadly?”

  “But I did know—I just didn’t remember until it was too late. And I’m responsible for everything at the Society.”

  I could have sworn he swallowed a laugh. “Nell, you’re only one person, and you’re human. If you hadn’t done what you did, you’d be dead and the Society would have gone up in smoke. I prefer this outcome.”

  “Me, too.” Suddenly I was exhausted. My watch said one thirty, and I had a date at police HQ at ten thirty, and I couldn’t show up looking like I did. I struggled to stand up. “I need to get some sleep.” I couldn’t seem to get my feet untangled from the blanket.

  And then James was there again, holding me up. “You take the bed—you need it. I’ll sleep out here. And I’ll call Marty in the morning, and I’ll go with you to the police.”