Silent Scream (25 page)

“I don’t think so,” Olivia said. “But I know he’s been called. Is the dog yours?”

“No, but I’m the one who takes care of him. Have for five years. His name is Bruno.”

Olivia wrote it down. “I’ll make sure the vet knows you’re the contact, Mr. Hart. You can tell him Bruno’s medical history
and make sure he gets the best care.”

“Thank you.” He swallowed hard. “You probably think I’m a horrible person, being more concerned about the dog than Tomlinson,
or this fire.”

“I have a dog, too. So, what can you tell us about this fire and Mr. Tomlinson?”

He rubbed his hands over his face. “I left at my usual time, about six. Barney was still here. He was doing the books. They
said he was shot. How?”

“We don’t know yet, and we haven’t been in there. So Mr. Tomlinson was doing the books. Was the business in any trouble?”

Hart rolled his eyes. “Oh, yeah. Tomlinson and the missus were in the middle of a messy divorce. He’d been cheating and she
had pictures. She made sure everybody knew she had pictures and who Barney’d been doin’ it with. Young woman he’d hired as
a temp. Nobody was surprised because we all knew why he’d hired her. The girl never did a lick of work except on him.” He
winced. “Sorry, Detective.”

“It’s okay. Was the divorce the reason the business was in trouble?”

“Not the whole reason. We were hurting before, with construction slowing. Most of our customers buy for commercial building.
But Weezie had just ordered an audit of the books, and all of our spending had to be approved. I guess she figured he’d been
buying things for the other woman from the business accounts.”

“Was he?” she asked.

“Yeah. I tried to tell him to stop, that he was gonna get fried, but he didn’t listen. He was a fifty-year-old man with a
twenty-year-old on the side. They never listen.”

“Mrs. Tomlinson’s first name is Weezie? Short for Louise?”

He nodded. “It’s a real shame. I like her. She didn’t deserve this.”

Olivia met Hart’s eyes. “But Mr. Tomlinson did?”

“No,” he said. “Nobody deserves that. But I won’t lie to you. Barney was a prick. He cheated on Weezie, he was rude to employees.
Never made eye contact, always either on his cell phone or using it to surf the Internet. Probably looking at porn. And he
hated Bruno,” he finished, as if hating the dog was the most egregious sin of all.

“What about you, Mr. Hart?” she asked. “Did you hate him?”

“Sure. He was racist, sexist, every bad ‘ist’ you can name. But he was my boss, and I said ‘yes, sir’ when he gave an order.
The only time I ever held my ground was over Bruno. And before you ask, I was with my wife and some friends playing bridge
when the fire started. I can give you their names.”

“That would be great. We can cross you off quickly.
Sergeant Barlow said you were the one to call 911. How did you know to come here?”

A sheepish expression stole over Hart’s face. “I installed a smoke detector in Bruno’s run. Just in case. It sends an alert
to my cell phone. We were just finishing our last game when my phone went off. I got here, saw the fire, called 911. I dragged
Bruno beyond the fence. I didn’t want him to get burned or trampled on by the firemen.”

“Why the dog?” Kane asked. “Did you have a problem with theft?”

“We used to store porcelain fixtures out here and had some vandalism. Kids, with too much free time. They’d break up porcelain,
that kind of thing. Barney got the dog, hoping Bruno would bite one of them. The kids went elsewhere and Bruno stayed.”

“Video security?” Olivia asked.

“Cameras outside, none inside. Feed goes straight to a recorder inside. Old-fashioned. Barney didn’t think he needed anything
fancy as long as he kept Bruno.”

“We’ll need a list of your clients and employees,” Olivia said.

“Talk to Jake Mabrow. He does our IT. I convinced Barney to set up an outside server about a year ago so that we’d have a
backup. Jake will have access to our files. So will Weezie. She came in and made copies of everything on Barney’s computer
the day before she filed for divorce. He didn’t know she knew about the temp.”

“What about you?” Kane asked. “What will you do now that this place is gone?”

“Retire. I’d been planning to anyway. Weezie promised me Bruno.” Hart’s head whipped to the side, focusing on a minivan that
had just arrived. “Vet’s here.”

Olivia recognized the vet immediately. “Barlow called Brie’s dad,” she told Kane. “He’s a good vet,” she told Hart. “He takes
care of my dog. Bruno’s in good hands.”

“I can go?” Hart asked and was gone with Olivia’s first nod.

“We need to get Tomlinson’s customer list,” Kane said. “See if KRB Corp or Rankin bought plumbing supplies from them.”

“We also need to pay a visit to the Widow Tomlinson. Sounds like she won’t be so grieving. This one shouldn’t be as hard as
Mrs. Weems. It’s my turn, isn’t it?”

“It is. You did good with Mr. Hart, by the way.”

One corner of her mouth lifted. “You’re just saying that so I’ll give you my turn.”

His brows lifted. “Did it work?”

“No.”

“Damn.” Then his eyes narrowed. “Firefighters at your six.”

Olivia looked over her shoulder at Barlow and three firefighters coming their way. David was one of them. That her breath
backed up in her lungs and her stomach rolled was an annoyance she’d just have to get used to. David Hunter was handsome.
Gorgeous. Total eye candy. And a jerk.
So live with it and do your job
.

By the time the men reached them, she was steady.

“I’m Cunkle and this is Sloan,” one of the firefighters said. “We’re with Company Forty. And this is Hunter. He’s with Company
Forty-four. Barlow said you wanted to talk to us.”

“We do,” Kane said. “Tell us what you saw inside.”

“Fire was fully engaged,” Cunkle said. “The office walls were burning and the ceiling crashed in. Sloan and I pulled the walls
down and there he was.”

“He wasn’t alive. He’d been shot.” Sloan pursed his lips hard. “Face was gone.”

“What about his desk?” Olivia asked. “What did you see?”

“A bunch of papers, splattered with his blood. They hadn’t completely burned, so I checked with my flashlight. They were hard
to see, but they looked like sex pictures.”

“Sex pictures? You mean, like porn?” Olivia asked and Sloan shook his head.

“No. Looked like the guy was him. Pudgy, lots of white skin. Really white.”

“This time they brought their own fuel,” Barlow added. “They found gas cans.”

“Pour patterns were similar to the ones we saw in the condo,” David said. “They spread the gas on the floor in a line, then
dumped what was left into a puddle. Looks like they came from the east and west sides of the warehouse and met in the middle.”

“And the ball?” Olivia asked and he met her eyes, his unreadable.

“Propping open a side door, just like you thought they’d done in the condo. The ball is covered in gel. I got a picture of
it. Look where the ball touches the floor.” He handed her his camera and Olivia turned it so both she and Kane could see the
view screen.

“What am I looking at?” she asked and David looked over her shoulder, his chin almost touching her ear. Her lungs stopped
working as he pointed at the screen.

“There. Piece of a fuse. They used the ball to hold one end of the fuse in place.”

David moved back, and Olivia breathed again. “When can we go in?” she asked.

“An hour or two,” Barlow said, “when it’s cooled. I’ll call you.”

“Thanks,” Olivia said, then gave Barlow a small smile. “Thanks for calling Brie’s dad. He’ll take good care of Bruno, and
that’ll make Mr. Hart more cooperative.”

Barlow nodded. “Hart’s got an alibi?”

“Yes, but we’ll check him out. First stop is the widow. She had motive to kill Tomlinson and to burn the place down. Supposedly
she copied her husband’s files, so we’ll see if we can get customer and employee lists from her.” She turned to the firefighters.
“Thanks for the information. We’ll be in touch.”

She walked away without a word to David Hunter, feeling him watch her back. Kane matched her stride, checking over his shoulder.

“He’s watching you, Liv.”

“He’d better stop,” she said through her teeth, then made herself chill. “I’ve been thinking. What if Barlow was right yesterday
morning, that this has nothing to do with the SPOT environmental group?”

“That the glass ball is just a smoke screen?” Kane asked.

“Yeah. What if somebody really wanted to kill a person they hated and set the first fire to establish a false pattern? That
killing Tomlinson was their plan all along?”

“I’ve been thinking the same thing. Sounds like Tomlinson’s wife really hated him.”

“Let’s find out how much.”

Sloan and Cunkle went back to their duties, leaving Barlow standing next to David. For a moment neither of them said anything,
then Barlow said, “Ouch.”

“What?” David muttered. “She was nice to you.”

“For the first time in a couple years, but I wasn’t talking about me.”

David hesitated, then shrugged. “Who was Doug?”

Barlow shot him a surprised look. “My friend, then and now. Used to be engaged to Liv. I introduced them, actually.”

“He left her.”

Barlow sighed. “He did. And I helped, which is why I’m persona non grata.”

David thought of Paige’s words.
He was in it, too
. “How did you help?”

“Doug had a fiancée long before Liv. They’d been college sweethearts, then she left him. He never got over her, but he met
Liv and I thought they had a shot together. Time passed, they got engaged. They set a date. I was going to be the best man.
Everything was fine. Then, a couple weeks before the ceremony, Doug’s old fiancée showed up. She begged Doug to take her back.”

“And he did?”

“Not right away. He came to me, asking for advice, and unfortunately I got involved. One of the stupidest things I’ve ever
done.”

David frowned. “You told him to dump Olivia?”

“No,” Barlow said forcefully. “I just told him to imagine himself at eighty and see who he thought he’d be happiest with.
He went off for a few days, thought it through, then chose Angela. Olivia was”—he sighed—“a lot more crushed than I ever thought
a woman could be.”

I don’t play second-string
. “How did she find out what you’d done?”

“That would have been me telling her, another stupid thing I did. See, a week after Doug left her, her father died. He was
a cop, too, apparently. In Chicago.”

“Yeah, I know. I’m friends with Olivia’s half sister Mia. They share a father.” David’s shoulders sagged. Now the second-string
statement made even more sense.

“You knew Liv’s father?”

David thought about Olivia and Mia’s father, the animal that he’d been. Which always brought back memories of Megan’s stepfather
and what he’d done to Megan and her family. Which always made him mad enough to kill. Carefully, David relaxed his fists.
“Not personally. Thank God.”

Barlow looked down at David’s hands, then back up, warily. “That bad, huh?”

“Olivia’s father was a miserable sonofabitch who didn’t deserve the air he breathed. Mia didn’t know Olivia existed before
their father died. Olivia only knew another family existed, that her father had chosen to live with them and not her and her
mother.”

Barlow briefly closed his yes. “Shit. And then Doug left her for someone else.”

And then I said another woman’s name when she was in my bed
. “Hell.”

“I saw Liv the day she found out her father had died. She was packing to go to the funeral in Chicago. I didn’t know about
her dad, and I thought she was packing to leave permanently because of Doug. I tried to get her to calm down, telling her
not to do anything drastic, and somehow, I told her what I’d done.”

“What did she do?”

“Just looked at me, with those big blue eyes. Like I’d stabbed her in the gut.”

Like she looked at me when I said “and.”
He sighed. “I know the look.”

Barlow’s eyes narrowed. “What did
you
do to her?”

David was tempted to say it was none of his business.
But I might need some help.
God knew he wasn’t being too successful on his own. “She thinks I wanted someone else, but she doesn’t understand. I wouldn’t
have hurt her for the world, but I did. Then I tried to fix it, and…”

“And you dug yourself in even deeper,” Micah finished. “Are you going after her?”

David’s gaze shot over to where she and Kane stood with the warehouse manager. “What, you mean right now?”

Barlow rolled his eyes. “No, not now. Are you going to make this right?”

“Yeah. I am.”

Barlow nodded. “Good. Now, let’s get back to work.”

They headed back to the warehouse. “This was no environmental arson, Micah. There was nothing in that warehouse worth burning,
except for the guy without a face.”

“I know. Something’s connecting these two arsons. You’ve got a good eye. You ever think of going into investigation?” he asked.

David shook his head. “Took me a while to find firefighting, but now I can’t see myself doing any- thing else.”

“You like walking into fires,” Barlow said, a touch of envy in his voice.

David grinned. “It’s a rush like no other. At the same time, I do like a good puzzle. Olivia’s brother-in-law is an arson
guy, too, back in Chicago. I like to think I’ve picked up a thing or two.”

Barlow slung his tool kit over one shoulder and pulled his camcorder from his coat pocket. “Then let’s see what our nonenvironmental
arsonists left behind.”

Tuesday, September 21, 12:55 a.m.

K
nock again,” Kane said when Mrs. Tomlinson didn’t answer the door.

Olivia raised her fist to knock again when the door opened, revealing a very tall, statuesque woman wearing a silk robe. Even
without makeup, she was very beautiful and not at all what Olivia had expected a woman named Weezie to look like.

“Yes?” the woman asked.

“We’re looking for Mrs. Louise Tomlinson,” Olivia said.