The Off Season (15 page)

Night terror—Doug’s not in this room.
She stared at the closed window.
There’s no one here with me, but—

She felt around for the greyhound, who’d been curled up beside her, only to find that that part of the dream was true. Max was neither next to her nor in his own bed in the corner.

From down the hall, she heard the sound of Lilly crying, undoubtedly frightened by her mother’s shriek. As Christina tossed aside the comforter, she felt the sear of shame, the memory of all those nights she’d upset her family during her childhood.

She thought she’d outgrown the disturbances, at least until they’d come roaring back two years ago, around the time of her father’s death.

Stress can be a powerful trigger,
a med-school friend who’d gone into psychiatry had advised her once.
Just like hormonal changes,
she’d added, referring to another, even more shameful issue Christina had confided in her.
Don’t be too hard on yourself. You’ll be fine again in time.

Shoving her arms into a warm robe, she slipped her feet into a pair of scuffs and hurried down the hall toward Lilly.

“I’m coming, sweetie. It’s fine,” she said, wondering whether her daughter could have been fussing for a long time, unheard, since Christina hadn’t yet replaced the monitor she would never again trust.

From downstairs, she heard something—footsteps or a cabinet closing. Her sister, coming home from the Shell Pile. Christina called, “Don’t worry about Lilly. I’ve got it covered.”

As she hurried down the hallway, Christina realized the crying had stopped.
But I didn’t dream it. I was definitely awake then.

With the night-light in her daughter’s room to guide her, she raced through the doorway. And stared down in confusion at her child’s empty bed.

Telling herself there was no need to panic, Christina groped for an explanation. “Lilly? Are you in the potty?” Yes, that had to be it. She’d had to go, and decided, for the first time in the nighttime, to try it on her own.

But Lilly wasn’t in the nearby hall bath and not in the master bathroom, either. Christina fought to keep her panic tamped down.

Back in the hallway above the stairs, she called down, “Annie? Do you have Lilly with you?”

No answer rose in the dark stairwell, nothing but a strong and pungent odor.

Gasoline,
she thought.
But how, here in the house?

“Annie,” she repeated, the stairwell echoing with her fear. “Annie, Lilly! Max, where are you!”

A new sound came, a whoosh that drowned out the wind’s voice outside the old house.

A flickering light made shadows dance along the walls of the long hallway. A dance that spoke of death and stank of smoke and ash.

The alarm system started shrieking, an earsplitting racket that almost, but didn’t quite, obscure Christina’s daughter’s terrified screams.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Harris pulled out of the skid as his Tahoe fishtailed around the corner of a mostly residential street just outside the historic district. A rear tire spun on ice before the back bumper caught a hydrant. Hard enough to leave a dent, but he didn’t give a damn about that. Nor did he take the time to worry about the condition of the plug.

Right now, all he cared about was getting to Christina before whoever’d carved that obscenity on her car found a way to make good on the implied threat.

Yet her sister’s voice kept running through his head for some reason, along with her crazy theory about how Lilly might have heard the name her mother had been born with.

“I’ve seen these shows on TV, these interviews with parents. About little kids, like Lilly’s age, who’ve all of a sudden, out of nowhere, started talking about their old lives, about how they were killed.”

“What kind of down-the-dial cable crap have you been watching?” he’d asked, wondering whether she also bought into those so-called documentaries about secret weather-control experiments, conspiracies surrounding 9/11, and real-life mermaids washed up on beaches.

“It’s not like that.” Annie’s face had gone red. “There’ve been books about this kind of stuff, expert studies, even an article in my mom’s
Reader’s Digest
. These kids come up with things they have no business knowing. Some of them say they’ve lived before, that they were these people.”

“So you’re thinking Lilly’s one of these kids, that she’s reincarnated or something like that?” Harris was mostly thinking that Lilly’s aunt was even flakier than he’d suspected. Except that he remembered the strange look on the toddler’s face from the day Jacob had been injured. A look that had gotten him thinking of old souls in young children.

Maybe he was the crazy one.

“I don’t know what to think,” said Annie, “except that something’s going on around here. Something bigger and uglier than vandalism.”

A blurred movement in front of his headlights had Harris pumping his brakes. Despite the icy road, the Tahoe jerked to a stop, and something that looked like a small deer or maybe one of the stray dogs that had become such an issue lately disappeared into the darkness somewhere to his left.

If it was a stray, it was in for a rough night out here, with the chill factor down in the teens. But Harris pushed the thought aside, caring only about getting to Christina safely.

He was a block away from her place when he caught sight of the aging Toyota Camry he’d sent Fiorelli out in, all its lights off. The unmarked sedan was parked a few houses down the alley behind the Victorian at 127 Cape, close to where Harris had kept watch before Jacob’s accident. As waves slammed the beachfront in front of the houses, spray misted the air, sheeting the vehicle with a layer of ice that glittered as his headlights reached it.

Harris’s gut dropped when he spotted the driver’s-side door standing open to the falling snow—and no Fiorelli in sight.

Rather than off slacking somewhere, was his officer in trouble?

Pulling up behind the vehicle, Harris forced himself to stay inside the Tahoe long enough to radio dispatch. “10–48,” he said.
Officer needs assistance.
“I want everybody you’ve got out here. Fire and paramedics, too.”

If his instincts were wrong, and there was some innocuous reason Fiorelli wasn’t answering his radio or cell phone, Harris knew he’d hear about it. But he’d gladly risk Edgewood’s bitching about his squandering resources before he’d take a chance on leaving one of his guys down or dead . . .

And he couldn’t forget that Christina and her sister weren’t responding to calls, either, and that Lilly was inside, too.

Harris bailed out of the Tahoe, a flashlight in his right hand. The wail of the Victorian’s alarm had his blood rushing in his ears, its roar competing with the howling wind and crashing surf.

That was when the realization hit him.
This is going to be bad.
Far beyond the brand of bad he’d need to justify his actions.

An image flashed through his brain: the bomber, Private Cody Yardley, with a dead-eyed look, his hand reaching beneath his jacket at the same moment Harris himself went for his sidearm. The fiery eruption of a shock wave that struck him as the blast burst his right eardrum.

Shoving back the memory, Harris made a quick circuit of Fiorelli’s cruiser, his gun in a left hand that would never be as dexterous as his damaged right had been. Seeing no sign of Fiorelli in or near the vehicle, he followed the partly filled tracks in the snow. A single set, they led straight toward Christina’s place . . .

A house whose lower windows pulsed with an eerie yellow-orange light as dark smoke forced its way through crevices between aged timbers.

He needed to get the hell out before he hit another complication. But the explosion of flame held him spellbound as it burned through the fuel he’d poured and fed hungrily on rugs and furnishings, cabinetry, and the walls leading up the staircase. With a folded hand towel he’d grabbed from the kitchen covering his nose and mouth, he listened as the bitch’s frightened calls for her family turned to panicked shrieks as the growing fire set off the alarm he’d thought he had once again disabled.

The alarm was one more in a string of unwelcome surprises, which had begun when a woman he recognized had followed his target to the parking lot. Only this hitch, the damn alarm, could well mean he would very soon have company—company he couldn’t risk catching him anywhere nearby, reeking of ash and covered in someone else’s blood.

Still, he stuck around as long as he could in case the bitch decided to charge through the flames to reach the ground-floor exits. But with as much gas as he’d poured on those steps, the fire was hottest in that area—hot enough to assure him there was no way she was getting down alive.

And no way he could risk remaining any longer, sweltering in the heat and choking on the thick smoke. Since he could no longer make out any screaming, it didn’t matter, anyway.

It would seem his work was done.

This is no nightmare. The house is burning.

With the flames leaping up the stairwell, Christina fought back her panic, ordering herself to function logically, efficiently, as she would when dealing with a medical emergency.

But it was no use, not when the frantic cries she’d heard down the hallway behind her were her daughter’s, not some stranger’s, and her own adrenaline-soaked maternal instincts had her shrieking even louder.

“Lilly, where are you?” she called as she ran back to her child’s room. “Come out! We have to leave now.”

As she stared at the bed—still vacant—the room’s night-light flickered. She switched on the elephant lamp at her right. Soft illumination flooded the room, enough for her to see the layers of dark smoke hovering beneath the ceiling and Lilly’s hooded purple jacket draped across a chair.

Grabbing the jacket, Christina heard a bang from downstairs, and both lamp and night-light went out, casting her into darkness, broken only by the faint light seeping through the shaded window.

Power’s out.
Somewhere below, the wiring must have burned through. The smoke alarm, still blaring, must be running on a backup battery.

She raced back to the master bedroom for her forgotten cell phone—it would give her at least a little light, light she desperately needed to find Lilly. Coughing as she ran, she tried to tell herself the smoke up here wasn’t bad yet. And fought to keep believing that her daughter’s voice really had come from somewhere upstairs with her and not the blazing first floor.

Snatching her cell phone off the nightstand, she called Lilly’s name once more, and once more got no reply. What if the cries she heard had really been from downstairs? If her daughter had been down there with Annie, as Christina had first thought, wouldn’t her sister have grabbed her and hurried out to safety, probably with the dog in tow?

She pictured her sister, with Lilly in her arms, phoning 911. Pictured Annie comforting the toddler, then putting her in the Mercedes, where they’d be warm and dry.

Unless it wasn’t Annie I heard moving around down there.

Terror fell on her like an ax blow as she remembered the pungent smell of gasoline. An odor that only made sense if someone had deliberately set the blaze.

What if whoever did this has her? What if she’s taken Lilly?
Choking on the thickening smoke, Christina thought of the voice on the monitor, the voice she’d initially feared was in her daughter’s room.

Except that when Christina turned around, Lilly was standing in her bedroom doorway, weeping as she held her ears to muffle the alarm’s noise. Not knowing whether to be horrified that Lilly was there or relieved that she’d come out from wherever she’d been hiding, Christina cried out her daughter’s name and scooped her up in her arms.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Already smelling wood smoke, Harris was thirty feet shy of the back gate when something sent him sprawling. Something that grunted as the tip of his boot caught a low hump, camouflaged by a thin, snowy layer.

His momentum pitching him forward, Harris smacked the ground like a bag of wet concrete. Scrambling to recover, he turned both his light and gun to see Fiorelli lying on his side and staring at him, his brown eyes fixed and open, and his face unnaturally white beneath a flap of coal-black hair. Despite the blue lips, Harris put down his weapon to shake him repeatedly.

“Frank!” he shouted over the wind. “Fiorelli, wake up!”

But there was no reply, not even when Harris shook him and said, “Come on, man. You can’t do this.”

Only after he failed to find a carotid pulse did he accept that he was looking at a dead man. At a corpse who’d only grunted because his own kick to the man’s ribs had forced air from his lungs past vocal cords that would never speak again.

His gorge rising with regret, Harris cursed and rolled Fiorelli onto his back. Finding that rigor hadn’t set in, Harris pounded the man’s chest, praying for a miracle—or at least a chance. But the skin had already gone waxy, the flesh as cold as meat from a refrigerator case. And when he brushed away the snow around the body, he came across a red-brown puddle leaking from beneath the body, already freezing around its edges. Blood from a wound or wounds either hidden by Fiorelli’s jacket or on his back.

His gun was missing, too, Harris realized, almost assuredly taken by his killer.

“I’m sorry, Frank. I’m sorry,” Harris told him as he rose, knowing that as horrifying as the loss of an officer was, his own first duty was to the living. To getting Christina and her family out of the burning house—and as far as possible from the armed cop killer who had most likely set the fire.

If this son of a bitch didn’t murder them before trying to cover the evidence with arson.
Pain twisted in his gut, but there was no time for doubt or grieving, no time to do anything but barrel forward.

Scarcely able to keep his eyes from closing against the stinging wind and snow, Harris quickly realized that in weather like this, with the cover of the thickening smoke and darkness and the alarm drowning out the sounds of movement, an assailant could come at him out of nowhere.

There were other sounds as well: the shattering of window glass along one side of the ground floor, the crackling of flames strengthened by fresh oxygen, licking the Victorian’s exterior. Garish color flared up, yellows and oranges reflecting off white paint stained with soot.

With so much old wood and the howling wind, Harris knew the house would go fast, the moisture from the snowfall no match for the head start the flames had gotten.

He gritted his teeth, telling himself the suspect would be operating with the same challenges he faced. But before he even stepped up onto the back porch, the heat presented a new issue, one that had him coughing up air bitter with soot, his skin feeling like it was melting before he could get near the door.

As another window splintered, Harris realized that he was never going to get in this way. Jumping off the porch, he started running toward the front of the house, desperate to find some way to get inside—hoping to discover that the ocean side of the house wasn’t yet ablaze.

As he rounded the front, he spotted a silver SUV pulling up. Recognizing the Mercedes emblem on the hood, he stopped in his tracks, relief flooding his system. It had to be Christina, returning from somewhere with her daughter safely strapped into the car seat.

He hurried toward them, eager to keep her from driving too close to the danger.

The SUV slammed to a stop, and a wide-eyed woman jumped out to stare openmouthed at the flames.

“Christina!” It was Annie, staring at the fire with huge eyes. “Oh my—Christina! Lilly! Where are they, Harris?” She was looking at him now, her face a mask of terror and disbelief. “Are they
in that
?”

He stared at her, shock rolling through him in waves icier than anything the weather could dish out. And the realization hitting him that he’d wanted—
needed
—so badly to believe they were safe inside the vehicle that he’d leaped on the possibility, wasting valuable time.

“Fire department’s on the way,” he managed. “Tell them—tell them I’m going in. And I swear to you, I’m not coming back without Christina and Lilly.”

The gash ran from wrist to elbow, a deep slice up Christina’s left arm. She’d gotten it after using a chair from Lilly’s bedroom to smash the glass out of a window that must have been painted shut. After zipping Lilly into her jacket to protect her from the shards, Christina had ducked to carry her out onto the steeply pitched porch roof just below it. One fang of glass from the frame’s edge must have caught her, though she hadn’t felt it—at least not until she realized that the sleeve of her robe was dripping with blood, and knew the glass must have nicked the ulnar artery.

After frantically checking Lilly for any similar wounds, she stood there holding tightly to her weeping daughter, coughing in the smoke-filled air and shaking with adrenaline. Worried about sliding off the steep, icy porch roof, she kept her back to the exterior wall and closed her eyes against the rush of pain that finally shot up from her arm. But they couldn’t rest there, not with the fire soon to come after them. For all she knew, the roof might already be burning from beneath.

Lilly’s sobs gave way to chatter, words Christina could barely make out with her daughter’s head so close to hers.

“Mur-mur-murder Mommy,” Lilly kept repeating, a mantra that coincided with a blast of wind that started Christina shivering. “Kill me.”

“Stop that! Stop, please!” she said, her own tears burning like acid as they rolled down her cold face. “Mommy has to—has to call the firemen.”

While maintaining her grip on Lilly with her right arm, she used her left hand—ignoring the blood soaking through her sleeve—to pull her cell phone from the pocket of her robe. With the movement, the deep gash sent fresh pain spiking through her, and everything went black for a moment, save for the spangles of bright color that splashed across her field of vision.

You can’t pass out.
Her heart pounded even harder.
You’ll drop her.

Christina sucked in a freezing lungful of choking air, but when her eyes flashed open, it wasn’t Lilly, but her cell phone that she saw skidding toward the roof’s edge, picking up speed with every inch it gained.

With their lifeline vanishing, Christina screamed in wordless protest—and saw the phone’s progress halted, as though by her order, against a weathered shingle halfway down. She pushed Lilly’s back against the outer wall beside the window. “Stay right here! Don’t move,” she ordered before scooting in the direction of the cell.

But when she glanced back, Lilly was crying again, reaching for her, calling, “No, Mommy. No leave babies.”

Babies,
she’d said, the plural sending Christina’s mind spinning backward in time, to the snowy night she’d been abandoned. Horrified, she cried out, “I’m not leaving, sweetie. I won’t. But I have to get—” Rocked by another wave of dizziness, she paused to catch her breath. “Have to get the phone.”

Once more she edged forward, still in a seated position, and shivered as wind-driven snow assailed her. But smoke came with it, too—a thick, black cloud that started her coughing again—and left her terrified that the fire was closer than she’d imagined.

When another gust cleared the air, she saw that the phone had vanished, undoubtedly continuing its downward skid and sailing off the edge into the darkness.

“Damn it!” she cried, realizing that her last chance to phone for help had gone with it. Panicking, she shouted, “Help! Please help us!” until a coughing fit forced her to stop.

As she fought to recover her breath, she accepted that all the yelling in this world wasn’t going to do either of them any good. If she was going to get her daughter and climb down to safety, she’d have to do it on her own.

Gritting her teeth against the pain, she tried crawling back to where she’d left her daughter. But for every inch she progressed, she slipped downward two inches on the ice glazing the shingles, which forced her to take things slower.

Smoke billowed once again, and from somewhere not far away, a crackling sound competed with the cacophony of storm noises and—were those sirens coming her way?

Hope leaping inside her, she told Lilly, “Someone’s coming!”

Except that when the smoke cleared, Lilly was no longer where Christina had left her, but instead, was sliding past her, her eyes rounded in terror and her mouth wide in a voiceless scream.

“No!” Christina spun onto her belly and launched herself after her daughter, shooting down the pitched roof so swiftly that she had no idea how she’d stop them both from falling.

Harris took off at a dead run but stopped in his tracks along the house’s side. With only one good ear to process all the noise around him, he couldn’t be sure whether the woman’s scream he’d just heard had come from inside, or whether it had been Annie, crying out behind him.

Or even whether the sound had definitely been human, rather than the smoke alarm in its death throes or the shriek of nails as they were pulled from burning wood.

Desperately, he scanned the side porch, where more flames were emerging from a broken ground-floor window. Though this portion of the house didn’t seem as heavily involved as the back, the wooden exterior was already catching, the fire climbing higher by the second.

Then he caught sight of a lit screen on the icy ground—the cracked screen of a still-functional cell phone. Scooping it up, he instantly recognized the background photo on the home screen—a shot of Christina’s adoptive mother smiling, Lilly in her arms.

As he opened his mouth to shout Christina’s name, he heard a woman’s scream.

When he looked up, his pounding heart squeezed into his throat, for right there, dangling about ten feet above him, he spotted a small child’s legs kicking. Lilly, he soon saw, was dangling, suspended by the hood of her jacket and the hand holding it in a death grip.

“Christina, I’m here, underneath you!” he shouted, though he couldn’t see her from this angle. “You’re going to have to let go of her.”

“No!” Christina cried. “I can’t let her fall.”

As he holstered his weapon, something warm dripped onto his face, and he saw that Lilly’s intensifying struggle was threatening to send her slipping from the jacket.

“She can’t breathe—she’s strangling,” he yelled back, realized that was why the child was silent. “You’re gonna have to trust me. I promise you, I’ll catch—”

Before he understood what was happening, Lilly plummeted into his arms. Above him, Christina shrieked, still clutching the jacket her child had slipped out of.

“I’ve got her. I’ve got her!” Harris shouted up at her, scarcely believing it himself. “There, you’re okay, Lilly.”

Lilly’s wails assured him she was breathing.

“It’s all right. You’re safe,” he told her before spotting Lilly’s jacket fluttering downward. “Christina?”

Directly above him, Christina’s hand dangled limply, and another drip of warm fluid spattered on Harris’s face.

Blood,
he realized.
Her blood.
Had the same bastard who’d murdered his officer mortally wounded Christina, too? Blindsided by the thought, he swore to himself that no matter what it took, he wasn’t going to allow her to die. He’d climb up there somehow and find a way to get her down.

As he struggled to figure out how, he tried to help Lilly into her jacket. Screaming as only a hysterical two-year-old can, she cried, “No! No want,” until Harris was relieved to see Annie rushing toward them.

“Take her,” he said, handing off the frightened toddler and her jacket to her aunt. “Get her to the car
now
. There could be a shooter nearby.”

Annie looked around them, clearly as frightened as she was conflicted. “But Christina. We can’t leave my sister—”

“She’d want Lilly safe. You know that. And I swear to you I’m going to get her down.”