“It’s okay,” he heard her say.
“Ready?” he asked.
“We’re going,” she announced over the abrasive fire alarm. Far in the distance, the first wail of a siren was heard. “Ready?”
He nodded, his attention riveted on all that he was leaving behind, on memories and artifacts of his time here with Ginny. She took hold of the doorknob.
“Slowly,” he cautioned, stepping aside.
She nodded and eased the door open. There was no flash of flame, no billow of smoke, only the increased volume of the alarm and the sounds of harried shouting and racing footsteps. Mac took off down the stairs. A general sense of chaos surrounded them as they hurried to the central stairs and began their descent. The smell of oil smoke was overpowering. It smelled of fear and old paint and dust, of all those, years Dart had used these stairs, forsaking the tired elevator. It smelled final.
The smoke grew thicker as they descended, enveloping them like a fog. They checked for each other at each turn of the metal handrail. Her wide eyes glanced over at him. From below came sounds of panic. Two floors down, Dart caught sight of several familiar faces and wondered how he could live in the same place for so many years and know so few of his neighbors. They knew him, most knew he was a policeman, and though he knew some by name, not nearly enough.
“Mrs. Amory,” he said to Abby as he stopped at the fire door to the ground floor. Eleanor Amory went about in a motorized wheelchair and had picked this apartment building because of its location on a city bus route. She was in her late seventies and fiercely independent. Abby apparently understood just by the way he spoke, and she stopped and helped him check the door for heat before they passed through and into the downstairs hallway. The smoke was heavier here, and Dart believed that it was coming from the parking garage, that a car was on fire, and this lessened his panic because fire could be contained well in the concrete garage. They ran down the long hallway, and only then was Dart aware that the only light came from the emergency lights, a fact that had escaped him. All the training, he thought, wondering how panic had so easily engulfed him, feeling it behind him now, and glad to have it gone.
“Which apartment?” he heard Abby call from behind him.
He kicked the door in, signaled her inside, and motioned for Abby to take the rooms to the left. Dart took those to the right.
Eleanor Amory was not in the kitchen, or the small sitting room or in any of the three closets that Dart searched quickly.
“Joe!” Abby called out.
Eleanor Amory was in her bedroom coiled into a ball in the far corner, a nightgown bunched at her knees, a collapsible wheelchair propped against the wall alongside her. She was in shock, her dull blue eyes glassy and open wide in a fixed stare.
Abby stooped, tried to communicate with the woman, but it was of no use. She tentatively eased her arms into the fold of the woman’s bent knees, and behind her head, and together with Dart, they hoisted her, and Dart took her fully into his arms as Abby helped the woman to take hold around his neck.
A moment later they were outside, in the alley behind the building, and Eleanor Amory was in the care of emergency personnel. Abby stood holding the woman’s hand. The alley was dark, awash in the scattering, fractured light of emergency vehicles, and from the building’s garage a thick coiling plume of black smoke rushed into the night sky. The area was crowded with onlookers as well as with residents of the building, in pajamas, raincoats, and whatever else they had grabbed. Several held pets tightly in their arms. One woman was crying as she stared up at her windows. Mac was sitting away from the chaos like an old person watching a parade.
Dart felt the cold. He felt awkward and out of place, accustomed to being the one responding to an emergency rather than experiencing it firsthand. There were so many things he wished he’d taken. Photographs. Gifts. Letters. His first uniform as a patrolman. He ran down an inventory as he watched four fully clad firemen become swallowed by the smoke as they charged the garage. He hoped for a quick resolution. The night air was filled with the sound of communication radios spitting static, of children crying and adults sobbing, and an endless roar of orders being shouted about. To the lay person, the bystander, the efforts of the emergency crews seemed chaotic and disorganized. But Dart knew better.
He crossed his arms tightly to fend off the cold.
A harsh and unforgiving voice whispered, “Don’t turn around, Ivy. Nod if you can hear me.” Dart nodded. He smelled the stale aroma of cigar smoke despite the petroleum in the air, and he recognized the deep slow voice and the way that voice spoke his nickname. “I can’t afford the attention,” Walter Zeller said. Dart, stunned, could feel the man’s presence as he stepped closer and continued in a hushed whisper. “Your Volvo has had a slight problem, is all-an electrical short under the dash; if there had been less plastic in it, it might have never burned at all.”
Dart had so many things to say that nothing came out, his thoughts bottle-necked somewhere near his tongue. What with the fire and the chaos, and the surprise that Zeller had orchestrated all of this to make contact with him.
“You’ll figure this out. At least if you have any sense left in you, you will.” He added, “I can’t do your fucking work for you, kid. I told you that. Wish I could. But then you wouldn’t hold up on the stand, would you? You gotta do this yourself. You gotta get your mind off your pecker and back onto your desk.
“What I want you to think about, Ivy, is-and I want you to remember this: You’re looking at what you know, what you’re familiar with, rather than digging in and finding what’s really the cause here.” He added, “That they’re all connected.”
“The gene therapy,” Dart said.
“Maybe you are listening.” He added, “Maybe I should have just called you again. You know how I like to do things in person.”
“So you torched my car?” Dart said, exasperated. He made a move to turn around, but Zeller stopped him with a stern “Don’t!” He added, “It’s not safe for me.”
“For you?”
“They’re murders, Ivy, but it’s not what you think. I know what you think. Do your fucking homework. Do us both a favor.”
An old beat-up car pulled into the far end of the alley. Not a police car, not fire. In the flashing lights Dart couldn’t make out the color or the face of the man who opened the car door and peered out quickly before climbing back in and driving off as a patrolman approached him to tell him to move.
“You see that?” Zeller asked. “They’re after me, Ivy. Why? Because I know the truth-because I found out the truth! Find it, damn it all. Do your fucking homework.”
Dart said softly, “The hormones.” He waited a second and turned his head slightly and said: “A treatment of some sort.”
Zeller didn’t answer.
Dart attempted to turn around for a second time, expecting his effort to be blocked, but instead faced the dark shadows immediately behind him broken only by the rhythmic, hypnotic pulse of vehicle emergency lights.
Zeller was gone-vanished, though Dart could still hear the man’s whispers over his shoulder.
His teacher. His mentor.
Gone.
His killer?
For a fraction of a second Dart wondered if he had imagined this conversation. He scanned the area again, carefully probing every possible hiding place.
Gone.
They’re murders, Ivy, but it’s not what you think.
Lies! Dart thought. Tricks! He’s toying with me.