Her mind went over all the possibilities. Her door was locked. There had to be some other explanation. “I had a lot of art supplies in there. Brush cleaner, turpentine. That sort of thing.” And of course, she told herself, that was probably it. When they’d lived together, Scotty was always telling her that her paint supplies were going to burst into flames one day because of the volatile chemicals.
Captain Wyatt seemed to confirm it. “That explains a lot.” Until he asked, “Is it possible you spilled any of it?”
She felt a dull thudding in her head, tried to think if she’d left anything open. Maybe Topper had knocked something over, when she’d been watching him. But surely Sydney would’ve smelled it? “I don’t think so,” she said. “Why?”
He asked her to follow him up the steps. Before they stepped in, he said, “Any reason someone would want to torch your place?”
“You really think it was arson?”
“Unless you twisted off the top to your turpentine can and splashed it across your kitchen table.”
They walked into the apartment. The place smelled like someone had lit a campfire, then doused it with water. Her braided rug was soaked, felt like a sponge beneath her bare feet, but at least it was still intact. The walls in the living room and on down the hall looked as though someone had tried to paint them gray with a really bad roller brush. No wonder she’d had such a difficult time trying to rouse herself, and she wondered how much carbon monoxide she’d sucked in.
She was almost afraid to look in the kitchen, but she followed Captain Wyatt to the edge, realized she couldn’t walk in there in bare feet. The shoes she wore to work were by the door, where she’d kicked them off, and she slipped those on, then walked into the once-yellow kitchen. The wall where her abstracts had leaned was now black, the paint bubbling up to the ceiling where flames had licked, fueled by the canvases that were now nothing more than a blackened pile of soggy ash. The painting from hell was no more than a piece of curled blackened remnant on the sodden floor, merely a fifth of its size, and Sydney reached down, picked it up, watched the gray water drip down onto the charred remnants of what had once been her easel. With one hand, she brushed at the soot, and saw a bit of orange red showing through. Devil’s eye, she thought, dropping it. She turned away, looking from there into her living room, then on down the hall, into her open bedroom door. Saw the bed where just a short while ago, she had been curled up, watching the Disney Channel, in concert with her sister below…
And that’s when Sydney started to shake. She was so wrapped up in her father’s murder, dreaming about the flames at the restaurant that night that she had unwittingly endangered her beloved sister, because she couldn’t, wouldn’t wake up…
And because she’d allowed her to stay there, even if in the apartment below.
Her knees felt like they were going to buckle, and somehow she managed to traverse the hallway to her bedroom. And there she tossed her purse onto the nightstand and dropped onto the mattress. She could hear the slight buzz as her phone vibrated another call, but at the moment all she wanted to do was hide from the world, and she pulled her pillow to her face, smelled the stench of smoke on the casing.. . She’d tried so hard to be strong. All these years. Thinking her father was this good person, that he didn’t deserve to die. And now she was faced with the reality that he wasn’t good, that he’d lived a double life. That maybe he was killed because of it. That she had stirred something up, and brought her sister into the fray, endangered her.
She took a breath, knew that she was feeling really, really sorry for herself, but couldn’t help the tear that slid down her cheek. Scotty walked down the hallway to check on her then. He stood there, in her doorway, not moving.
“You okay?” he asked.
She wasn’t. She wanted nothing more than to have someone hold her, tell her that everything was going to be fine. “Yes,” she said, though she didn’t know what she was saying yes to. Him being the one to hold her, or just her need for something more, an escape from all that seemed so wrong in her life right then.
He took a step in, just as one of the firefighters dropped something in the kitchen, and Scotty hesitated on the threshold of her room, his hand on the doorframe. Sydney glanced behind him, saw the firefighters working in her kitchen. One of them was snapping photographs, and Sydney knew they wouldn’t be bothering if they didn’t think it was an arson.
“Who would do this?” Sydney asked, slamming her fist into the mattress. “You’re supposed to have people watching this place. How the hell did this happen?”
Scotty didn’t answer. He just looked at her.
The flash of the camera went off behind him again, this time reflecting off the ring Scotty wore.
His red National Academy ring.
Her gaze fixed on it. There where his hand rested. On the doorframe.
She closed her eyes. Saw her painting as it was in the kitchen before the fire. The red eye. Not an eye at all. A ring. That’s what she’d been reminded of earlier tonight when she’d looked at the painting. She’d seen that ring, or rather one very much like it… The night her father was killed…
She realized then what she hadn’t realized all these years. What she’d refused to recognize-because it was too painful? The person who had killed her father, the person she’d seen leaving the restaurant that night after the arson, had been someone in her father’s group. His Posse, her mother called it.
There was no other explanation.
She couldn’t look away from that ring of Scotty’s, and he lowered his hand and took another step in.
44
“Sydney?”
Sydney looked up, slid back on the bed, her heart pounding as she stared at Scotty’s ring.
“Sydney?”
She grasped for her purse, her gun, but he was on her, and before she could move, he pulled her to her feet, was holding her by her shoulders, and then she heard, “Ma’am?”
It was Captain Wyatt. He’d come up behind Scotty, was looking at them.
“What’s going on?” Wyatt asked.
Scotty held on to her for a second or two, his gaze burning into hers. When she didn’t answer, he let go, said, “Good question.”
“I-I need to call work,” Sydney said, her mind racing, because she still hadn’t put everything together, and desperately needed to. What if she was wrong? “I need to let Dixon know. I-”
Scotty said, “He’s on his way. I called him.”
And Sydney figured that was probably Dixon who had called while she was talking to Jake. Sydney looked at Wyatt. “Was there something you wanted?”
“Just letting you know that our own arson investigator arrived.”
“Thanks.”
He nodded, glanced at Scotty, then returned to the kitchen.
“What did Dixon say?” Sydney asked Scotty.
“He’s sending a team out. Just to be sure.”
A team. Even Dixon suspected arson, and Sydney looked past Scotty, into her kitchen, feeling her shoulders tense at the thought.
“You should sit down,” Scotty said. “Clear your head…”
She wanted to, but when she closed her eyes, all she could see was the devil’s eye looking at her, and she knew no one was going to make this go away. Not even Scotty. Not until she found the truth. “You were supposed to be watching me.”
“This looks bad, I-”
“Looks bad! You have two goddamned teams out there. My sister was downstairs!”
“And that’s why it happened. I just talked with Jared Dunning. They knew Jake was coming by to pick her up. They figured in how long it would take him to get there, the time was right… They thought it was him, Syd. He must have gotten away when I drove up to check with them. That’s when I saw the flames and ran up.”
His story was believable. It didn’t make it any better, but it was certainly believable. Finally, reluctantly, she said, “I need to get some things together, change.”