“Fine,” Luke said insouciantly. He stood up from the chair he was in, pushed past Shawn, and made his way to the front door. Instead of opening the door, he locked it more securely with a key, which he pocketed, then headed for the stairs.
“Where on earth are you going?” Shawn questioned when he thought Luke was going upstairs. “Don’t make me repeat myself yet again!”
Luke passed the entrance to the stairs, blithely rapping his knuckle on the newel post. He seemed strangely detached, openly ignoring his hosts, who had just come home.
Shawn looked at Sana as if he expected her to have an explanation for such bizarre behavior. The man had a lit cigarette but wasn’t smoking it, nor was he getting rid of it. It seemed as if he was on a walking tour of the residence until he came to the door to the cellar, which was under the front stairs. There he stopped, and once he had a hand on the doorknob, he turned back to look directly at Shawn and Sana. Appearing now as breezy as he’d sounded just a few moments earlier, he recited a Hail Mary, at the conclusion of which he snapped open the basement door, threw in the lighted cigarette, and slammed the door closed.
”What the hell!” Shawn yelled near the top of his voice. Without a moment’s hesitation, Shawn ditched the groceries he’d been holding onto the couch and bolted for the cellar door. Whether he had felt or heard the throaty whomp that issued from the basement no one knew. Sana had felt it more than heard it as it rattled the knick knacks on the mantel. She did call out to him, but he was not to be deterred. His goal was to get the cigarette just as soon as he could and crush it into harmless cinders. As he got to the door, he threw Luke aside, grabbed the doorknob, ripped open the door, and started down, all in the same motion. Unfortunately, a huge ball of exploding gasoline vapor seeking lower pressure rocketed upward and immediately seared off his eyelashes, eyebrows, and most of his hair. Within seconds the old wooden house with its hundreds upon hundreds of pockets of air within its aged walls was a flaming inferno, and the fact that the only insulation in the building was crumbled period newspaper caused the fire to spread even faster. Seconds later, the heat flux soared over the thirteen-hundred-degree flash point such that objects within the building, including people, spontaneously burst into flame. Sana and Shawn, although on fire, did reach the front door, only to find it impossible to open.
Fifteen minutes later, a neighbor, noticing the glow coming from outside his house, looked out and then frantically called nine-one-one. Eleven minutes later the first fire trucks appeared, but by then the only possible thing to save was the chimney.
Epilogue
7:49 A.M., THURSDAY, DECEMBER 11, 2008
NEW YORK CITY
Since Jack wasn’t doing autopsies for the week, he didn’t make it a point to arrive at the OCME particularly early, and today he arrived at seven-forty-nine. On normal days by that time he surely would have already picked out what he considered the best cases and would already be down in the autopsy room with Vinnie Amendola, giving him a hard time or vice versa. Instead, Jack was content to be locking up his bike at the side of one of the intake garages in full view of security. When he was finished, he gave security a wave, comforted by knowing the guys would keep an eye on his bike.
Since Shawn and Sana were not expected in until ten or thereabouts, Jack decided to finish the paperwork on all his outstanding cases if possible, so that when he went back to doing autopsies he’d be starting out with a perfectly clean slate, something he’d not experienced in the thirteen years he’d been there. Wanting to get a coffee as well as a sense of what was generally happening in the morgue that morning, Jack went up to the ID room, where he knew one of the better MEs was on duty for the week, Dr. Riva Mehta. She had been Laurie’s office mate for many years and was a dedicated, intelligent, and hardworking colleague, which was more than Jack could say about too many others on the staff.
He could smell the coffee even before he got there. Although he teased Vinnie mercilessly about most everything else, Jack never teased him about making the coffee. Vinnie had it down to a science, and by not varying his technique, the coffee was not only good for institutional brew, it was also consistent. After a half-hour bike ride, it always hit the spot.
“Anything particularly interesting?” Jack asked Riva, squeezing behind her where she was sitting at the desk to glance over her shoulder before turning his attention to the coffee.
“It’s about time, you lazy bum,” a husky voice announced.
Jack looked up from the coffee machine to see his old friend Lieutenant Detective Lou Soldano toss Vinnie’s Daily News aside and struggle to his feet. As usual, when Lou appeared early in the morning, it looked as if he’d been up all night, which he had been, with his tie loosened, his shirt’s top button unbuttoned, and his broad cheeks and neck stubbled. To complete the picture, the dark bags under his eyes hung down like a hound dog’s to intersect with his tired smile creases, while his closely cropped hair, which was never particularly combed, was standing up on end near his cowlick. It looked like he hadn’t been home for a week, not just overnight.
“Lou, old friend,” Jack said with true affection. “Just the man I want to see.”
“Yeah, how’s that?” Lou asked warily, as he sauntered over to join Jack at the coffee machine. They briefly shook hands.
“I never apologized for the ridiculous conversation I forced you to have. Remember? It was about chiropractic.”
“Of course I remember. Why do you think you have to apologize?”
“I was on a mini-crusade, and I think I carried it all a little too far for a couple of people, yourself included.”
“Bullshit, but if you want to apologize, fine! You’re forgiven. Now apologize for coming in here so late. I’ve been here for forty-five minutes thinkin’ you’d be coming through the door any second.”
“I’m off autopsies this week.”
“Christ! Wouldn’t you know! How about letting me know next time?”
“I would have let you know this time if I thought you cared. What’s up?”
“It was a busy night last night, besides the usual mayhem. There was an arsonist’s fire in the West Village, which burnt up three people, two of whom the archbishop tells me you knew.”
“Who?” Jack demanded, although he had a sudden painful feeling he already knew, especially it being the West Village, with the archbishop involved. “Was it on Morton Street?”
“Yeah, it was. Forty Morton Street. How well did you know them?”
“One more than the other,” Jack said, catching his breath. He suddenly felt weak-kneed. “Good grief,” he added, with a shake of his head. “What happened?”
“We’re still piecing it all together. How did you know them?”
Jack handed Lou the coffee he was holding and then poured himself another. “I think we better sit down,” he said. When they had, Jack told the story about Shawn and Sana Daughtry, and that he had known both Shawn and the archbishop in college. Until he knew more from Lou, he didn’t mention the ossuary. “I was at Forty Morton Street last Saturday night for dinner.”
“Lucky you weren’t there last night,” Lou said. “It was a typical arsonist’s blaze. The accelerant was gasoline in the basement, but not a lot of help was needed. The house was an eighteenth-century wood-frame firetrap.”
“Have you made IDs on the three victims?”
“Reasonably, but we’re hoping for confirmation from the OCME. We’re quite sure two of the victims are the owners of the house, but we need to corroborate. Everybody is burnt up to a cinder. The third victim was more difficult to identify. We ended up finding some of his belongings, and he is now the prime arson suspect. His name we believe is Luke Hester, and it turns out he’s one of these religious nuts who lives upstate at a monastery with a dubious reputation that is dedicated to the Virgin Mary. By contacting the monastery, we learned he was on some kind of assignment to the archbishop of New York, who we then roused out of bed. From the archbishop we got the story. Apparently, this third victim, who truly is supposed to have been some kind of religious fanatic, was temporarily living with the Daughtrys. It’s the archbishop’s fear that the religious guy killed both himself and the couple as a kind of martyrdom to keep them from publishing anything negative about the Blessed Mother, Mother of God. Can you believe this? I tell you, only in New York City.”