“Uh-huh.”
“Good. Remember how I added that note that said there hadn’t been any other fires to the Neighborhood Alliance properties?”
“Yes.”
“Well, you can erase that. I heard a fire run called in on the police scanner ten minutes ago. It’s a house on West Twenty-fifth. The same one on the list I faxed you.”
I sat up.
“You there?” Amy said.
“Yes.”
“Ed Gradduk didn’t start this fire.”
“No.”
“But another Neighborhood Alliance house is burning. So what the hell’s going on, Lincoln?”
“I don’t know.” I dropped down from the wall. “But I’d like to see for myself.” I walked away from the library, back toward the avenue.
“Are you going down there? To the house fire?”
“Seems like I ought to.”
“Want me to meet you down there?”
“If you’d like.”
I thanked her, hung up, slipped the phone back into my pocket, and quickened my pace. I wanted to get to West Twenty-fifth while the house was still burning. And I wanted my gun.
I had the Glock in its holster and the key in the ignition of my truck when Amy called again. I started the truck and answered the phone as I pulled out of my parking space.
“I’m on my way, Amy.”
“It’ll be a shorter trip then you thought.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re not going to believe this, Lincoln, but we’ve got another fire going now. Another Neighborhood Alliance house. It’s on Hancock Avenue.”
“You’re sure?”
“Positive. They just called it in. We’ve got two fires going at Neighborhood Alliance houses now. Two in about twenty minutes, Lincoln. Who’s doing this? And why?”
The annoying thing about hanging out with a reporter is that she tends to keep asking questions, even when she knows you don’t have the answers. I told Amy I’d call her back, and I pulled into the street and hammered the accelerator, the big truck’s exhaust roaring. While I drove, I dialed Joe’s home number and put the phone back to my ear. It took six rings before I remembered that he’d still be at the office. I disconnected and called him there. He answered immediately.
“Something strange is going down, Joe.”
“Yeah?”
“Two house fires just started on the near west side in the last half hour. They’re both Neighborhood Alliance houses.”
Silence.
“This isn’t Ed Gradduk’s work,” I said, echoing Amy’s obvious statement.
“Where are you?”
“On my way to Hancock Avenue. It’s fresher.”
“You think it’s going to do one damn bit of good for you to stand on the sidewalk watching that thing burn?”
“I don’t know, Joe. But I’m sure not going to sit at home and wait for Amy to call me with updates. This has to be arson. Somebody might have seen something, just like Gradduk was caught on tape with the last fire. The time to try to talk to people is now, while they’re all out on the street watching the show. It’ll be easier than trying to knock on doors tomorrow, hoping to find out who was home when the fire got started.”
He grunted, which was the best acknowledgment of support I could hope for. “You want me to meet you down there? Work the crowd as a team?”
“I don’t know yet. Let me get an idea of what the situation is and call you back.”
“All right.” There was a long pause, and then he said, “You got any bright ideas as to what this could be about?”
“No.”
“Me neither.”
“I’ll call you back, Joe.”
A quarter mile away from the fire on Hancock, I could hear the sirens and see the smoke. I got within two blocks of the house before I ran into a roadblock of police cruisers parked sideways in the street, keeping traffic away from the fire. There was no parking at the curb on this side of the street, but I pulled my truck in anyhow, rolling the passenger-side tires up onto the sidewalk to get as much of the vehicle out of the way as possible. I left it there, sitting at an angle, half on and half off the sidewalk, and then I began to jog toward the house.
I jogged into view just in time to see the porch roof fall in under the deluge from the fire hose. Two trucks were working on the blaze, one parked in the street and one pulled into the narrow driveway. Neighbors stood huddled in little groups of five or six across the street, watching with a mix of horror and excitement. The flames seemed to have been beaten back by the water, but thick black smoke continued to pour out of the second-floor windows. When the roof of the porch caved in and collapsed, one woman screamed and covered her eyes, while a young boy beside her clapped his hands and bounced up and down on his toes, eyes wide, soaking up a scene that was much better than whatever show he’d been watching on television before the sirens had interrupted and drawn him out of the house.
The temptation was to stand there with them and watch the blaze, stare with awe as the old house—first burned and now soaked—continued to crumble to the ground. I put my back to it, though, and looked at the crowd instead.
Maybe twenty-five people were watching, staying in small groups, but I didn’t see any familiar faces. I approached the woman who had covered her eyes when the porch roof fell in and pulled out my wallet, letting it flip open to expose my private investigator’s license. Showing a license, any type of license, is often a great way to convey authority and convince people to give you more than cursory attention, and in this situation I figured it would be the only way to get this woman to look away from the fire.
“Ma’am, do you live around here?” I said, showing the license for all of two seconds before snapping the wallet shut and returning it to my hip pocket. She looked at me and blinked, surprised by my approach and not following the question. She was about thirty, with shoulder-length, blond hair and an ample stomach and abdomen pinched by a belt. I assumed the boy beside her was her son, judging from the way she kept pulling him back onto the sidewalk and out of the street.
“Do you live around here?” I repeated once I had her attention.
“Um, what? I mean, yeah, I live, you know . . .” She waved a hand behind her that could have indicated any of ten houses, and her eyes began to drift back to the fire.
“When did this get started?” I said, stepping closer, trying to command her attention.
“Like, five minutes ago?”
The kid beside her, who was maybe ten, was looking at me with far more interest than his mother, and he shook his head impatiently. “No, it was longer than that. Before the end of the inning. We were watching the Indians game.”
“Were you out here before the fire department got here?”
She looked from the kid to me and shook her head. “No. Well, like, about the same time. We heard the sirens, right? So I went to the window and looked out, and I saw the house was burning. We came outside right when the fire trucks were pulling up.”
My phone was vibrating in my pocket, but I ignored it and stepped closer to her, fighting to hear over the sound of the hoses and the shouting firefighters and neighbors.
“Any idea how it got started?” I asked.
“What? No. I mean, nobody lives there, so it couldn’t have been like a cooking fire or anything.” We were standing close now, our faces huddled together, and her breath came at me with a heavy smell of pickles that made me want to lean back.
“Was there any sort of explosion?”
“I don’t know. Jared had the TV on so loud . . .”
Another man who’d been standing near us, a tall, lean guy with an Indians baseball cap and a scraggly goatee, now interrupted.
“Yeah, there was an explosion. Well, you could hear it go up, at least. Kind of a whoosh noise.”