Fire and Bones (Temperance Brennan #23)

Chapter 33

CHAPTER 33

My skin felt strange. As if moths, maybe spiders were crawling over my body.

My thoughts were beginning to coalesce like sludge in a pond.

Zanetti said nothing. But I’m also good at that game. I said nothing.

Silence filled the space between us.

Zanetti stood motionless, one hand on the door frame, the other behind him and out of sight.

The air crackled with tension. Or was I imagining hostility that didn’t exist?

“Forget something?” I asked.

No response.

The mug slipped from my grasp and hit the tile with a sharp crack.

Disjointed memories flashed in my brain, slides in some cerebral power point delirium.

A chinchilla.

A face obscured by a Wizards cap.

Tattooed arms.

A Victorian building in sooty ruin.

Charred corpses.

Body bags rolling on gurneys.

My stomach roiled and I tasted bile in my mouth.

Zanetti’s face had become a blurry mask.

I smelled danger, dark and quick as a viper’s tongue.

Get it together, Brennan!

I blinked, struggling to bring the world back into focus.

How had I gotten to the kitchen?

Had I brought my phone?

I dropped my right hand from the fridge door, keeping my arm close to my body in hopes of detecting a hard bulge in one pocket.

Felt nothing.

My thoughts were a swirling vortex circling one question.

Where was my mobile?

Dizzy, I raised my left hand to cover my face as I ran my eyes over the room. Countertops. Stove. Sink. Table.

Zanetti in the doorway.

No phone.

Ivy’s words slammed home from our initial tour of the house.

Think! Where was the damn thing ?

Beside the sink. A short six feet away. But how to get to it without setting him off?

Buy time.

I drew a series of deep breaths.

My mind was still spinning, but more slowly now, thanks to the oxygen intake. Images and voices were rearranging and connecting with soft little clicks.

I inhaled again. Moved my hips slightly, seeming only to shift my weight, but inching a few steps to my right.

“You screwed up, Ben.” It was hard to talk, the words seeming to take forever navigating from my mind to my tongue.

“How’s that?”

“Who was she?”

“Who was who?”

“The third fire didn’t burn long enough or hot enough for your plan to work.” My voice felt thick, my words slurry.

“What are you talking about?”

“Jada Thacker said the most recent victim didn’t die in the fire,” I said, carefully forming each word. “No smoke in her lungs or trachea, that sort of thing.”

Some emotion rippled across Zanetti’s face, but he said nothing.

“Thacker said the vic would be easy to ID based on body details. I just phoned to ask what she meant.”

I swallowed, fighting down a new wave of nausea. Inched another small step.

“She was referring to tattoos and piercings. I saw you and your friend at the Petco.”

“What’s your point? That I was dancing with someone besides my ball-and-chain fiancée?”

“I had to wonder why you’d go to a pet store, you being so allergic to animals.”

Zanetti’s jaw muscles clenched, relaxed.

“I might not have put it all together, but you tipped me with your ‘super weird’ comment.” Hooking shaky air quotes. “You got that wrong, too.”

Adrenaline was pumping through me now, muscling out whatever Zanetti had put in the tea. I feigned dizziness and, imperceptibly, eased another few inches toward my goal.

“You overheard Ivy and me discussing kitty litter and gasoline, thought we were talking about the MO for the earlier Foggy Bottom arsons. You used the trick to make the third blaze look like the work of the same person.”

“You’re fucking nuts.”

“What you didn’t know, being out in ‘Hooterville’?”—more air quotes—“was that a suspect was already in custody for the first two arsons.”

“This is all lunatic speculation.” Though concern now wrinkled his brow.

“Is it?”

“You’ve got nothing to tie me to any fire.” Firm, but with an undercurrent of intense feeling growing in his voice. “Or to any fricasseed chick.”

“The property was on the market, Ben. Listed with your firm. You knew that W-C held title. You had the keys. The entrance code. Whatever.”

“That could be true of a dozen other realtors.”

“The dead woman was a poster child for tattooing and piercing. The ME says she’ll have her IDed by day’s end.” Not exactly Thacker’s words, but close enough.

Sweat was now dampening the black curls at Zanetti’s hairline.

If you don’t set him off, this doesn’t have to get violent.

Good advice from my frontal lobe. I ignored it. I’d made it across the room and was now close enough.

“Sound like anyone you know, Ben?”

“You’re batshit crazy.”

Maybe it was the drug-laced chamomile. Or the adrenaline rush. Maybe outrage at the way Zanetti had obviously been playing Ivy, whose wealth had likely kept him close. Maybe it was the false confidence I felt from having managed to reach and push the panic button. Ignoring the cerebral warnings, now at Defcon 1, I pressed even harder.

“Are you familiar with the big three in cop lingo, Ben?” Still brain-clouded, I had to think for a second to recall what they were: “Motive, means, and… opportunity? You… you’re rock solid on the last two. But for the life of me I can’t figure out why you killed her.”

No response. Just a hot amber sizzle that sent electricity fizzing through my chest, down my arms, and out into my palms.

“You’re batshit crazy,” he repeated.

I must have kept talking, but I couldn’t remember most of what I laid out. Warnings about the risk of physical harm during a takedown by cops? About the hazards of prison? The needle? Eternal damnation?

I was going full throttle when Zanetti straightened, bringing the hidden arm into view.

For the second time in three days, I was staring down the barrel of a handgun pointed at my face. This one was a big-ass Ruger 5.7 semi-automatic.

“You’re dead, lady.”

The amber eyes flicked to the gun’s inspection port, checking for a live round.

What happened next is a kaleidoscopic montage of whirling colors and figures and voices and sounds.

“Down!” A barked command.

As I dropped, Zanetti’s gun hand flew up.

“Who the fu—!”

Before hitting the floor, I caught a flash of a cylindrical object arrowing toward Zanetti’s skull. A rolling pin? A baton? It was all too fast to register. All I really understood was that Zanetti’s massive upper torso was lurching sideways.

Head covered with both arms, I listened to scuffling, cursing, gagging, and panting. The thud of flesh and bones slamming tile.

Finally, quiet.

I held in place for what seemed an eon but was probably less than a minute.

Then I mustered the courage to look up.

Zanetti was lying prone, arms above his head like a teller on a bank floor during a heist. Two uniformed cops hovered over him, one clutching his baton, both with hair in disarray and breathing hard.

A third cop stood just inside the door, weapon drawn and trained on the big man’s chest.