Chapter 12 #2
His color went from pink to ruddy. “Look, one of the hardest parts of this job is trying to balance professional and personal relationships, you know? And just because I think you might have some... possibly plausible points, it doesn’t mean I can just ignore procedure and law.
How would that look for me? For the department?
And,” he said before I could break in, “how would it look for you? People would assume you’re literally getting away with murder because we’re friends.
” He paused, then added, “We’re friends, right? ”
The petulant brat in me wanted to say no, my friends don’t make me feel small and dumb, but I swallowed that urge down and sighed. “Yeah,” I said. “New ones, but friends.”
Something seemed to lift away from him then and he visibly relaxed. “Okay then.” He pulled into the drive behind Ben’s subtly fancy Beemer and turned off the engine.
“You said you were coming to see me before Cherry called,” I reminded him. “What was that about?”
And that uneasy look was back, his shoulders hunching inward and chin dropping. “We should go inside.”
Crap.
#
BEN EMERGED FROM HIS office as Heath cautiously sat on the edge of the armchair in the front study. "What's going on?" Ben demanded, lawyer voice in full effect. "Heath, if this is a legal matter—"
"It's more of a concerned warning," he said, turning his hat between his hands.
He wore one of those cowboy hat type deals that was a little too broad, a little too hard to be anything but a uniform piece.
Without it, in the rest of his uniform, he looked like he was a teenager dress up with his blond hair flattened and the lean planes of his face exposed, too young for whatever was going on in his head.
"The major crimes unit the state sent down from Augusta found fingerprints on a lighter left at the scene of the Old Yacht Club fire.”
My stomach executed a slow, lazy roll and slipped down somewhere near my feet. "I don't smoke."
"Neither do I but I still have a few around my place and even in my office," Heath sighed.
Glancing at Ben, who stood blank-faced and quiet, he pressed on.
"The general consensus is it's a little weird, this lighter just sitting there in the rubble, you know? It wasn’t noted on the first pass-through but sometimes things get missed in the chaos.” That sounded like a practiced line.
“But it's there. And it has your fingerprints on it. "
"Just his?" Ben asked quietly. "Only his, no one else's?"
Heath nodded. "That's the other weird thing. The lighter has smudges, like it was wiped down before you handled it."
"I didn't—"
"I know," Heath soothed. "I know. And, thankfully, the MCU group thinks it's weird enough to be suspicious and they're not jumping directly on blaming you. They're running it past an arson investigation team again.”
"What does that mean for me?"
The two of them exchanged a look, years of working with the legal side of crappy choices flowing back and forth between them. "It means nothing," Ben finally said. "Heath's giving you a head's up."
"I wouldn't decide to take a six-month tour around the world any time soon," Heath put in quickly. "But this bit of evidence is pinging some radars as strange. You'll likely be getting a call or visit from a member or two of the unit soon."
"Don't talk to them without Mario on a video link," Ben said sharply.
I nodded. "Right. Right. SO I'm not in trouble but I should act like I am.
" Muffin, the giant sweetheart, picked up on my stress and came over to lean heavily against my legs.
As much as I wanted to be flippant and bratty about this, I knew better.
Cooperation was key here, making sure there was no reason to look twice at me. But... "Wait. Was it a metal lighter?"
Heath straightened. "How do you know that?"
"Because you said it was in the rubble," Ben pointed out. "A plastic gas station lighter would likely have melted."
"Not necessarily. It would depend on—"
I whistled sharply, startling Muffin into a bark that silenced them more effectively than my attempt. "Guys! Was it a metal lighter, Heath?"
He nodded. "One of those generic Zippo jobs."
Gwendolyn smoked. And she definitely had a silver lighter—I’d picked it up after she’d knocked her bag over.
"I need you both to just hear me out, okay?" I began. Ben perked up like a hound but Heath just went very still and had an expression on his face that clearly conveyed oh god not again. "The lighter might belong to Gwendolyn Terhune."
Heath groaned and covered his face with his hands but Ben slipped into professional mode. "Why do you think that?"
I filled them in on the brief encounters in the nail salon and in the tea shop. “Before they left, Gwendolyn dropped her bag. I helped her for a minute but she chased me off after I scooped up a lighter and some of her spilled makeup."
"But why would they plant your fingerprints at the scene of an arson?
" Ben asked, his tone curious rather than chiding as I'd feared it might be.
"The two of them don't have a history of anything criminal related outside of that one misdemeanor situation when Gwendolyn Terhune went off on Tubbs back in the late eighties and Pamela has a DUI from shortly after Beth Ellison's death.
" He paused, frowning. “Wait, before. It was before.”
I opened my mouth to answer, then froze, a small smile creeping forward. "How do you know that, Mister 'I don't read gossip rags'?"
He blushed but didn't look away. "My mom was a big fan of them. She had stacks of People, Star and Us Weekly as high as my knee all over her bedroom towards the end."
Heath had mercy on Ben before the blushing could make my poor friend burst into flames. "Look, the long and short of it is, don't do anything that'll put you on MCU's radar. Or mine, for that matter."
I was saved from further lectures by Heath's work cell. He had to go to the car to take it so we said our goodbyes and I did my best to avoid Ben's stern glare as I headed for my room. "I'm not doing anything," I called back over my shoulder. "Just taking a nap."
"I talked to Phil—he's managing partner at the firm—and he said I can take a few days of leave so long as I check in on a few clients while I'm out."
"What?" I stopped at the top of the stairs and turned to stare down at him, agog. "You are not taking off work just because I have a broken arm! I'll be fine!"
"You'll need help with the dogs," he shot back. "And grocery shopping and—"
"And I walked Muffin just fine this morning. And Tony is a backyard only kind of guy. And the store will deliver for a fee, if I absolutely can't be bothered to go down and get it myself."
He frowned deeply at that, aging himself a bit in the process. "What about your appointment with Doctor Bash tomorrow?"
I winced sheepishly. "Can I borrow your car?"
"I don't want to take the Beetle all the way to Boston," he hedged. "The parking at my place there is chancy. And it’s a classic car. And my dad’s so...”
Narrowing my eyes, I asked, "Are you just mother henning me?"
For a second, it looked like he was going to argue, but he just spread his hands and asked, "Can you blame me?"
"I'm going to go rest," I said, barely managing to keep from rolling my eyes. "Let me know before you head back."
"Damien, just a second. Molly O’Neill emailed me. She said she’s thrilled about the video from Max and is looking forward to it. So much so that she sent this.” He held out his phone, open the notes app and a list of items.
“This is from the fire?” I confirmed, gesturing vaguely towards the door as if Heath could jump back in and demand I hand over the phone.
“It’s a partial list. Most of the intentional burn was apparently papers and reduced to ash, but a few things stood out.”
“Tablet, phone, prescription bottles—melted...” I scrolled down, frowning. “Why try to burn this? I mean, you can recycle electronics. Erase the hard drive, reset it to factory, take it to one of those electronics stores that’s got one of those recycle boxes.”
Ben sighed. “I feel like I’m contributing to your bad habits by having this conversation but... If someone was panicking, someone was in a hurry to get rid of something they didn’t want around, they might try to burn it.”
“Why not just hide it? Or take it with them when they left?” I scrolled back up through the list. It was depressingly short and mostly personal electronics and a few items of clothing that melted rather than burned—better living through synthetics, thank you fast fashion.
“You know, I dated this guy when I was like twenty-one, twenty-two. When I broke things off, he burned all of the little mementoes from our relationship and sent me a video. Arson as revenge? A thwarted lover, maybe... But if it was Anmorata, why would Gwendolyn’s lighter be there?
” I scanned the list again. “It’s not on here.
Someone put it on the site after the first sweep. ”
“Heath didn’t confirm it was hers.”
Huffing a frustrated breath, I handed his phone back and threw up my hands. “Who else’s could it be? Why would he tell me about it if it wasn’t my prints? The only lighter I’ve touched in weeks has been hers, when I picked it up for her at the tea shop.”
“Promise me you’re not going to try and question them, Damien.”
“I won’t.”
“Won’t promise, or won’t do it?”
“I think I’m going to lie down for a bit,” I said, easing past him and heading for the stairs. “Not long.”
“Damien!”
I shut my door on his complaint, only to have to open it a moment later for Muffin.
Charlemagne, his collar catching the bright thin stream of watery sunlight peeking through the clouds and into my room, squeezed his eyes closed at us and turned away.
The collar caught my eye again, the way it shone and was so extravagantly made.
"He really loved you," I said quietly, a realization dawning slowly.
"I don't think he tore up the room, not with you in it.
He wouldn't have let you be in squalor, would he?
You haven't torn anything up since you've been here.
You haven't peed all over the rugs... Were you scared, Charlemagne? "
I padded over to the bed and carefully sat down beside him. He opened one eye to glare at me. "I wish you could talk. What the hell went on in there?"