Chapter 47 The Loose Cannon
WES got the daylight case locked on a Wednesday afternoon, which should have been the best day of the whole investigation, and it was ruined inside of an hour by a phone that wouldn’t stop and a man who’d stopped answering his.
Pike walked into my office at four with a banker’s box and set it on my desk like it weighed nothing, which meant it weighed everything.
“It’s done,” she said. “The insurance filings track Vance’s curve to the day.
Every payout to the Holloway LLC lags a fire by the same interval, and the disbursements out of the LLC to Rourke’s shell for ‘site remediation’ land two days after each check clears.
It’s a machine. A judge is going to look at this and it’s going to read like a confession with the serial numbers filed off.
” She almost smiled. “We can move on Holloway. Fraud, conspiracy, the works. In daylight, like you wanted.”
I looked at the box. Three years of trying to be early, and here was early, sitting on my desk in banker’s cardboard. Grant Holloway was going to fall the boring total way a man like him should fall, undone by his own arithmetic, no drama, no spectacle, exactly the ending Birdie’s map had promised.
“So why do you look like that,” Pike said, because she reads me almost as well as Birdie does now, which is a thing I’ll have to get used to about my own life.
I opened the box instead of answering. On top was the summary Pike had built, and under it the filings, and I paged through them slow, and it was as clean as she’d said.
Birdie’s colored-pencil curve, rendered in the flat grey language of insurance disbursement, a machine caught mid-motion.
I’d spent three years trying to be early, and here was the thing I’d never quite managed in the city, the fire understood before the next one, the man in the office named while the family still slept. It should have felt like winning.
“Because it doesn’t touch Cody,” I said.
“We can arrest Holloway tomorrow and it doesn’t do one thing about a man standing in a trench on Larch.
” I turned the box a quarter, an old habit.
“Worse. Think it through. The second we move on Holloway, the money’s gone.
The checks stop. The ‘site remediation’ payments Cody’s been living on — over.
What happens to a cornered man who liked the fire more than the money when you take away the money and leave the fire? ”
Pike sat down slowly. She’d been so happy about the box. I watched her set the happiness down.
“He’s got nothing left to lose,” she said, “and he’s already off the leash.”
“He’s already off the leash,” I agreed, “and the arrest that saves the town from Holloway is the exact thing that lights Cody’s shortest fuse.
If we move on the boss, we take away the only person on earth who had any reason left to tell that man no.
Holloway’s a coward with a checkbook, but he’s a coward who at least wanted his lots intact and his name clean.
He’d have called Cody off that block to protect his own investment.
Take Holloway out of the picture and there’s nobody left who benefits from those houses standing. ”
We sat with that, the box between us, the good news gone entirely sour.
“So we’re stuck,” Pike said. “We can’t move on Holloway without cutting Cody loose, and we can’t leave Holloway running the scheme, and either way there’s a man in a trench.”
“We’re not stuck,” I said. “We’re just done pretending this is one case.
It was always two.” I pulled Birdie’s colored-pencil map out of the drawer, the copy she’d let me keep, the schedule line and the harm line diverging across the page like a river opening its mouth.
“Holloway’s the schedule. We take him in daylight with your box, clean, whenever we want, and he’ll fold, Birdie called that weeks ago.
But Cody’s the harm, and the harm was never going to be solved by a subpoena.
We have to be standing on that block when he does it, close enough to stop it and far enough to prove it, and we have to do it before we spook Holloway, because the day Holloway goes down is the day Cody’s got nothing left but the thing he loves. ”
“You want to sit on the boss,” Pike said slowly, “while your consultant predicts the torch.”
“I want to sit on the boss,” I said, “while my consultant predicts the torch. She’s already doing it.
She thinks it’s her own block, the gas line feeding the whole row, and the more I look at it the more I think she’s right, and I don’t love that, because her being right means the target’s not a house, it’s what a whole block runs on — her building, Ren’s, the kid’s.
” I closed the box. “Holloway’s a case. Cody’s a countdown.
You don’t serve a warrant on a countdown. You get there first.”
Pike sat with that. She wasn’t a woman who liked plans that depended on being right about a person’s next move; her whole trade was built on not trusting a guess.
But she’d been in Wes’s kitchen the night Birdie read the escalation off a child’s colored pencils and turned out to be right about everything, and I watched her decide to trust the guess this once, against every instinct she had, because the alternative was a block of occupied houses and no plan at all.
“I don’t like it,” she said.
“I don’t either.”
“If she’s wrong about the block, we’re standing on the wrong street when it happens somewhere else.”
“She’s not going to be wrong about the block,” I said, and heard how sure I sounded, and understood I’d started to trust Birdie Vance’s read of a dangerous stranger more than I trusted the physical evidence in a banker’s box on my own desk, and understood that this was either the smartest thing I’d done in nine years or the thing I’d regret for the rest of them, and that there was no way to know which until a man in a trench decided it for us.
“And Vance,” Pike added, quieter, in the tone she used when she was about to say a thing she’d rather not.
“You know your consultant’s going to want to be on that street when it happens.
And you know she’s the reason we’ll know which street, and the only one who can read what he leaves.
So we’re going to be standing there needing the exact person I’d have arrested two weeks ago, and if this ever goes to a courtroom, some lawyer is going to stand up and make her the whole story, the mystery woman at every fire.
I can protect her from a lot. I’m not sure I can protect her from being right in front of everybody. ”
“She knows,” I said. “She decided to be seen anyway. Signed your paperwork this morning without me asking her twice.”
Pike absorbed that. “Huh,” she said. “Braver than I gave her credit for.” She didn’t know the half of it, and it wasn’t mine to tell, so I let it sit.
So we set the watch. Pike took the daylight case and holstered it — warrant built, box packed, waiting on a day we could afford to spend it, because the day we spent it was the day Cody came off his leash for good.
I took Larch — drove it twice a shift, kept the block sitting in the back of my mind like a stove I wasn’t sure I’d turned off.
We ran the whole thing quiet, no sirens, nothing on the open scanner, because the one thing worse than Cody Rourke in that trench was Cody Rourke learning we were coming.
And Birdie ran it quietest of all, living in the very building the line fed, sleeping in her clothes I’d have bet, phone in her hand, one floor of a two-flat between her and the two people she’d sooner die than lose.
I told myself we’d get there first, and I mostly believed it.
A man who stands in a trench all week is a man taking his time, and a man taking his time gives you a night to catch him in.
That was the arithmetic I drove home on.
It held two more days. What it never once accounted for was the day Cody Rourke stopped taking his time — and that when he stopped, he wouldn’t wait for the dark.