Chapter 23 #2
"Before any of this, Maureen and I had crossed paths.
" I rub at the soot still worked into my palm with my thumb.
"At the foundation gala, she caught my sleeve near the bar and asked about a sprinkler retrofit like it was small talk.
Then she suggested we grab coffee sometime so she could pick my brain about fire suppression upgrades for one of the development committees she was sitting on.
" I let out a quiet breath through my nose.
"Earlier in the year she maneuvered us onto the same planning committee for the Harbor View revitalization meetings and kept finding reasons to ask me to stay after. "
Pham watches me without interrupting.
"I answered her and moved on every time," I say. "I thought it was networking. Professional overlap." I shake my head once. "Looking back now, I don't think that's what it was. I think she was trying to figure out whether there was room for something else."
Pham studies me for a second. "If she had already attached herself to you personally, then Avery showing up changed the equation," she says. "At that point this stopped being strictly about Stein's acquisitions for her."
I think back to seeing her name in a forwarded invitation list and skimming past it without a second thought. I used to move through rooms like that, filtering people down to what mattered in the moment. Maureen had been paying a different kind of attention the entire time.
"Maureen had decided she and I were to each other, she escalated by planting the column, the forum post, the gala photo with the caption." I stop. "The fire."
"She set the fire in the bookstore corridor?" Pham asks.
I nod. "Shane was just a participant who didn't have full visibility into what he was participating in. Maureen took his jacket and was the one who entered the bookstore."
Pham repeats it back the way she does when she is locking details into place for later. "Booker's cooperation is still being evaluated."
I think about Avery on the corridor floor. The extinguisher still in her hand. The specific quality of the stillness before I understood she was breathing.
"And tonight, Stein was destroying the evidence that connected him to Maureen and to Kellerman."
"By removing the two people who could corroborate it," Pham says
The radios settle into a steady rhythm and the engines hold their lines, water hitting what is left of the structure in controlled bursts while Pham's people move through the scene with clipboards and cameras, marking, logging, bagging, every step deliberate like they have been waiting eighteen months to do exactly this.
I think about the Kellerman file in my office drawer.
The inspection report that never added up.
Danny Ruiz, who had a daughter who was six at the time and is now twelve.
Cora Mbeki, who had just passed her lieutenant's exam.
Six years of thinking I understood the whole story and trying to find a way to prove it, only to find out the truth stretched far past Kellerman and into something bigger than I ever imagined.
A sharp burst of voices cuts across the lot, followed by the snap of the tape line pulling tight hard enough that an officer reaches for it. Somebody is trying to push through.
"Hold the line!" an officer says somewhere to my left.
I angle past a hose and a stack of cones and head straight for the disturbance.
Avery is at the barrier with one hand locked around the tape and the other pushing against the officer trying to hold her back.
Jonah is right behind her with his hand on her shoulder, trying to keep her from forcing her way through while still letting her fight him on it.
Even from here I can see the strain in his grip and the sharp, jerking pull of the tape every time she lunges forward again.
She sees me and everything else drops out of her focus. Her hands tighten on the tape and her shoulders square like she is about to push through a wall. She says something to Jonah without looking away. He answers close, his hand steady on her shoulder, ready to move with her.
She steps forward. The tape dips under her grip and the officer steps in, palm up, body angled to block her path.
"Ma'am, stay behind the barrier," he says.
She presses the tape lower and tries to slip past him. "Oh, now we're enforcing rules?" she snaps, shoving against the tape again. "Fantastic timing. Truly inspiring work from everybody here."
"I need you to stay back," he says, firmer now, shifting with her every time she tries to force a way around him.
Even from halfway across the lot, furious and fighting like she plans to personally dismantle the police perimeter with her bare hands, Avery somehow still manages to look distractingly gorgeous.
I start toward them, heat at my back, gravel shifting under my boots. "Avery!" I yell, putting it where she'll hear it.
Her eyes lock on me hard enough that I can feel the force of it from halfway across the lot. Her mouth tightens and she leans into the tape again.
"Ma'am, you can't come through," the officer says.
"Watch me," she says. Then she glares at the tape in disgust. "This is the least effective security system I've ever seen in my life," she mutters, already shifting her weight forward again.
He reaches to stop her. "Ma'am, you can't—"
"You can arrest me if you think that's going to stop me," she says, clear and even. "Go ahead and try."
I take another step. "Avery," I call out, closer now. "I am extremely alive right now, so if you could stop trying to fight a police officer for like ten seconds, that'd be great for my blood pressure."
The officer glances back over his shoulder.
Pham is already there, eyes on Avery, then on me, then on the line. She makes the call without raising her voice.
"Let her through."
The officer lifts the tape.
Avery ducks under it and comes straight at me, fast enough that I draw in a breath and brace, setting my stance just before she stops short in front of me, breath sharp. "What the hell were you thinking?