“So far, it looks like an ordinary cooking accident. The sprinkler system did its job and put out the fire. Everything in this room and the hall is soaked.”
“So why wasn’t the body soaked before it burned to that condition?”
That was a good question. Rica moved beyond Stack and started looking around the kitchen, being careful where she stepped. Stack didn’t move, looking almost straight up.
“There’s a sprinkler head right over the body,” he said. “The victim might as well have burned to death in his shower as lying where he is.”
“He looks plenty wet now,” Rica said, “but obviously he took his shower too late.”
“That could explain it,” Stack said.
Rica looked where he was pointing, then stood motionless, realizing what he meant.
Propped in the corner where the stove met the wall was a partially folded black umbrella. It was wet, like just about everything else in the kitchen, and it reminded Rica of a huge bat that had roosted there.
“It’s been three days since we’ve had any snow or rain,” Stack said.
Rica had been thinking the same thing. She understood why the sprinkler system hadn’t extinguished the burning man before it was too late. Someone had stood over him, holding the umbrella so he’d burn bright and long. “Madre de dios,” she said. “Why would anyone do such a thing?”
“You’ve been a cop too long to ask that question,” Stack said. “You know there’s no answer that won’t drive you crazy.”
“One answer we have,” Rica said, “is why the FDNY figured we had a homicide here. They must have seen the umbrella.”
“Or something else,” Stack said. “Look at that.” He took her arm and gently led her closer to the body, as if escorting her onto a dance floor. He pointed. “See that blackened piece of cloth near what’s left of the legs?”
He stepped carefully around the body, keeping his distance, as she followed.
“I doubt if he died in that position naturally,” he said. “Or if he had a choice, with his arms behind his back.”
“His arms and legs were bound,” Rica said. “After he was tied up, then probably soaked with something flammable, he was set on fire.”
“And whoever did it stood holding an umbrella over him, shielding him from the water from the sprinkler system, watching to make sure he burned to death and then some.”
Rica tried to push away the vision of someone seemingly politely holding an umbrella over a fellow human being who was on fire. Her stomach lurched again. It was the smell, mainly. She went over to the window and was relieved to see it was the kind that could be cranked open. She worked the metal handle, leaned forward, and breathed in some high, fresh air.
“Ain’t we just in a hell of a business?” she said, when she finally felt steadier and straightened up.
But Stack had already gone down to the street to use the detectives’ band radio in their unmarked to call for the techs and the medical examiner, leaving her with the burned man and the questions that hung in the air like smoke.
THREE
The week after the Ardmont Arms fire, Stack walked into Mobile Response, located in the Eight-oh Precinct, with Rica on his heels. The Mobile Response Squad had been formed to conduct investigations the regular detective division couldn’t adequately handle because of case overload. It was authorized to operate in all five boroughs and had come to be regarded as a crack outfit.
Stack enjoyed the special status, though he knew for a fact that case overload wasn’t the only reason for the squad’s existence. It sometimes served as a kind of pressure valve; the higher-ups stepped aside and let sensitive, potentially damaging cases find their way to the MR Squad in order to minimize any political or PR damage. It was a situation Stack could live with. Departmental politics had worn him down at the edges. But only at the edges.
Though he wasn’t the ranking officer, the mood of the place was subtly altered by his arrival. Detectives at their desks seemed to bend to their work. Those standing and talking or drinking coffee sidled back to their desks or the swing gate to the booking area and either busied themselves or left. Stack took the work seriously, and when he was present, so did everyone else.
He was a big man, six-feet-two and 230 pounds. Now in his forty-seventh year, he was beginning to thicken around the waist, but his shoulders were broad and his big hands made fists like rocks. Even without NYPD politics, he might have climbed through the ranks on ability or looks alone. His head was large, his forehead wide. His dark hair was parted on the side, cut short around the ears and beginning to gray. Level gray eyes studied everything calmly from beneath thick dark brows. His cheekbones were prominent and his jaw was firm with a cleft chin. If it weren’t for a slightly crooked nose that hadn’t been set right after one of the bad guys broke it with a beer bottle, he would have been merely handsome instead of interesting and…well, scary. To civilian employees and probationary patrolmen he was Detective Stack. To his fellow officers who had been through the wars with him, he was simply “Stack.”
Sergeant Redd at the booking desk had told Stack that acting MR Squad Commander Jack O’Reilly wanted to see him. The regular commander, Lieutenant Vandervoort, was hospitalized after major surgery for colon cancer and would be gone for at least a month. If chemotherapy was required, Vandervoort would be gone longer.
“Still working on that hot one, Stack?” a detective-second-grade named Mathers, whose nickname, of course, was Beave, asked with a grin.
“You must mean me,” Stack heard Rica say behind him. Mathers and several other officers laughed.
“Try to be more professional,” Stack said, when he and Rica were out of the squad room and in the short hall, lined with file cabinets, that led to the commander’s office.
“They don’t take me seriously,” Rica said.
“I take you seriously.” Stack immediately wished he’d phrased it differently. He was aware of how Rica felt about him, and he didn’t want her misplaced affection to become obvious to the others in the department.
Rica, trundling along beside him, didn’t answer. But he could feel her smiling.
She’d gotten more blatant about her fondness for Stack as his divorce from Laura progressed. Stack knew what Rica was thinking: Laura had finally had enough of being a cop’s wife—which was true. And Rica, being a cop herself, was exactly what Stack needed. Not true, thought Stack. It wasn’t that Rica was unattractive—she was petite, with dark hair and eyes, and with a firm and compact physique that prompted locker room speculation when she wasn’t around. Not that she wasn’t respected for her abilities. It was, in fact, Rica Lopez’s remarkable talents as a homicide detective that kept Stack from having her transferred to break up their partnership.
Stack had never made any remarks about Rica when some of the other cops, male and female, were commenting on her looks. What worried him now was that, since word of his impending divorce had gotten around, he’d stopped hearing raunchy remarks about Rica. Apparently no one wanted to comment on her when he was present.
“You want me to go in with you, Stack?” Rica asked beside him as they approached the partly opened door to the commander’s office.
“Sure” he said. “Maybe O’Reilly wants to chew some ass.”
Stack opened the door all the way, then stood aside so Rica could enter first. As she moved around him he caught a whiff of her perfume. Lilacs or some such. When the hell had she had time to put that on? Cops weren’t supposed to smell like lilacs.
The office was the only one in the precinct house that was carpeted—a thickly napped beige surface that ran wall to wall and stopped at