Blue Smoke

they, just deal with you? You were there. Why not kill both of you?”
    “Because it wasn’t enough. Kill me, it’s over. But make me suffer, hurt me, use fire against me again and make me wonder. Pastorelli Senior had an alibi for that night. John checked it out. But it could’ve been bogus. Joey was supposed to be in New York, and there were people who said he was. But people will. And look, three months after Josh’s death, Joey goes up for the car boost. In Virginia, not New York.”
    “I’m not saying people don’t hold on to grudges or obsessions for twenty years. But twenty is a long stretch.”
    “There have been shots along the way. There might’ve been things I passed over, didn’t connect. There was an incident right after I came on the job. Firefighter I was seeing casually was killed. He was on his way to North Carolina—long weekend deal. I got hung up, so I couldn’t go with him, but Steve and Gina and I were going to head down the next morning. They found him, in his car, in the woods off a back road. He’d been shot, and his car set on fire. It looked like he’d been carjacked, robbed, killed, and the fire set to cover it. It was eleven years to the day after the fire at Sirico’s.”
    O’Donnell eased back. “Hugh Fitzgerald. I knew him some. I remember when he was killed. I didn’t know you were connected.”
    “It was casual. We’d gone out a couple times, and he was a pal of Steve’s. Steve and Gina were an item. It looked, seemed, random. And the locals put it down as such.”
    So had she, she thought, raking her fingers through her hair. She’d never looked beyond the surface.

    “One of his tires was flat, late at night, dark country road. They figured he flagged down the wrong person, or somebody came along, tried to shake him down. Kills him. Pushes the car into the woods, lights it up, hopes the fire covers the tracks. Which, essentially, it did. The case is still open.”
    She drew a breath. “I never made any connection, not on the surface. Hell, my uniform buttons were still bright and shiny. Who was I to question seasoned cops just because I had a sick feeling down in the belly? We’d gone out a couple of times, and we were both thinking it might lead to more. But we weren’t a couple. He was killed in North Carolina. Arrows weren’t pointing at somebody who’d fired up my father’s restaurant a dozen years before. I should’ve seen it.”
    “Yeah, too bad your crystal ball was on the fritz that day.”
    While she appreciated the sarcasm and the sentiment behind it, it didn’t cool her blood. “Fire, O’Donnell. It’s always fire. Josh, Hugh, Luke’s car and now Bo. It’s always fire. There might have been more, things I didn’t focus in on. Case is still open.”
    “Difference is, now he wants you to know.”

25
    Laura Pastorelli worked the counter at a 7-Eleven near the Maryland/ D.C. line. She was fifty-three, and carried the years poorly on a rickety frame. Lines, dug deeper by worry and sorrow than by years, scored her face. Her salt-and-pepper hair framed it without style. Around her neck was a silver cross. That and her wedding ring were her only jewelry.
    She glanced up when O’Donnell and Reena came in, and her gaze passed over Reena without recognition.
    “Help you?” She said it without interest, something she said by habit dozens of times a day.
    “Laura Pastorelli?” O’Donnell showed his badge, and Reena saw the instinctive flinch before Laura’s lips thinned.
    “What do you want? I’m working. I haven’t done anything wrong.”
    “We need to ask you a few questions regarding your husband and your son.”
    “My husband lives in New York. I haven’t seen him for five years.” Her fingers crept up her skinny chest to fondle the silver cross.
    “And Joey?” Reena waited until Laura’s gaze shifted to her face. “You don’t remember me, Mrs. Pastorelli? I’m Catarina Hale, from the neighborhood.”
    Recognition crept as slowly as her fingers. When it hit, Laura averted her eyes. “I don’t remember you. I haven’t been back to Baltimore in years.”

    “You remember me,” Reena said gently. “Maybe there’s somewhere more comfortable where we can talk.”
    “I’m working. You’re going to make me lose my job, and I haven’t done anything. Why can’t you people leave us alone?”
    O’Donnell walked over to a doughy-faced man in his early twenties, who wasn’t doing much to pretend he wasn’t avidly