Blue Smoke

What’s your name?”
    “Bleen. Jerry Bleen.”
    “Jerry, I need you to tell me what you saw in there while it’s fresh in your mind. Give me everything you can.”
    “I can tell you somebody set that bitch.” He lifted his head. “Somebody set her.”
    “Okay. You went in the southeastern apartment, third floor.”
    “Through the door. Brittle, Carter, me.”
    “Was the door closed?”
    He nodded. “Unlocked, hot to the touch.”
    “Could you tell if there’d been forced entry?”
    “No sign, none I saw. We hit the room with a stream. Bedroom on the . . . the left, fully engaged, kitchen straight back, thick black smoke. He’d set chimneys.”

    “Where?”
    “I saw one in the kitchen, maybe two. Window was open. Me and Brittle, we swung toward the bedroom. The whole room was going. I could see the body on the bed. Crisped. Then it blew. From the kitchen. I smelled the gas, and it blew. And Carter . . .”
    She closed a hand over his. And, sitting with him, watched the men surround and drown the lethal beauty of the fire.
    Her shoes crunched broken glass when she rose, walked over to meet O’Donnell. “He killed two this time. One civilian inside the apartment he used as point of origin, and a firefighter who was killed in the explosion, probably gas from the stove. He timed it, timed it to call me so by the time the fire department arrived on scene, it would already be fully involved.”
    “Reena.” He waited until she turned away from the belching smoke, the stubborn tongues of flame. “Deb Umberio lives at this address.”
    “Who?” She rubbed the back of her neck, struggled to place the name. When it hit, her heart slammed her ribs. “Umberio? Relation to Detective Umberio?”
    “His widow. Tom died a couple years ago. Car wreck. That was Deb’s apartment.”
    “God. Oh God.” She pressed her hands to her eyes. “Alistar? What about his partner, Detective Alistar?”
    “In Florida. Retired, moved there six months ago. I’ve put a call in to him, gave him a heads-up.”
    “Good, okay, good, then we . . . Oh sweet Jesus. John.”
    She was already fumbling out her phone when O’Donnell clamped her arm. “He’s okay. I got him on his cell. Some lucky bug crawled up his butt and told him to drive to New York tonight, check up on Pastorelli in person. He’s okay, Hale, and since he’s already on the turnpike, he’s going to follow this through. We’ve got a unit going by his place, just in case. Check it out.”
    “We’ll want to put a net over his social worker from back then, the court psychologist, hell, the family court judge. Anybody who had a piece of this. But I think he’ll be concentrating on those who had any part in taking his father down. I need my family protected.”

    “We’ve got that. We’ll stay on that until we’ve got him.”
    “I’m going to call home—I mean my parents and the rest—just clear that out of my head first.”
    “You do that. I’ll talk to some of the tenants, see who saw what.”
    Once she’d made her calls, she walked back to where Bo waited. “He killed two people tonight.”
    “I saw them take that firefighter away.” In a body bag, he thought. “I’m sorry.”
    “The woman he killed was the widow of one of the detectives who arrested his father for the fire at Sirico’s. He’s made his big move now, he’s opened the field. It doesn’t matter that we know who’s done this. It doesn’t matter to him that we know why. It just matters that he can do it. I’m going to ask you to do me a favor.”
    “Name it.”
    “Don’t go home. Call Brad, stay with him tonight. Or Mandy. Or my parents.”
    “How about a compromise? I won’t go home. I’ll wait for you.”
    “This is going to take hours, and you can’t help me here. You can take my car. I’ll ride with O’Donnell. Do me a favor, okay?”
    “One condition. When you’re done, you don’t go home either. Not without calling me first so I can meet you there.”
    “All right, that’s fair.”
    She leaned against him for a moment, let herself be held.
    An ambulance whizzed by, sirens screaming. On its way to take someone toward help, maybe comfort. She walked back through the smoke and into the weeping.

29
    The heat hung, a curtain soaked in sweat, when John threaded through the unfamiliar streets of the Bronx. The call from O’Donnell had changed his plans to find a motel off the turnpike, get some sleep and track down Joe Pastorelli in the