Blue Smoke

pulled out her ringing phone.
    “It’s John,” she told O’Donnell.
    “Go ahead. I’ll get the team started in here.”
    They started the grids and the photographs.
    “Pastorelli’s dying.” Reena pinched the bridge of her nose. “Pancreatic cancer. He told John he hasn’t seen Joey for a couple of months, that he’s supposed to send money. Something about them taking a trip soon, to Italy.”
    “That’s why he’s escalated.”
    “His father’s dying. He can’t let that go unsung. And from what John got out of the interview, Senior may have convinced his boy that he’s going to face the same fate. Joey wants me to know who’s doing this, who’s coming for me because it’s a tribute to his father—and Jesus, maybe a kind of suicide mission. He’s still the boy running after the police car, after his father.”
    “So he figures if they live, he can get them both out of the country after he’s done here? Take his revenge, pay his tribute, whatever he wants to call it, then hide out in Italy?”
    “Not hide out. He wouldn’t think of it as hiding out. That would make him weak.” She rubbed at her stinging eyes. “Getting away with it, that’s different. Enjoying the high life somewhere—for the time he thinks they have left—thumbing his nose at what he’s left behind. He had money last December. He could have used some of that for fake passports, for transportation, for a place overseas. He might have friendsor a connection there. Pastorelli said northern Italy, up in the mountains. We can start working that. But he’s not going to get that far.”
    She looked around at the steam and the rubble, the ruin. “I’m not going to let him get that far.”
    “Is John looking to stay on Pastorelli in New York?”
    “No, he doesn’t think he can get more there. He’s heading home. I nagged at him to get a room for the night instead of trying to drive all the way back. He sounded beat.”
    H e waited until midnight, then thought, What the fuck. He could come back for the old bastard another time. He could leave him a nice surprise, then take him out some other time.
    He’d seen the cops come to the front and back doors, and he’d seen them drive away. Doing a check, getting a lay of the land. So maybe it was best to do a little work, and move on to the next.
    He’d already primed the bedroom, the one where he’d found clothes in the closet. He used some of them to make trailers. Mattress stuffing—something he thought of as a trademark now. Waxed paper, methyl alcohol. Might as well sign the portrait, he thought.
    Though it would be fun to spread things out through the house, it was quicker—and just as effective—to concentrate on the one room.
    He’d found family photographs. These he broke out of their frames and scattered. Maybe he’d move on the real thing one of these days. You take my family, I take yours.
    But for now, he struck flame, watched it come to life.
    On the way out, he laid a paper takeout napkin with Sirico’s cheerful logo on the kitchen counter.
    R eena worked in the bedroom, teasing out liquid that had pooled in the cracks of the floor, settled under the remains of the baseboard. She bagged traces of trailers that hadn’t burned to ash, took samples of the ash itself.

    Trippley came and crouched beside her. “We found some hair in the shower drain. Might be his.”
    “Good. Good. We get his DNA on scene, it’ll wrap him like a bow.”
    “We’ve got glass fragments from a wine bottle in the living area. Might get prints.”
    There was something else, Reena thought as she paused. Something in his tone. “What is it?”
    “They found a Sirico’s takeout menu outside.”
    Her fingers curled, then released. “I wondered where he’d put it.” Eyes grim, she got back to work. “Delivery. Could’ve posed as a delivery guy. Not food. She wouldn’t let him in. Package? She’d have to have ordered something. What would . . .” Flowers, she decided, remembering Bo’s brush with him at the supermarket. “Maybe flowers.”
    She tilted her head back. “Why does a veteran cop’s wife open the door to a stranger? Because he’s delivering flowers. We need to ask the neighbors, the people in neighboring buildings if they saw a guy carrying a florist’s box in addition to the duffel or briefcase idea.”
    “I’ll get that going.”
    They both looked as O’Donnell moved into the room. “He hit again. Engines are responding to a fire at John