Chasing Fire

Quinniock continued. “I’m sorry. She didn’t spend those hours alone. She met a man there, the same man each time. We have a witness who’ll be working with our police artist to reconstruct his face.”
    With tears trickling down her face, Irene nodded. “I was afraid of it. I knew in my heart she was lying, but I was so upset with her. I didn’t care. Just go on then, I thought. Go on and do what you want, and I’ll have this baby to tend. Then, after . . . after it happened, I took that out of my mind. I told myself I’d been harsh and judgmental, a cold mother.
    “I knew she was lying,” she said, turning to her husband. “I knew all the signs. But I couldn’t let myself believe it when she was dead. I just couldn’t have that inside me.”
    “Do you have any idea who she was involved with?”
    “I swear to you I don’t. But I think maybe it’d been going on awhile now. I know the signs. The way she’d whisper on the phone, or how she’d say she just needed to go out for a drive and clear her head, or had to run some errands so could I watch Shiloh? And she’d come home again with that look in her eye.”
    She let out a shuddering breath. “She never meant to change.” Dissolving, Irene turned to press her face to Leo’s shoulder. “Maybe she just couldn’t.”
    “Why do we have to know this?” Leo demanded. “Why do you have to tell us this? You don’t leave us anything.”
    “I’m sorry, but Dolly was with this man the night she died. We need to identify him and question him.”
    “He killed her. This man she gave herself to, this man she lied to us about.”
    “We need to question him,” Quinniock repeated. “If you have any idea who she was meeting, we need to know.”
    “She lied to us. We don’t know anything. We don’t have anything. Just leave us alone.”
    “There’s something else, Mr. Brakeman, we need to discuss.” DiCicco took the ball. “At approximately nine thirty tonight, Rowan Tripp and Gulliver Curry were fired on while walking on the base.”
    “That’s nothing to do with us.”
    “On the contrary, a Remington 700 special edition rifle was found hidden in the woods flanking the base. It has your name engraved in a plaque on the stock.”
    “You’re accusing me of trying to kill that woman? You come into my home, tell me my daughter was a liar and a whore and say I’m a killer?”
    “It’s your gun, Mr. Brakeman, and you recently threatened Ms. Tripp.”
    “My daughter was murdered , and she . . . My rifle’s in the gun safe. I haven’t had it out in weeks.”
    “If that’s the case, we’d like you to show us.” DiCicco got to her feet.
    “I’ll show you, then I want you out of my house.”
    He lunged up, stomped his way back to the kitchen to yank open a door that led to a basement.
    Or a man cave, DiCicco thought as she followed. Dead animal heads hung on the paneled wall in a wildlife menagerie that loomed over the oversized recliner and lumpy sofa. The table that fronted the sofa showed scars from years of boot heels and faced an enormous flat-screen television.
    The room boasted an ancient refrigerator she imagined held manly drinks, a worktable for loading shot into shells, a utility shelf that held boxes of clay pigeons, shooting vests, hunting caps—and, oddly, she thought, several framed family photos, including a large one of a pretty baby girl with one of those elasticized pink bows circling her bald head.
    A football lamp, a computer and piles of paperwork sat on a gray metal desk shoved in a corner. Above it hung a picture of Leo and several other men beside what she thought was a 747 aircraft, reminding her he worked at the airport as a mechanic.
    And against the side wall stood a big, orange-doored gun safe.
    Pumping off waves of heat and resentment, Leo marched to the safe, spun the dial for the combination, wrenched it open.
    DiCicco had no problems with guns; in fact she believed in them. But the small arsenal inside the safe had her eyes widening. Rifles, shotguns, handguns—bolt action, semiauto, revolvers, under and overs, scopes. All showing the gloss of the well-cleaned, well-oiled, well-tended weapon.
    But her scan didn’t turn up the weapon in question, and her hand edged toward her own as Leo Brakeman’s breathing went short and quick.
    “You have an excellent collection of firearms, Mr. Brakeman, but you seem to be missing a Remington 700.”
    “Somebody stole it.”
    Her hand closed over the butt of