The Bone Collector

and reached for the knob to the basement door. She stopped suddenly.
    Come on, girl, think better! Feel a door before opening it. If it’s too hot and you let oxygen into a superheated room it’ll ignite and the backdraft’ll fry your ass good. She touched the wood. It was scorching hot.
    Then thought: But what the hell else can I do?
    Spitting on her hand, she gripped the knob fast, twisting it open and releasing it just before the burn seared her palm.
    The door burst open and a cloud of smoke and sparks shot outward.
    “Anybody down there?” she called and started down.
    The lower stairs were burning. She blasted them with a short burst of carbon dioxide and leapt into the murky basement. She broke through the second-to-last step, pitching forward. The extinguisher clattered to the floor as she grabbed the railing just in time to save her leg from snapping.
    Pulling herself out of the broken step, Sachs squinted through the haze. The smoke wasn’t as bad down here—it was rising—but the flames were raging all around her.The extinguisher had rolled under a burning table. Forget it! She ran through the smoke.
    “Hello?” she shouted.
    No answer.
    Then remembered that Unsub 823 used duct tape; he liked his vics silent.
    She kicked in a small doorway and looked inside the boiler room. There was a door leading outside but burning debris blocked it completely. Beside it stood the fuel tank, which was now surrounded by flames.
    It won’t explode, Sachs remembered from the academy—the lecture on arson. Fuel oil doesn’t explode. Kick aside the debris and push the door open. Clear your escape route. Then go look for the woman and the girl.
    She hesitated, watching the flames roll over the side of the oil tank.
    It won’t explode, it won’t explode.
    She started forward, edging toward the door.
    It won’t—
    The tank suddenly puffed out like a heated soda can and split down the middle. The oil squirted into the air, igniting in a huge orange spume. A fiery pool formed on the floor and flowed toward Sachs.
    Won’t explode. Okay. But it burns pretty fucking well. She leapt back through the door, slammed it shut. So much for her escape route.
    Backing toward the stairs, choking now, keeping low, looking for any signs of Carole and Pammy. Could 823 have changed the rules? Could he have given up on basements and put these vics in the church attic?
    Crack.
    A fast look upward. She saw a large oak beam, rippling with flames, start to fall.
    With a scream Sachs leapt aside, but tripped and landed hard on her back, staring at the huge falling bar of wood streaking directly at her face and chest. Instinctively she held her hands up.
    A huge bang as the beam landed on a child’s Sunday-school chair. It stopped inches from Sachs’s head. She crawled out from underneath and rolled to her feet.
    Looking around the room, peering through the darkening smoke.
    Hell no, she thought suddenly. I’m not losing another one. Choking, Sachs turned back to the fire and staggered toward the one corner she hadn’t checked.
    As she jogged forward a leg shot out from behind a file cabinet and tripped her.
    Hands flying outward, Sachs landed face down inches from a pool of burning oil. She rolled to her side, drawing her weapon and swinging it into the panicked face of a blond woman struggling to sit up.
    Sachs pulled the gag off her mouth and the woman spit black mucus. She gagged for a moment, a deep, dying sound.
    “Carole Ganz?”
    She nodded.
    “Your daughter?” Sachs cried.
    “Not . . . here. My hands! The cuffs.”
    “No time. Come on.” Sachs cut Carole’s ankles free with her switchblade.
    It was then that she saw, against the wall by the window, a melting plastic bag.
    The planted clues! The ones that told where the little girl would be. She stepped toward it. But with a deafening bang the door to the boiler room cracked in half, spewing a six-inch tidal wave of burning oil over the floor, surrounding the bag, which disintegrated instantly.
    Sachs stared for a moment and then heard the woman’s scream. All the stairs were blazing now. Sachs knocked the fire extinguisher out from under the smoldering table. The handle and nozzle had melted away and the metal canister was too hot to grasp. With her knife she cut a patch off her uniform blouse and lifted the crackling extinguisher by its neck, flung it to the top of the burning stairs. It staggered for a moment, like an uncertain bowling pin, and then started