Arrow's Rest by Joel Scott (best books to read all time .TXT) 📗

force of the explosion, and what remained behind was an undefined pile of steaming black embers interspersed with scorched and blackened objects that had once been appliances. Where the porch had stood, a yellow enameled wood stove was tipped over on its side with empty holes where the lids once sat. Even the detached woodshed off in the corner of the lot had been caught up and incinerated in the inferno. It was already too late when the first crew arrived, and most of their efforts had been spent on hosing down the adjacent houses to prevent them from catching fire as well.

Clarke stood to the side and waited for the chief to finish his string of mild “no comment” and “too early to say” to the aggressive reporter and her cameraman. Her eyes were red and her hasty lipstick crooked, and she was trying her best to disguise how pissed off she was at being dragged from her lover’s bed at this ungodly hour of the morning, and into a second-rate neighbourhood to boot. The chief, a man she knew well from previous on-site confrontations (and who, once upon a time, God forgive her, she had let comfort her after a particularly gruesome apartment arson), wasn’t helping.

“Assholes,” the chief said to Clarke, when the reporters finally packed up their gear and left. He pulled out a pack of cigarettes and offered one to Clarke.

“You’d think I’d know better after all the mattress and sofa fires I’ve seen,” he said as he lit it. He sucked in a lungful of smoke and gazed bleakly out over the charred remains of the house.

“But not this time,” Clarke said. He and the chief had attended a lot of fires together over the years, most of them before they’d achieved their current ranks.

“No, not this time. There won’t be anything official until the Fire Marshal issues his report in a couple of days, but it was arson beyond a doubt,” the chief said. “First responders could still smell the gasoline. Thrown into both ground-level bedrooms in bottles, Molotov cocktail style. One of the boys cut his boot on a shard of its glass. Sorry to say no chance at all for the old guy, he never made it out of his bed. Lady was lucky she was in the bathroom at the time. If you can call any of this luck. What is this all about anyway?”

“Too early to say,” Clarke said, mimicking the chief.

“Fuck off, you asshole,” the chief said affably, and walked over and crouched down beside one of his new guys, the one who’d spewed his guts out when he discovered the blackened remains of the old man curled up tight on his bed in the fetal position.

Danny put his cell phone back in his pocket as Clarke approached and shook his head.

“Jared says Annie’s still in intensive care,” he said. Jared had been the first member of the family at the scene and had gone to the hospital with Annie in the ambulance.

“They won’t know one way or the other for a few days,” Danny went on. “Even if she does pull through, there’s going to be some permanent damage to her lungs. It’s a miracle she wasn’t killed outright.”

Like Joseph, Clarke thought. The two men avoided looking over to the far corner of the house where Joseph’s bedroom had been. As if by not acknowledging it, it hadn’t happened.

A small tent had been erected, and inside it the coroner’s team was working over something once human, slowly clearing away small bits of debris and working their way down through the layers of ash and rubble with the care and patience of archeologists. Clarke had spoken with them before Danny returned from the hospital and they’d confirmed it was an average-sized male, but that was all they could say for the moment. The corpse had been near the centre of one explosion, and all the clothing and most of the skin had been incinerated by the blast. Positive identification would have to wait. Until the Otto Topsy, sprang unbidden into Clarke’s mind and he stifled a snort. Sometimes cop humour shocked even him.

“I was at a friend’s,” Danny said. “Poker night. Or I might have been here as well. Game ran late and I slept on their couch. Have they found Sinbad yet? He usually sleeps in Joseph’s room. Joseph leaves the window open so he can come in and out. I wonder why Sinbad didn’t hear them. Maybe he was away. He sometimes hunts at night.” Danny spoke disjointedly, without thought. Thinking was too hard just yet.

“They haven’t found the dog,” Clarke said, “but there’s still a lot of debris to search through. It’s suspected arson at the moment which makes Joseph’s death murder, so they’ll go slow and lock everything down. It could be days before we hear anything definite. I’ll tell the neighbourhood patrol cars to keep an eye out for Sinbad just in case. There’s nothing for you to do here, why don’t you head back up to the hospital and join the rest of them? Or try and get some sleep — it’s been a long night. I’m heading back to the hospital to interview Jared. Let me give you a lift. As soon as I have any news, I’ll be in touch. You have my word on that.”

An old experienced cop, Clarke could cheerfully lie bald-faced with the best of them. The last thing he was going to do during the investigation was keep Jared and Danny in the loop. They were his friends, but he knew their innate capacity for violence, and under these circumstances silence was the best policy.

Deep down Clarke felt there wasn’t a single member of the family who wasn’t capable of committing murder under the right circumstances. In fact, with Joseph incinerated and Annie grievously burned, they might even consider it their solemn duty.

That group of potential assassins included Jared, who Clarke thought might well be the most