Girls In White Dresses: A Detective London McKenna Novel Page 7

  We didn’t have that time. From the road, a telltale orange glow flickered from inside. The flames had already spread inside her home.

  Christ, what had he done? Was I too late?

  Had he already killed her and set the fire to cover the crime?

  I parked, throwing open the car’s door for cover.

  No shots fired. No movement shifted from the exterior of the house.

  I kept low, darting over the loose gravel on the secondary street. This area of Braddock was old, and the brick houses practically leaned on each other against the slope of the front yards. The old company homes had been here since the twenties, long enough for the orange brick to fade to brown, the chain link fences to rust, and the darkness to hide any number of men waiting for a kill.

  Louisa’s gate swung wide and got stuck in the mud. I darted up the crumbling steps. The front door popped open, trapped in a tug-of-war between the cold January air and the swirling heat erupting from inside the house.

  The front window’s glass had shattered, shot out in a violent explosion of gunfire. The shards spilled over the porch letting the pouring smoke snake out of the house.

  The gunshot was warning enough. But the fire?

  Whoever did this desired more than a quick scare. He wanted her dead.

  These old houses were built out of matchsticks and stuffed with asbestos. It wouldn’t go up immediately, but it sure as hell would smolder.

  I rushed to the door, coughing in the foul smoke creeping onto the porch.

  Louisa screamed from inside.

  Trapped.

  “Fire on the scene!” I radioed to dispatch. “Single victim trapped inside. Officer responding, attempting rescue. Notify the fire department that I’m entering the structure.”

  This was a terrible, dangerous idea.

  I sucked in a mouthful of the night’s cold air before plunging into hell.

  “Louisa!”

  The fire raged, but it hadn’t spread through the entire house. Black ravenous smoke churned in every corner, devouring the old wood. The spray of orange embers crashed through each room, leading the flames ever forward. The home wasn’t safe. I shouldn’t have gone inside.

  “Louisa! Answer me!” The smoke suffocated my words. “Where are you?”

  “Help!” Her scream came from the upstairs. “London!”

  The fire clawed through the basement, but it hadn’t burst to the upstairs yet. The toxic, agonizing smoke consumed what the flames did not. It coiled behind me, above me, through me, layering my body in soot, grime, and greasy regret for being so damn stupid.

  I crawled to the stairs, coughing the grit from my mouth. Louisa wasn’t in her bedroom. Or maybe she was. The smoke burned my eyes, and I squinted through the disaster that was her ransacked room. Bedding tossed off. Drawers ripped from the dresser. Clothing and paperwork littered the floor.

  A crash echoed from the next room.

  Running would save her. I only inhaled more acrid smoke. I fumbled into the bathroom, retched in the sink with a harsh cough, and grappled for any washcloth I could find in the dizzying mess of black-and-white tiles and too many hair care supplies plugged into the lone outlet above the pedestal vanity.

  The wet cloth helped me to breathe, but we’d be dead in minutes if we didn’t get out of the house and into fresh air. I crawled along the floor, diving inside the secondary bedroom.

  Louisa had trashed it. She stumbled, hacking and crying, into an overturned box of old papers. She dove at the box and slashed it open with bleeding fingers. Her frantic cry no longer begged for help.

  “I’m not going! I have to find it!” Her scream crackled like the roar of the fire downstairs. “Don’t make me leave! I have to find it!”

  And I wasn’t above dragging her ass out. “Let’s go!”

  Louisa shrugged me away, pirouetting off balance and crashing into a twin bed loaded with more boxes and old clothing. She lunged for another banker’s box, shrieking in joy as she grabbed a thick, leather-bound photo album. She pitched it into an open duffle bag and frantically crashed into another box.

  “I can’t go! I can’t leave!” She fell to the floor, gasping for polluted air between sobs. “This is all I have left of her!”

  “Of who?”

  “Anna!” Louisa rushed for another picture—a framed image of two teenaged girls sitting on the curb of a brick road. “He took her from me once. Now he wants to destroy everything else!”

  It must have been shock. She couldn’t see the danger. “Your house is burning down! We have to get out now!”

  “But my pictures!”

  What about her life?

  Her bag filled with bobbles and trinkets, framed photos and pictures. Nothing of her own. No purse. No cell.

  No more time.

  I zipped the duffle and tossed it over my shoulder. Louisa struggled, but a quick flick of my fingers to the pressure point on her wrist drove her to her knees.

  “We’re leaving! Stay close, and I’ll keep you safe!”

  “I can’t believe he found me…” Tears streamed over her face, staining her smudged, soot covered cheeks in a river of revealed, creamy skin. “He’s going to kill me.”

  And me too, if we were both tremendously unlucky.

  The lights cut, the lines melted by the fire. It didn’t matter. The hallway bled darkness from the thick smoke. Louisa gripped my hand, but I had her cling to my shirt instead. We’d lose each other in six inches of smoke.

  If we didn’t die first.

  The barber carpets frayed under my hand. It’d torch like a tinderbox the instant the flames leapt from the stairs to the hall. I scurried along the wall, passing the damp cloth to Louisa as her coughing slowed her crawling and racked her with a consuming shudder.

  A curtain of unrelenting smoke billowed up the stairs. Behind it, the flames surged along the banister. Heat blistered the paint on the walls. I leapt back, dodging a rush of superheated air.

  And all I felt was my cold, shivering sweat.

  We were too late.

  The fire trapped us in the narrow hallway, wedged between two bedrooms and a bathroom. The attic wouldn’t offer any refuge. And the creaking staircase was gone.

  We didn’t have much time. The house shuttered and groaned, threatening to combat the heat and fire the only way it knew how—collapsing down to smother the flames with hundred-year-old timbers and dust.

  If we lived to see that.

  Every breath laced with bitter ash. It’d only take one wrong gasp to split our lungs.

  I pushed Louisa towards the side room. This was a different neighborhood, but the floor plan matched that of my childhood home. Mom hated the weather-worn windows and the tin porch roof—worried someone would scale the gutter, cross over the awning, and break in through the bedroom windows.

  Just her luck—he’d grabbed me off the street.

  The double-paned windows had clouded with the white film of age and decades of condensation. The smoke followed. Louisa shut the door. I shouted for her to block the bottom crack with whatever fabric she could find. The coughing ripped through my lungs, hurting just as much as breathing, as not breathing, as moving.

  But I wasn’t done fighting yet.

  I fought against a window lock that hadn’t been opened since the seventies. My fingers grasped for it, lost their grip, and slammed into the window frame. A nail splintered up the middle, but Louisa’s frantic gasps hurt more. Hopefully my tears would wash away the burning soot before the smoky debris scratched my eyes as blind as James.

  “It’s stuck!” Louisa’s screaming only hyperventilated her. “Oh, God. We’re going to die!”

  I shouldered the window. The glass didn’t budge. Damn it. I grappled for my flashlight instead, smashing the base against the window’s lock.

  The hinge busted.

  The window didn’t move.

  Screw it. My heart already thudded too hard, too fast, and too terrified to stay in the house any longer. I pushed Lo
uisa away and grabbed the heaviest object I could find—an antique iron lamp with a decorative glass shade. I pitched the shade, yanked the cord from the wall, and crashed the base into the window.

  The window shattered, but our fresh air didn’t last. The smoke dragged outside, sucked up by the clean night’s chill. The iron base made quick work of the remaining shards of glass still imbedded in the sill.

  Louisa wasn’t wearing shoes. It’d hurt, but at least she’d live. Coughing and gagging, I yanked a comforter off the bed and laid it over the glass. She bolted for the window.

  The ominous orange glow consumed the stairs. The house groaned, and a new roar of heat and destruction sucked away my last bit of strength. I shoved her through the sill and dove outside, catching my slacks on a jagged piece of glass. The material tore over my thigh, but it hadn’t cut me too deeply. I could still run.

  We had no other choice.

  Louisa clutched her bag and scampered over an unsteady awning, pieced together with more pine needles, leaves, and muck than solid aluminum. Our steps rattled the thin metal.

  A surge of heat and burst of unrepentant flame launched out of the window. We dove over the awning, flailing backwards as the uneven, hail-dented rooftop offered no traction. Louisa tumbled. I leapt for her, grabbing her arm before she dropped ten feet onto the cement retaining wall.

  A couple gulps of air, my strength returned. The flashing lights of my responding backup shaded the yard in reds and blues, just in time for the wail of the firetrucks to squeal from the station only a mile away. Louisa’s bag fell first. I guided her to the edge, holding her arms as she shimmied off the gutter and lowered her down. She collapsed in a wailing heap entirely too close to the house.

  I followed, grimacing as the roof’s grime smeared over my legs, the cut, and the rest of my clothes. But I’d rather clean a wound than patch a burn.

  I hung over the edge of the roof, took a breath, and hopped to the cement. Louisa reached for me, and I dragged her away from the house as she sputtered and threw up in the grass.

  “He found us!” She repeated the terror-stricken cry over and over. “He found us!”

  I held her close and radioed to the responding officers. Three squad cars pulled alongside the road, making way for the first of the fire trucks on scene. The firefighters burst into action, and I led Louisa to a nearby patrol car. They didn’t have oxygen, but they tossed a blanket over her shivering frame.

  “No one can get you now,” I said. “You’re safe.”

  “You don’t understand!” Her eyes widened, the whites wide and frightened against the dark stain of soot on her face. “Detective, this isn’t my house!”

  My stomach clenched. “Who’s is it?”

  “This is my parents’ house! They died six months ago. I’ve been trying to clean it out!” She grabbed my hand. “He’s come back here!”

  “Why?”

  “Because of Anna!” Louisa stared at her family’s burning home and clutched the bag of photographs to her chest. “He wants to destroy everything about her. He’d make us forget she ever existed! If no one remembers her, he can keep her forever.”

  I tasted the smoke, the ash, and now a profoundly bitter truth.

  The man who had taken Louisa’s sister was remorseless, methodical, and homicidal. He’d stop at nothing to protect what he thought was his.

  Even if that meant murder.

  But Louisa’s voice hushed with a new excitement, bumbling with chills as the night plunged us from the hellish inferno into the frostbitten January air.

  “That means she’s still alive. My sister is still alive. He hasn’t killed her. She’s been alive all this time. Fifteen years.” She actually smiled. “There’s still hope.”

  No. There wasn’t.

  I wished the fire had taken Louisa’s every memory. Destroyed every picture. Burnt every memento. Reduced the home to ash.

  Anna might have been alive—but she’d lived with a psychopathic bastard for fifteen years.

  Fifteen years of captivity.

  Of abuse.

  Of worse.

  Anna died long ago. What remained was just a shell of survival. A body tested, bent, and broken.

  Louisa might have hoped her sister had lived all this time, but I knew truth.

  Just as I had done so long ago, Anna would have prayed for death.

  9

  I hate silence. There’s enough silence in death. So talk to me, London.

  Talk to me, or I’ll make you scream.

  -Him

  A funeral made for a lousy interrogation.

  Not that I expected any answers out of Nina Martin now. The body wasn’t talking. The family had nothing left to give.

  For two years, the girl had lived a double life. No law enforcement agency had located her. No media outlet reported on her. No compassionate passerby ever recognized her.

  And maybe she hadn’t wanted to be found?

  Or maybe Jonah Goodman decided that for her…

  And their baby.

  I attended the services much as I hated funerals. I’d had enough grieving in my life—mostly for people who thought me dead. Nina’s friends and family left before I dared to confront my grief, selfish as it was.

  My tears weren’t mourning the girl who died…I cried for the runaway I hadn’t found.

  I sat on a bench near the grave site. Cold and concrete and exposed to every chilly gust of air that covered Jefferson Cemetery. The groundskeepers waited until the afternoon to ride in on their backhoe, preparing to cover the frostbitten ground with the displaced frozen dirt.

  This was the part of the burial no one saw. The moment no one should have seen. It wasn’t a final rest. The earth opened up and swallowed.

  Lost to the uncaring earth and buried forever.

  Not a way I wanted to go.

  The backhoe’s tracks mixed mud into the pristine snow and trampled a path between other silent graves. The machine roared with that diesel rumble of hard work. The first bucket of dirt covered the grave. I looked away, but it hadn’t been sunshine and rainbows discovering her body either.

  If I had been at the station or sitting in the funeral pews, I might have blamed the stinging of my eyes and nose on the cold air. But alone, why hide the misery? No one could see me. No one would know how badly this missing had affected me.

  For once, I didn’t have to hide behind dark humor or pretend she was just another stiff.

  I could be me.

  And I could be sad.

  And I wouldn’t have to worry about how my fellow officers would judge me.

  It wasn’t because I was a woman. Enough of us had entered the force. Hell, women commanded two of the city’s enforcement districts. The reason I faked stoicism and ignored that past damage because I was London McKenna. The girl who escaped. And if I ever wanted to graduate from victim to partner, I had to prove I could handle these types of situations. The familiar ones—kidnappings, abductions, abuse.

  I’d been luckier than Nina Martin. Rachel Goodman. Whoever she decided that she was.

  My hand’s dressing caught on the bench—a quick wrap over an inconvenient cut on my palm caused from the frantic escape of Louisa Prescott’s home. The wound was a hell of a lot better than a burn. I picked at the binding. A fresh line of crimson looked black in the brightness of the afternoon. I squinted against the sun as it beat against the fresh snow. The cut would need to be rebandaged. Last thing I wanted was an infection on my dominant gun hand.

  It wasn’t fair. Nina had lost a hell of a lot more blood than me. Runaway cases weren’t supposed to end like this. Sometimes the kids needed a break from home. Other times they snuck out with friends. Met a boyfriend. Find a biological parent. Usually, the kids got in more trouble than they deserved, but most times, they came back.

  Those other times? I redressed my wounds at their funerals.

  I pushed from the bench to retrieve the first-aid kit I kept in my car. The supplies were usually low—the Neos
porin and band-aids always running out on me. I called it clumsiness. James preferred death wish. Never said if it was a joke or diagnosis. I never asked.

  I wrapped fresh gauze and a bandage over the cut and snapped the kit shut. I had nowhere else to be—crawling through a fire had earned me a personal day. Not something I’d recommend to the other officers. Louisa had gone to the hospital overnight. No better time than the present to get her detailed statement.

  My keys scraped the ignition when a white van rumbled down the narrow path, parking off the side of the road near the grave site.

  I checked the time. Three o’clock? The funeral home had no other services scheduled today, and the gravesite was deserted long before the groundskeepers began to tuck Nina’s final blanket over the coffin.

  Who was coming to pay their respects now?

  Jefferson Cemetery had buried half of Pittsburgh and the surrounding South Hills for nearly one hundred years. The van might have parked close by to visit any number of family members buried over the property. But it’d take one hell of a dedicated family to visit a grave in single digit weather. Christ, I ached to be one of the damned dead burning in hell just to warm up my toes.

  The van opened, and swirls of black emerged from the seats.

  Dresses. Mourning wear.

  Donned by six different women.

  No…girls. Teenagers, if they were lucky.

  The girls had cloaked themselves in black—boots, skirts and dresses. Even black shawls wrapped over their hair. They huddled together in the cold of the parking lot, stomping their shoes against the salt-stained pavement. They stared only at the ground.

  Waiting?

  For who?

  I squinted. The black made some of the girls indistinguishable from the others, but a few stood out.

  How could they not?

  Two of the six were pregnant.

  Heavily pregnant.

  Their bellies tugged at the dresses, but their draped shawls failed to cover the bumps. Nothing was hiding those babies except a doctor and a pair of forceps.

  The girls kept their heads down as the wind kicked up, but even once the icy pain died down, they averted their eyes. And then I saw why.