Tim Crocker liked being a fireman.
He liked the guys he worked with. He liked putting out fires. He liked saving people and their homes. Hell, he even liked getting cats down from trees. What he didn’t like was looking at people who’d burned to death.
The sight of a body—or in this case four bodies—burnt black beyond recognition, their heads turned into skulls, their mouths open from their last screams, their backs arched from their final struggles … well, he just hated it. And the smell. Every time this happened, he couldn’t eat barbecue for a month.
The fire had started in a bedroom in an apartment on the third floor. Then the ceiling above the third floor unit had collapsed and two people sleeping on the fourth floor had dropped right down into the bedroom of the two people who’d been sleeping on the third floor. So he had four bodies—two couples—and the man and woman from the fourth floor were stacked on top of the couple from the third.
Crocker’s guys had done a good job. They’d managed to put the fire out less than an hour after they got the alarm, and although three other units in the apartment building had been heavily damaged, no one else had died and they’d managed to save the building. It was the cause of the fire that was bothering Crocker. He wasn’t the arson investigator but he’d been around a long time, and he was pretty sure that the fire hadn’t been caused by a natural gas explosion or somebody who’d fallen asleep with a cigarette burning. There had been an explosion, though—strong enough to blow out a couple windows in the building next door—and Crocker thought that whatever had exploded had been attached to a container of something flammable. In other words, a damn incendiary device had gone off in this apartment.
So they weren’t dealing with some semi-harmless firefly, some guy who got his rocks off watching buildings burn, or some schmuck trying to collect on the insurance. No, this was something else; he didn’t know what, but whatever was going on it wasn’t his problem. The cops and the arson investigator would have to sort that out.
“Hey, Chief,” a voice said.
Crocker turned. It was a cop, a young guy with ears like pitcher handles under his cap. Crocker wasn’t a fire chief, but there was no point telling the cop that; the cops always called the senior fireman on the scene chief.
“You shouldn’t be up here,” Crocker said. “That floor you’re standing on could give way.”
“I talked to the manager,” the cop said, “and we know who three of these people are.”
“Yeah?” Crocker said.
“The couple from the fourth floor, their names were Sharon and Pat Montgomery. The gal was a teacher at some middle school and her husband worked at Macy’s over in Arlington.”
Just a couple of ordinary people who had the bad luck to be sleeping in the wrong place at the wrong time, Crocker thought.
“Who owns this apartment?” Crocker said.
“A young gal named Jennifer Talbot. She was a secretary, and that’s why I came up here. You’re never gonna guess who she worked for.”
“Well, who is it?” Crocker said. He wished the damn cop would just get to the point and get out of here. He wanted to get away from the smell.
“Broderick,” the cop said.
“You mean Senator Broderick?” Crocker said.
“Yeah.”
Oh, boy, Crocker thought, and took out his cell phone. He needed to tell his boss what the cop had just said, but before he dialed, he asked, “What about the fourth person, the one who was sleeping with Talbot?”
“We don’t know yet,” the cop said. “The manager, he said Talbot wasn’t married and he didn’t think she had a boyfriend, although he said she was one good-looking young lady.”
“Well, you guys need to figure out who he is,” Crocker said, “because …”
Before Crocker could finish telling the jug-eared cop that they were most likely dealing with a homicide, another cop burst into the room, panting, like he’d just run up the stairs. His name tag said WILMONT.
“Artie!” Wilmont said to the cop who’d been talking to Crocker. “We got … oh, man, you’re not gonna fuckin’ believe it!”
“Well, what is it?” Crocker said. What the hell was it with these cops? And what the hell were they all doing up here?
“I was down in the parking lot,” Wilmont said, “looking around, and there was a car parked behind the car of the gal who owns this apartment. You know, blocking her in like she let whoever it was park there. Anyway, I figured maybe I could find out who the guy was, so I slim-jimmed the door open and checked the registration.”
“Well, goddammit, who is it?” Crocker said.
Within twenty minutes, a dozen FBI agents, two carloads of brass from the D.C. Metro Police, four guys from the Secret Service, and Tim Crocker’s boss’s boss were there.
Somebody had assassinated Senator William Davis Broderick.