When we drove into the office parking lot, the captain greeted us with the chopper, engine running, waiting in a section of cleared-out parking lot. “We’re ready for you,” he said. “The pilot has the coordinates for the plantation. Says it shouldn’t take more than twenty minutes once you’re in the air.”
“Have you heard from Buckshot?” I asked as he ran alongside us.
“No, and we’ve been trying to reach him,” the captain said, appearing worried. “I can’t understand why he’s not answering.”
“David’s been calling, too,” I said. “Same result: the phone just rings, then goes to voice mail.”
“I called the locals,” the captain explained. “Buckshot requested backup half an hour ago, but they couldn’t spare any. Those towns are in a mandatory evacuation area, and all their personnel are on the street, directing hurricane traffic.”
“Damn,” I said as the captain backed up to get out of the way. He waved at the pilot, who pushed down the throttle, and we were off. The chopper hovered briefly over U.S. 290 and Houston’s 610 Loop, both clogged with traffic streaming from every direction, cars filled with folks desperate to flee the hurricane. Then we took a sharp turn, heading south to Brazoria County and the Westover Plantation. As far as we could see below, on all the streets and freeways, traffic crawled.
“Looks like we did the right thing calling for the chopper,” David observed. “None of this traffic is going anywhere.”
“Let’s just hope we’re in time,” I said, although I wasn’t sure for what. All I knew was that the man I’d been introduced to as Professor Alex Benoit was an impostor and that he could be involved in Joey Warner’s kidnapping. That Buckshot wasn’t answering his phone worried me. By now, he must have realized we were anxious to reach him. Why didn’t he call?
Beneath us, the city was a tangled web of freeways as we flew south, toward the plantation. The minutes dragged, and Houston’s trees and neighborhoods gave way to green fields scarred by country roads. Then, in the distance, we saw something odd. The pilot pointed at a plume of thick black smoke rising and drifting off in the clear blue sky, like the exhaust from a colossal chimney. “That should be right about where we’re going,” the pilot said. “What’s going on?”
“Don’t know,” David said, glancing over at me. “But let’s make a loop above it, see if we can find out.”
We flew on, approaching the fire, and the pilot maneuvered around the smoke, skirting close enough to the source to see but not so close that we’d feel the heat or get sucked into the currents of hot air. As we passed the source, we looked down and saw bright yellow-and-orange flames coming through the roof and licking the sides of a great house. “It’s the mansion,” I confirmed. “The Westover Plantation.”
As we cleared the smoke, I noticed a black vehicle parked behind the burning building, under an aged oak tree. “Buckshot’s Suburban,” I said with a sense of dread. “Over there.”
We landed in an open field, and David and I barely waited for touchdown before we jumped out and sprinted toward the burning mansion and Buckshot’s truck, guns drawn. The greedy flames crackled and tore away at the nearly two-hundred-year-old structure, destroying what had survived freezes and hurricanes, droughts and floods. “You go to the right,” David shouted as he ran to the left. I circled, gun drawn, my face flushed from the heat radiated by the blaze. Heart pounding, I peered inside, hoping to make out a figure emerging, someone alive. But I saw only fire and the mansion’s toppled brick walls. The house was engulfed in flames, and anyone inside had to have perished. We saw no one on the grounds. I looked for Buckshot to run to us, but he didn’t appear, and the only vehicle was his Suburban, with his silver-belly Stetson, 9 mm pistol, and cell phone abandoned in the front passenger seat.
“Damn it, where’s Buckshot?” I asked David, who stood surveying the property, watching. By then, sirens whined in the distance. The pilot had called in the fire, and firefighters in yellow-and-red ladder trucks arrived, unloading hoses and quickly going to work. So little remained of the house, so much of it had already been destroyed, that it took little more than an hour to reduce it to a smoldering mass of charred black soggy ruins that belched from smoldering pockets. The captain still hadn’t heard from Buckshot, neither had we, and as the minutes passed, my last remaining grasp on hope gave way. An ambulance sat nearby, the EMTs waiting as we were, but for what? Anyone caught in that fire surely died.
Yet as the firefighters walked the sodden and charred ruins, no one called out to announce discovering a body. Was it hidden beneath the debris, under a fallen ceiling or a collapsed brick wall? The lead firefighter, his face blackened by soot, walked toward me. “We didn’t find anyone. Your ranger could be in there, but we’ll have to bring in the cadaver dogs when it cools to look. Can’t right now, though. We’re spread thin with the hurricane, and we’ve got to leave,” he said. “We’ve got another call.”
“Where?” I asked.
“Down the road a piece,” he said. “Somebody called 911. There’s a body on fire.”
“Come on,” I said to David. “We’re going.”
We hopped onto one of the fire trucks, the siren wailing, and we held on as it sped down the long gravel driveway and then swung left onto the road. The ambulance followed, and we continued down deserted streets. This was shallow coastal plain, prone to flooding, and the folks who lived nearby were mostly already on the road, heading north or west, away from the Gulf and the storm. Two more turns, and minutes later we stopped abruptly at the intersection of two country roads surrounded by trees and fields. Out in the Gulf the hurricane churned, but the only wind was a stifling hot breeze, and the sky was picture-postcard blue. The putrid smell of burning flesh coated my nostrils and burned my throat.
In the center of the intersection, something flamed.
On closer inspection, I saw the outline of a body on its left side, its arms and legs raised as if ready to fight. I’d seen this stance before with fire victims. The medical folks call it a pugilist’s pose, caused when muscles contract from intense heat. Whoever it was, we’d arrived too late. The burning remains were completely still, the only motion the black smoke drifting upward. A firefighter rushed forward with an extinguisher, and David and I fell into line behind him. The man unleashed a funnel of cloudy discharge, quickly snuffing out the still burning flames. What remained was the stench of burned flesh and a disfigured, charred corpse. The hands, eyes, and most of the face, including the nose, looked like ash and crumbled off like bits of spent charcoal.
“Buckshot?” David whispered.
“Oh, God, no,” I said, covering my mouth with my hand. I could barely stand to look at the blackened corpse. It sickened me to think he could be my fellow ranger and my friend. Still, I had to know. Drawn to its side, I knelt beside the still body. Although the limbs and face were burned beyond recognition, nearly all the clothes reduced to ash, the trunk of the body, especially the area flush with the ground, on its left side, appeared unburned.
“He must have already been dead when the fire was lit,” David said. When I looked up at him, questioning, he said, “From appearances he was dumped here and didn’t try to run away.”
“Do you have a pen?” I asked. Staring at the body as if stunned, he didn’t respond, and I asked again. “David, a pen.”
I took the black ballpoint offered and pushed away fragments of a charred sport coat. The one Buckshot had worn that morning, when I last saw him, was lightweight and a camel color, one more befitting summer but practical for our fall heat wave. There was no telling what color this coat had been before the fire. As the fabric bits fell away, I saw peeking out from underneath the dead man’s torso the burned remains of a tooled leather belt, an empty holster, and a half-melted silver badge, like mine, a lone star surrounded by a wagon wheel. My heart drilling against my rib cage, I stared at the body, trying to think of a way I could be wrong.
“It’s Buckshot,” I whispered. “It has to be.” Once I’d formed the words, I couldn’t move. I simply felt incapable of it.
“Come on, Sarah,” David said, gently urging me back to my feet. “I’ll call the captain. You need to go sit down on the fire truck and wait.”
Slowly, I made my way back up onto my feet, but I couldn’t take my eyes off the body. Buckshot was my friend. We’d worked cases, eaten meals, and laughed together. When my husband, Bill, died, he and the captain went with Mom and me to the mortuary to plan the funeral; we sat on a bench together, and I cried inconsolably on his shoulder. I was the one who got drunk with him when Peggy, his wife, took off with his good friend. Buckshot and I once spent a full forty-eight hours together on a stakeout, taking turns sleeping in my Tahoe, and afterward joked that we should get married because we never argued.
David guided me to the fire truck, and for just a moment, I thought about asking why anyone would do that to my friend. Then I remembered something I’d realized long ago: there are people in this world who don’t need a reason.