Chasing Fire Read online

  “Share.”

  “You said you didn’t know Dolly that well, but you had definite opinions about her. Jim died last August. We’re moving toward July. Is she the type to be without a man for a year?”

  Rowan opened her mouth, shut it again, then sat back. “No. And why didn’t I think of that? No, she’d never go this long without a man. There’s a stronger case for that knowing that her whole I-found-Jesus deal was bogus.”

  “Maybe the current guy’s in Florence. Maybe that’s why she got work there, or said she did. Or maybe they just met up in a motel on Twelve or thereabouts.”

  “Lovers’ quarrel, and he kills her. If there’s a he. There had to be—it’s Dolly. Or her father found out, and so on. But if she had one on the line in Florence, why come back here anyway? Why not just go there, be with him? Because he’s married,” Rowan said before Gull could comment. “She fooled around with married men all the time.”

  “If so, it’s more likely he’s in Missoula. She came back here, got work here at the base. She’d want to be close to whoever she was sleeping with. Say, he’s married, or there’s some other reason why they can’t be open about a relationship. Then you have the meet-up somewhere away from where people know you, would recognize you.”

  “You’re good at this.”

  “It’s like playing a game. You work the levels.” He took her hand again. “Except it’s not characters, it’s real people.”

  “It still feels better to play it through. And here’s another thing. Dolly wasn’t nearly as smart or clever as she liked to think. If she was sleeping with somebody, she’d have dropped hints. Maybe to Marg. More likely to Lynn. She was going to church, so maybe to somebody she made friends with there.”

  “It would be interesting to find out.”

  “It would.” She needed to move again, do more than think. “Why don’t we go outside, see what’s going on?”

  “Good idea.”

  “Quinniock likes me, I think. Maybe he’ll give us a couple of nibbles.”

  When they went out, she spotted Barry heading toward his patrol car. “Hey, Barry. Is Lieutenant Quinniock around?”

  “He and Agent DiCicco just left. Do you need something, Ro?”

  She gave Gull a quick glance. “I could sure use a little reassurance. I’d sleep better tonight.”

  “I can tell you the weapon we found is Leo Brakeman’s. The lieutenant and DiCicco are on their way to his place to talk to him.”

  “Talk.”

  “That’s the first step. I had to back up Little Bear when he told them Leo’s a damn good shot. I don’t know if it makes you feel better or not, but I don’t think he was aiming for you.”

  “It doesn’t make me feel worse.”

  “He was wrong blaming you for what happened to Dolly. Some people just can’t get their lives together.”

  “I meant to ask Lieutenant Quinniock if they found out where she’d gotten work. Maybe somebody she knew or met there killed her.”

  Barry hesitated, then shrugged. “It doesn’t look like she was working. It’s nothing for you to worry about, Ro.”

  “Barry.” She put a hand on his arm. “Come on. I’m in the middle of this whether I want to be or not. What was she doing coming back from down that way if she didn’t have a job?”

  “I can’t say for sure, and I shouldn’t say at all.” He puffed out his cheeks as she kept looking into his eyes. “All I know is the police artist is scheduled to work with somebody tomorrow. The word is it’s a maid from some motel down off Twelve. Whoever he is, if we can ID him, the lieutenant’s going to want to talk to him.”

  “Thanks, Barry.” She moved in to hug him. “Erin got lucky with you. Tell her I said so.”

  “I’ll do that. And you don’t worry. We’re looking out for you.”

  Gull slipped his hands in his pockets as Barry got in the car. “You didn’t come down on him for saying he was looking out for you.”

  “Cops are supposed to look out for everybody. Besides, Barry gets a pass. He was my first. Actually we were each other’s firsts, a scenario I don’t necessarily recommend unless both participants have a solid sense of humor. That was several years before he met Erin, his wife, and the mother of his two kids.”

  “My first was Becca Rhodes. She was a year older and experienced. It went quite smoothly.”

  “Are you still friends with Becca Rhodes?”

  “I haven’t seen her since high school.”

  “See? Humor wins out. Dolly never worked in Florence,” Rowan added. “Our little what-if session hit a mark. A man, a motel—possibly a murderer.” She tipped her head back, found the sky. “I feel less useless and victimized. That counts for a lot. I’m going to talk to Lynn first chance I get, just to see if Dolly dropped any crumbs.”

  Time to put it away for the night, Gull decided, and draped an arm over her shoulder. “Pick one out for me. A constellation. Not the Dippers. Even I can find them. Usually.”

  “Okay. Then you’ll spot Ursa Minor there.” She took his hand, used it to outline the connection of stars. “Now, the stars in this one aren’t very bright, but if you follow that west, connect the dots, going south and over—it winds around the Little Dipper, see? There. You’ve got Draco. The dragon. It seems apt for a couple of smoke jumpers.”

  “Yeah, I get it. Pretty cool. Now that we’ve got our constellation, we just need to decide on our song.”

  He lightened her load, she thought. No doubt about it. “You’re so full of it, Gulliver.”

  “Only because I have so much depth.”

  “Hell.” She turned into him, indulged them both with a deep, dreamy kiss. “Let’s go to bed.”

  “You read my mind.”

  “DID YOU FIND who killed my girl?” Leo demanded the minute he opened the door.

  “Let’s go inside and sit down,” Quinniock suggested.

  He and DiCicco had discussed their approach on the drive, and, as agreed, Quinniock took the lead. “Mrs. Brakeman, we’d like to talk with both of you.”

  Irene Brakeman linked her hands together at her heart. “It’s about Dolly. You know who hurt Dolly.”

  “We’re pursuing several avenues of investigation.” DiCicco kept her voice clipped. It wasn’t quite good cop/bad cop, but more cold cop/warm cop. “There are some matters we need to clear up with you. To start with, Mr. Brakeman—”

  Quinniock touched a hand to her arm. “Why don’t we all sit down? I know it’s late, but we’d appreciate if you gave us some time.”

  “We answered questions. We let you go through Dolly’s room, through her things.” Leo continued to bar the door with his knuckles white on the knob. “We were going up to bed. If you don’t have anything new to tell us, just leave us in peace.”

  “There is no peace until we know who did this to Dolly.” Irene’s voice pitched, broke. “Go up to bed if you want to,” Irene told her husband with a tinge of disgust. “I’ll talk to the police. Go on upstairs and shake your fists at God, see if that helps. Please, come in.”

  She moved forward, a small woman who pushed her burly husband aside so that he stepped back, his head hung down like a scolded child’s.

  “I’m just tired, Reenie. I’m so damn tired. And you’re wearing yourself to the bone, tending the baby and worrying.”

  “We’re not asked to lift more than we can carry. So we’ll lift this. Do you want some coffee, or tea, or anything?”

  “Don’t you worry about that, Mrs. Brakeman.” Quinniock took a seat in the living room on a chair covered with blue and red flowers. “I know this is hard.”

  “We can’t even bury her yet. They said you need to keep her awhile more, so we can’t give our daughter a Christian burial.”

  “We’ll release her to you as soon as we can. Mrs. Brakeman, the last time we spoke, you said Dolly got a job in Florence, as a cook.”

  “That’s right.” She twisted her fingers together in her lap, a working woman’s hands wearing a plain gold
band. “She felt like she didn’t want to take a job in Missoula after what went on at the base. I think she was embarrassed. She was embarrassed, Leo,” Irene snapped as he started to object. “Or she should have been.”

  “They never treated her decent there.”

  “You know that’s not true.” She spoke more quietly now, briefly touched a hand to his. “You can’t take her word as gospel now that she’s gone when you know Dolly didn’t tell the real truth half the time or more. They gave her a chance there,” she said to Quinniock when Leo lapsed into brooding silence. “And Reverend Latterly and I vouched for her. She shamed herself, and us. She got work down there in Florence,” Irene continued after she’d firmed quivering lips. “She was a good cook, our girl. It was something she liked, even when she was just a little thing. She could be a good worker when she put her mind to it. The hours were hard, especially with the baby, but the pay was good, and she said she could go places.”

  “You didn’t remember the name of the restaurant when we spoke before,” DiCicco prompted.

  “I guess she never mentioned it.” Irene pressed her lips together again. “I was angry with her about what she did to Rowan Tripp, and embarrassed my own self. It’s hard knowing Dolly and I were at odds when she died. It’s hard knowing that.”

  “I have to tell you, both of you, that Agent DiCicco and I have contacted or gone to every restaurant, diner, coffee shop between here and Florence, and Dolly didn’t work in any of them.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “She wasn’t working in a restaurant,” DiCicco said briskly. “She didn’t get a job, didn’t leave here the night she died to go to work.”

  “Hell she didn’t,” Leo protested.

  “On the night she died, and on the afternoon prior, the evening prior to that, Dolly spent several hours in a room at the Big Sky Motel, off Highway Twelve.”

  “That’s a lie.”

  “Leo, hush.” Irene gripped her hands together tighter.

  “Several witnesses identified her photograph,” Quinniock continued. “I’m sorry. She didn’t spend those hours alone. She met a man there, the same man each time. We have a witness who’ll be working with our police artist to reconstruct his face.”

  With tears trickling down her face, Irene nodded. “I was afraid of it. I knew in my heart she was lying, but I was so upset with her. I didn’t care. Just go on then, I thought. Go on and do what you want, and I’ll have this baby to tend. Then, after . . . after it happened, I took that out of my mind. I told myself I’d been harsh and judgmental, a cold mother.

  “I knew she was lying,” she said, turning to her husband. “I knew all the signs. But I couldn’t let myself believe it when she was dead. I just couldn’t have that inside me.”

  “Do you have any idea who she was involved with?”

  “I swear to you I don’t. But I think maybe it’d been going on awhile now. I know the signs. The way she’d whisper on the phone, or how she’d say she just needed to go out for a drive and clear her head, or had to run some errands so could I watch Shiloh? And she’d come home again with that look in her eye.”

  She let out a shuddering breath. “She never meant to change.” Dissolving, Irene turned to press her face to Leo’s shoulder. “Maybe she just couldn’t.”

  “Why do we have to know this?” Leo demanded. “Why do you have to tell us this? You don’t leave us anything.”

  “I’m sorry, but Dolly was with this man the night she died. We need to identify him and question him.”

  “He killed her. This man she gave herself to, this man she lied to us about.”

  “We need to question him,” Quinniock repeated. “If you have any idea who she was meeting, we need to know.”

  “She lied to us. We don’t know anything. We don’t have anything. Just leave us alone.”

  “There’s something else, Mr. Brakeman, we need to discuss.” DiCicco took the ball. “At approximately nine thirty tonight, Rowan Tripp and Gulliver Curry were fired on while walking on the base.”

  “That’s nothing to do with us.”

  “On the contrary, a Remington 700 special edition rifle was found hidden in the woods flanking the base. It has your name engraved in a plaque on the stock.”

  “You’re accusing me of trying to kill that woman? You come into my home, tell me my daughter was a liar and a whore and say I’m a killer?”

  “It’s your gun, Mr. Brakeman, and you recently threatened Ms. Tripp.”

  “My daughter was murdered, and she . . . My rifle’s in the gun safe. I haven’t had it out in weeks.”

  “If that’s the case, we’d like you to show us.” DiCicco got to her feet.

  “I’ll show you, then I want you out of my house.”

  He lunged up, stomped his way back to the kitchen to yank open a door that led to a basement.

  Or a man cave, DiCicco thought as she followed. Dead animal heads hung on the paneled wall in a wildlife menagerie that loomed over the oversized recliner and lumpy sofa. The table that fronted the sofa showed scars from years of boot heels and faced an enormous flat-screen television.

  The room boasted an ancient refrigerator she imagined held manly drinks, a worktable for loading shot into shells, a utility shelf that held boxes of clay pigeons, shooting vests, hunting caps—and, oddly, she thought, several framed family photos, including a large one of a pretty baby girl with one of those elasticized pink bows circling her bald head.

  A football lamp, a computer and piles of paperwork sat on a gray metal desk shoved in a corner. Above it hung a picture of Leo and several other men beside what she thought was a 747 aircraft, reminding her he worked at the airport as a mechanic.

  And against the side wall stood a big, orange-doored gun safe.

  Pumping off waves of heat and resentment, Leo marched to the safe, spun the dial for the combination, wrenched it open.

  DiCicco had no problems with guns; in fact she believed in them. But the small arsenal inside the safe had her eyes widening. Rifles, shotguns, handguns—bolt action, semiauto, revolvers, under and overs, scopes. All showing the gloss of the well-cleaned, well-oiled, well-tended weapon.

  But her scan didn’t turn up the weapon in question, and her hand edged toward her own as Leo Brakeman’s breathing went short and quick.

  “You have an excellent collection of firearms, Mr. Brakeman, but you seem to be missing a Remington 700.”

  “Somebody stole it.”

  Her hand closed over the butt of her weapon when he whirled around, his face red, his fists clenched.

  “Somebody broke in here and stole it.”

  “There’s no record of you reporting a break-in.” Quinniock stepped up.

  “Because I didn’t know. Somebody’s doing this to us. You have to find out who’s doing this to us.”

  “Mr. Brakeman, you’re going to have to come with us now.” She didn’t want to draw on the man, hoped she wouldn’t have to, but DiCicco readied to do so.

  “You’re not taking me out of my home.”

  “Leo.” Quinniock spoke calmly. “Don’t make it worse now. You come quietly, and we’ll go in and talk about this. Or I’m going to have to cuff you and take you in forcibly.”

  “Leo.” Irene simply collapsed onto a step. “My God, Leo.”

  “I didn’t do anything. Irene, as God is my witness. I’ve never lied to you in my life, Reenie. I didn’t do anything.”

  “Then let’s go in and talk this out.” Quinniock moved a step closer, laid a hand on Leo’s quivering shoulder. “Let’s try to get to the bottom of it.”

  “Somebody’s doing this to us. I never shot at anybody out at the base, or anywhere else.” He jerked away from Quinniock’s hand. “I’ll walk out on my own.”

  “All right, Leo. That would be best.”

  Stiff-legged, he walked toward the steps. He stopped, reached for his wife’s hands. “Irene, on my life, I didn’t shoot at anybody. I need you to believe me.”

  “
I believe you.” But she dropped her gaze when she said it.

  “You need to lock up now. You be sure to lock up the house. I’ll be home as soon as we straighten this out.”

  ROWAN GOT THE WORD when she slipped into the cookhouse kitchen the next morning.

  Lynn set down the hot bin of pancakes she carried, then wrapped