Robin Burcell - Face of a Killer

She hit the off button, then handed the phone to Sydney. “Dad says I have to go home as soon as he gets here.”

“Dads,” Sydney said, giving her another hug. She knew she should call Dixon, let him know what was going on, but right now, she was more worried about keeping a calm and collected facade in front of her sister, and so she dropped her phone into her purse, figuring she could call him after Jake arrived. But Angie refused to go sit inside Scotty’s car and wait for him, worried that she’d miss the excitement, and when she started shivering, Scotty draped his jacket over her shoulders.

Sydney wasn’t sure how much time passed before one of the firefighters finally walked down the stairs and asked whose apartment it was.

“Mine,” she said.

“What happened?”

“I have no idea. I was asleep in bed. Special Agent Ryan woke us. He said he drove by and saw the fire.”

Scotty nodded.

“What agency are you with?” he asked Scotty.

“FBI. Same as her.”

The firefighter looked like he was about to say something, until his gaze lit on Angie. Clearly these men were having an issue with Angie’s presence, and that scared Sydney. “You have somewhere we can talk?” he said. “I need to ask you a few questions.”

Rainie said, “I’ll take Angie into my place-I can go in, can’t I?”

“Yes, ma’am. We’ll be up there awhile, but the fire’s out. No real structural damage to your part of the house. Her kitchen’s toast, though, and I might think twice about parking in the garage until it’s fixed.”

“Come on, Angie,” Rainie said.

Sydney gently propelled her sister toward Rainie, but Angie stopped to give Scotty his jacket. “Thank you,” she said, then looked at Sydney.

“I’ll be just a few minutes,” Sydney told her, waiting until they disappeared, her heart doing a little flip-flop when Rainie’s porch light lit up Angie’s blond hair like a halo before the door closed behind them.

When they were out of earshot, the firefighter introduced himself as Captain Wyatt, and said, “Most of the damage is centralized in the kitchen. Burned pretty hot. Like there was some sort of accelerant.”

Her mind went over all the possibilities. Her door was locked. There had to be some other explanation. “I had a lot of art supplies in there. Brush cleaner, turpentine. That sort of thing.” And of course, she told herself, that was probably it. When they’d lived together, Scotty was always telling her that her paint supplies were going to burst into flames one day because of the volatile chemicals.

Captain Wyatt seemed to confirm it. “That explains a lot.” Until he asked, “Is it possible you spilled any of it?”

She felt a dull thudding in her head, tried to think if she’d left anything open. Maybe Topper had knocked something over, when she’d been watching him. But surely Sydney would’ve smelled it? “I don’t think so,” she said. “Why?”

He asked her to follow him up the steps. Before they stepped in, he said, “Any reason someone would want to torch your place?”

“You really think it was arson?”

“Unless you twisted off the top to your turpentine can and splashed it across your kitchen table.”

They walked into the apartment. The place smelled like someone had lit a campfire, then doused it with water. Her braided rug was soaked, felt like a sponge beneath her bare feet, but at least it was still intact. The walls in the living room and on down the hall looked as though someone had tried to paint them gray with a really bad roller brush. No wonder she’d had such a difficult time trying to rouse herself, and she wondered how much carbon monoxide she’d sucked in.

She was almost afraid to look in the kitchen, but she followed Captain Wyatt to the edge, realized she couldn’t walk in there in bare feet. The shoes she wore to work were by the door, where she’d kicked them off, and she slipped those on, then walked into the once-yellow kitchen. The wall where her abstracts had leaned was now black, the paint bubbling up to the ceiling where flames had licked, fueled by the canvases that were now nothing more than a blackened pile of soggy ash. The painting from hell was no more than a piece of curled blackened remnant on the sodden floor, merely a fifth of its size, and Sydney reached down, picked it up, watched the gray water drip down onto the charred remnants of what had once been her easel. With one hand, she brushed at the soot, and saw a bit of orange red showing through. Devil’s eye, she thought, dropping it. She turned away, looking from there into her living room, then on down the hall, into her open bedroom door. Saw the bed where just a short while ago, she had been curled up, watching the Disney Channel, in concert with her sister below…

And that’s when Sydney started to shake. She was so wrapped up in her father’s murder, dreaming about the flames at the restaurant that night that she had unwittingly endangered her beloved sister, because she couldn’t, wouldn’t wake up…

And because she’d allowed her to stay there, even if in the apartment below.

Her knees felt like they were going to buckle, and somehow she managed to traverse the hallway to her bedroom. And there she tossed her purse onto the nightstand and dropped onto the mattress. She could hear the slight buzz as her phone vibrated another call, but at the moment all she wanted to do was hide from the world, and she pulled her pillow to her face, smelled the stench of smoke on the casing.. . She’d tried so hard to be strong. All these years. Thinking her father was this good person, that he didn’t deserve to die. And now she was faced with the reality that he wasn’t good, that he’d lived a double life. That maybe he was killed because of it. That she had stirred something up, and brought her sister into the fray, endangered her.

She took a breath, knew that she was feeling really, really sorry for herself, but couldn’t help the tear that slid down her cheek. Scotty walked down the hallway to check on her then. He stood there, in her doorway, not moving.

“You okay?” he asked.

She wasn’t. She wanted nothing more than to have someone hold her, tell her that everything was going to be fine. “Yes,” she said, though she didn’t know what she was saying yes to. Him being the one to hold her, or just her need for something more, an escape from all that seemed so wrong in her life right then.

He took a step in, just as one of the firefighters dropped something in the kitchen, and Scotty hesitated on the threshold of her room, his hand on the doorframe. Sydney glanced behind him, saw the firefighters working in her kitchen. One of them was snapping photographs, and Sydney knew they wouldn’t be bothering if they didn’t think it was an arson.

“Who would do this?” Sydney asked, slamming her fist into the mattress. “You’re supposed to have people watching this place. How the hell did this happen?”

Scotty didn’t answer. He just looked at her.

The flash of the camera went off behind him again, this time reflecting off the ring Scotty wore.

His red National Academy ring.

Her gaze fixed on it. There where his hand rested. On the doorframe.

She closed her eyes. Saw her painting as it was in the kitchen before the fire. The red eye. Not an eye at all. A ring. That’s what she’d been reminded of earlier tonight when she’d looked at the painting. She’d seen that ring, or rather one very much like it… The night her father was killed…

She realized then what she hadn’t realized all these years. What she’d refused to recognize-because it was too painful? The person who had killed her father, the person she’d seen leaving the restaurant that night after the arson, had been someone in her father’s group. His Posse, her mother called it.