John Lescroart - Damage

“I was, too!”

“But you left.”

“Hey, hey, hey.” Treya came over to the table. “Stop bickering. I’ll make some more pancakes for both of you two. Abe? How about you? The batter’s all ready.”

“I could probably force myself. Thanks.”

“More pancakes, coming up,” Treya said.

“Hey!” Zachary asked. “How come you aren’t dressed yet?”

“Hay is for horses,” Glitsky said. “And I’m taking a day off.”

At the stove, Treya stopped ladling batter into the frying pan. “Really?”

Glitsky nodded. “Really.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Nothing. Maybe go to lunch. Maybe see my dad. Think about things.”

Treya leaned against the stove, her arms crossed over her chest. “How’d you like some company?”

“I wasn’t going to ask,” he said, “but if you’re offering, I’d like it a lot.”

Durbin got into work, letting himself in through the back door, about a half hour late. He received an arched eyebrow from Liza Sato, his assistant manager, as she turned around and spotted him, but he simply evaded the unspoken question with a wave and a stop at the coffee machine.

Twenty-eight years old, personable, super-competent, single, and very easy on the eyes, Liza was in Durbin’s opinion one of the main reasons that the business was so successful. She’d opened the place on time this morning, as she had on the previous Monday when he’d gone down for Ro Curtlee’s arraignment. The franchise handled UPS, FedEx, and Parcel Dispatch, and was a registered Postal Service office as well, and this morning, by the time Durbin got there, customers stood in lines at every one of the seven workstations.

About a half hour later, the morning rush just about abated, Durbin’s private telephone line rang in his office. He walked back inside the half-enclosed glass cubicle and picked it up on the second ring.

He had barely finished saying hello when he recognized the voice of his neighbor from across the street. “Mike. Thank God you’re there. You’ve got to get back home right away. Your house is on fire.”

On the way out, blowing through streetlights and stop signs, almost praying he’d be pulled over, Durbin tried Janice’s numbers on his cell phone and got nothing but her outgoing messages.

He caught his first glimpse of the smoke-lots of smoke-as soon as he’d cleared the escarpment that ran from Union up to Broadway. He was still two or three miles away and the dark plume had already risen in the still, clear air to the height of the Sutro Tower. This was no small grease fire in a kitchen. Tires squealing, he finally turned onto his street, Rivera, and immediately saw that he wasn’t going to get within a couple hundred yards of his house, which in spite of the presence of six fire trucks spraying water from at least four hoses still looked to be completely engulfed in flames.

Janice’s sister, Kathy Novio, stood next to Durbin by the incident commander’s station near one of the trucks. Her arms folded over her heavy jacket, she made no effort to conceal the tears that coursed down her cheeks. “I can’t stand this,” she said.

“I know. Me, neither.”

“I keep thinking she might be in there.”

Durbin put his arm around her. “We don’t have any reason to think that.”

“Michael, she wasn’t at work.” After she’d gotten Durbin’s call, immediately before she’d come up here to the fire scene, Kathy had driven by Janice’s office over by the Stones town shopping center, which was relatively near her own home, and even though the lights weren’t on, she wanted to be certain and so she banged on the door for almost a full minute to no avail.

“I know. You said that. That doesn’t mean she’s in there. She might be on some errand she didn’t tell me about.”

“With her phone off?”

Durbin shrugged. “Sometimes she forgets to turn it on. Sometimes she forgets it entirely. Why would she be in there anyway?”

“I don’t know.” Her eyes went back to the now-gutted house. The flames were mostly contained by now, although men still worked a couple of the hoses and a pillar of thick, black smoke continued to rise into the sky. Her voice broke. “I’m just so afraid that she is.”

Durbin reached over, put his arm around her shoulders, drew her in next to him.

Chuck came jogging up from where he’d parked a couple of blocks away. Kathy threw her arms around her husband and he embraced her, patting her back consolingly and whispering words of comfort. Then, over her shoulder, he said to Durbin, “I’m sorry it took so long to get here. I didn’t check my messages until after my morning class.” His eyes went to the house. “God, Michael, Jesus.” Then he paused in a kind of double take. “Where’s Janice?”

Kathy, blotched and tearful, made a mewling little noise and just shook her head against him.

“We don’t know,” Durbin replied. “Not at work. Not answering her phone.”

Chuck threw a glance at the smoldering ruins, came back to Durbin, gesturing now toward the firemen. “Do these guys know anything?”

“Not yet. The arson inspector couldn’t get inside until, like, five minutes ago.”

But even as Durbin spoke, the arson inspector-Arnie Becker-emerged from the front door. He’d stuck his hands deeply into the pockets of his coat and walked, leaning slightly forward as though into a stiff wind, with a slow deliberation. His shoulders sagged. Looking up, his eyes glanced over where Durbin stood-the incident commander had introduced them to each other soon after Durbin’s arrival-and then quickly he looked away. In a few more steps, he’d come up to the IC’s table.

Durbin, who’d moved away from the immediate area when his brother-in-law had come up, now broke out of their little knot of neighbors and other onlookers and got back over to the table in time to hear Becker say the word police .

“What do you need the police for?” Durbin asked.

The two men turned to look at him. The expressions on both of their faces were so obvious that neither of them really had to say anything, but Becker reached out a hand and placed it gently on Durbin’s arm. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but there’s a woman’s body in there in one of the upstairs rooms.”

Kathy and Chuck had come up directly behind him, and now she split the air with a keening scream. “Janice! Oh God, no! Janice!” As Chuck turned and held her, she covered her face with both of her hands and broke down.

After they left messages at their jobs saying they wouldn’t be in, both leaving their excuses suitably vague, Abe and Treya dropped the kids off together at their respective school and preschool, then had come home and gone back to bed. Closing in on noon, they had finally gotten dressed and now sat in a booth at Gaspare’s.

“This is the best pizza in the city, you know that?” Treya said. “I don’t care about any of those newfangled places, or even the other old ones.”

“Tommaso’s?” Glitsky said.

“Very good, no question. Just not this good.”

“A-sixteen.”

Treya shook her head. “Again, delicious, but too long a wait. So let me ask you a question.”

“General category of pizza?”

“No.”

“Okay, hold it.” Glitsky put down his pizza slice. “No, wait, it’s coming to me. The Battle of Thermopylae.”