“Trae? No. He’s, uh, he’s the designer on the show. We had dinner earlier, and he was bringing me back here to pick up my truck when I smelled the smoke from the fire.”
Makarowicz played the beam of his flashlight over the back of the container, which was now a blackened, hulking chunk of steel. The front hatch had been unlocked and a mound of unrecognizable cinders spilled onto the scorched ground around it.
“So that’s where the fire originated?” the cop asked, walking closer. His steps made a sloshing sound in the puddles of water left from the fire hoses. He swept the light toward the house, and Hattie gasped softly.
A patch of the wooden siding nearest the house, roughly six feet by twelve feet, bore greasy black scorch marks, but the porch columns and planking looked untouched.
She walked up to the porch to get a closer look, and the cop’s flashlight beam followed her. “It doesn’t look too bad,” she reported. “But I’m afraid to open the house to see if there’s any water damage.”
“Let it wait ’til morning,” Mak advised. “Nothing you can do tonight.”
“Guess not,” she agreed.
He slapped at a mosquito on his arm and regarded her solemnly. “This might not be a coincidence, you know.”
The thought had occurred to her as soon as she saw the knot of gawkers standing on the street in front of the house, but she hadn’t wanted to voice the idea, for fear of giving it oxygen.
“You think somebody might have set this fire—intentionally?” she asked. “Could it have something to do with Lanier Ragan?”
“I’m not an arson investigator. It’s been all over the news about the investigation into her disappearance being reopened. Maybe someone doesn’t want you messing around with this house.”
“Do you know Howard Rice? The city’s code enforcement officer? He’s issued us two different citations for code violations. Someone reported us to the city for cutting down what he says were mature trees. They weren’t. Just a bunch of stunted scrub pines, palmettos, and weeds. That was a thousand-dollar fine. A couple days later, he came by to slap me with a two-hundred-dollar fine for violating the city’s noise ordinance. He said neighbors had been complaining. But nobody’s voiced any complaints to me.”
“Don’t know this Rice guy,” Mak said.
“You don’t want to. I’m just wondering if whoever ratted us out to Inspector Gadget might have gotten mad enough to set fire to the dumpster.”
“You mean, as a warning?” Mak asked.
“They could have been trying to burn down the whole house. That firefighter told me if we hadn’t seen the smoke when we did, this house would’ve burnt to the ground.”
The cop was silent for a moment. “Who’d want to do something like that? And why?”
“I guess it could be a really pissed-off neighbor. Or maybe someone who’s really pissed off that I bought his house ‘out from under him’ as he put it.”
“You’re talking about Holland Creedmore,” Mak said. “Maybe it’s time Junior and I had a discussion.”
29
Almost Famous
Mo was standing in the bathroom, shaving, when he heard his phone.
Da-dum. Da-dum, da-dum, dum, dum, dum. The ringtone was unmistakable. Every time he heard it he pictured Roy Scheider backing away from the hull of that fishing boat in the shark-infested waters of Cape Cod. But it was barely six A.M. in Savannah. What was she doing up at this ungodly hour on the West Coast?
“Rebecca?”
“Mo! You’re a genius. OMG, these photos are priceless.”
“What photos are we talking about?” He went back into the bathroom and unplugged the electric shaver, looked in the mirror. His face looked like an unmade bed. He tried to remember the source of the quote, but it was too early.
“On TMZ. Your stars. Hattie and Trae. Staring into each other’s eyes, kissing, caressing each other’s faces. Caught in action. These photos are perfection.”
He put her on loudspeaker and typed “TMZ” into the search engine on his phone. Right below the stories of a spectacular Hollywood divorce and an even more spectacular story about a married US senator from a blue state being caught red-handed with a same-sex lover, he spotted the headline: DASHING HPTV DESIGNER GETS STEAMY WITH SAVANNAH COSTAR.
The photos had the blurry, sleazy tabloid quality that sold advertising and launched or sunk celebrity careers, depending on the public’s mood that day. And just as Rebecca had said, they showed Hattie in a series of candid, candlelit shots, kissing and mooning at Trae Bartholomew, who was gazing at her with the look of a starving leopard considering a baby giraffe. From the look of the photos, they’d been taken at a local restaurant. And from the look of it, Hattie wasn’t exactly fighting Trae off with a steak knife.