‘Teun!’ I called out again.
I heard sure feet splashing and stepping over fallen roofing and collapsed walls. Then she was mere inches from me and steadying my arm with her hand.
‘Whoa. Careful,’ she started to say.
‘We’ve got to find Lucy,’ I said.
‘What’s going on?’
She began to carefully escort me out.
‘Where is she?’ I demanded.
‘There’s a two-alarm fire downtown. A grocery store, probably an arson. Kay, what the hell . . . ?’
We were out on the lawn and I was clutching the videotape as if it were my only hope in life.
‘Teun, please.’ I held her gaze. ‘Take me to Philadelphia.’
‘Come on,’ she said.
16
MCGOVERN MADE THE trip back to Philadelphia in forty-five minutes, because she was speeding. She had radioed her field office and talked on a secure tac channel. Although she was still very careful what she relayed, she had made it clear that she wanted every available agent out on the street looking for Carrie. While this was going on, I reached Marino on my cellular phone and told him to get on a plane now.
‘She’s here,’ I said.
‘Oh shit. Do Benton and Lucy know?’
‘As soon as I find them.’
‘I’m out the door,’ he said.
I did not believe, nor did McGovern, that Carrie was still in Lehigh County. She wanted to be where she could do the most damage, and I was convinced she somehow knew that Lucy had moved to Philadelphia. Carrie could have been stalking Lucy, for that matter. One thing I believed but could not make sense of was that the murders in Warrenton and now here were intended to lure those of us who had defeated Carrie in the past.
‘But Warrenton happened before she escaped from Kirby,’ McGovern reminded me as she turned onto Chestnut Street.
‘I know,’ I said as fear turned my pulse to static. ‘I don’t understand any of it except that somehow she’s involved. It’s not coincidence that she was on that news clip, Teun. She knew that after Kellie Shephard’s murder we would review everything we could find. Carrie knew damn well we would see that tape.’
The fire was located on a seedy strip on the western fringes of the University of Pennsylvania. Darkness had fallen, and flashing emergency lights were visible miles away. Police cars had closed off two blocks of the street. There were at least eight fire engines and four ladder trucks, and more than seventy feet in the air, firefighters in buckets blasted the smoking roof with deluge guns. The night rumbled with diesel engines, and the blasting of high pressure water drummed over wood and shattered more glass. Tumescent hoses snaked across the street, and water was up to the hubcaps of parked cars that would be going nowhere anytime soon.
Photographers and news crews prowled sidewalks and were suddenly on alert when McGovern and I got out of her car.
‘Is ATF involved in this case?’ asked a TV reporter.
‘We’re just here taking a look,’ McGovern answered as we walked without pause.
‘Then it’s a suspected arson, like the other grocery stores?’
The microphone followed as our boots splashed.
‘It’s under investigation,’ McGovern said. ‘And you need to stay back, ma’am.’
The reporter was left at the hood of a fire engine while McGovern and I drew closer to the store. Flames had jumped to the barbershop next door, where firefighters with axes and pike poles chopped square holes in the roof. Agents in ATF flak jackets were interviewing potential witnesses, and investigators in turn-outs and helmets moved in and out of a basement. I overheard something about toggle switches and the meter and stealing service. Black smoke billowed, and there seemed to be only one area in the plenum that stubbornly smoldered and spurted flame.
‘She might be inside,’ McGovern said in my ear.
I followed her in closer. The plate-glass storefront was wide open, and part of the inventory flowed out on a cold river of water. Cans of tuna fish, blackened bananas, sanitary napkins, bags of potato chips, and bottles of salad dressing flowed by, and a firefighter rescued a can of coffee and shrugged as he tossed it inside his truck. The strong beams of flashlights probed the smoky, black interior of the devastated store, illuminating girders twisted like taffy and exposed wires hanging in tangles from I-beams.