Page 265 of Sweet Ruin

And when I arrive on the scene, I see that—like always—my gut knows best.

There are two engines in the street and a ladder truck half up on the sidewalk. Thick hoses run across Fourth Avenue. A cop has put flares out and is waving traffic around, and people from the building across the way are standing there in coats over pajamas, watching it all go down.

The front glass is black on the inside. Water is coming out under the door and running down over the plywood ramp where her curb used to be. A six-foot scaffold pipe lies against the bottom of the door, wedged at an angle against the frame with the far end jammed into the base of the lamppost.

The pipe tells me the fire wasn’t an accident.

“Sir. Sir, back up.”

A firefighter puts a glove on my chest. I look down at his hand and then at his face.

“Where is the woman?”

“There’s nobody out. We haven’t cleared the interior.”

“There was a woman inside. She owns it.”

“Sir—”

I step around him.

The alley mouth is taped and there’s a man working a line into it. I walk past both of them. They see my face and don’t stop me.

The fire has been knocked down back here. It was a pile against the brick, pallets and rags and something that was in a plastic drum, and now, it’s a steaming black heap with water pooling around it and the wall above it scorched two stories up. The back door stands wide open. Smoke drifts out along the top of the frame.

She isn’t here.

I call for her. “Lilah! Lilah!”

Nobody responds.

So I stand in the middle of the alley and force myself to examine it as I would any other scene.

The wet concrete is scuffed to hell in a rough half-circle about a dozen feet from the street. There are heel marks. Two long drags where the toes of somebody’s shoes went backward through the standing water.

Her keys are lying by the wall. The ring with the bottle opener on it and the little enamel croissant that Priyanka gave her. I note blood on the teeth of two of the keys.

There’s more of it on the brick at chest height. A handprint, dragged sideways for about a foot, and then a spatter below it going down the wall in tails. Then drops. Big ones, spaced far apart, in a line that goes toward the mouth of the alley and then stops in a smear at the curb where a vehicle stood.

I crouch there in the water and study the trail.

There’s too much blood for it to be all hers, and the pattern leads the wrong direction. A woman being dragged doesn’t leave that. A man walking out on his own two feet with his hands over his face does.

“That’s not hers,” I murmur.

Yuri crouches down beside me. I didn’t hear him arrive. He’s got a flashlight, and he tracks it along the drops without touching anything.

“No,” he agrees. “She got one of them good.”

“Three sets of prints in the char there.”

“I see them. Big prints. Men, for sure.”

A faint buzz comes from the loading area. I ignore it twice before I register it, then turn my head and follow it to the plywood ramp.

I get down on my stomach on the wet ground in a five-thousand-dollar suit and put my arm into the gap.

Her phone.