yelling.
Miranda pulled her head inside and looked down again. The base of the lighthouse was an inferno. Her heart seized. Swinging her leg through the opening, she clutched the frame around the window. People were running now from every direction, waving and shouting at her.
She sat on the windowsill and pulled her other leg through, and her flip-flop fluttered to the ground. Smoke poured through the window. She felt the heat of the flames against her back.
“Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God!”
Miranda coughed and choked. Tears stung her eyes as she tried to blink away the smoke.
Please, God, please, please.
She looked out at the marsh through a blur of tears, and a strange calm settled over her. She looked down at the grassy hill. She was going to have to jump.
CHAPTER
FIFTEEN
Nicole strode into the bullpen and looked around. Where was everyone? She passed the conference room and spotted Joel at a table with his laptop in front of him.
“Hey, I’ve been looking for you,” she said. “Did Brady tell you what happened?”
“No.” He didn’t stop typing.
“I followed up on that lead.”
“The ViCAP thing.” He stopped and looked at her.
“Yeah.” She sat on the end of the table. “I submitted the details of our case to the FBI violent crimes database, and they got a hit.”
“You told me that part this morning. You’re saying it panned out?”
“Yes. Listen to this.” She pulled off her LBPD baseball cap and dropped it on the table. “There’s a cold case in Houston. Three years old. I drove all the way up there and interviewed the lead detective about it, and I think it’s our guy.”
He lifted an eyebrow. “You think?”
“No, I know. I’m almost positive.” She glanced through the door to the bullpen. “I brought back copies of the reports—”
“Just tell me what you found.”
Joel sounded impatient, and she didn’t blame him. Brady hadn’t wanted to read the reports either. He’d wanted the bottom line.
“Okay, the upshot is that I found striking similarities between the Houston case and ours, and I think we could be dealing with the same perpetrator.”
Joel leaned back in his chair and folded his arms over his chest, making his biceps bulge. He was skeptical. Or maybe he was just waiting to be convinced. Nicole could never tell with him.
“The victim up there is a forty-seven-year-old man,” she said. “This guy’s leaving for work one morning when he goes out to his driveway and gets shot in the chest, point-blank range.”
“They know the caliber?” Joel asked.
“A .38,” she said. “There are no eyewitnesses. No one heard anything either. No robbery. The assailant left behind this guy’s wallet, his Rolex, and his Mercedes. Just shot him in the chest and left.”
“So, same kind of weapon.”
“But there’s more,” she said. “Investigators found a long red feather in the pocket of his suit jacket. No idea where it came from. His wife didn’t know either. Nobody could figure out what to make of it.”
Joel stared at her, and she tried to figure out what he was thinking. She’d expected him to be more excited.
“Any suspects?” he asked.
“Suspects, yes. Arrests, no. They zeroed in on a few people but could never make it stick. I got the details down for us to go through.”
“What did this guy do for a living?” he asked.
“Chief financial officer for some company. EastTex Petroleum, I think it’s called.”
Interested flared in his eyes. “No shit. An oil company?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“We found a link today between our victims here and the environmental group that was protesting on the island last Friday.”
“The flash mob thing.”
“Yeah. The group’s called Alpha Omega Now. We think Lark and Stovak were both members.”
“Who’s ‘we’?” Nicole asked.
“Miranda and I. She’s helping me follow up on this. We talked to one of her professor friends in San Antonio who works with the FBI gang unit, and he identified the tattoos on the two victims. It’s a symbol of this group.”
“Is this group on the FBI’s radar?”
“I’m looking into it.”
“Are they violent?”
“I’m looking into that, too. But listen to this.” Joel leaned forward. “Alpha Omega also protested the company owned by that real estate developer in Corpus Christi—”
“Mark Randall.”
“Yeah. They protested his company a year before his murder. We need to find out if this Houston case has a connection like that.”
Emmet leaned his head into the room. “Yo, you guys hear the radio?”
Nicole turned to face him. “No. What?”
“There’s a fire down at Lighthouse Point.”
“When?” Joel asked.
“Right now. Calvin just called me. The fire department’s