Xo (Kathryn Dance 3)

And from downstairs, a voice calling her name.

A man's voice.

"Kayleigh, come on, hurry!"

She opened the door cautiously and peered down.

Jesus! Through the smoke she could just make out the form of Edwin Sharp, beating down the flames on the stairs with his jacket. Alicia lay on her back, on the marble of the hallway, eyes gazing up, unseeing. Her face was bloody. She'd fallen onto a patch of burning wood floor and her clothes were on fire.

Kayleigh understood: Edwin had ignored her warning and continued to the house anyway.

"Hurry!" he cried. "Come on! I called the fire department but I don't know when they'll be here. You have to get out!"

His slapping at the flames wasn't doing much to stop the spread, though he'd beat out a narrow path down the stairs to the ground floor.

She made her way along this now. He was pointing into the den. "We can get out that way, through the window!"

But she said, "You go! I'm going to fight it."

"No, we can't!"

"Go!" she shouted and turned the small extinguisher on the flames.

Edwin hesitated, coughing hard, and returned to flailing away with his jacket. "I'll help you."

She gave him a smile and called, "In the kitchen, there's another extinguisher. Beside the stove!"

Choking, Edwin staggered through the arched doorway and returned a moment later with the extinguisher, much bigger than Kayleigh's, and started to douse the flames too.

With a horrified glance at Alicia's burning body, Kayleigh ran out the back door and returned a moment later with her garden hose. She began attacking the stubborn fire as Edwin, next to her, blew bursts of foam from the big extinguisher. They both retched and coughed and tried to blink away tears from the smoke.

The singer and her stalker held their own but only for a time. Soon Edwin's extinguisher ran out and an outrider of fire melted her garden hose.

Too late ... no! My house.

But then sirens sounded and outside the evening darkness filled with flashing lights as the first fire trucks arrived. Men and women in their thick yellow outfits hurried into the house with hoses and began battling the flames. One fireman bent over Alicia's body, no longer burning but smoldering badly, and felt for a pulse. He looked up and shook his head.

Another ushered Kayleigh and Edwin toward the front door and they staggered outside. Kayleigh made her way down the stairs into the yard, coughing and spitting the terrible bits of soot and ash from her mouth. She paused on the lawn and vomited painfully. Then she looked back, realizing that Edwin was lagging behind.

She saw him on his knees on the porch. His hand was at his throat. He lifted his fingers away and looked at them. Kayleigh saw the digits were dark but not stained with soot, as she'd thought. Blood was flowing from a wound in his neck.

Alicia had shot him before he wrestled the gun away from her.

He blinked and looked at Kayleigh. "I think ... I think she ..." His eyes closed and he collapsed backward on the wooden deck.

Chapter 65

KATHRYN DANCE WAS sitting next to Kayleigh Towne on the steps of her house. They were bathed in a sweep of colored lights, blue and red, with flashes of white. Beautiful and troubling.

The young woman was diminished, her posture collapsed--chin tucked, shoulders slumped. She was smeared with Edwin Sharp's blood, from trying to staunch the bleeding. In kinesic analysis Kayleigh's carriage could be read as defeat and acceptance, the goal of every interrogator. But the pose was also an indication of exhaustion or disbelief.

P. K. Madigan was directing the FMCSO's crime scene team in their search of the house, and the fire department was making sure there was no chance of the flames sprouting up again.

"I don't understand any of this," Kayleigh whispered.

Dance explained what they'd learned about Alicia and found in her apartment. "And in her truck? There was a Baggie filled with things she stole from Edwin's rental. She was going to plant them here." Dance then explained the why. "There was a note too. She'd forged your handwriting and did a pretty good job of it. If anything happened to you, you wanted her to take over the band."

"She asked Edwin here tonight too so it'd look like he'd killed me. He gets arrested and nobody believes him when he claims he's innocent."