Ava let out a long sigh. “Then the two of you better figure out what you really want and go from there.”19TomDallas stood in front of us with a bag in his hand and a smile on his face. I was eagerly anticipating whatever it was he had to reveal.
“Thanks for meeting me here, gentlemen,” Dallas said.
“Yeah, yeah,” Jordan piped in. “Get on with it. What did you find?”
Dallas smiled again and pulled the bag up to eye level.
“I want to preface this with a bit of caution. I can’t tell you for sure this proves the identity of the arsonist, but it certainly seems to lend credence to your argument,” he said.
The room was a vacuum of silence as we waited for him to reveal what he had found. As the bag opened, he reached inside, and I noticed for the first time that the hand he was using had a flesh-toned rubber glove on. Gently, he pulled out a piece of cloth, and I immediately recognized what it was.
“That’s a piece of a flannel shirt,” I said.
“Son of a bitch!” Tyler yelled. “Danny wears those all the time. Same color and everything. It’s damn near his uniform.”
“Exactly,” Dallas said. “I don’t know how the police missed this, honestly. It was caught on part of the fencing around the back of the bar. Most of that fence was torn down by the fire department when they went to put out the fire, and there were track marks over part of it. But when I looked really closely, this was stuck under one of the poles.”
“We have to take that to Danny’s and confront him,” Jordan said. “We need to do it and do it now. Make him explain how one of his shirts ended up at the bar.”
“Hang on,” I interrupted. “We can’t go marching into his bar all pissed off.”
“Are you serious?” Jordan nearly screamed. He was only a foot away from me, and after a tense moment, he spun on his heel and slammed his hand on a table. “This is stupid. We should go and confront him, and you all know it.”
“What we need to do,” I said, keeping my voice calm, “is to call the police.”
“The police?” Jordan exploded. “The police who can’t be bothered to investigate? The police who missed a piece of Danny’s flannel on the fence? The police who have acted like we were bothering them when we were just waiting on them to do their job and investigate a crime?”
“Yes,” I said. “We need to go about this the right way.”
“The right way,” Jordan said, crossing his arms and sitting on one of the open chairs. “The right way is punching Danny in his dumb fucking face until he admits what he’s done.”
“The right way,” Mason said, speaking from across the table at Jordan and making direct eye contact with him, “is to do this by the book, until the book is over. Then, if it turns out he did it and we still don’t get justice, then we will make our own. Isn’t that right, Tom?”
I stared at Mason and then back to Jordan for a moment, then nodded and stood up.
“Thank you again, Dallas. I think we will bring that to the police station,” I said.
“If you don’t mind, I won’t be accompanying you. Police investigators tend not to have a terribly high opinion of PIs. I have a feeling my presence would do you boys a disservice,” Dallas said. “But please take this as well. It’s a photograph of the evidence with a timestamp before I removed it. That way there is no question that it’s legit.”
I nodded. “Fair enough. I’ll call you if we hear anything from them,” I said and held out my hand.
“And I’ll call if I find anything else out,” he said as he took my hand and shook it.* * *By the time we got to the police station, it was midafternoon, and the place was mostly dead. Officers were coming in and out, switching shifts, and we were directed to wait for the detective handling our case now. A good half hour later, we were called back into a small office just off the main bullpen. It seemed like a generic office, rather than a personal one, and by the look of the detective, our case was being handled by someone who was barely out of diapers.
“Detective Samburg,” the skinny young man said as he held out his hand for me to shake. I did and he motioned to a seat. I took the one across from the desk he sat at, and my brothers filed in behind me, standing or sitting wherever there was space.
“Detective, nice to meet you,” I said.
“Likewise. Now tell me why you’re here? I believe you were told I would be in touch tomorrow?” he said with a touch of impatience.