Page 49 of Burn for Me
Kyle laughed again, knowing how much it irked Gray that he called him old man even though he was only five years older. Heading for the door, he stepped back for Gray to pass him. “Age before beauty, sir,” he joked.
Ducking as he saw Gray swing at him, he took off down the passage, laughing as he went. “Last one in the ring buys the drinks.”
Stepping into the ring with Kyle, he let go of all the thoughts crowding his head. For all his joking and pranks, Kyle was a good friend. He knew it always helped him to clear his head and change his focus to get into the ring, spar a couple of rounds. He could come back to a case with a refreshed mind. Clear thought process. A fresh eye. It helped him to see it from a different angle.
Hopefully, it would work equally as well this time, because he knew, without a doubt, that the answer to solving this case was right there in front of him. If he could just see it. He needed to go over the analysis report the lab had sent back, again, and look over the evidence with a fresh perspective. But for now, he had to focus on not getting his head knocked from his shoulders.
“Yo, old man. You ready to rumble, or are you going to stand there gathering wool all day?”
Knocking his gloves together and then against Kyle’s, he threw himself into the physical release of trading punches.
“Just remember,loser buys the drinks, pipsqueak.”
“Oh-ho, it’s like that, huh? Bring it, old man. Let’s dance.”
After trading blows for over an hour, the two of them threw themselves down on the benches in the steam room.
“So how does it feel to get your ass whipped by an old man, pretty boy?”
Snorting out a laugh, Kyle quipped, “Don’t let it go to your head, you old geezer. I let you win. Didn’t want you crying foul for beating on an old man.”
Flipping him the bird, Gray laughed. Changing the topic, they chatted about this and that as they sweated the ache out of their tired muscles.
Finally making their way to the showers, Kyle asked, “Listen, bud, you want me to come up to the office with you, let you run some stuff by me? Maybe between the two of us, we can figure out what it is you’re missing.”
“Thanks, man, that’d be cool. An extra set of eyes and ears might be exactly what I need.”
“Sonofabitch!I can’t believe it’s taken me so long to see it. I knew I was missing something,” Gray exclaimed in frustration. “I should have seen this sooner.”
Rubbing his eyes tiredly, Kyle asked, “What did you find?”
Pointing at the evidence bags lying on the desk in front of them, he replied, “I knew there was something familiar about the pattern presenting in the fires. I just couldn’t put my finger on it. Take a look at these photos of the scene together with the evidence I’ve collected from each fire site. What do you see?”
Stepping closer to the forensic bags containing the evidence and the lab analysis reports, Kyle reached out a hand to snag one of the reports. He took his time reading over each report, went over the evidence laid out, sifted through the photos of each site, and finally, he turned to read through each of Gray’s reports related to each fire they’d attended in Kloof Street.
Gray silently watched him, waiting for him to get through all of it, to see what he made of it. Impatient to see if Kyle would see what he’d seen. Or was he grasping at straws here in an effort to solve this case? But when he saw him go back to a specific evidence bag, Gray knew he was right.
“Hot damn! You’ve got to be jacking me.” Kyle’s eyebrows looked like they were going to climb right into his hairline. “I was new on the team, a rookie at the time. This one was lighting them up all over the peninsula. It seems they were focused on some woman. Thought she was the one for them. She had business problems, and they seemed to think that burning the Cape down was a good way to ‘make them go away’ while getting her attention at the same time. Letting her see they ‘were looking out for their woman’. Total fuckin’ whackjob.”
“I can’t believe I missed it. It’s been right in front of me this whole time. I knew I recognised the work, the pattern. It’s only when I found that” — he indicated the item in the evidence bag Kyle held in his hand — “the pieces started to fall into place.”
“Why would you have thought of them? Last I heard, this crazy mother was still locked up. And they should be there a good long while after all the crazy crap they got up to last time. Could it possibly be a copycat?”
“I have no idea. It’s possible, because last I heard, too, they were still locked up.”
“Ok, so, what do we do next? Where to from here, bud?”
Reining in his emotions, Gray took a deep breath and considered his options.
“Let’s have a look at their profile on the database, see what we’re dealing with. Refresh our memory some more. It’s been a while since I last dealt with this crazy. Let’s get these details out on the wire. Then I’m going to hunt them down. When I find their sorry ass, I’m going to make sure they’re locked up for good this time. We’re just lucky this nutter hasn’t killed anybody yet. We’ve got to get them off the streets before our luck runs out.”
Seating himself at his desk, Kyle hanging over his shoulder, Gray logged into the national database. Typing in the name and information he had, he waited for the profile to load. When it did, he felt his whole body go ice cold. He knew that face and realised he’d seen it recently. Very, very recently.
“Fuck!” Launching himself out of his chair, he raced for the door. “Come on, Ace. No time to lose. Let’s get moving.”
He was already reaching for his phone when he heard Kyle say, “I’ll drive.”
Kyle wore a bemused expression on his face since he probably had no idea what the hell had just happened – Gray didn’t have time to explain himself. But one thing was for sure, it wasn’t a good idea for him to be behind the wheel right then.
