89.
Sienna
Jamal had been pretty thorough as we’d mapped out what needed to happen. He’d gotten me cover to leave the Staten Island police station within a very short window, where it would look like I’d just strolled out of the frame of their cameras for a few minutes if anyone checked. He’d also done a pingback of cell phone signals in the area of Nadine’s mansion and determined that she had a few burner phones secreted away in her house. He’d tracked them back to a big, dense metal room in the center of her house, partially buried and thus hidden from the FBI when they’d searched her place. Too bad they didn’t have a hacker who could control electricity well enough to override every system out there.
Including the justice system.
Nadine’s house was always going to look like arson, but I’d set it up so that it looked like she’d dropped a cigar—one with her own DNA on it—into a spilled bottle of liquor. Fine stuff. If I’d given a damn about that sort of thing, I might have felt a twinge of regret at wasting it on burning her house down.
I pushed things along, of course, speeding up the fire in a few key places with Gavrikov’s power. Mainly along the axis of her panic room, because I needed that space clear. The name of the game was to make a mess, let the fire take its natural course, but give it a little juice to hurry things along. When the arson investigators gave the place a once-over, what they’d find would be consistent with a fire started in whiskey by a drunken, negligent idiot. They didn’t need to know I’d helped it grow, and there certainly wouldn’t be any signs of it.
Pretty soon, the fire was spreading to the ceiling, and I had a nice, clear view of the metal wall of the panic room. It was time to execute the plan that Jamal and I had worked up once he’d detected it.
The problem with leaving Nadine Griffin’s corpse in her house while it burned was that if I killed her myself, it’d be fairly obvious. I was strong but not particularly controlled, so if I busted her in the face, she would die and it would look like someone strong had busted her in the damned face. I’d seen that cause of death enough times to know what it looked like, and it wouldn’t be a very long leap for someone to figure out I’d probably done it. Proving it might be difficult since I was torching the DNA evidence I was leaving behind, but I didn’t need a cloud of suspicion over me.
That meant Nadine had to leave the premises, and fortunately for me, she’d played right into my hand, panicking when she saw me, and of course, running right into her … panic room.
I keyed my Wolfe strength and gripped tight along the sides of the panic room’s steel surface, lifting as I siphoned the heat from the metal where I’d burned away the covering of drywall that hid it from sight. The foundation cracked under my strength, and I ripped the panic room’s steel floor free from the concrete surface of the mansion. It wasn’t bonded at all, really, which made sense given that no one had ever thought someone would come along and lift the damned thing up, after all.
“Gavrikov,” I muttered and felt my feet lift off the ground. The panic room was heavy, but I’d lifted heavier things. I left the ground behind, taking care not to get more than about ten feet above the place where the roof had been, dodging the panic room around trees as I headed for Long Island Sound just across the lawn. I kept low to avoid radar and witnesses, gaining speed over the moonless night, carrying the multi-ton burden of the panic room along with me out to sea about ten miles. It didn’t take very long, and when I figured I’d gone far enough, I just dropped it into the water.
It landed with a splash, floating on the surface, full of buoyant air. I dropped down, hovering a foot or so above it as it bobbed in the waves. I looked around, listening, but heard nothing but the ocean. In the distance, I could see the lights of a ship in the utter blackness. I heated up my finger and sent a line of superhot flame into the corner of the panic room, carving it off and leaving a three-inch window into the darkness.
“Hi, Nadine,” I singsonged as a little water slopped into the room through the hole I’d made.
“What the hell, you crazy psycho?” she screamed back out at me.
I ignored her jibe. “I just wanted you to know, this isn’t about Scott. I was mad about that, sure, but this is because you decided to plan a terrorist attack and then ruin the life of a woman who was utterly decent and good in a world that … isn’t.” Water was running into the open hole like crazy now. It wouldn’t be long before it would start to drag the panic room down.
Nadine thrust a hand out through the small hole. “Okay! Okay! I get it! That’s—that’s a fair point! Just—get me out of here!”
“Are you sorry you did these things?” I asked, watching detached as she stuck her face up. I could see her white, panicked eyes glistening under the blanket of starlight, her face partially obscured by boundaries of the small opening.
“I am,” she said, sincerely, slurring a little. “I—I am so sorry. Gah—this—the water is freezing. Please, just—get me out and I’ll—well, I’ll say I’m sorry to her. And the city. I'll make it right!”
“I don’t really believe you for some reason,” I said, like I was puzzling it over. “Maybe it’s because you’re a liar and a murderer and a thief—”
“I didn’t—I’m not—”
“Yes, you are.”
There was a pause, then a hard breath. “Okay. Okay. Yes, I am. I am all those things. But—”
“No buts.”
“You can’t just—”
“I can,” I said, and then I heated my hand up and blazed another, smaller hole, in the side of the panic room. I heard it sizzle as I burned through, and then water started pouring in from the opposite direction, icy cold, and she gasped in shock at the temperature. “In fact, I just did.”
“You’re no better than me!” she screamed as the water rushed in on her. Her lips were already blue, I could see as she stuck her face up again. “You’re a murderer! You’re no different than me!”
“Actually, I am,” I said, a little happier than I probably should have been. Watching her sink as the waves took her little box away felt strangely therapeutic, as though I were punishing someone who truly deserved it in the manner that I’d suffered on so many occasions thanks to Mom. “I’m out here, see. Also, I’m working toward improving things for humanity. You? You’re trying to screw things up. There is a difference, just, you know … not in the actual killing, I guess.”
She opened her mouth to say something, but she was already up to her neck, and the dark water swallowed her, and her reply before she could make it. The panic room sank below the waves, rippling in the sound, and I watched it go, acutely aware that I needed to get back to the Staten Island police station post haste.
“Also,” I said to the black water below me, “Yeah, I’m a liar, too. When I said I didn’t do this because of you sleeping with Scott?” I put my thumb and forefinger a centimeter apart. “It might have had a teensy bit to do with it. I mean, I woulda killed you anyway, because of what you did to Jamie and New York, but … I would have felt bad about it if you hadn’t done what you did.”
I stared at the dark water, ripples lost to the waves, not a bubble left to mark the panic room’s passage. I imagined Nadine Griffin sinking into the icy depths, and felt coldly satisfied. “So long,” I said and flew off, low, close to the surface. I had an alibi to finish shoring up, after all.