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Payne shrugged, and forced a smile. “I guess.”
“So, not that I’m not glad to see you, but what the hell are you doing here? And you said you had some information on this?”
As Harris sipped his coffee, he saw Matt’s eyes were pained.
“Kind of a long story, Tony. A lot of it I don’t know, and what I do know I don’t fully understand.”
Harris nodded appreciatively. “I probably could say the same about this job.” He looked at Payne and thought he detected some interest. “You want to see it?”
Payne immediately nodded.
“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I do, Tony.”
Harris thought, That’s not just morbid interest on his part.
It’s professional.
And maybe something more…
“The guys from the Medical Examiner’s Office are working the scene. It’ll be called in to Homicide anytime now.”
“It’s not your job?”
“No. At least not yet.”
Payne considered that, then asked: “How’d you wind up here?”
“I live over off Ryan. Across from the middle school?”
Payne nodded. “Oh, yeah.”
“When the room went boom, it about blew me out of bed.”
“No shit,” Payne said, then after a long moment: “So, who’s on the Wheel?”
“Bari.”
Payne frowned and shook his head.
Harris thought, And that damn sure was a professional assessment.
Great minds think alike, which explains why I’ve always liked Payne.
“I hear you, Matt.”
Harris motioned for Payne to follow him.
“C’mon. Let’s go have a look. Maybe you’ll see something I didn’t.”
When Payne had approached Harris standing in front of Room 44, he’d noticed that all the rooms from there to the front of the motel had appeared more or less normal. But now, as they walked down the sidewalk and turned the corner, he had a clear view of the back side of the motel.
It looks like a war zone.
Debris was strewn-blown out from the building in an irregular semicircular pattern-all through the parking lot. Everything was coated either in water or what remained of the foam that the firefighters had sprayed to suffocate the flames. One room eight doors down from the corner looked to have taken the brunt of the damage-its broken and burned door hung outward at a great angle, only the bottom hinge holding it to the door frame. And both the plate-glass window and its frame were missing from their place in the masonry wall.
They followed the sidewalk that ran the length of the back side of the motel. The doors to all of the rooms they passed were wide open, and Matt knew that the rooms had been cleared by the first responders. By the look of the interior of the rooms, though, no one had occupied them recently, and certainly not in the last night.
The acrid odor of burned plastic, fabric, wood, and more hung heavily in the air. And it got heavier as they moved toward the middle of the building.
