Free Rogue Island by Bruce DeSilva Page A

death? The thought, more than the smell, made me retch. Sometimes it’s better not to know how things work.
    Rosie spoke a few words into her radio, and within the hour two cadaver dogs were on the scene, yipping as soon as their paws hit the ground. I already had a pretty good idea what they’d find.
    I paced, chatted with some of the exhausted firefighters, looked at my watch a lot. It took an hour to dig the victims out of the wreckage. There were two of them, most of the clothes burned from their bodies. Firefighters laid them on the sidewalk where Polecki and Roselli squatted to look them over. Then firefighters covered the corpses with a tarp to await the medical examiner.
    â€œIf they had ID, it got burned up,” Roselli told Rosie as I sidled over to eavesdrop. “Most likely they got sick of sleeping on the street and snuck back in for a little warmth.”
    â€œThen they came to the right place,” Polecki said, his laugh making his belly jiggle.
    Rosie’s hands clenched into fists. “I ought to kick your ass,” she said, “but it wouldn’t be a fair fight.”
    *  *  *
    Two hours later, I was looking over Veronica’s rough draft when Gloria came by to show us her photos. Firemen ducking for cover in a hail of glass and sparks. An ice-encrusted Rosie, silhouetted against a row of flaming windows, muscling a hose. A wide shot of firemen and equipment looking small in the foreground of a building engulfed in flame. A cadaver dog straining at his leash, snout speckled with ash.
    â€œWow,” I said.
    â€œWhen they hired me, they promised I’d be in the lab no more than a year before I got my chance,” Gloria said. “It’s been four years now. When I called it in from the scene, know what the night desk told me? Said to sit tight while they woke up a real photographer. I told them I had it covered, but they called Porter in anyway. I just looked at his stuff. Mine’s better. The photo desk says they’re gonna use one of his and four of mine. And I get page one.”
    â€œThe one of Rosie reminds me of Stanley Forman’s work,” I said, “back when he was winning Pulitzers for the Boston Herald .”
    â€œThanks,” Gloria said, and she touched my arm. “By the way, I thought you’d like to have this one.”
    It was a picture of me staring wide-eyed at the flames. I looked like I was in a trance. As I stared at it, I felt the heat stinging my skin again as sparks danced in the dark. Behind me in the photo, I could make out a string of gawkers. I held the print close for a better look. I couldn’t be sure, but one of them might have been Mr. Rapture.

17
    First thing Monday morning, my computer flashed with a message from Lomax:
    M AYOR PRESS CONFERENCE, CITY HALL AT NOON.
    So what? I wasn’t the city-hall reporter. But asking Lomax why he wanted something always carried the risk of public humiliation. I wandered down the street to see what was up.
    City hall, a Beaux-Arts atrocity at the southern end of Kennedy Plaza, looked as if a madman had sculpted it from a mound of seagull shit. I walked up the guano-slicked stone steps and into the foyer, then turned right and entered the mayor’s office, with its crystal chandelier and floor-to-ceiling windows with a panoramic view of a Peter Pan bus stop. Carozza stood behind his desk, the same mahogany antique Buddy Cianci had fancied before they packed him off to a federal penitentiary for getting caught doing business as usual.
    TV cables snaked across the red-and-blue oriental carpet. Camera crews and on-air reporters from Channels 10, 12, and 6 had arrived early and hogged the best spots up front. Channels 4 and 7 in Boston were there, too, along with an AP reporter and a woman I recognized as a stringer for The New York Times . Mount Hope was getting to be a big story.
    The occasion had flipped the mayor’s “on” switch.