Excerpt: 'The Killing Club'

So when I first saw the sky, I didn't think fire; I thought, wow, Ben's really outdone himself this year. He was always a believer; we were already in fifth grade when he socked Garth McBride for saying there was no such thing as Santa Claus. Now Ben played Santa for the Rotarians in a plastic igloo in Appleton Mall. Shopping with my nephew Clay, I'd seen him there a week ago, telling a long line of kids that if they were good, they'd get what they wanted. Clay, 13, had laughed, "Yeah, sure." In Ben's case, it was had to argue with Clay's pessimism: Ben had wanted to go to college on a football scholarship and had never made it. He'd wanted to live in one of the big houses on the river and never got there. "Just not good enough," he used to tell us, and nobody had argued with him.

Turning into Glen Valley, I could see the smoke, then smell it. Once I hit Windsor Lane, I knew it was Ben's house on fire. When I saw how bad it was, my hands went hot on the wheel. Our big red ladder truck and the pumper had pulled up onto the lawn. Black and whites blocked off the street. Neighbors stood watching from the sidewalks. EMS was in the driveway and two paramedics were lifting a gurney with a body lumped on it into the back of the van. Half the bright yellow two-story clapboard colonial was a charred shell. Firemen were still hauling out wet sooty furniture. Everything was steaming in the frozen air.

I drove past a brand new black Mercedes sedan, still with its dealer plates, across the street. The guy who owned it was talking on his cell phone in the driver's seat. I recognized the aggressively handsome profile of Barclay Ober, who'd built Glen Valley, and wondered why he was there.

Nearby, my fiancé Rod was walking the chief of police to his car. Even in a New Jersey suburb, there was something about Rod's way of walking that made him look like he was headed through an open stretch of dusty sagebrush to lasso a wild horse. Chief Waige depended on Rod. But Rod gave everybody that feeling -- that you could lean on him and he wouldn't fall over.

The chief drove away as I got close enough to shout out the window, "Rod! Is it bad?"

He nodded, hands hunched in his suede jacket pockets.

I called again, "Goddamn. Is it Ben?"

He nodded.

For our date at the Inn, I was wearing a short dress under my parka, and I was tripping in the hard snow in red Ferragamo knock-offs that spend most of their time in a box on my closet shelf. It was a rare enough sight for my fellow GPD detective Danny Ventura to grab the flattened fire hose, shake it at me from between his legs and whistle. "Hey, Jovanna Lucia, you're a girl!"

"Give it a rest, Danny." I threw him the finger. It didn't mean as much with my padded gloves on.

He made a kissing face. Danny Ventura and I had gone out once, years ago when I first joined GPD. Once was enough. He was good-looking in a sleazy sort of way. He was a good detective too, though not a smart one, but dogged and observant. Everything else about him-well, let's leave it at that.

Rod told Danny to back off. Danny did. Rod is his boss too.

"How did this happen?"

"You catch it on the radio?" Rod pulled me under his arm and hugged me. He's lanky, but as solid as a tree. He's close to a foot taller than I am.

"No, I was just driving by. How bad is it?"

"Bad." Rod still wears his hair longer than the current style. Most people in Gloria are a little behind the times. I could smell the smoke in his hair when he said, "Ben's dead."

I'd figured somebody was, from what was on the gurney. "Oh Jesus. Megan and the girls?"

"No. We couldn't find anybody else in the house. Haven't reached her."

"Electrical?"

He walked me over to the front walk, guiding me out of the snow patches into which my heels were slipping. "Looks like he fell down his basement steps, went down probably because some fuses blew. Kicked over a gas can. I'm sorry, baby. I know you two go back."

"God, Ben?" I watched the bulk of the body bag sliding through the white doors. "Ben Tymosz? In a basement? I still think of Ben three feet off the ground."

As I said it, I shot back through a dozen years, and hunched on the sidelines of scruffy football field in a rainy December. I was pointing a beaten-up zoom lens at a teenager with Tymosz on the back of his jersey. He was twisting his thick body high in the air in the end zone, his pockmarked face earnest, his big hands red and raw around the football. Touchdown!

"HART HIGH SCHOOL CHAMPS!" flapped the banner over Main Street until that April, although the truth was, we lost that final game. And, like I say, Ben didn't make it through college. And he hadn't been very good at selling insurance either. And we'd run out of things to talk about and had lost touch.