"07 - Burnt Offerings 4.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hamilton Laurell K)

Ryan once before she died. Nice lady." He started to turn the ice-filled glass
round and round in his large hands. He stared at the glass and not at me while
he talked. "I met one other firebug. He was young, in his twenties. He'd started
by setting empty houses on fire, like a lot of pyromaniacs. Then he did
buildings with people in them, but everybody got out. Then he did a tenement, a
real firetrap. He set every exit on fire. Killed over sixty people, mostly women
and children."
McKinnon stared up at me. The look in his eyes was haunted. "It's still the
largest body count I've ever seen at a fire. He did an office building the same
way, but missed a couple of exits. Twenty-three dead."
"How'd you catch him?"
"He started writing to the papers and the television. He wanted credit for the
deaths. He set fire to a couple of cops before we got him. We were wearing those
big silver suits that they wear to oil rig fires. He couldn't get them to burn.
We took him down to the police station, and that was the mistake. He set it on
fire."
"Where else could you have taken him?" I asked.
He shrugged massive shoulders. "I don't know, somewhere else. I was still in the
suit, and I held onto him. Told him we'd burn up together if he didn't stop it.
He laughed and set himself on fire." McKinnon sat his glass very carefully on
the edge of the desk.
"The flames were this soft blue color almost like a gas fire, but paler. Didn't
burn him, but somehow it set my suit on fire. The damn thing is rated for
something like 6,000 degrees, and it started to melt. Human skin burns at 120
degrees, but somehow I didn't melt into a puddle, just the suit. I had to strip
it off while he laughed. He walked out the door and he didn't think anyone would
be stupid enough to grab him."
I didn't say the obvious. I let him talk.
"I tackled him in the hallway and slammed him into a wall a couple of times.
Funny thing, where my skin touched him, it didn't burn. It was like the fire
crawled over a space and started on my arms, so my hands are fine."
I nodded. "There's a theory that a pyro's aura keeps them from burning. When you
touched his skin, you were too close to his own aura, his own protection, to
burn."
He stared at me. "Maybe that is what happened, because I threw him hard up
against the wall over and over. He was screaming, 'I'll burn you. I'll burn you
alive.' Then the fire changed color to yellow, normal, and he started to burn. I
let him go and went for the fire extinguisher. We couldn't put the fire on his
body out. The extinguishers worked on the walls, everything else, but it
wouldn't work on him. It was as if the fire was crawling out of his body from
deep inside. We'd dampen some of the flames, but there was just more of it until
he was made of fire."
McKinnon's eyes were distant and horror-filled as if he was still seeing it. "He
didn't die, Ms. Blake, not like he should have. He screamed for so long and we
couldn't help him. Couldn't help him." His voice trailed off. He just sat there
staring at nothing.
I waited and finally said, gently, "Why are you here, Captain?"
He blinked and sort of shook himself. "I think we've got another firebug on our
hands, Ms. Blake. Dolph said that if anyone could help us cut the loss of life,
it was you."