The Devil Close Behind by Janet Dawson

Author:Janet Dawson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mystery, New Orleans, Oakland, private investigators, arson, missing persons, mystery fiction
ISBN: 978-1-56474-825-6
Publisher: Perseverance Press
Published: 2019-09-08T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Sixteen

Back at work Monday morning, I sent a text message to Gary Manville, letting him know I was back in town. I worked at my desk until nine-thirty. I had a ten o’clock meeting with a new client in Berkeley and I wanted to give myself plenty of time to get to her office. I had just locked my door, heading for the back entrance and the parking lot, when my cell phone chimed. The text was a response from Gary. It read, “Lunch, 1 p.m., Zacky’s?”

I responded, “See you there,” sent the message and headed for my car. I returned to the office a couple of hours later and spent some time making notes on the meeting, determining how I would proceed with the new client’s investigation. At a quarter to one, I locked my office again and left the building, this time to walk the few blocks to my lunch destination.

The pace of change in Oakland over the past few months was breathtaking. Despite the efforts of preservationists, the old round building on the corner of Twenty-seventh and Broadway that had for years housed Biff’s Coffee Shop was gone. Now the whole block was a construction site, just like the surrounding area. Buildings were going up all over the Valdez Triangle, and there was more construction all along Broadway between downtown and the Oakland hills. Down on the waterfront, the Brooklyn Basin project on the Embarcadero was rapidly rising from what had once been abandoned industrial land.

The pattern of development was retail on the first floor, with apartments on the upper floors. We certainly needed more housing. Places to live were in short supply and rents, both commercial and residential, were skyrocketing. Before moving into my garage apartment, Madison, like many of the students at Cal, had been paying an enormous sum to rent a room in an apartment.

A couple of years ago there had been a huge fire at one of these sites, a building under construction at Twenty-fourth and Valdez. The fire had gutted the partially constructed building, known as the Alta Waverly project, destroyed nearly 200 apartment units and over 30,000 square feet of retail space. Residents of neighboring buildings, some 700 people, had been temporarily displaced. The fire had poured ugly black smoke, full of soot and ash, into the air. It took days to extinguish the hot spots. As far as I knew, it was still under investigation, by local police and fire departments as well as the ATF, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

The prevailing opinion was that the fire had been arson. So had several other fires, here in Oakland and over in Emeryville. The fires had hit construction sites, destroying buildings in progress and causing grief not only for developers and investors, but residents of nearby apartment buildings who had to evacuate due to the danger of the fires, many faced with damage to their own buildings.

As far as I knew, investigators had not yet determined who had started the fires, or why.

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