Nikki Shore - Ghost Beneath The Ashes

Chapter 1

DAY 1 - Gainsborough Street, 9:30 AM

The sun already casts its warm glow at Gainsborough Street. It was dawn, another day in Bellvue, but not for me. After witnessing the explosion, my gut instincts say there's more to this, that I needed to see for myself somehow. The place was cordoned by the firefighters after it was put off. Most of the busybodies in the crowd have left by then when the police cars arrived. I approached the scene closer, hoping to find a familiar face among the cops. The cops on guard duty, doing their jobs, barred the scene and kept me from entering.

"Sorry mam, this is a restricted area,"

One of them said, approaching me holding his rifle up. I wasn't going to take this lightly. Among the officers, I saw a man with a leather jacket talking to a fellow investigator. He wasn't really going to look at me, obviously, but I want to get his attention.

"Hey, hey!"

I shouted to him, but the officer pushed me back ...

"Mam, unless you're some kind of reporter, you're not allowed to get inside ..."

"Excuse me officer, I know the woman. I'll do the talking."

The guy in the jacket approached us. He was a scruffy man with slicked back brown hair wearing leather duster with what is clearly a formal suit underneath hiding his lithe but well-built frame-the very image of a classic detective.

"Well, who do we have here, Nikki Shore. What are you doing in a place like this? This isn't the mall and you're knee deep in trouble as it is with your last stint of going vigilante. You don't want to add obstruction of justice and insulting an officer on top of it."

"Well, that one just happened to gone out of hand Melden, so I had to drag you along with me. This is different."

"No, it's not that different. This time, I beg you as a friend to stay out of this."

Inspector Carl Melden said, pointing at me and then looks back. The last time we met, we had to deal with an old man in his smuggling gig. The man went gung ho on us with a prototype exoskeleton hooked with a machine gun he hid among his smuggled goods on the guise of export products. (Trust me, it makes sense in context.) Though the man had guts and guns he could not beat my sheer determination and experience in the force and underground. After that stint, Melden had another criminal behind bars under his name.

But this time, we're on the opposite corners of the same side of the law, each with our turf. I was going to get some info, he was the one stopping me, at least for now.

"Now if you excuse me Nikki, I'm still a bit busy here."

As he was about to turn his back,

"What if I tell you that it wasn't an accident? What if it's something else? Arson perhaps?"

"Well, that's one possibility, but how can you tell it, huh Nikki?"

"My intuition."

"Well, ladies intuition doesn't count for much in the law and you know that."

"Well, I've stuck my nose into things that are far from legal and I've seen this scenario before ..."

I said as I changed my position and looked at the wreck.

"This isn't what you and your buddies think it is. I can tell you're out of your leads and I'm not going to stop you finding them, but you've got to at least get a second opinion."

My words reached him, he thought about it like Rodin's "Thinker" sculpture. If I wasn't going to get an answer from him, I would have gotten to it myself, but,