Fire Engine Dead by Sheila Connolly Read Free Book Online Page A

feel better if I passed my suspicion on to James, who would either tell me I was hallucinating, or he’d take it and run with it, letting me wash my hands of it. I dialed his office number.
    “Morrison,” he barked when we finally connected.
    “It’s Nell,” I said.
    “Oh,” he said in a milder tone. “You’ve got something already?”
    “I’m not really sure, but I have something I think you need to see. Can you stop by my office?”
    “I’m tied up this afternoon, but I can make it later. After five okay?”
    “Sure.” That would give me time to do a little more digging. If the picture in the paper showed what I thought it did, I needed to find out more details about the museum and its collections. Latoya would be more useful than Felicity in that arena. Heck, maybe Shelby, too—the files in the development office probably had organizational information for the place; hadn’t we held some sort of joint event with the Fireman’s Museum at the Society a few years back? Before my time, but I remembered checking the file for the promotional materials and table arrangements for the event when I was planning a later event here. So I’d talk to Latoya first, then Shelby. I’d have to bring Shelby up to speed about what was going on—or what I suspected might be—but I trusted her, and she had a good sense of social connections. And Eric already knew—I hadn’t considered all the implications when I showed him the pictures, but now the cat was out of the bag. I didn’t think either of them would blab, but I shouldn’t spread my suspicion any further. I felt a pang of guilt about keeping Latoya in the dark, but James might need this information kept quiet, and I’d have done enough in telling Eric and Shelby.
    I carefully marked the photos with sticky tabs, added my newspaper to the file (making a mental note to myself to ask Eric to see if he could print out a higher-quality photo online), neatly stacked the pile—and slid it into my drawer. Then I stood up and went down the hall to Latoya’s office again.
    She looked up from whatever she was working on, reading glasses perched on her nose, clearly not happy to see me. “You wanted something else, Nell? Apart from your request yesterday? I’m working on that.”
    “Yes,” I said, sitting down across from her before shecould invite me. “Tell me what you know about the Fireman’s Museum.”
    “Can it wait, Nell? I’d really like to finish this.”
    I was getting kind of tired of her superior attitude. I had a work-related question, and damn it, I was her boss. “No, it can’t wait. This is part of a criminal investigation, and the FBI has asked for our help.”
    She gave me a long, unreadable stare before she folded the journal in front of her. “What do you need to know?”
    “If I remember correctly, there’s something unusual about the organizational structure of the museum. What can you tell me?”
    She leaned back and stared at the wall over my head. “As I recall—and don’t hold me to it—the Fireman’s Museum was first suggested by a bunch of fire buffs in the 1960s, in advance of the 1971 centennial of the Philadelphia Fire Department. They put together the core collections from fire stations all over the city. The fire commissioner at the time offered them the use of a retired firehouse, but it took a couple of years of work before it could open as a museum. The original staffing came from the fire department and volunteers. Still does, more or less—members of the fire department still volunteer time to provide tours, which saves a lot in staff salaries.
    “They’ve gotten some funding from the city and from local insurance companies. They created a nonprofit corporation to manage it, with a volunteer board of directors.”
    I was impressed by her knowledge. “Interesting,” I said. “I hadn’t realized it was such a homegrown institution. Thank you, Latoya, that’s exactly what I needed to know. How do you know so