Clean Burn (17 page)

I ignored the shiver spiking along my spine, the catch in my breathing, and focused on the beer. “What have you got?”

“Bud,” he answered succinctly.

As my grandmother would say, I could piss stronger than that. “Anything else?”

A ghost of a smile curved his mouth. “Bud Light.”

Crazed laughter wasn’t really called for in that moment. “A Bud’s fine.”

He brought the beers, setting a can beside my laptop before downing half of his. “So how do we do this?”

On the table works, I mused. Move the napkin holder and the salt and pepper shakers, lose the bottle of barbecue sauce. I shook off the image of Ken clearing the table with a sweep of his arm.

He leaned over to check the screen. “This is what you used to use for your profiling.”

“Similar. It’s got a few more bells and whistles, but it’s basically the same software.”

He dropped into a chair next to me. “What do you want to know?”

“You tell me everything about the arson fires. I enter the data and the program puts it together.”

“And out pops a suspect.”

“Not quite so easy.” I edged my chair away from his a scosh. “First tell me about possible motives.”

“For arson? You’ve got six basically.” He held up one finger. “Profit.”

“That was a high-ticket car that burned at the Markowitz’s.”

“The rest of the structures have been like Abe’s shed. No insurance value.” He unfolded another finger. “Then there’s vandalism.”

“Still possible.”

“Except the targets don’t make sense. Vandals are usually kids. They’ll set fire to a trash can at school, maybe an abandoned building or car.”

“Profit, vandalism,” I prompted.

A third finger went up. “Crime concealment.”

“Doesn’t fit. What are the odds so many different people have something illegal to hide?”

“Right. Same problem with revenge. Unlikely someone had an axe to grind with all these different folks.” He held up four fingers. “Then there’s extremism. Using fire as a form of social protest or terrorism.”

“If that was the case with your fires, some wacko group would be taking responsibility.”

“No one has. Excitement is number six. Thrill seeking. Need for attention. Sometimes there’s a sexual component.”

That froze my brain in its tracks. Hearing the word “sexual” from Ken’s mouth brought me back around to the naughty thoughts I’d been entertaining. A tangible energy lingered in the air between us.

I remembered it all, the way his legs felt sliding between mine, his tongue in my mouth. His groan as he climaxed.

Those memories were a damn slippery slope. I shook them off. “You think it’s number six, then? Excitement?”

His gaze fixed on me, he swirled the can of Bud. “Doesn’t make sense they wouldn’t stay to watch the fire.”

“What if they
are
coming back? Hiding somewhere we can’t see them?”

“Maybe at Markowitz’s place where the tree cover is dense. But where would someone hide at the Double J? It’s all open country. And why not just watch it burn when it’s set? Why use a delay at all?”

“Then we’re out of options.”

He took a sip of beer. “There is irrational fire setting.”

“Meaning?”

“It’s motiveless. Or at least it seems that way to you or me. To a perpetrator with a mental disorder, his reasons for setting a fire are completely rational.”

“Then by process of elimination...”

He nodded. “We’ve ruled out everything it couldn’t be. We can start with the theory of an irrational fire-setter. See where the facts take us.”

“You’ve already given this some thought, though.”

“Yeah. I already got to this point.”

He didn’t seem very happy with it. I couldn’t blame him. Even I, who could easily fall into the excitement category if I let my obsessions take complete control, felt uneasy at the irrationality of these fires.

I scooted back up to the table and my computer. “Let’s get into the details.”

Ken moved his chair slightly closer to mine. As if I was a magnet and he couldn’t resist the pull. “They’ve all been structure fires. Some brush burned incidental to the main blaze.”

“What kind of structures?” I floated my hands over the keyboard.

“Sheds, barns, a chicken coop. A garage.”

“I’ll need them in date order.”

He pulled several folders off the stack and flipped through them as he checked dates. “The first was an old chicken coop on January 16th. Then two sheds, one on February 9th, the other on the 27th. The first barn was on March 5th followed by another shed on March 15th. The second barn burned on March 22nd. The garage was yesterday, the fourth shed today.”

As he reeled them off, I entered the dates and structure types in the appropriate data fields. I angled the laptop toward Ken. “These are the fields I have so far. Anything I should add?”

He glanced at the input screen. “Area of origin, point of origin, type of fuel, maybe some kind of checkbox for flashover.”

I gave myself a mental palm-slap to the forehead for forgetting it. Flashover happened when a contained fire, like in the sheds, the barns and the garage preheats the room like you’d preheat an oven. When the fuel all reaches ignition temperature at once and the entire space is consumed by flame in an instant, that’s flashover.

I right-clicked to select the field creation menu and added the additional fields. Then I switched back to data entry mode. “So flashover occurred in how many of your arsons?”

“All but one of the first five. The chicken coop was such a wreck, it wasn’t truly a confined space.”

I clicked the checkboxes on the appropriate entries. “No flashover in the one today, according to the fire captain.”

“No windows in the shed, just big vents along the roof. Abe introduced oxygen by entering and leaving the door open, but with the venting, the fire still wasn’t energetic enough to form a sufficient hot gas layer required for flashover. Since Mary called 911 the moment she and Abe saw the smoke, suppression started sooner than with the other fires.”

With flashover temps in the neighborhood of one thousand degrees, not only would Abe not have survived, there wouldn’t be much left of him to ID. “Any evidence left of ignition source?”

“Even with flashover, the investigators found candle wax left behind at the first six fires. It helped that the candles were set on the floor.”

“And kerosene was confirmed as the accelerant in the first two fires?” I asked.

“Those are the only two I have official results from. Investigators are pretty certain they’ll find the same in the others as well, based on the fire behavior.”

“You told me, no assumptions.”

“Right. Except...” He dragged over the rest of the folders. “These are reports of arsons in the area over the last five years. We average a half-dozen or so a year. Most burn brush or forest, idiots get a kick out of throwing matches out a car window or kids start fires out in the woods. Like I mentioned before, we’ve had some trash can fires at the high school. When there have been incendiary structure fires, the homeowner’s always been involved – insurance fraud, that kind of thing.”

“Excitement, vandalism and profit motives.”

“Right.” He stabbed a finger at the other stack. “Eight in three months is unprecedented. They all seem to have been set during the night because there’s been no sign of an intruder within at least an hour or two of when the blaze starts. Candles as ignition source, kerosene-soaked rags, the areas of origin on the floor away from windows or doors. We’ve seen the same patterns of clean burn in all of them.”

With clean burn, the accelerant creates such an intense fire, the soot gets burned away. A fire so hot it would burn away all my sins.

I flexed my shoulders to throw off the notion. “Flashover could have burned away the accelerant too.”

“In some cases it did.”

“Then theoretically, those could have been accidental fires,” I suggested, playing devil’s advocate.

“The structures all had plenty of fuel – hay in the feed shed, old lumber out at Sadie’s place – but the owners tell me there were no flammables stored inside.”

Which meant less likelihood of an accidental source. “Electrical short?”

“None of the sheds were wired,” Ken reminded me.

“And the electrical in the garage was brand new and to code.” Somehow Ken had moved his chair closer; I edged mine away. “Let’s go through them one at a time, make sure we have everything.”

He read through one folder after another, pulling out the data I needed to enter into the fields we’d set up. I filled a few empty holes.

I eyed the ignition source field. “I’m still having trouble with the idea of an arsonist using a candle. It seems so old school.”

Ken tossed the last folder back on the table and leaned back in his chair. His arm brushed against mine, an electrical shock of awareness jolting through me. Just like that, the memories came tumbling back, reaching inside with hot intensity.

Ken flicked a glance at me. He knew what I was feeling. “Since he’s not sticking around to watch it, I’d say our arsonist isn’t as interested in the fire itself as much as its end result.”

“Destruction of whatever he’s burning,” I suggested, wishing I could destroy the sensations rocketing around inside me. “Although that doesn’t explain why.”

“If it is an unbalanced individual, his reasons probably won’t make much sense to us.”

Ken was so close, I could feel the warmth of his skin. “Any connection between the victims?” I asked.

He took another swig of Bud. “Nothing we’ve been able to find.”

“The program might be able to make some correlations.” And kick my brain onto a less dangerous path. I returned to field creation mode and added several columns to the database. “Let’s go through it all again, but with our focus on the victims.”

Rising from his chair, Ken laid out the eight folders along the table for easy reference. “The chicken coop was on BLM land along the river, nearly all that was left of a defunct ranch that used to lease the property. The first shed was northeast about ten miles as the crow flies at Sadie Parker’s place. The second was southeast of Sadie’s, nearly three miles away. A contractor put in the shed to store supplies while he built a client’s house.”

His hands propped on the table, he checked the next folder. “First barn was farther south and east, at a ranch on the north side of the river. The Westfields bought the place a few years ago and built their house and a second barn on the property, but only the older barn was burned. The McKays owned the third shed; it’s a good five miles west of the Westfields’.”

He moved to the last three folders. “Second barn was on a parcel that’s up for sale nearly at the south edge of the county. Elvin Hughes caretakes it. He lives in an old modular on the property. The garage you saw yourself.”

I shook out a cramp in my hand, then resumed typing. “Markowitz’s place is what... maybe two miles north of town?”

“Something like that. He bought the place last year and had the garage built in the last month. Abe and Mary’s place is south again, a bit west of Markowitz’s property.”

“Sadie’s been in Greenville since dirt was invented, so I’m guessing she’s well acquainted with Abe and Mary. What about the others?”

“Markowitz likely doesn’t know anyone since he’s so new here and a horse’s ass to boot. The Westfields are more sociable, but they haven’t been here long either. Their kids are young, so they usually interact with other young couples. The contractor’s from out of town. The McKays are from the Bay Area and Mr McKay is only here on the weekends. No one knows them very well.”

“So other than Sadie and Abe, the people involved don’t know each other.” My fingers ached, tension tightening my arms from wrist to elbow. “Anything else?”

He sank back in his chair. “They were all fairly isolated locations. Other than the garage, they were all old structures. Other than the chicken coop, someone was in residence when the fire was set.”

“Occupations?” I asked, taking a stab in the dark.

“Sadie still publishes the Greenville Gazette, believe it or not.”

“Good God, she’s got to be nearly ninety. Still a muckraker?” She used to take great delight in skewering the town council whenever possible.

“I nearly lost the election when I turned down her invitation to coffee and cookies.”

“What does she think of you now?”

“I hang the Moon.” His smile just about stopped my heart.

“Managed to develop a little charm since you left SF?” I laced my query with as much sarcasm as I could muster.

He ignored the jab. “Mr Westfield runs a computer consulting business out of a home office, his wife is a stay-at-home mom. The McKays, I have no idea. Markowitz commutes down to his law office in Sac.”

I entered everything, even though it might turn out to be useless garbage. “Let’s see what ProSpy makes of this mess.”

One hand on my chair, Ken looked over my shoulder, his breath warming the back of my neck. “How’s Darren been doing? Staying out of jail?”

Darren had created ProSpy as a sixteen year-old genius twerp. “He’s a hotshot senior scientist of some cutting edge tech company.”

Ken must have straightened his fingers because I could sense them stretching toward the nape of my neck. “I don’t remember the program looking this good.”

I tried to build a mental wall between us, shutting out his touch. “He keeps me updated. It’s light years ahead of what I used to run. Does a better job of isolating connections between disparate data elements.” I wasn’t entirely sure what I was talking about, but I figured it would impress the hell out of Ken.

“Could I get that in backwoods country sheriff terms?”

“Think of it like a jigsaw puzzle.” I turned toward him, despite my better judgment, edging nearer. “You pick up a piece, consider the color, the shape, look at the options for where it fits in the picture. Or you have a piece missing, so you visualize it in your mind as you search.”

“Haven’t played with puzzles since I was a kid, but okay.” His fingers grazed the curve of my ear. “It’s a jigsaw puzzle.”

I should have shrugged him off again, but it was late and I was tired. And wanting him, inside and out. “I treat the arsons like a puzzle, but instead of shape and color forming the picture, I use the common elements we come up with.”