Fire Born (Firehouse 343) (23 page)

Chris knew as he settled t
he receiver into its cradle
that he would not be getting any sleep that night.

***

What joy! While he hadn’t found a solution to the
Breckon
problem
just
yet, he had solved another one. A certain lovely Italian investigator had been the object of his desire for a very long time—God was she hot! She had a perfectly round ass, breasts that begged to be sucked, and a mouth that belonged around his cock
as often as he could get it there
. He’d wanted her from the moment he met her, and just thinking about
Martie
Liotta
had blood rushing to his groin.

Be
cause he was alone
and the door was locked, he indulged the sudden desire to take his flesh in hand. Unzipping his trousers,
he freed his already stiffening member from the confines of his boxers and began to stroke it. He imagined his hand was Martie’s, that she was naked and kissing him as she touched him eagerly, wanting to satisfy him as much as he wanted to satisfy her. He knew without a doubt that she’d slide her fingers along his shaft with just enough pressure to titillate and sensitize him, to get him hard before she placed her succulent lips over the head.

Learning that she
had found herself attracted to one of the firefighters in Gracechurch had upset him, but he nipped that problem in the bud quickly.
It had only
been too easy to slip little seeds of doubt in her mind
about him
. She already had an unfortunate track record with men, much of which he’d observed first hand over the years he’d known her. Martie was no pushover by any means, but she had trust issues when it came to the opposite sex that had made her only too easy to manipulate. All he’d had to do was make her question her decision to get involved with someone she barely knew and
bam
! She’d not only done a background check but had pushed to get the asshole’s juvenile records unsealed.

Pe
r
fect!

Oh… Oh, yeah. Now he was feeling
really
good. His stroking became more insistent as he imagined Martie coming to him, crying over the fact that she and the firefighter had broken up before they were officially a couple. When he’d called her earlier to ask how things went at the funeral, she had
revealed that they’d fought and that she’d be glad when the investigation
was over
. He pictured himself offering her a hug mean
t
to comfort. She’d look up at him with teary eyes and he
would lower his head to kiss her. She’d be surprised at first, but she’d melt into him once he slipped his tongue into her mouth and showed her what a real kiss felt like. Then he’d fuck her senseless and she’d come screaming his name.

That happy thought undid him, and he shot jets of semen onto the floor. He kept jerking until he was spent, then put his pecker away and used a Kleenex to wipe his spilled seed from the carpet. He tossed the tissue into the trash a
nd then headed for the bathroom
where he washed his hands. As he looked into the mirror over the sink, he remembered that before he could make that little dream come true, he had another one—a nightmare—that he had to end.

That bitch and her brat had to die.

***

Martie hadn’t expected a call from the lab so soon, so it was with singing nerves that she hurried down from her office. She couldn’t make anymore headway in the
Breckon
Apartments case without those results—all the interviews had been conducted, pictures taken, evidence collected.

Her heart broken.

She shook that thought off as she stepped through the opening elevator doors on the lab floor. Now was not the time to be thinking about a certain Native American fireman who’d set her very soul ablaze in
so short a time of knowing him
. Martie was afraid to put her feelings into words, sure that if she admitted to the impossible
the cracks in her heart would spread further, shattering it into a million pieces.

She took a deep, steadying breath,
then
pushed open the lab doors.
Various techs were milling about doing their jobs, but her eyes sought out just one person.
“What have you got for me,
Stillman
?”
she asked as she approached the man.

Victor
Stillman
, the chief lab technician, turned to Martie with a grim expression. “What I have is your accelerant, Lieutenant,” he told her, rolling over on his wheeled chair and handing her a few sheets of paper.

She looked them over as he continued to explain. “Those streaks you found in
th
e
empty apartments? They were
made with acetone
. As you know, y
our firebug poured a trail of it in every one of them.”

Martie looked up at him.
Acetone, she knew, as a highly flammable chemical with a flashpoint of
0˚ Fahrenheit. It was
a substance that lit easily and enabled fire to
spread quickly.
“
The use of acetone as the accel
erant explains why the flames
li
t the entire building up before the fire department arrived.
Was it the same batch
,
or did
he
use more than one
source
?” she asked, knowing it was possible
that the arsonist had procured the chemical
from different sources.

“The molecular structure of the acetone in each sample was the same
,”
Stillman
replied.

“Which means the source was,” she mused, looking over the data on the pages. “I don’t suppose anything in he
re’s
gonna
tell me exactly what
that source is
or where it came from
?”

Stillman
shook his head. “Not in that report, no—the solvent used by your
perp
was industrial grade.
We have precisely zero
industrial-grade
acetone
retailers
in Montana.
”

“
Are you kidding me? No acetone retailers whatsoever?
” she countered.

He grinned. “
Oh, there are plenty of places that sell acetone—Home Depot, Lowe’s… Just about any DIY place or paint store.
The
Walmart
in Gracechurch
even sells it, but
only in the form of paint thinner and nail polish
remover
.”

Martie frowned. “Damn it,” she muttered darkly. “N
one of those places would sell industrial-grade acetone.
”

“Nope—only stuff they got is for removing pain
t
, furniture polish, or fake nails
,”
Stillman
replied.
“Believe me, I looked—even did an Internet search for acetone retailers in our fair state. Closest maker of industrial-grade I could find is
Seacole
Specialty Chemicals in Plymouth, Minnesota. If your guy didn’t order the stuff online, and got it from somewhere here in the state, then he pulled a five-finger discount from someplace that uses it.”

“What
kind of businesses use
that grade
of acetone?”

Stillman
nodded toward the papers in her hand. “I put it there in the report.
There are some agricultural applications for acetone, but the m
ost likely candidates are furniture repair shops, automotive repair shops, metal finishing plants… We’ve even got some here in the lab. Out of curiosity I looked up where we get it from, and Requisitions orders it from
Seacole
Specialty
.”

Martie sighed resignedly. “Thanks,
Stillman
. These are mine?” she asked, hefting the pages.

He
nodded.
“Of course, Lieutenant.”

“You get anything on the kind of saw used on the ceiling beam?” she wondered then.

“Haven’t matched the
kerf
marks yet—I’ll let you know when we do,”
Stillman
replied.

Thanking the tech, she left
the lab
and
headed up to Graham’s office to fill him in. He was as surprised as she had been that there were no manufacturers of industrial-grade acetone in Montana.

“
A great big state like
ours, and there’s not one?” he said with a shake of his head.

Martie shrugged.
“Apparently not.
According to
Stillman
there are plenty
of places you can buy acetone for things like household projects
, but not the kind the arsonist used.”

“Well, at least we know what he used
to start that fire. Explains why it
spread so fast,” Graham said, echoing her earlier thought. “Doesn’t explain why the firebug passed himself off as an electrician to gain access to the attic of the building.”

Clearing her throat, Martie said, “Sir, I can only think of one explanation for that,” she said slowly.

Graham raised an eyebrow. “Oh? What’s your theory?”

She’d thought a lot about it these last few days, when she wasn’t ruminating over her fight with Chris…and how much she missed him. “Well,” she said, pushing Chris to the side of her brain for the moment, “look at whose apartment he went into. After I talked to Veronica Thompson, I asked the other residents, even some of the ones who weren’t at home when the fire started, if they had ever received a visit from an electrician.
Nobody remembered seeing one, or even getting a call from one.”

“Veronica Thompson,” her boss mused. “That’s the woman from apartment 3C, right?
With the little girl that was saved by the firefighter who died?”

Martie nodded. “Yes. She said he was in every room, and that the one with attic access was her daughter’s. That’s the room where the ceiling beam crashed, the one that was partially sawed through.”

“But why would anyone target a struggling single mother?” Graham pressed. “What harm could she possibly have done to anybody?”

“That’s where I’m stuck,” Martie confessed. “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about it, and my gut is telling me that either she or her daughter—maybe even both of them—were supposed to die in that fire. What I can’t figure out is why anyone would want them dead.”

Graham thought about that for a moment. “What about the girl’s father? Where is he?”

“I don’t know. Ronnie said something about having lived in Billings
when she left
him, but that sh
e hasn’t seen him since
.”

“Because he wanted her to have an abortion.”

Martie nodded again.
“She moved around until she settled in Gracechurch about a year ago.”

Graham propped his elbows on the edge of his desk and laced his fingers together. “It’s a good thing you put that story into your report, despite not having recorded it like you usually do.”

“I’ll be honest, sir, I thought about not adding it since it wasn’t a part of the official interview,” Martie told him. “But as I was typing it up, something told me that it would be best if I did.”

“And like I said, it was a good thing,” he repeated. “Having that conversation on record lends credence to the theory that Veronica Thompson or her daughter is a target. Since that’s what you think and I happen to agree, looks like you’re going to have to do a little digging into the woman’s history.”

He stood then and Martie followed him with her eyes as he came around the desk, leaning back on the edge and looking down at her with what she recognized as his concerned expression. It was the same one that had crossed his face the other day when he told her she should take a closer look at Chris.

“Speaking of digging,” he said softly, “how are you doing since breaking up with your fireman?”

Martie shuddered inwardly. She liked Graham, even respected him a great deal, but he was her boss. She rarely called him by his first name even though he’d told her time and
again that she was welcome to, and t
alking about personal issues with the man she answered to
on the job made her feel more than a little uncomfortable.
She’d felt odd about his concern the other day, and she was feeling the same way now.

“I’m, uh, I’m doing alright,” she said casually. “Working helps, though making another trip to Gracechurch might make things a little difficult.”

Graham frowned. “And why’s that? Why would you even need to go back there?”