Playing with Fire. Rachel Lee

perp ever gave a damn about that to begin with.”

      “Well, that’s a problem, isn’t it? How little we really know about arsonists.”

      “Exactly. The profile is next to useless. Saying that most are below average in intelligence only speaks to those who’ve been caught. Among the other sixty percent, you could have a lot of really smart guys with all kinds of motives.”

      “Yes,” she agreed emphatically as she closed her box. She rose to carry it to the fridge. When she turned around to come back to the table, she saw frank male appreciation on his face. She smiled inwardly. The two of them might strike a match themselves at any minute.

      The momentary amusement acted to clear her head almost the same way the food had. Feeling more comfortable with him now—silly when the sexual tension should have been a concern—she returned to her seat and reached for the latte.

      “Great coffee,” she said, unable to contain her surprise.

      The smile danced across his face again. “Maude finally bowed to reality when she bought that espresso machine, and when she bowed she did it right.” He pushed his plate to the side. “You ready to talk about the incident site?”

      She nodded. “Let me get my computer. We can use the photos, and I have some notes. You brought yours, right?”

      “Always.” He pointed to the clipboard on the table. “Which reminds me.” He pulled a piece of paper off the top and handed it to her. “Your log-in for the Wi-Fi. It’s pretty good here in town.”

      “Fire and police are separate?”

      “Different codes, so while you’ll be able to access all public records, you won’t wander into any files you shouldn’t see.”

      “Great. I was wondering how you worked it.”

      “How it works is beyond my scope. I’m not an IT guy. It’s enough that it does.”

      His tone held self-deprecating humor and she liked it. She felt herself smiling faintly as she went to get her laptop from the table by the front door.

      When she returned, he had cleared the table except for the coffee, and was rifling through his notes. It was a thick stack, probably begun from the moment he’d first seen the Buell place in flames five days ago.

      He folded some pages back, then pulled a cell phone off its belt clip. He punched in a number, reading from the sheet, and waited. Finally he put the phone down. “Fred must be out on the range. Cell connections can be questionable there.”

      “Will we get him later?”

      “No problem. He and his family are staying in town with his wife’s sister.”

      She opened her laptop, skipped through photos to one of the tiny holes in the charred wood. “We have a scenario now. Impossible, but valid.”

      “I know.” He stared at the photo. “It’s not impossible, but it’s disturbing. Sickening even.”

      She nodded her agreement. It appeared that someone had drilled small holes and filled the walls of the house with a volatile accelerant. It would sit in those walls, little of it escaping because the place had probably been fairly well sealed up for the frigid winters. Seeping throughout the building until the walls had become a bomb ready for one spark. Until it built up in the attic.

      Devious. Diabolical. A fire in the walls would have plenty of fuel from the timber framing. It would probably spread quite a way before it did enough damage for smoke to seep out and set off the alarms. In such an old house, it was doubtful the walls were filled with a nonflammable insulation, but even if they were, the frame could have provided enough chinks for the fire to spread once it got hot enough. And some of the hottest, fastest fires were those that smoked for a long time because they didn’t get enough oxygen, releasing even more volatile vapors until flashover was possible the instant oxygen poured in.

      She flipped back to the assessor’s record and saw the house was a century old. In those days insulation often consisted of newspapers, if any was used at all. Plaster walls, like gypsum board, were fairly noncombustible, but between the house siding and the interior walls, a whole world of possibilities lay. “Do you have any idea if the wiring was inside the walls?”

      He looked up from his notes. “No. The house was built before we had electricity out here.” He paused. “You’re thinking an accelerant could have spent a lot of time inside those walls without escaping. No socket holes.”

      She nodded, making a note. “I’m not a criminalist,” she said. “You really need your state arson investigator. I need to be clear on that, because most of what I know involves detecting fraud, not solving fires.”

      “I understand. But you’ve already helped, just by noticing that hole. I can’t believe I kept missing them.”

      “I can. I never would have found that one if I hadn’t been brushing charred wood away. Too small. It would pass for a nail hole, and I’m sure I don’t have to tell you how often nails pop out in fires because of expansion differences. It hit me only because it was right above one of your ignition points.”

      “As hot as that fire was, they might still be nail holes.”

      She pushed the computer back and rested her cheeks in her palms, her brain spinning around with ideas, most of which she discarded. “It’s the only explanation for the way you described it.”

      “So far.” He turned some more pages on his clipboard. “By the time we arrived, the barn had collapsed, the house was fully engulfed and only minutes from collapsing. Most of our job seemed to be cooling things down. An accelerant filling the walls, maybe suffusing the attic, would explain it all perfectly. Nothing else I can think of does.”

      She lifted her head, folding her arms on the table. “This guy scares me, Wayne. He terrifies me.”

      This arsonist was indeed the stuff of nightmares.