Playing with Fire. Rachel Lee

of the car. She sat staring at the blackened ribs of what had once been structures. “My God,” she said finally.

      He didn’t answer. The scene spoke for itself. Without a raging wildfire, you didn’t usually see this kind of destruction. Blackened areas surrounded the remains, but the fire hadn’t spread. Green grasses still waved in the breeze. It almost looked as if the house and barn had been blasted from above.

      “How many ignition points did you find?” she asked.

      “So far eight.”

      She shook her head. “There must be more.”

      “Seems like it. Short of a bunker-buster bomb, this shouldn’t have happened.”

      She turned her head, looking at him straight on. “You have more than a firebug. Did the Buells have enemies? Because whoever did this was awfully determined. It wasn’t about thrills.”

      His chest felt heavy. “No,” he agreed quietly. “It may have been about murder.”

      Then he climbed out of the vehicle, unable to say any more. Blue tarps rippled everywhere he’d managed to find ignition sources, protecting them from the elements. But time was short. Even without rain, each passing day destroyed more evidence. Although at this point he couldn’t imagine what evidence was going to get them any closer to the sick mind that had done this.

      “No pyromaniac,” she said when she stood by the car.

      “No,” he agreed. “Too organized. But angrier than all get-out about something. Or making some kind of point.” He paused and looked at her. “I know my department is under suspicion, too.”

      Something flickered across her face but he couldn’t read it. “I didn’t say that.”

      He shook his head. “I’m well aware that a small but significant number of arsonists are firemen. So don’t count us out. I’m not.”

      Then he went to the back of his vehicle to pull out his evidence gathering equipment, a handled rack of glass bottles, a large metal equipment case and protective gloves. “Let’s see what we can find.”

      * * *

      Charity hung back as he walked toward the blackened ruins. Lifting her laptop, she began to take photos of the scene, and his silhouette provided a good perspective point. It also reminded her how solidly and well he was built, but she brushed the thought away like an annoying gnat. No time to be experiencing her own brush fire. Time to get to work.

      When she was satisfied with her photos, she tossed her ball cap on the seat and replaced it with her yellow hard hat. Computer in hand, she followed Wayne toward the mess.

      While the scene looked as if a huge gasoline bomb had demolished it, some items survived. After a fire there were always surprises that left her wondering how they hadn’t burned or melted. There wasn’t much this time, though, and that disturbed her. Wayne was right—this had been hot and fast.

      Few arsonists achieved so much destruction. Most acted on impulse with little knowledge of how a fire burned, and they weren’t necessarily interested in burning up an entire property. Most often they wanted the excitement of the fire, and the excitement of watching the firefighters. Except for firefighter arsonists, who often were just bored young men, most especially in rural departments, and who wanted some action. She knew that as well as the chief, but she wasn’t going to say it to him. His department was under suspicion, all right. Especially the younger firefighters.

      But this fire hadn’t been set for entertainment. That many ignition sources, and perhaps more, meant that this had been carefully planned. Whether the Buells were chosen at random or with reason, she could only guess. One thing for sure, this hadn’t been prepared all in one night.

      When she turned around and surveyed the remains of the house and barn, she judged it unlikely that one fire had set off the other. Oh, it was possible, but if the barn had blazed first, the family would have had some notice. What was more, it was doubtful that sparks hitting the house could have caused this kind of destruction so fast. If the house had gone up first, upon escaping the family would have attempted to remove livestock from the barn. Two buildings burned to the ground in one night. An amazing haul for an arsonist.

      Crunching her way across charcoal, avoiding a steel-framed chair that still had its cushioning and a stove that looked as if it would still work once the soot was removed, she joined Wayne at the far side of the black.

      “You can judge the heat of the fire by the standby propane tank,” he said as she came up beside him. “It used to sit here on a rack a good ten feet from the house. You can see the legs here on the ground and the crumpled drum over there. No black leading toward the house, and the drum was blown twenty-five feet.”

      She snapped another photo. “Not buried?”

      “Fred has a much bigger underground storage tank. This fifty-gallon job was used only if they were close to running out, like during a bad winter storm. Probably didn’t even have much in it this time of year.”

      She took some more pictures. It didn’t seem to have abutted the house, which would have been really unsafe, but right now it was a display piece for the power of the house’s collapse. It could have been sucked in by the fire, but had been blown that whole distance. She made a mental note to think about that some more. “LPG is tremendously volatile once it mixes with air.”

      “Yeah.” He squatted down, surveying the surrounding area. “But he could have left the barrel open and the gas could have run toward the house before evaporating if it was pouring fast enough.” He shook his head. “I don’t see any sign of that. And it still wouldn’t have been enough to make the house go up that fast.”

      She agreed wholeheartedly. Now, if the house had been full of gas vapors... Her mind was fully engaged, trying to imagine the ways enough ignition points could have been placed to create this kind of mess. “It looks to me like his fire starters would have needed to be inside.”

      “Or they sprayed accelerant everywhere just before ignition. Come look at this.”

      He led her to another point, just outside what had once been a wall of the house, and pointed at a strongly burned area along the remaining concrete foundation and the black burst that spread out from it across the ground as if soot had exploded outward.

      She saw it immediately. “It looks like a backdraft, as if the fire was in the walls and was trying to breathe. But how could that be? You’d need heat without fire because of the lack of oxygen, and surely they would have noticed the walls getting hot, or paint bubbling. Unless that happened awfully fast, too.”

      “Yeah. Some headache.” He waved to the barn. “That’s easier to grasp. He picked a few good points in there. There’s always plenty of hay in a barn, and quite a few other things to help. Dust, for example. Acetylene. Paint thinners, maybe, although Fred doesn’t remember having any. The barn was old, too, probably tinder looking for a match, at least inside. Easy enough to burn the barn hot and fast. It’s the house that’s the problem.”

      “Did you run across anything resembling ignition devices? Because from what you say, everything went up at the same time.”

      “Seems like it, but who can be sure? It was three in the morning. You’d think they’d have wakened if the barn went first, given the racket the animals would have made, but no one did. They woke up to the sound of shrieking smoke detectors.”

      She knelt down again and looked at the clear sign at the obvious burst of soot just outside the wall. Whatever was left of the foundation had charred. Pulling on a glove, she reached out and touched the wall. So severely burned it nearly crumbled at her touch. Gently she brushed a finger over it, her mind sorting through possibilities and discarding many of them. This was looking like an impossible fire. “Did Mr. Buell go for a hose when he got out?”

      “Yeah. But according to him, he couldn’t make a dent. The house was burning everywhere, and he couldn’t seem to get anything to cool down. He said by then the barn was already clearly