Burning Love. Debra Cowan

The cops knew only that this was Harris’s house. No one had identified him, only a male victim.

      Out of habit, she reached for the camera around her neck, but rather than stop for her first set of pictures, she moved inside.

      The smell of wet ash settled over her like a cloud of fog. Gripping her tackle box, she nodded to the firefighters coming toward her. The somber, whipped look on their faces sharpened the knot in her throat. They’d contained the fire, but lost someone. She knew from her nine years fighting fires that no one would sleep tonight.

      In the living room to her right, Terra spotted Don LeBass and Rusty Ferguson from her old station house. Rusty’s eyes were red rimmed and Terra knew it wasn’t strictly due to the blaze he’d battled. The two men were deep in conversation with Captain Maguire.

      She absently registered moving across slick tile then soggy carpet past a couple of firefighters, down a long hallway to her left. The wall’s creamy paint was hidden beneath streaks of soot and ash. Wood and glass littered the floor. A clump of men and women stood in the doorway at the end of a hall and Terra knew the body was there. The bedroom door had been blown out from its hinges. Was this room the point-of-origin?

      She’d need to check every room for that, ask if anyone had discovered any sign of forced entry, anything that might indicate arson, but all she cared about right now was seeing the body and making sure it wasn’t Harris.

      Three firemen stood against the wall just outside the door, nodding soberly as she reached them. She recognized the oldest of them, Jerry French, a twenty-year veteran from Station Four. She stepped into the room, leaning her shovel against the nearest wall.

      The bedroom was now a skeleton of burned rafters and support beams, studs peering out from gouged and blackened Sheetrock. She automatically noted those details as her gaze went immediately to the body lying on the bed.

      She drew in a deep breath and moved closer so she could see the body. The face was too severely heat-bloated to be recognizable, but her gaze snagged on the victim’s cowboy boots. Water-gray, Australian sharkskin.

      No! Her vision grayed. Dizzy and nauseous, she turned and stumbled blindly toward the door. Harris. Harris. Harris.

      Her heart clenched painfully. Those boots had cost a pretty penny. Terra and the other Presley firefighters had pooled their money to buy Harris the pair for his retirement, along with an Alaskan fishing trip. The M.E. would have to use dental records for a positive identification of the body, but for Terra the boots were a macabre dog tag.

      Trying to breathe without keeling over, she reached for the nearest wall, grabbed only air and pitched forward.

      An arm, solid and thick, caught her at the waist. “Easy there.”

      The deep masculine voice commanded rather than soothed. Reflexively she clutched at the arm bracing her waist, her stomach rolling. For an instant, she let herself lean into the steel-hard strength, tried to absorb the pain slashing through her. Her entire body throbbed with it. In another few seconds, her vision cleared and she registered dark brown hair, hard blue eyes and a mouth that meant all business.

      Cop. She saw the gold badge clipped to the waistband of his faded jeans at the same time she realized he still held her. She felt steadier and managed a thank-you.

      He frowned, his lips flattening. “This your first body at a fire scene? Something like this isn’t for a rookie.”

      Irritation flickered through the smothering pain. She mumbled thanks only out of politeness and pushed her way out into the hall.

      “Cut her a break, man,” Terra heard Jerry French say to the cop. “The victim’s a friend of hers.”

      She ducked into an empty bathroom, boots squishing through ashy water and crunching over glass and splintered wood. Wet smoke and the rotten smell of death weakened her knees as she dragged in deep breaths of cold, rancid air. The bloated, unrecognizable mass of Harris’s face floated through her mind. She closed her eyes, leaned her forehead against the wall and focused on breathing. She’d thrown up twice in her adult life; she battled to keep from doing it a third time.

      Tugging off one of her gloves, she pushed back her helmet and wiped at the cold sweat on her forehead, her nape. Tears burned her throat and she thumbed off the strays falling down her cheeks. The cop’s disapproval of her pricked, but it didn’t matter. What mattered was what had happened to Harris and she meant to find out.

      Despite how difficult this case was, fire investigation was her job, what Harris had trained her to do. What she would do. For him.

      Terra waited there until her stomach settled. She had to focus on her job, not Harris. You can’t make it personal. That had been one of the first things he’d taught her. A sob ached in her throat, but she swallowed it. After another minute, she pulled her glove back on, adjusted her helmet more comfortably and returned to the bedroom.

      The medical examiner, Ken Mason, handled bodies for Oklahoma County, which included the town of Presley. He now stood beside the bed waving off a young man who approached with a body bag. “Wait until Investigator August is finished.”

      Ken, who’d worked with Harris during his last year as the fire investigator, turned to Terra with compassion in his dark eyes. “Take your time.”

      She nodded, fighting down another swell of emotion. Her mind still couldn’t accept what her eyes had seen. For a moment, she made herself stare at the body. There was nothing of the shy grin, the trimmed beard shot with gray, the kind brown eyes. All traces of the man she knew—loved—were gone. Except for the boots. Bit by bit, she let in the pain until she felt she could control it. When she began to tremble, she bit her lip and looked away.

      Someone, probably Jerry and the guys from Station Four, had set up her portable floodlights while she was gone. Putting herself on autopilot as best she could, Terra decided to record the body first, get it over with. She lifted her camera with shaking hands and snapped pictures from several angles. After each photo, she dictated a brief memo into her microcassette recorder. Tears blurred her vision, but she had a job to do. Harris, of all people, wouldn’t have cut her any slack.

      She moved to the right side of the bed. The hallway, guest bathroom and living room only had smoke damage, but fire damage was severe in this room. Especially on the wall beside the bed where destruction was the heaviest.

      This could very well be the low point—the place where the fire started—for this room. There could be other origins. She would double-check and verify every room before making notes to that effect. Her initial guess was the bedroom as the point-of-origin, but she would make no conclusions until she finished her investigation.

      “Where did you come from?” she murmured to the fire, staring at the charred wood that moved in an upward-spreading vee from the bedside table. “Here? Or another room?”

      She forced herself to look a second time at Harris’s body. She wanted to scream, to run, but she didn’t. Her heartbeat thundered in her ears and her breathing went shallow, but after a minute, she was able to detach a bit. That’s when she noticed his hands and feet were tied. She froze as the implication sunk in. He wouldn’t have been able to escape.

      She jerked her gaze away. Rage swept over her until she shook with it. She stared blankly at the blackened wall and counted to ten as she struggled to level out the tide of emotion battering her. Do your job, she mentally reminded herself. Do your job.

      She should take measurements of the body’s position, compare them later to the ones taken by the lab tech who’d already put away his tape measure. And as quickly as possible, she needed to determine what, if any, accelerant had been used before any remaining indication vanished due to the areas ventilated by the firefighters.

      She’d always been able to scent kerosene or gasoline at a scene; she smelled neither here. She could call Vicki at the State Fire Marshal’s office and request the use of their German shepherd. Pyro was trained to sniff out accelerants, but Terra didn’t want to wait for the dog to arrive. Besides, her portable “sniffer,” an instrument that detected combustible