Playing with Fire

“I can believe it,” she answered. “I was impressed with the way you handled that fire yesterday, by the way. Good work.”

He didn’t know how to evaluate that. “Thanks.” Then, “Do you watch many fires? I wouldn’t have thought so.”

She made a small sound. A laugh? “Before I got into this business I was a volunteer firefighter.”

Okay, then. He wasn’t dealing with a bean counter who knew next to nothing. That settled him a bit. The woman in the suit had transformed from a threat into a potential ally. She knew both sides of the problem.

A few minutes later she spoke again. “The sheriff said you sent samples to the forensics lab already?”

“I did. I’m sure I didn’t get everything. I need to look some more. It’s only been five days, and there’s a lot I still need to look at. I’m not even sure yet that I’ve found all the ignition points.”

“It’s harder when there isn’t much left.”

“No kidding.” He turned onto the Buell’s road. In the distance he could just make out the black smudge of what was left, an ugly hulk against a beautiful blue sky. Fred Buell was probably out there somewhere taking care of his herd as best he could. There were a lot of young calves at this time of year, still frail enough to develop problems. They probably needed all kinds of care, too, and Fred might even be sorting out the ones he’d sell. Wayne had never run a ranch, though, so he didn’t claim to know much about it. As a kid he’d lived in town, his dad a lineman for the electric co-op. Adulthood had taken him through some college and into working for a fire department in Glenwood Springs. Then he’d come home to be chief here.

“How big is your department?” Charity asked.

“Full-time? Part-time? Volunteers?”

Her laugh surprised him. “That kind of headache, huh? And only three trucks?”

“Only three plus two fire rescue ambulances. We have other heavy equipment garaged on the end of town. Never needed more yet.”

“But what about wildfires?”

He shrugged. “Then we get help from everywhere, up to and including heavy equipment lent to us by ranchers and the state. I’ve got twenty career firefighters. Sixteen part-timers. And a whole boatload of volunteers.”

“Twenty full-timers doesn’t seem like a whole lot.”

“There are smaller volunteer departments. But the full-timers make the core, and usually between them and the part-timers, we can handle the average incident. We spend an awful lot of time on training, though, especially with the volunteers.”

She nodded as if she was familiar with that. “I was impressed yesterday, so don’t take my questions as criticism. I’m just curious.”

“Well, if it’ll settle your mind any...” He paused as they went over a bump in the road and he had to steady the wheel. “There are a few very small outlying towns in the county. I’m talking around a hundred people per. They have their own volunteers. And of course the ranchers stand ready to jump in at a moment’s notice. It’s not as if we have to cover thousands of square miles with just three trucks. But we train everyone.”

“A lot of open land,” she remarked.

“A lot,” he agreed. He supposed it could be startling to someone from back East. Out here you could drive dozens of miles, sometimes hundreds of miles, and see nothing but fences and a ranch road from time to time. And the mountains. They could be seen from everywhere.

At last they jolted to a stop in front of the burned-out lumps of the barn and the house that used to be the Buells’. He hoped that, underinsured or not, Fred and his family could come back from this.

Charity didn’t immediately climb out 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 lost.”

“So the house was a little slower, if not by much. That makes sense to me.” A house had lots of things to stall a burn, not the least of them gypsum wallboard or plaster. She’d have to find out what his interior walls had been made of.

Then she saw it.

“Wayne? Look at this.”

There was a small, unmistakable hole at the base of the remaining wall. Without a word, he pulled out a swab and ran it around inside the hole and dropped it in a screw-cap jar. Then, and only then, did he cuss.

* * *

It was midafternoon by the time they headed back to town. Charity had dozens of photos, and spent the ride tapping away at her laptop, recording impressions and ideas for her next move. When she saw the outskirts of the town approaching, she spoke for the first time. “I need to talk to Fred Buell. And you and I need to talk with some privacy.”

He turned a corner onto Front Street. They soon passed the street where they’d had the grease fire yesterday. “My office is far from a sanctuary. Let me check in there, get your internet log-in info, then run to the diner for takeout. I’ll meet you at your house.”

“I can’t make you coffee.”

“I’ll pick up a couple at the diner. I can run out for more later if we need it. Anything you don’t like, foodwise?”

“I’d love a latte, but that’s probably out of the question.”

He chuckled. “We’re not entirely in the backwoods. I’ll get you a latte. Anything else?”

“I’m okay with anything except wilted salads.” She closed up her computer. “Chief?”

“Yeah?”

“Those holes make an argument unfavorable to Fred Buell.”

She noticed that he didn’t answer immediately. In the end, all he said was “We’ll talk to him.”

So he was wondering now, too. She let it lie for the moment. At the station, she climbed into her own car. One of the guys in the engine bay cheerfully gave her directions to the grocery and assured her it wasn’t far.

She headed down the narrow streets, noting how gracious some neighborhoods appeared while others looked so worn. She got the impression of a town that was barely hanging on, and it didn’t surprise her. Small towns everywhere had troubles these days. A paid-off ranch might even be a liability. She wondered what other debts Fred Buell owed, because running a cattle operation had plenty of costs attached that accrued year by year. It wasn’t always possible to keep ahead of them and support a family.

At the grocery she bought fresh coffee and some cream and sugar just in case. She also grabbed a fruit tray that looked reasonably fresh, then hurried back to her house.

Wayne was just pulling up out front. She turned into the driveway and climbed out with her laptop, then went around to the trunk to get her grocery bags.

“I see you sidestepped me,” he said jokingly as he approached with his own bags and his clipboard.

“I’m hard to corral,” she said lightly. “Actually, I decided I’m not starting another day without decent coffee.”

He laughed and grabbed her bags by their handles so she only had to juggle her computer as she unlocked the front door. Boy, he was attractive when he smiled. She doubted that he’d be smiling for long.

Inside, while she unpacked her few groceries, he hunted through the cupboards and set the kitchen table for them. She noticed he wasn’t saying anything, not even casual conversation, and while she wasn’t the type herself to make unnecessary talk, she began to get uneasy. Was he as disturbed as she? Or was something else going on?

Finally they sat at the table facing one another, foam containers beside each plate, and tall lattes in heavy paper cups in front of them. A pile of napkins sat in the middle.

“I got us steak sandwiches,” he said, “Maude’s specialty.”

“That sounds good. Is she always such a bear?”

Again that devastating smile. “Always. Ignore it. Everyone else does.”

“I kind of got that impression but I thought I’d make sure.” She opened her container and found a sandwich big enough and thick enough for two, along with a mountain of fries. She moved some of the food to her plate, then took a bite of sandwich. Her eyes widened at the flavor explosion. Then she sent him off into another laugh by saying, “I didn’t know beef could taste this good!”

“When you buy locally, someone’s reputation is on the line. This is always prime grade.”

“I couldn’t afford it in Atlanta.”

“Most likely not. So you were a volunteer firefighter?”

She nodded and grabbed a napkin from the stack to wipe a dribble of juice from her chin. “For over a year. My company encouraged it when I expressed an interest in arson investigation. They thought it would be good training.”

“Was it?”

She regarded him across the table. His gray eyes returned her look. “Very,” she said. “It’s amazing how common small arson fires are. Just small ones, though. Nothing like what we saw today. Most are kids fooling around, looking for excitement, and most aren’t very big. It’s hard to make a big fire.”

He nodded and swallowed. “Did you ever see a big one?”

“Abandoned industrial building. Smart arsonist. There was enough trash in that basement to cause a huge conflagration. Three departments had to respond.”

“Did you catch the guy?”

“Actually, they did. He bragged about it.” She sighed. “Sixty percent of arsonists never get caught. The ones who do most often have big mouths.”

“Which makes figuring out the psychology of an arsonist fairly difficult.” He took another bite of his sandwich, clearly a hungry man.

“What about you? Do you ever want the excitement of being with a bigger department?” She took another bite, watching his eyes narrow in response.

He raised one brow. “Frankly? No. Turns out I wasn’t built to be an adrenaline junkie. And I don’t enjoy some of the memories I carry with me.”

She looked down, wondering if he had thought that question critical of him. Then she linked it back to their earlier remarks about arsonists. “I wasn’t implying anything,” she said carefully. “Sometimes I miss firefighting myself, parts of it anyway. I just wondered if the slower pace here was a good fit for you.”

“A much better fit in some ways.” He smiled as if to let her know he hadn’t taken it wrong. “We don’t have as many fires, not nearly, but that means I don’t have to worry about my men as much. I guess it depends on your motivation in joining a department. If you want to save lives, we get plenty of opportunity to do that, especially in the winter when auto accidents are common enough. We’re often the first responders for injuries and heart attacks, too. But if you join mostly to fight fires, you might be bored.”

And boredom, she thought, was one of the leading causes of arson among firefighters. In bigger towns and cities, a fire team got plenty of action. Not so much in rural towns. Although that could probably change drastically during wildfire season.

“I know what you’re dancing around here,” he said. She glanced at him again, felt that instant of sexual attraction, then shoved it aside. To her surprise, he’d already eaten most of his sandwich. She looked down again at her own and figured she had dinner and maybe breakfast staring back at her.

“You don’t have to answer,” he continued after a few beats. “I brought it up myself earlier. It’s been gnawing at me since the first fire.”

At that she looked up. “Slow down. Because you said something when we were out at the Buell place that disturbed me. You said that fire was attempted murder. That doesn’t fit the fireman-as-arsonist profile.”

“No?”

She shook her head, feeling a little more energized as the calories began to hit her system. She guessed she must have still been worn out from yesterday. “The fireman who sets a fire almost always picks a building that’s unoccupied. Arson conflicts with his desire to save lives.”

He leaned back, fries totally untouched, and watched her as she began to put her food back in the foam container. “That assumes the 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.”