He’d had a lot of time to think about this, and he was not going to let trace evidence trip him up any more than a random witness.
As he started the engine, he heard an explosion in the beauty shop filled with chemicals. The flames would soon jump up the walls and arch over the ceiling. He calculated it would take less than a minute before the entire building exploded. He hoped the attorneys across the alley were paid up on their fire insurance, because they were going to see some damage.
He glanced in his rearview mirror and caught the glow of the flames. In the distance, the fire engine sirens were revving up, and he could picture the men at the station jumping up from dinner and running toward their engines. Wheels rolling in less than sixty seconds. Another two minutes to the fire. Hoses out.
His blaze had enough momentum to gut the building and also eat through the woman’s flesh. The human body melted at fifteen hundred degrees, and if he had maybe ten minutes of solid burning, there would be nothing left of her.
But five minutes would do enough damage to hide what he had done.
He grinned.
“You always wanted to go out with a bang, baby. Got your wish.”
The blast in the back room startled Lana back to consciousness. She gulped in air saturated with chemicals and smoke as the fire roared and licked at her feet.
Her throat burned as she screamed and tried to rise up. But her bruised, nearly crushed throat stung as she drew in the acidic air, thickening with chemicals that she used every day.
She rolled onto her belly, wincing as she crawled toward the front window and away from the unleashed fire dragon consuming the storeroom and the salon. Her escape route was vanishing, and in seconds, this entire building would collapse on her.
Panicking, she rose up on her hands and knees, but another lungful of lethal smoke sent her back to her belly.
She had been so damn obsessed with fire. Setting them had been a game.
The fire, as if it had heard her, jumped up the west wall and rolled over and consumed the posters featuring the newest hairstyles. Long amber fingers crept over the ceiling above her, and she wondered if she were already dead and in hell.
A police car’s red and blue lights flashed outside less than twenty feet away.
“Save me!” she screamed.
Timber above her head cracked. Several ceiling tiles fell and hit the floor, releasing a swarm of firefly embers that burned her skin. Flames licked over her feet and spread to her jeans. She howled in pain as her flesh melted.
Confessions of an Arsonist
I burned myself today on the arm, and the pain sent a rush of pleasure through me as potent as sex. Both pleasures create an intimate bond that cannot be duplicated.
CHAPTER THREE
Missoula, Montana
Saturday, September 5, 2020
6:55 p.m.
Detective Gideon Bailey had hoped his first day back on the job would be peaceful. He had expected a call or two. With the students back for the fall semester, trouble was inevitable. And so far, so good. Since his shift had started that morning, he had responded to an overdose and an attempted rape. He had stayed with the victim in the emergency room until the sexual-assault nurse had arrived. Now it looked like his plan to reenter the job after three months of leave was coming off without a hitch.
He had taken three months off to spend time with his ten-year-old son, Kyle. The two had spent the time living in his grandfather Mac’s cabin, nestled in the Sapphire Mountain Range. Their days had been filled with fishing, hiking, and rebuilding the stone firepit on the property.
Gideon’s ex-wife, Helen, had died in the spring from cancer. Helen had reached out in January and told him what was happening. She was not the type to ask for help, even when their son had been hit by a passing car and suffered a broken arm. But she had sense enough to think of Kyle first and had contacted Gideon.
Gideon had immediately driven to Denver to see her and his son, whom he saw one weekend a month and two weeks during the summer.
Whatever animus he harbored toward his ex-wife vanished when he’d seen her. Helen had aged a decade in the last few months. Her once-full figure had been whittled down to a hundred pounds, her blond hair had thinned, and her skin had turned sallow. She could barely stand. Kyle refused to leave his mother, which meant Gideon traveled back and forth for several months, staying for longer and longer stretches until finally Helen had passed on in early May.
Gideon had packed up his grieving, sullen son and driven back to Missoula. After checking in with his chief, he’d taken leave, and he and Kyle had driven north. The lack of Wi-Fi had been a shock to both their systems. The quiet had created too many opportunities to talk. And the cabin’s confined space had offered few places to hide.
That left streams to fish, trails to hike, wood to chop, and a lot of anger and emotions to untangle. They had mended some fences and distance created by the divorce, and he was almost sorry they’d had to come back. But he had a job, and Kyle needed to catch up on the spring’s lost schooling.
The car’s radio squawked. “All vehicles in the downtown area, we have a structure fire.”
“Damn it,” he muttered as he reached for the radio. “This is Detective Gideon Bailey. I’m a mile away. I’ll respond.”
“Roger that. Fire crews have been dispatched and deputies en route.”
“Roger,” he said. He flipped on his lights, did a U-turn at the next intersection, and punched the accelerator. The wails of the fire trucks’ sirens quickly grew louder as he hurried through each successive intersection. As he rounded the final corner, his welcome came in the form of flames shooting up toward a dimming sky.
He was out of his vehicle as fire trucks parked and the firefighters scrambled to hook up their hoses to the hydrants. He grabbed his flashlight and raced toward the building, praying that if there were any survivors, he could help.
As Gideon stepped onto the sidewalk, the heat from the building forced him to shield his face with his hands. He angled his body, gripped the flashlight tighter, and edged closer to the front window of the beauty shop, once a favorite of Helen’s. Through the window, he saw that the blaze was shooting from the back of the store and heading toward a woman who lay on the floor.
The fingers on her left hand twitched. Shit. She was alive.
He rammed the butt of the flashlight into the glass display window. Glass shattered and fell into the shop and around his feet. The extra boost of oxygen energized the fire, making it crackle and wail louder as it dipped down from the ceiling. He thought for a split second that he could get into the building and save the woman. But before he could put the thought into action, all hell broke loose. There was an explosion inside the building, the roof bowed, and ceiling tiles dropped. Cinders danced as heat supercharged the air into a bellowing furnace.
Forced to retreat, he backed up to the vehicle, brushing the burning sparks and soot from his jacket. The firefighters raced toward the blaze, their hoses now shooting at full capacity.
Two patrolmen hurried toward him. The first was Stuart Hughes, who was in his midtwenties and the newest to the department. Tall and lanky with red hair, he still ran almost as fast as he had on the college track team.
Steps behind him was Detective Becca Sullivan, also in her twenties. She stood a few inches over five feet and had thick black hair that she secured in a neat bun. She was one of the department’s best shots.
The officers gathered beside Gideon, each staring at the raging flames with a mixture of awe and horror.
“What the hell happened?” Stuart asked, breathless.
“I saw a woman alive inside, lying on the floor.” Gideon shouted the words as he jogged over to the fire chief on scene, Clarke Mead.
Clarke was married to his sister, Ann, and the two had recently separated. So far, Gideon had managed to stay out of their separation, which appeared friendly enough, if that was possible. His own divorce had been a nasty, tangled affair that he would not have wished on his worst enemy.
“There’s someone inside,” Gideon said. “I saw a woman on the floor, near the window. Her fingers moved.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah.”
Clarke raised the radio to his lips and spoke to his crew through their headsets as they wrestled the hose. One team shifted toward the window and sprayed cold water onto the inferno. The flames hissed and spit, not wanting to yield any ground.
“The building is fully engulfed,” Clarke said. “I can’t send anyone in there now. It would be a death sentence.”
“Clarke, she was alive.”
Clarke rested his hands on Gideon’s shoulders. “If she was, she isn’t now. No one could have survived the toxic chemicals and heat.”
He stepped back, unable to shake the image of the woman lying unconscious on the floor. “It’s like the College Fire.”
Clarke stood several inches over six feet, with the broad shoulders of a linebacker. He had short, dark hair and an angled face weathered by the sun. “Don’t do that.”
Haunting memories, never far away, rushed him. His thoughts went first to his son and nephew, who had been spending the afternoon with Clarke. “Where are Kyle and Nate?”
“They’re safe. I dropped both boys off at their friend Tim’s house.”
Gideon said a word of thanks as he stared at the blaze and prayed the woman had died quickly.
Joan settled her backpack in the room assigned to her by Ann, accepted a glass of wine, and was sent to wander around the house as Ann finished dinner. Her gaze was drawn to a picture of Ann, Clarke, and Nate resting on a large raw-edge mantel above the fireplace. The picture looked as if it had been taken a year or two ago. Clarke and Ann both looked much the same, and the boy appeared to be a mix of the two.