smelled so much better than men.
“Fifty-five percent of arsonists are under eighteen,” she said with no emotion and without a glance in his direction, all business as usual.
She studied the clusters of people while Tully continued to go from window to window, floor to floor.
“You’ve been reading too many worthless statistics.”
He stopped at the third floor of the brick building on the corner. He could have sworn he saw a flash through the window. Did it come from inside the building or was it only a reflection of the flames?
“Body’s outside,” Racine said. “It’s in the alley behind a Dumpster.”
“Outside?”
That didn’t sound right to Tully. The other fires had had no casualties. A body usually meant the acceleration of an arsonist, the next step. Fire wasn’t enough to achieve the same high so they started setting fires to occupied buildings. But if the body was outside, it was hardly a casualty.
“Someone who made it out but too late?”
Racine shook her head and pulled a notebook from her pocket. Started flipping pages. Tully kept his hand in his pocket, fingering his crunched receipts. Why couldn’t he ever remember to carry a notebook?
“Separate call about the body,” Racine said, finding her notes.
Tully glanced over. Even her handwriting was neat and clean, not the scratches and odd abbreviations he used.
“Person said there was a—quote—stiff with half its face gone in the alley by the Dumpster.”
“By the Dumpster? Not in the Dumpster?”
Racine flipped a few more pages and returned to the same one. “Yep. By, not in. Fire chief told me she’s not burned. We have to wait until it’s safe for us to enter the burn zone.”
“That changes things,” Tully said.
“Yep, it sure does.”
They stood silently side by side again, eyes preoccupied. Seconds ticked off. Behind them firefighters called out to their crew members. Pieces of soot with sparks floated through the air like tiny fireworks filling the night sky. At the last fire someone had mentioned that they looked like fireflies, and soon after they started calling the arsonist the firefly. Tully figured it made about as much sense as firebug.
It was Racine who broke the silence. “So you suppose the bastard’s right here watching and jerking off?”
That’s exactly what Tully had been thinking earlier, but he knew it wasn’t that simple, especially if this guy had now started to kill and hadn’t even bothered to set the body on fire. Again, he didn’t glance at her, but he did smile. “You’ve been reading way too much Freud.”
CHAPTER 5
Maggie parked a block away. Her head had started its familiar throb, same side, same place, drilling a
She tried to slow her breathing. Closed her eyes and gently rubbed her fingertips, starting over her eyelids and moving to her temples. Small gentle circles, trying to ignore the scar.
She tried to focus on why she was here. And yet all she could think about was how angry fire always looked. Flames like this reminded her of those grade school catechism books with colorful illustrations of what the gates of hell were supposed to look like. Where killers and rapists were sent. Where evil was punished. Not where loved ones raced in and never came out.
Not for the first time, she wondered about her father, and now Patrick. How could they go charging into the middle of raging fires when her entire body kept telling her to turn around and run?
She knew that fear of losing someone else important to her—that dread knotted at the pit of her stomach— had triggered these recent nightmares. That uncertainty riddled her sleep in between her regular bouts of insomnia. Her self-diagnosis spelled out the simple reason. This latest set of nightmares was caused by Patrick’s coming to live with her, the fact that he reminded her of their father, and, of course, his new job, which put him into the same danger that had cost their father his life.
Tonight for a fleeting moment when Patrick stood in front of the refrigerator and looked up at her—right before she almost bashed in his skull—Maggie was struck by how much he looked like their father. Thomas O’Dell had been only six years older than Patrick was now when he ran into that burning building and cemented Maggie’s image of him forever in her mind, the mind of a twelve-year-old girl.
Simple enough. Psychology 101.
She was used to having nightmares. It was one of the reasons she didn’t sleep. Maybe a good night’s sleep was asking too much in her line of work. She chased killers for a living and in order to catch them she sometimes had to crawl inside their heads, walk around in their skin.
Long ago her mentor, Assistant Director Kyle Cunningham, had taught her how to deal with it through his example. He was a master of compartmentalizing, shoving and stacking different killers and victims into different parts of his mind, separating them from one another and from the emotions and memories they caused.
He was a master of sectioning his life into separate cubicles. Such a master, in fact, that when he died, Maggie realized she knew little about his private life. Ten years she’d worked with him, admired and respected him, and yet she’d had no idea if he and his wife had any children, a family pet, or a favorite vacation spot. And now that he was gone she couldn’t ask him what to do when some of her carefully sealed compartments started to leak. How was she supposed stop them from seeping into her subconscious? For the last year Maggie had been trying to keep them from flooding her sleep with nightmares. And now Patrick and these arsons …
She took a deep breath and made herself get out of the safety of her vehicle. She cinched her jacket and shoved her hands into the pockets for warmth. At the last fire, she had hated how damp and chilled she’d gotten. Her clothes reeked of smoke despite putting on Tyvek coveralls.
What was worse was getting wet, little by little, spray by spray. She’d never considered that investigating a fire scene could leave her feeling like she’d stepped into a rain of cinder and ice water mixed with foam. All of it dripped from the charred skeleton of the building. From the rafters that dared to hang on and the pieces of ceiling that defied gravity. It was like walking inside the dark hollows of a dying creature. One that still hissed and groaned and bled.
Not that Maggie was squeamish about blood. She’d been sprayed with it, splattered with it, and rolled in it, had even felt her own leaking out. She had dealt with murderers, killers, and terrorists. Had profiled their motives —power, greed, revenge, sexual gratification.
But arson? This was her first experience with arson and she was having trouble deciphering the motives of someone who set fires deliberately.
She and Tully had been called in as profilers. Neither was sure why, but then their director had been sending both of them on strange and wild cases in the last year. Maggie guessed there might be some politics involved. There always seemed to be with Assistant Director Kunze. A favor, a payback, some piece of legislation that needed to be passed or some scandal that needed covering up. She never thought she’d be working for a man she not only didn’t respect but also didn’t trust.
At first glance this case seemed to be that of a typical serial arsonist. He chose a warehouse in the middle of the night when no one would be inside. That fact made Tully and Maggie believe he was a nuisance offender, setting fires for attention, for kicks. He really didn’t want to hurt anyone. Just enjoyed watching the chaos and the sense of power it gave him.
He’d now chosen another warehouse. But tonight was different. Racine had said there was a body. That changed everything.
Maggie walked slowly, approaching the scene from a distance, giving herself a big-picture view but also trying
