He laughed. “Hopefully I’ve not lost my girlish figure.”
“No. You still got game.” For a moment, they locked gazes, and he was so tempted to brush the strands of hair off her forehead. Her body was rigid, as if she could not decide whether to stay or go. He waited, knowing she wanted to invite him up to that little apartment.
She parked, reached for the door handle, and opened it. Cold air rushed into the cab. “You need to stay on top of Clarke.”
“I hear you.”
Gideon watched her walk toward the house, hoping she would turn back and beckon him. Foolish to think she would suddenly reconsider. If whatever had joined them in the past was not enough to make her stick around, a short trip would not do it now.
She vanished into the garage, the lights in the stairwell soon turning on. He pictured her lingering by the door, kicking herself for not being with him. That image was enough to give him hope to wait another beat.
But she never came back out the door.
He parked and tried to picture Clarke setting fires for money and killing women, one of whom might be carrying his child. It was an outrageous theory.
Inside the house, he hung up his coat, his attention shifting to a picture taken of Clarke, Nate, Kyle, and himself. They had been fishing back in June. As he stared at father and son side by side, he saw the differences more than the similarities now. “Shit.”
He grabbed a beer from the refrigerator and sat at his home office computer. He twisted off the bottle top and took a pull as he thought back to the trips Clarke had taken to various fire-training conferences around the country in recent years. There’d been one in San Diego, California, and another in Washington, DC. Next he searched for fires in those areas matching the time frame. Nothing came up.
He refined the search, digging into news reports in the outlying counties. After an hour of reading local crime reports around San Diego, he found articles detailing several shelter fires at a park thirty miles east of the city. The fires could have been caused by anyone. He read down three paragraphs into one article and noted the fires had been started with a cup full of gasoline. The heavy-duty plastic had melted, and whatever the arsonist had used as a wick had vanished in the flames.
He shifted his attention to the DC metro area. Another forty-five minutes of reading and he discovered a series of dumpster fires in Fredericksburg, Virginia. The site was less than an hour south of Clarke’s conference and easily reached off I-95 South.
Gideon sat back, rubbing his eyes. Though two fires had aligned with Clarke’s travel schedule, that did not mean there was enough evidence to request a DNA test on Clarke.
He reached into the side drawer and pulled out the old Bible his grandfather had left him. He thumbed through the thin pages until he reached the picture that he’d tucked in there years ago.
The image was of Joan and him, taken in the spring of their senior year. They were dressed for the spring formal. He had rented a tux, and she wore a red halter dress that showed off her figure. It had been cold as hell that night, and this picture had been snapped seconds before she had been forced to swap the heels for boots and slide on a thick overcoat. She looked sexy as hell in that gown and boots. But even better now, he thought as he slowly put the picture back in the Bible.
His phone rang, with the medical examiner on the other end. There was no way he could have picked up Tucker’s body and had any information yet.
“Doc.”
“I got your message about the DNA. Elijah Weston is not the baby’s father.”
Gideon pulled in a slow breath. “I got one more test for you.”
Confessions of an Arsonist
The time has come. She will die tonight.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Missoula, Montana
Friday, September 11, 2020
1:00 a.m.
Under the moonless sky, he stood outside the garage apartment and stared up at the window near where he knew Joan was sleeping. His last fire for her had been a gentle message. It was his nice way of telling her she needed to leave town and let the folks here live the lives they were meant to live.
But she would not leave. She kept pressing. And she would keep on pushing and turning over every rock until she exposed him. And that was not going to happen. Ever.
Gasoline had sloshed in the milk jugs as he walked up to the main entrance of the property. This fire was not going to be a warning. It was going to be his final message to Joan.
He set two jugs by the side and primary entrance into the apartment upstairs. Once the flames caught, they would travel up the stairs, bringing along a black smoke and flames that would chew up the oxygen. The garage would burn nicely before Gideon would be alerted in the main house. And as long as the wind did not pick up, poor Gideon would not lose his house because of this bitch.
He moved around to the back side of the structure and set the remaining two jugs by the back exit. Whether she ran down the front or the back stairs, his fire would be there to greet her like an old friend.
He struck the first match and tossed it at the jug of gasoline. The vapors caught on fire instantly and flames jumped, whooshing like a dragon taking flight. His creature had taken its first breath.
Confessions of an Arsonist
“And I will be to her a wall of fire all around, declares the Lord, and I will be the glory in her midst.” Zechariah 2:5.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Missoula, Montana
Friday, September 11, 2020
1:05
