by Lori Ryan
“Can you look at these other addresses and tell us if any of them ring a bell? Were you ever associated with them in any way?” John flipped a page on his notepad and pushed it toward Don. He had written out the addresses of the properties on two separate pages of his notepad intentionally, so they could ask about the additional properties after they’d talked about the ones they had already linked to Don.
Don pulled the pad closer to him and looked at the paper. This time, he did turn to his computer. He typed in first one address, shaking his head, then the other.
He frowned at the screen. “This one is in our lead database.” He pointed to the address of the home that had been burned that morning.
“What does that mean?” John asked. He could guess, but he wanted to have the man explain. Making assumptions was never a good idea as a cop.
“It means we got it from a service that generates leads for us to call. I don’t know how they compile the phone numbers and stuff. I guess that’s why the boss pays them the big bucks.” He glanced toward an office with the name Benjamin J. Falco on it. “Each week we all get a stack of names and numbers. Hot leads for us to call. If you close sales, you get more of those. If you aren’t closing sales, you get colder leads, people who cold call into the office. That sort of thing.”
“And someone called this lead? The one on Mesa?” John pressed before Eric could.
Don looked at the computer screen. “Yeah, a couple of us called. Looks like Mary called. She isn’t with us anymore. Left to have a baby.” He scrolled. “Ned called twice. That’s it.”
“Is Ned here?” Eric asked.
Don pointed to a man sitting at a desk across the room. Ten more minutes and a conversation with Ned and they were able to verify he didn’t remember making the calls but if the computer said he did, then he must have. Both men provided their whereabouts for that morning when the fire was started, and looked up their whereabouts for the dates and times of the other fires in their calendars.
They got the name of the company that provided the leads from Mr. Falco himself—another slimy looking guy—but that was a large data mining company that wasn’t located in the state, much less the city.
They’d gotten nowhere. Just like most investigative work, it was a lot of mundane interviewing, a lot of crossing off possibilities, and way too much legwork that led to nowhere. The suck of it was, it just had to be done.
Chapter Ten
Rhys didn’t give them a chance to sit down when they got back to the department. He had been one of Dark Falls’ best football players during his high school years and everyone assumed he would go on to play at the national level. His sister’s murder had changed all that, though. He was dedicated to the work they did in Major Crimes and he was damned good at pulling small details out when no one else could find them on a case.
“I ran all of them and came up with three who had a link to real estate in the past,” he said as he walked alongside Eric through the center aisle of the bullpen.
John turned toward the break room for coffee. He and Eric were long overdue for an infusion.
Eric knew who Rhys was talking about when he said them. He had messaged Rhys as soon as they left the real estate office to see if any known fire bugs in town had a connection to selling or leasing real estate. Eric hadn’t gotten the sense that anyone they’d just interviewed was involved in the crimes, despite the almost criminal level of tackiness in their paint choices. But he had to wonder if the arsonist might be connected in some way to the real estate industry.
There were probably many more people in town with access to real estate listings and the kind of leads that gave them information about what houses might be on the market or sitting empty.
“Have we talked to them already?” Eric asked Rhys. Naturally, when they started to see that the fires were more than just a bunch of teenagers pulling a prank, they’d tracked down and questioned as many known arsonists in the area as they could.
“Not yet. One of them has no known current address. One of them wasn’t around when we conducted our initial canvas. And the other one wasn’t on our initial list.”
John caught up to them, passing off one of the coffees to Eric before settling into his chair. Rhys stayed standing, leaning over the half wall between the walkway and Eric’s cubicle, while Eric sank into his own seat.
John asked the question that was running through Eric’s mind. “Why wasn’t he on our list?”
“Hasn’t been active for the last five years.” Rhys handed over the list of three names to Eric as he spoke.
All three of them shared a look. When they were digging for suspects in a case like this, they had to limit the list initially by adding some variables. Often, timing was one of those variables. Now that they had a possible connection to real estate sales, they could go further back than five years and look for any links known fire bugs have to real estate. It could give them the edge they needed to catch this guy.
“You want me and Mason to run them down?” Rhys offered.
“No.” Eric chugged his coffee a little faster than he should have, given its heat level. “We can head back out. Can you try to get us an address on the third guy?”
Rhys nodded his agreement and a few minutes later Eric and John were back in their unit headed to talk to two known fire bugs. The first guy easily alibied out, showing them an ankle monitor he’d been given as part of his parole deal.
It was something they should have seen on his record, so they’d need to look into why that hadn’t shown up in the system.
Still, it was easy for them to pull up the record of where he was and when. They did just that, right from their car after he shut his front door in their faces. When their fires were set, he was home and at work, right where he was supposed to be.
“What’s your money on?” John asked as they pulled up in front of the home of the third known arsonist on their list. “Not active for five years or not getting caught?”
Eric snorted. It wasn’t worth answering. They both knew chances were the guy just wasn’t getting caught. Too many arsonists walked free because of lack of evidence. The fire burned up a lot of what could lead to an arrest and conviction.
The home was on the outskirts of the city, a larger one with maybe three or four bedrooms inside. It was on a large plot of land.
“Has to be an acre or more here,” John said as they walked up to the door. “Reminds me of the first fires.”
Eric understood what he meant. The houses that were abandoned and served as their arsonist’s first sites were on the outskirts of town on larger parcels of land like this. It had the same feel to it, only the house in front of them looked kept up. He wouldn’t exactly call it well kept. The paint could use a little touchup here and there and the shrubs out front were a little overgrown, but it wasn’t anything like the broken-down properties their arsonist had hit during what Eric was now coming to think of as his practice phase.
The front door opened before they got to the front steps and Eric and John both moved at the same time in response to the sudden movement. Each man turned their bodies to the side, one hand going toward the hip, ready to pull a firearm.
A tall thin male with graying hair and a pallor to match stood in the doorway. He smirked at them and raised his hands, as if to show he had nothing in them. “Knew you’d come around sooner or later. I’ve been watching the papers.”
He had a smoker’s voice and he followed the statement with a smoker’s hacking cough.
Eric and John shared a glance before moving up the front path at a normal pace again.
“Dyson Edwards?” John asked.
“Yeah, yeah, that’s me, but I’m not the guy you’re looking for,” the man said.
“Mind if we come inside, ask you a few questions?” Eric asked.
The man’s answer was a wave of the arm as he disappeared back into the house.
Eric stayed on guard as he entered the front hallway. One look at his partner told him
John was doing the same.
Dyson was standing at a counter in a kitchen just ahead of the front entrance. The smell in the home said it all. This guy was still burning something, somewhere. Or everywhere. Eric wasn’t sure which.
Dyson didn’t wait for them to ask any questions. “I didn’t start these fires. I’ve got my habit under control.”
“Your habit?” Eric asked, glancing around. There was a stack of newspaper clippings on the table nearby and he suppressed a shiver when he saw that the top one was one of Merritt’s articles. The idea of this man collecting anything having to do with Merritt McKenna didn’t sit right with him.
“It’s a habit, a hobby, and as long as I keep it under control and don’t hurt no one or nothing, it’s no concern of yours.” Dyson stood tall like he was defending knitting instead of starting fires.
“And how are you keeping this hobby under control?” John asked the question with a straight face which was more than Eric could do at the moment.
“I’ll show you.” Dyson walked through the kitchen to the back of the house and through to the attached garage.
Or what had been the attached garage. When they got out there, they could see the modifications and it was not normal. The room had exhaust fans and fire suppression devices galore. Hoses on several walls, extinguishers mounted in each corner.
But the biggest thing was the giant fire pit that took up the entire center of the two-car space. It was a large ring made of rock and it was clear all manner of things had been burned in there. There was the twisted carcass of a bicycle, what looked like an old television, and a set of drawers.
“This is one of my pits,” Dyson said.
“There are more?” John asked, looking about as dumfounded as Eric felt.
“Yup.” Dyson looked proud. “I started watching that show, you know, with the guy that kills people but he only kills bad people because his foster dad taught him to control his urges that way.”
Eric knew the show he was talking about, but didn’t offer the name. He watched it for shits and giggles sometimes. It had a dark humor he could relate to sometimes.
Dyson walked back through the kitchen and up to the second floor of the house. There, they could see that many of the rooms had been gutted, all but the load bearing walls torn down. There was more evidence of fires being burned in what Eric had a feeling Dyson would say were a controlled manner.
“Don’t your neighbors call the fire department?” John asked.
Eric didn’t know what to say so he let John do all the talking as the man explained that the neighbors did call the fire department initially, but he kept his fires controlled and never burned one if there was a burn ban going.
“Burn bans are for outside,” Eric said, feeling like he should at least contribute something to the interview. When he played back what he’d just said in his head, he almost laughed. Almost.
Dyson shrugged and Eric had the feeling the guy thought that meant he was going above and beyond by following them indoors as well as out. The whole thing was surreal.
Eric circled the outer edge of what appeared to be a bedroom. The ceiling had scorch marks and the center of the room had a large metal pit of some sort that had seen more than a few fires. Still, there was damage around the outer edge of the pit. Floors weren’t meant to take repeated dousing with water or fire suppression chemicals.
God, he hated to think what this man’s lungs must look like from living with the fire damage and breathing in smoke and chemicals all the time.
He looked over at Dyson, who looked happy to be showing off his home to them.
Shit, he might not be their guy—and Eric wasn’t willing to rule him out yet—but either way, he needed help. This wasn’t safe. Not for him and not for his neighbors, whose houses could go up in flames if this guy let something burn out of control. Dyson needed help.
A peek into the next room told him that Dyson didn’t always keep his burns in the pits. There were patches of walls that had been scorched from fire.
Arsonists were fascinated with fire. It would be too easy for this guy to get sucked into watching his flames and end up burning himself alive. Even if that didn’t happen, he couldn’t live like this much longer. They would need to get in touch with social services to get him the help he needed. If he really was keeping his urge to set fires at bay like this, what would happen if social services tried to convince him to stop? Or worse, tried to remove him from his home?
Eric looked around at the floorboards again. “We’re still going to need to you tell us where you were at the time of the fires,” Eric said, mentally running through their options as he spoke. They should talk to the captain, see if she had any idea how to keep this guy from killing himself out here.
And maybe they should talk to the fire department. Surely they were aware of this guy and his hobby.
“I can show you right where I was,” Dyson said. “I’ve started recording myself right here at home every hour on the hour since this guy started work.”
“Started work?” John asked.
“You bet.” Dyson headed back down the stairs as he talked, another deep cough wracking his body. “I noticed the guy early on as soon as Ms. McKenna started writing about him. I’m no idiot. I knew once you had a practicing arsonist in the area, you’d come see me.”
Eric’s gut clenched again. The man didn’t use Merritt’s first name, but despite that, there was something intimate and personal about the way he talked about her. Eric felt himself starting to growl again. He was doing a lot of that lately.
He shot a look to John. It was strange the way Dyson said active arsonist like he thought there were a bunch of guys just like him who were controlling their urges by setting fire to pieces of their houses around themselves. Holy hell, this man was sick.
They followed him back into the kitchen and Eric saw that a small room off to one side has been set up with a bed. It was tiny without windows, like it might be meant to be a food pantry or mudroom or something. The man was using the rest of the house for fires and living in this one small section.
The man turned an old laptop their way and pulled up a folder with dated files.
“Pick any date and time you want. All of them were taken with me standing right here.” He jabbed at the countertop.
Eric stared as John pulled up a few of the times they knew would correlate roughly with their arsonist’s timeline.
There was Dyson Edwards on the screen day after day, hour after hour, recording his whereabouts.
It took them a half hour of depressing videos, but he’d confirmed it. He was home during the last two fires, at least. Unless he was working with someone else, which wasn’t typical for an arsonist, he wasn’t their guy.
Chapter Eleven
Merritt stared at her boss, knowing full well her mouth was hanging open.
“Close your eyes,” the makeup artist said.
Merritt continued to stare. Her boss was trying to explain the concept. But it wasn’t at all getting across to her.
“I need you to close your eyes, ma’am.” There was more than a hint of annoyance in the woman’s tone and Merritt played back the last few minutes in her head. Sure enough, the woman had asked Merritt to close her eyes a good four or five times now.
She let her eyes close and decided now would be a good time to take advantage of the posture and send a prayer up asking for this all to end.
She couldn’t imagine why her boss thought this was a good idea. Didn’t they have lines of people waiting to get on the air for the morning talk show? I mean, sure it was a local show, but still, they must have applicants willing to sell their left arm for a shot at getting on the air.
Her boss’s voice cut into her prayer. “It’s a one-time guest spot and the network wants it. Your posts online have more followers than they’ve seen in a long time and people want to hear from the journalist who first connected the fires together.”
When she interviewed at the paper, Merritt ha
d known it was owned by the same company that owned two of the local television channels and a few radio stations, but she never imagined there would be any overlap or that she’d be dragged on the air.
She opened her eyes, trying to decide if there was any wiggle room with her boss. “I have no idea how to do this. This isn’t what I was hired for,” she said, somewhat lamely.
He gave her a look that said she was crazy for trying to get out of the role. She was getting the sense that he was as excited by this chance as she was supposed to be, and she wondered if he didn’t have dreams of getting on the air himself. Or maybe it was that he was hoping to work in television instead of print media.
She frowned. She always assumed people in the newspaper business were as committed to print media as she was. Truth be told, she didn’t even love having to write online pieces during the week. She liked the printed edition of the paper as both a reader and a writer. It was her baby.
Going on Good Vibes, Dark Falls for even the few minutes she was meant to be on the air held no draw for her.
And then they were dusting her face with some kind of powder and an assistant producer came over to give her a rundown of what to expect. She heard about a third of it over the buzzing in her ears. She processed less of it.
And then they were pushing her toward the small set.
Brianne Leonard, the female face of Good Vibes, was out for the week. It was her absence that led to them bringing in guest hosts, apparently.
Merritt was greeted by Denzel Abrahms, a man who could give his actor namesake a run for his money in the looks department. Smooth black skin framed light green eyes and a wide smile. He gave a brief intro, making her sound a lot more exciting than she was, and she hoped like hell he didn’t expect her to live up to it.
“Merritt, Merritt—” this was said as though they were old friends— “thanks so much for coming by to be with us today!” The man laid the greeting on a little thick, and Merritt wondered if she was supposed to crank everything up by a few gigawatts for television.