Burned Too Hot: A Thriller (Val Ryker series Book 2)

by Ann Voss Peterson

  “I can’t.”

  “Time is of the essence here, doctor. Lives could be saved.”

  Pender let out a long and heavy breath. “He’s been dealing with a lot. But he’s worked so hard. I really think he’s pulling his life back together. It would be such a shame to ruin that.”

  “Whoever set those fires has killed two men and kidnapped a little boy.” Val reminded her.

  “I just can’t believe he’d do that.”

  “Serial arsonists don’t just stop setting fires. If you’ve done so much research into people like Dixon Hess, you should know that.”

  Behind her glasses, Pender’s eyes took on a sheen.

  A woman in a tough place? Or crocodile tears? The psychologist had said all the right things. Seemed sincere enough, and yet there was something about her that made Val uneasy.

  “Tell us,” Val pushed. Then I’ll decide whether to believe a word of it.

  “He came to me after a lot of bad things happened in his life. The only source of income he had was working as a paid volunteer.”

  “A paid volunteer?” The back of Val’s neck prickled. Paying volunteers was an unusual arrangement. In fact, she could only think of one entity that handled their workforce that way, and more than anything, she didn’t want to believe the Milk Jug Firebug could be part of it. “Where?”

  “The Lake Loyal Fire Department.”

  Chapter

  Twenty-Five

  Lund

  Lund found Dempsey in one of the fire station’s open bays, working on Unit One. A full time mechanic, Dempsey was invaluable to the fire district.

  For major repairs, they had little choice but to take the vehicles to a garage that specialized in the big rigs. But for everything else—routine maintenance, the smattering of junk vehicles donated for training purposes, even help with fire fighters’ personal rides—Dempsey provided the answers. In addition to Unit One, Engine One, and Ladder One, the multi-bay garage held an old Chevy, a Ford panel van, and a Suzuki Sidekick that looked as if it had been T-boned. Apparently the chief had been planning a training session with the Jaws of Life.

  Lund had expected the place to feel different, now that Chief Fruehauf was gone. But everything from the oily smell of the garage to the gravel sound of Nancy’s voice drifting from the dispatch office to the sight of Dempsey’s grease-covered overalls made this day feel like any other. Life goes on, even after a tragedy, and that fact made him hopeful and sad all at the same time.

  “You still here?” Lund asked Dempsey. Maybe it was strange that he didn’t talk about the chief’s death, but that was the way it worked. Life went on, and pain was buried deep. Lund supposed Pender wouldn’t think that was healthy, just like the shrink he’d seen after Kelly’s first death, but it worked well enough for the LLFD.

  “I stopped by last night,” Dempsey said. “Played some sheepshead then went home. Not sure Bix ever left.”

  Lund used to think Dempsey was the most obsessed with the job of the three of them. But after Hess, he’d stopped spending endless hours at the fire station, stopped drinking with Lund at the Doghouse, and had even trimmed his annual deer hunting trip from ten days to two. “Life’s too short,” he’d tell Lund whenever he got the chance. “I’m spending every second I can with Sarah and the grandkids.”

  And he had.

  Lund would have been all alone if it hadn’t been for Bix Johnson being laid off from his day job. “So where is Johnson?”

  “Cleaning up.”

  He found Bix in the community room, mopping the puke green linoleum with care, as if it was the finest marble. “Do you have a minute?”

  Bix paused and checked his watch. “Maybe one or two.”

  “This won’t take much longer than that.”

  Bix plunked the mop in the bucket and rolled it to the side. “What can I do you for?”

  “I have some questions. About your old job.”

  The outsourcing of manufacturing jobs in past years had taken a toll on the entire state, some regions worse than others. Johnson had worked for a company that supplied the mining industry. Unlike most, he’d had the fire department to fall back on, and now he had the chief’s job.

  “What do you need to know?”

  “How to build a fertilizer bomb.”

  “You don’t think our arsonist…”

  “I don’t know. But how hard is it?”

  “Not hard.”

  “Isn’t it tough to get supplies?” a voice said from behind them.

  Lund didn’t have to turn around to recognize it was Blaski.

  The kid continued. “My uncle had to sign some kind of form or something when he bought fertilizer for his field.”

  “The kid’s right,” Johnson said. “Wherever he got the ammonium nitrate, there’ll be a record.”

  “There was a break in at the co-op night before last.”

  “You think it might be the Milk Jug Firebug?” Blaski asked.

  “Unless some farmer was so eager to get fertilizer down for spring that he couldn’t wait until the place opened in the morning.” Lund angled his chair, putting his back more solidly to Blaski and focusing squarely on Johnson. “So what do you think? Once our guy had the AN, how easy would it be?”

  “Explosives grade ammonium nitrate, like the mining industry uses, is different from the stuff applied to farm fields,” Bix said.

  “Different? How?”

  “The prills contain about 20% more air.”

  “Prills?”

  “They’re like fine pellets,” Bix explained. “The explosive grade prills are more porous. More air as a result.”

  That made sense. An explosion was an oxidation reaction, just like flame. The big difference lay in the reaction’s velocity. The more heat, fuel, and oxygen, the faster the reaction. The faster the reaction, the more violent the explosion. “But the regular stuff, the agricultural stuff, that’s still explosive, right?”

  “Yeah. You mix it with diesel or heating oil just the same way. The AN is the oxidizer and the oil is the fuel. The explosives grade mixture is what we call ANFO.”

  “Ammonium nitrate fuel oil.”

  Johnson nodded.

  “But it’s pretty stable, isn’t it?” Blaski said.

  “That’s why it’s used for mining. It’s also cheap.”

  “Haven’t I heard of accidental explosions?” Lund asked. “Or wasn’t that ANFO?”

  “Accidents are usually a case of large stockpiles of AN that aren’t stored properly. Once the ammonium nitrate is mixed with the fuel oil, you need a detonator of some kind to set it off.”

  The heat in the equation. “What kind of detonator?” Lund asked.

  “Anything you want. Dynamite, blasting caps, electric detonator. Has to be powerful enough, especially with those agricultural grade prills. This still doesn’t sound like the Milk Jug Firebug to me.”

  “You think we have two arsonists?” Blaski again.

  “I do. One set a couple of harmless fires. The other, Lund seems to think, wants to kill people and blow things up.”

  Lund gave him a frown. “No fire is harmless.”

  “And burning a shed is different than setting off bombs.”

  Lund shook his head. “It’s too much of a coincidence. This is a small town. Most crimes around here are the underage drinking and shoplifting kind.”

  “Except for Dixon Hess.”

  Lund nodded. Everything seemed to circle back to Hess. Lund only wished he knew how a homemade bomb fit into the mix.

  Preferably before it went off.

  Grace

  Grace thought she was awake, but she wasn’t sure.

  She had cloudy memories of stumbling down the steps of her house and climbing into a car that had cardboard mats on the floor of the back seat. The mats were dirty at the edges, and all she could think about was how her mother would never allow something so ugly to be in her vehicle.

  Her mother.

  Grace could hear her voice
now. Gentle. Reassuring. Telling her to be strong. But even as the familiar warmth settled into her chest, she knew it couldn’t be a real voice. Her mother was dead. Buried in a cemetery in Illinois. And although Grace liked the idea of heaven and the thought of her mom and grandma watching over her, she couldn’t really believe.

  She hadn’t been able to since she met Dixon Hess.

  Maybe it was him talking to her. Maybe instead of feeling reassured, she should be afraid. Her heart was pounding in her ears. That meant she was scared, didn’t it? But more than that, she couldn’t manage. She couldn’t move. Couldn’t really care. She felt as if she was in some sort of weird nightmare.

  Here, but not really here. Afraid but not really afraid. And all the while, not reacting to anything the way she should, the way she would when she was awake.

  She tried to open her eyes, make the dream stop, but she couldn’t. She sensed she was lying on something soft, but her head was so dizzy, she wasn’t sure if she was still on the car seat or a moving bed or spinning above it in midair.

  But that was stupid.

  Wasn’t it?

  Now the voice sounded different, like a girl, younger than her, a middle-school girl who rode her bus. But try as she might, Grace couldn’t understand any of the words the girl was saying. She’d catch a word or two… okay… strong… aunt… job… but pulling the sentences together, coaxing them to make sense, it was impossible.

  Something touched her cheek. Not Hess’s knife, but something soft, gentle. Fingers. Fingers that smelled like graham crackers.

  And then a little body curled into Grace’s lap. A baby. Her baby? No, no. She shook her head. She didn’t have a baby. She was just a kid. But she used to babysit. She must be dreaming. Dreaming of babysitting and graham crackers and the girl who sometimes sat next to her on the school bus.

  Grace tried to open her eyes again, but her world stayed plunged in darkness.

  “It’ll go away.”

  The first words she’d understood, but she wasn’t sure if they were coming from the girl or from a voice inside her head, the one chanting Aunt Val will save me, Aunt Val will save me.

  Grace was dizzy and confused and wasn’t sure what was going on, but she did know one thing. She couldn’t trust that voice.

  Aunt Val wouldn’t save her, because Aunt Val didn’t know she was missing in the first place. And she had no way of finding out where Grace had gone.

  Chapter

  Twenty-Six

  Val

  Val stared at JoAnn Pender, her mouth dry. “A firefighter? You’re saying the person setting these fires is a firefighter?”

  “He heard about me through the support groups I set up for first responders. A lot of people had a hard time with all Hess did.”

  “That’s a nice story,” Olson said, “but we can get the background later. Right now, we need a name.”

  “I want you to understand. He’s not a bad man.”

  Val shook her head. She was stunned, still reeling, but that didn’t mean her bullshit-o-meter had ceased to work. “He killed two people. That’s bad enough in my book.”

  “He didn’t mean to hurt anyone.”

  Olson let out a bark of a laugh.

  “We need a name, doctor,” Val said.

  “I just don’t think…”

  “Now. Or we’ll have to arrest you for obstruction.” Val wasn’t sure if that would stick in court or not, and at this point, she didn’t care. If Pender didn’t provide a name soon, Val would enjoy parading the doctor past the news media in handcuffs. She might even put them on extra tight.

  As if reading her mind, Olson reached for his belt, grabbing his handcuffs, letting them rattle as he pulled them out into the open.

  “Wait.” Pender threw her hands up in front of her, palms out. “Wait. I’ll give you the name. But I’m doing this under protest.”

  Val raised her brows. “Well?”

  “Blaski. The Milk Jug Firebug is Kyle Blaski.”

  Lund

  Lund was out in the back parking lot, on his way to his truck when his phone rang. He looked at the display, tapped the screen and held it to his ear. “Val.”

  “I just saw your message. Are you at the fire station now?”

  His shoulders tensed at the tone in her voice. “Yes.”

  “Is Kyle Blaski there?”

  “You mean my favorite person? Sure is.”

  “I need you to keep him there.”

  “What’s up, Val? What happened?”

  “I have a lead on the Fire Bug.”

  “Blaski?”

  “It’s complicated, and I can’t get into it right now, but I need to talk to him.”

  Lund couldn’t have heard her right. Blaski was a lot of things, a snot-nosed little back stabber for one, but he was still a firefighter. Lund knew there had been firefighters around the world who’d turned out to be arsonists, he’d read the stories, but he still couldn’t believe it of his firefighters. Even Blaski. “You sure?”

  “We have some new information.”

  “From where?”

  “I can’t really go into it. The source has privilege.”

  “The shrink? Pender?”

  Val sighed, as good as a yes. “I’m not sure how much to make of it yet. But I need to talk to him. Can you keep him there?”

  “Consider it done. And there’s more you need to know.”

  He gave her a quick rundown on what he’d learned about ANFO, pointing out the recent Co-op theft.

  “So the Firebug has built a bomb?”

  “Looks like it, yeah. And now that I know it could be Blaski, I’m not sure how long I can hang around him without punching the little bastard in the face.”

  “I’ll hurry.”

  When Lund returned to the community room, Blaski was alone, putting away the mop.

  “How’s it going” Lund asked him.

  Blaski shot him a wary look. “I’m not supposed to talk to you, you know.”

  “You were just talking to me five minutes ago.”

  “No, I was talking to Bix. And it had nothing to do with the complaint.”

  “Where is Bix?”

  “Got a phone call. Went outside to take it. I think it’s probably from his wife, needed a little privacy. I hear they’re not doing so good.”

  “Yeah, I heard that, too.”

  “But now he’s chief, right? I mean that’s good.”

  Lund gritted his teeth. Good? Really? Blaski had the nerve to say that good came from the fire he’d set? Good had come from killing Jerry Fruehauf?

  “You don’t like me much, do you?” Blaski said.

  “What gave you that idea?”

  “I was just telling the truth about what happened in that fire. The way I saw it, anyway.”

  “I thought you weren’t supposed to talk to me about your complaint.”

  Blaski turned back to the janitorial closet, dumped the mop water down the drain, then rolled bucket and mop inside and closed the door. “I didn’t mean for you to be suspended or anything. I was just—”

  “You’re talking about it again.”

  “Right. I just feel bad. Didn’t mean to throw you under the bus or anything.”

  Lund glanced at his watch. Come on, Val. “So now that you opened the door, why did you throw me under the bus?”

  Blaski folded his arms across his chest. “I just think it was a bad call, staying in there, looking for the kid, when it turned out the kid wasn’t even there.”

  “Did you know he wasn’t there?”

  “Of course, I didn’t.”

  “If you had reason to know for sure, you should have told me.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Then how was it a bad call?”

  The kid stared at the butt-ugly floor. “I just… I just never had a victim die on me before. Not like that. It seems like we should have been able to do something to save him.”

  Lund didn’t want to identify with Blaski, especially not since
he’d gotten Val’s call. If there was even the smallest chance the kid was responsible for Chief Fruehauf’s death or the kidnapping of Kelly’s son, Lund would much rather gut him like a deer than understand anything about him. But he found himself nodding anyway. “It always seems like we should be able to do something.”

  A knock sounded on the front door, followed by the sound of Nancy releasing the lock.

  “Does it get better? I mean, losing someone? Feeling helpless? Does that go away?”

  “If it ever does, I’ll let you know,” Lund said. He turned toward the office just in time to see Val working her way down the hall on her crutches, Sergeant Olson beside her.

  “Kyle Blaski?” Val said.

  Blaski flashed a confused smile. “Hi, Chief Ryker.”

  “I need you to come down to the police station. We have some questions for you.”

  His focus pinged between Val and Olson and Lund. “Questions? About what?”

  “The recent fires.”

  “The recent… You don’t think I…”

  “I don’t think anything that you can’t clear up,” Val said. “At least not yet.”

  Blaski looked so trapped and so frightened, for a second, Lund felt sorry for him.

  Okay, maybe a fraction of a second.

  “You can go with us willingly or not. Either way is fine with me.” Olson said.

  “I’ll… I’ll go. Do I get a phone call or something? Should I call a lawyer?”

  “You’re not under arrest, Mr. Blaski.”

  Not yet.

  The thought flitted across Blaski’s expression at the same time it registered in Lund’s mind.

  “Okay, okay, what do I do?”

  “Walk with us.” Val led the way, Blaski a half step behind at her side and Olson riding herd.

  As they entered the hall, Val twisted back to mouth a quick thank you Lund’s way.

  Lund reached the door in time to see Olson loading Blaski into his black-and-white. Val climbed into her own car, and they drove off with a man who might be the Milk Jug Fire Bug.