by Anne Marsh
When Evan spotted the first burn marks, he eased the truck off the road and pulled in tight to the guardrail. Ahead of him, Jack was setting up cones. Getting knocked off the road by a passing car wouldn’t help their investigation any. State fire marshall had come in yesterday, so now it was local law enforcement’s turn to take a look-see for the fire’s origin. Donovan Brothers wasn’t local, but Ben could and had requested their participation.
Any fire, no matter how small, merited a firsthand look.
And a second look.
Keeping Ben’s advice of last night in mind, Evan had swung by the firehouse to collect Faye in his truck. Kind of another down payment on the adventures he owed her; plus, it would be a good opportunity for her to get pictures of the boys in action. Cheap and easy. All this cost him was a few extra minutes. And since she was the only eyewitness they had, taking her back to the scene made plenty of sense.
“Showtime,” he said, coming around the truck to hand her out.
She nodded, dropping her camera strap around her neck. “Tell me what you need me to do.”
“Walk us through what happened,” he suggested. “Show us where you pulled over, where you parked. Ben has your statement, but let’s double-check it and see if there is anything else you want to add and if you can point out exactly where you saw the firefighter.”
Ten minutes later, he turned her loose. This morning, they’d seen the scene from her angle. That was helpful, even though she hadn’t gotten a picture of the truck’s license plate. But that would have been too goddamn easy. Now, he wanted the four of them—him, Ben, Jack, and Rio—to walk the scene. Hell, he’d crawl the thing an inch at a time if it gave him the information he needed.
“Burn path is widest here.” Ben pointed to a thick section of black char. “So that’s where we start.”
Evan nodded and fell into step with the other three.
“This could be merely a nuisance fire, another routine brush fire,” Ben continued. “I’m going to start with that hypothesis, and I want to see anything that screams otherwise. If we find nothing, that’s fine, too. Either way, I’m not leaving here until I know something more.”
At first, walking the perimeter turned up nothing out of the ordinary. Even hours later, the familiar smell of smoke and creosote was heavy in the air. They moved up the road, following the burn.
Following the burn path was like rolling up a reel of fishing wire. Eventually, Rio pointed to the char marks on trees, the slow narrowing of the black marks. They were definitely getting closer to the origin point.
“Any chance lightning is our villain here?”
Rio looked over at him and shook his head. “Not this time. Weather reports are all wrong for that. We haven’t had a storm, wet or dry, in days. If this was a lightning strike, we have ourselves an actual act of God.”
“Stranger things have happened.” Jack moved ahead, taking the lead on the road’s edge.
“You see strike marks anywhere here?” Ben snorted but didn’t lift his eyes from the ground he was quartering.
Ben’s question was rhetorical, but Evan wanted to see the answer for himself. Right now, he was on the widest end of the blackened area. If lightning had been the bad guy here, a strike on a tree could have sparked and then hopped, but the fire wouldn’t have hopped too far. Instead, Evan had a black swath marching up the mountainside where the grasses were gone. Although plenty of trees still stood, none of those trees showed the kind of damage you’d get from lightning. Of course, lightning could hit whatever it damn well pleased—it didn’t need a tree for a target. Still, you didn’t pump that much voltage into anything, even the ground, without leaving some sign behind. The ground would be baked where the strike had landed, and there was no sign of that here.
“Not lightning,” he agreed.
Rio was already nodding. “Boys yesterday put in a call to NOAA, and that’s the message they got, too. The feds confirm there wasn’t anything happening here, weather-wise, to set off a fire.”
NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, monitored the country’s weather. If lightning had hit here, those boys would have been the first to know.
“Other than that act of God.” Rio’s look said he didn’t like Evan’s suggestion. Evan wouldn’t have, either, if he’d been in Rio’s place. Acts of God weren’t predictable. In their business, predictable was good.
This far up the road from where Faye had pulled off, there was nothing but char. The fire had found plenty of fuel here and had hit the road fast. The bushes hanging over the guardrail and a helping hand from the wind probably explained the flames Faye had driven through.
Behind him, Faye’s camera clicked softly, recording their search for posterity. He wondered what she saw, what she thought about the small, tight group of guys leisurely strolling up the side of the highway. Walking the scene was never a quick job, and they’d take it one foot at a time.
“Here.” Ben stopped, pointing down. “Here’s our origin.” The burn pattern had been wide and broad when they’d started the walk a hundred yards down the highway. Now it narrowed. They’d found the point of their V, all right. That didn’t surprise Evan any. Ben Cortez was one of the best in the business.
“It didn’t get far.” The fire should have, though, given the amount of fuel it’d had. The highway had been a natural firebreak, but there had been plenty of room for the fire to go uphill. That had him questioning the presence of the unknown firefighter again. If that man hadn’t been on the scene, the fire would have been far worse.
A couple of smaller trees poked up from the edge of the burn zone, their bases scorched and blackened but their tops untouched. A handful of unburned, fallen branches on the ground confirmed the fire hadn’t gotten that far. This was the start point, all right.
Evan crouched down, looking at the grasses. Most were gone, just a small sea of black char and ash. Dry grasses always burned fast, and there was nothing to learn. Instead, he focused on those places where the grasses were only half-burned. That grass had a story to tell, all right.
“You’ve got it,” he agreed.
Behind him, Faye made a small noise of disbelief. “I see half-burned grass,” she said. “What do you see?”
“Same thing. This grass didn’t burn all the way. Fire’s going to start at the bottom and work its way up, right? Here, the fire didn’t get the whole thing. When the base of these stalks burned, the rest of the stuff fell over, but it fell over out of the way. Fire was moving in the other direction, so this part didn’t burn.”
He stirred a finger gently through the ash and found himself a match head. He looked over at Ben. “Yesterday’s boys may have missed one. You got the tweezers and a baggie?”
Ben and the Donovan Brothers were second string here. They all knew that. The primary on the case would do the coordinating with the state arson unit and the Forestry Commission, sharing information and cooperating in joint investigations. That was a hell of a lot of red tape for a what-if, so everyone would make sure they had their proof—he eyed the match head—before they let a private contractor like Donovan Brothers lend a hand in figuring this shit out.
It would have to be Donovan Brothers’ shit. Which, unfortunately, was looking more and more likely.
“It really wasn’t a big fire,” Faye said behind him, sending a jolt of something right through him. He’d forgotten she was there.
“No. This kind of fire starts small. She can burn fast, though.” Especially when some asshole was working the matches and the grass was this dry.
“We have the report from yesterday yet?” he called to Rio. He was betting the investigators had the match head’s companions safely stowed in a state lab by now. Sometimes, though, they missed. So he’d make sure.
Rio sprawled in the pickup’s cab, working his laptop. “Should be ready. Depends on how backed up our boys were.”
“You got a good zoom on that?” He motioned Faye over, stopping her when she got too close.
She’d have a more powerful lens than theirs. “Watch your feet now—keep them over here. We need a picture of this.”
“Match head,” he said when she looked at him. She lowered her face to the lens, and the soft click of the camera doing its thing filled up the space between them.
“That doesn’t belong here.” Her face came away from the lens.
“No. This whole exercise is what-doesn’t-belong.”
Ben handed over the baggies and a pair of tweezers, and Evan carefully picked up his find. One unburned head, all nice and shiny red. Sealing the bag, he held it up to the light, turning it around. Just your standard match from the kind of box you used to get the barbecue going. Every home in the area had a blue-and-red box of these matches.
“Label it and send it in,” he said to Ben. “Let’s see if they’ve got the mates.”
He pushed to his feet and headed back to his truck. He didn’t want to be sitting here, staring an ugly truth in its face. He needed to move.
Rio called over from his truck. “They’ve got match heads.”
He knew that. Fuck. He knew that.
“God damn it.” Evan’s fist slammed down on the truck’s hood.
“Bad news?” Stupid, stupid, stupid. That was obvious, wasn’t it? Faye tried and failed to think of something else to say. Evan was pacing up and down beside the truck. She didn’t think he lost control often, but right now he was walking the edge. And he was a big man.
She watched and he pulled it together, the anger and upset vanishing, as he forced his hands to relax by his sides. He paused by the driver-side door and looked at her, shaking his head. As if he didn’t have all those emotions churning away inside him somewhere. “You could say that, darlin’.”
His size and obvious strength made other people nervous. She’d seen the instinctive wariness others displayed around him, even at Ma’s bar, the night he’d first walked into her life. People saw him and couldn’t help realizing how much physical power he was packing. She couldn’t help thinking, though, that he wouldn’t use that power destructively. Not unless he was out of options.
Evan thought with his head, not with his hands or even his heart.
So, instead of running away from his bad mood, she asked, “You want to tell me about it?”
“Not particularly.” He walked around the truck as if he hadn’t just put a dent in the hood, and she followed him. She didn’t like following, but she wanted more from him than a two-word answer.
“But you’re going to.”
“Yeah.” Again with the too-brief succinctness. He opened the passenger-side door for her and waited until she got in before carefully shutting the door and heading around to his side. That old-fashioned courtesy was sweet. She wanted to think it meant something, but she didn’t know. Instead, she kept her thoughts to herself, waiting while he drove out, lifting his hand to Rio as they passed his brother.
“I’m waiting,” she said, when the truck picked up speed and they’d put some distance between themselves and the burn site.
Evan’s voice was calm and smooth as he laid it out for her. If she hadn’t seen him do a number on the hood of his truck, she’d have wondered if the afternoon’s discovery meant much at all to him.
“Match head on the side of the road? It doesn’t have to mean anything, but you find a match head where you had a fire? You’ve got yourself probable cause. You pair that with an eyewitness who just happened to spot a fireman before anyone called in that fire? That means I’ve got a big fucking problem.”
That last observation wasn’t so calm. “Arson,” she agreed.
“Looks like it,” he said grimly. “I got the smoke, I got the fire.”
“What happens now?”
“Now I try to find out the who before this happens again.”
“You think this was more than a one-off?” She wondered if he would say it or if he’d try to convince her that everything was fine. That it was all under control here in Strong.
“Almost certainly. This kind of arsonist specializes in serials, and this isn’t our first brush fire,” he admitted. “We’ve been keeping our eye on the situation. What I didn’t know before was that there was a fire-department presence at these fires. That’s the piece you brought to the table.”
She hadn’t expected Evan’s brutal brand of honesty, but it shouldn’t have surprised her.
“This shouldn’t be happening again,” he said, and her head snapped right around from her contemplation of Strong’s green-and-pretty. Again? “We already had one arsonist this summer. Lily Cortez, Jack’s fiancée, had a crazed nut-job stalker who thought setting her stuff on fire was a courtship ritual. His last ‘love note’ burned up three hundred acres in the mountains.”
She’d seen the arson mentioned in the handful of newspaper articles she’d read as background before coming out to Strong. She knew it had been bad. “You have no idea who this new arsonist is?”
“No.” He glared at the road, as if somehow he could undo what had happened. “Only who he isn’t.”
“Why is it your fault? I mean,” she added hastily, when he shot her an incredulous look, “why are you acting like this is so personal? It’s more work for you, and you have to clean up the mess. I get that. But isn’t this just another job, when you get right down to it?”
Evan cursed. “Firefighting doesn’t work like that, Faye. If these fires are an inside job, then it reflects badly on all of us. We’re a team. Whatever this guy does, it hits all of us professionally and personally. Because we should have known. We should have stopped it.”
“Right. Because you’re a team of superheroes.” Apparently, smoke jumping and urban firefighting had even more in common than she’d suspected. Those were the kinds of sentiments she’d come to expect from her ex-husband. It was all about the team. The boys. Hurt one, and you hurt them all.
“Jack has that new firehouse,” Evan said calmly, ignoring her outburst. “He’s looking into some grants and private sponsorships to really fix the place up. What do you think happens to the funding tap if it turns out one of our firefighters is running around starting fires?”
“That’s not fair,” she protested.
“That’s how things work.” He shrugged. “Fair doesn’t come into it much. I think having a second arsonist in Strong won’t paint Jack’s project in the best possible light. Best case, the story about rehabbing a historic firehouse gets swallowed up by the more sensational story of a firefighter who is setting his own fires. It’s better reading. Bolder headlines.”
“So you don’t want that story out there.”
“I don’t,” he admitted, “but I’m not saying don’t file it. That’s not what I’m saying at all. If one of ours started these fires, I’ll do what has to be done. He goes down—he doesn’t get away with this. I just want to have the evidence first. I don’t want guessing.”
“Because you’d be flushing your brother’s dream away.”
“Exactly.” The intense look on Evan’s face made it plenty clear how he felt about keeping his brothers happy. She almost pitied the man who had started this fire and threatened Jack’s dream when Evan caught up with him.
“There’s not too much you brothers don’t share.” She eyed him speculatively. “You share women, too?”
“I wouldn’t share you,” he growled. He looked as if he didn’t know where the words had come from, but they were out there now. He wasn’t taking those words back, either. “You can count on that.”
“I can’t not tell this story, Evan. That’s the truth.”
“I know,” he said, and she watched his hands tighten and then relax on the wheel. “I know you have to, darlin’. I’m not asking anyone to hide anything. I’m just thinking it’s time to clean house—personally.”
Chapter Seven
The hangar had a full house. Evan eyeballed the men streaming in. Both the jump team and the ground crew were present. He should have been proud. Donovan Brothers had assembled one hell of a team
. These were some of the finest firefighters the state of California had to offer, and, before yesterday, he’d have been proud to go out into the field with any one of them at his back. Today, however, he was full of doubts—and that was all due to walking the scene yesterday where Faye had encountered the brush fire.
One of these guys was playing with matches in his spare time.
There were things a man simply didn’t do. Lines that didn’t get crossed, no matter how bad the provocation. If he was being honest with himself—and there was no point in not being straight up, since he’d taken to having these little conversations with himself—the betrayal bothered him almost as much as the fires themselves did. The guy who’d done this hadn’t thought about his team. When the Donovan Brothers’ crew went out there to take on the fires this asshole set, there was always the possibility that someone could get hurt. Badly.
So unhappy didn’t begin to describe his conviction that the fires were an inside job.
The jumpers were a close-knit bunch, sprawled on their gear bags. The ground crew mingled some, but there were lines here, too, and those lines didn’t get crossed much. The ground crew was made up mostly of hotshots. They outnumbered the jumpers about three to one. They were damned good men, and they got the job done, but they didn’t jump, and like stuck to like.
Rio leaned in to Evan. “I’ll take the left side. You take right.” The two of them had agreed to hang back and let Jack handle the talking. Jack was the public face of Donovan Brothers, and if anyone could send a heads-up to their arsonist, it would be Jack. Rio and Evan’s preferred approach was a little more hands-on and physical.
“Sounds like a plan,” he said. When he looked down, his hands were balled into fists. Again. Forcing himself to relax, he sucked in a deep breath. Just because he wanted to beat the crap out of whoever it was didn’t mean he would follow through on the urge. He’d learned firsthand on the streets, before he’d gotten to Strong and discovered Nonna’s brand of salvation, that hitting didn’t fix things.