“The entire windowsill was splattered with gasoline. He didn’t need to break in or enter the building at all. The fire broke in for him. There were curtains hanging in the window. After the glass broke, the curtains ignited and suddenly the fire easily spread inside. It’s similar to the warehouse fires. I don’t know much about the church fires in Arlington yesterday but I understand they were started from the outside, too.”
“I’m sorry,” Racine said, “but it seems like a lot of hocus-pocus to me. How did he know it would work?”
“Just between us, I’d say he knows what he’s doing.”
“Wait, what do you mean? Are you saying it could be a firefighter?”
The chief shot a look at Ivan like maybe he had already said too much or, worse, offended the ATF investigator.
“It wouldn’t be the first time,” Maggie said. “I’m thinking of Benjamin Christensen in Pennsylvania. I think he was a volunteer firefighter. No body count but at least a dozen fires, some landmarks.”
“John Orr in Southern California,” the chief said.
“That was a long time ago,” Ivan said with a scowl.
Maggie remembered the case. Although it was thirty years ago, it had come up when she began researching serial arsonists. Orr had been a fire captain and arson investigator and had even been assigned to one of the fires he started.
She wasn’t surprised Ivan didn’t like anyone bringing up the criminal behavior of a fellow arson investigator. Surely they had their own version of the thin blue line.
Maggie considered Brad Ivan. There was something about him that bothered her, but she hadn’t wasted time trying to figure it out. He hadn’t been happy about the FBI’s involvement, to the point of withholding information from her and Tully. From the beginning, Brad Ivan had struck her as someone who didn’t play well with others, nor did his confrontational manner fit in with other law enforcement officials.
He listened to the fire chief with his arms crossed over his chest and she noticed that his coat bulged tight across his midsection. She remembered his hitching up his trousers yesterday and then looking almost surprised, like a man who was used to being in shape and suddenly finding he was no longer.
He scratched at his steel-gray hair and swiped back the swatches that climbed over his ears like he was well past a haircut. She realized all the extra weight and need for a haircut could just mean he was putting in some unexpected long hours. Which would account for his irritability. But there was something that made Maggie wonder if he was disgruntled or just exhausted.
He was standing behind the fire chief when she saw him frown at something the chief was telling Racine. Maggie decided she needed to take a look into Ivan’s background. She found herself wondering whether he could have followed her down the manhole, hoping to catch a fleeing arsonist and maybe scare the crap out of her just for good measure. Teach the profiler how much she doesn’t know. Was that something he was capable of? Was he the man she’d seen outside her property? As an ATF investigator he could easily get access to federal employees’ information, including her private home address.
She was considering all this when something across the street caught her attention. An empty lot had been gouged out. Stacks of concrete and piles of dirt were all that remained except for monster yellow equipment with claws and dump wagons, all parked and quiet for the night. There were construction sites all over the city, but two of them right across from arson sites? Was it a coincidence?
CHAPTER 63
About an hour ago Sam had been laughing with her son, watching her mother struggle to pick up a fried dumpling with chopsticks. That’s when she had heard the first siren.
It had stopped blocks away, but she felt her body tense up. She had forced a smile so her family wouldn’t notice that her pulse had started to race. She didn’t want them to see the slight twitch of panic as her eyes darted around the restaurant in search of the nearest exit.
A few minutes later she had heard a waiter tell someone that the shops just five blocks away were on fire. And Sam thought immediately about Jeffery. She knew he’d be frantic to get in touch with her. She had reached for her cell phone to turn it back on. Had it out of her purse and in her hand when she caught herself. Across the table her mother and son had been giggling over each other’s fortune cookies.
“Momma, read yours.”
Her palms had started sweating. The phone felt heavy in her hand as it slid from her fingers back into her purse.
It had been the purest choice she had made in a very long time.
Now when she saw Jeffery’s Escalade in her driveway a lump gathered in the pit of her stomach and she reminded herself that the right decision is not always the easiest. Nor would it be the best for her career, if she still had a career.
“It’s my boss,” she told her mother.
“Your boss here? On your day off?”
Instead of explaining, Sam asked her mother to take Iggy into the house and put the leftovers in the refrigerator.