“Okay . . .”
“Anyhow, that’s always been a part of me. Always the thing that got me juiced like nothing else could—” He paused, looking up, catching her expression. Worry and unease had to be written all over her face. “You all right?”
“You’re not going to confess that you went to work for the FBI, using your powers for good, are you?”
His smile was pure apology. “Sorry, honey. I liked money back then, as much as fire. And good doesn’t pay all that well.”
She nodded, and, feeling cold, she took her hand back and locked her arms around her middle.
“This is my confession, remember?” he said gently. “It was never going to be a happy surprise.”
“I know. Go on.”
“So, over time, hanging with all those card-counters and dabbling in those con jobs, I got involved with some folks who were into insurance fraud.”
Fraud. Okay, that didn’t sound too terrible, she thought, trying to quell the nausea.
“There’s this whole criminal sector,” he said, “to do with insurance. Guy takes out a big policy on his house or his boat or his business; then the place burns to the ground, he gets his fat payout.”
“On purpose. Like, he sets the fire himself.”
“Exactly. The thing is, arson’s real hard to do right. It leaves a million fingerprints—in the chemical residue, the burn patterns, loads of little tells. You can’t just splash some gasoline, light a match, then tell the investigators it must’ve been some faulty wiring. Dumb-asses try that shit all the time, and all of them get busted.”
Her heart had gone from racing to plodding at some point, and as the truth began to gel, her body went cold, cold, cold. “So you did that yourself? Bought places only to destroy them and get insurance money?”
He shook his head. “No, I contracted. People hired me to start fires for them. Then in exchange, I got a hefty cut of the settlement.”
“But . . . I mean, what people? And where are you setting fires? In houses?”
“Some, but mostly commercial spaces. Most of my clients—”
“Clients?” That word sounded so, so . . . businesslike. So prim, or something. Something vulgar in its propriety.
He nodded. “Most of my clients were business owners on the brink of bankruptcy, or else they’d cooked their books or otherwise fucked themselves into a corner, and needed quick cash and a way out. I go in, I set up a scene—finesse some wiring, or maybe it’s a faulty space heater, left on too close to a trash can full of paper. Maybe it’s industrial—the right rags soaked in the exact sorts of chemicals you’d expect to find in whatever place of business it was, too close to a heating duct that’s got too much dust built up in it. Whatever accident fits the scene.”
“Accident,” she repeated.
“Seeming accident, yeah. The key is to design the fire to burn through quick.” He sounded excited now, talking faster, gesturing like he was recounting a boxing match. “You leave the right windows open in the right sort of weather, keep others closed, control the spread. Make sure the building goes down quick, ideally before the authorities can even arrive.”
“The firefighters.”
Casey nodded.
Her stomach turned all the way over, three hundred sixty degrees. “My grampa was a firefighter, and my uncle.”
Casey sat up straighter, snapping out of his animated state in a blink. “Oh, honey—don’t worry. Nobody ever got hurt by any fire I set. I was careful.”