Casey waited until midnight, until he couldn’t sit still any longer. He had a Maglite in his trunk, and he fetched it, stowed it in his pocket. With an idle thought about criminals returning to the scene, he got his pistol as well. He couldn’t think where to find a tarp without looking suspicious himself, creeping around in the dark, but he did nab some extra-thick trash bags from under the sink and took two of those and a roll of duct tape with him, plus a pair of rubber dish gloves.
It was a dark night, the moon out of sight. Darker than it had been during the eclipse. A million times quieter, with a million stars now glittering above. He gave the bunks and stables a wide berth, hugging the fence that bordered the road. If anybody asked what he was doing . . . Shit, he had no fucking plan. Pretend he was drunk, maybe. He’d spent years caring about nothing more than covering his own ass, but just now, it was way too hard to give a shit.
The barn was in near darkness, with just the weakest trickle of light making it over from the bunkhouse windows. There was yellow tape up, but nothing more. To most people this looked like the scene of a tragic accident.
Lucky them, Casey thought, weary to the marrow with all the death that had begun skulking around his hometown.
He sat on the dirt, taped two layers of heavy plastic around each foot, and donned the gloves. Switched the flashlight on but kept it trained low, mere centimeters from the ground.
It had been a huge barn, but a secondary circle of caution tape narrowed ground zero—the spot where Don’s body had been uncovered beside a small industrial tractor, black now, but surely the telltale green and yellow not twelve hours earlier. The floor was covered in junk. Charred wood, fat old nails, slate tile scraps everywhere. Casey turned his attention to the tractor first, to its engine, exposed where one panel had been propped up. He couldn’t make much sense of anything with just one beam. Couldn’t say where the fire had started, which way it had spread, how hot it had gotten. Only daylight could tell him those things. But tonight, he wasn’t after the how. He was after the who.
He swept the light around the mess underfoot, shifting debris, looking for anything unusual and wishing he owned one of those doohickeys his father had had when he’d been little—a strong magnet on a long rod, for fishing dropped bolts and screws from underneath cars or behind workbenches. There might be a single tiny staple somewhere in this mess—the only clue left behind from a pack of matches. Even if there was, though, talk about a needle in a hay—
His hand froze, locking the beam on something square, just where his rustling, plastic-booted foot had pushed aside some litter. Square and black and familiar. He moved the Maglite to his left hand and picked it up.
A cigarette lighter.
It wasn’t unlike his own—a chrome deal, though a gas station knock-off, not a real Zippo. He didn’t dare wipe at the soot, on the off chance any fingerprints had survived, but instead peered at it by the beam of the flashlight. Like his, it, too, had an emblem on one side. Faux enamel, it looked like, and the plastic once coloring it had melted away, leaving only the metal relief of a cheesy skull-and-daggers motif.
Don didn’t smoke, far as Casey knew, and even if he’d had a secret habit, he sure as shit wasn’t dumb enough to have lit up while working on a greasy old tractor engine.
It could have already been here. Just another forgotten bit of junk cluttering up this disused barn. But Casey doubted it. Doubted it as surely as he could picture the amateur arsonist who’d started this fire—picture him flicking it open, striking the wheel, perhaps dropping it in surprise or pain when those flames lashed back at his hand, more aggressive than expected, startling him.
He set the lighter on the hood of the tractor and resumed the search.
Casey couldn’t say how long he was there, scrabbling around on his hands and knees, peering at blackened scraps and bits of junk by the beam of the Maglite. He only knew that when his back began to ache and his head to throb that it must’ve been hours.