“Older house,” Sebastian mused. “Could have been the wiring.”
“They should have seen something or smelled something first,” the chief countered.
“I don't know,” Sebastian shrugged. They should have, but should didn’t always mean people did notice. Or they’d noticed but dismissed it—either thought it wasn’t that bad a smell or decided that they’d just fix it later. He wasn’t ready to rule out faulty wiring.
He spotted Luke coming up the street toward them. That was odd. The firefighters stayed put. Each had his position and leaving it would rearrange how the team worked. It must mean Luke had something to say.
“Hernandez.” The chief greeted him with a neutral tone, letting him know he was free to talk, but unexpected.
Hernandez glanced towards Sebastian, but again the chief nodded. The movements were simple conversation between people who worked together as a unit consistently, sometimes in life and death situations. They all understood the nod to mean that, whatever Luke had to say, he could say in front of Sebastian.
“I didn't put anything together before,” Luke looked between them. “But I'm getting a little concerned about the locations of the fires.”
“I don't understand,” the chief said, now curious about what one of his newest firefighters was bringing.
“When I was a kid,” Luke added, “We moved around a lot. It was my mom, my dad, me, my three brothers. Then my dad left when I was seven.”
Chief nodded. Sebastian understood. Luke hadn't made a secret of his family history, and he was wondering why it was getting repeated now.
“I've lived in each of these two neighborhoods. I’ve …” He didn’t finish, but shook his head as if shaking off something disturbing.
Interesting, Sebastian thought. Two house fires, barely a week apart. One firefighter had lived in both places.
The chief took a more cynical approach. “You moved around a lot. But the people who live in these neighborhoods move around a lot more, too. It’s probably not just you who’s lived in both places.”
“True,” Luke said, and Sebastian wondered if maybe there wasn't something more. There was. “This house—”
He didn't point. They'd all been trained not to do that. Not to draw attention.
“—belonged to a man my mother once dated.”
“But not anymore?”
“No. He moved out of town years ago.”
“Do you think an arsonist is targeting you?” The chief asked, finally becoming pointed to what Luke was maybe hinting at.
“No.” The answer was firm and clear. “I used to play with the kids in the family that lived in the other house. If someone were targeting me, there would be much better places to hit. I just think it's odd I’ve had a connection to both of the houses.”
Sebastian was soaking in the information. It probably had nothing to do with Luke personally, but the idea opened up a new line of thought … especially if this was another instance of arson.
“Anything more?” the chief asked.
Luke shook his head. “I just wanted to report it. I didn’t want it coming up later and you didn’t know. If there's anything you can ask me—anything I know that can help—I'll do what I can.”
But the chief dismissed Luke, and he headed back down the street to join the brigade.
“We should definitely take advantage of what he knows,” Sebastian said. “If this is a hit, then we should be asking Who else moved around this neighborhood, like the Hernandez family?”
It was an angle he and the chief hadn't entertained. Whether the chief had thought of it before, Sebastian didn't know, but it was certainly a new angle to him.
Their chat done until actual investigation could commence—which probably wouldn’t even begin until tomorrow—the two of them headed back down the street, not far behind Hernandez.
Luke joined back on the line, aiming the water at the base of the flames. A second team watched between houses, aiming to douse any flying sparks before they could take hold. They’d already wet the houses as much as they could, but nothing could be counted on with fires.
The homes were packed in relatively tightly here, and several neighbors were more than a little worried, standing on their own front lawns as the neighborhood glowed with loss.
As he stood back and surveyed the damage, Sebastian surreptitiously checked the crowd for watchers, anyone who didn’t belong. He didn’t even know yet if this was anything more than faulty wiring or a too-old appliance, but he had his eyes open for an arsonist coming to admire his work.
His thoughts turned and he wanted to message Maggie. He hoped she was asleep, it was the middle of the night after all. Though she said she'd be fine—and he believed she'd be safe—he didn't think she'd be comfortable.
But there was no time.
He left the uneasy feeling behind and hoped he'd get back to the station in time to catch a few hours of sleep before shift end, because it looked like he and the chief would have to come back here tomorrow.
Something told him they’d find ample evidence it was arson. He hoped he was wrong, because the more he learned the less he liked leaving Maggie alone.
Chapter Thirty
Maggie was grateful that Sebastian had made it home—well, back to her house—by ten. He’d gone to his apartment, showered, changed and came immediately to her place.
Would she have the presence of mind to say something to him today? To maybe ask him out? He wasn’t moving too fast, but maybe that mean he wasn’t interested.
He looked good, if tired, and instead of offering up herself she offered him breakfast. “I make a mean scrambled omelet.”
“What’s that?” he asked, giving her the side eye.
“It’s when I try to make an omelet and then I give up and scramble it halfway through, but it tastes just as good.” She'd even found hash browns she could make in the oven.
They'd eaten together quietly at the table—Maggie having a sensible breakfast, Sebastian acting as though he hadn't been fed at all in the last twenty-four hours. The guys ate meals at the fire station, but it was well known that the better the meal they sat down to, the more likely the bell would ring.
“You look exhausted,” she told him. “I’ll show you what I found in Abbie’s records later.”
“Why not now?”
“There’s a lot of it, and you need sleep.”
“I do,” he agreed, then added, “and I've got to go back later and check out an arson.”
“Well, if you're staying here …” she hoped he was. He’d said he’d be back and then he’d shown up. But they hadn’t explicitly stated that he was sleeping at her place now. “You can go to sleep in your room.”
She could call it his room. It should be his after two straight nights of him sleeping in that bed.
“You look relatively tired, too.”
Maggie had never dated a man willing to tell her she didn’t look her very best. But then again, she and Sebastian weren’t dating, to her disappointment. Though she'd managed to snag a few hours before he got off work at eight, her dreams had been wild and crazy, from running from faceless menaces in the dark, to finding bones in the water, or getting tangled in gold chains.
It didn't take any kind of therapist to figure out what they meant.
“I did my best. I got some sleep,” she told him, then switched topics. “Will you be back before dark?”
“Absolutely.” He looked her in the eye to let her know she wouldn’t be alone another night and her anxiety settled. “Arson investigations work best in daylight. Trying to find evidence in the dark is a bitch.”
“Then go sleep now.”
“What about you?” He was already standing, taking his plate to the sink, rinsing it and putting it in the dishwasher, yawning as he did it.
“I want to sleep tonight. So I’m going to check out the backyard.”
She could see him pause. With one hand on the counter, he frowned at her from the kitchen to where
she still sat at the table, finishing the last of her eggs.
“The feds checked out the yard.”
“I know,” she said. “But it's not their yard. They haven't been visiting and digging up the flowers here since they were eight. They might not notice if something was amiss.”
“It's a good point,” he conceded. For a moment, he looked like he would offer to join her. Then he yawned again though she could see he was trying to fight it.
“You go to sleep.”
With a nod, he walked past and her eyes followed as he made his way slowly up the stairs, looking more exhausted with each step he climbed.
Maggie finished her last few bites of hash browns, put her own dishes into the dishwasher, and headed straight through the kitchen and out the back door. She hadn't been out here since the FBI had come through. The grass had mostly sprung back. When they’d left, she'd been able to see footprints everywhere.
Now it looked as if the yard was righting itself. Maggie checked everything she could think of. She gazed down into the flower beds around the house. Abbie had ringed the whole place with three feet of mulch and a variety of plants that bloomed at different seasons. It was a bitch to weed all of it, but Maggie loved that it looked somewhere between manicured and wild.
The open space of the yard was plain grass and Maggie had hired someone to mow it. She was getting ready to pay the fee for them to weed the gardens, too. Turning away from the cultivated beds, she peered along the fence where her wildflowers bloomed. Some of them were several feet high.
Now, she examined it with a different eye. She headed to the fence and pushed some of the unruly plants aside, as though she might find jewelry and evidence littering the dirt. The only other thing she could think was to dig holes and see if she could turn anything up. A metal detector would be better, and she didn’t have any tools on her.
Heading toward the back, she looked to the blackberry bushes that lined the back wall. She walked along that border too, though nothing jumped out at her as being out of place.
As much as Aunt Abbie loved her gardens, she hated change. These bushes were the same ones Maggie remembered from when she was little. The newest things in the yard were the flowers she herself had added as a child, and that had been quite some time ago. Even inside, Abbie hadn't replaced any of the old wallpapers. The best she would do was refinish a floor now and then. From the looks of it, that hadn't happened in a long time either.
The old gate was exactly as she remembered it, though when she was a kid, the latch was almost at her eye level. Now, it barely passed her waist. Lifting it, Maggie swung the gate open. The creak and whine of the hinges indicated it too hadn’t been maintained. She closed it behind her and re-latched it though she didn't know why.
The back gate opened to one of the stretches of woods that ran through the town. There were walking trails back here and houses on the other side of the trees.
The other neighborhood wasn't quite so far away that Maggie couldn't see through to the other side if she looked. But if she wasn't looking, it would be easy to pretend she was lost in the woods, as she had when she was little.
Now, knowing what had been found in her home, it was easy to imagine that someone had come out the back of Aunt Abbie's boarding house and cut through the yard. As long as they'd made it across the grass undetected, they could have cut through the trails and wound up almost anywhere in town.
Though it was late morning and the sun was shining brightly, casting little diamonds of light along the ground, Maggie suddenly felt as though she knew that this was what the killer had done.
Her prowler had gone out the back door—and not the front—then disappeared … just like this. Maggie was becoming more and more convinced she was right.
A chill climbed up her neck despite the bright day. She spun around, looking all directions, feeling suddenly as if someone was watching her.
Chapter Thirty-One
Maggie stood for a moment looking first one direction then the other down the path, debating what she should do.
She’d only wandered a few feet from the back fence. Though she was in a thick stand of trees, her own home was still visible. When she tipped her head or paid attention to the light, she could see through to the houses on the other side. But Maggie was just as confident that they wouldn't see her.
She turned a full circle, alert to anything unusual, but found no one actually watching her. It didn't change the warning sensation that crawled the back of her neck.
Taking stock, Maggie asked herself what weapons she had. The answer was none.
But there was no one visible to need weapons against. And neither of the two predators she was dealing with seemed to strike in the woods or at daytime. Also, she had her phone on her.
Despite the sensation crawling up her neck, she was perfectly safe.
Sebastian knew where she was. She’d told him she would be in the back yard. It was an odd feeling, planning how to best be careful if something happened to her. She wanted to make sure they knew where to start looking. But she wasn’t even in either target demographic, and she was pissed.
The elderly clients—who were her only clients right now—were likely already gossiping that she had FBI agents in her home. That wouldn’t help her practice that wasn’t even off the ground yet. Someone had broken into her home and they might not have taken anything she could find, but they’d stolen her sleep and her sense of peace.
And if she had a way to add to the FBI’s evidence? Well, she was going to take it. So, rather than turn back, Maggie let her anger fuel her forward.
Her home—and thus this strip of woods behind it—was relatively close to the center of town. The front opened onto one of the more traveled streets, just off the main drag. She could turn left or right.
Before she went one foot further, she turned on the location system on her phone. She opened the app she had and messaged a link to Sebastian. If he woke up before she got back, he'd see the message from her and be able to find her quickly. That was being smart. Then she made a random decision and headed to the right.
Following the trail, Maggie kept her eyes peeled for any suspicious movement. Her ears strained for any unusual sounds. But the movement she saw was birds and squirrels and a single raccoon. The sounds were muffled by the same traffic she heard on the street, no different from an average day in Redemption.
She passed by the backs of various houses and realized likely none of them even knew she was back here. Maybe in the winter, when the trees were bare, the sightlines would be clear, but now, when it was dense and green like today? No one would see her unless they knew exactly where to look. And maybe not even then.
It disturbed her more to know that she could have accessed any of these homes easily from the trail. All she would need to do is cross the back lawn and go into the back door. She would bet many of the residents left their doors unlocked.
Then again, she hadn’t, and she’d still had someone in her home. So maybe she wasn’t any smarter or safer than anyone else.
Turning again to look down the trail that stretched in front of her, she thought back to the map that one intrepid reporter had made and posted online. None of the murders had occurred in Redemption. Only one victim had been a Redemption resident, and that had been a handful of years ago. The young man had been staying in Lincoln at the time.
She walked a little further, surprised at how many homes in Redemption backed up to this woodland. She’d known the trail was long. but it was warm today and she was surprised she hadn’t seen anyone else. No joggers. No moms with a stroller. No one.
Maggie passed into a different neighborhood and was now at the backs of playgrounds built on the lawns behind apartment buildings. If she followed it much farther, she would reach the industrial complex at the edge of town.
It had been almost an hour since she’d gone out the gate and it was past time to turn around. Heading back, she thought through the things that were known about the Blue R
iver Killer and the La Vista Rapist.
For a wild moment, she entertained a ridiculous fantasy in which one of the boarders was the rapist and Aunt Abbie herself was the Blue River Killer. It took less than thirty seconds to get to the point where Maggie was almost laughing out loud. Abbie hated houseflies but couldn't kill a spider. The victims had been relatively young and seemingly innocent, not the kind of people that made Aunt Abbie angry enough to even curse at them. Maggie couldn’t imagine her sweet and sour Aunt as an actual murderer.
Besides, another body had turned up missing since after Abbie had died. DNA evidence said it was the same predator. So Maggie dismissed the absurd idea.
Even if she was laughing at herself, light hit her eyes from the right hand side.
Something glinted.
Maggie turned to see what it was.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Sebastian followed the moving dot on his phone, grateful that Maggie had messaged him the link. Otherwise, he would have been terrified.
The La Vista Rapist took women from their homes. Some prowler had already been in Maggie’s house while she was there, and it made him doubly nervous.
He hadn't told Maggie what he thought of this—that maybe the prowler hadn't been after the box of jewelry but had been scoping the place out. He didn't want her to worry more. She already wasn't getting enough sleep.
Having him staying here should keep her safe, but it was still far too easy for anyone to find out what nights he was out of the house. Waking up and finding her gone had been petrifying.
Luckily, he’d found the text before he fully panicked. Hitting the link, he’d headed out the back door and was now following the trail she'd left behind. According to the dot, she’d turned around a while ago and he was about to run into her.
“Maggie?” he called out,
“Sebastian!” He heard her from far enough away for her voice to sound small. But she was up ahead, exactly as the system said and he breathed easier.
Crash and Burn (Wildfire Hearts Book 1) Page 11
