Oooh. Maybe he’s more like a troll bobblehead doll?
“I killed him,” Virgil looks stricken.
“Who?” Aaron frowns.
“That firefighter,” Virgil points to the memorial board. “I killed all of them.”
I sigh. Figures. We’ve got a serial confessor on our hands.
“What are you talking about?” Aaron frowns harder if that’s even possible.
Don’t encourage the crackpot, Aaron.
I slap the back of my hand against his stomach. A wall of steel greets my knuckles, and it’s all I can do to remain present in our current conversation. My lady flame flares to life and tells me to forget about the crazy troll doll. She wants to see if Aaron is still sporting that big fire log in his pants.
“I’m not a liar, liar, pants on fire,” Virgil insists. “I did it! I cursed them all.”
Aaron sucks in a breath.
I roll my eyes. “Alright then, how did you do it?”
Virgil blinks at me several times before shaking his head. “I don’t know. But I cursed them.”
I take Virgil’s elbow and direct him to The Squad Room’s front door. “Okay, then. Thank you for coming by. I’ll talk to the police and fire chiefs, and we’ll get back to you, okay? Mmm-kay. Bye-bye now.”
And with that, I shove Virgil outside.
I spin around to see Aaron hot on my heels. “Great balls of fire, Aaron! Warn a woman before you sneak up on her like that.”
Aaron is staring at the door, deep in thought.
“Don’t tell me you’re giving this crackpot any credence?”
He doesn’t answer.
What-the-fuck-ever. I got shit to do.
I leave him gaping at the door and head toward Nimble’s widow. She’s talking to family members of our Flame Jumper team. The survivors.
I glance over at the memorial board. There are a lot of deaths from our initial team, but it’s not like those are unexplained deaths. It’s shit that happens as you live your life. Plus, we work in a very high-risk field.
“I’ve demanded an autopsy,” Nadine tells the crowd.
“Why?” I shake my head. “Why would you do that? Didn’t they check his blood for drugs and alcohol?”
“They did,” she sighs. “But, I know there’s something more. He wasn’t acting like himself in the days before he died.”
This is new information. “In what way?”
She shrugs. “From the outside, you probably wouldn’t notice. He went to his job. He did his work. He came home. But when you live with someone as long as we were together, you notice the little things. Like how he took longer to come home. Or how he no longer kissed me goodnight. Or how he was taking more showers every day.”
I sigh. I hated to tell her those were signs of foul play, just not the kind she was looking for.
“He was off,” Nadine dabs her eyes. “What if he had a brain tumor or something? That would explain it, right?”
Her fellow fire widows hug her. I ease away from the group.
What’s that saying? If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s probably a cheating motherfucking duck.
