Slowly, he turned back to Felicia, who was already standing.
“Looks like you have another meeting.”
Captain Nash stood in the open doorway, a file folder in his hand. “You got a minute, Chief?”
Mick straightened in his chair as the firefighter left, and the officer replaced her. They were about to discuss the humiliating scene he’d made on the call, and as command, Nash had every right to bring it up. Even a responsibility to do so.
“Look, Captain, I’m really sorry about—”
Louie waved off his apology. “I just wanted to let you know about some paperwork that the investigator located at the scene. You know, the MIPD is opening an attempted murder investigation, don’t you?”
“I suspected they would.”
Still, hearing that fact spoken aloud made it so much worse. Mick sneaked a shallow breath, wishing he could stop blinking. They’d been able to recover some of the papers? Would it be enough to prove whatever Rachel thought she could with those boxes she’d found? And would she be able to forgive him for forcing her to leave them behind?
Louie wouldn’t have noticed Mick’s oversize reaction, anyway, as he sat staring down at the folder in his hands. But he didn’t open it or rest it on the chief’s desk.
“After the upstairs came down, I didn’t think anything in the house would have been recoverable, let alone paperwork.” He shook his head, still not believing it. “Did he find something from the boxes in the office?”
Louie shook his head, chuckling. “No, not in the house. Stan’s place was so full of books that it burned like a paper company.”
“Then what are you…?”
“Someone dropped this at the scene. The investigator found it, not near the house but where the crowd was standing.”
The captain rested the folder on the desk between them and opened the file. Inside was an inkjet photo of a sheet stored inside a clear evidence bag. The note itself had been folded so many times that it had square marks all over it.
Mick’s breath caught as he took a closer look. The wordTORCHhad been handwritten at the top of the page in what looked like pencil. A kid’s handwriting. The sheet itself was a formal document with one-inch margins, a readable font, numbered sections and bulleted details. But as he read the list, his fingertips went cold.
Someone had left a step-by-step, how-to guide for setting buildings on fire.
Chapter 25
Mick forced himself to wait until Louie made another copy of the letter for him and headed back to the kitchen to help with dinner before he rushed over to his filing cabinet. The two-inch binder was right where he’d left it, with cadet program applications and photos of all those hopeful candidates inside.
He lunged for the book and carried it back to his desk, perching on the edge of his seat and coming up on his toes. His legs refused to stay still. Once he’d opened the cover, he couldn’t turn the pages fast enough. Was it possible that the answer to the questions about the rash of fires had been in Riley Hoffman’s office—now his—all along?
“What was his name? Kevin? Curtis?” He flipped the pages harder as the answer didn’t instantly appear. The name didn’t matter, anyway, because he knew the kid’s face.
Maybe all of these fires had started as some game, some “TORCH” for people who thought it would be fun to destroy other people’s property. That was dangerous enough. But today was different. This morning someone, maybe a participant in that game, had tried to murder the woman he loved. Had tried to burn her alive. And there was no way he would be getting away with it.
“He’s here. He has to be here,” he said, though a weight settled in his chest over the possibility that he could have been wrong. That he was just grasping at straws.
Still, he continued to rip at the applications that weren’t even alphabetized. Just punctured with a three-hole punch and threaded onto the rings, probably as the packets arrived during the monthlong application period, each marked with the date it was received. As that thought settled, Mick flipped the whole book to its back cover to look at the earliest applications submitted. After working backward through two letters of recommendation and the transcript, he stopped on the first page from the earliest applicant.
And there he was. Cameron Lewis Phillips, the sheet said at the top. For several seconds, he could only stare at the photo clipped to it. He could have been any teen that Mick had passed on the streets since arriving in Mount Isabel. White. Ordinary. Only if Mick was right, he was also the kid who’d tried to kill Rachel.
To be sure it was the same boy, he turned back to his computer and moved the mouse to awaken the monitor. The photo that had been there earlier filled the screen. Mick zoomed in to get a better look, but from even at a distance, he could tell it was a match.
Mick couldn’t help it. He lifted the photo and read the whole application, trying to glean details from the typed words. Though in this day of helicopter parents, he recognized that the boy might not have completed the application himself, his answers suggested that he had. The kid listed only computers and video games as interests, even referring to himself as a “computer wizard.” His answers to the question about why he wanted to consider a career in firefighting weren’t so different from those on any of the other applications, but Mick gave them a closer inspection.
“A ‘hero’ and ‘big part of the community.’” Mick whispered and then reread every word. “He has big plans, all right.”
But when he scanned to the bottom of the page where Cameron had added a little something extra to make his application stand out, Mick’s blood went cold. The boy had added a quote.
“A coward turns away, but a brave man’s choice is danger.”
—Euripides (c. 485-406 BCE)
