His own breaths still whooshing out like Darth Vader through his SCBA, Mick chuckled, but he turned away before the younger man could catch him rolling his eyes. Oh, to be that innocent again and still believe that good had a fighting chance against evil. Had heeverbeen as optimistic as Noah, who perfectly matched his nickname, “Sunny”? If so, someone had pounded the Pollyanna out of him that first week at the Chicago firehouse. He appreciated knowing that another crew member besides Peter wouldn’t be giving him the cold shoulder, but he suspected that this probie was still too green to have declared fealty to the former chief.
He pulled off his helmet and mask and pushed back his hood over his soaked hair, coughing immediately over his first breath without protection from the acrid smoke.
“Good work out there tonight, Carlson.” Despite the sweat trailing beneath his collar, Mick shivered as the near-freezing temperature cut through his turnout gear more now than when he’d first arrived, its job to keep him safe, not warm. “I mean this morning.”
“You, too, boss. Heck of a way to start your first day on the job. I guess it wasbeforeyour first day.”
“Heard the firehouse siren and headed over. You know…muscle memory.”
“You showed up like a paid-on-call crew member, and this fire wasn’t even an all-call,” Noah said, indicating the signal for every available firefighter to respond to an emergency. “Though don’t those guys usually suit up at the station and ride on the truck?”
Noah gestured first to Mick’s turnout gear and then to his pickup, parked on the side of the road near a pile of dirt-striped snow.
No way would Mick admit that he’d been tempted to ignore the call altogether. To stay sprawled on the lonely air mattress on his apartment’s living room floor, gnawing on pizza and trying to shut off that conversation that had repeated in his thoughts. The one with Rachel Hoffman. Even fighting a fire, the effort straining his out-of-practice muscles, the snug fit of his mask making him feel like a scuba diver under twenty feet of water, had only briefly helped to interrupt that loop.
If you’d ever cared about anyone…Her words, unfair and untrue, still stung. She knew nothing about him other than what she’d read. And if he had any sense, he wouldn’t let himself crave more information about her. He already knew she was the former chief’s sister. That should have been enough.
“Good thing you set up your locker before you went home last night,” Noah continued with their conversation as though Mick hadn’t already left it. “Don’t know about you, but I could eat an elephant right now.”
“Sorry. No enormous land mammals here. I ordered a pizza last night. Just finished the first slice when the fire whistle started up. Pepperoni and banana peppers.” His stomach roiled at the thought of all the greasy meat and congealed cheese back in his otherwise empty refrigerator.
“Have it in the truck?” Noah pointed to it, his body positioned to run.
“Sorry again.”
His shoulders slumped. “Too bad. Could’ve shared.”
At least someone would have eaten it then. Before the younger man could bring up food again, Mick switched topics. “You mentioned the arsonist earlier. Remember, this incident is only ‘suspicious’ so far.” He paused to add the air quotes. “Possibly intentionally set, but it’s above our pay grade to declare it arson. Only the prosecutor gets to make that official charge.”
“I know.” Noah gave him a side-eye. “But just ‘suspicious,’ huh?”
The younger man stopped and stared at the pile of soggy wood, scattered roof tiles and insulation sludge that had once been a building. After hours of work, no visible curls of smoldering threat remained. When Noah turned back, he raised an eyebrow, the lines of ash creasing on his forehead. Maybe the probie wasn’t so green, after all.
“For now,” Mick said, anyway.
Yellow crime-scene tape flapped where firefighters had stretched it around trees and orange caution cones to mark the scene’s perimeter. Investigators would continue to comb through the debris for several hours this morning, but there was no doubt that this fire had been intentionally set. Not first-degree arson since that charge was reserved for incidents where multi-unit buildings or mines were the targets or those resulting in physical injuries, but Michigan’s penal code offered four more degrees. One of them surely would fit this situation.
Still, something about this scene bothered him. Reports from recent fires had shown different fuels, ignition sites and burn patterns, but this one was even more of an outlier. Comically amateurish, in fact. The suspects had left the can of gasoline, used as the accelerant, in the middle of the living room floor like a bull’s-eye. Hopefully, with fingerprints all over it.
“Copycats,” he breathed the word, the possibility of it pressing down on his neck and making it ache even more. Mick slid a glance to Noah, who was looking at something on the phone he should have left on the rig and didn’t appear to have heard him. But the thought of imitators continued to eat at him. If the original fires had been the work of a serial arsonist, then copycats would make the crimes more difficult to unravel. And nearly impossible to stop.
After tucking his phone away, Noah paused again to stare over at what was left of the building. He spun to point to a site where two pickups had been parked earlier.
“Didn’t pull much of an audience for our fine work today. Usually I get assigned to take photos of the crowd in case the suspect is there, admiring his handiwork, but Golden told me not to bother,” Noah said, indicating Captain Joe Golden, who’d been command on the scene.
“Since we’ve already interviewed both of them, I’d say he made the right call,” Mick said. One of the farmers had even called in the fire.
“I don’t recall any of the other incidents as involving houses,” Noah said. “Weren’t they all barns or outbuildings?”
That was another thing that had bugged Mick. Though vacant at least a few years, this had been someone’shome, maybe lost to foreclosure. A place where report cards were celebrated or feared. Where holidays and births and deaths were nailed into the frame as surely as baseboards and sheets of drywall.
Where someone like Rachel Hoffman could have lived with her two little girls.
He shivered again and tried to blink away a picture his mind had conjured, its potential melding with true images from his too recent past. Why was he thinking about her in that context? Rachel might have been taking a risk by asking too many questions, but it was a leap for him to imagine her being a victim in another fire.
“You guys want to hang out here all day, or are you going to get back on the truck?”
Mick jerked at the voice coming from off to his left and turned to identify it. Backlit by one of the LED scene lights, Joe Golden approached, swiping a sleeve over the red ring of hair that lingered on his pale, bald head. Senior firefighter Rodney Sampson caught up with them and then slowed to wipe a streak of sweat dripping down his ruddy cheek.
