Though, frankly, he was worried about the human variety more than the animals.
They weren’t the only people to come this way.
Noah automatically cataloged details with the precision that had earned him accolades across the globe. Broken branches. Disturbed ground. Signs of recent vehicle activity where there shouldn’t be any.
Someone had definitely been out here. Recently.
The first hints of smoke teased his nose—just a whisper, but enough to set off warning bells. It was not the friendly kind of smoke that meant someone had a campfire going. This smelled like burning plastic and charred wood, a toxic, acrid aroma of an unnatural, destructive fire.
Dancer’s urgent bark confirmed he’d scented it too.
“You smell that?” Sabrina was already moving faster, Ripley tight on her heels.
“Yeah.” Noah’s pulse revved into overdrive even as his brain snapped into journalist mode.
Remote location. Dawn timing. A whiff of accelerant under the smoke.
Someone did not want their fire discovered until it was too late.
What had Jacob’s cryptic text gotten them into? Noah resisted the urge to shuffle Sabrina behind him, mostly because it would be hard to walk and shield her at the same time, but also because she’d probably just hustle around him again.
Yeah, he knew she could take care of herself. But still. He liked her in one piece and he didnotlike the way this whole scenario sat in his craw.
“You know what this reminds me of?” he muttered as they pushed deeper into the scrubby vegetation after the dogs. “That time in Yemen when my local contact insisted we follow his ‘reliable source’ into questionable territory.”
“Do I want to know how that ended?”
“Probably not.”
The dogs led them around a white rock ledge big enough to obscure their view, and there it was—a ramshackle cabin that might have been someone’s hunting getaway once upon a time. Now it blazed against the predawn sky like an angry beacon.
Sabrina already had her radio in her hand, bless her.
“Dispatch, Officer West, over.” Sabrina’s voice carried an edge of steel. “I have a visual on a structure fire in sector seven, coordinates—” She rattled off numbers. “Request immediate relay to local emergency services, over.”
As she clicked off, she glanced at him.
“How long?” Noah asked.
“All the way out here? Probably fifteen minutes.”
Okay. Good. That was all they could do for now.
Dancer’s barking shifted into that particular tone that meant only one thing. The sound hit Noah’s bloodstream like ice water.
“What?” Sabrina’s gaze flitted between him and the dog. “Why does your face look like that?”
“Dancer. He only barks like that when he scents a human,” he said, his throat drier than if he’d gargled with a handful of the broken rocks underfoot.
“Friend or foe?” she murmured, her expression suddenly wary. “You think the fire bug might still be around here? Or are we dealing with something more sinister?”
He scrubbed at his face, calling Dancer back to heel. Honestly, he hadn’t gotten that far, but he wasn’t sacrificing his dog to a criminal’s itchy trigger finger if she was right. “Getting caught by the arsonist feels pretty high on the sinister scale. I was more worried about finding another Annie Ross.”
“We don’t have a choice. We have to see what he’s indicating.”
Noah nodded, clenching both hands into fists, because the desire to pick up Sabrina and forcibly take her back to her truck had just gotten worse, not better.
Sabrina fell into step beside him as they followed Dancer’s lead, Ripley matching the lab’s focused intensity, clearly wanting in on the action.
