ONE
Police Chief Truman Daly slammed the door of his Tahoe and raised a hand to protect his face from the heat of the fire. He took a half step back, bumping into his vehicle. Flames had engulfed the old barn and were stretched high against the night’s black sky.
A total loss.
He’d believed he’d parked a safe distance from the fire, but the toasting of his cheeks caused second thoughts.
He pulled down on the brim of his cowboy hat to cover his face, ignored the flooding memories of a past deadly fire, and jogged toward the two Deschutes County sheriff patrol vehicles that’d arrived before him. The two deputies stood behind their cars, talking on their radios, eyeing the towering flames.
There was nothing they could do. A faint siren sounded in the distance, but Truman knew the fire department was too late. Its goal would be to keep the fire from spreading to the woods and neighboring ranches.
“Hey, Chief,” one of the deputies shouted over the roar of the fire as he approached.
Truman recognized the older deputy. Ralph something. He didn’t know the other one.
“Did you see anyone here?” Truman asked, knowing there was no way to check inside the barn.
“No one,” said Ralph. “We’ve been here fifteen seconds, and there was no chance in hell we’d try to look inside.” The young deputy next to him nodded emphatically.
“Let’s walk the perimeter,” said Truman.
“You go around to the right, and we’ll head left,” suggested Ralph.
Truman nodded and headed around toward the back of the burning barn, putting plenty of space between himself and the hot inferno and welcoming the crisp November air. The fire has gotten bigger in the few seconds I’ve been here. In the last two weeks, three other fires had popped up around his small town of Eagle’s Nest in Central Oregon. He and the fire department hadn’t caught the serial arsonist, and none of the previous arsons had been on the scale of this one. The first had been an abandoned car. Then someone’s trash. The last had been a small shed.
He’s escalating.
Sweat ran down his back, and it wasn’t solely from the fire. I hate fires. He jogged through the sagebrush and rocks, the ground well lit as he scanned for any signs of victims or a possible fire starter. Ponderosa pines towered about fifty yards away, and Truman was thankful to see the immediate area around the barn was clear of fuel for the fire. At one time there’d been a few small holding pens, but nearly all the fence rails had collapsed and rotted away. He doubted the old barn had been used in the last decade.
This fourth fire was several miles outside his city’s limits, but as soon as he’d received word about it, he’d rolled out of bed and gotten dressed. The arsonist had pissed him off, and Truman now took every fire personally. Truman could imagine the asshole’s glee as he sent police and fire crews scrambling to put out his handiwork.
One of these times, he’s going to hurt someone.
The fire engine sirens grew louder, and two gunshots cracked over the sounds of the flames.
Truman dropped to his stomach and rolled behind a rock, his weapon in hand. Who’s shooting? He froze and listened, trying to hear past the roar in his ears.
Two more shots.
Was that a scream?
His heart pounding, he called 911, reported shots fired, and advised the dispatcher to immediately let the approaching fire trucks know. He ended the call and slowly moved out of his hiding place behind the rock, his eyes peeled for the shooter. Who fired?
Eagle’s Nest officers had never found anyone at the scene of the previous fires. Why is this time different?
Truman resumed his circular path around the barn, his weapon ready, his focus on the shadows of the terrain beyond the barn. The light cast by the flames extended several yards into the dark, but beyond that the landscape was pitch-black. Anyone could be lurking just out of sight. He widened his circle to use the shadows for cover.
His shirt soaked with sweat and his senses on high alert, he rounded the back side of the barn and spotted two figures on the ground. Motionless.
In the flickering light, he recognized the Deschutes County uniforms.
Please, dear Lord, no.
He sank deeper into the dark and strained his vision, searching everywhere for the shooter. The flames created moving shadows in every direction, and his gaze shot from false movement to false shadow. He pushed his anxiety away, knowing he needed to check the officers even through it would expose him.
“Fuck it.” He dashed across the cleared area, feeling the heat singe his shirt, and landed on his knees next to the closest body. He shook Ralph’s shoulder, shouted, and then felt for a pulse in his neck. The officer had been shot in the head, and Truman averted his gaze after one horrified glance at the gaping exit wound in his cheek.
I shouldn’t see teeth.
He couldn’t find a pulse.
Staying low, he scrambled to the next officer. Blood flowed freely from the young deputy’s neck, and his frantic gaze met Truman’s. His eyes were wide, his mouth silently opening and closing in frantic motions, but his arms and legs held still. Only the deputy’s eyes could communicate, and he was clearly terrified.
Spinal injury?
He knows it’s bad.
Truman ripped off his coat and pressed it against the wound in the deputy’s neck. The fire trucks with their big tanks made their way down the long, rutted road to the barn, and Truman checked his surroundings again for the shooter.
I’m a sitting duck.
He wouldn’t leave the deputy alone. He looked the man directly in the eyes. “You’re going to be fine. Help just got here.”
The man blinked at him, holding his gaze and gasping for breath. Truman spotted his name badge on his coat. “Hold on, Deputy Sanderson. You’ve got this.”
The man’s lips moved, and Truman leaned closer, but no sound came from Sanderson’s mouth. Truman forced a reassuring smile, ignoring the growing heat on his back. “You’ll be okay.” He looked up, thankful to see two firemen approach with caution, giving the fire a wide berth and carefully scanning the area.
They got word about the shooter.
A huge burst of air punched him in the back, lifting and hurling him past Deputy Sanderson. He hit the ground face-first, the force knocking away his breath and grinding gravel into his cheek and lips. The sound of the explosion reached him and blew away his hearing for five seconds. He lay in the dirt, his ears ringing as he fought to get his bearings, and an old terror rocketed up from the depths of his subconscious. He battled it down and took mental inventory of his body, spitting the grit out of his mouth.
I’m alive.
Sanderson.
He pushed up to his hands and shaking knees and spun around to look at the injured man he’d flown over.
Vacant eyes stared past him. The mouth had stilled.
“Noooo!” Truman lunged and shook the deputy, but the life he’d seen moments before was gone.
The fire continued to roar.
The morning after the fire, Special Agent Mercy Kilpatrick stared at the smoking pile of burned boards. The old barn hadn’t had a chance. It’d been ancient, brittle, and dry when she was a child, so no doubt now, two decades later, it’d gone up in flames as if it’d been soaked in gasoline.
A childhood girlfriend had once lived on the farm, and Mercy had spent several hours rooting around in the barn and surrounding grounds, searching for small animals and pretending the barn was their castle. After her friend had moved, Mercy hadn’t seen it again until today.
Now she was an FBI agent assigned to investigate the murder of law enforcement officers. A very angry FBI agent. Cold-blooded murder of her fellow officers in blue did that to her. And to every other person in law enforcement.
She wished she could return to playing princess.
Was the fire set to draw the deputies out here on purpose?
She didn’t like to think such a thing could happen in her community.
Truman was nearly killed.
She shuddered and put the image out of her thoughts.
Our relationship could have abruptly ended after only two months.
She still hadn’t seen Truman. She’d talked briefly with him on the phone, relieved to hear his voice, but he’d been pulled in a dozen directions since he arrived at the fire at midnight. Thankfully he’d suffered only some minor burns. Last night she’d flown into the Portland airport at ten o’clock after two weeks of special training at Quantico. Not wanting to drive home to Bend in the middle of the night after flying all day, she’d slept in her Portland condo, which had been on the market for nearly a month without a single offer.
Seller’s market, my ass.
The 3:00 a.m. phone call from Truman had immediately gotten her up and on the road for the three-hour trip home to Central Oregon, the news of the fire, shootings, and explosions driving all sleep from her brain. By the time she’d arrived at her apartment, her boss from the small FBI office in Bend had called.
The two murdered county deputies were now her priority.
As she surveyed the scorched disaster, a frosty breeze shot down the neck of her heavy coat. Thanksgiving was rapidly approaching, and hints of winter had been in the Central Oregon air for several weeks. She’d spent the first eighteen years of her life in the tiny community of Eagle’s Nest, but had never returned until she’d been assigned temporary duty in the Bend office for a domestic terrorism case and discovered she’d missed living on the east side of the Cascade mountain range. Less than two months ago, she’d decided to move from wet Portland to the high desert of Bend.
Life in Central Oregon was different from life in Portland. The air smelled cleaner, the snowy mountain peaks were more plentiful, and traffic was a hundred times lighter, although the locals might disagree. Everything moved slower over here. The people were an eclectic mix of families, retirees, ranchers, farmers, cowboys, millennials, and business professionals. Farther out from the main city of Bend, the population drastically thinned and trended toward ranchers and farmers.
Some people moved to Central Oregon to leave all society behind. If you weren’t picky about the location, a parcel of remote land could be purchased for a very reasonable price. Some wanted to live on their own terms without relying on the government for their safety or food supply. Sometimes they were called preppers; other times they were called unpleasant names. Mercy had grown up in such a family. Her parents had built a self-sufficient home and lifestyle and embraced the prepper label. It’d been a good, down-to-earth life until she turned eighteen.
After Mercy left Eagle’s Nest, she discovered she couldn’t fully cut herself off from the prepper lifestyle, so she’d created a balance to ease her mind. While she’d lived and worked in Portland, she’d maintained a remote secret getaway, spending weekends stocking and preparing her Central Oregon cabin. If disaster struck, she was prepared.
She was always prepared.
But no one needed to know that. Only Truman and some of her family knew she slaved like a madwoman in her spare time to ease her worry about a possible future disaster. Her new coworkers and even her closest workmate, Eddie, had no idea that she hid what she thought of as her “secret obsession.”
It was her business. People were judgmental. She’d seen it all her life and didn’t want that judgment aimed at her.
Plus she couldn’t help her entire office if disaster struck and they turned to her because they knew of her resources. She believed in keeping her “wealth” hidden from onlookers. Her hard work was for herself and her family.
She dug the toe of her boot into the wet ground, the area soaked with the thousands of gallons of water trucked in by the fire department. This rural area didn’t have fire hydrants every hundred yards, and thankfully, the fire hadn’t spread beyond the barn. Pines still stood proudly beyond the smoking pile of rubble. The usually brown ground was black and gray, from the burning of low brush and a thick coating of soot and ash.
She watched the county evidence recovery team crawl through the barn’s remains and carefully search a large perimeter under the watchful eye of the fire marshal. Earlier they’d recovered four rifle casings that Mercy’s FBI supervisor, Jeff Garrison, had immediately sent to the FBI laboratory instead of the backed-up local labs.
Mercy had never worked a case involving a fire investigation, and she felt out of her element. Truman had been working several arsons around Eagle’s Nest, the first of which had occurred just before she went back east for training. Someone had set fire to an ancient abandoned Oldsmobile at the end of Robinson Street. Before the fire, nearby residents hadn’t called to have it towed away because they’d assumed someone would eventually come back for it.
Truman had laughed as he repeated the words of an older witness to Mercy. “Hate to mess with someone’s car. That’s their transportation . . . maybe their livelihood . . . don’t want someone getting inconvenienced because I made a phone call to a tow company.”
The car had been sitting there for six months.
People had more patience on this side of the mountain range.
Truman had chalked up the car fire to bored teenagers. But then it’d happened two more times while Mercy was training back east. The tension in Truman’s voice had increased during their nightly phone calls. The second fire had been in a dumpster, and then the arsonist had burned a shed stocked with prepping supplies.
Mercy’s heart had grieved when she’d heard about the supplies. The shed had belonged to a young family who’d worked hard to set aside food and supplies for their future. Mercy understood how much work and sacrifice went into being prepared. The thought of a fire destroying her years of storage work had made her stomach churn uncomfortably. Now the family was struggling to feel safe in their home and wondered if they’d been purposefully targeted.
“The first two fires were set to things people had abandoned,” Truman had told her. “But this third fire targeted the hard work of a family. I hope this isn’t the start of a new trend.” All his spare time during the last two weeks had been focused on the arson cases.
No one had expected the arsonist to suddenly commit murder along with his fourth fire. Now everything had changed.
Mercy stared at the dirt where the deputies’ bodies had lain, dark stains still soaking the ground. Had the arsonist planned to shoot whoever arrived? Or was he simply watching the flames and decided to shoot on a whim?
One shot is a whim. Four focused shots are planned.
Each of his bullets had found its mark.
She swallowed hard and fought back another wave of boiling anger. Both deputies had families. Deputy Sanderson’s baby was three months old.
His poor wife. A baby who’ll never know its father.
She watched the fire marshal bend over the shoulder of one of the evidence techs, pointing at something in the pile of wooden debris. The wood all looked the same to Mercy. Wet and burned.
“I wish I understood exactly what he sees,” said Special Agent Eddie Peterson. She hadn’t noticed him stop beside her, and the presence of her favorite agent immediately boosted her mood. Eddie had applied for the other open position with the Bend FBI office, surprising everyone but the office’s intelligence analyst, Darby Cowen.
“I knew Eddie liked it here,” Darby had told Mercy confidently. “I saw his eyes light up the first time he went fly-fishing out on the river and heard it in his voice when he talked about the skiing at Mount Bachelor. This area casts a spell over nature lovers. Even when they don’t realize they’re nature lovers.”
Eddie was the last person Mercy would have identified as a nature lover. He was a city boy who paid a little too much attention to how he dressed and fixed his hair. But since he’d moved to Bend, she’d seen a side of him that appreciated the beauty of the area, and she was delighted he’d moved. To her he was a piece of Portland in Central Oregon. A small link to the good memories from the bigger city. He’d jokingly suggested they rent an apartment together, but Mercy needed her own place. She had a teenage niece to take care of.
Kaylie was seventeen and in her senior year of high school. She’d been abandoned by her mother when she was one, and her father had died recently. His dying wish had been for Mercy to finish raising his daughter. Mercy had reluctantly accepted, feeling as if she’d been thrust into a foreign world. Teenage angst, girlfriend drama, Internet predators, energy drinks, and celebrity crushes. Mercy’s teenage years had involved ranch work and hand-me-downs.
“Do we know where the shooter was standing when he shot the officers?” Eddie asked her. His eyes were hard, his usual cheery persona buried under the rage directed at their murderer.
“They found the rifle casings over there.” Mercy pointed at a group of pines far to the left of the barn.
“Holy crap. Someone was a good shot.” Eddie ran a hand through his hair. “I don’t like the thought of that at all,” he muttered.
“No one does,” said Mercy. “I could never make a shot like that. And I’m pretty good.”
“You’re much better than me,” Eddie admitted.
“I was raised around guns.” Mercy had heard the same compliment from several agents she worked with. Firing their weapons wasn’t their favorite thing. Most agents spent a lot of time sitting at a desk.
“Everyone out here was raised around guns,” stated Eddie with a dour look, and Mercy wondered if he was second-guessing his decision to transfer to the area. The agent was her close friend, but he often made snap decisions. His grumpiness made her want to pat him on the head and hand him a cappuccino with extra foam.
“But why shoot people who are coming to help with the fire?” Mercy said softly.
“That’s what I don’t understand,” agreed Eddie, turning his focus back to the hot pile of burned wood. “Some of the wood looks like alligator skin,” he observed. “I think I read that if those marks are large and shiny, it means an ignitable liquid was used.”
“Untrue,” said the fire marshal as he joined the two agents. “That’s often repeated as a fact, but there’s no significance to the appearance of the alligatoring.” He shook hands with both agents as they introduced themselves. Bill Trek was a short man, maybe five foot six, but he was broad in the chest and spoke with a voice that sounded as if he’d smoked a thousand cigarettes. Or had been exposed to a thousand fires. His eyes were a clear blue, and he had a dusting of gray hair above his ears. Truman had told Mercy that Bill had been working fires for over forty years.
She liked him immediately. “What are your first impressions?” she asked.
“It was a hot one,” he said with a half smile. “And I could smell the gasoline the minute I opened my truck door.”
She and Eddie both sniffed the air. Mercy couldn’t smell it.
“So definitely arson,” said Eddie.
“Absolutely. Someone used a heck of a lot of gasoline. I can tell they soaked several areas of the barn, and I’ve barely started investigating.”
“Did you find what caused the explosion?” Eddie asked.
“I can see some remains of a propane tank. It’s buried under the debris, but that matches up with the description of the explosion.” The investigator looked regretfully at the pile of wood. “I was told the owner doesn’t have previous pictures. I guess I’ll never know what the barn looked like before.”
Mercy looked past the smoking heap, focusing on the image in her brain. “It was two stories. The second level was a loft with a low ceiling. A man wouldn’t be able to stand up straight except in the center at the peak of the roof. It had a huge opening on the second level directly over the front double doors. And double doors in the back.”
Bill narrowed his eyes at her. “Been here, have ya?”
“I played in it as a kid when someone else owned it.” She paused. “Truman—the police chief—said the entire structure was on fire when he arrived.” She ignored Eddie’s raised eyebrow as she fumbled her words. “Do you know how long it would take to get to that point from when the fire was started?”
Bill stroked his chin, considering her question. “A lot of factors would affect that. Right now I can’t even guess. Why do you want to know?”
“I’m wondering about the anonymous phone call that reported the fire,” Mercy explained. “It was called in from a gas station pay phone five miles away. Did a passerby report it or did the arsonist set the fire and wait to see that it’d caught sufficiently before he called it in? Then did he come back and wait for the officers to arrive? I’m just thinking out loud here, but he could have just watched it burn, never caring whether anyone showed up or not.”
“Firebugs like to watch the reaction of the responders,” Bill stated. “I’ve met enough of them over the years. They can seem like perfectly ordinary folks, but start them talking about fires and they get a weird look in their eye . . . like they just popped a happy pill.”
“Did you go to the other arsons that happened in Eagle’s Nest recently?” Mercy asked.
“I briefly visited the burned-up shed.” Bill shook his head and clucked his tongue in sympathy. “I felt bad for that couple, but they’re young and they’ll soon rebuild what they lost. Wish they had some insurance, though. I saw the pictures of the burned Oldsmobile and the dumpster fire. My first thought was kids, but you never know.” He turned and looked back at the smoking pile. “This was different,” he said softly. “I suspect we’ll find that setting the fire was only part of his intention.”