“You were there when Mike Randall was arrested, weren’t you?” Monica’s smooth voice flowed into the room.
“Yeah, but so were at least three other cops!”
“A young girl died in the fire he set, didn’t she?”
“Yes.”
“Did you think it was fair that her mother had to bury her only daughter, while Mike Randall didn’t even spend one single day in a prison cell?”
Silence.
“Detective Malone?” She pressed with that light southern drawl. “Did you think it was fair—”
“Fuck, no! But that dick in the DA’s office made a deal, and I had to be the one to tell Candace that the little prick who killed her girl was gettin’ therapy while Tonya Kelly was getting a hole in the f**king ground.”
“What kind of punishment did you think Mike Randall should have gotten?”
“How do I know?” He shook his head. “I’m not the damn judge.”
“And what if you were?” Her voice dropped. “What if you had the power to decide Randall’s fate? What would you have done?”
“Locked him in a damn cage!”
“For how long? When he got out…” She shrugged. “He just would have started the fires again. It was a compulsion for him.” Monica paused and stared at the detective. “So how do you stop someone like that?”
“Only a bullet can stop some of the killers out there. Otherwise, they just keep right on hurting people.”
“A bullet… or fire. Maybe that fire he loved so much was the perfect way to kill him.”
Malone’s fingers locked around the table and his knuckles whitened. “Maybe it was.”
Well, well… and just maybe that cop was getting close to a confession.
“No! No, let me go!” As she screamed, a woman with long red hair struggled against the firefighter who held her in his grip. Darkness threatened in the sky, pushing the sun away, even as the flames from the two-story house on Delaney Boulevard jumped higher.
A baby cried, the sound rising to a desperate wail, and Kenton saw the infant clutched tightly in the woman’s arms.
“Ma’am, let us check you out. Let us check the baby—”
“Brian is in there! I just wanted to get the baby out, but I’m goin’ back for my son! I’m goin’ back—”
“They never understand,” Garrison muttered, coming to Kenton’s side and keeping his voice low. “There’s no time for a second trip. You go back in when the fire’s spread so fast, you’re DRT.”
DRT. Dead right there.
“Brian!” She fell to her knees, screaming his name.
Two firefighters ran from the front of the house.
She jerked forward and hope lit her face, but their arms were empty.
“No!”
The flames shot higher.
It hurt to look at her and see that much pain and fear.
An EMT managed to pry the baby out of her hands. But then she tried to run again, heading right back for that burning house. The two firefighters who’d just come out caught her and dragged her back even as she begged for her son.
“Please, let me go back in, let me find him, let me—Brian!”
“Where’s Lora?” Kenton asked, voice rough, but he knew. Of course, he knew where she’d be. The two uniforms who’d been on guard duty for her stood to the side and watched the flames.
Garrison lifted his radio as he kept his stare on the fire. “That’s spreading too fast.” He pressed the button on the side of his radio. “If they don’t find him…”
“Where’s Lora?” Fear knifed through Kenton’s gut.
“Brian!” the mother screamed.
“Leading the team,” was Garrison’s curt reply. He glanced at Kenton. “She won’t leave kids behind.”
But at what price? What if the fire was too strong? What if—
“We don’t give up until hope is damn well gone,” Garrison barked.
Kenton could feel the heat from the fire blowing against his skin. So hot. He glanced toward the mother and found her sobbing on the ground.
“Brian!”
“Randall was sick,” Malone said as he leaned back in his chair and licked his lips. “That guy—he’d been in and out of psych wards for years. He caught his house on fire for the first time when he was eight. Eight.”
“And when he set the fire that killed Tonya Kelly, he was only sixteen.” Monica didn’t glance down at the paperwork before her. No need. She knew all the details. She made a point of always knowing. “Randall was just a kid, too. At least that’s what the courts thought. That’s why he didn’t get hard time.”
“Mike Randall wasn’t gonna stop.” His eyes slit at the corners. “We all knew it. The damn DA knew it. The guy was sick. If he hadn’t offed himself, he would have taken out someone else, another innocent—”
“Like his mother?”
But he shook his head, just as she knew he would. “That woman wasn’t innocent. Hell, she made Randall into the monster he was.”
Something nagged in her mind. Teasing, but just out of reach.
“She burned him when he was a kid. Burned him. I saw the doctor’s reports. The woman took cigarettes to him when he was six years old. She f**ked him up, made him think the fire was something good.”
And not death. Monica cleared her throat. “So she was being judged, too?”
“I didn’t do anything to them. Not to either of them.”
She was starting to believe him. The guy wouldn’t crack. “Tell me, Detective Malone, have you ever been in a fire?”
“What?” He shook his head. “No, no, and I sure don’t want to be in one. I’m not one of the firefighters, lady. I don’t run into the fires.”
Click.
But she had to be sure. “I’m going to send in a male agent. I want you to submit to a physical examination.”
“What? You’re shitting me, right?”
“Prove to me that you don’t have a burn scar on you, and you can walk out of this office.”
But it’s not all pain, is it? When the fire lances your flesh…
When Phoenix had said that, he’d been talking from personal experience. She knew it. She’d heard the truth of those words in his voice.
The way he spoke of the fire—he personified it, called it a lover…
“That’s all it’ll take?” Malone shoved to his feet. In an instant, he’d wrenched off his shirt and tossed it to the floor. “Special Agent, look your fill.”