Page 28 of Sizzle
Damn it, despite how hard Sam’s gut was screaming, she wasn’t wrong. After one last look at the storage room, he followed Lucy into the hallway. He counted off his steps—a habit that would never lose its foothold, even if he lived to be ninety—his boots skidding to a halt at the doorway to the next storage room. The damage in here was far more extensive, and he stepped over the threshold, carefully scanning the room in front of him from left to right, then back again as his heart began to beat faster.
Lucy mirrored his movements before taking a handful of cautious strides toward the center of the room. The steel framework on the shelving unit—this one larger than the one in the room they’d just been in—was still standing, although the wooden slats had all burned away. A few charred boards littered the ash-streaked floor, but if anything had been on the shelves, it was long gone. Scorched debris that looked like the remains of more wooden pallets lay strewn on the concrete near the wall that adjoined with the room they’d already checked. They might’ve been stacked at one point, but they were practically unrecognizable now, burned and broken from having fed the flames that had consumed nearly everything in the room.
“This room was almost fully involved when we did search and rescue,” Sam said, digging through his fast-moving thoughts to pull up the memory. The window had been blocked by a wall of flames. Getting close enough to use it as an exit point, especially with parts of the ceiling beginning to crash down around them, had been impossible, otherwise they’d have done it.
Lucy nodded. “The fire must have traveled in here from either that wall or the ceiling. Maybe both.”
If it was the ceiling, that tracked with the fire potentially starting on the second floor. “It’s hard to tell what direction the fire took with everything torched like this. But the flames were definitely moving fast from both the adjoining wall and the ceiling when we searched in here.”
“They were,” she said, although she seemed almost lost in thought as she stared at the damage. “Almost like…”
She stopped, her chin snapping up. But nope. No. No way was Sam lettingthatgo.
“Like what?”
“Nothing.” Lucy’s head shake was immediate. “I was just thinking out loud. That’s all.”
“Okay,” he said, prompting her with his tone, and she huffed out a breath.
But still, she answered. “I know this sounds really far-fetched, and I’m not saying I think it’s necessarily true. I certainly can’t back it up with anything we’ve seen so far. But when we were doing search and rescue, especially in this room, I remember thinking that the fire wasn’t behaving normally. That it was moving like…I don’t know. Almost like it had been fed.”
“Yes!” Sam said, his pulse knocking faster in his throat. “Holy shit, that’sexactlywhat it looked like.”
Lucy stared at him, her brown eyes wide in the sunlight that made it past the smoke-smudged window. “But that’s crazy. There’s no sign of an accelerant.”
“There’s no sign of anything. At least, not outwardly,” he said. “Everything in here burned to the ground, then got drowned in thousands of gallons of water. Plus, five days have passed.”
“That would mask the sight and smell of most commonly used accelerants,” Lucy mused. “The only way to prove if one is present at this point would be to send samples to the lab for gas chromatography. But this warehouse is huge. We’d have to either test a billion samples or hope like hell we picked the right ones. Even then, we could find nothing.”
“Or we could find exactly what the RFD needs to call this arson.” For Chrissake, the proof could be right here in this room with them.
Not that Lucy was going to stop playing Devil’s Advocate now. “Okay, but those tests are expensive, not to mention the time and assets that would be required to run enough of them to cover a warehouse this size. The fire could’ve been moving that fast simply because there were a lot of things in its path to burn. We’d have to give the department a more compelling reason to test a large number of samples than ‘we just have a hunch,’ don’t you think?”
It was a challenge if he’d ever heard one. “By all means. Let’s keep looking, then.”
After a few more pictures taken with Lucy’s phone, they moved to the next room. It was in much the same shape as the one before it, with large amounts of widespread damage and not a hell of a lot left other than ash. The room after that was the one where he’d seen the person standing in the window, and something spun in his mind, just out of reach.
Sam looked at the window, now partially blocked by the ceiling beam that had caused him to inadvertently tug Lucy to the ground when it had fallen. “You know”—he paused in an effort to organize his thoughts, which were currently moving through his skull like a swarm of bees—“the more I think about it, the more I’m sure that whoever was in here wasn’t trapped at all.”
“Are you also sure that you’re not just looking to strengthen your whole arson argument?” Lucy asked, raising one dark brow.
“Those two things don’t have to be mutually exclusive,” he said, and she held up her hands as if to sayfair enough. “But hear me out. When you and I were at the hydrant, the fire on this side of the building hadn’t blocked the window or the door yet. I had a clear line of sight on whoever was in here, and they obviously got through the door to this room before we made it to them.”
She considered this, nodding after a beat. “Fair enough. Logic dictates that if the person had been trapped, or even looking for the fastest exit, they’d have tried to signal for help through the window. We had to have been just as visible to them as they were to you, and if they were trapped, the window would’ve been their only escape route. But maybe whoever it was ran because they thought they’d get in trouble for being in the warehouse in the first place. Just because they bolted doesn’t make them an arsonist.”
A fact he hadn’t been able to refute—yet. But he could argue it. “But it doesn’t exclude the possibility, either. For the sake of argument, let’s say he set the fire on purpose.”
“He,” Lucy repeated, and Sam lifted one shoulder in a shrug.
“Depending on the study, the ratio of male arsonists to female arsonists ranges from 5:1 to 10:1.” Oh, the things that did manage to get stuck in his brain. “So, yep. I’m going with ‘he’, strictly as a probability thing. Anyway, he arranges these pallets and any other debris left behind in the warehouse so it’ll burn fast and spread faster, right? He probably starts the fire on the second floor, knowing the flames will travel upward to the third floor really quickly, but also—”
“That it would start taking out the first-floor ceiling, making that burn faster, too.” Lucy’s eyes went wide as she connected the dots.
“Exactly.” Sam could picture it in his head, the images flashing faster, like an old-fashioned movie reel rolling out of control. “The second floor fire is close to the stairs, so he knew those would become unstable fast enough. Add in accelerant—”
“Which we can’t prove we have—”
“Yet,”he said, “and it all moves even faster, which would explain what you and I saw.”