Fanning The Fire Marshal's Flame

Expert Opinion

She stood corrected. Her day was officially s**t. It hadn’t mattered their experiments had been tested over five states. They had fallen under the nose of the Fire Marshals office and the person they assigned to check out if there were truly a link or just close or copycats was Diarmid Clooney. He had a ninety-eight percent success rate in catching his arsonists. If he solved even one of these cases, she was going away for a long time and Bellona could potentially be compromised, though she’d never implicate them. She would take all the blame herself before letting anyone interrupt the actions of her organization.

She kept her face neutral the way any highly trained Bellona agent would do and continued flipping through the chemical lab reports. His team were good, but they were looking at the fires and explosions the way an arsonist would versus the way a scientist would. All of her fires were set by a woman who was a chemical expert first and an arsonist second.

Lita loved fire. As a little girl she had dreamed more than once she was a dragon who could command it at will. As a teenager, she had spent far too much time watching her father’s firepit in the back yard wishing it would be higher or wider. She had played with more matches and lighters than she had barbies. Her favorite present her father ever bought her was when she was thirteen when he gave her a Bunsen burner. She could light and relight that thing with glee for hours.

But, as much as she loved fire, she loved chemical reactions even more. The way two completely different substances collided and reacted made her skin tingle with excitement. The more unstable the chemical the more she liked to toy with it, find a way to make it stable and then set it off.

Yet, it was even more thrilling if the collision resulted in an explosion or better yet, fire and an explosion. Just thinking of a chemical caused fire made her thighs burn.

She had known at fifteen she had a problem when, while using her Bunsen burner in the lab her father had built for her in the basement, she had created a small, controlled fiery explosion and her first reaction was she needed to masturbate. Of all the weird reactions to the results of her experiment, an o****m hadn’t been in her checklist of possible outcomes. She had been compelled so strongly she couldn’t control herself and then after had cried for hours knowing she was a freak of nature. She had spent days and weeks avoiding her lab out of guilt and shame.

Now, she accepted who she was and what her medical condition and response entailed. She knew how to control it and how to deal with it.

“What do you think?” Diarmid’s voice cut into her thoughts.

She looked up with a sigh and shook her head, “I’m not sure what to think. The chemical compounds listed are so fractional, realistically, they could be anything within the vicinity of the fire.” She pointed to a specific line, “this is commonly emitted from melting certain forms of plastics. You could create this melting any household plastic items. Think kids’ toys, plastic furniture like a lawn chair or,” she pointed to the laundry basket sitting at the bottom of the stairs, “something as common as a laundry basket.”

“They could be carrying the incendiary device in with a laundry basket or anything plastic.” He hypothesised as he stared hard at the way her finger trailed the lines.

“Perhaps, but not necessarily,” she looked to another line, “and this line is fairly common for any softwood.”

“Softwood?”

“Yeah. I would think pine maybe and only because I read an article recently in a science journal on the effects of people burning their Christmas trees and its impact on pollution versus using those same trees and donating them to local zoos or animal shelters as bedding. I was more interested in the findings, but I remember the chemical composition of the fir tree being very similar to this.” In truth, she had been mostly interested in the findings on the burning, but he didn’t need to know.

“Why softwood?” he muttered.

“We’re in North America? All of our houses are built with pine or cedar in them, depending on what the lumberyard treat their products with. Even subfloor is made of pine or a form of MDF.”

He pulled a face, “No, I get it. I just wish it were anything other than a softwood. Like if it had been teak in every single fire then I could say it’s a clue, but this is so damn common.”

“Yup.” She ran her fingers along the seven reports, “every one of these reports though are different. I can see where you might think they are similar, but the composition percentages vary so differently from one to the next not one single one of these are identical and frankly from my perspective different enough, I would opine from a scientific perspective we can’t conclusively consider them from the same source. Unless you can find an uncommon single compound, which shows up in every fire, it’s really just your gut telling you they’re linked.”

“It’s the burn patterns,” he offered his explanation. “The way the burn patterns for the first six presented, it was almost as if a micro-explosion took place but there was nothing, no evidence of any device anywhere in the ruins.”

“I’m not seeing this in the first six.” She looked back to the photos. “First five maybe but completely different the other two.”

“There’s one other report I didn’t slide along. There are eight fires as of now I’m looking at in this particular case.”

“What’s the eighth one?” She leaned back surprised he’d kept one away from her, “maybe there is an element in the report there I can pinpoint.”

He leaned into his leather case and pulled it out. “I was on the fence to show you.”

She gave a hiss of annoyance at him when she noted the date of the fire as the folder title and nodded, “you’re right. I don’t want to see this one.” She gave an impatient grunt when he held it out.

“I won’t force you to look at it. I don’t want to dredge up any more of your past. We’re fairly sure this was ground zero though.”

He was dancing on her last nerve now, “just the chemical analysis. Nothing else. Don’t open the entire file to me, please.”

If she saw any images of the fire which burned Reardon to a crisp, she would have a hard time explaining to Diarmid why she needed ten minutes alone in the shower with a battery-operated device. She had too many orgasms thinking of Reardon being consumed by fire. Most women fantasized about sexy men in business suits or tattooed bikers. She got off to the thought of her r****t being scorched. Even Psych-One hadn’t been able to keep her face straight when she’d asked if it was normal. The woman had given a stunned glance in her direction, stared at her notepad for several long minutes and then had erupted with laughter. When Artemis had read the report, she’d also laughed her a*s off. It seemed her kink was funny to them.

She squeezed her knees together and looked over the report. She had seen this particular one multiple times. She had her very own copy in the space she had bought four years ago because Clara had gotten it for her as part of a gift. The fact Diarmid was holding it to her was amplifying her emotions in the worst way. She had a feeling she would be dreaming tonight of Reardon burning while Diarmid watched, and she came.

“It’s the same as the others. Nothing out of the ordinary.” She gave it a cursory glance.

“The only clue we have,” he sighed as if debating internally what to share, “was in the interview with Reardon, he describes feeling a depression under his foot and hearing a click. His description is on par with someone stepping on a landmine. Yet where we know is the spot of detonation, there is nothing there to support his words. Nothing. No device could be recovered or found.”

She passed the paper back to him and knew he saw her shaking fingers, but she considered he’d think she was upset about the report and the memories of Reardon when instead the notion the guy had been lit on fire like a funeral pyre made her panties wet. Mania was hard to control.

“Maybe he lied? He is the epitome of lying asshole. If you look up liar in the dictionary, his face is there,” she commented as she watched his head shake. “He might have f****d up in the fire and did something to himself. Lied and said he heard a click. Even if his story is corroborated, and I assume it is, the four asshats he hung with would lie for him every single minute of every single day.”

“He’s the only one who heard the click, and they had a pattern,” he made a face. “They thought they were a kind of made for television squad and he always bragged about the way they approached a fire. If it were intentionally set, it made sense he would be exactly where he was based on his history. He wasn’t quiet about it. The men on the squad hated the fucker because he did what he wanted, and his daddy let him get away with it. His claims to have followed his regular pattern, entered the most dangerous part of the house and in the spot just before the door to where the blaze was contained, he stepped on a floorboard and heard the click, then the explosion.”

“How does he remember?” she asked with a raised eyebrow. “His recall of the events cannot be perfect.”

“They aren’t,” he agreed, “but the one thing he insisted on, was the click.”

“Okay, let’s say he isn’t a lying conniving bastard looking to find a way to say he didn’t just f**k up and get to play the pity card for the rest of his pathetic weaselly life. Say it was deliberately set. Do you think all of these fires have the same kind of ignition source. A device which disappears once set?” She waved at the papers and waited for him to respond. At his slow nod she turned to face him directly, “so who is setting them off? If a victim has to step on the device to activate it, wouldn’t you find a bunch of Reardon’s with burnt d***s and burns covering fifty-to-ninety percent of the body?”

“The fires have grown increasingly higher in temperature, many to the point where there is nothing left in its wake. What if it’s disintegrating the person setting it off?”

She gave a giggle at his question, mocking him, “like lava?” She was aware of the possibility of this. She had figured out exactly how to do it with the help of her scientist team. However, there was no way he could know.

He nudged her with his knee. “Stop mocking me. Something tells me deep in my gut, these are all to hide a murder.”

“Oh, so maybe it’s not a serial arsonist you have but a serial killer? Nobody died in Reardon’s fire.” She openly teased his theory and at his glare she held her hands up defensively. “You have zero evidence, other than in Reardon’s file, another human being was in the midst of any of these from what I can see. It would be mixed in the chemical composition. Where’s the DNA?”

“What if the fire is melting it?”

“Even in a funeral home, the cremated ashes may contain DNA if all the bone or teeth aren’t gone, don’t they? I’m not sure, microbiology isn’t my thing, but I seem to recall one of the girls in school talking about bones being pulverized after a cremation. I’ll let you check the science on it, but I do know even then, things like metal from say a hip replacement or a wedding ring etcetera are often sifted through and found following cremation. I know this because when granny was cremated her hip was sent back to the manufacturer after the fact. We got the little urn they got the metal.”

They both looked to the urn on the mantle, and she grimaced at it. The last year of her Gran’s life had been one of the worst of Lita’s and the old hag hadn’t helped. They had fought even on her last day alive.

She refocused back to Diarmid, “Well, how hot are we talking? The temperature is how much to burn bone?” She already knew. Her team had done so much research she could recite the numbers in her sleep but, in the end, it wasn’t about the temperature in as much as it was the chemical compound, they used to disintegrate the body in the seconds before it burned. She shivered with excitement as she thought of watching the reaction. Diarmid patted her knee reassuringly as if he thought she was uncomfortable with the notion of dead people. If he only knew.

“It’s about three thousand degrees Fahrenheit.”

“And to vaporize and leave nothing behind? Like an atomic bomb would do?”

“I’m not suggesting my arsonist is using an atomic bomb,” he grunted at her as he collected the papers as if annoyed with her now.

“Look, I’m not trying to s**t on your theory. I’m just saying, if there were bodies at these sites, even if the temperatures reached disintegration, at what temperature would you need vaporization because really, it’s the only way an individual’s entire being, including DNA would be gone. Even a tooth or a bone should show up.”

“I know,” he scratched his temple and reached for his coffee cup. “I do appreciate your input and you’re looking at it in a different way than my team had.”

“I wish I could have seen something your team didn’t, but I didn’t really notice anything apart from the common elements I would expect from a fire in a house.”

“You’re really smart.”

“Thanks,” she made a face. She didn’t need his praise. She needed to get away from him. Sitting here and talking science was making her confused. He had been the thing she needed to blame for so long and she felt like she was fraternizing with the enemy.

“It’s a compliment.”

“Yet, it didn’t sound it. Sounded a bit condescending as if you were surprised, I had an iota of intelligence.” She flicked him a glance forcing herself to cool her tone.

“Not intended to be condescending. You really are sensitive. Is it me or just guys in general?”

Now she frowned at the way he narrowed his gaze on her, “again, Diarmid, you don’t know me from a hole in the wall.”

“And you don’t know me either if we’re using your logic so why so antagonistic and confrontational with every word coming out of my mouth? You took one look at me yesterday morning and decided you didn’t like me. Why?”

She gave an impatient sigh, “you want the truth?”

“Yes. I do. I’m staying here for two weeks. If we can hash this out, then maybe it won’t be uncomfortable.”

It was going to be uncomfortable