Fireproof

questions. She couldn’t remember any of them or her answers.
    All she remembered was that look on Tully’s face and the panic in his voice when he said, “I don’t think you’re okay either.”
    It was the fire, the flames and the heat. All of it too much like a gunshot. She closed her eyes. She’d be okay. It would just take time. She never had patience. Hated feeling vulnerable, out of control. But not to have control over her body …
    No one needed to know how disoriented she really had been at the fire site. She didn’t have to tell anyone about the blurred vision or the scent that permeated the lining of her memory, that smell of scorched flesh from the bullet scraping her scalp.
    The gunshot wound had happened four months ago. The fire’s blast had simply been a reminder. It threw her off her game. That’s all. But this little slip-up would be enough to trigger Kunze. It’d be enough for him to justify his psychological tests.
    So let him. Bring it on .
    There’d be nothing to report. Maggie had a degree in psychology. She knew exactly what they’d be looking for and she simply wouldn’t give it to them.
    Just then she realized she could still feel the needle as the doctor pulled it through her skin. The local anesthesia hadn’t been enough to numb the area. Her jaw clenched and her eyes stayed closed. This pain—this prick of the needle sliding through, the tug of the suture thread following— this was nothing. She wantedall of it to be over. To get back to the crime scene. This was just a distraction.
    When they were finished the doctor quietly left. The nurse told Maggie she had some papers to get for a signature and she left. She hadn’t been gone long when the examination room door opened again.
    Benjamin Platt wore his military dress uniform, had his hat tucked under his arm, and his stance was that of a soldier delivering dreadful news. The look on his face wasn’t much better. Worry creased an indent between his eyes.
    “Are you okay?” he asked in almost a whisper.
    “I can’t believe Tully called you.”
    “It wasn’t Tully.”
    “Racine?”
    “I wish it had been you.”

CHAPTER 14

    “This isn’t unusual,” Stan Wenhoff, the District’s chief medical examiner, told them.
    Tully stared at the blackened skull. The pile of rubble didn’t appear to include a body. He took a couple of careful steps closer. Something about a fire scene made him expect the floor—what was left of it—to still burn all the way through the fire boots and the soles of his shoes.
    The scent of smoke and ashes hung in the air. Water and foam dripped from the skeletal rafters that remained. He wished he had a baseball cap. Stan had brought an umbrella and looked ridiculous, like an English gentleman in from a stroll along the countryside. That is if the English gentleman wore Tyvek overalls.
    Something wet and solid slopped onto the back of Tully’s neck. He snatched at the debris and flung it aside, drawing a few scowls from Ivan and the fire chief, who had stopped their own inspections to hear what Stan had to say about their latest “not unusual” discovery.
    The skull looked as if someone had taken a fist-size rock and bashed a hole into the top of it. The fire investigative team had justbegun moving and raking smoldering debris into ridges along the concrete floor, where they would later sift and examine it.
    “Think of the skull as a sealed container,” Stan explained to his audience, ignoring the pitter-patter hitting his umbrella. “Like a ceramic jug filled with liquid. Heat it up and it doesn’t take long for the liquid inside to reach a boiling point. That creates pressure.”
    Just when Tully envisioned the ceramic jug bursting apart, Stan put an end to his own analogy and added, “The cranium explodes. Boiling blood, brain, and tissue expand and have nowhere to go. The skull literally explodes into pieces. Sometimes it can blow a head right off a body.”
    “It was a hot fire,” the fire chief admitted, nodding. “This thing burned upward of a thousand degrees. That doesn’t happen without some help. Definitely used an accelerant. May have been a chemical reaction. We found the start point at the back door. Actually on the outside of the back door.”
    All of them continued to stare down at the rubble as if expecting more bones to appear, like one of those picture puzzles that if you looked hard enough and long enough you’d see the hidden objects.
    “The intense