Fireproof

statistics.”
    He stopped at the third floor of the brick building on the corner. He could have sworn he saw a flash through the window. Did it come from inside the building or was it only a reflection of the flames?
    “Body’s outside,” Racine said. “It’s in the alley behind a Dumpster.”
    “Outside?”
    That didn’t sound right to Tully. The other fires had had no casualties. A body usually meant the acceleration of an arsonist, the next step. Fire wasn’t enough to achieve the same high so they started setting fires to occupied buildings. But if the body was outside, it was hardly a casualty.
    “Someone who made it out but too late?”
    Racine shook her head and pulled a notebook from her pocket.Started flipping pages. Tully kept his hand in his pocket, fingering his crunched receipts. Why couldn’t he ever remember to carry a notebook?
    “Separate call about the body,” Racine said, finding her notes.
    Tully glanced over. Even her handwriting was neat and clean, not the scratches and odd abbreviations he used.
    “Person said there was a—quote—stiff with half its face gone in the alley by the Dumpster.”
    “By the Dumpster? Not in the Dumpster?”
    Racine flipped a few more pages and returned to the same one. “Yep. By, not in. Fire chief told me she’s not burned. We have to wait until it’s safe for us to enter the burn zone.”
    “That changes things,” Tully said.
    “Yep, it sure does.”
    They stood silently side by side again, eyes preoccupied. Seconds ticked off. Behind them firefighters called out to their crew members. Pieces of soot with sparks floated through the air like tiny fireworks filling the night sky. At the last fire someone had mentioned that they looked like fireflies, and soon after they started calling the arsonist the firefly. Tully figured it made about as much sense as firebug.
    It was Racine who broke the silence. “So you suppose the bastard’s right here watching and jerking off?”
    That’s exactly what Tully had been thinking earlier, but he knew it wasn’t that simple, especially if this guy had now started to kill and hadn’t even bothered to set the body on fire. Again, he didn’t glance at her, but he did smile. “You’ve been reading way too much Freud.”

CHAPTER 5

    Maggie parked a block away. Her head had started its familiar throb, same side, same place, drilling a rap-a-tap into her left temple. She stayed behind the steering wheel of her car. Black clouds of smoke billowed over the area. She stared at the flames shooting out the windows and devouring the roof of the four-story building. Even a block away the sight paralyzed her. It kicked her heartbeat up and squeezed the air out of her lungs.
    She tried to slow her breathing. Closed her eyes and gently rubbed her fingertips, starting over her eyelids and moving to her temples. Small gentle circles, trying to ignore the scar.
    This is temporary , she told herself. She was going to be okay. How could she expect to get shot in the head and bounce right back?
    She tried to focus on why she was here. And yet all she could think about was how angry fire always looked. Flames like this reminded her of those grade school catechism books with colorful illustrations of what the gates of hell were supposed to look like. Where killers and rapists were sent. Where evil was punished. Not where loved ones raced in and never came out.
    Not for the first time, she wondered about her father, and nowPatrick. How could they go charging into the middle of raging fires when her entire body kept telling her to turn around and run?
    She knew that fear of losing someone else important to her—that dread knotted at the pit of her stomach—had triggered these recent nightmares. That uncertainty riddled her sleep in between her regular bouts of insomnia. Her self-diagnosis spelled out the simple reason. This latest set of nightmares was caused by Patrick’s coming to live with her, the fact that he reminded her of their father, and, of course, his new job, which put him into the same danger that had cost their father his life.
    Tonight for a fleeting moment when Patrick stood in front of the refrigerator and looked up at her—right before she almost bashed in his skull—Maggie was struck by how much he looked like their father. Thomas O’Dell had been only six years older than Patrick was now when he ran into that burning building and cemented Maggie’s image of him forever in her mind, the mind of a