Fireproof

twelve-year-old girl.
    Simple enough. Psychology 101.
    She was used to having nightmares. It was one of the reasons she didn’t sleep. Maybe a good night’s sleep was asking too much in her line of work. She chased killers for a living and in order to catch them she sometimes had to crawl inside their heads, walk around in their skin.
    Long ago her mentor, Assistant Director Kyle Cunningham, had taught her how to deal with it through his example. He was a master of compartmentalizing, shoving and stacking different killers and victims into different parts of his mind, separating them from one another and from the emotions and memories they caused.
    He was a master of sectioning his life into separate cubicles. Such a master, in fact, that when he died, Maggie realized sheknew little about his private life. Ten years she’d worked with him, admired and respected him, and yet she’d had no idea if he and his wife had any children, a family pet, or a favorite vacation spot. And now that he was gone she couldn’t ask him what to do when some of her carefully sealed compartments started to leak. How was she supposed stop them from seeping into her subconscious? For the last year Maggie had been trying to keep them from flooding her sleep with nightmares. And now Patrick and these arsons …
    She took a deep breath and made herself get out of the safety of her vehicle. She cinched her jacket and shoved her hands into the pockets for warmth. At the last fire, she had hated how damp and chilled she’d gotten. Her clothes reeked of smoke despite putting on Tyvek coveralls.
    What was worse was getting wet, little by little, spray by spray. She’d never considered that investigating a fire scene could leave her feeling like she’d stepped into a rain of cinder and ice water mixed with foam. All of it dripped from the charred skeleton of the building. From the rafters that dared to hang on and the pieces of ceiling that defied gravity. It was like walking inside the dark hollows of a dying creature. One that still hissed and groaned and bled.
    Not that Maggie was squeamish about blood. She’d been sprayed with it, splattered with it, and rolled in it, had even felt her own leaking out. She had dealt with murderers, killers, and terrorists. Had profiled their motives—power, greed, revenge, sexual gratification.
    But arson? This was her first experience with arson and she was having trouble deciphering the motives of someone who set fires deliberately.
    She and Tully had been called in as profilers. Neither was sure why, but then their director had been sending both of them on strange and wild cases in the last year. Maggie guessed there might be some politics involved. There always seemed to be with Assistant Director Kunze. A favor, a payback, some piece of legislation that needed to be passed or some scandal that needed covering up. She never thought she’d be working for a man she not only didn’t respect but also didn’t trust.
    At first glance this case seemed to be that of a typical serial arsonist. He chose a warehouse in the middle of the night when no one would be inside. That fact made Tully and Maggie believe he was a nuisance offender, setting fires for attention, for kicks. He really didn’t want to hurt anyone. Just enjoyed watching the chaos and the sense of power it gave him.
    He’d now chosen another warehouse. But tonight was different. Racine had said there was a body. That changed everything.
    Maggie walked slowly, approaching the scene from a distance, giving herself a big-picture view but also trying to calm herself and reverse the strong instinct to flee. She had to physically coax her entire body—from her rapid pulse to her staggered breaths—to go toward the flames. It didn’t help matters that she could already feel the heat.
    The smell of smoke assaulted her nostrils almost immediately, gaining strength as she approached. She could hear the violent hisses, the crackle and pop as flames ate away chunks of the building, leaving other pieces to crash down. It sounded like trees being timbered—a slight crack followed by a whoosh and then the crash.
    Unnerving sights and sounds and smells.
    Stick to your job , she told herself. Observe. Look for any clues he may have left .
    She walked by an empty lot under construction where the bulldozers and huge equipment with clawed scoops and trucks with dump wagons seemed out of place in this landscape. Her eyes jumped from cab to cab—dark and