Laura nodded. That was a sensible approach to take: assume that all of your assumptions until now were faulty. “Well, you’ll need to look into the records of anyone who now lives in the area,” she said. “Starting from maybe five or even ten years ago, you need to compile lists of anyone who was ever accused of starting a fire – and especially those who had it confirmed. These won’t all necessarily be arrests – you might have fines on record, for example. If you can’t find anyone in your own arrest and fine logs, then start looking at people who’ve moved from out of town recently.”

  There was a general murmur of agreement and a lot of nodding heads as the detectives began to disperse back to their own desks. Agent Won looked unaccountably pleased with himself, following them to stand over one of their monitors and observe as they presumably brought up their internal system.

  Four cooks toiling over one dish was already enough, and Laura knew her talents would not be best used in simply doing the same thing as them. She chewed her lip for a moment in thought, and then turned on the computer they’d been assigned, making up her mind. While they looked at arrest records and individuals, she could look into this pyromancy thing from another angle. Incidents and fires. Arson wasn’t always solved or even detected, and that meant there might be more out there the records couldn’t tell them about.

  Laura searched for and navigated to the page of a local newspaper. With the simple keyword ‘fire,’ she began to trawl back through their records, looking for anything that would stand out.

  Of course, there were plenty of things that didn’t have any relevancy at all. A Firefly Dance barn raiser. News about the local fire department, that was more to do with the arrival of a new captain or fundraising events than actual fires. But there were fires, here and there, and Laura read into each of them, jotting down the details.

  The articles seemed to be filtered by relevancy rather than by date, which was irritating, but Laura fought through it. On the third page of the results, she spotted something: a fire that was dated very recently. She clicked open the article and read through it, her interest growing with every second.

  LOCAL STORE LOST TO FLAMES

  Lighting The Way, a store which opened five years ago on West Ocean Drive, has been burned to the ground in a terrible accident which has devastated the owner.

  Michael Noran, 53, spoke to our reporter on what was once the grounds of his well-stocked and recently refurbished store. He said: “I just can’t believe this has happened. Obviously, on some level you always know that you’re dealing with a very flammable product, but I never expected something like this to happen. It’s my whole life’s work really, just gone, just like that. It’s the end of a dream.”

  The fire was reported at 4 A.M. on Saturday morning, just a few hours before Lighting The Way was set to open for the weekend’s trading. The store, which was in a central location on West Ocean Drive and popular with tourists, was fully stocked with scented candles and other themed items, such as essential oils, burners, and incense sticks. Firefighters say that the stock would have caught fire quickly, turning a small accidental flame into an inferno which ravaged the building and ultimately brought it down before anything could be done to save it.

  When asked if he would rebuild and reopen the store, Noran was only able to look down at the blackened ash and remains of his store and shake his head sadly.

  The Pacific Cove fire chief and police chief came together to issue this joint statement to all homeowners in the town: “This is a timely reminder that fire is dangerous and is not something to be played with. If you are burning candles in the home, please make sure that all flames are snuffed out before leaving the room or falling asleep. This is also a good time to check that your fire alarm is functional – it could save your life.”

  Laura felt a smile coming over her face, in spite of herself. A fire at a candle store. Not only was it the kind of delicious irony that would probably make it onto some kind of wacky world news round-up site, but it was also extremely relevant.

  “Agent Won,” she called out. “Get your jacket. I have a lead. Let’s go and see if it checks out.”

  ***

  West Ocean Drive was easy to find. Laura parked the car alongside the very obvious site of Lighting The Way, a half-shell of a storefront that was covered in construction materials. Bags of sand and bricks were laying around it like dropped eggs, and scaffolding supported what remained of the structure. Some of it was still visibly blackened from the fire. The rest was new, brickwork going up to fill in the gaps that appeared to have been blown out by the flames.

  “Excuse me?” Agent Won called out to a passing man. He was wearing a yellow hard hat and an orange reflective vest. Together with his slightly smarter clothing, compared to the other two men working on the site, Laura thought that Won had correctly guessed this to be the foreman.

  The man wandered over, giving them an inquisitive look. “Yeah?”

  “I was just wondering if you could tell us about this fire,” Agent Won said. “It was a few months ago, right?”

  “Yeah, pretty bad business,” the foreman said, tilting his head to look up at the structure as if reassessing it for the first time. “One single candle was left on as a display item, and the whole place went up. We’ve been brought in to remodel and build it back up from what it was.”

  “It’s going to be a candle store again?” Laura asked, surprised. She’d mostly expected to find an abandoned lot, if anything. It hadn’t sounded in the news report as though Michael Noran had much intention of coming back.

  “No, no,” the foreman said, shaking his head. “We’re building a restaurant. The lease for the store never got renewed after it was burned down, so I guess the owner thought it was time to move on. Get some more income in.”

  “So, there’s no more candles?” Agent Won asked. “Or he just moved somewhere else?”

  “No more candles. I don’t know for sure, and you can ask him yourself, but I heard the guy who owned it lost everything in the fire. He didn’t want to start all over again. Maybe couldn’t. It’s a real shame; tourists liked it a lot.”

  “Thanks,” Agent Won said, letting the man go back to his work. He turned to Laura, his hands on his hips. “Sounds like we need to talk to the owner to get a better picture of what happened here.”

  Laura nodded. “I’m intrigued,” she said. “The news report said it was a stray candle that started the whole blaze, and that guy just repeated it. But how would they know?”

  “What do you mean?” Agent Won asked, frowning.

  “Well, you have a whole store full of candles and other flammable items,” Laura said, gesturing to the blackened arch above one of the empty windows. “When you go and look at it all later, how do you know that one of those candles started it? And even if you know there was no accelerant or other signs of arson, how do you know for sure that a candle was the original source? There would be no way to trace the fire to a single, individual candle.”

  “You think this could be the work of our pyromaniac?” Agent Won asked, his eyes lighting up.

  “I wouldn’t get too excited just yet,” Laura said, studying the building one last time. “But maybe. Let’s go talk to this Michael Noran and find out what he has to say about the whole situation.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Laura thought that it was good luck – or maybe not, given what they were investigating – that the owner of the candle store was still living in town. Despite losing everything in the blaze, Michael Noran had not moved on, and was still living in the same home he’d owned when he was working in his own store every day.

  Laura let Agent Won approach the home first, going ahead to knock on the front door. It wasn’t a cheap-looking property: the yard was beautifully manicured and sculpted, with rose bushes shaped just so and flowerbeds beneath them looking ripe for spring. The home itself was decently sized, a two-floor building with a portico around the entrance and a few solar panels on the roof. Given its position towards the beachfront and in a town like this, Laura had to assume it had cost a pretty penny.

  The man who opened the door was the same one she had seen in the photographs accompanying the article: balding, a little overweight, but with dark beetling brows and a tall stature. “Hello?” he said, looking at them suspiciously as though he though they were about to sell him something. Maybe, given their dark suits, a religion.

  “Michael Noran,” Laura said, showing her badge. “We’re with the FBI. We’d like to talk to you a bit about your store and the circumstances of it burning down, as well as a few events that have been happening around Pacific Cove recently. Can we come in?”

  He looked affronted, right away. Like there was no way he wanted to let a couple of strangers into his home, and now that he knew they were FBI agents, he was even less interested. But that didn’t mean he was going to have a choice. He spoke to them here, or at the precinct. Laura gave him an even look, until he seemed to get it.

  “Okay,” he said, at last, pulling back from the door. “Just… brush off your shoes before you come in, will you?”

  Laura had to hold back a smirk as Agent Won obediently did as he was told, scuffing his feet across the welcome mat to dislodge any dirt. There was no reason for them not to do it. In fact, it was something she did automatically whenever she entered someone’s home, because she wasn’t rude and didn’t like to leave them with a mess to clean up. But there was something about how Won just did as he was instructed that made her want to deliberately not do it at all. She made a perfunctory movement on the threshold and then stepped right through, following the figure of Michael Noran into a newly built sunroom.

  Noran sat in a wicker chair there, letting it take his weight as he looked at them both. He had a guarded expression already, which meant he was not going to be easy to talk to necessarily. But that also buoyed Laura up a little. Those who wanted least to talk were often the ones with the most to hide.

  “Can you tell us what happened to your store?” Laura asked, taking the initiative even as she and Agent Won both sunk down on a matching wicker sofa with a floral-patterned cushioned seat. “Lighting The Way, wasn’t it?”

  “I’d have thought you’d be able to get all of the details from the local fire department,” Noran said sniffly. “They were the ones who did all the investigation.”

  “We can,” Laura said, in a light tone that suggested they, indeed, would. “But I’d like to hear it from you. Your account, from the horse’s mouth, so to speak.”

  If he had disliked their presence already, she could see that Noran liked being compared to a horse even less. His nostrils flared, a coincidence that Laura found highly amusing. He didn’t even know he was making himself look even more like a horse by doing it. She was in a contrary mood to begin with thanks to all the confusion of this case, and there was nothing wrong in running with it when you had a suspect like this.

  Because he was a suspect, given how cagey he was already behaving. And with a man like this, it would be easy to sting him enough that he blurted out something he wasn’t supposed to. A death by a thousand cuts, resulting in him losing his temper and snapping out the truth.

  “There’s not much to say,” Michael replied. “I owned a candle store, and we would often have a candle burning on display to show customers what they could expect. One night, I had an employee lock up and they forgot to blow out the candle before leaving. Somehow, it must have fallen over or something and the flame caught the display it was sitting on, and spread to the other candles, and pretty soon all my stock went up in flames along with the store itself.”

  “You’ve decided not to reopen?” Laura asked. “We just went by the site. It’s apparently being remodeled as a restaurant now.”

  Michael nodded, looking down as if he was too sad to think about it. “I couldn’t afford to start up again.”

  “Didn’t your insurance pay out?” Laura asked.

  Michael made a vague movement with his hand and his head, a kind of dismissal. “I didn’t get enough to consider opening up again. The rebuilding alone was going to cost me a fortune. I had to give up my dream.”

  There was something about the way he was speaking that just didn’t sit right with her. It wasn’t just the way he so clearly didn’t want them to be there. It was the way he spoke the words – almost like they were rehearsed. He’d spoken about losing his dream in the interview, too. The same words.

  It was possible that he’d been asked about it so many times that he simply had stock answers ready to go, but…

  “Did you feel any suspicion that your employee started the fire on purpose?” Laura asked. What she really wanted to know was whether Michael himself could have done something but asking that outright would only get his back up. Going after someone else instead could have better results. The thing she really wanted to analyze, anyway, was his reaction.

  “It was an accident,” Michael repeated, as if she was too stupid to understand what he was saying. “The fire department and the police both said so.”

  “I know they did,” Laura said evenly. “I want to know what you thought about it. Did you ever have the feeling that the fire might not have been started by accident? Like maybe your employee enjoyed playing with fire?”

  Michael snorted, shaking his head. “The insurance wouldn’t have paid out if it wasn’t an accident.”

  Two mentions of the insurance. Not much effort to protect the reputation of his employee. That was interesting.

  Normally, Laura would expect a range of responses mostly hinged around the innocence of the employee. The owner might react with shock and talk about how good that employee was, how bad they’d felt since it happened. Or they might talk about how yes, it was possible, they had their own suspicions. They might even rant about how the person had been careless, but ultimately made a mistake. But Michael clearly didn’t care about his employee’s reputation.

  It sounded more to Laura like he was trying to justify the insurance payout and ensure that no one looked into the possibility of taking it away from him.

  “Where were you last night, in the late evening?” Laura asked, because if he didn’t have an alibi there was a possibility that this needed to be taken further.

  “What?” Michael blinked. “I was here.”

  “Alone?”

  “With my wife.”

  Laura caught Agent Won looking at her and glanced his way. His expression was skeptical, and she felt the same. A wife was not exactly a reliable source for an alibi. A wife could reasonably be expected to lie in order to save her husband from prison. Especially if she assumed he was innocent, and this would all be blown out of proportion.

  “And two nights ago – on Saturday?”

  “I was here,” Michael said, frowning. “Why?”

  “Two nights before that?” Laura pressed.

  Michael’s expression cleared, but then clouded in an altogether different way. “This is about the murders,” he said, obviously having put two and two together with the dates. “You’re asking me for an alibi!”

  “Yes, I am,” Laura said. “So? Where were you, and can anyone else testify to that?”

  “On Thursday I was out at the bar,” Michael said.

  “How late?”

  He struggled. “I… Probably eight, or nine. I don’t remember.”

  “Not late enough,” Laura said. She was watching him closely. Something about his reaction, once again, struck her as not quite right. He was acting like he was on the back foot. Like he hadn’t expected to be asked about this topic at all. He’d been all gung-ho and ready to defend himself – but not on this. It had thrown him for a loop. He was distracted. His eyes darted in all directions, and Laura noticed him wiping the palm of his hand discretely on his knee. He was sweating.

  So, if he’d been expecting them to come and interrogate him on something else, what was it?

  “Have you ever eaten at the Fresh Catch diner?” Agent Won asked, picking up the thread of the murders while Laura tried to get a handle on what Noran was hiding.

  “Yes,” he said. He was stammering slightly, casting nervous glances around. “Of course I have. Everyone has. It’s one of the only local options.”

  “And have you ever ordered something or sat in at the Rise and Shine café?”

  “Of course, I have!”

  “How about getting gas at the gas station on Ocean View Boulevard?”

  “Well – I mean – it’s right on my way to work!”

  Agent Won looked at Laura expectantly. She could see it in him: that eagerness, as always. He was waiting for her to arrest the guy, or at least give him permission to do so. But he was making a mistake. Laura could see there was something else going on here, something that Michael Noran didn’t want them to find out about.

  Laura got up, noticing how he practically jumped out of his seat when she did so. Like he was scared of something. Scared of what?

  What didn’t he want her to see or know?

  “You mentioned your wife,” Laura said. “Is she home at the moment?”

  “No,” Noran said, watching her hawklike, his gaze only briefly straying back to Agent Won as if he was trying to keep an eye on what they were both doing. His anxiety levels seemed to have shot up the moment she stood. “No, she’s out at the store.”

  “Getting what?” Laura asked. She took a step experimentally to the side, saw sweat break out on Noran’s brow, and took another.

  “I… some supplies,” Noran said. “You know, food and stuff. Where are you going?”

  Laura had moved forward enough to see just down the hall into a part of the house they hadn’t yet been shown. And what she saw made her want to smile, because now she knew she had him.

  “I think the more accurate question is, where are you going?” she asked. “Since you have your suitcases already packed, I mean.”

 

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