Free Count to Ten by Karen Rose Page B

on not fumbling the clasps on his boots. His fingers always got clumsier when he was in a hurry. He joined them at the front door and led them into the kitchen. “We found the body right here.” He pointed to the far wall.
    She looked up at the damaged ceiling. “The master -bedroom’s up there?”
    “Yeah. It’s one of the three points of origin. The kitchen here was the main one.”
    Her brows furrowed. “But you think she was in the spare bedroom studying. On the other side of the house. Tell me the time line of the fire from start to finish again.”
    “The neighbors reported an explosion about midnight and called 911. That would have been the kitchen. The first company arrived three minutes later and found flames engulfing this whole side of the house, top to bottom. There was a smaller fire in the living room on the other side. They charged a line and hit the blaze just inside the front door. The kitchen ceiling came down shortly after the fire department arrived and the chief pulled the firefighters out of the house. I got here at 12:52. They’d knocked it back by then. They shut off the gas line to the house when they arrived, so there wasn’t any more fuel for the fire in the kitchen.”
    “Heat, fuel, oxygen,” Mitchell murmured. “Good old fire triangle.”
    “Eliminate one and you can knock down the fire,” Reed agreed.
    Unger looked at the wall with a frown. “The ‘V’ pattern’s narrow. Like it ran straight up fast until it hit about five feet high. Then everything’s black the rest of the way up.”
    “The valve to the gas line was removed. He started a leak, waited for gas to build up, then left a device to get the fire started. The room exploded when the flame reached the gas, which rises. He ran a line of accelerant up the wall to make sure it did.”
    “What did he use to start it?” she asked.
    “The lab’s doing an analysis for the exact structure, but it was a solid accelerant, probably in the nitrate family. Mode of delivery was a plastic egg.”
    Mitchell’s blond brows went up. “Like an Easter egg?”
    “No, bigger. Like the eggs panty hose used to come in. He probably mixed the nitrate with guar gum so it would cling to the wall. When the solid ignited, it would have burned straight up. That’s why you see the narrow ‘V.’ But it also exploded out, which took care of everything below the gas line. Most likely he drilled a hole in the egg, filled it with the mixture, and ran the fuse. He wouldn’t have had much time to get away. Probably no more than ten or fifteen seconds.”
    “He likes life on the edge, then,” she said. “How did he get in the house?”
    “Through the back door,” Reed answered. “We took pictures of the lock, but we didn’t touch it to get prints.”
    She looked up with a frown. “Why not?”
    “I was afraid it was a homicide yesterday. I didn’t want some judge throwing out our evidence because it was collected under an arson warrant.”
    She looked reluctantly impressed. “Did you get prints, Jack?”
    “Yeah, but I’m betting they don’t belong to our guy. If he was smart enough to pull all this together, he was smart enough to wear gloves. Although we could get lucky.”
    “Can you check for shoe prints?” she asked Unger. “Although the rain’s probably destroyed any chance of that. Dammit.”
    “We got a number of shoe prints,” Reed said, “most of them from firefighters’ boots, but there were a few that weren’t. We made plaster casts of those yesterday.”
    Again she looked reluctantly impressed. “They’re at the lab?”
    “Along with the egg fragments. They’re checking for prints on those, too.”
    She crouched next to where they’d found the body. “Jack, let’s get samples here.”
    Reed crouched next to her, so close he picked up a lighter, much more pleasant scent than the smell of charred wood that hung over the room. She smelled like lemons. “I took samples around this area. We found traces of