Free Up in Flames [The Heroes of Silver Springs 10] (Siren Publishing Everlasting Classic) by Tonya Ramagos Page A

How’d he get in?”
    Regina pursed her lips as she started walking. Each step she took was slow and methodical as she moved across the garage to the inside glass door leading to the customer area of the structure.
    Max hesitated, watching her, admiring every detail from the fire helmet that rode low on her forehead to the fire-retardant boots that resembled clown feet on her slender frame. Her turnouts bore signs of use and attempts to clean, and fit her figure like a rag doll. Why she looked so freaking sexy decked in bunker pants and a heavy turnout coat was beyond him, but apparently not a mystery to his stiffening cock.
    “This door was already open.”
    Max tore his thoughts from his perusal of her body and forced them back to the moment he’d entered the burning structure. Though she’d made it more statement than question, he said, “Yeah, it was.”
    She flattened a hand on the wall that separated the garages from the customer area and pushed. The wall didn’t budge. “The concrete is still stable and that door is made of fire-resistant glass. If the door had been shut, the fire wouldn’t have progressed into or out of this garage.”
    “So the arsonist propped that door open, started the fire in the garage, and monkey climbed his ass onto that workbench and out the window?”
    Regina didn’t answer as she dropped to her knees again. She reached for something, made a face, then sliced her attention back through the garage. “Hand me my kit, will you?”
    Max scooped up the bag she’d left on the floor and carried it to her, then watched as she dug inside it for a scraping tool. She chiseled off a piece of the charred debris on the door frame and held it to her nose before offering it up to him for a sniff.
    “Accelerant was used around the door, too.”
    “Yep.” She smacked her lips as she rummaged through the bag again, pulled out an evidence tube, and shoveled the piece inside. “The fire was set over there.” She pointed to the place she’d determined as the point of origin. “The basics of fire behavior and dynamics leads me to the opinion the fire wouldn’t have traveled through this doorway, even with it open, as quickly as it did without help.”
    She spun around and pointed to the opened door of the garage. “It got oxygen from that door.” Her finger dropped to the concrete floor, started at the point of origin, and dragged until it stopped at her feet. “The accelerant painted a path for it to follow all the way here where it came in contact with more fuel to feed its way around the frame and through the door.”
    Her head tipped back as she stepped through the doorway into the customer area, her eyes moving rapidly in their sockets as she scanned the ceiling, walls, and, finally, the floor. “The fire was hotter in here, thicker. It gained momentum when it got through the door.”
    “Which means the accelerant was even heavier in here,” Max concluded.
    “Which tells us the arsonist didn’t want the place to blow,” Regina countered. “It would’ve been easier to make that happen if the fire had moved the opposite direction, into the garages rather than out of them.”
    “But then he would’ve cut off his escape route.”
    “Or he would’ve been forced out the front garage door in plain sight of anyone passing by. He might have expected that oil drum out there to blow, but he knew it wouldn’t happen until he got out.”
    “All that still doesn’t answer the puzzle about how he got inside in the first place,” Max reminded her. He could practically see the wheels turning in her beautiful head. Intense concentration etched itself on her ivory face. She’d managed to get a black smudge down the side of her nose and another just below her right temple. Even dirty, clad in bunker gear, and wearing a chip on her shoulder she’d thankfully started to ignore for at least the last few minutes, the woman was still quite possibly the sexiest thing he’d ever seen.
    Wrinkles