onto the long gravel driveway that led to a rundown ranch house. He took note of the dogs racing to meet him. the sagging barbed-wire fence, the gaping hole in the old barn roof, but he kept thinking about Abby Patton.
Maybe the challenge was what appealed to him. Maybe it was more complicated; could be he had some deep-seated need to erase fear where he found it, to coax trust from the smallest seed.
But Ben didn’t know why that would be. He was usually attracted to confident, smart women. He liked honesty, serenity, a witty tongue. Timid women in need of protection weren’t his thing.
He snorted at the idea of Abby Patton, arson investigator, needing a protector. At five foot ten inches or so, she wasn’t small.
But honest, serene... He didn’t think so. She might find serenity in her old age, but that was fifty years away, give or take a few. And blunt didn’t equate to honest. Ben doubted that Abby was honest even with herself about what she felt or why.
He shouldn’t want her any more than he should indulge the hope that the small feral cat living like a ghost around his house might someday become a real pet, the kind other people had.
Rolling to a stop, Ben shifted into park, set the hand brake and turned off the engine, giving the dust and the dogs a minute to settle.
Yeah, he thought, but just the other day Cindy had hopped onto the porch railing so close to his hand she was clearly asking to be petted. So you never knew, did you?
He opened his door just as a man came out of the barn.
“Goddamn it, shut your mouths up!”
A few yaps later the two shepherd mixes sniffed Ben’s hand and decided he wasn’t the enemy.
The rancher, tall and skeletal, must have been working on some piece of machinery. His hands were black with grease, some of which he’d smeared onto his face, weathered to the texture of the desert.
“Won’t offer to shake hands.” He cast a dubious eye at the shield Ben extended. “You fellas don’t get out this way much.”
“Not much reason,” Ben said. “Day before yesterday, a pickup was abandoned and set on fire up the road a piece. I’m wondering if you ever notice passing traffic.”
“If the dogs don’t bark, I don’t come out.”
“Kind of figured that.” Ben nodded ruefully. “Hope you don’t mind my asking.”
“Anybody can ask me anything.” The rancher shrugged. “You need a little old lady, hasn’t got much better to do than peep out from behind her blinds.”
Ben nodded toward the house. “You wouldn’t have a wife or mother in there?”
“Wife never looks away from her soaps.”
Ben extended a card. “Well, if you wouldn’t mind asking her tonight,” he said just as laconically. “I’d appreciate it.”
“I’ll ask.”
He had already disappeared into the barn before Ben got back in behind the wheel. Tongues lolling, the dogs gave halfhearted chase. They’d given up long before he turned onto paved road.
This was going to be a waste of time. He’d known it would be. But hell, now and again you got a surprise. At least, you did if you looked for it.
Seemed to him, Abby Patton might be one of those surprises.
BURNED WOOD had the texture of alligator hide. Abby crunched across the blackened floor of the corner grocery store in her steel-reinforced boots, not worrying too much about where she stepped.
Char licked up the walls. This baby had definitely started at floor level.
It was a no-brainer, but she did a meticulous search anyway, clicking photographs as she went. They were essential to document what she saw. Good pictures sold the prosecutor’s case to the jury like no testimony ever could.
The wooden subfloor was deeply scorched in half a dozen places, always a dead giveaway. The samples she took would show the presence of a flammable liquid, sure as shootin’. Fuse box indicated no electrical troubles; the point of origin wasn’t near wiring, anyway.
What interested Abby was the lack of ash and bits of debris on the crumpled, seared metal shelving.
Earlier the owner had come out of his hysteria long enough to claim the store was fully stocked.
“What the hell do you think?” he demanded, face flushed with fury and—she suspected—guilt. “People keep coming back if they don’t find what they want the first time? This is a grocery store. We have regular deliveries.”
Yeah, but about six months ago Price-Right had built a big store three blocks away. A little mom-and-pop place like this might have been a going concern until then; people liked convenience. They wouldn’t do their week’s shopping here, they’d go to Safeway a mile away, but they’d stop by here for a six-pack or some forgotten item. But the small volume in a store this size meant prices had to be higher. A mile was one thing; three blocks was another. This past six months had to have been a struggle.
She wandered into the back, which had suffered damage from smoke and water but not fire. The loading area was empty; the office, bare bones. The computer was darn near an antique, unless its guts had been replaced. No TV or microwave or refrigerator. Either the owner had never had any of the comforts back here, or he’d moved them out before he’d torched his place.
Abby put her vials and bags of evidence along with her Minolta into the trunk of her car, then rang doorbells half a block each way. The stories she heard confirmed her suspicions.
“He was going out of business. Had to be,” one gruff, graying man with a paunch declared. “Who the hell was going to pay what he asked?”
“Even the freezers didn’t have much in them the last time I was there,” a housewife said. “I bought milk, but the date was a little past. Mr. Joseph said a delivery had been delayed, but I wondered.”
“Yeah, I saw him and his old lady moving a TV and microwave—I think that’s what it was—out the back two days ago,” said a neighbor, whose backyard abutted the alley. “Mr. Joseph said the TV at home had gone kaput. But it makes you wonder...”
Abby’s cell phone rang and she excused herself.
“Patton,” she said in answer.
“Hi, it’s Meg. Have you heard from Ben?”
Abby was annoyed to realize she felt mild disappointment that the caller wasn’t Ben Shea. Of course, their one date had been a flop. He wouldn’t be asking her again. She didn’t want him to ask her out again. But she had hoped for news about his door-to-door questioning.
“Nope,” she told her sister. “You?”
“Not a word.” Meg puffed out a sigh that expressed acute frustration. “If I didn’t feel about as mobile as a moose stuck in deep snow, I’d go back to work part-time. Darn it, I don’t know how seriously Ben is taking this.”
Abby
