the idea, but after a brief hesitation, she nodded and walked past him, motioning for him to follow her out the door and back down the hall.
He did, trying to keep his gaze from tracing the slender lines of her back, the gentle rounding of hips his hands suddenly itched to span. A vague hint of woodsmoke drifted around her, but Jack was more aware of the scent of sweet, musky woman. Good hell, what was going on with him? “This building’s in pretty good shape for its age.”
“Yes. I like it—the history, the stories.”
They walked into her small office where the scent of roses merged with a metallic whiff of chemicals. Behind her desk sat a pair of firefighter’s boots, a shovel and a fire ax. Amid the stacked files on the cluttered desk were maps and newspaper clippings.
He gestured to the files. “Are you handling all this yourself?”
“My secretary, Darla, helps a lot.”
Jack gestured to the photographs covering the opposite wall. “Did you take the pictures?”
She glanced at them as she walked around the corner of her cluttered desk. “I took a few. Harris actually took most of them. Like that one.” She pointed at a framed black-and-white photograph in the middle of the wall. “That’s Presley’s first fire engine.”
Terra moved aside the vase of full-blooming flowers and pulled on a pair of latex gloves. After opening a small paper bag, she shook into her palm a piece of glass about the diameter of a pencil eraser.
Jack leaned forward to get a better look.
She lifted her hand toward him. “Lightbulb glass.”
“Yeah.”
“See the tape?” The pleasure in her voice had him glancing up before directing his attention to her palm as she pointed at what he now determined was a piece of clear tape on the glass.
He nodded.
Reaching to her left, she flipped on a lamp then adjusted the shade so the light shot across her palm. She pointed again. “See this hole? You can make it out if you hold the piece of glass up to the light.”
She did so gingerly.
“Someone drilled a hole in the lightbulb?” He frowned.
“Yes. The fire was deliberately set and this lightbulb plant is the incendiary device.”
“Lightbulb plant?” He straightened, his pulse revving. “How does that work?”
“Our arsonist drilled a hole in the top of the bulb, probably used a syringe to fill it with accelerant, covered the hole with tape then screwed in the bulb. He connected the lamp to a clock timer—” she picked up a blackened piece of metal sprouting a short wire “—and he left.”
“So the lamp wouldn’t come on until the timer tripped the switch?”
“Right.”
“The heat generated by the electricity caused the explosion.”
“Yes.” She smiled.
“And our guy was far away, establishing an alibi.”
“Yeah. Lightbulbs distort at a thousand degrees and will hold that temperature for about ten minutes. The explosion would’ve happened once the temperature climbed higher.”
“There was definitely an explosion? Not just a leak?”
“An explosion, probably close to what sounded a while ago back in the testing area. The bedroom door and windows were blown outward, not inward. That’s a sure sign.”
“So, it makes sense to think the victim was either immobilized or dead before the fire started.”
“Absolutely. Whoever did this probably tied up Harris then set the plant.”
“The killer and the arsonist might be two different people.”
“Maybe, but I don’t think so. Still, the M.E. will be able to tell us if Harris died before the fire or as a result.”
Jack agreed. “Any ideas about the type of accelerant used?”
“Isopropyl alcohol. I think it was some type of cleaning fluid.” After carefully returning the piece of bulb to its brown paper bag, she closed it. She gestured to the pictures around her office. “I was able to recover some traces of the accelerant. No other lightbulbs exploded at the burn site. I washed down the lamp with the blown bulb and the bedside table holding it, and found a fluid pattern at the base of the lamp. I also took some samples from Harris’s darkroom. He was an avid photographer.”
“Right. I noticed a lot of photographs in his house.”
She nodded. “I scraped some samples from the charred wall around his bed, also from the lamp base, and ran them through my gas chromatograph.”
“Do you have a full lab here?” Jack glanced around, wondering if he’d missed another door.
“No. I have a few pieces of equipment, but until our budget gets a little more healthy, I have to use the lab in Oklahoma City for most of my analysis. My chromatograph showed an alcohol-based chemical.”
“So, none of the darkroom chemicals were used to start the fire?”
“No. A photo fixer in Harris’s darkroom did contain glacial acetic acid, which is also highly flammable, but that isn’t our accelerant.”
“This is great. You’ve really made some progress.”
“Unfortunately, I didn’t have to start at the very beginning.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve seen this before. Three times, in fact.”
“What? The lightbulb thing?”
“The alcohol-based solvent, the lightbulb plant, the timer.”
The little nerve on the side of his neck twitched, as it always did at any sign of danger. He narrowed his gaze. “What are you saying, August?”
She exhaled and reached up to release her ponytail, funneling her fingers through the reddish-gold fall of hair as it tumbled to her shoulders. The thick satiny curtain was an equal mix of gold and red, a true strawberry blonde.
“I’ve been working on three cases very similar to this. I think this is his fourth fire.”
Jack’s spine stiffened. “You’re saying we have a serial arsonist?”
“I think so.”
“There have been no other fire deaths,” he said bluntly. “I would’ve heard about that.”
“You’re right, but the other fires involved a janitorial supply store, a photography studio and a dental office.”
“All places with the same accelerant?”
