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I shook off my musings.
Right. I was on shift. There was work to do.
Shoving up from the table, I followed Chief Thompson into his office and shut the door. The room smelled of coffee and the barest hint of smoke that seemed to have soaked into the very walls of the firehouse. Papers were strewn across Thompson’s desk, and I recognized photos from the open investigation.
As I took a seat, I nodded toward them. “So, what’s the latest on the beach house fire?”
“It’s almost certainly arson, but we don’t know the who or the why.”
I had to fight to remain casual. “Do you consider Caroline sufficiently cleared?”
Thompson studied me for a long moment. “By rights, I should exclude you entirely from this investigation due to lack of objectivity, because of your involvement with a person of interest.”
I knew that. It was why he hadn’t used me more than absolutely necessary in the immediate aftermath of the fire. Him allowing me to come along when he questioned Caroline had been a professional courtesy that had skated a few lines. I had considered telling him the truth about our relationship status or lack thereof, but I’d realized it didn’t matter. Either way, I wasn’t objective about her.
But Thompson had hesitated instead of saying an outright no.
“But?”
“But you have more investigative training and experience than the rest of the department. So, while I can’t have you actively investigating, I want your insight.”
I could live with that compromise. “Do you believe Caroline set that fire?”
“If I did, I’d hardly have you sitting in that chair. But no, apart from the fact that she’d get no financial gain, no insurance payout, and has no history of trouble with her employer, the timeline doesn’t fit. She was already across island starting her shift at the tavern well before the fire began. And while you and I both know that there are ways to set up a delay, there was no evidence of that in the debris.”
I relaxed a little. “Okay.”
The chief kicked back in his chair. “The sister’s alibi also checks out, as does the brother’s.”
“You asked about Rios? Why? Is there some connection there that we didn’t originally know about?”
“No. Just covering our bases. I didn’t actually think he had anything to do with it. But he’s a favorite scapegoat on this island right now, and the chief of police will investigate him one way or the other because he’s got a hard-on for him. Figures if he can’t pin him for the Busby girl, he’ll get him on something else.”
I had nothing good to say about Bill Carson. He’d been chief of police for most of my life, and while I hadn’t had any run-ins with him, I knew others who had. He wasn’t what you could call a fair and impartial sort of man to begin with, and I’d spent a fair amount of time wondering whether his obsession with Rios was because he truly believed Caroline’s brother capable of harming someone or because he was just a racist son of a bitch. I appreciated Thompson’s doing due diligence ahead of time.
“That’s true enough. So, where are we? Give me the overview.”
“We have a case of probable arson—not a particularly sophisticated one—that left the kitchen of the beach house a total disaster, caused damage to the structural integrity of the second floor, and likely would have taken out the entire house had it not been caught so quickly by the Newmans.”
I considered. “They arrived more or less when they’d told the rental company they’d be arriving, so either the person setting the fire wasn’t aware of the schedule or wanted the blaze to be stopped before it could get fully involved. The latter doesn’t really make sense unless the insurance was the point.”
“I can see something else is circling around in your brain. Keep going.”
“Is it a matter of convenience that the fuel used was readily available cleaning supplies, or was it meant to make it look like Caroline was the guilty party?”
“It’s possible. To what end?”
“Somehow striking back at her instead of her brother?” I shook my head. “That feels far fetched. I might just be paranoid on her behalf. What if it wasn’t a particular effort to frame Caroline? Maybe it was simply meant to look like an accident. The kind of thing that insurance would still cover. There were no trailers, no fuel scattered elsewhere. It literally looks as if someone set a tub of cleaning supplies on the stove and turned on the burner. Oh, whoops. My bad. That’s terrible. Can I have a check now?”
“That’s certainly a decent working theory. We’ll need to get local PD to look into Jim Foster’s personal and company finances. Certainly his insurance is going to want a ruling one way or the other before they’re going to pay out. We’ve put in for the State Fire Marshal to come out, but we’re way on down his list. We’ve done as much evidence collection as possible and passed that on to the lab. Again, that’ll take time to come back. So we’re in a holding pattern. This is largely going to be a waiting game.”
“Often is. When was the last time you had arson on the island?”
“Aside from the usual contingent of kids playing with shit they aren’t supposed to, about three years back, we had a fire at the marina office. Late night fire that took out the whole damned building, including some pretty valuable navigation equipment and historical records. It all ended up being because the marina manager couldn’t keep it in his pants. His wife found out about the infidelity and went to confront him about it up at the office, which was, coincidentally, where he met his mistresses.”
“Plural?”
“Yup. He wasn’t there at the time, but she had a right hissy fit and started trashing the place. Broke a lamp that sparked on all the heaps of paperwork on the desk and one thing led to another… You know how that goes.”
