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He said it like it was nothing, but she saw how his jaw locked on the word.
“Did you ever try to look into what happened to him?” she probed.
He shrugged. “By the time I got on the department, they already closed the case. Too much damage to determine the cause.” He flexed his hands, like the story itched under his skin.
Desiree felt a sudden urge to say something, to cut the weight of it, but found she didn’t have to.
“We should probably get some sleep,” Brandon suggested. “Everyone’s beat.”
She nodded. “We can compare the cases tomorrow.”
CHAPTER 5
Brandon didn’t usually make it to the station before dawn, but he wanted time to think before Desiree arrived. The evidence table was already cleared in the conference room—he’d swept it himself the night before, wiped down the surface, lined up two fresh legal pads with pens. This morning, he added two still-steaming mugs of coffee along with printouts of yesterday’s fire. He included the wide-angle photos of the warehouse, the inside of Miller’s Hardware, close-ups of each flag Desiree had planted. Next to those, he’d stacked the lab findings for accelerant samples at the warehouse and hoped to have the store’s back soon.
Desiree walked in wearing the same black parka from the day before, hair slicked behind her ears, eyes so awake he wondered if she ever even slept. Her field bag banged against the table, the sound echoing a little in the empty station. “You said we’d meet at six,” she said, not quite accusing, but still pointed.
He motioned to the evidence setup. “Couldn’t sleep. Decided to get a head start.”
Desiree took one look at the spread and made a face. “The photos aren’t labeled.”
“Wasn’t sure what format you liked,” Brandon explained. “Do you want sticky notes or pen-on-back?”
“Sharpie, lower right corner. Name, incident number, date. And chain-of-custody needs full initials every time a photo changes hands, including between us.” She told him while pulling out a marker from her kit, as if the answer was obvious.
He watched the way her pen hovered over each photo before she wrote, a single half-second of consideration, like she was judging the photo’s character before committing it to evidence. He’d been on plenty of fire scenes, helped out a dozen investigators, but none of them handled their paperwork like Desiree. It was as if she’d treated red-tape drudgery as works of art.
“So—” he started, reaching for his mug, “is this part of the county’s new improved system, or are you just naturally more thorough than other investigators?”
She shot him a glance. “You don’t get convictions by being sloppy. That’s how defense lawyers get acquittals.”
He almost laughed. “You talk about lawyers like they’re a type of invasive insect.”
She didn’t look up, but the left corner of her mouth twitched. “You ever sit through a cross-examination where they question whether you can tell north from south because you missed a single piece of tape on the floor?”
He had not, but he could imagine it. “Nope. But I did once get yelled at for labeling a hose with a marker and then smearing it.”
She slid a photo toward him, uncapped her second marker, and handed it over. “Don’t touch the face, only the edge. Like this.” She demonstrated with the next print, every movement tight and precise.
He copied her, making sure to take his time. “You know, I’ve got years of training, including some pretty high-end fire science, and nobody ever taught us this level of evidence handling.”
Desiree didn’t miss a beat. “That’s why County has to clean up after Municipal. You get the adrenaline, we get the liability.”
“Harsh,” he teased, then let himself chuckle with a grin.
She didn’t smile back, but her eyes lingered on him for a half-second longer than needed. “If you want me to teach you the right way, this is it.”
He moved on to the next photo, careful with his grip. “You always wanted to be an arson investigator?”
Desiree’s pen kept moving. “Not really. I wanted to be an engineer—math, not people. But engineering didn’t have enough purpose for me, so I changed to fire investigation. All the rules, but with a little more at stake.”
Brandon tried to picture Desiree at eighteen, sitting in a college lab, and couldn’t. “You’re good at it,” he praised, “both the technical side and the people side.”
“I worked hard to get that way,” she admitted. “It didn’t come easy, but I was determined.”
He nodded and went back to marking the next stack of evidence. The hour blurred past: bagging, labeling, initialing, even cross-checking the digital files with Desiree’s phone, so there’d be no “evidence gaps” for the lawyers to wriggle through.
The only interruptions were the sounds of the two of them flipping pages or tapping Sharpie to table. When Kimble and Ruiz appeared, half-dressed and rubbing sleep from their eyes, they both did a double take at the sight of Brandon and Desiree hunched side by side, not speaking, not moving except for the evidence relay between them.
