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“He’s trying to scare you,” Mr. Forrest said. “I’m going to work on it. If they’re going to charge you, you’ll get a bail hearing within twenty-four hours. Since it’s a Friday night, it’ll probably be tomorrow morning, and I imagine they’ll set bail rather high.”
The more this guy talked, the more it seemed like this was a hole Gabriel would never dig himself out of. “Fantastic.”
“I’m going to see if we can avoid charges altogether.”
“How the hell are you going to do that?”
“It sounds like they have a lot, but really, they don’t have a thing on you. The lighters are suspicious, I’ll grant, but no one actually saw you start a fire. No other incendiary devices have been found in your home. You have no record of starting fires.
You’re not a model student, but according to Layne, you’re not a troublemaker around school, either. They can’t even get you for impersonating a firefighter unless you did it to get money.”
“They have an eyewitness.”
al Faulkner had that pen in his hand again. “I think maybe you know a little something.”
Gabriel didn’t say anything.
A pause, a glance in the folder. “Alan Hulster says you had an altercation in class that day.”
Gabriel came halfway out of his chair. “He was being a dick!
I didn’t burn down his house!”
“Sit down.”
“Damn it!” Gabriel’s hands braced against the table. It took everything he had not to shove it across the room. “I didn’t start those fires!”
“Sit. Now.” The marshal hadn’t moved. “Or the cuffs go back on.”
Gabriel sat.
“I didn’t start them,” he said. “I didn’t.”
“Don’t take this all on yourself, kid. Who else is in on it?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’re lying to me.”
“I don’t know who’s starting them.”
“What do you know?”
“Nothing!”
“What are your brothers going to tell me?”
Gabriel felt like there wasn’t enough air in the room. “They don’t know anything, either.”
“I have a report from a few weeks ago. You were caught with a few bags of fertilizer. Played it off as a prank, right? Was that supposed to be the first one?”
It was a prank. Tyler and Seth had beaten the crap out of Chris, so they were just going to screw with them. “What? No!”
“Your brother Christopher was with you. Is he the one starting the fires?”
“No.”
“Did he help you?”
