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Per the plan they’d formulated on the way here and because they couldn’t retrace their steps in, they started to reverse the trip they’d taken out, instead. Sam led the way around the side of the warehouse, Lucy’s bootsteps keeping time with his until they reached the damaged fire hydrant they’d tried to tap. It had been marked with a tag readingOut of Service, which was no shock. He stood beside it for a minute, his thoughts beginning to race and jumble together as he tried to remember all the details of what he’d seen and exactly what had happened, and damn it, the last thing he needed was for his brain to do this now.
“You okay?” Lucy asked. Her presence should have stressed him out even more—she was so smart, so damn observant, he had to be extra careful not to let her see any dots to connect. But somehow, her standing right beside him felt okay. Good enough to calm his thoughts, even. At least, a little.
“Of course.” He stuck some extra wattage to his grin as a precaution, and it seemed to do the trick. She nodded, focusing her gaze on the window where he’d seen the person trapped inside the warehouse. Only now he knew that wasn’t quite accurate. Clearly, whoever it was hadn’t been trapped at all. They’d found a way out, then disappeared.
Something about this was very, very wrong.
“This part of the warehouse sustained a lot of damage, too,” Lucy mused, her eyes fixed not on the window itself, but the area around it. “I guess that makes sense, considering how hard everything was burning when we were inside.”
“Those ceiling beams from the second floor did start dropping down on us pretty fast,” Sam said by way of agreement. The burn on the back of his neck, now healed down to a barely tender spot the size of a quarter, was reminder enough. “But how could the fire have traveled from the second and third floors to this side of the place, then down to the ground floor so quickly?”
She tilted her head, her eyes still on the warehouse. “It could’ve been burning for a while before anyone called nine-one-one.”
“But not so long that whoever I saw inside didn’t get out,” Sam said, igniting more questions in his already busy brain.
“Unless the person thought they were trapped, but then found a way out,” Lucy countered. Well, shit. Thatwaspossible. “There’s only one way for us to find answers, though. Let’s go around to the back door and reverse our path to that room, like we planned. Then we can head over to the other side of the warehouse and see what the damage looks like from inside. Maybe there’s a clear fire pattern there that’ll help explain it.”
They fell in step together, walking a path parallel to the right side of the building, and headed for the back door. The damage lessened with every step closer to the rear of the building, although Sam had no doubt that the whole place would’ve burned with equal opportunity if given the chance. But ruling out points of origin was sometimes as important as ruling them in, so he’d take whatever he could get if it meant getting him closer to unraveling all the WTF still surrounding this fire.
“Here we go,” Lucy said, pointing to a large steel door on the back of the building. Per fire department protocol, it was padlocked—Dempsey had some ludicrous breaching skills, and he hadn’t held back on breaking through the door’s original mechanism to get Sam and Lucy out. Keeping the now fire-damaged warehouse free of anyone who might hinder the investigation or, worse, get hurt by trying to climb those stairs, was a priority. Luckily, Nat had given them a key along with her blessing to go check out the scene, and Sam pulled it from his pocket, reaching for the thick links of chain looped through the door handles. A thought sparked in his brain, there and then gone before he could grab it. He tried anyway, even though focusing on demand was almost always a lost cause, trying to uncover the source of the odd feeling pinging around in his gut.
“Does the key not work?” Lucy asked, and only then did he realize he’d frozen with the key in the lock.
Sam shook his head, dismissing the weird feeling. “Nope. Totally good to go. I just had a little déjà vu, I guess.”
He had the lock sprung and the chain keeping the door shut free of the doorframe with a few easy moves. The bite of stale smoke and ash invaded his senses before he’d made it two steps over the threshold. Lucy clicked on the Maglite she’d pulled from a kit in the back of her SUV—Christ, she was probably prepared for everything from a faulty engine to a flood—the beam cutting through the dusty interior of the hallway and ending at the left turn that would let them retrace their steps from the day of the fire.
“After you,” Sam said, and Lucy raised a brow.
“I know that charming people is your default, but you don’t have to sell it when it’s just you and me.”
He couldn’t help it. He raised a brow right back at her. “You have the flashlight, Lucy. Plus, you know what you’re looking at just as much as I do, and I’m sure you remember the path we took through this place. There’s no reason for you not to lead the way. Unless you don’t want to.”
She blinked. “You have an awful lot of faith in me.”
“I do,” Sam said, some force that he had no name for making him take a step closer to her. “You should try it sometime.”
Lucy’s eyes widened, her lips parting by a fraction, and in that moment, Sam wanted nothing more than to taste the surprise on her mouth.
But then it curved into a tart smile that knocked him back to reality. “Okay,nowyou’re trying to charm me.”
For a slice of a second, he nearly said no. He wasn’t trying to charm her. He was simply telling her the truth. She was good enough, strong enough, smart enough to be believed in. Given the lead. But since that was a) crazy, and b) likely to make her think he was a fucking cretin, he gave her his best aw-shucks smile. “I can’t help it if you make it easy. Now, are you leading the way, or what?”
Turning toward the right side of the hallway, Lucy began to make her way deeper inside the warehouse. Her flashlight became a necessity after half a dozen steps, the beam bouncing off the dingy walls and high ceiling. Between them, they lined up the maze of corridors and storage rooms with the floor plan Nat had sent him, moving slowly but methodically down the rear hallway, then making the first turn to lead them deeper into the warehouse. The walls were smoke damaged and stained with soot in places, but essentially intact. At least, until they reached the second turn that led back to the hallway where they’d started their search during the fire.
“Whoa,” Sam breathed. The fire marshal must’ve opened all the storage room doors when he’d done his inspection, because sunshine spilled into the hallway from the exterior windows, putting a spotlight on the dust motes and residual ash hanging heavily in the air. The first storage room wasn’t a total loss, although the wall that it shared with the one beside it and half of the ceiling were singed and warped from both heat and flames. The floor was still damp, ashy puddles having dried in some places and remained in others, making Sam’s boots stick slightly to the concrete as he walked slowly through the room.
“These would have been easy kindling if the fire had reached them,” he said, taking in the rows of wooden pallets stacked against the walls on either side. The whole fucking room would’ve gone up in a matter of minutes if the flames had spread just a little bit farther.
Lucy nodded. “These shelves, too. Parts of them are steel, but see these slats?” She pointed. “They’re all wood.”
“Doesn’t that feel a little weird to you?” he asked. “I mean, pretty much the only thing that would’ve made this place burn faster is if it had been doused in accelerant.”
“It’s an abandoned warehouse, and from the look of things, they probably weren’t up to code even before they shut down. Anyway, just because it’s a giant fire hazard doesn’t mean someone tried to burn it down,” Lucy said, but there were two sides to that coin.
“It doesn’t mean someone didn’t, though.”
She lifted her chin in a half-nod, but that was where her concession ended. “We’re still going to need more to go on than a bunch of flammable debris to prove arson.”
