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Lucy’s heart squeezed at the frustration hidden deep behind his words. They’d looked at hundreds upon hundreds of faces over the course of the past few weeks. It had been enough to make all of them weary as hell, but for Sam—God, she couldn’t even imagine how hard cataloguing all the facts and faces must be.
She brushed her hand alongside his, just enough that their outermost knuckles touched, and Sam seemed to refocus with a shake of his head. “So, Yearwood has a son. That doesn’t necessarily mean anything.”
“Well, it wouldn’t,” Isabella said, “except for the fact that his son was present in the courtroom for the duration of his trial.”
Sinclair added, “And the fact that the scene of the first fire five weeks ago was a storage shed behind a house in North Point. The property was in foreclosure, but the last known occupants were a woman named Evelyn Porter, and her son. Malachi Yearwood.”
Oh, God. “Helivesat the scene of the first fire?” Lucy heard Sam ask past all the shock buzzing in her ears, but here again, Sinclair paused.
“Not quite. As we said, this case is complicated. Evelyn Porter and Malachi Yearwood did live at the address for nearly a decade, yes, and Cyrus Yearwood was also living at the residence at the time of his arrest. But Porter was diagnosed with stage four ovarian cancer a little over a year ago, and there’s a record of substantial medical debt. It looks like Malachi made a few payments on his credit card, but nothing recent. The bank had no choice but to foreclose on the house five months ago. Porter died not long after that.”
Lucy’s heart squeezed, but she forced her brain to stay on task. “Okay. So, we know he had the knowledge to set the warehouse fire and make it look inconclusive, and we know he had a direct tie to at least one of the fire scenes. Is that enough to arrest him?”
“Not by itself.” Xander shook his head. He was engaged to Remington’s fiercest ADA, so if any cop knew the ins and outs of getting an arrest warrant, it was definitely him. “Itisenough to make him a suspect and bring him in for questioning, though.”
“We might have more than we think,” Dallas said. “Did Cyrus have a motive for setting those nine fires?”
Isabella shook her head. “No. After he was arrested, he had a psychiatric evaluation, and he was diagnosed with clinical pyromania. He was caught after being spotted on surveillance video as a spectator at all three fire scenes in Remington. That shed that burned down in North Point? At the time of his arrest, it was filled to the rafters with tinder, building plans from the sites that had burned plus a dozen or so others, and four different kinds of accelerant. It made the case a slam dunk.”
“Holy shit,” Sam said, and yeah, that pretty much summed up the sentiment flying around in Lucy’s chest. “Cyrus Yearwood was a pyromaniac?”
“It makes sense,” Dallas said. “While the research is still fairly limited, some studies do show that impulse disorders are moderately hereditary. It’s not exclusive to pyromania, but that would definitely fall under the umbrella.”
Lucy’s thoughts raced at Olympic speed, and she gave up hope of making sense of them and just plucked one out of the pile. “Okay, but Malachi is twenty-three, right? Wouldn’t he have set things on fire far before now if he’s a pyromaniac like Cyrus?”
“To be fair, we don’t know that he hasn’t,” Dallas countered. “But not everyone who sets a fire is committing a crime. Sometimes, setting controlled fires where there’s no destruction of property can satisfy a pyromaniac’s impulse control urges. At least, until or unless his or her disorder escalates.” Turning toward Sinclair, Dallas asked, “Malachi lived with his mother until her death, right? And since he made at least a few mortgage payments when she got sick, is it safe to say he was her caregiver?”
Sinclair nodded. “It appears that way, yes.”
“Psychological disorders are very often triggered by traumatic events. Injury, abuse, being a victim of violence—”
“Or loss,” Lucy said, the realization snapping into place.
Dallas looked at her, his blue eyes solemn. “Yes. If Malachi and his mother were close and he was in charge of her care, her death would have been extremely traumatic for him.”
“And that would explain the rapid escalation from burning smaller structures like the shed to setting fire to an entire warehouse,” Xander said.
“As well as him setting fire to Lucy’s SUV,” Dallas added. “If Malachi knows Lucy and Sam uncovered that the warehouse fire was set intentionally, he could very well perceive them both as a threat.”
Sam went completely still beside Lucy, even as her own heartbeat exploded into motion. “Tell me you know where to find him.”
The pause that extended through the room didn’t give her the warm fuzzies. “The address in North Point is Malachi’s last known residence,” Hollister said. “We’ve tried to track him through work and his bank account activity, but his employment records are spotty—apparently, he did a lot of manual labor down on the docks in North Point, but most of it was off-book, and no one there has seen him for months—and he closed his local bank account over a month ago. His one credit card has a freeze on it since the balance is more than ninety days overdue, so we can’t track him that way, either.”
“Damn it,” Sam bit out, starting to pace a tight path over the linoleum. “So this guy could beanywhere?”
“We’re working on tracking him down,” Sinclair said. “We got a search warrant for the house in North Point just in case we get lucky there, and we’ve got BOLOs out with all of our patrol units listing Malachi as a person of interest. As soon as we find him, he’ll be brought in for questioning. Until then, we’ll continue to gather whatever evidence we can to connect him to these crimes.”
Lucy looked at Dallas, then at Sinclair, and screw it. There was no sense holding back now. “Do you think he set all these fires?”
Sergeant Sinclair answered first. “What I think is that it’s important not to form opinions that can make us blind to all potential angles. That said, Malachi Yearwood is a suspect for a reason. Do I think he could have set all these fires? I do, and we’re going to keep looking at him for it until the evidence proves otherwise. This is a big break, Lucy. I promise you, we’re treating it as such.”
“I agree,” Dallas said. “Malachi fits the profile. Given what we’ve uncovered here, we have very good reason to believe he could have set these fires.”
“Okay,” she said. “So, you think he’s our guy. What do Sam and I do until you find him?”
Now that the Intelligence Unit had a suspect, they wouldn’t need help trying to pull clues from any old cases. Her and Sam’s work with the arson investigation unit and the RPD was done. Well, at least it was unless Malachi set another fire. Or tried to take revenge on her and Sam by doing something worse than trying to blow up her SUV.
Nope, nope, not going there, la la la la la.
