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“Stay here so we don’t have to strain to hear,” Miss Adeline said.
Willa looked a little taken aback. The lab probably wasn’t this lively.
“Nah. I’d tell them what you said anyway.” Burke ripped off a massive bite with his teeth.
“Logan, I tell you these things in confidence,” Willa snapped.
“And these are my people. I trust them.”
That Burke trusted Pepper and Miss Adeline because I did meant a lot to me.
She pulled a stack of papers from her bag but didn’t look at them. “I ran a tox screen on all the victims.”
Something about her calling Cassano a victim struck me as odd. It was just a generic term, one that definitely fit the bodies in the barrels, but it felt wrong for him. He’d hate being referred to that way. Any of the guys at the firehouse would.
“Ellen said the autopsy proved heart attack.” Burke chomped on his sandwich. A piece of lettuce fell from it.
Sadie raced and gobbled it up. She decided to stick around him since he seemed to be the most likely to drop something else.
“I’m sure it did,” Willa said. “Tetrahydrozoline was in his system.”
“Is that normal?” I twisted to look at her. “And what is that?”
She chewed on her lip. “Unless they gave eye drops to him in his water instead of his eyes, no, it’s not. Though the amount is something that can be overlooked in an initial analysis.”
“So it could be foul play.” Burke perked up.
I put my sandwich down. “Is it possible that stuff was in another drug they gave him at the hospital?”
“Not likely.” She thumbed through her papers. “On this case alone, I couldn’t rule conclusively. There is an inordinate amount in his system, but he’d suffered other traumas due to the fire injuries. Mr. Cassano could’ve passed away as a result of the drug, but maybe not.”
“You didn’t have to tell me that in person.” Burke hung his head.
“I’m not finished.” Willa was no-nonsense. “Of the other five victims, I only had enough of their remains to test three of them.”
“Five?” I asked. “I thought there were only three victims in the barrels?”
Burke looked behind Willa at me. “I had her look at the people from the fire you saved Cassano from.”
Ash’s fire.
I tore off a small piece of ham and discreetly fed it to her. Pepper noticed but said nothing.
“All of the victims had roughly the same amount of tetrahydrozoline in their systems. Given the timeline and proximity of the fires, the cases appear to be correlated. And this is why I wanted to tell you in person and not via text.” Willa showed Burke the paper she’d pulled from the stack. “The cause of death is, without a doubt, homicide.”
Chapter Thirty
Pepper
“Why didn’t they kill Ash?”
Burke and Willa had left hours ago, but we were all still shell-shocked. Willa’s findings concluded that Ash’s owners were deceased before the fire started.
Teague put an arm around my shoulders and pulled me close. “They probably thought she’d die in the fire.”
I shuddered. It was impossible to think about Ash not being in our lives, yet we were so close to losing her. What if Teague had walked a few feet away from her? He might’ve never known she was there. And he’d gotten suspended for saving her life.
“Do you really think all these fires are connected?” It seemed impossible. I didn’t know anything about serial arsonists or killers except oftentimes they had similar patterns for each crime. These seemed to be haphazard other than the heart attacks and the fires.
