the charred remains in the grass. With every step closer her heart increased its tempo until it was beating a rapid tattoo she feared could be heard by the officers at the perimeter.
Was that nearby tree familiar, with its branches growing in an X shape, studded with leafy buds? Perspiration dampened her brow. Her palms. What about that building beyond the trees to the west, with its boarded-up windows and tarpaper roof?
“Hey, lady, you can’t go in there.” The hand on her elbow sliced through the sticky haze of memory and had her jumping in surprise. The officer released her when she shot him a look, but stood his ground. “Crime tape is up for a reason. You need to stay back.”
She was tempted, more than she should have been, to do just that. To wait quietly for the detective at his car. To forget the dreams that seemed far too entangled with the body inside the tape.
The dreams that had been blessedly absent for four long months.
Instead, she scanned the area for McGuire and pointed. “I’m with him. You saw us come together, didn’t you?”
The officer, with a fresh youthful face that pegged him as barely out of the academy, looked uneasy. “Well, yeah. But I thought . . .”
Mystified, Risa waited for him to go on. “You thought . . .”
The kid—and he really was little more than that—actually shuffled his feet. “Ah . . . look! The detective is waving you over.” The relief on his face was almost comical. “Guess it’s his call if he wants you to go inside.”
Still confused, she gave a little shake of her head before bending down to snag shoe covers from the opened box at her feet. Donning them, she grabbed a pair of latex gloves from another opened box and ducked beneath the tape. She was halfway to where McGuire stood speaking to a slender blond man standing next to the remains—
—charred bones, melted flesh—
—when comprehension belatedly struck.
The officer had thought her presence here was due to a personal relationship with McGuire, rather than a professional one. Under normal circumstances, the realization would have had her grinning. But her chest was tight. Her throat closed. The nearer she drew to the body, the more conscious effort it took to keep oxygen moving through her lungs. To resist the urge to sprint, far and fast, in the opposite direction.
“. . . use an accelerant?” McGuire was saying.
“Like I was saying . . .” The man broke off as Marisa approached. “Well, hello-o, beautiful.”
Ignoring his words, she focused instead on the gas chromatograph the man was using. “What’d the VTA indicate?”
“Jett Brandau.”
Because it seemed churlish to refuse the hand the man thrust out, she took it for a moment. “Marisa Chandler.” When she would have pulled away, he made a point of squeezing her fingers for a moment longer before releasing them.
“Arson investigator?”
He sent a quick glance to Nate before responding. “That’s right. For the PPD.”
She nodded. As the fourth-largest police department in the country, the force was plenty large enough to employ their own arson investigators who were also trained police officers. “And the VTA results?”
Brandau patted the side of the Vapor Trace Analyzer’s heating element. “Did three samples of the air over and around the body. Each yielded a substantial bump in temperature.”
“Meaning a flammable residue is present in the area,” she murmured, intrigued despite herself. It made sense. Setting someone on fire—if that’s what had happened here—was more difficult than it sounded. Fire required fuel. The fabric of the victim’s clothing would provide some, but with the wide range of fibers used, it couldn’t be relied upon to burn evenly. If total conflagration were the intent, an accelerant would guarantee it.
“Let me know when you’re done getting the samples you need off the body so I can let the ME in. Then you can take comparison samples in the area as we finish searching each grid.”
“Will do.” Though his answer was directed at the detective, the investigator’s attention was on Risa. His smile was probably supposed to be boyish, but to her jaundiced eye it looked more than a little smarmy. “You’re welcome to stay and help.”
“I’ll pass.”
Her response didn’t seem to faze him. He set down the VTA on one corner of the concrete pad before approaching the body with an evidence kit. “Hey, where’s Cass?” The comment was directed at Nate and brought, to Risa’s mind, a definite reaction.
McGuire’s lips tightened momentarily before he turned away.