man. Aside from that, though, Simpson was the police officer here and should be the one questioning the man as to what had happened. Apparently, that hadn’t occurred to him yet, and the fact that it hadn’t made her wonder just how much of a rookie the kid was.
“Simpson,” she called with exasperation.
The patrolman turned a blank face her way, and then left the group to rejoin them. When he then just stood there, she asked pointedly, “Don’t you have some questions for Mr. Argeneau?”
“No.” The word was said without any inflection at all.
CJ gaped at the young officer briefly, and then shook her head and snatched the small notepad and pen out of his front chest pocket where she’d seen him place it earlier. She quickly flipped it open to the first clean page, and turned to Argeneau. “Can you give us your full name, Mr. Argeneau?”
“Macon Argeneau,” he answered easily. “But my friends call me Mac.”
CJ quickly wrote down Macon (Mac) Argeneau. “No middle name?”
“No.”
CJ nodded. “Birth date?”
“June 21,” he answered.
“Year?” CJ asked as she wrote down what he’d said, and then glanced up when he hesitated. Raising her eyebrows, she repeated, “Year?”
“You tell me yours, and I shall tell you mine,” he said lightly, but when CJ stared back at him, unimpressed, he sighed and said in a questioning tone, “1985?”
It was almost as if he were testing to see whether she would believe him, CJ thought, and since he looked about twenty-five and being born in 1985 would place him around her own age of thirty-six, she didn’t believe it. She didn’t say as much, though, but merely raised one eyebrow and asked, “Is that a question or the year?”
“The year,” he decided.
CJ nodded and wrote it down, but put a question mark beside it. She suspected he was lying about his age, which raised red flags in her mind. Someone had set his home on fire and he was lying about his age. Was he even giving his real name? She’d ask for ID, but since he was standing there in pajama bottoms and a T-shirt and his house had just burned down with everything in it, she doubted he’d have any to provide. She’d check his info when she got back to the police station, CJ decided as she asked her next question. “And where do you work?”
“From home,” he said at once.
CJ lifted her gaze to his, her pen poised over the notepad, but not writing. “You said you were a doctor.”
“Yes.” He nodded.
“And you work from home?” she queried doubtfully.
“I started out a physician, but then went back to school to study hematology and now I work with, and study, blood in the lab.”
“From home?” she repeated dubiously. That seemed even more unlikely than running a doctor’s office from home.
Mac shrugged. “I prefer to work from home, and fortunately the company I work for allows it.”
“And who is that?” CJ asked at once, and then clarified her question. “The company you work for?”
“Argentis Inc.”
CJ wrote it down with a question mark beside it. She’d never heard of it and would be looking up the company later too. If she got lucky, they’d have an employee listing online. Some companies did, and sometimes even had photos of the individuals. Although usually it was people in leadership roles, and she doubted Argeneau was a manager or other leader if he was working from home.
Lifting her head, she eyed him solemnly for a moment, and then said, “You mentioned that you were working in the basement when you smelled smoke. So, you were working with blood?”
“No. I was unpacking boxes and setting up my lab,” he corrected, and then added, “I only just moved in yesterday.”
CJ had lowered her head to write down his answer, but jerked it back up at that. She blinked briefly as she absorbed the fact that his home had been burned down directly after he’d moved in. She cleared her throat and said, “It’s 2 a.m. on Saturday morning now. Are you thinking it’s still Friday night and you moved in Thursday, or do you mean you moved in Friday?”
“I arrived at about eleven on Thursday night. The movers got here about ten minutes after that and worked through the night to move everything in, finishing about nine thirty or ten Friday morning,” he explained, getting more specific.
CJ turned to peer at the house. It wasn’t overly large. She would have guessed it was a three-bedroom, which she estimated would