his desk. “You seem a little jumpy, Chief. Why would I have to warn you before I knock on your office?”
Of course she didn’t have to do that. He had an open-door policy—mostly because he didn’t even have a door. It had come off its hinges during the previous chief’s administration and never been replaced. On his first day as fire chief, as a joke, the volunteers had installed a beaded curtain instead of a door.
That had lasted about half a day, until he’d nearly gotten blinded by a bead to the eye.
“Sorry, I didn’t get any sleep last night. The only reason I’m here is that Nate’s out on a call. What’s up?”
“How was your trip to LA?” she asked neutrally.
“Are you asking as a professional colleague or as Kate’s friend?”
“Little of both. Mostly as Kate’s friend. I know something’s going on that she doesn’t want me to know about.”
“So you’re doing an end run around her and asking me?” he said dryly. “Sorry, you know me better than that. Her business is her business.”
“Unless it’s the town’s business.” She fixed him with a strict stare. “If there’s anything I should know for public safety purposes, you need to tell me.”
He hesitated. He supposed it was possible that the Kramer minions could have tracked Kate to Lost Harbor. Ethan James had done it, after all.
“I agree, Chief. If anything like that comes up, I’ll tell you.”
He held her gaze in one of those stare-downs that neither of them ever won. He had patience on his side and Maya had badassery, and it worked out about even.
“Is that why you hauled your busy self all the way over to this side of the building? Is something up with our bond proposal?”
“No, it’s something else.”
“S.G.?”
“Nothing new there. I still have some inquiries out. But she seems fine where she is, so I’m not in a big rush to distract myself from town business.”
“Good.” He nodded and sat back, feeling exhaustion drag behind his eyes. “It might be more disruptive for her than anything else.”
“That’s what I’m thinking too. No, it’s the fires we’ve been experiencing the last few weeks. A lot more than normal, right?”
That woke him up fast. “Yes. More frequent, but not damaging—so far. You got any theories?”
“It’s not a theory, just something odd that I noticed. I’ve been keeping a spreadsheet of them. Logging each fire, location, damage, date, and so forth. I turned that data into a graph. Want to see?”
“Sure.” He leaned his elbows on the desk and she whipped her iPad from under her arm. A colorful bar graph marched across the screen. He blinked at it; his eyes felt like sandpaper. “There’s a gap there.”
“Yup. A pretty noticeable gap.”
“What does it correspond to? Long night, no sleep, no data comprehension.”
“This gap represents the last few days. There was another fire this morning, that’s this.” She pointed to an orange bar labeled Nightly Catch. “The fire before that was here. The Dunfords’ bear cache. On May sixth.”
May sixth. That was the day before he and Kate had flown to Los Angeles. He stared at the graph, double-checking the dates of each fire she’d logged.
“There were no fires while I was gone. I know, Nate told me. Two medical calls, a creek rescue, but no fires.”
“Right. Not a single fire while you were gone.”
“We’ve gone days without fires before this.”
“Yes, but not so many days. If you include every fire and every nuisance call, the way I did here, the longest gap before this was only a day and a half.”
His gaze flew to meet her steady brown eyes. “What are you saying? I didn’t set those fucking fires.”
Her expression didn’t shift. “Didn’t say that you did.”
His brain clicked over to the next possibility.
“Are you saying Kate did? That’s absurd, she wasn’t even here when the first few broke out. Look, you’ve been tracking them since January, and—”
“Of course Kate didn’t set any fires,” she said irritably. “But the fact is that we don’t know when the first suspicious fire broke out. This graph includes all the fires since the start of the year. I wanted a baseline to start with. The fires don’t exactly match the time that Kate’s been here, but they did tick way up over the past few weeks.”
He dragged a hand through his hair. This, he didn’t need right now. He needed a nap or a drink or a motorcycle ride. Not together, obviously.
He forced himself to focus on the data