little more time together. She was a puzzle he had not cracked.
“Home sweet home.” Bitterness dripped from her words.
“Why do you say it that way?”
She shook her head. “Just being sarcastic.”
“Say what you mean, Joan.”
The heater blew gently on her face, teasing the edges of her bangs. She moistened her lips, making them glisten. As he looked at her face, he was tempted to kiss her and see if she still tasted the same. Still, he was smart enough to know some territories were better undiscovered.
“I’ve got to get back to Philadelphia. My union rep and boss want a meeting next week. Rep says I’ll be back on the job soon, though it’ll be desk duty for a while.”
“That’s what you want, right?”
“That’s where I’m headed.”
“Then why the ‘Home sweet home’ comment?”
“Because there’s no such thing. No place feels like home. It’s all temporary.”
“That’s up to you. You can put down roots anywhere you want.”
She turned toward him. For once, her frown was gone, as if she had released a secret that had been weighing her down. “I once thought I could live out here. Then I realized it’s no different from back east.”
Gideon was so rooted in the Montana soil that he doubted he could ever break its tethers. “I’m sorry you feel that way. I can’t imagine.”
“That’s what drew me to you back in college. It was a certainty that you knew where you belonged. You never questioned it.”
“Is that the only reason you went out on that first date with me?” he asked, feigning surprise.
A small smile tipped the edges of her lips. “You also had a nice ass.”
He laughed. “Hopefully I’ve not lost my girlish figure.”
“No. You still got game.” For a moment, they locked gazes, and he was so tempted to brush the strands of hair off her forehead. Her body was rigid, as if she could not decide whether to stay or go. He waited, knowing she wanted to invite him up to that little apartment.
She parked, reached for the door handle, and opened it. Cold air rushed into the cab. “You need to stay on top of Clarke.”
“I hear you.”
Gideon watched her walk toward the house, hoping she would turn back and beckon him. Foolish to think she would suddenly reconsider. If whatever had joined them in the past was not enough to make her stick around, a short trip would not do it now.
She vanished into the garage, the lights in the stairwell soon turning on. He pictured her lingering by the door, kicking herself for not being with him. That image was enough to give him hope to wait another beat.
But she never came back out the door.
He parked and tried to picture Clarke setting fires for money and killing women, one of whom might be carrying his child. It was an outrageous theory.
Inside the house, he hung up his coat, his attention shifting to a picture taken of Clarke, Nate, Kyle, and himself. They had been fishing back in June. As he stared at father and son side by side, he saw the differences more than the similarities now. “Shit.”
He grabbed a beer from the refrigerator and sat at his home office computer. He twisted off the bottle top and took a pull as he thought back to the trips Clarke had taken to various fire-training conferences around the country in recent years. There’d been one in San Diego, California, and another in Washington, DC. Next he searched for fires in those areas matching the time frame. Nothing came up.
He refined the search, digging into news reports in the outlying counties. After an hour of reading local crime reports around San Diego, he found articles detailing several shelter fires at a park thirty miles east of the city. The fires could have been caused by anyone. He read down three paragraphs into one article and noted the fires had been started with a cup full of gasoline. The heavy-duty plastic had melted, and whatever the arsonist had used as a wick had vanished in the flames.
He shifted his attention to the DC metro area. Another forty-five minutes of reading and he discovered a series of dumpster fires in Fredericksburg, Virginia. The site was less than an hour south of Clarke’s conference and easily reached off I-95 South.
Gideon sat back, rubbing his eyes. Though two fires had aligned with Clarke’s travel schedule, that did not mean there was enough evidence to request a DNA test on Clarke.