on anyone he cared about or knew. Since that meant pretty much everyone in town, the waiting part chilled him to the bone.
“Did corporate ever hire that night watchman?”
It was a detail Dev would know if he hadn’t been so behind reading his reports. Better security had been an official recommendation after the incidents at Number Ten and Number Five.
“Affirmative,” Brody reported. “Only they didn’t hire a watchman for each plant. They hired one watchman for all the plants and put him on rotation.”
Dev looked up from his phone long enough to throw Brody an incredulous glance.
“I don’t suppose we know the whereabouts of this person?” Dev trailed off.
If the night watchman had been anywhere near the site, he’d have been the one to call it in. Either he was far away at another plant, or he was inside.
“Still digging,” Brody admitted. “We’re only thirty-six minutes in. There might be a lot more information once we get to the scene.”
“Sheriff.” Jack, the other deputy, tipped his hat in Dev’s direction the moment Dev stepped out of the car. Hot air temperatures from the fire immediately assaulted the exposed skin of Dev’s face and hands. It didn’t seem to matter that they were at the edge of a wide perimeter. The fire blazed from a quarter mile away. Still, it radiated intense heat.
Dev fished in his pocket for the handkerchief he always kept there, cupped it inside his hand and raised it to cover his mouth and nose. Industrial explosions smelled a lot worse than a campfire in the woods.
“Here,” Jack continued, abandoning his greeting long enough to stride to his kit and fetch Dev a mask. Dev put on his P100 but kept his handkerchief in his hand.
“Thanks,” Dev managed offhandedly, his eyes still glued to the burning building as he put it on. It had once looked a lot like Number Six—that was the mill where Evie still worked, on the east bank of the river. This one was on the west.
“What have we got?” Dev wanted to hear Jack’s take.
Arriving at a crime scene as a small-town sheriff was nothing like they showed on TV. No yellow tape to form a perimeter or marked police cars flashing lights and barricading the streets. No multiple officers already hard at work processing the scene. The duty officer was the first one there. If the duty officer wasn’t the sheriff, you were lucky to get her to show up whenever she could.
The other thing about incident scenes was there wasn’t much to do. It had always struck Dev as a lot of “hurry up and wait.” The firefighters cooled the flames—slowly and methodically, they wetted down the building and took precautions to protect the surrounding wooded area.
I’ve got to catch him.
The same mantra Dev had repeated at the scenes of the previous crimes repeated itself in his head. This was the third one in three months. He had to know at least half the people who worked in the few mills that were left. Hell, one of those people was Evie. And even if he didn’t know any of them, everything about this was wrong.
It may have been theft on the surface and vandalism in truth but when you played with explosions, people got hurt. From Duff’s injury alone, whoever was arrested for this would be charged with manslaughter.
“Who would be this stupid?” Brody echoed Dev’s thoughts. Even cut-rate criminals knew as soon as a cop got hurt on a job, the stakes changed. Duff hadn’t died, but she could’ve—which meant anyone who continued a series of crimes this easy to link together was just plain stupid or had a whole lot of skin in the game.
“Someone with the right motive,” Dev murmured through his mask. “Someone with so much to gain from destroying the mills, they’re willing to take the risk.”
He and Brody exchanged a knowing look. The further they got into this investigation, the more suspicious Packard Industries looked. Technically, they were responsive. They had attorneys galore and other oddly titled people whose job it seemed to be to clean up incidents such as these. They had agreed to more stringent and preventative measures. But if they were doing their part, why did the incidents keep getting worse?
Most unsettling was the reappearance of Donovan Packard, Jr., progeny of the original man who had built the mills and inhabitant of the helicopter Dev had seen the week before. He was staying up on Elk Mountain at the Packard house—the grandest