Burn It Up(105)

The barn was in near darkness, with just the weakest trickle of light making it over from the bunkhouse windows. There was yellow tape up, but nothing more. To most people this looked like the scene of a tragic accident.

Lucky them, Casey thought, weary to the marrow with all the death that had begun skulking around his hometown.

He sat on the dirt, taped two layers of heavy plastic around each foot, and donned the gloves. Switched the flashlight on but kept it trained low, mere centimeters from the ground.

It had been a huge barn, but a secondary circle of caution tape narrowed ground zero—the spot where Don’s body had been uncovered beside a small industrial tractor, black now, but surely the telltale green and yellow not twelve hours earlier. The floor was covered in junk. Charred wood, fat old nails, slate tile scraps everywhere. Casey turned his attention to the tractor first, to its engine, exposed where one panel had been propped up. He couldn’t make much sense of anything with just one beam. Couldn’t say where the fire had started, which way it had spread, how hot it had gotten. Only daylight could tell him those things. But tonight, he wasn’t after the how. He was after the who.

He swept the light around the mess underfoot, shifting debris, looking for anything unusual and wishing he owned one of those doohickeys his father had had when he’d been little—a strong magnet on a long rod, for fishing dropped bolts and screws from underneath cars or behind workbenches. There might be a single tiny staple somewhere in this mess—the only clue left behind from a pack of matches. Even if there was, though, talk about a needle in a hay—

His hand froze, locking the beam on something square, just where his rustling, plastic-booted foot had pushed aside some litter. Square and black and familiar. He moved the Maglite to his left hand and picked it up.

A cigarette lighter.

It wasn’t unlike his own—a chrome deal, though a gas station knock-off, not a real Zippo. He didn’t dare wipe at the soot, on the off chance any fingerprints had survived, but instead peered at it by the beam of the flashlight. Like his, it, too, had an emblem on one side. Faux enamel, it looked like, and the plastic once coloring it had melted away, leaving only the metal relief of a cheesy skull-and-daggers motif.

Don didn’t smoke, far as Casey knew, and even if he’d had a secret habit, he sure as shit wasn’t dumb enough to have lit up while working on a greasy old tractor engine.

It could have already been here. Just another forgotten bit of junk cluttering up this disused barn. But Casey doubted it. Doubted it as surely as he could picture the amateur arsonist who’d started this fire—picture him flicking it open, striking the wheel, perhaps dropping it in surprise or pain when those flames lashed back at his hand, more aggressive than expected, startling him.

He set the lighter on the hood of the tractor and resumed the search.

Casey couldn’t say how long he was there, scrabbling around on his hands and knees, peering at blackened scraps and bits of junk by the beam of the Maglite. He only knew that when his back began to ache and his head to throb that it must’ve been hours.

He checked his phone. Hours indeed. It was pushing six, and though he wasn’t sure when dawn was due, precisely, he knew he’d be stupid to still be here once the sky grew light.

One cheap lighter wasn’t much, but it was something. He slipped it into a sandwich bag from his pocket and picked his way through the rubble, the scorched earth, and eventually found grass and gravel beneath his feet once more. He ditched the taped-up plastic and the gloves, wadding them up and stashing them in his trunk for the time being. Sloppy, but time was of the essence.

He found his front door key and let himself into the farmhouse, relieved to find it dark and silent. Normally Christine would be up by this hour, but he had no doubt she needed to sleep in . . . if she’d dropped off at all. He f*cked around until he found the right light switch, then crept up the front stairway to the Churches’ wing of the house, hoping Miah’s room was where he remembered, the last door on the left.

Casey knocked firmly. No answer. He turned the knob and eased the door in on a dark room. “Miah?”

“Yeah.”

He pushed inside, letting the light from the hall reveal Miah, who was sitting on his bed, fully clothed, with his back against the wall and his hands linked atop his belly, staring at the far window.

“I got no doubt you don’t feel like talking just now,” Casey said quietly, “but I found something that I could really use your opinion on.”

“What?”

“Turn on that light.” He nodded to the lamp on Miah’s deep windowsill, and he turned it on. He looked about fifty by its mellow glow.

“I found a lighter in the barn, beside the John Deere. Any chance you recognize it?”

He handed Miah the baggie, and the man’s eyes were wide in an instant.

“You know it?”

“Yes, I f*cking know it.”

“Whose?”

Miah spoke so quietly—a simmering growl of a sound—Casey could only just make out the name.

“Bean?” he echoed.

“Chris Bean.” Miah sat up, still staring at the bag. “He used to work for us.”

“When?”

“Must’ve hired him five, six years ago. Fired him two winters back.”

“Why?”

“Drugs. He was one of our best hands, until he got mixed up with amphetamines. I was the one who caught him at it. I’d know that lighter anyplace—I found him camped out in one of the outbuildings, and I saw it on the floor beside a couple of folded-up sheets of aluminum foil, with tweaker streaks burned all over them.”