Burn It Up(89)

“So, over time, hanging with all those card-counters and dabbling in those con jobs, I got involved with some folks who were into insurance fraud.”

Fraud. Okay, that didn’t sound too terrible, she thought, trying to quell the nausea.

“There’s this whole criminal sector,” he said, “to do with insurance. Guy takes out a big policy on his house or his boat or his business; then the place burns to the ground, he gets his fat payout.”

“On purpose. Like, he sets the fire himself.”

“Exactly. The thing is, arson’s real hard to do right. It leaves a million fingerprints—in the chemical residue, the burn patterns, loads of little tells. You can’t just splash some gasoline, light a match, then tell the investigators it must’ve been some faulty wiring. Dumb-asses try that shit all the time, and all of them get busted.”

Her heart had gone from racing to plodding at some point, and as the truth began to gel, her body went cold, cold, cold. “So you did that yourself? Bought places only to destroy them and get insurance money?”

He shook his head. “No, I contracted. People hired me to start fires for them. Then in exchange, I got a hefty cut of the settlement.”

“But . . . I mean, what people? And where are you setting fires? In houses?”

“Some, but mostly commercial spaces. Most of my clients—”

“Clients?” That word sounded so, so . . . businesslike. So prim, or something. Something vulgar in its propriety.

He nodded. “Most of my clients were business owners on the brink of bankruptcy, or else they’d cooked their books or otherwise f*cked themselves into a corner, and needed quick cash and a way out. I go in, I set up a scene—finesse some wiring, or maybe it’s a faulty space heater, left on too close to a trash can full of paper. Maybe it’s industrial—the right rags soaked in the exact sorts of chemicals you’d expect to find in whatever place of business it was, too close to a heating duct that’s got too much dust built up in it. Whatever accident fits the scene.”

“Accident,” she repeated.

“Seeming accident, yeah. The key is to design the fire to burn through quick.” He sounded excited now, talking faster, gesturing like he was recounting a boxing match. “You leave the right windows open in the right sort of weather, keep others closed, control the spread. Make sure the building goes down quick, ideally before the authorities can even arrive.”

“The firefighters.”

Casey nodded.

Her stomach turned all the way over, three hundred sixty degrees. “My grampa was a firefighter, and my uncle.”

Casey sat up straighter, snapping out of his animated state in a blink. “Oh, honey—don’t worry. Nobody ever got hurt by any fire I set. I was careful.”

“Because you didn’t want to get caught,” she inferred. Anger was simmering now, melting some of the ice in her veins. Anger was her least favorite emotion, the one she avoided at all costs. But just now, trying to square the look in Casey’s eyes with the facts he was telling her . . . She was pissed, yeah. “Only because if you did get caught, and somebody had gotten hurt, you’d probably be in way more trouble.”

“Yes, because of that. But because I didn’t want to hurt anybody, period. We were careful. We made sure no other buildings were in danger of going up. We made sure there were no people around, no pets in the buildings. Hell, I did industrial jobs where we had to make sure we weren’t going to release a load of toxic smoke too close to a residential neighborhood. We were careful,” he repeated. “If anybody suffered, it was the multibillion-dollar insurance industry, and they’re a load of cons themselves.”

“But somebody could have,” she said. “A firefighter could’ve been hurt or killed, responding to what you did. They could’ve gotten trapped and died, had a ceiling collapse on them, or . . .” She was about panting now, feeling suffocated. “I can’t help but imagine it was my grampa or my uncle Hal who was in there. What could’ve happened to them.”

“Don’t picture a fire like you see on TV. We accepted these jobs because they were ripe for it. Remote, or out in industrial areas, dead after dark.”

“But you couldn’t know that something wouldn’t go wrong. That somebody wouldn’t get hurt. This was in Texas. You could’ve started a wildfire.”

His smile was weak, and definitely guilty now. “No, I suppose you can’t ever know for sure. All I know is that it all worked out. Every single job.”

She felt hot all over, agitated and verging on out of control. She hated this feeling. This feeling had made an addict out of her, made her want to feel nothing, rather than sit in the discomfort of her own emotions. She focused on other questions, to keep in control of herself.

“Who’s we? Who did you work with?”

“Small teams. Very small. I did the research and all the planning and set the fires. I worked with one of two drivers, who got me and the materials in and out, and monitored the police scanner. And then another one of us was in charge of brokering the deals—finding the jobs, setting the terms, working with me to pick the right time for it to all go down. Three people per job, just four of us, total, that I ever worked with. Though the woman who did the brokering, she worked with more teams than just the one I was on.”