Page 72 of On Fire

A young Vietnamese woman, with mid-length, jet black hair and a beautiful smile enters the room looking slightly alarmed.

“Yes?”

“I want you to dig up info on a death—” he looks to all of us. “Took place—”

I finish his sentence. “Thirty-four years ago. In Searsport. A Mark Graham.”

“You got that?’ Good.” Carlson points at the door. “Go. Try to have something to me in an hour.” He closes the door and glances at all of us in the room. “ATF is crawling all over the coast and the FBI is out in full force too. We will get him.”

The pit in my stomach tells me we won’t. At least not in any satisfying way. Graham will escape real justice.

There’s a rap on his door and three agents stand there, two I don’t recognize and Sessions. The two I don’t know introduce themselves as Andrea Nichols and Jamie Dias.

I rise and my side prickles with the effort. My muscles have not recovered. “You want a deeper debrief?”

They nod.

The four of us move to the small interrogation room where, unlike the last time, the tone is quite congenial. Sessions is almost mute and when he does speak, it is only to clarify a detail I brought up.

Then I have questions. “What’s your sense there’s another bomb planted somewhere?”

Nichols and Dias then debrief me about what their profilers think. They work with more information than we have, so I have to defer to their conclusions.

“Because he knows we know who he is, we believe the probability of another attack is quite small.”

Dias chimes in. “He won’t want to risk coming out into the open—and there really is no safe space for him.”

The irony of these words does not escape me.

Then I asked my second question.

“Have you looked into the death of his younger brother?”

Now Sessions answers. “It was his older brother.”

“Really? He always claimed it was his younger brother.”

“There was just the two of them. And no, the brother who died was older. There’s nothing there. Tragic, but nothing.”

“The way he tells it there was a fire in a chicken coup on their property.

“Yeah, and the kid died of smoke inhalation.”

“How old was the brother?”

“Mark Graham was almost fifteen. Jim Graham was thirteen.”

“And he found the body.”

Sessions nods his head. “Yes. He found the body.”

When we’re done, I’m sweating but not from the questions. Sitting for so long has left me stiff.

I try to get up from the chair as smoothly as possible, but I know I’m moving slow.

Sessions stops me for a moment after the other two leave. “I can only offer you an apology.”

“We’re good, man. You were doing your job.”

He pauses and then looks me in the eye. “I could have done it better.”

By the time I’ve walked down the hall back to Carlson’s office, Bryce and Mateus have left the station and have been tasked with working with ATF, connecting all the airports. Jackson is to turn over any info Officer Wilson coughs up about the brother’s death. Finn’s outlining their details as I watch Jackson leave his contact info with Officer Wilson.

Finn and I shake Carlson’s hand, but before he let’s go of mine, he says, “I’m so glad you’re back . . . with us.”

΅

That evening there’s a call from Jackson.

“I got something,” he says.

“I’ll be right down,” I say.

I send Keller a text that I’m going to be at The Inn offices as soon as I hang up. He’s asleep upstairs after working three shifts in a row.

But I never get there. On my walk over there’s a second call from Finn.

“We traced him. Where are you?”