Page 77 of On Fire

If Finn arrives by seven it will be another two to three hours for Keller and his unit. Luke was sent out as backup for the bomb investigation team both to help out and to learn protocols and techniques.

I hiss slightly when I sit down in one of the leather office chairs.

“Yeah. Still not a hundred percent.”

“That’s okay.” Jackson’s tapping on a keyboard.

My phone vibrates. It’s a text from Carlson.

Have J check Colton private server.

I relay the message and Jackson checks his email with Colton Security. In a moment there’s a low whistle in the same pitch as Finn’s. I must remind myself to tell Finn he’s rubbing off on my young recruit.

“There’s two files here.” He clicks one and it opens immediately to a surveillance feed. It’s in black and white. There’s Henry at the bar talking and then a moment later, Graham shows up in the background. Henry turns around and talks to him for a moment. Then he nods and Graham walks into the kitchen. The time signature leaps to ten minutes later. Now Graham is coming out, bumps into Henry and yells something at him and moves off screen.

The next screen is correspondence from Boston PD: Henry Holt was scheduled to be interviewed the next morning. He wanted to offer several descriptions of possible suspects.

“So that’s it. Your friend must have remembered seeing him there.”

I swallow. “With his connections Graham would have found out Henry was about to be brought in for descriptions.” All it meant was an hour and half drive south to Boston.

As I’m trying to quickly digest this, Jackson opens the second file.

“She found it. I mean Officer Wilson found it. It’s all scanned here.”

His doggedness, though admirable, is irritating now. Maybe it was seeing Henry again alive in the video stream, but I’m suddenly not in the best mood. “Jackson let’s drop this for now. Even the bar owners are back home. We can return to this later. We have other things to worry about right now.”

“Like what? The guy’s dead—and you just said the other bar owners are safe.”

I stop for a moment and say the one truth we’ve known since before the truck blew up. “There could be other bombs out there. We just don’t know.”

“Shit. I didn’t think of that.”

“Yes. So why don’t we worry about this later?”

“I’m off the clock dude. This is on me.” He grins and turns back to the computer.

“Okay, well I’m going down to—”

“Wait. Wait. Can you search young man dies or teen dies with this date range?” He points to the date in a newspaper story with the shot of the chicken coop.

I check my phone. “Nothing.”

“How about deaths in general. Forget the young part.”

I look again. There, in black and white, is a shot of a very handsome young man guy holding the railing of a boat. The wind is in his hair and he’s smiling. He’s gay. Don’t ask me how I know. I’m a profiler. Underneath a caption read, “Anthony Pope.”

“This guy,” Jackson says who has him pulled up on a second screen, “Lived a mile away from the Grahams and was friends with Mark.”

He keeps reading. So do I, but on my cell phone.

“How do you know he was a friend?”

He pulls down on my arm so he can see what I’m seeing. “That’s shit. No man, look here.” He points to the large screen. It’s the same picture but blown up. There, in the background is another young man—Mark Graham. Jackson keeps reading as I stare at the photo.

“Fuck me,” whispers Jackson and then shoots halfway from his chair, keeping hands on the keyboard. “He died in a car fire.”

We share the same gaze. “Double murder?”

I nod. The mattress. Two fires. It made sense. Mark was seeing Anthony. Maybe Jim found them together. Maybe Jim was jealous. Who knows?

“But that guy Graham had such a macho handshake. About broke my fingers.”

“That’s because he probably though you were gay.”

“Why?”

“Because you were at the Blue Wave. You got press. He could have targeted you too.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake.”

“Seriously, you’re lucky he didn’t come after you—”

Suddenly I realize what’s been bugging me since those photos were fanned out on the table in Carlson’s office—what was missing from the table.

I pull up my photos from that afternoon.

Shit.