Page 3 of The Fire Went Wild

The neighborhood is as empty as the apocalypse as I drive away.

CHAPTER ONE

CHARLOTTE

“Was Scott Hensner’s death set up by the CIA?”

The middle-aged man asking this stupid-ass question goes by the name of AlphaWinner69 online, and he has filmed approximately 58,038 videos on this general theme. In every single one of them, he’s sitting in his car.

Always with these guys. Always with the car.

“Here’s the thing,” he says, leaning so close to the camera that his forehead gets huge. I suck boba up through my straw, watching him on the very minuscule chance that he’ll have something new. Something I haven’t heard yet. “The three vets on the campsite. Why were they there? Iknowthe ‘official story’—” He makes quote marks with his fingers— “is that Hensner hired those men from Ironshield Security Solutions. But why? He was meeting his wife.”

“Ex-wife,” I mutter to the phone, then suck down another mouthful of boba and milk tea. It makes my skin crawl, how everyone—from the true crime podcasters to the social media stars to the nerds on the CrimeSolvers forum where I’ve been doing most of my research—keep calling my best friend Edie his “wife.”

I realize it’s not their fault. They don’tknowthat Scott tried to kill her and that was why she was in Virginia in the first place. But I hate it. I hate that this is how people are remembering her.

As Scott Hensner’s fucking wife.

“—so obviously it indicates CIA involvement,” AlphaWinner69 is saying. “He didn’t hire those men. They were there to assassinate him. But the CIA had to clear out the evidence, right? So?—”

I swipe away from the video, rolling my eyes. I should have known better than to expect anything from someone named after a disproven theory about lupine social structures.

Defeated once again by short-form true crime videos, I toss my phone face down on my patio table and lean back in my chair, looking out at the swimming pool in the center of my apartment building’s courtyard. They still have the Christmas decorations up even though New Year’s was three days ago. Big silver-and-red bows in the palm trees. A couple of strategically-placed Santa Clauses.

Edie went missing on Halloween, the same night Scott Hensner and the three armed security personnel he hired met their apparently extremely gruesome ends—not that I give a shit about that. Just Edie.

It’s been three months.

Nothing.

I try to suck down more boba tea, but I’ve exhausted my supply. Frustrated, I toss the cup aside, watch it roll across the balcony and bounce up against the pot of bougainvillea that I’ve managed to keep alive.

Unlike my best friend.

No, I tell myself. It’s the same thing I’ve been telling myself since I got the phone call two days after Halloween from the Altarida sheriff’s department.You don’t know she’s dead.

Because unlike Scott and his soldier boys, who left four mangled bodies behind, the Altarida sheriff hardly found a trace of Edie anywhere on the old campgrounds. They certainly didn’t find her mutilated corpse. Just some blood splatter, fibers from her sweater, footprints in the snow. And all her stuff—her clothes, her car keys, all of it—in the cabin where she’d been staying. Including her cell phone, which was why they called me, since when they charged it they found my messages.

Except she had told me, a few days before Halloween, that shewasn’tstaying at the cabin. That she had been with a friend in Roanoke.

So why did Edie, my best friend in the whole world, lie to me?

I stand up, scraping my chair across the concrete balcony. It’s starting to get chilly out here, and my oversized sweater isn’t doing much to keep me warm. Although that might not have anything to do with the weather.

I always get cold, thinking about Edie. Cold and sick to my stomach.

Because when she fled Virginia to escape Scott, I promised to protect her. And I didn’t do shit.

I grab my phone, shove open the sliding glass door, and go back into my cramped little apartment. Half-finished paintings are sprawled all over my living room, commissions for an art gallery that are going to be late in about two weeks. Since Edie’s disappearance, my mind hasn’t exactly been on art.

It’s been on trying to find out what the hell happened to her.

That’s why I watch videos by people like AlphaWinner69. It’s why I spend the better part of my days reading through CrimeSolvers, this website where, ostensibly, people try to solve crimes. In reality, it’s a lot of bloviating and bullshitting and no small amount of harassing victims’ families.

Normally, I wouldn’t want anything to do with a site like that, except Scott Hensner’s death has been huge on there. It’s notsurprising given he’s sort of famous among the kind of douchey techbros who think they’re smarter than everyone else. The consensus on CrimeSolvers isn’t that Scott was killed by the CIA—because that’s dumb as fuck—but that he was murdered by a copycat emulating the infamous spree killer Sawyer Caldwell.

With whom Edie has a…history.

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