Page 47 of Up In Smoke

She was glad she could now feel comfortable in that assessment.

“I always thought Tiago looked the best for it,” Luke volunteered, and Ivy could hear the tinge of regret in his voice at having put his own brother under the gun, even if it was only around her dining room table. “He's got the biggest string of arrests.”

“But that’s exactly what makes me think it's not him.” Leo argued many of the same points that Ivy had before. “None of his crimes matched the kind of thing that we would likely see in the history of someone inflicting pain on others. And Tiago keeps getting arrested.”

Ivy caught on then, and watched as Luke did, too. “If Tiago was our arsonist, the chances that he would have made it this long without making some kind of mistake is low.”

“Exactly,” Leo filled in.

“So who's left?” Jo asked, sitting in her chair, though both Ivy and Leo were standing. Ivy thought Jo's legs were giving her more trouble than she was admitting to but she didn't call her friend on it. It wouldn't be appreciated and probably Jo was doing the best she could.

“Mario's got a drug problem,” Luke said. It wasn't news to anybody. Mario had a record and they could see where he'd gone into rehab twice.

“Is he using again?” Jo asked bluntly and Luke nodded. “How confident are you of that?”

“Well, I came up on him right after he'd purchased.” Luke ground the words between his teeth. “I took his drugs from him and watched him get ready to dig through the forest floor to get them back. So yeah, really confident.”

But it didn’t make Mario their arsonist.

Together, the four of them started from scratch, retracing where Luke and Ivy had alibied out each of the brothers.

“You and Carlos were with your mother when the fire at the old convenience store was set?” Jo pointed to one document.

Luke double checked the date and nodded. When they finished, they agreed, as Luke and Ivy had the first time that each of the brothers wasn't available to set all of the fires.

“But look here: Tiago, Mario, and Carlos … all three of them are only alibied out for one fire each.” Leo pointed out. “How good are you at determining the origins?”

Both Jo and Luke jumped into the answer on that. “Pretty good, we think.” “You're talking about Kane and Taggart. Kane is relatively new as an arson investigator, but Taggart goes way back. He trained at Quantico.”

“So they would have found timing devices, anything like that?” Leo asked.

Ivy was impressed at his fire knowledge. Though, as he pointed out, they dealt with them a lot in the park system. She jumped in. “These fires are classified by ringing the building in an accelerant and burning from the outside in. In several cases, we found a single burnt matchstick, not even a match book that would give us a location where the arsonist might frequent!”

Lord knew, she'd seen that often enough on TV shows and movies. But they weren’t so lucky.

“No fingerprints on it?”

It was Luke who shook his head. “Ivy and I gave this information to Taggart and Kane a little while ago. They went back and searched the sites again and they actually found another matchstick. They've since tested all of them. No fingerprints or any DNA.”

Crap. That should have been a good lead. A fingerprint would have solved everything. So of course they didn't have it.

They all stared at the paperwork in front of them for a while longer, each occasionally reaching out, picking up one of the documents, reading it thoroughly and, to Ivy's disappointment, setting it back down without having made some grand deduction. She really believed that having her friends here would help—more brains, more eyes, all of that.

She was about to get up and ask if anyone needed a drink or a shot of whiskey when Luke, looking dejected, said, “I think we need to expand the search.”

“I agree,” Jo offered, her expression grim. “But maybe not that far.”

All eyes turned to her as Jo looked to Luke and said, “You said your mother told you that there was nothing she wouldn't do for her boys.”

Chapter Thirty-Six

“Holy shit, Luke!” Ivy threw her hands in the air and almost pissed her pants … her nice new pants for work. Luke had a gun aimed right at her head.

By the time she’d said it, the barrel was aimed down at the floor. “I’m so sorry!”

“You gave me a key …” she reminded him, but she had come in while he was showering. She’d thought she’d sneak in and surprise him, and well, she guessed she had.

Her heart was still racing, her breath whooshing out of her as he clicked the release and popped the magazine out of the gun, quickly rendering it useless. But …

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