Page 37 of Inferno

“Dispatching now.” The guy on the other end of the phone gave him a three-minute ETA.

Julio hung up even though he wasn’t supposed to, and pocketed his phone. “I need something to cut him free, and we need to get pressure on these wounds.”

Far as he could see, the guy had been carved up on his chest. Beaten, probably punched. The knife lay on the table—something the police would hopefully be able to use to get fingerprints. Whoever had done this wanted information from the man, surely. Why else torture him?

Julio wondered if the assailant got it and that was why he was gone now.

But he’d left the man alive, instead of leaving him for dead. Which meant when this guy woke up, he would hopefully be able to identify his assailant.

“I have to check out the rest of the house.” Samantha handed him a pair of scissors she’d found in a kitchen drawer.

“I’ve got this.” He wanted to squeeze her hand, or kiss her forehead, but there was no time. They were professional enough not to be distracted by personal feelings when a man was dying in the room, and they had a murdering arsonist to find. But the longer the case went on and their feelings continued to be unresolved, the harder it would become.

One kiss hadn’t fixed their relationship. But two was a start.

Julio cut the man free and eased him onto the floor. His weight made his lower body drop hard, but Julio braced the guy’s upper body with all the strength he had, and then lowered him down. He set the man’s head down last, cradling it in his hand. Mitchell didn’t need more injuries than he already had.

Julio ran to the front door and pushed it open wide. Then he hit the bathroom and grabbed the towel he found and a stack of rags that were probably washcloths or for cleaning.

The guy kept a decently neat house. He lived minimally, but plenty of people chose to do so. Not much as far as personal effects scattered around the house. The file Samantha had puttogether that they’d read over before they left indicated he worked for a local tech company in a cubicle, coding or doing some kind of programming.

Not something Julio understood. All he’d ever done was fight fires.

The idea of working in a tiny box and doing the same thing every day, typing away on a computer, sounded like his idea of a nightmare. He much preferred to be active. When his duties became rote, he’d done the work to form a bomb squad with two other firefighters, two police officers, and one of the EMTs in Benson.

One day the mayor would sign off on the team as legit and they would receive more than minimal funding. But it hadn’t happened yet.

One day…

Right now, the future looked a whole lot brighter than it had even just this morning.

“Captain Coda!” The man’s yell echoed down the hallway.

“Kitchen!” Julio called back.

The EMTs raced into the room a few seconds later, carrying duffel bags and pushing a stretcher down the hall with them. “What have we got?”

Julio pressed the towel against the man’s chest wounds. “Mitchell Sylvana. Thirty-two-year-old male. Multiple stab wounds to his chest. Bruising, contusions, and swelling on his face. The side of his ribs looks nasty as well. His pulse is low, and his breathing is very shallow.”

He was pretty sure that covered all they needed to know, but he probably missed something. It had been a while since he used any of the EMT training the department required all the firefighters to have. Being a captain meant he didn’t go on many routine calls.

If he were honest, he did miss it. Not just because he did a lot more paperwork these days.

“We’ve got it from here.”

“Copy that.” Julio rocked back on his heels and straightened out of his crouch while the EMTs took over assessing the guy. They would lift him onto the stretcher and wheel him out as fast as they could, rushing him to the hospital so he could be treated. But the first job would be stabilizing him.

In the hopes he’d make it to the hospital alive.

Julio was pretty sure they were looking at the arsonist as the main suspect for who had done this. However, despite Tennet’s press conference, the taskforce still had no idea who that might be. Even with the FBI looking at the letters Richard Sylvana had received, all they really had was a personality profile. And unless the suspect made himself known, how were they going to find him?

The press conference announcing him as a copycat had probably been a long shot, and Captain Tennet likely knew they would all disagree with his decision to go ahead with it. Probably why he never told them.

Julio didn’t like being blindsided much more than he liked being left out of decisions made concerning a team he was part of.

Was Samantha right that it would either tip off the suspect to the fact they were looking for him, or maybe send him on a rampage out of anger? No matter what came of the press conference announcement, it was already done. All they could do was deal with the fallout.

He and Samantha knew well enough that the past wasn’t something they were able to change. Considering the moment they’d had in the truck, he figured she was onboard with him and looking to the future.

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